Even though making a movie typically requires the combined efforts of anywhere from dozens to thousands of individuals, the result is often tabbed as the product of a single auteur. In this view, a director fuses screenplay, performance, camerawork, and editing into a gestalt that is ultimately their creation. Even if it’s a drastic oversimplification, auteur theory nonetheless reflects the reality of most productions, where the director’s chair is indeed where the buck generally stops.

That’s not, however, the route taken by the makers of the Portland-shot feature film The Great Divide. Director John Skipp, who’s also credited as writer, producer, composer, and editor, was inspired by his experience as a student in a class at the Actor’s Lab taught by coach Kristina Haddad to spearhead a collaborative effort. His script included roles tailor-made for each of the twenty or so students in the class, incorporating their feedback and focusing on their strengths as performers. The result is a dark comedy about an extended family that gathers in the wake of its wealthy matriarch’s death to settle scores and sort out exactly who gets what from the billions she left behind. Sarah Brody Webb, who co-stars and served as a producer, offered up her home to the production and has been a crucial backer of the film in the runup to its world premiere on October 8th at the McMenamins Kennedy School Theater (another screening follows on the 10th). ArtsWatch sat down with Webb and Skipp to discuss this unique passion project. Questions and answers have been edited and condensed for clarity.

OREGON ARTSWATCH: John, what was your background before getting involved with this acting class?

JOHN SKIPP: I’m a New York Times bestselling author who moved into film. I moved to Portland a couple years ago because I got priced out of Los Angeles. I had written a film with a role for myself and I thought it would be good to take an acting class just so I don’t stink up the joint for the film I’m going to do.

OAW: You hadn’t previously done any acting?

JS: I had not. I wanted to meet actors, and I wanted to be a better director of actors, so I joined this acting class taught by Christina Haddad through the Actor’s Lab, a Thursday morning class, and I immediately fell in love with the class and everybody in it. I was watching week by week as everybody was improving. Everyone was talking about the need to find a good scene, one that they can really work with, and I thought I should just write some scenes because I’m seeing who they are and what they bring to the table. I decided to write a feature with great roles for everybody, so they’ll be able to say that they’re a star in a feature on IMDb. Sarah’s got a great place with a lot of dimensions to it, like seven distinct zones that you could work with. The downstairs is very different from the living room, which is very different from the dining room, et cetera. So I asked, could we do a feature at her house? And Sarah said yes, as long as it’s not a horror movie, which is what I’d done previously.

SARAH BRODY WEBB: I was aware of that, and I love the idea of using my house as a set, but I just didn’t want that energy in there. So it was sort of a joke, but not really: write something that’s not horror, and you’ve got it.

JS: The most adjacent genre would be dark comedy. I think horror and comedy have so much in common. They’re the flip side of the same coin. I thought of movies like The Anniversary Party, by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming, that use an event that brings people together. I made a list: funeral, anniversary, wedding, and so on. I showed it to Sarah and she instantly said funeral. So it became the story of what happens when the world’s richest old lady finally dies, and all of her highly dysfunctional family come together for the memorial to try to figure out who gets what piece of pie.

SBW: It all goes down in one day, not totally in real time, but real time in chunks, extended sequences within one time period. The whole thing starts at something like one in the afternoon and goes until maybe 11 at night. Or even a little later. When we shot it, it was 5 a.m.

JS: So after the next class, everybody met at a place called Mio Burrito down the street. I had a stack of file cards and some pens, and we started to figure out names for everybody, occupations, one good thing about this person and one not-so-good thing. There are no heroes or villains, just complicated people. And then we started to jam.

SBW: Skipp wanted it to be a true ensemble piece. There were a few obvious relationships emerge: Marjorie [Marcellus, also credited as a producer and set designer] and I would be sisters, and Samm [Hill] would be a son. So there’s the family. And Blair [Nesbitt], who’s a phenomenal young actress, and I had done a lot of scene work as mother and daughter, so she had to be my daughter. And so on.

OAW: So some of the roles and the casting were built on relationships that had started to emerge in class?

SBW: Once we had the kernel of the McMahon family, we added to that. But it all started with Granny Fanny, which is what we fondly called the matriarch. In fact, the first working title was Granny Fanny’s Funeral Pie.

OAW: What’s “funeral pie”?

SBW: It’s a thing that was quite common in the early 20th century. Made of raisins, I think, because they were cheap.

JS: Granny Fanny’s pie is substantially more interesting and weirder. I have a friend who is a master baker and he made our test pies and the ones that actually made it into the film.

SBW: The pie gets to put that on its resume. One of the gifts that Skipp gave us was the opportunity to really help create our characters, like he said. What is their profession? What’s their backstory? What are their good qualities and bad qualities? And meanwhile, I’m an executor by nature. I like to turn ideas into reality. And I know how wonderful creative people can be, but rubber’s going to hit the road here at some point. I created a Google form. Skip already had in mind that we’ll shoot for about a week. But, for instance, we had one gentleman who had a family and multiple jobs, and he can only shoot two days. So, Skip took that into account. And then we asked people, do you want to be involved in script writing? Do you want to help fundraise? I forget what all the levels were. And the last one was, I just want to act. There were a couple people that said just write me. I trust you. But I the majority wanted to be involved. And they were.

JS: I do want to be clear: I wrote the thing. But we jammed on character. And we would do rehearsals that were more about exploring relationships. How do you guys know each other? Were you in school together? Can we start talking about, like, stupid shit that happened 20 years ago that they’re still dealing with? The whole thing evolved in a really fun way over the course of a couple months.

OAW: These exercises, or rehearsals, were they similar to things you worked on, improvisational work you did, in the class?

JS: We actually did improvs in class based on the characters. I wrote a piece of music for the dance scene, because there’s gotta be a dance scene. And then we go into the class and everybody dances in character. You find out a lot about who everybody is just by doing this thing that seems to have nothing to do with anything. You could see who gravitated to who, who’s relaxed, who’s stiff, who was contemptuously watching somebody else dance, who’s side-eyeing.

OAW: And Kristina was willing to go with the flow and turn the class over to this idea?

SBW: She was unbelievable. She’s such a good teacher and completely understood what we were up to. She could not have been more supportive.

JS: What she has created in this class is a truly unique, safe environment. We’re talking 23-year-olds to late 60s and all different backgrounds and genders and sexual orientations and life experiences. In that room, we’re just family. And it translated really well.

OAW: Are there other films or filmmakers that have worked in this way, any models you had in mind for this sort of collaborative approach?

JS: Well, a lot of my favorite filmmakers have a team of people they love to work with. Judd Apatow, Preston Sturges back in the 1940s. But really, The Anniversary Party was a big one for me because it was the first film shot in Hollywood with then-new digital technology. I went to the premiere at the Egyptian Theater in L.A., and they talked about how they just got their friends to come over: Kevin Kline; Phoebe Cates, who hadn’t worked in like a decade and a half; Jennifer Jason Leigh’s sister, who was great. You could see them reacting like friends.

OAW: So the performances are less about an actor inhabiting a character that’s separate from them and more about bringing their own selves or essences into the performance?

JS: One thing that I’ve learned from Kristina is that we all bring our essences to the role. There’s no showing. There is only feeling. And, of course, it helps if that character is somebody you’ve helped to bring to life. But you’ll see the essence of every one of these humans coming through their characters, which is really cool.

SBW: Also, the film is very tightly scripted, but there are these set-aside improv zones, where there would be a scripted scene and then Skipp would just not cut and tell us to keep going. There’s one scene, and I don’t want to give too much away, but by the end of it I wasn’t even aware Skipp was there. I ended up just walking out, like “I’m done with you people.”

JS: That’s exactly what happened. That scene almost turned, it almost went Cassavetes at that point. There’s this tightly scripted scene, and once everybody but a couple of characters walk off, they just keep going. We had two cameras, and there’s a weird psychic connection that happens with camera people that’s sort of like when musicians are jamming and everybody changes key at the same time. You could feel that sort of group mind happen.

SBW: Marjorie, who plays my sister, is also a co-producer, so she and I worked together very closely. Sometimes we would be in the kitchen, and we’d snap into character and start bickering. And people were like, uh-oh, trouble on the set. They really couldn’t tell.

OAW: How stressful was it having the production take over your house for a week?

SBW: It was actually more like ten days, with a couple days off. I handled it pretty well, but I lost it at one point around day six. And Cody, who plays my son, says, “Are you okay, Mom?” It was so real I forgot for a moment, because I do have a son his age. And it really brought me back.

JS: Our DP had a night job, so we had to shoot on the nights that he wasn’t working. So we’d do two days on, a day off, two days on. We had at least two 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. all-nighters. But we were able to light for day or night.

OAW: How large was the crew?

JS: We had a skeleton crew: a DP, an assistant camera who took the second camera when we moved to two cameras. We had a first AD, a sound guy, a gaffer, and a couple of PAs who backed everyone up. Everybody was amazing, but Haley McCoy, our gaffer, was essential.

OAW: So it’s been about 18 months since John joined the class, and the film was shot in March, and now you’re ready to birth this thing into the world.

JS: I had the amazing experience of cutting and scoring it. I had written some of the music before we shot, while I was writing the script, and then the rest while I was cutting.

OAW: Had you filled all these roles on the previous films you’ve been involved with?

JS: I’ve worked on two features as writer-director, both anthology films. I worked with an editor named Andrew Kasch, who went on to be the lead editor for the series Legends of Tomorrow and did a billion other things. I worked with him very closely and learned a lot watching him. I had edited some short films, but this was the first feature. Musically, I had just done a horror short called Doppelbanger that’s set in a karaoke bar. So I had to write 37 original pieces of music for people to sing in a variety of styles. And I’ve been playing music since I was little.

OAW: Not to look too far ahead, but once The Great Divide is out in the world, do you have any plans to try to replicate this model of filmmaking?

JS: Actually, I’m talking now with all the actors about their parts for the next film, which will be a horror film. It will not be shot at my house. It will not be shot at her house. Meanwhile, we’re just trying to get this movie seen more widely. This is a movie with no stars, and it doesn’t have some of the things that normally galvanize marketing departments. But what it does have is this cool story of how we put it together. This movie was entirely financed through donations. There were no investors at all. This is something that can be used as an example to inspire other people.

SBW: It’s uniquely Portland. It showcases what an incredibly vibrant community we have here of indie filmmakers. And how supportive everyone is. I hear stories about the cutthroat nature of things in Los Angeles. But here, people are constantly lifting each other up.

OAW: It seems like further proof that Portland has enough talent and infrastructure that you don’t need to be tempted by L.A.

JS: There were great technical people in Hollywood I could have gone to for this, but we didn’t need to because we had great people right here, and they could drive home. This was one of the greatest experiences of my life and the most artistically satisfying thing that I’ve ever worked on. I got nothing bad to say!

SBW: Our acting coach is always telling us, make your own work. Good Will Hunting happened because those guys didn’t get cast in Dead Poets Society. They both went for it, but Ethan Hawke got the role, and they decided they would just write their own thing. This is just an example of putting that philosophy into action and getting these wonderful roles that, if we waited for them to fall into our laps, we’d be waiting forever.

(The Great Divide screens on Tuesday, Oct. 8 and Thursday, Oct. 10 at McMenamins Kennedy School Theater.)