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Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of maximum fun.org and is distributed by NPR.

Hey! Hey! It's Bullseye. I'm Jesse Thorne.

Some filmmakers have the whole movie pretty much made inside their heads before the first actor even gets cast.

The Coens dropped storyboards for basically every shot. David Mamet once wrote that an

actor's job is basically to deliver the lines loud enough so that everyone can hear them.

But my guest, Mike Lee, isn't one of those filmmakers. On the other end of

that spectrum, there are directors that just kind of roll tape and let the movie happen, figure it out

in editing. Maybe they have an outline. Your Cassavetes, your Malics, your Christopher's guest.

But Mike Lee isn't really one of those filmmakers

either. Lee's films are collaborative. He builds the movie and rehearsal with his actors over

weeks and months, improvising character specifics, finding language, asking what the characters

eat for breakfast,

what their childhoods were like, what the real nature of their relationships is, until those

characters are real. So ultimately, the script is tight, but it's woven from all that preparation.

Lee says he started work on his latest movie, Hard Truths, with one actor in

mine, Marianne Jean-Baptiste. They'd last collaborated in 1996's Secrets and Lies. It earned

five Academy Award nominations, including one for Jean-Baptiste. Hard Truths is about two sisters,

Pansy, played by Jean-Baptiste, and Chantel, played by

...