'Project Greenlight' Winner Jason Mann on the Pitfalls of Reality TV and How He Really Feels About Effie Brown

As the Season 4 winner of Project Greenlight, Jason Mann was given the chance to direct his first feature film… but he was also given the label of “reality TV villain” in the process.

This season of HBO’s filmmaking reality competition has been all about Mann’s uncompromising approach to every aspect of making his directorial debut, The Leisure Class — and the squabbles that resulted with producer Effie Brown. But in a conversation with Yahoo TV, Mann says the tension between them wasn’t nearly as bad as the show makes it appear. (They just hung out together in New York!)

With the Greenlight season wrapping up this Sunday, we chat with Mann about how what we’ve seen on TV is only “maybe five percent” of what happened on set, how he and Effie are getting along these days, how Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s faith in him encouraged him to keep fighting, and whether he’d sign up for the “Faustian bargain” of reality TV if he had the chance to do it over again.

First of all, how do you feel about your film The Leisure Class, now that it’s finished? Are you happy with the final product?
Yeah, I’m very happy with the final film. It was definitely the sort of thing where I had to just keep my head down and keep working away at actually making a good movie, while all the peripheral stuff was going on. But yeah, I’m really, really happy with it. And I can’t wait for everyone to see how great these actors are, especially Tom Bell and Ed Weeks. They’re really just tremendous together. The way they play off each other is really incredible to watch.

Related: Ken Tucker Reviews This Season of ‘Project Greenlight’

And then, how do you feel about how the show played out? Have you been watching?
Yeah, I’ve seen it. It’s unfortunate to see that they’ve kind of taken what was, in my view, maybe five percent of what was really going on, which was dramatic, and they’ve made it look like that’s what was happening the whole time. So it kind of makes it look like the movie’s a disaster or something. [Laughs.] It’s very weird. It’s a bit of a Faustian bargain, to try to make more movies and kind of sacrifice that. But it’s cool that it gets people excited about the prospect of making movies. Obviously, I get tons of hateful messages. [Laughs.] But it’s nice to also have people excited about the movie.

So you feel like the show played up the conflict, and it wasn’t as contentious as they made it seem?
Definitely. And it makes sense. It’s completely understandable to shade everything away except the most contentious, most aggressive, combative dynamics. Especially between Effie and myself. I just saw Effie the other day in New York, and we hung out a little bit, and we were commiserating over the way the show has portrayed everything. It’s like, “Oh my God.”

It did seem very tense between you and Effie at times. Was that not the case?
It was a little bit tense, in terms of: We both had different goals, somewhat, it seemed. Effie’s trying to do her job, and I’m trying to do my job, and sometimes it did feel like they were at odds. So there is a degree of reality there. But it certainly isn’t what is actually on the show. Because when you remove all the context of us being nice to each other, with all that stripped away, you’re only left with people seeming like they’re going to cut each other’s throats. [Laughs.]

It’s good to hear that you two can laugh about it together. Would you work with Effie again?
Um… I think she and I have very different tastes. And I also have producing partners that I have worked with in the past, who are kind of like my team, who weren’t allowed to be a part of this because there was already a full roster of producers involved with this. But you know, Effie and I get along, and I think she definitely knows how to maintain a budget. She’s very skilled in that regard.

Matt Damon and Ben Affleck seemed to have your back throughout the process. Affleck even put up his own money so you could shoot on film!
Yeah, the really incredible thing about Matt and Ben is just how much they encouraged me to go with my conception of what I was trying to do, and to believe in that. They encouraged me more than anyone to really fight for what I thought was best for the film. So that was incredibly bolstering: to have people who have such experience really be in your corner and give you that kind of encouragement. That was incredibly helpful.

A big sticking point this season was your insistence on shooting on film rather than digital video. Looking back, would you still make that choice, knowing you’d have two extra days of shooting if you chose digital?
Well, it’s a very complicated thing, because the way the show portrays some things are not quite how it was in reality. But I definitely stand by shooting on film, and I would definitely do it again. Two days wasn’t really tempting enough to change the format of the movie, which would’ve affected every single frame of the film. That would’ve maybe helped us do a few more shots for a few more scenes, and that would’ve been nice. But when you were weighing the two, it wasn’t really a big thing.

Also, early on, when I’m being given that proposal — “You can shoot on film, or you could have two days” — I would never be able to get film back if I gave it up at that point. But there still would be the possibility of getting extra days if we needed it. So it was a little bit of a strategic thing to say, “I’m gonna stick with this thing.” Because there was a lot of back-and-forth, and kind of shifty things going on with things that were being proposed.

There’s one point at which Effie promised… it’s not on camera, but we had this scene that was taking place outside of this party that the characters go to in the middle of the movie, and we were supposed to shoot outside on a road, and Effie had not planned for us to do this for some reason. And she said, “Okay, if you give up this road, you can do the car stunt exactly as it’s scripted.” And I said, “I’m gonna hold you to that!” And then when the day came, the logistics just hadn’t been put in place. And it was like, “Why did I trade that away, if it wasn’t actually going to happen?” So it was sort of a careful decision to just make sure we held onto film. And then ultimately, we did have the chance to do a day of pick-ups, so it did get us a little bit of extra time that was helpful.

So knowing what you know now, with all the reality TV aspects of it, would you sign up for Project Greenlight again?
I think I would do it again. I have a little bit of a naive vision of what might become of the show, because initially they wanted to make this Hollywood script that even the producers weren’t fond of. But then we came in, we’re changing it, we’re gonna make something personal. And it seemed — maybe naively, from my perspective — like we were doing this great thing, and that would evolve the way that the show was going to be made.

In a sense, the poster for the show had an evolution like that. When they initially showed me the poster design, it had much more to do with the original movie they were doing. It was really goofy, and I wasn’t really a fan of it. But it kind of evolved in a nice way. And I assumed that would happen with the show as well. But that didn’t really occur.

And so I think I would’ve been more cautious about how they were ultimately going to manipulate the footage to create the thing that they were after. Because they were always fishing for the catfighting stuff: “What’s going on with Effie right now?” And I would just never answer. They would actually even come with soundbites of what they wanted me to say, and I was like, “I’m not going to say that stuff. It sounds so cruel and awful.” But that’s kind of what the modus operandi of a reality show is: to create that drama.

The season finale of Project Greenlight airs Sunday, Nov. 1 at 10 p.m. on HBO; The Leisure Class premieres Monday, Nov. 2 at 10 p.m. on HBO.