‘I was anthropologically suited to adapt About a Boy’
Chris Weitz and his older brother Paul made their feature film debut as directors on the hit teenage comedy American Pie (1999). They then directed the comedian Chris Rock in Down to Earth (2001), a re-make of Warren Beatty’s 1978 film Heaven Can Wait. They achieved considerable success in their first writing–directing role, nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, along with Chris Hedges, at the 2003 Oscars for co-writing About a Boy (2002).
London, the present Will, a rich, child-free and irresponsible Londoner searches for available women by inventing an imaginary son so he can attend single parent meetings. As a result of one of his new relationships, he meets Marcus, an odd twelve-year-old boy with problems at school. Reluctantly, Will takes a liking to Marcus, helping him become more confident. In turn, Marcus helps Will accept that he is an adult.
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KEVIN CONROY SCOTT: Chris, your father was a fashion designer and a writer, and your mother was an actress. So was creativity something that was encouraged in your household?
CHRIS WEITZ: My mom [Susan Kohner] won two Golden Globes and was nominated for an Oscar for Imitation of Life, the Douglas Sirk movie. But it was funny, because she never really talked about making movies when we were little – I think she was glad to put it aside. And I grew up in New York, so there wasn’t much talk of the film industry. It was only when my grandfather and grandmother would roll into town – my grandfather was an agent, he was Ingmar Bergman’s agent, and John Huston’s, and Billy Wilder’s, so he represented a lot of the European talent that came to Hollywood in the thirties, forties and fifties. He was born in what is now the Czech Republic, and he was extremely literate, like a man of letters from two centuries ago. So the idea that people who made films could also be literate and have ideas, and be inspired not only by a visual culture but by a literary one – that came from my grandparents. My grandmother too had been a silent film actress, and she starred in Mexico’s first talking picture. So there’s a weird lineage there …
My father also served in intelligence in the Second World War, and he was writing biographies of Nazi leaders as well as designing clothes. So he was also very well-read, and really he didn’t like designing; it was basically just what he made his money from. So he encouraged me and my brother to seek careers in the arts, and I think there were points where he regretted it, because he thought we would just be deadbeats. And for a long time, that’s definitely how it looked …
But my brother and I did grow up with very hierarchical ideas about writing, and to this day I’m still not sure that screenwriting is ‘writing’ in that literal sense. I don’t think it’s literature, really – rarely and unintentionally does it achieve that status. It’s not even as important as architectural drawings – and that’s the thing it’s similar to, in that a script is a map that’s meant to be undertaken. But I always feel uncomfortable calling myself ‘a writer’, because that’s not what I think screenwriting really is. It’s a much more pragmatic event.
So how did the pair of you get into screenwriting, given that it was so frowned upon?
I was working as a journalist and my brother as a playwright, and we just started writing something together for fun. I don’t think we ever realized it would be our business at all. And so it’s always been done – not on a wing and a prayer – but we’ve just improvised a lot of it as we’ve gone along. Whereas I think a lot of young Hollywood screenwriters really set out to be ‘screenwriters’ and have a lot of set ideas about what that means.
How was you and your brother’s relationship when you were growing up?
Paul is four years older than me, and he was very nice, which was, for me, the first reason we worked together. He didn’t beat me up constantly … My parents had very strong ideas about child rearing and it was definitely on the European model rather than the American – meaning curfews, and strict ideas on etiquette and what we were supposed to wear. So we lived in a little enclave, it was very old-fashioned, in a way, and it left my brother and me under pressure to conform a lot – as well as to create fantasy worlds for ourselves. We used to constantly come up with strange characters who had weird shrieks that they would do, and these became obsessions with us. They were odd, little running skits, and they drove our parents crazy but kept us sane. In that sense, it became easy for us to write comedies. Eventually it would be harder to change from that to write more grown-up comedies. But it happened eventually, I guess …
Have you and Paul always stayed good friends?
We always got along really well, we were very close and we still are. We get on each other’s nerves probably more now than we ever have, especially because when you’re directing a movie you’re living on top of one another. So we do have arguments on the set, but we’re very careful at keeping them away from the actors, because they get spooked easily. And when we disagree about writing – this holds especially when you’re writing comedy, because the question of what’s funny or not is very much open to judgement – things can get quite personal. For example, we go through so many drafts that there can be a running battle over one joke that can last the course of a year, and in the end one of us comes out on top. But then it still happens that we’ll agree on a joke, agree that it’s hilarious, and then nobody will laugh in a screening. And our attitude is, ‘Screw them!’ If you have enough stuff that’s actually funny, you can afford to have stuff that drops …
How does someone who grew up in New York end up studying English Literature at Cambridge?
My Dad was born in Berlin in 1923 and was sent away in ’33 when Hitler came to power. He went to the Hall School in London, then to St Paul’s, and then to Oxford. So he always liked the idea of one of his sons going to St Paul’s – it was a very important place that restored his sense of worth after being made a second-class citizen in Germany. I originally went there for a year to look at things, I was fourteen, and I ended up deciding to stay and finish there because it was a great school, I had really good friends and I liked it there. Then it was kind of logical to apply to Oxbridge, and once I got into Cambridge I stayed on.
Your American accent hasn’t changed.
Yeah, but I came back to the US afterwards. At fifteen I sounded like an English public schoolboy, because I was a kid and tried not to stick out. But then I came home and was accused of being a fake, so I actually had to relearn the American accent to survive. But if I’m hanging around English people, it goes again …
What were your impressions of Cambridge? Did you row in the boat race against Oxford or any of that stuff?
I played rugby, but not at a high enough level of becoming a Blue. I had a shot at becoming a Blue at basketball but I didn’t even make that. No matter what school you went to beforehand, it’s a shock to the system. It’s still quite anachronistic in many ways. For instance, it’s very difficult to study other disciplines while you’re there. There are a lot of things American universities would find barbaric: there’s no creative writing programme – it’s discouraged, if anything. It’s seen as too keen, too enthusiastic, amateurish. Whereas they figure that if you’re a real writer, it’ll happen anyway. There certainly wasn’t a film programme. I don’t think there is a film camera within fifty miles of Cambridge. But there’s a really good arts cinema there, which definitely helped.
Were you harbouring any ambitions to be a novelist when you chose your major there?
English Literature was the only thing I could imagine doing at that young age. But I don’t think I ever thought I would be a novelist. I still think that writing a novel is on a completely different scale of magnitude in terms of the effort and thought involved compared to writing a screenplay, which is really pretty light when you compare it to the work of writing a novel. Also – and this is a slight digression – the question of style in a novel is also much more difficult than in a screenplay, where you’re really dealing with images and dialogue. You have more strictures in a screenplay, and I find that much easier than imagining how you would go about the degree of detail you would express in a novel. You don’t have to go into that in a screenplay, because you know that the details will be handled by a production designer or a director. In a novel, there are more perspectives – you can go inside a chair’s head if you want. You can do anything, and that variety of choice is crippling. I’ve had a few stabs at writing a short story or a novel and I can’t get my head around it. Whereas films start with a relatively small number of opening moves. You can start it with an image, and it would be preposterous to describe it to the nth degree in the way you could justifiably do in a novel. And you usually don’t have to convey someone’s state of mind except in as much as they display it outwardly. But if you’re writing a novel, it would be a shame if you didn’t address some of the inner narrative of the characters expressed in the book. And that was certainly the case with About a Boy; not only was the dialogue in the novel excellent, the inner commentary was fantastic as well, and why we decided to do voiceovers in the film. That way, we’re converting from – beware, something pretentious is coming up – what Flaubert called ‘style indirect libre’, which is the influence of a person’s state of mind on the description of the events, or the characters that he’s noticing. In other words, the narrative voice takes on the tones of the character’s feelings. You can’t do that in the same way if your characters are stating things outright in voiceover. There are passages in About a Boy, the novel, which are expressed as the third-person narrative voice but are clearly tinged by the perceptions of the child or Will, and we have to state them directly. So that means you have to be careful with the nuance of how you do it.
Which English literature really inspired you when you were doing your MA?
Lord Byron was my guy, because he was a lot of fun to begin with and much more intelligent than people gave him credit for. I mean Don Juan is kind of a philosophical poem on a really grand scale, as much, I think, as Paradise Lost is. It’s not so coherent but in terms of the kind of scope of ideas it’s concerned with, it’s really amazing. Byron is consistently underestimated and just thought of as a guy who had sex with his half-sister – and everyone else he could get his hands on. I find that he’s the figure of English literature that I’m most devoted to.
One English critic called you an Anglophile in his review of About a Boy. Would you agree with that?
Well, I love being one, but it’s from having lived there and partially growing up there more than anything else. I’m not sure if that makes me an Anglophile. I feel sort of like that anthropologist who went to live with the Yanomami in the Amazon. I feel like that guy. I do know their language, their ways more than a lot of people. So I guess I was anthropologically suited to adapt About a Boy.
Was it your idea or the studio’s to have an English to American-English dictionary on the DVD of About a Boy to explain phrases like ‘shag’ and ‘bugger off?
It was the studio’s idea. They always come up with these ideas for bonus items to encourage people to buy the DVD instead of the VHS. It wasn’t a terrible idea, and it wasn’t horrifically executed. Although it was mistaken that the biggest audience for the film would be in America, not England … A big question did come up during the writing process: should we say ‘sneakers’ instead of ‘trainers’? And we decided against it. It didn’t feel right; we didn’t feel comfortable with it. We knew that the characters wouldn’t say it, that people living in London wouldn’t say it, and that it would bother British people who watched it; whereas it wouldn’t necessarily be that hard to understand in context. I think people take too much effort to tailor films to an imagined audience and in doing so, lose grasp of what’s particularly interesting about something.
Stephen Frears filmed Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity in Chicago, and you must have been under a lot of pressure to relocate About a Boy. Why didn’t you capitulate?
I think we wouldn’t have shot in the US with Hugh, and since he came with the package when we came on board – and we were very happy with that – that was one very strong reason. The strongest, really. But you could transpose those characters, and I think they did that really well in High Fidelity but for us, I think there was something particularly London in the setting. Also the fact that it’s so dialogue-driven and the characters are so hyper-articulate – even Marcus – that seems more of a British trait. And the kind of misery the kid was in seemed particularly British to me.
What would you say was so ‘particularly London’ in the setting?
If it was set in Los Angeles, it’s very hard to fight against the visuals of bright skies and hills and palm trees, whereas depression has a particular resonance in London because of the rain, the greyness, and those gothic piles of schools. Actually, the bizarre thing was we had a choice of two specific locations and in each case the school was exactly the same. There were some buildings that were built exactly to the same plan.
What happened to those aborted short stories you mentioned? What were they about?
Of course, the first things I thought about writing were autobiographical self-justifications which were just awful. Whatever relationship I just had gotten out of at the time and I felt aggrieved about became the basis for a novel … The one thing I think I might even follow through on is that I have an idea for a novel about four kids who play Dungeons & Dragons. So that’s taking place on one level, and on another level it’s a fantasy novel about the characters who the kids play, who think they’re not characters but actual people. So, on one level, it would be sort of about self-determination and free-will but in the light of this ludicrous fantasy world; and on the other level, about these kids and how the personas that they’re playing reflect what they’re going through.
It sounds almost like something J K Rowling would write.
Weirder. One of the kids would be realizing he was gay; all the kinds of things that happen when you’re fourteen or fifteen and that get transposed to the Dungeons & Dragons characters, the barbarians, or magicians or whatever.
So you played some Dungeons & Dragons with your brother?
We did, and it’s embarrassing to say, but it had such an influence on my life. I’d like to write an article on this some day. There are a lot of people who played and are horribly embarrassed about it and won’t admit it, because it’s part of their lives they put behind, but it had an incredible influence as to how they’ve gone about things. I was never as fervent about doing anything as I was about Dungeons & Dragons. Making movies might be a close second. I think the brilliance of it is how you live out these stories with such fervent care and attention to detail. There really was something to it, a consensual story told by lots of different people at once. Things that happened within the game had no objective value whatsoever – the idea of finding treasure was totally imaginary but it still breeds some sense of real worth. In fact, I still wonder why the hell anyone would get into a movie knowing it’s a two-dimensional, clearly artificial process. Even the act of cutting and editing around a scene is so artificial, it’s so unlike any actual experience of real life. But people take it on board as if it was tapping into a dream.
After university, you wrote some articles for some London newspapers: The Sunday Times and the Independent. How did these come about?
My director of studies was a great guy and he hooked me up with someone who wrote for the arts pages of the Evening Standard. His name is Ian Irvine, and he’s an extremely lovely guy. Having only seen stuff I had written for some really bad Cambridge magazines and newspapers, he gave me a chance to write an article and I just did a terrible job and it was never published because I was making literary references totally out of context to what the articles were supposed to be about. I wrote about books and about films too, but very much what they call ‘think pieces’ – you just sort of bullshit for a while.
What was your relationship to cinema like at that point?
I didn’t really have a sense of film history at all, which was stupid because my grandfather was in the thick of everything. I wasn’t out in LA where he worked to get a sense of that. And, growing up, I never went to a school in which film was thought to have a history at all and it really wasn’t considered a subject, which was a blind spot for me. And that’s something about Cambridge, the canonical view about English Literature and of subjects in general. If things don’t fit into one of the established subjects, either you have to create a whole new department or manage to dovetail it in some way. So I had no idea about it. I mean, I loved watching films and I think I’ve got a decent grounding, but not a true film-nerd grounding in film. I know what I love and, in a way, I wish I had had the time to watch classic films and have an excuse – because now it’s hard to find an excuse to sit and watch a three-hour Japanese film. But I’ve been able to follow my enthusiasms, which is cool.
And you’re still reading a lot …
When I can. I actually want to re-gear my life and make reading more of a priority, to the extent that I really do think of re-ordering my time and other responsibilities because I can sort of do a little less work now and read more. Because I feel it’s slipping out of my grasp. There’s not enough time to read. I read slowly and I’m not comfortable when reading is not a big part of my life.
Is it true that you got interested in International Relations after Cambridge?
Well, I didn’t know what the hell I was going to do as a job, I was still living abroad, and I thought I could maybe keep living abroad if I worked for the State Department. So, ironically, the task was to figure out how to become an American again – to be interested enough in the world for them to send you out, but American enough so they don’t think you’ll go native. So I also had to teach myself macroeconomics at least to the level they wanted for the exams. The first level was largely informational, American history and economics and government. The second was weird role-playing exercises, like D & D International Relations – ‘Write a cable to the Embassy’, or ‘Propose this aid package for this imaginary country.’ I went through that, too, and I was ready to sign up, but there was a backlog in hiring because of a recent lawsuit which was allowing in a lot of female applicants who had previously been rejected. And while I was waiting to get hired and assigned, my brother and I started writing. It was a much more appealing thing to do. And I’m really, really glad I didn’t do work for the Department of State, because I’m pretty gloomy and I know for a fact that if I had to go to another country and start over again, I would have hated it.
Your brother had written some plays which had been produced in New York. Why did you think it was a good idea to collaborate together?
We had both reached a bit of a dead end. I’d realized I wasn’t a very good journalist and Paul realized he was a really good playwright, but no one was going to pay him very much to do it. I was twenty by now, and he was twenty-four. And halfway through writing Legit, our first screenplay, I moved back to New York. It was about a porn director who wanted to make an art film – a fairly broad comedy about people with no talent trying to do something very ambitious. We were definitely at that point dealing with pretty buffoonish types. Paul Thomas Anderson did a much more difficult thing with Boogie Nights because those characters have much more pathos and humanity, and at the same time they were laughable and were fun. I suppose we did Legit for fun and thought, ‘Wow, wouldn’t it be great if someone wanted to buy it?’ Nobody did, but it got us some meetings and we sold a pitch.
Did the thought occur that your family might be able to open a door?
Actually, the one contact that worked for us was through my brother’s work as a playwright: David Seltzer, a screenwriter and director who had a production deal at MGM, and had seen my brother’s plays, so he didn’t think we were complete idiots. That’s kind of how we got our first job.
How did you and Paul work together then as compared to how you work together now?
Well, it’s changed, because we used to sit in the same room at the same computer for six-to-eight hours a day. That was horrible. Sometimes it was funny, because you would crack each other up, but we’d also get into fights and be kind of wrestling for the keyboard. And it was also really forcing blood from a stone, which isn’t great if you’re writing a comedy.
Now we’re at the stage where we very carefully outline a script so that we know what should precisely happen in which scene. And then we’ll divvy up sequences so that someone isn’t just writing a single scene, but a sequence with a particular feel to it, so you can get a run-up to something. And then we’ll just swap them over and edit each other’s stuff. That still occasionally leads to fights but at least we resolve them.
And sometimes there are bizarre gaps in logic where for instance, I’ve written a sequence where a character ends up in Ohio whereas in the next sequence Paul has him in New York for no particular reason, and these things have to be straightened out. But that’s usually pretty straightforward. Actually, the most important thing is that we agree on the tone of the particular script we’re doing. And that’s the problem I find in most of the scripts that I read. If it’s a comedy, people will sacrifice the consistency of tone for something funny because obviously it’s a comedy, it’s supposed to be funny – but that can lead to a weird jarring of the audience where they suddenly realize they’re watching a film that’s trying to make them laugh, rather than being seduced into a particular frame of mind in which things happen to be funny. That’s the worst thing about most comedy writing that goes wrong: nobody has respect for the tone of the piece they’re trying to do.
How do you and Paul find that consistency of tone in a piece yourselves?
It really comes out of the outline. We don’t start out saying, ‘OK, what’s the tone of this movie going to be?’ But I think there’s a basic understanding of what it is. With About a Boy, the tone of the book was somewhat established, but in terms of movies, it was going to be Wilderesque in tone but also Lubitsch, everything that Lubitsch paid attention to, that particular brand of light comedy of Austro-Hungarian origin, really. And we do understand each other well enough that we come up with the same reaction to a situation in real life, a joke – it’s bizarre but there must be some genetic encoding, a humour gene of that particular type as opposed to another.
Do you consider yourself a comedy screenwriter?
I guess I’ve got to admit to that, because that’s mostly what I’ve done.
Do you think that’s what you’re hired to do when you’re not writing your own stuff?
No, I don’t. We are hired to do various things, and sometimes it is to write a comedy. But you tend to get pigeonholed into various arcane definitions of what you actually do. We wouldn’t necessarily be considered comedy writers so much as people think we’re ‘the guys with heart’: the bizarre notion that we or anybody else can bring some kind of emotion to a piece which before that was completely lifeless. That’s probably our reputation in the industry. ‘Heart’ is shorthand for characters who behave like human beings might, and there’s occasionally a problem for scripts that don’t have that.
But, technically, we probably are comedy writers. The thing I like about comedy is that it doesn’t ignore an aspect of human life, which is that human life is occasionally bizarre and ridiculous and laughable. And dramas can ignore that at their peril, because you haven’t presented a rounded view of things if you haven’t shown something funny or amusing. I think a lot of Oscar-grab movies go for what they imagine to be the emotion while ignoring humour. But, no – when I think about comedy writers in Los Angeles – I would like not to fall into that stereotype. At least I hope I’m not a bitter, cynical jokes-salesman-type who’s wearing tennis shoes and jeans, and slightly overweight from too much lobster tempura. And I don’t think that the guys who write films that happen to be terribly funny in other countries really consider themselves ‘comedy writers’ in that sense. Going back to Byron again, he wrote some comic verse at times, but his best work is incredibly funny as well as interesting and heartfelt and explorative of very important ideas. And I’d rather be more on that model.
So what is a normal writing day like for the two of you these days?
It’s different for the two of us. Here’s what Paul does: he wakes up at an early hour, sets himself down to work, concentrates very hard and earnestly and produces five pages. I wake up late, I go to Starbucks and dick around reading the paper. I go home, go online, check e-mail even though I don’t need to and then I go to Book Soup and knock around the aisles there, and then at the end of the day I start really sweating, work really hard for half an hour and maybe produce five pages. Sometimes it’s ten pages or sometimes none at all. I’m far more slipshod about it. There used to be one place where I would consistently get a lot of work done, which was this café in New York called Le Gamin on McDougal Street below Houston. I’ve written twenty pages there in a day, which is like a fifth of a script. But they closed it so I’m completely screwed. I need to find a back-up.
Take me through your process a little bit more. Do you do character biographies or story charts or the like?
We don’t do character biographies in the sense of really having an idea of what the character did at a given age, or even having a page of information about them. Occasionally we ask ourselves what we think he was like, but it’s done more on a case-by-case basis and the feel of what a character has and what we think he might say – the intuition we have about it, more than anything else.
The outlines are pretty detailed. It’s embarrassing, because we do it on index cards, one for each scene, which is how everyone does it. We never say, ‘Let’s just start with this scene and see where it goes’, because we don’t know how it will end. That would be sheer disaster for us even though it isn’t for other people. But, first of all, our plots would never match up, we’d have to stay in the same room and end up strangling each other.
Soon after that we would have no idea as to what was happening which might lead to an interesting movie if someone else wrote it but it would be a complete, horrible train wreck if we did. So we need to be pretty detailed not only because we work separately a lot but also because we really want a sense of the film as a whole. If you plot out a film, it’s clearly working like a machine in some fashion going from point A to point B. And in that sense, it’s non-intuitive and can lead to characters who behave as though they’re automata. So it’s a weird balance between that very mechanistic view of it and trying to keep some life in your characters so that they can say and possibly do things that you didn’t necessarily specify at the beginning. So we start with a very, very detailed version of how things go, and hope that we can roll with anything that sort of comes up through inspiration.
That’s the weakness of American screenwriting, I think – this notion of the first, second, third act. The freedom that foreign films have by contrast is sometimes really stunning. But having said that, although some American films can be horrendous, the plots tend to be less of a mishmash than films that are developed in a less formulaic way.
Do you think it’s because American audiences expect things to be figured out for them while foreign audiences are allowed to figure things out for themselves?
It is that in part. Foreign audiences allow themselves to view screenwriting and film itself as more of an art form than a lot of Hollywood filmmakers. My brother and I are on one edge of the independent ghetto with About a Boy, with one foot in the studio world, where there are happy endings. We didn’t set out to do that. To a horrible fault, Hollywood is very audience driven and ninety per cent of the films that come out of these studios now are really just engines for producing profit. I don’t think that studio people would even deny it. They call it ‘summer entertainment’ but what else is it but fleecing people for nine dollars and making it loud enough so that they think that they’ve seen something?
I was a judge at the Tribeca Film Festival a little while ago and one of the features that I saw was a bizarre French film about a gay couple, where one of them leaves town. At first it seems to be a weird haunted-house story, with two strange bald men appearing in a basement in polka-dot summer dresses. But it doesn’t end up being scary at all, it doesn’t even have a plot per se that you can make out. When I saw the filmmakers at the interview afterwards, they said, ‘Yes, it came out of living with the idea of this picture we had seen.’ It wasn’t really an explanation that demanded that you sympathize with them whatsoever. And I thought, ‘That must be really liberating.’
On the other hand, I’ve probably fallen into the habit of entertaining mass audiences and wanting to. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, I really do like the idea of entertaining. Modern audiences don’t have a lot of patience, but then they haven’t been trained to have it. They certainly don’t think, ‘I’ll go to a movie and be patient.’ I guess it’s a more European attitude to view film like any other art form and take time to understand it. Then again, I really like the fact that American films have very strong narratives. We tell a story better than anybody else – except maybe the Japanese, Kurosawa. But we tell a story better than the Europeans do.
Switching gears … how do you and your brother handle those moments in the writing process when things aren’t working out and you are having periods of self-doubt?
Geez, wow. I’ll try to throw caution to the wind and say I don’t doubt myself as a screenwriter because, first of all, this goes hand in hand with not being a writer. Doubting yourself as a screenwriter would be like doubting yourself as a roller-blader. Who cares, really? I’m certainly not going to beat myself up about it. I find that certain things can be going badly and not be coming out well but I just don’t think it’s going to be that difficult to sort it all out.
So I guess the way we get past it is like extreme arrogance in a way because we feel we understand as well as anybody else what has to be done to make something work well in a screenplay. I’ve had a lot of doubts about myself as a filmmaker because you’re in a world of infinite possibilities and it’s terrifying and gut-wrenching and then you have to take a deep breath and jump. Now, my brother would disagree, so I have to say this is me talking. But I don’t feel like screenwriting is brain surgery: I feel like all you have to do is imagine the film in your head, and that’s what I’ve always done. I sort of fuck around and procrastinate until I can get into a weirdly meditative state where I can see the film playing out, and then it’s more like transcribing it than making it up.
Having such a literary pedigree, how did you find yourself co-directing the teen comedy American Pie?
I enjoyed Porky’s when it came out, but I was twelve years old then and didn’t know any better … Actually it’s a horrible film with a lot of horrible sentiments behind it. And I never really watched a lot of John Hughes movies, so I never really knew those films or had a fondness for them. American Pie wasn’t the first directing job to occur to me, but it was funny, and I liked the characters, so we decided to just make the best possible teen sex comedy that we could. That having been said, that vein of humour exists in literature and in the canon. In Aristophanes there are giant phalluses all over the place, and Rabelais is just disgusting when you get down to it. And I could say it was just about the spirit of misrule and carnival, which is really sordid. But the fact of the matter is, my father was German, he always enjoyed bawdy toilet humour and I did too, and so we just knew it was going to be a whole lot of fun. That said, the whole gross-out comedy movement, I just can’t wait for it to end. I think it is over, actually.
Has your mother being an actress helped your writing?
I know that it’s terrifying to stand in an actor’s shoes. So I’m more inclined to trust actors when they say, ‘I can’t say that line, it doesn’t sound right’ – because when you write you don’t have to speak the lines, although you probably should because then you’ll know whether human beings can actually say certain lines of the dialogue. And that’s crucial, because an audience will be thrown by dialogue that seems to be overly expository, or syntactically correct but not realistic, and not only that, it will make life very difficult for the actor, and he’ll have to adjust his cadences to get it right. So I guess I’m more inclined to listen to actors, because I know they’re not a bunch of people prancing around – it’s really difficult to do, and especially difficult if the words that you’re saying don’t fit the situation or the human voice either.
How did you first come across the novel About a Boy?
I read it, because I’d heard that it was a fun novel. And I thought that it was incredibly absorbing but also in such an unpretentious and powerful way, evoking certain feelings and emotions while dealing with human problems. At the crux of it, I could see the idea of a guy inventing a child in order to meet women as a Billy Wilder tactic. So we saw it as being similar to The Apartment.
How did you then become involved in the film?
New Line bought it for Tribeca, and Peter Hedges wrote the first draft. Iain Softley was going to direct it but he fell off to do K-Pax. It was still at New Line and by then Hugh Grant was attached but it was an American character in London. So that draft was obviously written before Hugh came on because they were thinking about an American star. The end of the film was in many ways similar to the end of the book, the element of Kurt Cobain’s suicide being a focal point. But tying it to Cobain’s death made it a period piece, 1994, which seemed strange and difficult for us to handle. Also I think it would have proved impossible to get the rights to play the music. At any rate, when we looked at the plot, the suicide wasn’t central to the actual machinations, it was a red herring in fact. It represented all kinds of themes, about whether you’re going to keep on living even if things seem to suck. But also, in the intervening time, Kurt Cobain’s death became something different from what it was at that moment – the shock then had become part of a litany of tragedies since.
We obviously set about to re-Anglicize it. Peter had chosen to express the interior monologue by Hugh Grant’s character communicating with various trendy friends of his, and you got the sense of his superficiality through theirs. But we wanted to actually strip it back a bit and make it much more about a depressed, alienated person who didn’t realize how depressed he was. You could imagine he might have friends, but you were never going to see them in the movie if we could help it. We always wanted to keep him isolated in his apartment, or alone in big shops, so he doesn’t have anyone to talk to. We didn’t mind the audience imagining he was just some weird loner who spent time on the internet and watching TV and didn’t have any real contacts with human beings.
So how was your third act different?
In Peter Hedges’s version, there was a finale in which it seemed as though Marcus was going to commit suicide, and it would take place in Piccadilly Circus. Visually it was a really big set-piece because obviously that’s the most active, kinetic part of London. Well, first of all, we didn’t see how we could actually film that, and second of all, we felt that we just wanted to bring Marcus and Will together in a much more familiar environment that we had already seen before. And we felt it should be about Will being childish or at least dealing with what we imagined to be his childish fears and the fear of not being cool being a metaphor of never being accepted in the first place. So the whole third act became about this performance Marcus was going to make, and also about how to get the audience to give a shit about the importance of a child performing a song and how that might be terrible for him. There is an imagined suicide, which is the mother’s suicide, but it’s not really about that. It’s about the fact that the little boy thinks he’ll cheer up the mother if he sings for her, and that’s a child’s idea as to how you can influence events. But how to convince an audience to really care about this little kid being humiliated – frankly, there was no way you could achieve that on the page. It was one of those cases where I was blustery and over-confident about thinking it was going to work, but people who read it weren’t so sure. And really it was up in the air until the actual kid did it on the day, and he was so winning that we were able to pull it off, I think.
This novel, more than any of Hornby’s other novels, gives you more of a challenge in balancing what’s fantastical and what’s realistic just by its premise. And that’s obviously what Billy Wilder did very well.
He did. The S.P.A.T. (Single Parents, Alone Together) meeting posed a difficulty and that’s Nick Hornby’s accomplishment in the novel. It is actually fantastical when you think about it and only a slightly deranged individual would actually think of it and that’s where you really have to depend on the actor. I don’t think it would have been so easy for Billy Wilder to do half of the stuff he did without Jack Lemmon who could, when you look at The Apartment, be extraordinarily broad – he can be like Jim Carrey – and yet he brings this sort of everyman feeling to it, a terribly likeable quality. So Hugh Grant saves the S.P.A.T. scene literally, you can’t do it without him. And the kid saves the rock concert. Yeah, it’s totally far-fetched and just on the edge of ‘Hollywood’ and I think that it would have been a disaster if we had written that the crowd erupts into applause – there had been suggestions that we do that. But I think that the only thing that saves it is that there is this realistic aspect of a few scattered claps, and that Hugh’s character has managed to do it to avoid the child being completely slaughtered. He’s taken the damage on to himself by the end of it.
The novel is told from two different points of view, Marcus’s and Will’s. However, you open with Will’s point of view, and then we see a glimpse of Marcus during Will’s date in Regent’s Park. Did you ever consider introducing Marcus when Will meets his date in Regent’s Park?
We did, and we thought that it was crucial that you care as much about Marcus as about Will, and we kind of bit off the challenge of justifying that degree of attention from the audience. We knew it would be surprising, first of all, to be introduced to this kid who no one had ever seen before except in the credits. But we thought it was easier to get them interested in that point of view by saying, ‘This guy is going to be playing equal to Hugh Grant, so get used to it’, rather than introducing him later and seeing the kid as just a function of Hugh’s story. That’s only what the novel does; it alternates chapters in terms of whose point of view it is. But we did compromise by introducing Hugh’s character first, whereas the novel introduces Marcus first. And although we argued with Hugh because he wanted to start with the boy, we wanted to come out with what they call the number one batsman – you put the strongest guy out there first.
I read somewhere that Casino influenced the voiceover. Can you expand on that?
Martin Scorsese is just great at voiceovers. He never uses them unnecessarily and he also uses them in imaginative ways, like in Casino when Joe Pesci’s voiceover ends in mid-sentence when he’s hit over the head with an aluminium baseball bat. Horrible scene, it’s just gut-wrenching. But Scorsese’s just so good at doing that, and uses it as a real element instead of something that’s clearly been added later to make up for deficiencies in the film. And also the idea is that there’s such a thing as an unreliable voiceover in the way that there’s an unreliable narrator: Casino does that as well and you get two different perspectives on an event, neither of which are completely correct. And that was really useful to us.
How did Hugh Grant get involved in the writing process?
He was the person we listened to most, because he’s really smart and he knew the character really well. He’s a good writer in his own right. He came up with a lot of the good dialogue, not only for himself but for other characters as well, and he was a really great sounding-board as to what sounds like something a person might actually say. He’s a much more technical actor than people give him credit for. Everything has been worked to death by the time he delivers his lines, so we’re not just brown-nosing him when we say he was our collaborator when we were working on the script.
How did you handle his improvisation on set?
Sometimes we thought, ‘This is a really great piece of dialogue and we’ll try to protect it as much as we can.’ But other times we knew it could always be better and so we were very happy. Not all actors can improvise. It’s just like writing on the fly, really, when you’re in the groove of the character – which is all you’re doing when you’re writing anyway and you’re imagining yourself into these different voices. And it can be absolutely wonderful.
There are a lot of intricate camera movements in About a Boy. Did you write them into the script?
Mostly no, because it’s really hard to do that. You can suggest camera moves. It would be lovely if sets are built entirely to instructions that are written down in the screenplay but that won’t happen because all kinds of financial considerations will come into play. So you hope you’ll have time to look at a location, and for shot-listing to be an additional writing period that you do with your cinematographer. We might start writing camera angles into things more, but there was a long period where every time I read somebody else’s script where it said ‘Extreme Close-Up On’ or ‘Angle Over’, I thought, ‘Fuck yeah, when have you ever been on set making a movie?’ I guess it helps the reader imagine things, but for any director reading it, it’s just a red flag.
The scenario is very much a boy meets boy, boy loses boy set-up.
Yeah, it’s very much a romantic comedy between these two guys, absolutely not between any of the men and any of the women.
When the mother goes to see Will, there’s a suggestion of paedophilia there. How did you manage to get the delicate balance on that issue?
We pretty much handled it the way that the book does, which is if we didn’t address the question whether Hugh’s character was interfering with the little boy, it would leave an open question. I find it very sad that it’s become one of the tropes of American society, sexual abuse. I think we worried about it all along the way, how someone might say, ‘Why hasn’t the mother done something to protect this child?’ At the same time, the audience knows that Will isn’t doing anything terrible with Marcus. So we just had to try to address it in a nuanced enough way so that the suggestion became laughable in the context of what the audience knew. The fact that Fiona overreacts at that point, first of all it’s understandable, but it adds to the idea that she’s very wrong-headed but very loving at the same time.
Were you worried about audience sympathy towards the shallow Will?
Hugh Grant helps a hell of a lot. We did worry. There’s something Pauline Kael said about characters in screwball comedies that has been lost in modern or contemporary screenwriting: the best way to make a character likeable is to make them funny. She was talking about heroines in romantic comedies. If a character makes you laugh, he instantly becomes likeable no matter how much of a heel he is to begin with. And you have to walk a very fine line between undercutting moments in which Will is sympathetic and making sure they’re not sentimental, and moments where he’s really horrendous and seeing that actually the degree of his self-loathing isn’t completely justified by the situation. And when he is actually being loathsome, he’s also being amusing. It’s there in the novel in the first place. When he’s at S.P.A.T. lying, on one hand he’s actually got a weird childish enthusiasm that develops, he’s not being completely rational about it. There’s a great line in the novel which we couldn’t use because of an odd reason. He’s kind of constructing his fake life story and talking about how he gets choked up and says, ‘I wasn’t a creepy liar, I was Robert De Niro.’ Of course you can’t use that line since De Niro was one of the actual film’s producers … but it’s in the book. He’s finding his artistry. He’s an artist at certain unpleasant things, like wasting his time and lying, and you sort of grow to love him in a certain way. The sins he commits are quite forgivable and identifiable. It’s weaseling out of relationships, which everyone, male or female, has done at one point or other; and lying in order to gain something, which everyone does as well although not on such a grandiose scale.
Who came up with the idea of asking Badly Drawn Boy to score the film?
We usually have some set of music we listen to when we’re writing something and it varies completely as to what we’re into at the moment. When I was starting I used to write particular music cues into a screenplay, but what you learn the first time you make a movie is that you’re not going to get the songs, because they’re too expensive, or the guy who owns the rights is crazy, or someone else is using it in another movie. So you can only use music as tonal references; and it just became sad to ask for a particular song in a script so I think we tended to leave that out of consideration altogether.
Anyway, my friend Erik Feig said, ‘I’ve just heard a really good album by someone called Badly Drawn Boy, it’s called Hour of the Bewilderbeast.’ It’s so good, just one of the best single albums ever made in terms of the strength of every single song. I fell in love with it before I even read About a Boy and wrote a lot of the script while listening to it, both Paul and I did. We kind of realized that its air of melancholy and humour fitted perfectly to the film, so we had the crackpot idea of getting him to write all the songs, which isn’t something that’s usually done with a studio film. They usually think about it in terms of how a film can be made to market a kind of compilation album in the case of a comedy. But Nick Hornby had separately hit upon the idea of Badly Drawn Boy to do the music, so it was a really bizarre coincidence that we were both after the same guy. And the amazing thing was that we actually got him to do it largely because Badly Drawn Boy liked the book and was a big fan of movies and movie soundtracks and had been interested for a while in doing it. And we were able to do it because we weren’t under the radar, we were in England and so Universal didn’t really know what was going on until it was too late.
How did you work with Damon Gough?
Some of the songs were written by Damon just having read the screenplay and the book and he said, ‘This might work here, this might work there’, and we fitted them in. And in some cases we had a cut of a given scene which was to a particular bit of music, like the Dylan piece for the suicide note. And we said, ‘We’ve been using Bob Dylan here, can you come up with something like it? Have you got the Nick Hornby 31 Songs?’ It’s a CD and commentary by Nick Hornby and he includes that song which is called ‘A Minor Incident’ and in fact the lyrics of the song are the content of the suicide note which is actually written out in Hornby’s book. There’s no way to do it in conventional terms. We’re not going to have Toni Collette reading out this four-minute long letter, it would just be insanity. But the great thing is that Damon’s lyrics were another part of the screenplay because he was able to convey what was contained in the letter but in an oblique, great way. And there are so many wonderful, gratuitous things that happened with the film just in terms of everybody coming up with great stuff at the right time.
How was your relationship with Nick Hornby throughout the whole process? How involved was he?
It was a little terrifying because, first of all, I loved the novel so much I didn’t want to screw it up, so you feel a genuine responsibility to the guy who wrote the book. But he had a very permissive, Zen attitude to what we were doing. I think it was also fatalistic because what are you going to do eventually? As the writer you’re always going to be overruled. If he’d wanted to, he could have seen every draft because he was one of the producers on the movie and he could have been copied into any distribution. But we never really got notes by draft. Occasionally we would hear from him about this thing or about that thing and they were always pragmatic and useful. And he was actually working on a screenplay with Emma Thompson at the time, really busy, and I’m sure it was good for his sanity to not to have to face whatever we were doing to his work. But that was another really fortunate thing for us, that it was another relationship that worked really well. I think he understood that we cared a lot for his novel and that we weren’t jobbing directors, guns for hire. Getting it right really mattered a lot to us. I think he was worried about American Pie at first. To adapt the novel demanded a lot of tact and a sense of nuance and a balance so it wouldn’t turn into over-sentimental mush or Disney’s The Kid. I think the fact that I had lived in England helped a hell of a lot, and also Paul is a very serious, earnest person – the moment you meet him you know he’s not there to fuck around with your labour of love.
You’ve written for other people, directed other people’s scripts, and produced and directed your own scripts. Which is your favourite? And which is your least favourite?
I guess my favourite would be directing something absolutely genius that we’ve come up with. On About a Boy there was such a resonant story with Nick’s novel that you’re halfway there – we only knew a good thing where we saw it, and were careful not to fuck it up. It’s hard to come up with a great idea to begin with, so I’ll take them in any form. I think a lot of the great films that I admire from the thirties, forties and fifties came from stage plays or from classic novels, history … So who cares, really, in terms of the inspiration? The only reason to direct something that you wrote is that you’re less likely to think that the writer’s an interfering asshole, and the writer’s less likely to hate the director – although there’s no guarantee of that either …
Hollywood, California