‘There are always times when you don’t know if it’s a movie.’
Wes Anderson’s first feature, Bottle Rocket (1996), was co-written with his university friend and aspiring actor Owen Wilson, featuring Wilson in the lead role along with his brother Luke. The debut fared poorly at the box office but became a comedy cult-classic. The writers collaborated again on Rushmore (1998), featuring Bill Murray, and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), earning them a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the 2003 Academy Awards.
Synopsis
The United States, the present. Max Fischer is a scholarship student at Rushmore, a private school where he has great success in organizing clubs and dramatic productions but fails most of his academic classes. He befriends a rich industrialist, Blume, and falls for a recently widowed teacher at Rushmore, Ms Cross. His attempt to build an aquarium with Blume’s money in order to impress Ms Cross gets him expelled. Max then discovers Blume also loves Ms Cross and he seeks vengeance. Blume retaliates, war ensues, and Max’s troubles worsen. Rescue comes from unexpected places, including his simple but philosophical father, a barber.
* * *
KEVIN CONROY SCOTT: I believe your father lent you a camera when you were young. So what kind of films were you making back then?
WES ANDERSON: He gave me a Super-8 camera, and the first film I did was called Skateboard Four; it was based on a book I read that I’d checked out from the library. Then we did adventure movies, and a lot of chase-type things.
I know it sounds silly, but since we are talking about screenwriting … did these films have any kind of narrative structure?
Yeah, the structure was usually a scene where some guy gets alienated by a group of people, and then is hunted by them and killed. That’s basically the structure of almost every movie we did.
Was becoming a filmmaker your career ambition as a teenager? I understand you were very interested in the theatre back then.
I was interested in theatre even earlier than my teens. When I was a teenager what I really wanted to be was a writer. I always had movies on my mind but I was mostly focused on writing – until I was eighteen or nineteen, then I got back into movies.
From your teens you were obsessed with the New Yorker. Can you explain what was your interest in the magazine?
I just read a couple of articles that interested me, in my school library. So when I went away to college I ordered a subscription, which was one of the first things I did. That’s a magazine – especially then but still, I think, even now – where you’ll often find that you want to read every single article and as a result, you’ll get to know the writers. Also, I was always doing research on everything I would come across. I remember hunting down the Truman Capote profile of Marlon Brando that had been in the New Yorker and I went and got Salinger stories that they had printed, and I started reading old Pauline Kael things so I would always refer to the New Yorkers that were in the library. Actually, the shelves in my office are usually filled with bound New Yorkers. The more I got interested in the current stuff the more I got interested in the earlier stuff. A lot of those writers, their pieces are collected in books. Like Mitchell, Liebling and other less-read guys like S. N. Berman or Walcott Gibbs and dozens of others.
You studied at the University of Texas. Did you take any writing courses there?
Yeah, I took English literature courses and I probably did a couple of years of writing classes which were OK; they just gave you some kind of structure. One thing is, they give these conference courses, little seminars where you could set your own agenda if you worked it out with the professor. Those were good. I could get someone who knew a lot about something that I am already interested in, and get a lot of information from them. I did a couple of play-writing classes too.
Did you write plays in high school as well?
No, I wrote one in college. Many before high school …
So there weren’t any ‘little one-acts on Watergate’ written during high school?
[laughs] No, it was more like I did a play on King Kong; I did a Star Wars play, a play of The Alamo. They tended to be things that had a lot of scope, but only lasted about fifteen minutes.
You met your co-writer on Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, Owen Wilson, at university. How did that happen?
We were in a play-writing class together. I don’t think he actually ever wrote his play for that class, but I did, and we sort of knew each other from that. Then we had a mutual friend who really introduced us. In the drama department there, they wanted to produce the play I wrote in class during the next semester. I thought Owen would be good for a character in it, and that was actually the first time he ever acted in anything, in that play.
Did the pair of you write any screenplays before Bottle Rocket?
No, but I wrote one. It was called The Plagiarist. Since then, somebody wrote a novel with the same title, which seems appropriate, somehow … It was nothing describable. That was one of the main problems. I think it would be best described as a screenplay about this guy. Some guy. Which is what I felt was a good idea for a screenplay back then. It was just a rambling mish-mash of different influences. There was no hope for it. It was never going to be anything. It was a completely literary object. It wasn’t meant to be a movie, it was not even meant to be read, ultimately – just written, I think. [laughs]
I think it is safe to say that there is a very unique tone at play in the films that you and Owen Wilson have written together. At what point were you aware that you had a similar sensibility towards life, or at least to your work?
Probably instantly, I think. We started talking about Bottle Rocket and then that summer we weren’t around each other and I wrote it and gave it to him. He found it interesting but then we made it something completely different. There were a few scenes that made it through, like the bookstore robbery. The problem was, at the time that scene didn’t fit with the rest of the piece. It didn’t have the tone right. It took us a while to finally realize that neither of us were really suited to doing a Mean Streets type of movie.
So it was a straight-up drama back then?
Not really, because it had that bookstore robbery just the way it is. It just didn’t know what it was. It definitely had very serious dramatic things but they weren’t the right sort of dramatic things. They were like State of Grace or something. They were not in keeping with what they needed to be. So we slowly worked our way around to that. I think Bottle Rocket came from how our lives were. And if you take the guns and crime element out of it, then it was more or less our lifestyle at the time, some of the places we were around that we were interested in. It was more about the group of friends we had than anything else.
At some point the screenplay was over three hundred pages long. How did it get so fat?
It was three hundred pages because we had written what we thought was a hundred and twenty, but then some people in California kind of formatted it for us, then it turned out it was much, much, much longer. Also, we did a reading that was interminable, so we knew there was something wrong.
The legendary writer-director Jim Brooks helped you with the script for three or four months. At one point he told you to read it out loud. Is this something that you find helpful when analysing your scripts?
We did two readings of Bottle Rocket. One very long reading where Jim and Polly Platt had come to Texas to meet us, and it was a disaster. Then, some months later, we went out to LA, more or less to find out if they were really going to do our movie, for Jim to make a decision. They weren’t telling us that, but we knew that was more or less what was happening. For that I had us rehearse it like a play. We cut out lots of description and we rehearsed it and that went much, much better. That also got everyone excited about it.
We didn’t do a reading of Rushmore but when it came time to do The Royal Tenenbaums, we did kind of a half-baked reading up at the house where we filmed. We also did one of the new scripts that Noah Baumbach and I had just finished, The Life Aquatic. That was with Bill Murray and a group of actors. That was actually one of the better readings I’ve had, because we did it early enough in the process; we learned some things about what was working and what wasn’t. We wanted the reading to figure out what was working and we definitely got some stuff from it.
How so? Is it just that you can hear that a line is not working properly?
It’s more to do with how I am feeling about this character, how are these relationships taking shape, is the story moving? You can really feel when it’s moving in a reading. And the absence of feeling like the story’s moving – you’re made aware of that as well.
Jim Brooks is considered to be something of a genius when it comes to screenwriting. Can you tell me about any rules you might have learned from him?
I don’t think we learned rules from him, although Jim will talk about theories and rules. ‘There’s a theory that they will give you the first minutes of a film, that’s a theory that some people will believe in.’ He’ll quote you something like that, he doesn’t really believe in it, but if you’re arguing then he’ll make an argument based on a ‘theory’. What Jim really gave us was a whole screenwriting course.
Jim had things to teach us and we had things to learn, and that was a whole big complicated experience of us realizing that we didn’t know it all. I was never more confident then when we were about to show Bottle Rocket for the first time and I have never been that confident since.
At the time I wasn’t really prepared to be told how to do anything, wasn’t inclined to hear a bunch of rules, because I felt so confident that we were going to do something that was above the rules – which Jim sort of forced me to realize wasn’t the case. He helped us to make the script work towards engaging an audience, maybe in some ways be less esoteric. Once we had shot the movie Jim was working with me on the cutting, and that was another screenwriting course. That was, ‘How does this work as a movie?’ I feel like I got enough from Jim, especially in the editorial process, that both Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums were basically the script, whereas Bottle Rocket was rewritten like crazy and then the movie was re-edited like crazy, re-shot. We wrote a new opening, we wrote new scenes, we worked and worked and worked to try and make it function. Rushmore, more or less, works the way it was meant to work. The script did that and there was not a lot of reorganizing.
What about your interest in plays? You still read a lot of plays and the theatre featured heavily in Rushmore. Are you still interested in writing for the theatre?
It interests me but I don’t know if I am really suited for it. I do know that I would like to produce and direct a play. But in terms of writing, if you’re thinking of an idea and then you have a montage that goes with it and the settings are all cinematic then it is a movie. I just haven’t had ideas that I have been thinking of lately where the emphasis is on the words in such a way that you would just want them to just be sitting on stage.
Do you think it also has something to do with plays having this unity of space incorporating long scenes on one location?
Yeah, in The Royal Tenenbaums there are only four or five scenes of any real length at all. Most of the scenes are very brief. Rushmore maybe less so but there are a lot of little scenes in Rushmore too. The new one I’m working on, there are some long scenes that are longer than anything I can remember having done; but yeah, it’s an interesting point. I’d like to write longer scenes at some point.
Are there any playwrights you are particularly fond of?
Just tons. I just found this play The 5th of July that Lanford Wilson wrote which is very good. He’s the guy who wrote Burn This, that’s a good one. The ones who were always my key guys, that I read everything of and was the most interested in were Shepard, Pinter, Mamet, Tennessee Williams, Chekhov.
Have you ever read David Mamet’s book on writing, Three Uses of the Knife?
No, I guess what I read was Writing in Restaurants and there is one on directing that I read. That’s like a rulebook. He’s very focused on the rules.
Yeah. Three Uses of the Knife is quite good because it’s based on how an object can become a metaphor and embody the change that occurs between characters during the story. I think it goes something like, ‘You use your knife to go out and cut down food for your lover, you come home and you use your knife to shave to look good for your lover and then you use your knife to cut out her lying heart when you find your lover cheating on you.’
That’s real Mamet.
Where did the idea for Rushmore come from? You described it as ‘being interested in characters whose ambitions were completely out of proportion to what they could realize’.
I wanted to do a school movie for a long time. When I applied to film school, I had to do these two treatments, one was roughly Bottle Rocket and the other was roughly Rushmore. It was just a school movie and I only had a vague idea of the character. Before we made Bottle Rocket we had some time to figure things out. I wanted to do a school movie and Owen got excited about that too, and we sort of slowly cooked it up.
Somewhere early in the thing, I had written this play that Max in the film was doing called Shakedown in Alphabet City – the Serpico play. And then when we sat with Mike De Luca, who was running New Line Cinema at the time, to tell him about this, he wanted to do something with us and said, ‘Whatever you guys want to do.’ During our description of what we wanted to do, as shorthand we said we did a play of Serpico and we got a really good reaction from Mike De Luca. So we kind of adapted Shakedown in Alphabet City and put in a few lines from Serpico. Most of it was the way it always was because it was this Serpico-esque thing. I had written a lot of plays like that but there was also a Fitzgerald story, I think it is called ‘The Captured Shadow’, and there is another one called ‘The Freshest Boy’. Owen and I have always loved Fitzgerald so somehow that figured in.
Do you remember having cinematic influences on the radar during the writing process?
If … was definitely one. Murmur of the Heart, the Louis Malle film, it’s one of my favourite movies, that one. And The 400 Blows, of course. I think there is a whole French thing that connects to it. And I guess Harold and Maude and The Graduate were big movies for us that were somehow tying in.
Have you ever thought about adapting a novel or directing a screenplay that was not written by you?
Not seriously, but at some point I figure I probably will. You know, John Huston’s entire career of movies is almost all adapting books and stories that he loved, and he made so many good movies …
Does it bother you that so many critics thought Rushmore was autobiographical?
No, it doesn’t bother me, because there is a ton of autobiographical stuff in there anyway. I’m not really like Max, I never was. But the fact that I wrote plays, which gave us the idea of making those plays in the film, is enough to make them say that.
You have said that Rushmore is a dream version of the school it was set at. What did you mean by that?
It’s sort of filtered through his perspective of the place. Max sees Rushmore as this great institution with longstanding traditions that will be upheld, and really it’s just another school, and he’s the only one wearing the blazer with the patch on it. In the way we photographed the movie, at Rushmore everything is warm with all of these rich colours, and when he gets sent across the street to the other school, Grover Cleveland, it’s lit like a prison, more or less. We sort of timed it that way, cold, to take out all the colours, and put barbed wire on the fence and things like that.
Bottle Rocket became something of a cult film with studio executives in Hollywood. How did those people react to Rushmore when they read the script?
We had enough people who wanted to do it where we got to choose. Scott Rudin read it and wanted to do it. The guys at Jersey Films read it and wanted to do it. Joe Roth read it and wanted to do it, and he was running the company. It was originally written for New Line and we would have great conversations with them about it but really the conversation was, ‘Are you guys going to do the movie?’ and they ultimately weren’t. That was that. Then when we went to Disney and Joe Roth, and he was ready to do it.
I understand that you and Owen Wilson don’t work in drafts. Instead you focus on part of a film and then rewrite it. Are you ever worried that by concentrating on one part of a film that it will make the other parts suffer?
It’s not concentrating on a particular part at a time. Noah and I have shown our script to people, we get different notes, maybe we get an actor to read it and when we hear back from her we incorporate it into her part so we think about that part for a while and that is woven through the movie. We think about someone saying, ‘I don’t feel this way about it’, then we think about something. It tends to be an element that is woven through it than about working on one scene. That is the way I feel like I have approached them.
Can you tell me something about how you work when creating a screenplay?
With Rushmore we started talking about it when we were doing a cross-country drive; we just figured out a lot of things. Then we just started writing different scenes. On Rushmore, we were working together closely for the first half of the script then we worked apart. The kind of thing we would talk about were ideas for events in the story and things about the character and the key relationships and the idea of him having a relationship with this older guy where they’re more or less equal. Then I would write something and show it to Owen then Owen would write something and show it to me.
When you are alone during the writing process and you are not satisfied with your work how do you deal with nagging feelings of self-doubt?
I don’t know how you handle it because it is a constant thing. I think what I always try to do is say to myself, ‘How did I feel about this last one when I was around this point, was I feeling good?’ The answer to that is usually, ‘No, you were feeling terrible. You didn’t even know that you wanted to make the movie.’ Usually I ask somebody else to remind me because I have a mental block and it always seems like it was going better on the last one. There are always times when you don’t know if it’s a movie. The thing which we are on now is as much a movie-movie as anything, and up until six weeks ago I just wasn’t sure if we were on the right track at all and somehow we turned a corner and got confident about it.
When you are doing the physical writing, do you have any tricks to keep yourself engaged like making yourself sit in a seat for a certain period of time?
I use little notebooks. I write out everything longhand first, then I type it into the computer. Back when Owen and I were working together, he would write in longhand also. Rushmore, Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic are all in small notebooks like this … [Anderson presents a pocket-sized notebook, and flips through the pages showing carefully sketched portrait drawings very similar to the chapter headings featured in The Royal Tenenbaums] I create seven of these for each film for some reason.
Is it ideas for characters or ideas for moments in the film that you’re putting into these notebooks?
Both. The first notebooks are like this one, and then the fourth, fifth and sixth notebooks; you can flip those open and say, ‘Well, that scene’s in here. This scene’s totally changed now. This part never made it in at all.’ For me, where I start first with a script are these images of the characters. There’s usually quite a lot of that before there’s anything that resembles a page of a script. Then, once we have it printed, I always have a draft on me and I make changes on the page as we’re reworking the material.
You wrote Bill Murray’s role in Rushmore with him in mind. I’ve always been intrigued by how a screenwriter can write something for a specific actor.
Well, it was written with Bill Murray in mind but we thought we weren’t going to get him at certain points. And there were other guys we thought about, in case Bill wasn’t going to do it. There’s a scene in the beginning of Rushmore where Blume gives a speech: I had seen Alec Baldwin giving that speech in some ways. So it was written for Bill, but less so than The Life Aquatic was. The central character in that is written for him – I just couldn’t see anybody else doing it, period.
That’s what I am trying to get to. Is it Caddyshack Bill Murray; is it Groundhog Day Bill Murray …?
In the case of The Life Aquatic, there is a lot of Bill Murray. I’ve now known Bill for six or seven years, so I just think of him like the way I would draw on someone else I know and put them in it. And this one is a lot more Bill that I know, as well as Bill from the movies. It’s really a mixture of all kinds of people – like Royal Tenenbaums, the main role was written for Hackman; I didn’t know Hackman at all but I just had an image of Hackman and his voice and I just pictured it, I guess. Basically, everyone else was the same way. Luke’s character was the first thing I wanted to have in the movie, and he was supposed to be the main character but then it shifted somewhat. Anjelica Huston, I always had in mind. Owen’s character is kind of odd. When he read the finished draft he felt that that character didn’t belong in there, the character was something that I had written and he didn’t see himself playing it at all until the first day of shooting. Then he was totally comfortable with it and brought it to life in a way that he didn’t expect to.
Were you ever interested in writing on your own?
Well, for The Royal Tenenbaums I was more or less on my own. But I prefer to write with a partner – probably for the same reason I see myself as a director more than anything else. Because I like to have a team together, and work with people. Owen was mostly an actor, and that’s what his schedule was shaped by. So to have a writing partner who you meet with every day, and work, and talk about the thing and sort it out … for me, making these movies, that’s what my whole working life is about, and it’s just good to have someone who is completely in it with you. Also, the way that Owen and I would spark each other creatively – I have that same thing with Noah Baumbach, who I am currently co-writing with on my new movie, The Life Aquatic. They each have different qualities, but I feel like I can be inspired by my interaction with somebody who’s got the enthusiasm and the ideas.
And who has a similar frame of reference and sense of humour?
Yes, one thing about Owen and Noah is that they are both guys who, if we go out to dinner with somebody together and we talk about it afterwards, we’re going to laugh about the same things.
Music is a really important part of Rushmore. Do ideas for scenes come to you through music? Do you also play it while you are writing?
Yes, I’ll play music while writing a specific scene. There’s a scene in The Royal Tenenbaums where Gwyneth Paltrow puts on a Rolling Stones record. When I was working on that scene, I was playing that record over and over and over. It was a song I had known I wanted to put into a movie for a while, and then I sort of figured it out.
Sight & Sound said that it was the only scene in cinema history where actually two songs from the same album are played back to back.
Although they don’t actually occur in that order on the record … But we make them appear that way by putting in that ‘hiss’ sound, making it seem like it’s vinyl. If it had played the actual next song, that would have ruined the scene.
I liked the opening of the film where Max demonstrates his skills as a maths genius only to wake up in chapel service because you don’t realize you are in a dream until Max wakes up. You withhold this information from the audience. It’s also a curtain-raising set-piece.
In Bottle Rocket we have that too, the way we hold off on telling them it’s his parents’ house they’re burgling. That to me is a theatrical device more than it’s a movie thing. The Rushmore scene was something that we added to the script late in the game. I wrote the first version of it, then I showed it to Owen and he liked it a lot. But then Owen made changes to the dialogue to make it more dreamlike. It’s a good example of our collaboration, how we took it further by working together. It was also very consciously a scene where we would really open strong on Max. Previously he had appeared in the audience at Bill Murray’s speech, and we kind of slowly found our way to him. But then we added this scene where you just land right on him. Also there’s the idea of someone who’s able to solve a math problem; we’ll quickly learn that it is far out of Max’s range of abilities.
Then there’s Bill Murray’s strong opening where he makes a speech at the chapel service, telling these students how lucky they are and making an appeal to the underdogs in the crowd.
I had an idea of a speech that was like Alec Baldwin’s in Glengarry Glen Ross.
‘Coffee’s for closers’?
Exactly, but it wasn’t as strong or as interesting as that. I was trying to come up with it and I called Bob Wilson, Owen’s dad, and asked him to write a chapel speech, because I knew he was interested in this kind of stuff. I explained it to him and he sent me a speech – it wasn’t really the speech he would have given himself, it was more him interpreting what I wanted for the character and then writing the scene that way. I just phoned him and said, ‘Just write your speech.’ Then he wrote a second speech, and three or four lines of the one in the film are directly from Bob Wilson. There’s that line, ‘Get them in the crosshairs’ that I heard him say on the phone one time, he was talking to someone about some incredible lawyer. Also, ‘You were born rich and you’re going to stay rich’ – that was a Bob Wilson thing. ‘Take dead aim on the rich boys’ and ‘They can buy anything but they can’t buy backbone’ – that’s him too.
In that scene where Max takes Mr Blume, Ms Cross and her doctor friend, played by Owen’s brother, Luke, out for dinner after the opening of his new play, there is a great line. Max is getting drunk and criticizing the doctor, making fun of his outfit, ‘I like your nurse’s uniform, guy.’ To which Luke says, ‘They are O.R. scrubs.’ To which Max says, ‘Oh, are they?’ You probably get a lot of laughs for that line.
That’s Luke. Luke wrote that line.
So there are a lot of different people who make small contributions to your screenplays?
Without a doubt. That line is without question something people ask me about. Luke read the script and came up with it. I recently gave my new script to Luke when we were at this bar called Bungalow 8, and Luke left it there. This script is meant to be top secret and he left it there … So he got another one sent to his hotel, and then left that one too. He called me and was really apologetic but, I mean, he lost it twice in one night. Then he wanted me to send it to him in LA and I was thinking, ‘No.’ But now I’m remembering how good the ‘Oh, are they?’ line is and I’m thinking, ‘I should send it to him.’ [laughs]
One interesting thing about that scene is where you actually get four people playing a scene at once. Most of the movie is two people, two people, two people; so that is one of the few where it gets to go all around. One of the inspirations for that was a movie Owen and I both love, My Left Foot. There’s a scene in that film where Daniel Day-Lewis has a total meltdown and that’s kind of where this scene was coming from.
Yes, the great thing about that scene is that Max has tried to act so sophisticated and suave and now the truth comes out about how emotionally immature he is. Was the screenplay designed for that rift to happen there?
I think it was more like we just felt at this point he needed to do this. I think we were surprised when we were writing that it becomes a scene where it breaks through his whole act. It might have just been intuitive, and then we just knew we needed it. We used to have another scene after it, outside at the valet, where it went even further. But somewhere along the way we just condensed it – it was redundant.
Do you find that a lot of editing that you do is taking out things that are repeated?
Yeah, sometimes you don’t even realize how many times you are doing the same thing, but then you step back and there it is.
Your montages are very effective and it seems like you enjoy doing them. I’m thinking of the opening where you show Max performing his school activities and all the school clubs he’ s had a hand in starting: the beekeepers society, the model United Nations, the go-cart team. But that’s exposition, which we know is a terrifying thing as far as the rules of screenwriting go. Were you ever worried that this would make the audience a passive participant?
Worried? For sure. At the start of The Royal Tenenbaums we tell the whole story of the family, which is absolutely expositional, I guess. Then we introduce all the characters in the present, with their names on the screen, and then we tell what every one of them is doing now. So we’ve actually spent twenty minutes before we even have the first scene where we can see something happening in the present. The whole first reel of the movie is just setting it up, and that’s just not right. It’s not the way to do a movie, and it probably doesn’t function properly, but I was just really attached to it. Part of the reason I wanted to make the movie was because of all this stuff at the front of it. So I just felt like I wanted to do them anyway and hoped that they would be engaging on their own even though the movie doesn’t really start to function dramatically until after that. We also fill in an entire backstory of Gwyneth Paltrow’s character, Margot, at one point through a montage to a Ramones song.
There is a real turning point in the film that relates to a minor character, Dirk, especially with the almost gothic music that you use to show Max’s younger friend’s feelings about being betrayed by Max. It happens when Dirk is told that Max has been bragging about getting felt up by his mom, which is the only reason Max chose Dirk as his chapel partner. You are walking a real tightrope there as far as tone is concerned. His conniving letter to Max is very Machiavellian.
That letter we were having some problems with, and I actually asked our agent to have his son write a letter. So that is another situation where we asked somebody else to do some writing for us! So I explained the situation to Jim Berkowitz’s son Jordan, and he wrote a letter, and we used the opening and last lines of that: ‘Dear Max, I am writing to tell you that I have learned that Miss Cross is secretly having an affair with Mr Blume.’ Here Jordan is laying out the exact thing that I have told him on the phone. After seeing the letter, I think Owen had the idea that Dirk was being deeply sarcastic, then we wrote the letter from that. It was part collaboration between me and Owen, and part collaboration between Owen and Jordan Berkowitz.
Dirk has a small but crucial role as far as the plot is concerned. He does bad things and good deeds. Was that something that got cut out at some point?
There was an element of him setting things up behind the scenes, which I think is there in a slight way. I think there is a shot where Blume drives up and Dirk is watching with his binoculars. We went with ‘Dirk is watching’ rather than ‘Dirk is orchestrating’ because it was a little bit too contrived.
Why did you use the seasonal title-cards through the film? Was it to give some kind of a structure?
Yeah, and I was also thinking of Powell and Pressburger. It’s also tied to Max doing his theatre stuff. The one I like the most is when it goes to October; there’s a green curtain and then it opens to Grover Cleveland High School. The second it opens, we learn this big piece of information: he’s been kicked out of the school.
I think the scene that follows that is where Max climbs through Miss Cross’s window on a rainy night claiming to be hit by a car. It’s a very daring gesture on Max’s behalf …
That scene is the scene that is the most like a play in the whole movie, I think. It is one of the longer scenes and a lot plays out between the two of them in it.
Were you at all worried about the audience believing that Miss Cross would let Max get as far as lying on her bed with her? When she goes to the toilet to find some medical supplies Max places some mood music into her tape player and lies down on the bed.
You know, the scene used to be that while she was out of the room he looked around the place and then he found a shoebox and took it out and it was filled with pot. And it used to have that she threw some of his clothes in the laundry and he was wearing a bathrobe. So it took it much further before. I think the thing is, she’s drawn to him. She is overstepping something a little bit because she is connected to him.
When they start talking about Miss Cross’s husband, Edward Appleby, Max is quite coarse in the way he talks, very matter of fact about her husband being dead. It’s kind of insensitive. This is something that also comes up in The Royal Tenenbaums where Gene Hackman’s character calls Danny Glover’s character ‘Coltrane’. Where does this edgy stuff come from?
Owen and I like characters who are capable of some bad behaviour. And you kind of want to put them through something. At the same time that we’re drawn to showing them at their best, we’re also drawn to showing them at their worst. Often something mean is the funniest thing, especially in people who are unaware about how they come across and don’t censor themselves.
Was Max meant to be getting somewhere sexually? There are a few moments in this scene where he seems to be teetering on the edge of scoring with Miss Cross.
Definitely, she sort of has a thing for him on some level. I think she does associate him with her dead husband, she can definitely see some connection between the two of them.
At the end of the film you show your theatrical influences by putting all of your characters together in one scene. It’s the opening night party for Max’s new play about Vietnam. In some way it rhymes with the final scene in The Royal Tenenbaums. It ties up all the characters together in a large set-piece.
Right. Part of the inspiration for this came from The Magnificent Ambersons where Welles has a great big party scene shot in long takes, moving through the party, from one group to the other. I remember this scene being so easy to write, just because we knew all the characters so well, and they all had outstanding things in their lives, and it was just so easy to plug it in.
What is the trick to getting to know your characters?
Well, probably being obsessed with them for more than a year while you are writing, you’re going to know them …
Manhattan, New York
Darren Aronofksy
‘What is that noise?’ Harry Goldfarb (Jared Leto) discovers that his mother Sara, (Ellen Burstyn) is addicted to drugs of a different kind.