Of Minor Prophets – Landlocked Film Festival | Behind the scenes with Screenwriter Jeff Barker

We’re excited to announce that Of Minor Prophets will be screening at the Landlocked Film Festival next weekend in downtown Iowa City, Iowa. The film will show at 2:00 on Saturday, August 15th in the Iowa City Public Library, Room A. If you’re in the area, we hope you can make it!

Along with that announcement, we wanted to share another Of Minor Prophets behind-the-scenes interview, this time getting into the actual crafting of the story itself.

Simply put, it’s obvious that a good film needs a good story. What’s not so obvious is where that good story comes from. In the case of Of Minor Prophets, that story started with an idea from Director Joe Hubers and the writing talents of screenwriter Jeff Barker. Here’s what Jeff had to say about developing a story, firing yourself halfway through and learning how to let go of a script no matter how tightly you want to hold onto it.

Can you share some of your background?
I started writing plays in college and took some playwriting classes in that time and then became an actor and a director and just kept gravitating toward playwriting.

I’ve continued to act some, direct mostly. But I feel most at home as a playwright. And it was 10 years or so ago, maybe a little longer, that I began working with a friend, John Grooters [of Ferocious Films, AngelHouse Media, Grooters Productions] and we began making some short films together and then worked on a couple of feature films and I fell in love with filmmaking. Frontier Boys is the film we saw through to completion while working together.

And so I just started reading as many screenwriting books as I could get my hands on. I think Joe approached me somewhere between 5 and 7 years ago and said “We want to get into feature filmmaking.” And I was eager to continue down that road. At that point, I had worked on a couple of scripts with John Grooters, but I had not written a complete feature film myself.

So me wanting to take that step forward and Joe and his company wanting to take that step forward, we were kind of a natural match-up. It was around that time I went to Robert McKee’s Story Seminar, which is a screenwriting/story retreat, although I already knew I’d be working on this film with Passenger.

Along with writing and directing, I’m also a Professor of Theatre at Northwestern College in Iowa.

What drew you to Of Minor Prophets?
I have a great interest in what I call the Bible dramas, particularly Old Testament dramas. In 2002, I began working with Tom Boogaart. He’s an Old Testament professor who essentially says in his writing that the Hebrew people are the oldest substantial theatrical tradition in the world.

We know it as the Old Testament; people of Judaism know it as the Bible. And these are the historical narratives of the Old Testament. Any time there is an event described in the Old Testament, it’s typically described in dialogue. Those of us in a new Bible movement called Biblical Performance Criticism are really curious about what that means for morality vs. textuality and performance vs. silent study. And so, for the past 13 years, I’ve been part of that movement along with my students, and we’ve been performing the Bible.

So when Joe came to me and said our company is really interested in the book of Hosea, particularly the narrative section in which this prophet gets a word from the Lord to marry a prostitute and he does it—and then he has to make different sacrifices to hang onto that marriage—I was already primed for that because of my interest in Old Testament dramatic events.

Now the book of Hosea is a particularly difficult nut to crack, and I went to work studying Hosea from every angle that I could try to figure it out. And that led us to many possible approaches to the story, which I would keep floating past Joe. And then he would say, “Well let’s try going down this road.” And that’s how we eventually ended up with Of Minor Prophets. So it was never intended to be a straight-up performance of the book of Hosea. I would say it is loosely inspired by the book of Hosea. But if you didn’t know that it was inspired by it, you probably wouldn’t even necessarily connect those dots.

What were some of the unique challenges you faced while writing the script?
The challenge for me as a writer is, and continues to be, negotiating the distinction between what most of my writing career has been—which is theatrical writing—and the difference between that and writing for the screen. Theatre is a word-based art form and screenwriting is a picture-based art form. And I continue to have to work on that.

Here’s a hot one which got people who hadn’t written a screenplay wouldn’t know. Screenwriting’s format—just the look on the page—is fairly complex. You can handcraft the play in terms of how the margins function on the page, but you can’t handcraft a screenplay. You have to work with special software and then you have to learn how to use that software. So there was that.

And then there’s… a stageplay is by a playwright. Hamlet is by Shakespeare. A movie is not by the screenwriter. It is really by the director or by the production company. The general populous knows it by its stars—the main characters. So we think of a film with Bradley Cooper or whoever. I’ve known that, because I’ve been around movies a long time. And there was never any rub. I don’t think we ever had any major conflict. We certainly had some negotiations along the way with me saying “I don’t like that cut, I don’t like that addition,” and Joe, in his graciousness, would say “Well, you can float a possibility past me.” But I’ve always known he would make the final product he wanted to make, and I as a writer needed to be ready to allow that to happen. I had to hold on things very, very loosely and give my fellow artists their freedom—the actors are going to add words on the set, the editors are going to cut words out. Anyway, this whole process is very much not mine. I’m simply a cog in that wheel and I feel honored to be that.

Other challenges included our female lead getting sick that first summer and having to pull the plug on shooting and come back a year later. And I had grand schemes. I wanted the arc of the movie to go through the seasons. I wanted it to start in the late winter and end in harvest with winter coming back around. I thought just being able to see that arc of the seasons would be valuable. But it was tough to do all that.

We had been working on this film for several years. There was some funding and loss of funding and waiting with casting issues and, in the meantime, I was still developing drafts that had varying structures, I think the film was 130 pages at one point, maybe even more. And eventually when Joe got very serious about getting to proper length for a production, it got cut to about 75 pages or something like that.  So nearly half of what it was at one point. And finally one day Joe came to my office to talk about a latest draft and I said, “You know what Joe, I think I’ve lost perspective on this. So I think you need to do yourself a favor and fire me and either write it yourself or hire another screenwriter, but I’m wrung out. I can’t help you anymore. So I think I’m fired, and you go on without me.” And Joe was so stunned, he just said, “OK,” and walked out of my office. And then he called the next day and said “OK, I’m unfiring you and you need to give me another draft.” Which I did.

And then I think the final draft went into production without me even looking at it. Essentially it is my script and there are a few lines that aren’t mine and the overall structure of it isn’t totally mine because things got shuffled.

Did you have specific actors in mind for roles, or were you strictly focused on telling the story?
I do not write toward specific actors. It’s just not the way my brain works. However, Joe told me early on the ideals that he had for our Hosea and Gomer characters—the bachelor farmer and the prostitute. So I was aware of those actors’ work and I knew that Joe was interested in those actors.

At the same time, I also was imagining… even though I wasn’t writing for these actors, I was imagining people that I knew who might be willing to play these roles. So I began asking Joe if I could talk to them, and we eventually had a reading with Kris Kling, who ultimately became our Doug, at my house. Then I happened across Cora Vander Broek at a concert in Chicago and I said, “Cora, I have this script…I don’t know if Joe’s willing to consider you, but I would love to have you in this role. If he’s willing to let me share the script, would you be willing to read it?” And she said of course. The next day she got the script and it was just one of those magic kinds of sequences. The next week, she wrote a letter to Joe asking if he’d be willing to consider her, and, at that point, Joe said OK. So we had our leads cast and went from there.

I suggested a couple of the other characters, and then the rest of the casting happened. All of them were ultimately Joe’s decision, but I was really thrilled with the cast he got. I just think they’re all excellent. I couldn’t be happier.

What were some of your favorite parts of the process?
Seeing some of the early rushes. Once I was able to see some… particularly Cora’s performance—oh my goodness. That woman is just amazing. And to be able to see what an actor of that caliber brings to your lines… You know, I’m a director and a performer as well and have a pretty strong sense of what an appropriate line reading would be, but Cora brings so much more nuance and just makes the words look good and sound good. And that brought great satisfaction there.

Another thing is the incredible beauty of the imagery of the film. Dalton [Coffey, the Of Minor Prophets cinematographer] is really quite remarkable. I don’t know that much about cinematography to know exactly how he got what he got, but when I saw the final cut of the movie, I thought… the field, the nature, the landscape of Northwest Iowa became a character in the movie. And that was just remarkable. And made me really proud to be associated with the film.

Earlier on we decided that God would not be a character in the movie. God is kind of a glancing character in the book of Hosea because he comes to Hosea and says “Marry this prostitute.” And then the rest of it is Hosea just trying to be as obedient as he can because of that initial edict from the Lord. We decided to leave the “voice of God” out. We could’ve done a Field of Dreams, we talked about a priest, we talked about a homeless guy in a jail…there were lots of ways to interject a God character or God voice into Doug’s life, but we decided to leave that out.

And for me, finally, there is just a landscape. It has a kind of redeeming, healing, beautiful quality to it that I’m proud of.

I think there’s a sense in which I had expected and wished there to be more religious symbolism in the film, or even blatant statements that would carry some of the themes of the book of Hosea, and Joe was able to create a really beautiful film without stumbling into trite religiosity. And I’m grateful that he danced around that.

The picture of the praying guy [Grace by Eric Enstrom] might be seen as trite to some, but Doug is living in his parents’ house, and his parents’ generation might very well have had that picture over their table. I think it’s a kind of iconic image that people will get. It represents an era, and a kind of perspective of that small farming community.

What was it like working with a crew that was largely working on its first full-length film?
I was usually busy with other stuff. And Joe was gracious enough to receive my notes and I would even go into the editing suite and make some suggestions—notes about cutting some lines even after we’d shot them, and Joe was kind enough to give my notes a try. But I think maybe if these guys had been further down the road, they might not have played ball with me as an early screenwriter as well as they did. They might’ve been more like, “Thank you for your script, goodbye.” So I felt as much a part of the process as I wanted to be and could be amongst my other responsibilities, and it was pretty kind and pretty wonderful.

What are your thoughts on the finished product?
I’m very proud of it. It is, as I’ve said before, different from the film that I wrote and it is different from what I expected it to be, but it has been so gratifying to me to have my wife and some other friends watch early cuts of the film and be really delighted with it. So that’s been tremendously gratifying to me.

It is a gentler, subtler film than I personally am capable of creating. It’s a type of artistry that is Joe’s and Dalton’s and the cast’s and I don’t know exactly whose. But it’s not mine. And so I am just kind of standing back going, “I’m really proud to be associated with that.” And I can’t claim that it’s mine. I contributed to it. But I can just be proud of what these other folks have created. I think they’ve created something very beautiful.

What did you learn from the creation of Of Minor Prophets?
The first thing that springs to mind is to hold it lightly. When I’m writing a play, I really have a strong sense of what it’s going to look like on the stage, what it’s going to sound like coming out of the actors’ mouths. And when I write a film, I really do not know. And that doesn’t mean I should hold it lightly in the “Well whatever, I’ll just slap something on the page and they’ll do something” sense. No. I really must do my very best work, and then I have to send that young child off into the world to go to school and get a job and become an adult. And I can’t control it all the way through the process. I need to let it go. And it’s a great joy—and I can be gratified by this—that Joe has come back to me and said, “Let’s work on another one.” So we’re already at work on another one. And I’m now developing that script, and I’m now more aware than I was before of how much that script will change after I get through the several drafts that I’m going to do.

Maybe it’s not that the script is going to change, but that what I think that script is going to become is not what it’s going to actually become. It’s going to become something different and hopefully better than what I thought.

Is there anything you’d like to add?
When Joe came to me with this story idea initially, he said, “I want to do something that’s a modern version of the book of Hosea.” And I said, “Why? What really interests you about this book?” And he essentially said, “I am so struck by the love in this story. The committed love that hangs on in the face of something very dirty and painful.”

And I think ultimately, even though it’s not blatant, we have been able to hint at that. It doesn’t completely flesh it out, but it hints at the kind of sacrifice that true love is capable of. It’s a film that, without being an overly romantic or idealized film, hints at the birth of that kind of love. We don’t know where it’s going to go, but we’re beginning to see its birth by the end of the film. Which is a miracle. And I’m glad to be able to see that miracle on screen. As subtle as it is.

To learn more about Of Minor Prophets, visit ofminorprophets.com. For more info on the upcoming Landlocked Film Festival screening in Iowa City on Saturday, August 15th, click here.