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Grantland has conducted an oral history of the making of Swingers. It's a really interesting and entertaining piece for any one who is a fan of Swingers and/or indie film, in general. Some snippets:

Favreau: I sent the script to my agent. She sent it out and there were some nibbles. People were interested in optioning it, but they had a lot of notes. They wanted to change Vince’s character to a girl and have them not go to Vegas and said the dialogue was too repetitive, and it had to be darker and more violent. I was really trying to embrace the notes. I tried to change the script, but I just couldn’t.

Favreau: I said, “Look, before I change anything, why don’t we do a staged reading? Let me bring in the friends of mine that these characters are based on. And that way we could really hear the script as I intended it so you understand the dialogue, and then you can also maybe be open-minded, and maybe cast one of these people?” I figured it’s a shot to put my friends in front of whatever guy who was going to direct this thing.

Livingston: Vince and I, and a couple of other people — Alex Désert, Ahmed Ahmed, who’s in the movie — we started doing all of these staged readings for potential buyers of this script. They came in all shapes and sizes. Every three months or so, we’d get together in somebody’s living room and rehearse for a while and then go to some empty theater space and do it for some guy who had Saudi parking lot money.

Liman: I actually had 20 days of shooting budgeted. Four five-day weeks. But I scheduled the movie to shoot in 18 days with the thinking that I was going to be taking so many chances to get this movie done, I couldn’t really be sure any one thing we did would actually come off. I had a mind that we were going to shoot 12 pages a day. A studio film might shoot two pages in a day and an independent film might shoot four or five pages in a day and some TV show might get up to eight pages a day, but we were going to shoot 12-page days. It was an insane proposal.

Favreau: It was embarrassing because we were walking into clubs and bars that we would really drink in. And nobody knew about Swingers, they just saw us walking around making our movie.

Livingston: We would use just the house lights and the bar to light the scene. If you turn the lights up a little bit, all the bar denizens would sort of thin out and move away. And if you dialed them down a little bit, the bar denizens would sort of fill in a little bit.

Liman: We were shooting in a trendy bar and suddenly I ran into some classmates from film school and I could just see the way they were looking at me — with this big poufy thing on my shoulder and some actors and a scene lit with lamps from a discount home store — that they were thinking Doug’s lost it. Just that, like, this poor guy, maybe he showed some promise in film school, but he has clearly gone off the reservation. This is not how you make a movie on any level. There is no aspect of this that looks professional.

LaLoggia: At any rate, they owned this very cool old house and had a bunch of roommates. And we asked them if they would throw a party that we could film but not tell anybody we were gonna film it. And obviously people saw cameras in there once we all arrived, but they still didn’t know what it was about, and people in L.A. love that stuff.

Mike White: They wanted people to stick around so they could have the liveliness of a real party. They provided booze. Maybe too much booze.

Adam Scott: I was at that party. We would see them walking around, shooting these little scenes. And we had no idea what it was they were doing.

White: I remember them shooting and I actually thought, at the time, This is so embarrassing for them.

Désert: Was I really drinking? I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I might incriminate myself.

White: The cast and crew saw us as just background to the movie, but from our perspective it was a real party. It wasn’t like I was an extra.

Liman: It may have been the low point of the filming. Nobody was taking our film seriously.

Ludwig: And so this kept the cop waiting for 25 minutes. So we start shooting the other side of the conversation and then the cop goes, “Did you actually show this permit to any other police officers?” And I said, “Yes, there was another cop who came by here at 10 a.m.” And he said, “OK, let’s call the other cop.” Ten minutes later, that other cop that had come by in the first place comes up, pulls over, and he says, “He never showed me a permit.” So they go, “You’re done, wrap up, get out of here.” And we hadn’t finished the scene. So I go around telling everybody to pack up. And the whole crew starts moving stuff from one place to another, except Doug and the actors are sitting in the car. The actors are sitting in the car and Doug just sort of turns on the camera surreptitiously. They’re wired for sound. So we kept shooting while the entire crew starts picking stuff up and moving it around and around and around because we’re still shooting and actually nothing is getting put away until finally Doug is happy.

Favreau: I taught Heather Graham to dance.10 I brought her out and I think we did it in her house, also. She lived in Beachwood Canyon. She had wooden floors. And I went over there and we practiced some moves. But I had learned how to dance at the Derby; they used to give lessons. And then I just would lead. You know, it’s easier if the guy knows what he’s doing.

Vaughn: I went back to Chicago to see my parents before I started filming Swingers and I was at the airport, waiting to fly back to Los Angeles, sitting down, waiting. And there was a gentleman in line to get his boarding pass. But it appeared to me that he kept waving at me and smiling at me and giggling and it made me uncomfortable. At first I thought, How do I know this guy? But he’s doing it in a very kind of babyish way, it feels a little weird. And he just was very confident the way that he did it. And he kept moving through the line very slowly, and so I tried to look at him like You’re crazy, or laugh, like Ohhhhh. But nothing like this seemed to deter him from wanting to engage me in this kind of a flirtatious, little-kid way. So when he finally got his ticket, he began to walk toward me. And I’m like, Oh jeez, this guy is really coming over here. And then he stopped and he picked up a baby that was sitting in a chair that I couldn’t see from my vantage point.

Favreau: Vince told me the story and that clicked and I thought, Oh, here’s a good way to use both things.

Liman: It’s a genius scene.

Be sure to read the whole thing. It's long but a great read.

 

[johnny_park]

Love this movie. Thanks for sharing this.