David Siegel

Sixteen years ago, directors David Siegel and Scott McGehee rode a wave of buzz out of the Sundance Film Festival, based on their debut feature, “Suture.”

With the heat from their initial film as writer-directors, they began making plans for their next film – an early space-age tale about rocket science and gigolos called “Modern Mates.”

Almost two decades – and three subsequent films – later, they’re still hoping to get it made. Indirectly, their frustration at not being able to move the project forward led to their latest film, “Uncertainty,” opening in limited release and on VOD on Friday (11.13.09).

“It’s that hard to get a movie made,” McGehee says. “We’ve been very busy trying to get movies made that didn’t go. We’ve come close on a lot of movies that haven’t been made.”

Adds Siegel, “We spent a lot more time on movies that we didn’t make than on the ones we have. It’s difficult to get a film off the ground. It has been frustrating.”

“There are a lot of ways a movie can fall apart and we’ve explored many of them,” McGehee says, “Luckily, we enjoy the process of trying to make movies.”

“Uncertainty” grew out of that frustration. Having moved their base of operations from the San Francisco Bay area to New York, the filmmaking partners were casting about for a project they could get off the ground: “We were noodling around with ideas about decision-making,” Siegel says.

Says McGehee, “We decided on a title early on and the idea of starting on the bridge with a coin flip.”

“Uncertainty” focuses on a pair of young lovers, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lynn Collins. Undecided what to do on one summer weekend day, they meet in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, flip a coin – then run in opposite directions.

When each reaches an opposite end of the bridge, he or she finds the other there. Siegel and McGehee then split the storytelling into two color-coded storylines – a romantic comedy-drama set in Brooklyn and a thriller set in Chinatown. The film cuts back and forth between two stories, both featuring the same couple, in a pair of what-if scenarios.

“Essentially, we were making two movies,” McGehee says. Adds Siegel, “There were a ridiculous number of locations, with stunts and chasing. I feel like we learned a lot about a certain way to shoot.”

Scott McGehee

Though Siegel and McGehee scripted the entire film in terms of scenes and action, they wrote no dialogue. Instead, they worked with Collins and Gordon-Levitt to figure out the dialogue for each scene – though most of that was done while shooting, rather than during the month of rehearsal that preceded production.

“Most of the rehearsal time was spent rehearsing scenes that established the history of the couple, things that weren’t even in the film,” McGehee says. “We were building a bank of memories so they’d know each other.”

“Then they’d have a history to draw on,” Siegel says. “It was a script with almost no dialogue. We fleshed it out as a story, but not with dialogue. Joe and Lynn were such great participants, so game and eager. It was a remarkable process.”

Still, the bifurcated plot line and the improvisational nature of the material put the filmmakers in an unexpected position: trying to market what some see as an experimental film, at a moment when even straight-ahead independent films are struggling to find distribution and an audience.

“We made ‘Uncertainty’ as a kind of attempt to go back to our roots,” Siegel says. “But it was before the crash of the independent market. Would we have made something as experimental if we’d known that?”

“If we’d seen the writing on the wall, would we have done it?” McGehee asks.

They both shrug: “I don’t know,” McGehee says.

The pair met in college in California – where neither was studying filmmaking – and became friends. But one Christmas holiday, they hit upon the idea of making a short film. From there, it was a short step to co-writing and directing “Suture.”

“If we’d known more, we might have directed in a more traditional way,” McGehee says. “If we’d been in a film-school environment, collaborating would have been discouraged; one of us would have been pointed toward directing and the other probably to producing. But we were so outside the system that it seemed easier to collaborate. We worked really well together.”

With “Suture,” Siegel and McGehee came out of Sundance as one of the hot new teams of the indy world. They got involved with “Modern Mates,” an adaptation of a script from the late 1940s by Walter McCoy (“They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”). They wrote it on spec for Sydney Pollack’s production company and seemed to have some momentum.

“But then it went from this smallish indy to a studio film,” McGehee says. “This was 1995, when even Steven Soderbergh and Spike Lee weren’t directing studio films. As it grew, it became difficult to cast. Then the producers thought we were the problem, so we were gone. And then they spent a couple of years not making it. So we wrote a couple of other scripts that came close to getting made.”

The pair finally found a producer and raised the money to make 2001’s “The Deep End,” which was a hit and provoked a bidding war at Sundance. That brought more offers, including a script they wrote of Richard Preston’s “The Hot Zone” – which went away when the start of the Iraq War (and fear about anthrax) made Hollywood nervous about a movie about a near-outbreak of Ebola virus, even one starring Robert Redford and Jodie Foster.

Eventually they made 2005’s “Bee Season”: “We’re really fond of that film but it made no money,” McGehee says. And now – “Uncertainty,” which IFC is releasing as part of its day/date program of films that hit theaters and video-on-demand the same day.

Meanwhile, the partners are writing an adaptation of Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist” for The Weinstein Company. They have another script, a heist film set in Turkey, that they’d like to make. And, of course, “Modern Mates.” As to whether that will happen, well, let’s just say that the title of their new film is apt.

“Our world of movie-making changes so fast,” Siegel says. “The last three years, there’s been such a fall-off in attendance at independent films at theaters. The effect of technology on the way people consume movies like this is so new. And sort of disruptive. It is changing so fast. Places that used to be major markets – nothing sells. Still, we continue to have opportunities to get movies made. Like so many people, it gets under your skin and you want to keep going.”

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