Interview with Jason Reitman - 18th October, 2009

Promoting: Up in the Air
Venue: The Mayfair Hotel, London
Interview type: Press conference


Question (Q): The film's based on a book, isn't it? If I read the book, would I recognise it in the film?

Jason Reitman (JR): Yes and no. The book is about a man who fires people for a living, this man Ryan, who obsessively collects Air Miles, but if I had directed the book exactly as it was, these two lovely ladies next to me (co-stars Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick) would not be here, because their characters are not in the book.

Q: That sounds like a considerable difference. So the book was source material but you were then able to fly with it, as it were, to take it beyond whatever's on the page?

JR: The way I use source material is, I kind of see it as a toolbox. Usually there's a story that I want to tell and I'm looking for the right words and I'll read a book, I'll read an article and suddenly it'll just be the language that I've been looking for to say something that I've needed to say or ask something that I've been meaning to ask and at that point it just becomes a toolbox of ideas that I can either follow literally or sometimes I take someone's dialogue and give it to someone else or, in this case, I really took the main character who – I liked his occupation, I liked his life philosophy and from there I built the plot around him to ask the questions that I wanted to ask.

Q: I read that you wrote the role of Ryan with George Clooney in mind. Is that correct?

JR: Yeah, I wrote the role with him in mind and with Vera and Anna in mind too. It's easier for me to write when I know who I'm writing for – that's often how I identify the voice of the character. I had met Vera before and seen many of her films and I knew the things that she was able to do that no other actress is capable of doing and it was because she's able to walk that very fine line of being aggressive and feminine at the same time that I was able to write Alex the way I did. It was because I saw Anna in Rocket Science and knew the kind of sparkling brilliance of her mind and how fast she is that I was able to write Natalie the way I did. And look, if you're going to make a movie about a guy who fires people for a living and you still want to like him, that actor had better be damn charming and I don't think there's a more charming actor alive than George Clooney. I was just very lucky he said yes.

Q: What would have happened if you'd written it with him in mind and he'd said no? Do you then go to a Clooney clone? A George Cloney?

JR: I don't think there is such a thing? I'd have probably just ended my career right there and then. The story is actually kind of funny – I'd been writing it for six years and I told his agent, 'Look, I'm about a week away or a month away from finishing it, but in the middle of that I'm going to Italy on vacation with my wife' and he said, 'Well, if you're going to be in Italy, you should just go see him!' And I said, 'That sounds like an awful idea. I don't want to go see him if he hates my screenplay' and he's like, 'No, no, no, just go, he'll love to see you'. So I said, 'Well, look, I'll send him the screenplay and if he enjoys it, then certainly, I'll drop by'. So I get to Italy and I call his agent up and I say, 'Did he like it?' and he said, 'Yeah! Go see him!' 'But did he like the screenplay?' 'Just go, look, here's the address'. So I drive there, I get to his address in Como and one of the first things he says to me is, 'So, what are you working on these days?' I said, 'There's a screenplay, it's called Up in the Air' and he said, 'Oh, I have to find that – I gotta read that' and for two days, my wife and I stayed in his home and I was just trying to prove that I was a man to George Clooney. I played basketball with him, I hadn't done that since eighth grade, I never drink, I tried drinking with George Clooney. He opened four bottles of wine between the three of us, so for an evening I – I don't know how I didn't die of alcohol poisoning and finally, about the end of the second day, he disappeared for a while and, I don't know, he walked into the room and he said, 'I just read it, it's great, I'm in'. And those are words that I feel changed my life and probably one of the greatest moments I'll ever remember from my career.

Q: One of the fun things about the film is that it balances against the darkness of everyone getting fired and then the optimism of these people finding new jobs and kind of the cherry on top of that is the song that came in at the end of the credits. Was that dumb luck? Was that something you were looking for? How did that come about?

JR: That was dumb luck. After Juno, I've gotten kind of used to teenagers sending me songs with the idea that it'll appear in one of my films. But I was speaking at a college in St Louis and a man in his mid-fifties came to me with the song. That was unusual. And he handed me a cassette tape. So, first off, I had to find a place to actually listen to this, but we found a car with a cassette deck and I really was ready for something ridiculous and instead on came this voice, which you know is in the credits now, and he introduced himself, explained how he had lost his job after being there for a decade, decade and a half and he was now in the middle of his life, trying to figure out the purpose of his life and he started singing this song that is not the greatest song ever written, but it's an authentic song. And I guess my feeling was that we're in the middle of one of the worst recessions on record in America and about a million people had lost their jobs in the last year, but we really have no experience of who these people are – they're just often numbers on newspapers' mastheads, percentages – and here was a guy who was able to sing, very authentically, about how he felt about it and I felt what better tribute than to end the movie with it. And I knew, halfway through listening to it that it was going to be in the credits.

Q: One of the pleasures / sadnesses of the movie are the interviews that are conducted by Anna's character and Clooney's character, with apparently real people. How was that done? Obviously J.K. Simmons is an actor, but were some of the others genuine people who had lost their jobs?

JR: Well, when I started writing the screenplay seven years ago, the economy in America was very different – we were basically at the tail end of an economic boom and I decided to write a corporate satire about a man who fired people for a living and I wrote comedic scenes in which people lost their jobs. And by the time it came to shoot this film, it just wasn't funny anymore and I couldn't go about shooting these scenes as written. And we were scouting in St Louis and Detroit and the idea just came to me, that we should try and use real people, so we put an ad out, in the newspaper, in the Help Wanted section, saying we're making a documentary about job loss and we're looking for people who would go on camera and talk about their experience. We had an overwhelming amount of response and we brought in a hundred people and twenty-five are in the finished film. So, outside of the people you recognise, like J.K. Simmons and Zach Galifianakis and Pamela Jones, everyone else who loses their jobs in this movie is a real person who came in and sat down at a table with an interviewer and for about ten minutes answered questions about what it's like to lose your job in an economy where really, there's nothing available and you have to consider some very dire decisions. And then after that we fired them, so 'We'd like to now fire you on camera and we'd like you to either respond the way you did the day you lost your job or, if you prefer, you can say what you wish you had said'. And this would turn into improv scenes in which they would pelt our interviewer with all sorts of questions that he did not know the answer to, about their severance, about why they lost their job instead of Jeff and, you know, it just went on and some people were really angry, some people got emotional and cried, some people were very funny. And I'm so grateful for their participation in the film, because I could have never written the type of things that they said.

Q: You've got a history of writing strong female characters, like with Juno and then this film as well. Do you think there's a shortage of those in Hollywood right now?

JR: Yeah, I think that's why I write them. I like to write original films and I think many of the men's stories have been told and so many of the women's stories haven't and I've fallen in love with many really smart women over the course of my life – the most recent and presumably the last one being my wife – and I enjoy it and I enjoy spending time with my wife talking about these scenes. The best thing I've ever written, I only wrote half of and it's the scene in this movie where Vera and Anna talk about what they look for in a man at each of their ages and the only way I could write that is I asked my wife to have a conversation with herself at 18 about what she looked for in a man and so everything that they say is true to her, which breaks her heart every time she watches it, but I basically laughed at her for five minutes. But no, I enjoy writing for women and I enjoy working with great actresses and I've just been very fortunate, I've made three movies now and throughout all of them, from Maria Bello on Thank You For Smoking and with Ellen and Jennifer on Juno and then not only Anna and Vera on this one but also Amy Morton and Melanie Lynskey, I've just been surrounded by great actresses that I hope I can work with more and more.

Q: You mentioned that you started this script seven years ago and obviously you've had a couple of films come out in between that time – Thank You For Smoking and Juno. Does that mean you put this on the back-burner for a while, while you did Thank You For Smoking? How does the time-line work?

JR: The time-line is that no-one would make Thank You For Smoking and so I started looking for something else to write and direct and I found this book, I fell in love with it and I started writing it and then out of nowhere, a millionaire – one of the creators of PayPal, who had sold PayPal to eBay for one and a half billion dollars with his partners – decided he wanted to make movies, he read my script, he got it from a friend, he called my agent and said, 'Hey, I'd love to make this movie' and he wrote a cheque for six and a half million dollars and made Thank You For Smoking, so all of a sudden, I wasn't writing Up in the Air anymore. I made Thank You For Smoking, went back to writing Up in the Air and then Juno came into my life and was just this irresistible screenplay that I knew if I didn't direct, I would regret for the rest of my life. The interesting thing was that I basically finished the screenplay after Juno and about five years in, I had basically got to the end of the script having never gone back and reread what I'd been writing and as I read from start to finish, I watched myself grow up. You know, over the course of the six years that I wrote the script, I became a professional director, I bought a home, I got married, I became a father and I watched myself in the first act be kind of a cynical guy in his 20s who was really just a satirist and then over the six years I became, I don't know, a bit more sophisticated as a writer and I also realised at least what was important in my own life and that really changed Ryan's journey as I continued to write.

Q: There are lots of real-life locations in the film, including several different airports. Did that present any particular challenges?

JR: Oh, it's a total pain in the ass. Shooting in airports is very difficult and we shot in four international airports. There was actually a fair amount of access and because American Airlines was our partner in this film, basically our trade was that they were our airline and they gave us access to all their check-in gates as well as their departure gates, but still, all the actors had to go through security every day, on the way to the set. And I think they would, on purpose, put George through as much security as humanly possible. I'm surprised he didn't get pat down every time he went through. And you know, we can't bring our own food in there, we have to bring in our own electricity, we have to bring in our own wire for our generators through an airport – it was really tricky.

Q: Anna Kendrick says that she thought you hated her after her audition. Why did she think that?

JR: Well, one, I'm a mean guy, but two... I wrote the role for Anna and Anna auditioned against thirty of the best actresses of her generation. I needed to know that she could actually do it – I basically saw her in one movie. I thought, 'Oh, she's great, but I need to see her actually read the lines.' And when she came in, I didn't want her to get psyched out by saying, 'Hey, I wrote this role for you' because then she'd probably freak out and not be comfortable, because then it would be kind of hers to lose, but since I'm a horrible actor myself, in trying not to show that I was already a huge fan of hers, I probably wasn't as nice as I could have been. It's kind of like when you meet a pretty girl but you don't want to show her that you think she's pretty, so you're trying to act as straight as possible and then you're not acting like yourself and then pretty soon you're acting like a jerk.

Q: I just wanted to tell you how much everyone enjoyed the film. When Anna gets dumped by text and Clooney says the line “I guess it's kind of like firing someone over the internet”, the whole cinema was in stitches.

JR: That brings up something worth mentioning and that is that this is the first film that my father (Ivan Reitman) and I have actually worked on together. I'd avoided doing that with the first two, because I wanted to make a name for myself and once I'd made a couple of films there was nothing that would make me more proud. Now, my father wrote one line in this movie and that line is “Oh, it's kind of like firing people online”. It's a MONSTER line, it gets applause every time the movie plays. If the reaction to that is a ten, the next biggest reaction to a line is a four. So, I don't know, I'm a little jealous, but it's a really proud moment for me. It's as if he's a baseball player, he can just, like show up and go, 'Oh, you want me to hit one? Sure, I'll hit one' and then he knocks it out of the park.

Q: One of the pleasures for film fans is when well known actors turn up in tiny roles. You mentioned JK Simmons, who has a very unselfish cameo and also you had Sam Elliott in the film. How much explanation do they need?

JR: Well, once I gave them a great role, like the ones I gave to Vera and Anna, I presume that on the next film they'll come in free and do three or four lines of dialogue each. No, I invited all of them to come in and do those roles and they've all been very gracious and have done them. I try and keep strong relationships with them so that when I ask they come back and do these roles. When I started my career, my biggest goal was I want to be a director that actors want to work with. Actors make movies, not only fiscally but they make them work and I just knew that the only way I'd ever be a successful director in the way that I want to be a film-maker would be if good actors actually wanted to work with me. And I'm slowly working my way towards that and I look at people like Sam Elliott, who would show up for a day and do that role and that makes me more proud than anything.

Q: Could you talk about your choice of music in your films? Is that drawn out of your personal taste? What was the case with Up in the Air?

JR: I start up an iTunes library while I'm writing the screenplay and I'm very specific about music and there are some very personal things for me. I originally thought this movie was all going to be done to Hank Williams music and then I got into the edit and realised I was wrong and I started moving into kind of folk music, but yeah, it's very personal for me.

END

Interview with director Marc Price and actor Alastair Kirton - 6th October, 2009

Promoting: Colin
Venue: The Horror Room in the Movieum, London
Interview type: One-on-two


ViewLondon (VL): Where did the zombie point-of-view idea come from?

Marc Price (MP): I was always a fan of zombie movies and I thought it would be great to make a zombie movie but I wanted to something that – to me, as a zombie fan – I thought I hadn't seen before. And the idea of doing a movie from the perspective of the zombie gave me so much to play about with, such as the lack of dialogue – I thought it would be interesting to use the language of film to engage an audience rather than a bunch of actors running around saying how they felt, which is how I write dialogue, because I'm just not very good. And I had Alastair very much in mind to play Colin. So it grew from there and then we looked at what locations we had available to us and other actors we wanted to work with who we knew and we based the script on that. And there were a couple of scenes that were kind of over-reaching but I felt that was important as well, because it's a challenge and it's fun.

VL: So, Alastair, were you there right from the beginning? You knew each other before?

Alastair Kirton (AK): Yeah, we'd worked on a couple of short films together. I think I was pretty much in Marc's mind when he first came up with the idea.

MP: No, you were at least fourth or fifth choice (laughs).

AK: (laughs) Thanks, man. Yeah. Dean Gaffney wasn't available. Yeah, Marc pitched the idea to me really early on. He didn't have a script, so he used wooden stirrers and sachets of sugar in a coffee shop to mark out the film and I knew he wanted me to do it when he stopped saying “And then Colin gets hit in the face with a hammer” and started saying “And then you get smacked in the face with a hammer and bundled into a car”, so I was like, “Oh, brilliant, he wants me to play a zombie. That's...terrifying.” But yes, I wanted to get involved and having worked with Marc a couple of times before, I really love the way he approaches things. Just his enthusiasm and joy at film, really. And we had a lot of the same reference points, movie-wise. So when you go into a project like that it's nice to know you're both on the same page and working towards the same goal.

VL: So are you both big zombie fans then? What was your first zombie movie?

MP: Dawn of the Dead was mine. We'd borrowed – of all the films – Ah'm Gonna Git You Sucka. My aunt had taped it for us and on the tape at the end it wound down and there was the end of Ghostbusters and we were like, 'Oh great, Ghostbusters' so we watched the end of Ghostbusters and then that wound down and then something else had finished and Dawn of the Dead was starting, so we missed the title but it was the shot of waking up and all the chaos in the television studios. And I just watched it, thinking 'This is fucking amazing' and then the tape ran out! And I was like 'Argh! What's this movie called?' I was about 11 then. And then, when I was 14, I think Alex Cox had it on Moviedrome and it came on and I recognised the shot straightaway and then it just blew me away. I couldn't believe all that amazing stuff was happening so early in a movie.

VL: Which zombie movies were a big influence on the film?

AK: Well, Day of the Dead was a big influence, in terms of Bub [a named zombie in the film]. Marc said that when he watched Day of the Dead he got really deeply emotionally concerned for that character. So Marc gave me Day of the Dead – I'd seen Dawn and a few other things, but I hadn't seen Day of the Dead – so we watched that and Bub was obviously a big influence. But then we kind of just chatted about what we thought the best way to approach it was. The idea was really to think that he didn't have much vision, he was just a creature very much caught in his own small circle of consciousness and just the way he approached things, the way he picks up objects and plays with them like a child, that was how we approached it.

VL: Tell me about the special effects, because the effects are amazing for such a low-budget film.

MP: In terms of make-up effects, we were really lucky to have someone like Michelle Webb. We put out a sort of casting call to make-up people and we said 'Hey, why don't you come? You're going to have to bring your own equipment because we don't have any money but you have total freedom to create any zombie you like, providing we have the ones that we need for the sequence'. And all the make-up people who came down were fantastic with that, but what Michelle Webb [make-up artist on X-Men: The Last Stand] did that was exceptional was that she'd show us how to apply these make-up effects ourselves and leave her equipment with us and say 'Okay, see you next week – good luck with the week's filming'. And then she'd come back, see what we'd done and say, 'Right, okay, you can do this now...' and she'd help us and teach us more. And where that ends up being a truly amazing thing is you've got someone like Justin Hales (who owns the production company with me, because he knows how to set them up), who's normally a very technically-minded guy, he's now an amazing make-up artist. And that's just through wanting to do something, not wanting to wait around for us to start filming. We were even leading the make-up session at Raindance with him.

AK: I think the other thing that really helped was the fact that, being shown how to do it and you knowing how to capture things and the way to shoot things is that you just worked out the best way to cheat stuff, like the eye gouge and the face being pulled off. It's knowing what you can do with make-up.

MP: And then how to light it and what the camera should be doing to sell it.

VL: Did that all come from trial and error or from Michelle pointing you in the right direction?

MP: It was more a case of what I'd read about film productions in the past. And also the setting I wanted to apply to the movie, how in the stiller moments where there isn't that human influence, the camera's fairly static or smoothly gliding along, but whenever the human is the dominant force we wanted it to have that sense of panic and franticness in the camera. And in the case of the street battle, if the camera was smoothly moving around then you'd see that none of those people are actors and none of them are capable of faking a decent fight (laughs).

VL: How did you decide on Colin as the name of the film?

MP: It's my dad's name. And I thought it was a gentle enough name and then we have him biting someone's face and ripping someone's arm off.

VL: What was the biggest difficulty? I imagine there must have been times when the low budget meant you couldn't quite get something you wanted?

AK: There was one make-up effect that we wanted to do, which was after the street battle, when Colin has a hammer lodged in his head and we tried so hard to get the damn thing to stick. We tried latex, we tried sellotape and I think the last thing we tried was four rubber bands, which were cutting off the circulation to the top of my head. And then we walked out and Marc was like, 'It's on the wrong way round', so we just lost it.

VL: Which scene are you most proud of?

MP: I think the street fight, what with the explosions and the very small amount of people we had there to shoot that scene and how we dealt with that, in terms of framing.

AK: I just enjoyed the slower, more pensive bits, like the bit with the pigeon. Just the little bits, like Colin on his own and being a bit vulnerable, from a distance.

VL: What's your next project, both of you?

MP: We're working together again on something else. It takes place entirely on a Halifax bomber, returning from a mission over Europe. The plane's badly damaged, it's limping home and a creepy creature attacks one of the gunners. But it's not like the monster's killing everyone on the flight, it's only attacking this one guy. It's called Thunderchild, which is the name of the plane and hopefully it's an exercise in tension and it'll be an exciting ride.

END

Interview with writer-director Rémi Bezançon - 23rd June, 2009

Promoting: The First Day of the Rest of Your Life

Venue: The Edinburgh Film Festival

Interview type: One-on-one

ViewLondon (VL): Where did the idea for the film come from?

Rémi Bezançon (RB): The film is about how time is spent. I wanted to pose that question and talk about time, so I thought the best way to do this would be through the depiction of a family. I was thinking about Italian family comedies and the dramas that result through the different generations in the family. The idea then was to tell this story in an original way, so I chose five different days within the family and had a large amount of time pass between these five different days, to highlight the idea of time.

VL: Was the structure of the film something that came through the writing or something you had in mind before?

RB: That was my idea from the beginning. I deliberately left so much time between the five days to allow the audience member to fill in the gaps between them, using their own memories and reflecting on their own experiences. It's interactive, in a way. I wasn't so sure that it would work, at first. In order for it to work, the family needed to experience or live things that every day-to-day family could live, not things that were out of this world. Things that people could identify with.

VL: How much of the film was drawn from your own family and experiences?

RB: A little. Very, very little. For example, for the Super-8 film sequences, I was inspired by some home movies that my grandfather made with my mother when she was a girl. But there are also a few little things and some lines of dialogue. When my family saw the film, they didn't recognise any of it, which is a good thing.

VL: Do you have a similar family unit?

RB: I have two big brothers and one little sister, so it's like I've stepped outside and am looking in at my own family. I can put myself into every different member of the family.

VL: Can you tell me about the casting? How long was the casting process and did you know which actors you wanted from the start?

RB: Not very long. I cast the parents first and the first person that I cast was Jacques Gamblin. I chose him because he has a special air about him and I very much like him, as an actor. After that I cast Zabou Breitman as the mother. I liked her very much, because she has a huge range – she can play comedy, she can play drama and I was very much drawn to the tragi-comedy that she brings to the role. But in France, these actors aren't particularly bankable. So it was quite difficult to get the go-ahead to make the film with them, but I really wanted both of them for these roles. When I cast the children I really wanted to find a family that could hold the comedy that I wanted, so I was trying to find a family atmosphere when I was casting.

VL: The younger son, Marc-André Grondin was the lead in a film called C.R.A.Z.Y. Had you seen that?

RB: Yes. When I was writing the script for the film, the casting director told me to see C.R.A.Z.Y. And Marc-André Grondin was very good in C.R.A.Z.Y., so I cast him from that. And C.R.A.Z.Y. was cool too – there are a lot of similarities between C.R.A.Z.Y. and The First Day.

VL: Where did the title come from?

RB: From American Beauty – Kevin Spacey says something similar in the film. Also there's a song with the same title, by Etienne Daho, which comes on at the end of the film.

VL: Do you have a particular favourite scene in the film?

RB: I like the scene with the cushion at the end, when the mother lets the air out of it. That was actually the first scene that I wrote.

VL: Did you cut out anything that you really hated to lose?

RB: I didn't really cut a lot, maybe one or two scenes I had to readjust. You often have to choose scenes like that, but I didn't cut too much.

VL: You mentioned Italian family comedies earlier. Are there any specific directors that have influenced you in the same way?

RB: Yes, definitely. Wes Anderson, for example – I love both The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited. I also like Sam Mendes. There are a lot of influences from American cinema, but also from French cinema, particularly the films of Claude Sautet. There are so many other things. I love the six hour Italian mini-series, The Best of Youth – that was very, very good. That was a big reference for me. And the American series, Six Feet Under – that was a big reference for me too. I love it. Psychologically, that was a fantastic series.

VL: What's your next project?

RB: My next project is an adaptation of a book called The Happy Event, by Eliette Abécassis. It's about a pregnant lady. It's a very good book and I hope my movie will be very good too. I have finished the script and I hope to start shooting in March.

END