Interview conducted by Josh Horowitz
March 5, 2004
There’s just something about brothers in Hollywood. From the Zuckers and the Coens to the Wachowskis, for years many of the top filmmakers come in sets of two. In recent years, the Weitz bothers have joined the club. Chris and Paul Weitz hit the ground running with their directing debut, AMERICAN PIE, a film that, depending on your perspective, brought new life and intelligence to a tired genre, or signaled the end of our civilization as we know it.
Subsequent efforts included the disappointing Chris Rock comedy DOWN TO EARTH and the Oscar nominated ABOUT A BOY. The guys also found time to script the underrated animated film ANTZ and the star in the wonderfully depraved CHUCK AND BUCK.
Paul is the elder of the pair and is currently embarking on a couple of projects without his kid brother. He’s about to start filming a comic drama called SYNERGY starring Dennis Quaid and has a new play that’s just opened off-Broadway in New York called ROULETTE. A darkly comic look at a dysfunctional suburban family and their neighbors, ROULETTE stars Larry Bryggman, Anna Paquin, Ana Gasteyer, and Shawn Hatosy.
I caught up with Paul recently on the phone.
Josh Horowitz: What a pleasant surprise to find that this play was not set in Atlantic City but rather involved the underappreciated game of Russian roulette.
Paul Weitz: (LAUGHS) Yeah exactly. I’m hoping it will catch on now.
JH: As the New York Times review pointed out it sort of takes elements of the traditional family sitcom and turns it on its ear.
PW: In a way it was an attempt to be in a particularly American milieu and you can’t avoid the fact that America defines itself with television at this point.
JH: What idea starts something like this off?
PW: Actually it was just the image of this conservative business man as part of his boring daily routine including Russian roulette in that. It was just that single image and everything else was grafted on that.
JH: There’s a pretty dramatic shift for the second act both plot wise and tonally. Was that a delicate line for you to play with?
PW: It was incredibly difficult. The first act ends with a guy shooting himself in the end so all sorts of possibilities present themselves for the second act and I wrote all sorts of possibilities. I’ve had like ten different second acts of this thing. And this was the one that at least thematically fit the best for me and that allowed me to sort of dwell upon some things that I’d observed in recent years, ie. people who had cognitive problems. That seemed to fit into what had been set up in the first act thematically. It was a practically impossible task to have the second act be an inevitable progression of the first act. There were many times I was cursing myself. I tried to have him hold off on shooting himself until the end of the second act. But this is the one of my various options that made the most sense.
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JH: There’s a point where the audience seems to collectively wonder in the second act if it’s ok to laugh because a lot of it revolves around this mentally handicapped character.
PW: I find stuff funny that most people don’t which is sometimes a problem in my movies and in this play.
JH: So for you is the second act a completely comedic one? You’re not trying to have people reconsider their thoughts on the mentally ill or anything?
PW: I’m certainly not trying to get anyone to reconsider their thoughts on the mentally ill. There’s no sort of didactic intention. It’s an attempt to introduce sadness into it. It’s an attempt at a tone that other people have done better than I and I would include in that list Pinter and Chekhov. All those playwrights operated within a scale of comedy and sadness. Pinter on the surface of it appears very bleak and sad but is also extremely funny to me. Chekhov also appears very sad but he always called his plays comedies and was very upset when Stanislavsky would direct them to be portentous dramas. That’s the most interesting thing to me – trying to navigate those curves between those two tones. You have a lot more control when you’re doing film and you can actually manipulate the angles the audience is seeing. Theater is a little bit more uncertain.
JH: Congratulations, I know you’ve worked on your own before but once again you’ve lost that dead weight of a brother for this project. Do you feel a weight lifted when Chris doesn’t drag you down?
PW: (LAUGHS AND PAUSES) No. The funny thing is before we started doing film Chris, when he was at Cambridge, used to direct my plays there. So our first collaborations were in the theater.
JH: Do you still get his feedback on something like this? Has he been at all part of this process for you?
PW: Chris finds theater excruciatingly embarrassing.
JH: The stuff he directed must have been great.
PW: (LAUGHS) Well I don’t think he arrived at that conclusion when he was back at Cambridge. But since then getting him to go to the theater is like getting him to go to the dentist. So he wasn’t too involved in this one.
JH: This production has gone up while you’ve been prepping a movie [SYNERGY] and now you’ve just become a dad. How are your time management skills right now?
PW: Pretty good. Time management is to a degree anxiety management. I find that the anxiety of the three various things has cancelled each other. (LAUGHS)
JH: So you’re walking around in a fog right now?
PW: I’m more wondering when I’m going to have my major panic attack. Luckily for me it hasn’t come yet.
JH: Is this usually a stressful time for you right before you start shooting?
PW: I go to a shrink once a week and he occasionally points out to me that the physiological signs of anxiety are very similar to the physiological signs of excitement. So if I’m freaking out about something I try to tell myself I’m excited about it as opposed to stressing out about it. Prep is a stressful time because you’re waiting for the car accident to happen. But also I’m doing everything humanly possible to decrease my stress by having as much of a plan as possible.
JH: What can you tell me about SYNERGY? It’s Dennis Quaid, Topher Grace…
PW: Scarlett Johansson. The theme of it is to some extent how economic trends affect individual lives. It’s sort of an attempt again at a Billy Wilder-esque film. Quaid plays a 51 year-old guy who works at a company that gets bought in a corporate takeover. They don’t fire him but they demote him and they put in his boss a 25 year old guy played by Topher Grace. Quaid would love to quit but he’s got these two daughters who are going through school and he finds out in the beginning of the movie that his wife is having a baby. So he can’t quit. In the meantime Topher Grace’s character is this young guy who’s gotten this huge promotion but simultaneously his wife of seven months has dumped him. So he’s on a personal level shattered. The inciting incident of the movie is that Topher falls in love with Dennis Quaid’s daughter played by Scarlett Johansson.
JH: Tonally what are you shooting for in terms of comedy and drama?
PW: It’s a comedy/drama along the lines of ABOUT A BOY but it’s more sort of approaching particularly American myths.
JH: You mentioned Billy Wilder here and you have elsewhere. What about his work resonates with you?
PW: It’s probably the balance of cynicism with optimism. When I’m talking about Wilder here, I guess I’m talking about THE APARTMENT. This film is an attempt to do a film in the line of THE APRTMENT, THE GRADUATE, and KRAMER VS. KRAMER. KRAMER VS. KRAMER was pretty much a pure drama but it was about something that was very much present in the American landscape. It was sinking in that divorce was here to stay. And that film really captured what that did on an individual basis. THE APARTMENT was sort of about the American dream and our tendency towards career ambition and how that balances with being a human.
JH: I’m not a huge animation fan but I’ve always enjoyed ANTZ. What I really appreciated about it was that I felt it was as good a film that’s been written for Woody Allen. I feel like you guys really had him down.
PW: Thank you. We listened to his early stand up material and watched his early films and tried to have that be the voice of the character more than his later works. It was really fun and incredibly flattering that he responded well to the dialogue. I don’t know if he knew that humans actually wrote it. (LAUGHS)
JH: Did you talk to him at any point in the process?
PW: No but at one point when he was recording the dialogue I was the schmuck reading opposite him which was really fun because I got to act with Woody Allen. We would only usually hear what he thought through Jeffrey Katzenberg.
JH: With AMERICAN PIE you were obviously just showing off your range by going from animation to a sex comedy.
PW: (LAUGHS) The funny thing is everyone was looking at us like these smut mongers after AMERICAN PIE, not giving a shit about the fact that we’d just done a children’s film. But actually ANTZ was somewhat inappropriate for children. I was horrified when ANTZ opened and I went to theater and I realized children were actually going to go see it.
JH: So to switch up again, is PASSION OF THE CHRIST II next for you guys?
PW: (LAUGHS) Yeah. I’m going to do THE TRAGEDY OF CAIPHAS.
JH: I’ll be there. First on line.
PW: Excellent.
JH: DOWN TO EARTH. What happened there? Were there too many guys stirring the pot? Did you guys clash with Chris [Rock]?
PW: I haven’t seen it for a while so I don’t really know what I would think of it now. We’re friendly with Chris and we like him and respect him a lot. It was a PG-13 film and I think that coming from Chris whose stand up is generally edgy and us who had come off a practically NC-17 AMERICAN PIE, we had one strike against us. One of the reasons I did the film was I can remember seeing HEAVEN CAN WAIT as a child and thinking about certain spiritual things I hadn’t thought of before. I thought if a 10 or 11 year old white kid would see this movie, they might think about race in a different way than they had before. I don’t really know if it had that effect or not. To that extent I don’t know if it was a success or not. I don’t think Chris and I were totally on top of our game. And I think it was a
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film that could have benefited from some interesting visual storytelling but Chris and I were way too conservative in our approach to it. We had sort of taken away from AMERICAN PIE to be as unpretentious as possible with the camera. And that was not the best lesson to take to DOWN TO EARTH. But it was beneficial when we got to ABOUT THE BOY because we said, fuck it, we ought to stretch ourselves visually.
JH: It’s not too late to bash the screenplay for THE PIANIST [which beat ABOUT A BOY at the Oscars].
PW: (LAUGHS) What screenplay?
JH: How was the Oscar experience?
PW: It was totally great, especially coming from the perspective of just having done AMERICAN PIE. If you’re coming from something that’s considered a sign of the devolution of American culture and then you get a nomination, it makes it seem nicer.
JH: With ABOUT A BOY, were you concerned at all about Hugh Grant’s huge persona he came in with and how much you’d be able to play with that?
PW: The lucky thing is we all wanted to make the same film. He wanted to make a comedy about depression and isolation and I felt that his image and iconography were incredibly beneficial. The film is about a guy who’s gotten by with charm who then gets stripped down to his essence. I felt if we could go into it with the Hugh Grant that everybody was used to and then strip that down, we’d be in a great place.
JH: You grew up in New York City as I did. But you’re another guy that sold out to live in la la land. What do you have to say for yourself? Do you miss a little thing called the seasons out there?
PW: I don’t miss the seasons because I can come in for one or two days and get a full dose of winter. That’s about all I can take. And I’m not one of the New Yorkers that’s constantly bemoaning the lack of culture and intelligence in LA. I was largely in touch with a journalistic scene in New York and I found that scene to be far more frightening and exclusive than anything I’ve found in Hollywood.
JH: Do you still have this push-ups tradition for your films? What’s that about?
PW: Yup. Every time there’s a magazine change we do pushups.
JH: How many and who does them?
PW: It’s always interesting to see who does them and who doesn’t. On our two Americans films, people joined in. We start out at about ten every magazine change and by the end we’re doing about thirty. On AMERICAN PIE, the crew pretty much joined in. But with ABOUT A BOY, the English crew was just watching us and laughing the whole time. Rachel Weisz was the only one who did the push ups with us.
JH: Does Dennis Quaid know what he’s getting into? Is this written into his contract?
PW: (LAUGHS) The thing is we do them even if we’re shooting in the middle of a dirty street so I don’t blame people for not doing it.
ROULETTE is playing at the John Houseman theatre in New York City through March 14.
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