I met with Richard Shepard recently to talk about his latest film, the quite fun The Hunting Party, but amongst other topics we touched on was his first movie, 1991’s The Linguini Incident, still commercially unavailable… and blissfully so, according to Shepard. “You know, it’s funny, because I’m not particularly proud of
that movie. I was 24 and it’s not the movie that I meant it to be on any level,” he says of the caper flick, starring Rosanna Arquette, Marlee Matlin, David Bowie, Maura Tierney and Buck Henry.
“But I think about it often. I think, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if I could somehow
track down the negative to that movie, re-cut it, re-score it and re-do it,
because there was a good movie that we shot, I just didn’t edit it correctly.”

“One of the things that I learned from that experience is that you have to
test your movie,” Shepard continues. “First-time filmmakers get terrified and paranoid that their
film is going to get ruined by showing it too much, but that also comes from
insecurity. You have tons of insecurity when you’re a first-time filmmaker, but now I try to
show my movie every week that I’m cutting, and really try to get feedback — not
that I listen to everything that everyone says, but if people are bored, then
they’re bored. You can’t fake that, and certain lines of mine, some people find
funny, some don’t. And if there’s a group of people watching and a few people
laugh but not everyone, that’s good, that’s fine. But if no one laughs? That’s
interesting. You might say, ‘Oh, that one’s missing.’ One day maybe I’ll be rich
enough to hire someone to track that down and go back to it.”