Jason Reitman is a 4-time Oscar nominated director, whose films include Thank You For Smoking, Juno, and Up in the Air. His latest film is Young Adult, written by Juno collaborator Diablo Cody and starring Charlize Theron (Monster). We had the opportunity to sit down and discuss the film during a recent stop in San Francisco.
The interview took place last Friday, December 2nd, at the Ritz Carlton in downtown San Francisco. Do to length, we have divided the twenty minute interview between Reitman, Hypable.com, as well as Marco Cerritos at Gman Reviews and Jason LeRoy at Spinning Platters. Part one of the interview is below, with the second part arriving tomorrow.
When asked about whether he would do another massive press tour like he did to promote Up in the Air, Jason Reitman said:
Reitman: I think it was definitely fun to do once, but doing the six month run and really going everywhere and meeting everyone was interesting…it was fun. I think the pi chart was the best part, tracking the questions. it was weird to realize how many times i was asked the same questions so many times.
Q: And so weird that people would see that chart and still keep asking the same questions.
Reitman: Well, it brings up an interesting idea, which is I understand why you guys need to ask the same questions every time, right? Because you know what people want to read about, and i’m going to have to say it. But if you know what you’re going to ask, and I know what I’m going to say, and you know what you’re going to say. Then we’re doing dialogue, right? It’s a scene. So now we’re just acting in a scene, and there’s something kinda crazy about that, right?
Q: Yeah, I don’t even know if I would call that improv…
Reitman: It’s not even improv. It’s a scene. And I’m doing the same scene, I’m just acting it with different people.
Q: For you does that get boring after a while, or do you just have ways to keep it fresh and mix it up sometimes?
Reitman: Of course it gets boring. And insanity making. I mean, if you think about a crazy homeless person, that’s what they’re doing. They’re just saying the same thing over and over. Yeah, it’s a little manic.
Q: I mean this is your third consecutive award season courting movie, do you ever consider just doing a bad movie?
Reitman: It’s my fourth!…I’ve been really lucky, it’s a big function of how these films get noticed. It’s easy to make fun of the award season. It’s easy to say “you give these people trophies and they’ll show up for anything.” But, that’s what convinces people to see these films, otherwise they wouldn’t. You can’t advertise Young Adult as this uncomfortable experience about a woman who treats people like shit. And you’re like “C’mon down!” There has to be a reason, and when people start talking about Diablo [Cody’s] screenplay and Charlize [Theron’s] performance. and Patton [Oswalt’s] performance. All the sudden it becomes, “Well, I need to see that and check out what this is all about.” It was like Natalie Portman in Black Swan its like, “That film seems a little uncomfortable but I heard I gotta see Natalie.” And then people go see it and then they love it, once they’re there, they really enjoy it. But that’s part of the process.
Q: Do you deliberately set out to make awards season films, or do they just turn out that way?
Reitman: [Laughs] I don’t go after this process in my filmmaking, no.
Q: I don’t mean that disrespectfully, but I know some people..they aim towards the end of the year to make their stuff.
Reitman: No, I want to make personal films. Small, personal films that push the audience. And it seems the best time to release those movies is at the end of the year.
Q: Do you see yourself in the future, or near-future, making a more mainstream, summer type film?
Reitman: No, not really. I don’t see any reason to make one. I think theres people who are really gifted at doing that, and are doing a great job of it. The stories i want to tell, the things that I want to explore, are far more subversive and far more personal.
Q: I think that my favorite thing about Young Adult is that, I feel like that there have been such a glut of movies that are just these suburb satires — such a glut of these lazy suburban satire. And I love so much about Young Adult, is that it sort of flips that around and it instead sort satirizes the kind of person who would really love a suburban satire.
Reitman: Oh, that’s interesting! That’s really funny. I never thought of it that way.
Q: That was just what jumped out at me. I loved that about it. So I was wondering if that was sort of any kid of thought that you or Diablo had talked about, “oh there are so many suburban satires, how can we portray the suburban life really as this sort of that has all this emotional honesty?”
Reitman: No, I think that’s a really interesting point though. And I have to be honest…I think far too much credit is given to writers and directors as far as what they were trying to do when they set out to make a film. I think most artists in general, if they’re writing songs or making movies, or whatever, uh — are following some sort of instinct, and they don’t even know why. You know, when I read this script and i wanna make it, I don’t read it and go, “oh! this will be my comment on, dot dot dot.” You know? I read it and go “this speaks to me. I have an instinct to make this.” And I don’t even know why yet. And in making it I’m going to start exploring why. And often you don’t really know why until people start watching it, and you start to hear a similar response to the finished film that you had to the screenplay in the first place. And the way other people start to articulate it and you go “oh, that is what I felt, I just never put it into words.”
Q: How is it, say writing your own thing versus working with Diablo, how do you approach trying to make it your own? I assume you’re involved with the screenplay throughout the whole process…
Reitman: No, most times Diablo wrote a complete screenplay, then I read it and worked on it a little bit — for a couple weeks — and then we went and shot. I wish I could say there’s something really different about it, but there really isn’t. At the end of the day I need to feel personal about the project, and it needs to feel emotionally autobiographical. And when I read Juno, and when I read Young Adult, I saw so much of myself in those screenplays, that I knew how I was going to tell those stories.Because i’ve had other great scripts that have come to me that I’ve had the opportunity to direct, movies that have been made, that — there just wasn’t enough of me, there was nothing for me to say there. They’d be great films, I don’t think I’d be the right director, because I’d just be making a rudimentary version of a great screenplay, whereas with Juno and Young Adult, I look at them and thought, “That’s me on the page.” And, “I know how to do this.”
Q: How easy or difficult was it to convince Charlize (Theron) to do this?
Reitman: I mean when she first read the script, I intimidated her…in the right way. Then we had a conversation about it, and she came around and she finally just said, “Let’s jump off the cliff together.”
Q: And that’s a good thing, that’s a great feeling to have that trust in your lead actress.
Reitman: Oh yeah, I mean that’s a really exciting thing to hear, because then you know…you need each other.
Q: And the pressures on to just kind of keep that going.
Reitman: I mean, A) It lets you know you’re doing the right thing and, B) It lets you know you have to rely on each other. And I felt that trust throughout the entire process.
Q: So when that’s on, how does your working relationship — where does it go from there? Do you just bring her more into the collaborative process?
Reitman: There wasn’t much. As soon as you have an understanding of who the character is, I don’t think there’s much to do except just keep it in key. Early on I sent Charlize (Theron) a bunch of DVD’s of reality TV shows, like I sent her My Super Sweet 16 and The Hills and Laguna Beach, and that became her primary research. [laughs]
Q: Is that why Kim Kardashian is always on in every room she was in?
Reitman: Yeah, I think that was…I kind of wanted the Kardashians to be the soundtrack to the film. I think that there is something really disturbing about the popularity of reality television and what it says about everyone who’s watching it, and what we value. You know, this is a movie about a movie who is trying to go backwards down the highway of her life, and that’s what those shows seem to be doing all the dime.
Young Adult opens nationwide on December 9, 2011.
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