An Interview with Scott Weintrob, Director of ‘Paradox Effect’

Director Scott Weintrob. Photo Courtesy of Iervolino & Lady Bacardi Entertainment.

Scott Weintrob is an accomplished director, whose work can be seen on Prime Video and Peacock. His current project, Paradox Effect, is also his feature film debut, and it is available on demand now, and we here at NTG had the distinct honor of sitting down with Scott to discuss his first feature film.
 
John Betancourt: I'm very curious, first and foremost, what attracted you to this film as the director?
 
Scott Weintrob: Well, it's funny because the producers first approached me, they saw a Ford commercial they liked, and they said, “Hey, come in and we'll chat.” So cool. I went to meet them, and they offered me this Christmas movie. And I was like, “What is this, man?” Like, What? What? Because you get, as a filmmaker, the goal for me is always to be to make movies. So, when you get a call and people are like, “Oh, I've got a movie for you,” you’re like, great! But I was like, I don't want to make a Christmas movie, you know, like, here's this script, read it, and they're like, “There's nothing, no one attached, no money. But if you want to rewrite it, go for it.” And that's basically where it came from, is they gave me this script, and the bones of it were pretty solid. And then, you know, a friend of mine and I would just rewrite the thing
 
John Betancourt: Now this film is such a tight knit ride, like everything pops, everything moves, and I'm curious how your prior experience influenced that, that tight knit, intense vibe.
 
Scott Weintrob: Well, there's two parts to it, right? So, I do a lot of Doc(umentary), and I really believe that, like when you make doc, it makes you a really good storyteller, because you can have your assumption of what the story is going to be. But in doc, you're like in real time making decisions, should I go left? Should I go right? And you're making instant story decisions, right? And so that's like a really good preparation for a movie, because on a movie with a very small budget, like things don't always go to plan, and very rarely do. You don't have time to shoot extra, and if things go amiss, you have to work out, “What can I do? There's a scene I no longer have time to shoot. How do I tell the story to keep going?” So, I mean, the doc part of it is very helpful. And then obviously, I've done a ton of car commercials, so I just understand how to shoot action because been doing it for, you know, very high level for quite a while.
 
John Betancourt: What was different about directing a feature in this vein over anything else that you've done so far.
 
Scott Weintrob: So, the thing about a feature is it's a very, very intense and like all consuming process, like you can work on several projects at a time in Doc, you can be, “I'm working on a doc and I'm shooting a commercial at the same time.” A movie? Your whole life stops, and you are just working on the movie. So I was in Italy, and you spend a few hours asleep, and other than that, you work on the movie. It is everything. And as a director, there is no one that can move forward because they have like questions, and everyone has questions. No one ever says, “Hello, how are you?” at all. They always have a question. So that's your like, from dusk till dawn is answering questions, but they're all like, you know, valid questions. It's just very, very like, this is a story, and there is no time for anything else.
 
John Betancourt: I’ve heard from other directors; how critical it is to be prepped for a project. What kind of prep work goes into a project that is he's kind of a bit on a smaller budget, but so ambitious and so big in scope regardless.
 
Scott Weintrob: Yeah, so, like the other directors said, so, coming from commercials, I know exactly what I'm going to shoot before I shoot it, right? I've gone through -- I go to the location. I take stills, I like work out exactly the movement, both camera positioning and talent and/or car, whatever it is that's actually moving through the scene. So, I know, and I pick locations that I know how to utilize. I just have that background of, you know, knowing that this is going to take X amount of time, and once I've got that worked out, the like, technical part, I can get creative, because I know that once that's ticked off, the team's good and they can do what they need to do. And now I'm like, I can get creative.
 
So, in terms of prep, I went there way before the shoot to pick locations. So, because that's so key, is the locations all get triggered and approved, for budget, for schedule, because in my head, I'm like, this is where we're going to shoot this scene. This is how it's going to work. So, I need those things to like, get settled so I can really like, then start to (story) board, and then I board, and then when we get there, like, we know what we're doing. And remember, you only get the talent, like, maybe a day or two before you start shooting on a budget like this. Olga's gotta do a fight. Olga's gotta do a car chase. When is she gonna rehearse? There's no real time for rehearsals. I believe Olga (Kurylenko) got there on a Thursday and we started shooting on a Saturday.
 
John Betancourt: Well, that’s just incredible prep work, and I have to ask a follow up to that. In that, how did you pull off rehearsals and everything else, in such a short time?
 
Scott Weintrob: So, I had a rapport with Olga because I'd spoken to her a couple of times before the shoot. It was just important. I’ve just worked with, like, a lot of talent. I know it's important to really sort of get to know each other, and, like, they need to know that, like, I earned my spot, and by doing work that got me the spot, like it wasn't that someone just said, “Hey, your uncle got you…” wherever the bullshit that happens, right? And when they've done other work that they know and you earned it, there's a different rapport. So now, like we're into that, and we talk about character, we talk about what's needed. There was actually a scene that was very important to Olga, because she had had a friend who had some addiction challenges before, and she was like, “This movie is all well and good, but like, there has to be a moment where the character stops us. ‘I don't know if I can do this’” right? And you're like, “Yes, brilliant, great idea, totally valid. Let's put that in there.”
 
And I think these are the moments that like, built the rapport with the talent, there's trust, and you're a shared vision. So, when you need to like, say, “Look, this is where we're going now. We need to go and do this car chase. We need to go and do this, like, this is how we're going to do it.” It may seem like a rush, but she has the trust that I know how to build these scenes, right? And there's a trust in her that she's really deeply thinking about her character, because she's asking questions like that, and that's how you do it in a shorter time.
 
John Betancourt: This is a big, ambitious film. I noticed there's a little bit of heart to it, though, and a little bit more depth than some of the average film in this particular vein does. What are you kind of hoping audiences take away from this movie on a deeper level.
 
Scott Weintrob: Yeah. I mean, look, there's this, the mama bear, parent idea of, like, what a parent would do for their child, but not in such a like, cheese ball way that it's like, you know, just tons of people fighting, and it's unrealistic, and people are like, falling over walls and stuff. Like this is, I wanted it to be believable and true. Like this is really the characters. You believe them. And like Olga all the way through, never felt like an action hero. She just felt like somebody just happened to be part of it, holding a gun. She always looks a little awkward when she's holding the gun, because she doesn't really know how to properly do it anyway. You never see her doing some sort of crazy maneuver, right? You never see her like doing shooting somebody and then like a trained shooter, like, missing her and her shooting them like, so I feel like just everything about it felt true and real and that was important. And then, like, you know, at the end of the day, her goal was very simple, like, just to be with her daughter and have a regular life.
 
John Betancourt: Last question that I have for you today, what does it mean to you now to have this out to the world.
 
Scott Weintrob: I mean… It's been out in different countries, so I’ve received messages and stuff. You know, we premiered it at Rome Film Festival. Jared Butler introduced it. It was really cool to see it, you know, we literally locked the movie up, I don't know, like 48 hours before they screened it for the first time. So, I didn't even watch that screening because it just looked like a bag of shots. It didn't look like a movie to me because I was too close. So now, like, however far away we are from wrapping is cool because I can watch the movie as a movie, which I enjoy.
 
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

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