How Much Do You Say, and How Much Do You Leave Out?
A conversation with James Sturm about adapting his book Off Season
Part of the mission statement for Little Scraps of Filmmaking is to bring a level of transparency to talking about filmmaking that is often distinctly lacking. People are secretive, dishonest, or just too unsure to talk about many aspects of the process.
Projects that don’t happen are a big part of that. They get mythologized, but the pain and the detail gets left out.
My adaptation of Off Season by James Sturm is one of those projects that I just can’t get made. I would love to, but so far I’ve failed. Drama is a hard sell, everyone tells you. People get scared off by the genre itself, or by the politics in it, or by subtlety.
So instead of a script sitting on my desktop, alongside a truly beautiful look book that nobody wants to look at, I need the world to at least know I tried…
I read the graphic novel Off Season in one sitting. It was one of those slightly-frustrated, searching-for-distraction days and I picked it up in Skylight Books, bought it and read it in a cafe on the way home.
The book is set during the first Trump election, which makes it feel like a time capsule already. It’s about one family separation as the country falls apart. Subtly asking how did we get here? How do we come together again?
(I pitched it as a hopeful film, leading a path to reconciliation and individual and collective growth, which seems like an insanely naive thing to do from this distance).
The book absolutely ripped me apart in the best way possible, and I knew I wanted to make a film of it. I wrote to James that day, and by happenstance he was impressed by something I’d made. After a tortuous few months getting a simple shopping agreement done, I floated the idea that I come up to Vermont and we talk and I would do research around the genesis of the book.
The night before I left, I broke my hand playing football. This did not help. It meant I had to write all my notes left handed, so I gave up writing anything.
James and I drove around where he lives (he said I drove like a Grandma), talking about everything in and out of the book. He showed me places that inspired locations in it, or that matter to him. I got to see the incredible school for cartooning he runs.
And then one morning, we sat on a porch at my Airbnb (one of the greatest Airbnb’s I have ever stayed at) and had a long conversation where we went through the book page by page. I asked questions about character, structure, storytelling pace, details, research, references… everything.
Afterwards, I would take these notes away and use them as reference for the screenplay I wrote, that Cinereach were kind enough to get behind.
I love that script. It’s personal, nuanced and beautiful and I would love to make it.
But that doesn’t seem like it’s happening soon. And so much of what James and I talked about was interesting, so I’d thought I’d share some of it here. Especially about the process of adaptation and how I work, but also the creative life in general. I’ve added notes of context between the quotes and tried to show panels where possible.
The book unfolds elegantly in a series of panels, and I loved the rhythm of the book.
James: It’s the organizing principle. There are panels draw to show things, little units of time.
I saw each of these things being their own little vignettes that had to work in and of themselves. I would sketch them out on the index cards and hang them up. I always wanted each chapter to have the thing that was happening, and then the thing that was really happening. And there had to be a couple of levels going on in each piece. And sometimes - with the Stronger Together - he’s just taking his kid shopping but you get the setting of when and where it’s happening and then there’s the battle with the kid in the backseat about the juices. Just showing how these power dynamics are starting to play out a little bit, in the personal and political. Literally setting the stage of where this takes place.
Tomas: With the - there’s something happening and then there’s something else really happening - Was the ‘something else happening’ always the political thing?
J: I think it changes chapter to chapter. Theres just different kinds of little wavelengths that are going on. Not each one is a political thing. Like the hungry giant one - one one level it’s just a game he plays with his kids and shows him as a dad - and the other one is this conversation he has with his brother about divorce and “it’s not gonna happen to me” and “we’re gonna do it differently” and “me and Lisa love each other” - so it’s also establishing all of that information and introducing the character of his brother, earlier in the book
As it turns out, in almost all my conversations with creative people, we get to the ‘how do you cope?’ theme...
T: How much do you think he loses his shit? I mean he loses it in a big way later, but he actually seems pretty calm.
J: It depends on what one considers normal. I think he did pretty good. Parents are held to some impossible standard. I feel like how he behaves in this chapter, I’ve behaved on more than one occasion towards my kid. Sometimes you just get impatient and lose it from time to time. You have bad parenting moments. God bless those parents that never have them. But that’s not me.
There’s things like that where there’s all these ideals. Political idealism to the reality on the ground, and also the parenting realism vs reality of “we’re not gonna do screen time” “this is how were gonna raise kids” but the reality is that you do the best you can and over the course of many years, you hope your batting average is pretty decent.
My parents split when I was young and I really loved the balance of the kids in the book. One of the things I wanted to do with the adaptation was expand the eldest kid’s perspective. There’s a great scene where she wants to stay up late to watch the presidential debate and it becomes an argument…
T: These landmark political things, like the debate and the kid dealing with them. Was that imagination or was that from other people you know kids? Because she’s quite young to be in on it?
J: She’s 8? That’s not that young for that stuff. Especially because I got the sense that her mom is all in. So when she’s at her moms house, she’s probably hearing about it all the time. It became, for a lot of people, an obsessional thing. Trump being elected - the Armageddon is coming. My guess is that in Lisa’s house, she’s depressed after the election, well this is before the election. She’s probably checking her phone every second and is distracted and it’s all she’s thinking about. And kids are like sponges and they think wow, this is more important that me.
T: Like, this is the most important thing happening in mom’s world, which means it’s the most important thing happening in the world.
J: Kind of, yeah. So she wants to watch and she falls asleep right away because she’s a kid. And you don’t know how much it is of her acting out. Suddenly she’s taking on her moms role a little bit, like “i’m gonna watch this”. She’s challenging her dad. And the mom’s right, like yeah, let her, she’ll fall asleep.
It’s also the gruesomeness of the stuff going on in the public life. Those are all lines right from the debate. That’s the civil discourse. Or un-civil. The fact that this just permeates our lives - it feels like you should be showering everyday to get it off you. I wanted to expose the kids to it directly at some points. And in the first chapter she’s a little bit aware and asking questions.
T: Well, she’s making the whole thing about you’re either with us or against us. She’s saying you gotta choose somebody.
J: Which of course is a metaphor. I did choose somebody, her. My wife and now we’re not together. How do you move on from that?
This was one of the scenes that I felt gave the book, and hopefully the film, hope.
T: What physically is happening? Because he’s driving and he phones her and reaches out to her.
J: I think it’s he knows how hard she worked on the campaign. He knows how much this would devastate her. And he’s not really a Trump supporter. If he voted at all, he probably voted for Hillary. But I just wanted to show them connecting. I think there’s this thing where you do a scene in a movie and you’re seesawing back between connecting and disconnecting, and what side of the coin are you eventually gonna land on. So scenes that seem like this, you want to show some kind of tenderness, that’s not a lost cause. Also the fact that he can’t get through to her and he’s thinking about her.
T: And it opens something up in him because he becomes much more respective and softens in this scene. He’s trying to get back out there and be more sympathetic to other people in a way.
J: And he’s appreciating how Lisa always had his back at these things. He’s trying to circulate but he’s also aware of the absence of her.
In starting the adaptation, the thing I felt most confident about was the tone. I felt like I knew what the film would feel like, so I was constantly trying out ideas of that on James to see whether I was aligned with how he saw it.
J: I’m trying to show these little - like he plays soccer with his son for an hour on an Indian Summer afternoon. All those little pleasures peppered in as the noose tightens a little bit.
T: In one way there’s a great big dollop of hope that is then — as they say, it’s not the despair I can’t handle, it’s the hope.
J: The challenge with all of these things, in whatever medium you’re working in, is to try to have some type of handle on the tone of it.
T: I’m half sounding out my theories as well. There’s not a definitive answer…
J: I’m just trying to get all the stuff of life in there. When you’re in the middle of it, you’re not thinking — I never wanted to impose this writer from up here looking down. I never wanted it to feel like strings were being pulled. I feel like in some of my historic fiction, it’s set back, the themes I’m wearing more on my sleeves, and there’s this self conscious structuring of the whole thing. And there is a lot of structuring of this thing, but I wanted that to be as sublimated as possible. I didn’t want people to be aware of me as the author. I didn’t want his perspective to be so elevated. There’s only a few lines where he has anything to say that offers any kind of greater perspective to things. I tried to get rid of that as much as I can. The one chapter where he’s literally working through it - it’s just about the next hour, the next job, the next thing. He can’t even afford to not just go from job to job to keep his head above water.
T: It’s one of those subtle things in a human drama, which is really against the norm, but something like ‘you can count on me’ does it. And this book does it. It’s not on rails, so you don’t know what’s going to happen. In most cases, even if you didn’t know what’s going to happen, you’d know what you would want to happen. But in this, you’re not sure what you want to happen. You have no idea if they’re going to get back together. You’re also not sure that’s what you want. Which is much more delicate, but even more powerful.
J: With this kind of format, everything is it’s own little discrete unit. Like you get through this and now we have another little — like we're stringing little beads and each chapter is it’s own little bead, and it’s only until you look at the whole thing and see the bracelet or how it all kind of loops together.
The book has two great challenges for an adaptation. One - all the characters are dogs, which I chose to deal with by just ignoring. The second is how there is dialogue and diegetic ‘sound’ in the book, but also a layer of the main character’s inner thoughts as text. Voice over was something to avoid and yet the clever way these inner monologues subvert the action, was something I wanted to keep…
T: This is one of the lines where the inner monologue is undercutting or speaking at the second level. That’s harder to do in a film. You kind of have to leave that to be put together by an audience.
J: Both those things just landed at the same time. The text track and the image track. What was happening in the panels. There’s two narratives going on at the same time and they land at the same time. There’s different tricks you do as a storyteller. Having those land at the same time, you can’t do that on every one or you’re gonna roll your eyes.
T: Then it’s predictable and you’re expecting it and it lessens it’s impact as well.
J: I tried to have every chapter have its own structural integrity and have it be a little bit different in how the words flow. In some of them, there’s no little text.
Our conversation talked a lot about how with comics you can accelerate and decelerate time. And how cinema does the same. James is a master of that art and part of the process of hanging out with him that I loved the most was his openness and total depth of thought at what he was trying to achieve, but how it might fail.
J: The landing of this book has got some issues.
T: Well, I don’t know. I loved it when I read it. I have no idea how I would do that in the film though. It’s so heavy
J: I wanted it to end with new information and I kinda filled in a little bit. Because he is such a hard character to have any sympathy for. Even though I tried to show some grace notes with him. But I wanted to show that it’s not so black and white too. I mention her mental illness or issues, and I wanted to show the extent of those in postpartum and all of that. And also the other thing is that I always had this image of a cat - this anger that he has - tossing up a hair ball. I had to work it into the comic at some place because it was an image that just keeps in my mind. It felt like that’s it. How do we cough that up?
T: Spit up something we have to deal with.
J: Yeah, spit it up and get it out. How do we get that anger out? His spirit self can go but there’s something so deep inside him that he can’t cough up. I wanted to show that somehow visually. And that seemed like that was it. And him trying through whatever means to do that. Maybe microdosing helps?
T: But first you have this element - it doesn’t make you rethink everything in the book, it doesn’t make you do that - but it shades it all in a different way. The same things are there but with this whole other wave a nuance. And you go ‘oh that’s how he survived.’ As horrible as 2016 was, those moments were worse. These people have been through a whole lot of shit already.
J: And then it’s a different game with the images. It’s just one shot of the cat moving without anything else. So there’s a laser focus to that sequence. So even though the text goes a little all over the place, the fact that you can not worry about the images —
T: yeah, you can properly read. Because you’re not half watching the images so much.
J: There’s also something when someones tripping a little bit, you’re just hyper focused on little things. Like you’re just staring at your hands, or mesmerized by the cat in the corner. It felt like that was more true to the state he was in, if he was microdosing when he was writing this.
There’s also something about big chunks of dialogue that slow down reading. Those chapters where it’s just him walking in the snow - you’re just rifling through pages. There’s a breezy quality to it, even if there’s a line that every now and then, hits you. But when you put that much text on the page, it slows you down as a reader. So suddenly he’s reaching out to his wife and wishing he could be with her, and those last things land - and then now, instead of a landing that’s a little lighter, I wanted to slow it down a little bit.
T: You have to concentrate and that takes the pace right out of it, and it gives you space to think about all the layers of significance to what you just learned. And it what it means for everything you read before that.
J: And what I try to do with all of my work, if you read it again, having read it once - then it’s colored a little differently because you know the backstory or have more information about the relationship.