Ron Eldard and the Cuesta Brothers on the New York Film Roadie, and What Makes the Tribeca Film Festival Better Than Sundance

One of the things I was most impressed with about the film was how authentic everything was. You shot it on Metropolitan Avenue in Forest Hills. It had a real neighborhood feel.

MC: It's funny. Forest Hills. Gerald lived there for a while. It was written in the original script, but when I went to Forest Hills to go scouting -- or Queens, in general -- it was just about driving around, and I kept telling the location scout, "It needs to be a welcome mat."

RE: Oh, I like that.

MC: A welcome for Jimmy. Not gritty. It needs to be sweet. And it needs to be storybook. The neighborhood. It's like a great photo album. That was the approach. So finding that house -- this is when I knew the movie was clicking: the house was found.

RE: It's almost exactly as the house is.

MC: We did almost nothing.

RE: Photos, maybe a few things around, that's about it.

MC: There's a quaintness to Forest Hills. As soon as I was on that street, I was like, "This is the look." And then it became about knocking on doors, literally. When you're at that budget, you're like, "We're making a film, would you like $500-600 per day," instead of $2500 a day that a studio film would play. Actually, a studio film would talk them down to $500, then destroy their house. We didn't do that. The mother actually passed away, and the children were selling the house, and they extended the contract for us.

Ron, what made you decide to sign on for Roadie?

RE: This movie felt right in a million ways. When he told me he met Lois Smith and was going to use her as the mother, I was like, "This guy is not fucking around." Lois Smith is no joke. But that is not the person you put in there when you're thinking, who are you going to put on the video box. She is not going to sell that, but she is going to sell it once she's in it. She's great.

Did you guys think of Ron for the role when you were developing this?

MC: I wanted to make a small film. The experience I had before was the contrary. It was a $12 million movie -- not really with movie stars, but with a heavyweight like Ridley Scott, who was my producer. Who was very hands on. I wanted to make something small, and I wasn't going to cast movie stars. Oh, we gotta get Brad Pitt to play the roadie. Or Vince Vaughn. Or even Paul Giamatii, who would be the more cartoon-y, typical version of the schlepp-y guy. I just wanted to find the right actor. Then Ron and I met, and it was just a done deal.

Was the script furnished to his strengths?

RE: Kind of the opposite.

MC: Ron encouraged us to stick to the script.

RE: I changed my look, I gained a bunch of weight. The reason I liked -- loved it -- I think this is a great script. I think this is one of the -- I've read some great things, but this is as perfect a script as I've read. It just touched me immediately. And I would encourage them, "No, no, no, I want to do this because of what you wrote. I'm finding my way in here; let me get into your world." Because it's about a very specific world -- and some of that I know; I'm from Queens, I've lived in these areas -- and unless I couldn't make it work, I wanted to be in this world that you wrote.

During the Q&A on Saturday, you said the script took about six years to write. What kind of reactions did you get to it?

GC: When we first got the script done, I remember there were some industry people that I was talking to read it -- agents, some agents. And they were just trying to be helpful, but the notes were, "He can't be lying." [Laughs]

MC: It wasn't that he can't be lying, it's that he wasn't likeable.

GC: No, this is a direct quote from some agent that I spoke to, who was like, "The problem with the character is that -- your dialogue is excellent, there's something really good here, but can you make him more likeable?" One of the ways to do that was he shouldn't be lying, he needs to do something courageous.

RE: What does that mean?

GC: The person was trying to be helpful, but -- to what Ron was saying, I think what makes the script special is that the character has these flaws, and you can still empathize with him as a person.

RE: Everyone is lying! He's heroic because he's still alive and trying.

MC: The audience is right with him! They understand why he's lying. They empathize. They get it.

Definitely.

RE: He lies over and over, but you can see -- maybe that's how I tried to play it, but I think you also wrote it like that -- every time I started to tell that lie, mostly I just wanted to be quiet. But he's got to stand up for himself someway; he's sinking. I felt that every time the area came, I tried to do a version of it where I was close to the truth, where I would try not to embellish it too much. I felt that was in the script. "OK, I'm lying, but just a little bit, then I'll change the subject." I didn't lie to get something -- I wasn't doing it to get laid.

MC: You were like, "This is what I do."

Roadie takes place over the course of one night -- which is a conceit usually reserved for comedies. The "one crazy night." What made you decide to employ that with this film?

MC: What I was really interested in from the original script -- and it was different -- was the awkwardness of being home for the first time. That feeling in that first moment. It's like an itchy sweater that Jimmy wants off. I related to that. It's that reentry period, so that's what I wanted.

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