Posts tagged cinema

Here’s part 2 of my interview with Jason Reitman director of Up In The Air, Juno and Thank You For Smoking. If you missed part 1 check it out here. Up In The Air is in cinemas now!

Over the 7 years you were working on this how did you have to change the screenplay after the financial problems of the last year or so?

Jason Reitman: When I started writing the screenplay 7 years ago the economy in America was obviously very different, we were basically at the end of a corporate boom. So I wanted to write a corporate satire about a man who fires people for a living. I wrote comedic scenes in which people lost their job, but by the time we started shooting the film it wasn’t funny any more, I couldn’t shoot these scenes as they were written. We did have to change things

How many of those people interviewed in the film were real people?

Jason Reitman: Well we were scouting St Louis and Detroit, with the idea of shooting real people, we put out an advert saying we’re shooting a documentary on job loss, we are looking for real people who would go on camera and talk about there experiences. We had an overwhelming response, we brought in a 100 people, 25 of those are in the film, so outside of the people you recognise like JK Simmons everyone else who loses there job in this movie is a real person. They came in and sat down with an interviewer for 10 minutes answered questions on what it’s like to lose your job in an economy where there is really nothing available, then after that we would fire them on camera and asked them to respond the way they did when they lost there job or if they prefer say what you wish you said. This would turn into improv scenes where they would pelt our interviewer with all sorts of questions that he did not know the answer too, about severance, why they lost there job instead of Jeff, it just went on and on, some people got emotional, some people were really funny, some people got angry, I’m so grateful for there participation in the film, I could never have written some of the things they said.

You’ve got a history of writing strong female characters do you think there is a shortage of them in Hollywood?

Jason Reitman: Yeah to be honest that’s why I think I write them, I like to write original films, many men’s story’s have been told but so many women’s stories haven’t. I’ve fallen in love with really smart women over my life, the most recent being and presumably the last last (laughs) my wife. I enjoy spending time with my wife. The best scene I’ve ever written, which I wrote half of, is a scene in this movie when Vera and Anna talk about what they look for in a man, at each of there ages. The only way I could have wrote that was by asking my wife to have a conversation with herself at 18 about what she looked for in a man, so everything they say is true to her, but it breaks her heart every time she sees it with an audience, because they basically laugh at her for 5 minutes. I enjoy writing for women and working with great actresses, I’ve made 3 movies now and through all of them I’ve been surrounded by great women actresses, I hope I can work with more as my career moves along.

You mentioned you started the script 7 years ago earlier, how did the time line work? You made Juno and Thank You For Smoking in that time.

Jason Reitman: The time line was that no one wanted to make Thank You For Smoking so I started to look for something else to write and direct. So I found this book and fell in love with it. I started writing it, then out of nowhere a millionaire, one of the creators of Paypal, who had sold Paypal to Ebay for $1.5 billion with his partners decided he wanted to make movies, he read my script, he got it from a friend and called my agent and said hey I’d love to make this movie, so he wrote a cheque for $6.5 million and we made Thank You For Smoking, all of a sudden I wasn’t writing Up In The Air any more, so I made Thank You For Smoking then went back to Up In The Air and Juno came in to my life, which was this irresistible screenplay that I knew if I didn’t make I’d regret it the rest of my life. Then I basically finished the screenplay after Juno. 5 years later after never going back over what I had been writing, as I read from start to finish I watched myself grow up, in that time I had become a professional director, I bought a house, I got married, I became a father and I watched myself in the first act be a cynical guy in his twenties who really is just a satirist but over the 6 years I became a bit more sophisticated as a writer and understood more what was more important in my own life, that really changed Ryan’s journey