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ALEXANDER PAYNE AND JIM TAYLOR

Election

‘We try to begin with the raw materials of life, not the raw materials of other movies.’

Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor have co-written (with Payne directing) four movies together: Citizen Ruth (1996), Election (1999), About Schmidt (2002) and Sideways (2004). Election was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and About Schmidt won the Golden Globe for Best Screenplay – Motion Picture. The writing team have also collaborated on Hollywood rewrites such as Jurassic Park III (2001) and have worked with a variety of interesting actors such as Laura Dern, Matthew Broderick, Reese Witherspoon, Jack Nicholson and Kathy Bates.

Synopsis

Omaha, Oklahoma, the present. Tracy Flick is the most ambitious student at Carver High. Her teacher, Mr McAllister, is in charge of the student government. Elections are coming up and Tracy Flick is the only one running. Annoyed by Tracy’s overly ambitious ways, Mr McAllister convinces the popular football player Paul to run against Tracy. Meanwhile, Tammy, Paul’s lesbian sister, decides that running against her brother is the best way to avenge being dumped by her ex-girlfriend who is now dating Paul. Mr McAllister makes a bad decision when counting the ballots, causing a scandal that mirrors a real political election.

* * *

KEVIN CONROY SCOTT: How did you two come to work together? I read somewhere that you lived together in Los Angeles for a while, so I’m wondering how the friendship started.

JIM TAYLOR: We were only acquaintances through mutual friends, until I moved into a room that Alexander had available in his apartment. Although I’d been working in film-related jobs for many years, I had recently started to temp in law offices so I could have more time to write. After I moved in, Alexander and I gradually became friends and we ended up collaborating on the scripts for two short films. That experience was fun and went well, so it seemed like a good idea for us to write a feature together, and we wrote the first draft of Citizen Ruth before I moved to New York.

What had been driving you to write on your own before meeting Alexander?

JT: I had wanted to be a filmmaker since I was thirteen, and I was working in the film industry, trying to figure out how to connect my work experience with becoming a filmmaker myself instead of helping other people make their films. So it seemed like the best way for me to do that was to write scripts.

Alexander, what were you doing when Jim moved in?

ALEXANDER PAYNE: I was finishing up my thesis at UCLA film school. Jim moved into the house in around 1989, my last year at UCLA, and my first two years of trying to get a film made. The last eight months of Jim’s living there were spent writing Citizen Ruth.

At what point after you met did you two know that you would work well together?

AP: It was more a shared sense of humour that was responsible for why our friendship was growing.
JT: It probably had a lot to do with how we enjoyed talking to each other about articles in the newspaper. Our first script was inspired by some of those news stories.

Alexander, can you say something about The Passion of Martin, your thesis film?

AP: It was about fifty minutes long … If you check it out you have to be very, very forgiving. There’s a lot of amateurish stuff in there. It was loosely based on an Argentine novel and I spent a lot of time making it and after I graduated in 1990, I had an agent who got me a writing-directing deal for a studio. That’s when I wrote The Coward, which later became About Schmidt. It took me a long time to write. During that time I also co-wrote two shorts with Jim that I directed.
JT: Writing those shorts was a test. Not intentionally, it just sort of happened that way.
AP: So by late 1991, early 1992, I finished The Coward and was trying to figure out what to do because the studio that hired me said, ‘We’re not making this.’ I was maybe going to try to rewrite it and raise money to shoot it on 16mm or something. Then in February of ’92, Jim and I came upon the idea of Citizen Ruth, so I abandoned The Coward for many years.

When you guys were writing, what were you doing to make ends meet financially?

AP: I had that money from Universal. And I never changed my lifestyle from the one I had as a student until after I made Citizen Ruth. Until the year 2000, I never paid more than $800 a month in rent.

Which leads me to a question, Jim, about you and the host of Wheel of Fortune, Pat Sajack.

JT: Oh, right … [laughs] In the years before I moved in with Alexander, I had been working in a lot of film jobs. If I wanted to be a creative executive at a studio I was well on my way, but I wasn’t interested in that, so I stopped doing that kind of work. I went to a temp agency and I said, ‘Don’t send me to entertainment companies.’ I started temping in law offices in downtown LA. It was depressing, putting on my tie –
AP: Jim hates wearing ties.
JT: – and you know, packing my lunch and getting on the bus and going down there and doing word-processing, mostly. So we had to carve out time to work around my temping schedule. I had been working with the director Ivan Passer for a few years, which was great, but it ended up being that the project that was driving our little company along fell apart. I hadn’t been paid for a few months and I was already in debt. Actually, that’s why I ended up living with Alexander, because I couldn’t afford to live in my own apartment. So I guess it’s an example of how bad luck can often lead you somewhere good …

The thing about Wheel of Fortune was that I needed money and I knew people who had been successful on game shows. Wheel of Fortune was, at the time, the only show where you could get a good chunk of money. Except for Jeopardy! of course.
AP: He wasn’t smart enough for Jeopardy!
JT: But I thought I had a chance of winning on Wheel of Fortune. The process took a long time and I was very serious about it. I trained with Alexander, do you remember that? AP: I participated in many training sessions. It’s like practising for your SAT tests.
JT: I trained because a big factor in winning is getting used to spinning the wheel while you’re trying to solve the puzzles …

It sounds like something you guys could make a short film about.

AP: He was going to.
JT: As I was preparing for the show, I realized that I really needed to get something out of it – it wasn’t for fun, I desperately needed the money and if I didn’t win I was going to be very depressed. So I thought, ‘OK, maybe if I lose I can make a short using the footage.’ So I came up with a scenario for the film, but in order for it to work, I had to change what my character would be when I was introduced on the show.
AP: It was about a third grade teacher who is engaged to be married and loses on Wheel of Fortune. After the show, not only does his fiancée leave him, but his third grade students make fun of him for being such a dope on the show.
JT: So I went up to Pat Sajack before we started taping the show and I said, ‘Actually, I’m not a writer. I’m a third grade teacher.’ Which was partially true since I’d recently been substitute-teaching in the Pomona school district. Pat crossed out ‘writer’ on his card and wrote in ‘teacher’. Also, during my introduction I made sure I had a chance to say, ‘I’m engaged to be married to my lovely fiancée Beth’, because she was going to be an important character in this short film. When the show aired all of my extended family thought I was getting married. People who didn’t know me well were very confused …

So what happened with the project?

JT: I ended up using the idea for some directing exercises, but I never made the film.
AP: And you won, too.
JT: True, I won one show but then I lost the next one so I did have the footage I needed of me losing. It just didn’t end up being something I wanted to make. Besides, by the time I got around to really thinking about it, I’d aged and put on weight so any additional footage I’d shoot wouldn’t have matched …
AP: He won a boat, and at the end of the show when everyone is applauding and the credits were rolling they cut to the grand prize, the boat that Jim just won. Jim ran over to the boat and climbed up on to it and went into the front and stood there, one foot in the air behind him with his hand to his forehead and his other hand behind his back like he was looking out to sea. It’s the funniest thing in the world …
JT: I don’t think Pat Sajack liked my attitude very much.
AP: Do you still have that tape?
JT: Sure.
AP: Can I show it to my wife?
JT: Sure.

Jim, your short films, Memory Lane and Living Will, are they close in tone to the stuff you write with Alexander?

JT: Pretty much.
AP: But I think if you see them you will find, in distilled form, an absurd streak which you see in the things we have co-written. There is an isolated deadpan absurdity that is very distilled in those two shorts.
JT: We’re lucky that our sensibilities are very close.

How did the two of you work together when you were writing Citizen Ruth?

AP: I think we wrote downstairs in the dining room a lot. I went to the city where the original story happened and did research for a week. I think we were already well into the first draft at that point, and I found that the research was confirming things that we had invented.
JT: It was very organic and it’s probably why our partnership works. We just talked and then wrote some stuff. But of all the scripts we’ve written, I think Citizen Ruth changed the most from the first draft to the shooting script.

You managed to get paid for writing the first two short films you did together, didn’t you? Which is unusual.

AP: It was a job. The film was shown domestically on the Playboy Channel.
JT: [laughs] It was interesting, actually. It was a show that Propaganda Films produced that was trying to be something ‘new and different’. Actually, a lot of Alexander’s filmmaking team came out of that short.
AP: Rolfe Kent the composer, and Jane Stewart the production designer.

How did this Playboy job come about?

AP: I met producer Alan Poul at Sundance in ’91 and he hired me there. I thought I would do it because no one would ever see it and I could just practice directing. Of course, now one of them is out on DVD …
JT: But the second one we did, Playboy hated. It only aired once and since then they’ve buried it. I’m proud of it because it’s truly subversive, especially considering where the money came from.
AP: It was anti-Playboy. It shows at one point a very lonely fifty-eight-year-old Czech plastic surgeon in his study watching 16mm footage of a dead girl from his youth, and he’s masturbating watching her. It was called The Hands of God.
JT: What did that executive from Playboy say? ‘What is this auteur shit?’ First we did one that they loved, then when it came time to make the second one they said, ‘What is this? We don’t understand it.’ And we said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s funny. Just like the first one.’

I think this kind of ties into another job that you guys did. You were hired to rewrite Jurassic Park III. Can you tell me something about that experience?

AP: It was a job. Four weeks. We also did Meet the Parents, the last draft before shooting, un-credited. We made enough structural changes in Jurassic Park to get credit but we didn’t make enough changes in Meet the Parents to get credit.
JT: It’s weird because there is much less of us in Jurassic Park than in Meet the Parents.
AP: They hired us for character and humour.
JT: And Bill Macy was going to be in the movie, so we thought it would be fun to write for him. Also, I like the Jurassic Park premise. I find it really compelling as a nature-bites-us-in-the-ass story.
AP: When we started, I talked to the director a lot about how it should have elements of the original King Kong and Wages of Fear. They hired us six weeks before they started shooting, and we had four weeks to write a whole new script with new characters while maintaining the five set-pieces they had already built. It was a challenge and an exercise.
JT: It was really hard work. But these rewrite things, as much as they’re lucrative, they give us a chance to write something very fast – because we usually write very slowly.

You could also argue that the restrictions that genre movies provide can actually bring some creativity to your writing. Did any of that happen with Jurassic Park III?

JT: It was too rigorous a deadline, and there were too many obstacles in the way of doing great work. The last rewrite we did – they often pay you by the week – we were contracted to do a two-to-three-week polish, and we took three months to do it because we just couldn’t limit ourselves to a polish. In that case, there wasn’t a production date looming, so there was room and we took it. [laughs] Jurassic Park III was an interesting lesson for us. But ultimately the realities of producing an effects-driven movie almost always get in the way of telling the best story.
AP: It’s a ride. My phrase when taking these jobs is, ‘We might be highly paid but we can’t be bought.’ The biggest obstacle in the rewrites that we’ve done is that you really have to follow the orders of the producer and the director. We do this to a certain point but then after that point we say, ‘Well, you hired us for us and this is what we think it should be.’ So from time to time there has been a tension between what we think the good-movie version should be and what they want to do. For example, on Jurassic Park, there were things they wanted us to write into it but we refused to because we thought they were too dumb.
JT: I think most writers would agree that it’s almost impossible to do a decent job writing scenes that the filmmakers don’t support.

So then how do you deal with notes from the studio – on both your writing assignments and your own films?

AP: In the rewrite deals, it comes written in the contract that we’re going to get notes. In fact, we like to get notes from the director because we trust the director; at least that’s whom we have to serve. Fortunately, the three movies that we have co-written and I have directed, our scripts have largely been left alone. We have been really lucky in terms of studio notes. Citizen Ruth, no one ever said anything. Election, we had a little bit right before shooting in one scene; and then About Schmidt, zero.

I remember reading you quoting Mel Brooks to the effect that studios tend to leave you alone when you write a comedy. Why do you think that’s the case?

AP: I read that in Kenneth Tynan’s piece about Mel Brooks that was printed in The New Yorker in the seventies. Mel Brooks thinks that when you direct comedies they leave you alone a little bit more because they think it’s harder to talk about –
JT: When we were doing Election it had all these voice-overs, and all of these convolutions in the story. It’s kind of hard to tamper with that. If you’ve moved far enough away from what is the norm then it’s difficult to force the script into a normal form because it’s not even close.

So it’s something about the tone of the film?

AP: In interviews after the films I get so many questions about the tone. ‘How do you ride that balance between drama and comedy?’ I don’t know how to answer that because the tone simply comes out of us.
JT: One good thing is that now when someone asks us what a future project of ours will be like, we can just point to previous movies of our own as examples …

When you are doing polishes on these rewrites, how do you approach it? Do you look at what is there and then it’s just a matter of tweaking it?

AP: Usually it starts with, ‘Do we think we can help this along?’ Because these things are very highly paid, and we would never want to not give them their money’s worth. Even though we took three months on that project that we were hired for two to three weeks, we only charged them for three weeks.
JT: On the one hand we’re doing the job for the money, but on the other hand we care far more about doing something we’re proud of than how much we’re getting paid.
AP: We have to be honest contractors. It’s like, ‘We gave you this estimate, and we should have tested that wall and seen that it was all rotted inside.’

How did you come across Tom Perrotta’s novel Election?

AP: Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa sent the book to us in January of ’96 but I didn’t read it until April – because I was not remotely interested in anything set in high school. But as a favour to Albert I went to Palm Springs for a weekend and read it, and I got sucked into it. Then I sent it to Jim and he agreed that we should do it.
JT: And Alexander didn’t set it up for me by saying it was great. But as soon as I read it, I realized it was great material for us.

How did you go about adapting Election from the novel? The novel is told from multiple points of view.

JT: Using multiple voice-overs was a decision we made from the outset. Thankfully it was a decision that the studio supported us on.
AP: In fact, one of the main reasons I wanted to do the film in the first place was because I wanted to do multiple voice-overs. I thought it would be a cool thing to try.

Election is set in New Jersey but the film is set in Omaha, Nebraska, which is where Alexander is from. How important was it in the writing to have a location that you could identify with?

AP: I think Election could have been set anywhere. It’s not that ‘Omaha’ is in the writing or structure of it but it is in the production design and the photography and the casting.

How long did you work on the screenplay?

AP: It’s always about six months.

For just your first draft?

AP: Yes, but our first drafts are always very much within striking distance of the final draft. They’re usually about eighty-three per cent there … Then we’ll let a month go by, and we may do another two or three weeks and that’s pretty much it but with constant tweaking after that. It never stops. It’s there structurally, but we never stop thinking about it. That was the case mostly with Citizen Ruth because it took such a long time to get made.

Jim, since you are not behind the camera, do you help out with suggestions as far as directing goes?

JT: In one sense, yes, because when we’re writing I’m working with the director, and together we’re talking about certain things that he wants to achieve when he’s directing, so we’re trying to write them into the script. But when he’s on the set? No.
AP: But I consult with you about casting sometimes.
JT: Citizen Ruth I was there on set all the time because it was our first movie and it was exciting. Election a little less. It’s really dangerous if an actor is looking to someone besides the director for guidance.
AP: On one of my films I had to ban one producer from speaking to any of the talent because he or she spoke to the talent in a way which made that actor insecure and uncomfortable. It was just wrong.
JT: If I’m around during filming – and I am around less and less on each film – people know that I probably have a good idea as to what Alexander is thinking and they’ll ask me questions. My response is always, ‘You have to check with Alexander but I think …’ There’s one person on the set who everyone should go to if creative decisions need to be made on a film Alexander is directing, and that person is Alexander. When I’m directing it will be me. AP: Jim did do second-unit directing on both Citizen Ruth and Election. Actually, Jim just finished the first draft of a script for the first film he’s going to direct. I co-wrote some of it but I didn’t get quite as involved with it as he’s done with what I’ve directed. I had the same experience working with him as the co-writer – not as the director – and then trying to listen to him about how he wants to direct the film so then we can write it accordingly. I liked that experience of having the tables turned very much.

So you have a generous relationship with each other.

JT: Yeah, it keeps getting better and better …

Now that you are both directors in your own right, is there any way either of you can write on your own?

JT: We can but we hate it.
AP: And I think the work wouldn’t be as good. The thing that Jim is going to direct is very much him – his sense of the absurd, and making fun of the pretentious. When I was writing with him I was able to bring it out of him even more.
JT: Absolutely, we are such a good audience for each other. I’m not into being a solitary writer, sitting in my room, alone. It takes me for ever to write something on my own.
AP: It helps to be writing with a director. The polish we took three months on, the job-job, we didn’t have a director. At least with Meet the Parents and Jurassic Park III, even if we disagreed with the decision, the director would give us a reason. The length it takes to write something is all about the speed with which you make your decisions about the overall story and then getting from A to B and B to C. You can execute any decision quickly, but it’s about making sure which decision is the best that will lead to the next set of choices that are best for the material. So when we were writing Jim’s directing project, because he is going to direct and knows the film, he’s able to make decisions on the spot based on his own feelings.
JT: It’s a really important distinction between directing and writing. I know there are all of these co-directed films, but I think that directing comes down to one guiding instinct. When we are writing in our early drafts, we are strictly co-writers. Alexander becomes more and more the director as the drafts go on. Ultimately the script is finished because he says it’s finished and he feels that he can direct those scenes. I can’t tell him that it’s got to be a particular way if he doesn’t feel comfortable directing it, because I’m not the one who is going to be standing out there trying to get the actors to do it.

How do you guys communicate with each other when your ideas are not working or you think something that one of you has come up with is just bad?

JT: That’s where a lot of partnerships don’t work, when you have to endure the criticism of your partner. We work very hard to listen with an open mind and not take offence.
AP: We generally come to a point where we agree.
JT: Or – we just have to move on. I think both of us try to keep the good of the film in mind and not our egos. Neither of us is trying to keep something in just because it is ‘ours’.
AP: When we have disagreements about the direction of the script, at a certain point we can argue and argue but whoever has the stronger instinct, the other one will trust him unless he feels very, very strongly as well.

Staying in the realm of the uncomfortable … how do you guys deal with self-doubt during the writing process, when you question the whole project and your abilities as a writer?

AP: When are you not dealing with self-doubt?
JT: As a matter of fact, what we have been working on in the last few days has been going through this doldrums period.
AP: But we know we’ll break through it. You have to break through it, because you want to make your movie. Also, since we’ve already been through the doldrums before, we know it doesn’t last for ever. That’s the only thing that helps from experience, knowing you’ve been there before and that you got through it.
JT: That’s one of the advantages of partnerships. If you are on your own your doubts can deepen and linger whereas in a partnership there is someone there to tell you to move on or to reassure you. That’s tremendously helpful.

When you were adapting Election, how did you know when you had established authority over this high school world that you hadn’t created?

AP: From the get-go, because of it striking chords inside of us. The great thing about adapting novels is that they become immediately personal, because of the dialogue between those concerns in the book and how they echo with your own. Most of Kubrick’s films are adaptations and he obviously had the same experience, finding things that struck a chord in him and he then took complete authority in terms of making it his own.

Did you have any contact with Tom Perrotta during the writing process?

AP: We didn’t have our first contact with him until we finished a draft or two. He read a draft and then it was communicated back to us that he kind of liked it.
JT: I think that is fairly routine. If someone besides the author does the adaptation, they usually don’t bring the author into the process until much later. But he came to the set and we liked him and I think he liked us.

Were you at all nervous about showing him your work?

AP: When you adapt a book, you’re not making another book – you’re making a movie, which operates grammatically very, very differently. The better the book is, the more you have to change it. A good book succeeds with literary effects, but you need cinema so you have to just treat it as raw material. Anyone who expects a movie to be faithful to a book is not really giving the proper respect to cinematic form and literary form.

Tracy Flick’s sexuality was much more overt in the book than in the film. Why did she become less of a Lolita and more of a busybody?

AP: Because it seemed more interesting for her not to be more overtly sexual – even though she really is.

Do you worry that it might be harder for the audience to believe that Mr McAllister would be attracted to her if she were not as sexually overt?

AP: No. We’re in New York. Go to the subway and look around – all of those people, they fuck. If people were only attracted to other people who are themselves attractive then we wouldn’t have an overpopulation problem on this planet. The notion that people have to be pretty or sexy to be attractive is bullshit to me, because that’s not how the world is.

Election uses four points of view for narration. Did you have a back-up plan if the studio didn’t go for it?

JT: No, it was the only way we wanted to do it.

The voice-over works really well in the film and I think it’s wonderful. Why do you think Hollywood screenwriting books are so against the technique of using voice-over?

AP: It seems that there are two schools of thought against voice-over. The first is that in cinema you are supposed to show, not tell. The second is that if a film is perceived to be bad or is incomprehensible you slap voice-over on it so you can at least release it. I don’t know why some people take those examples of voice-over badly used and translate it into a blanket statement against all voice-over work. You can point to all the great directors and great films that have used voice-over.
JT: How could you watch Sunset Boulevard and say, ‘You should never use voice-over’?
AP: What about Clockwork Orange? I really think it’s tantamount to saying that in a play you shouldn’t have a character speaking a soliloquy all by himself: ‘I feel this, I aspire to do this.’ But I saw Uncle Vanya last week and three or four characters have moments when they express their inner thoughts on stage. I can’t conceive of Election without voice-over. That is where form and content are very much united.

So then, if there are four voice-overs, whose movie is this? Is it Jim McAllister’s?

JT: That was an evolving process. We really wanted it to be all four and then Jim and Tracy came to the forefront with Jim being first among equals.

The music is very good in the film. Was the music suggested during the writing?

JT: Music is very important to Alexander. He has a musical sensibility that’s unusual and particular to him, and it’s really evident in his films, especially in Election. He’ll often play something while we’re writing to help us capture a certain tone.
AP: In terms of the directing side, one film I found inspiring to watch in terms of music and in some degree of multiple voice-overs was Casino. Casino is an influence on Election, directorially. Kevin Tent and I watched it a couple of times while we were editing Election.
JT: I didn’t know that.

It’s funny you mention Scorsese, because when I think of the day of the election and what Jim McAllister goes through: the botched affair, the bee sting, etc. I think of Ray Liotta’s day in GoodFellas where he’s being chased by helicopters while trying to sell his guns and make a homemade pasta sauce for his little brother.

AP: When Jim gives the pop-quiz he looks at the clock twice – that’s stolen from GoodFellas, when Henry Hill is stirring the sauce and looks at the clock in the kitchen twice …

Also, you’ve spoken elsewhere about how Scorsese talks about a film being composed of five sequences rather than three acts.

AP: I think it’s good to get away from thinking about three-act structure when you’re writing films. When you see Scorsese movies or Fellini movies you just see episodes. At the same time, you know that Robert McKee could go and say, ‘Yes, but it still responds to the three-act structure and here’s how …’ Howard Suber, who taught film structure at UCLA and is a proponent of the three-act structure, used to say that in pretty much every film, no matter what structure, at the one-hour mark there is usually a major change. I’ve kept that in mind when I have watched films and you can almost set your watch to it. Within plus or minus three minutes of the one-hour mark there is some major turning point, a reversal or something. But that’s more about making an observation than it is about making a film.
JT: You just instinctively know when things need to move on. It’s a lot like making love. If you’re looking at the clock thinking ‘OK, we’ve been in foreplay for fifteen minutes and now it’s time for the inciting incident’ … then you’re not going to have very good sex.
AP: When I give screenwriting seminars or classes and they ask me, ‘What advice do you have for young screenwriters?’, I say, ‘Don’t read any screenwriting books.’ I actually think the whole three-act structure is so deeply ingrained in us from living in this culture and watching movies that in order to come up with new movies, which is what I want to see, you really have to fight what you have innately learned. When you’re writing, you will find yourself being drawn naturally by gravity into doing something which corresponds to all of these things that you have seen. You have to fight that instinct in order to come up with a new movie.
JT: One idea I had for titling the chapters on the DVD was to use McKee’s definitions for where we’re at – ‘Chapter 18: The Point of No Return.’

Both Election and About Schmidt start off slowly and then pick up steam, passing along information about the characters very quickly.

AP: Both films begin like a lawyer impassively presenting a case in court; the facts are presented blandly, ‘There’s this, there’s this and there’s this.’ Only later, once you have all that stuff submitted, can you start drawing conclusions from it. You can watch those two movies and say, ‘Well, nothing happens for a long time.’ In fact, only when you reach a certain point you can realize it’s all been happening but just in a different way than you expected.

You create a visual motif of Jim McAllister moving in circles. We open with him running around the track at his high school’s athletic field. Where did it come from?

JT: It wasn’t in the script. That’s production design and directing. But there were similar ideas, like how Jim McAllister is constantly throwing things away, which we were aware of when we were writing. It begins with him cleaning out the fridge at school.
AP: Oh yeah, but then directorially I went hog wild with it.
JT: True. It’s very important that he’s introduced this way, cleaning other teachers’ leftovers out of the refrigerator at school, because it sets up his character. Jim’s somebody who is trying to control the messy parts of life which he does mostly by blaming other people. But then his own messes spill out and he has to face the consequences.
AP: What was also important was to have Jim and Tracy meet at the beginning of the film. We introduce antagonist and protagonist. I don’t know which is which …
JT: We also needed to establish the multiple voice-overs. As soon as possible, we give Tracy and Jim each a little voice-over of their own so that right away you get the idea that this is not just going to be one person’s movie.

I have to say, the way the school is shot reminds me of my own Midwestern high school routine. Did you look at a lot of schools?

AP: Yeah, I went to every high school in Omaha, Nebraska.
JT: But also it comes from our experiences, because we feel like high school is a universal experience.
AP: Yeah. I was surprised how similar it was to my own high school days, how things hadn’t really changed that much.

One of my favourite moments in the film is when Jim McAllister asks his class what the difference is between morals and ethics …

AP: We just came up with that dialogue as a joke.
JT: It’s a joke, but with a purpose. Jim McAllister is someone who wants to create clear distinctions in the world, and between people, but that’s not such an easy thing to do. When we wrote that line, we had no idea ourselves what the difference was between morals and ethics – and we still don’t.

Neither do I. It made me feel like I was a kid in the class who didn’t know the answer.

JT: Right, it’s an unfair question – which makes Tracy’s certainty about the answer all the more revealing. In a way, she and Jim are both people interested in simplifying the world into easily controllable elements.

How do you handle an expository montage like the yearbook sequence where we see Tracy Flick doing all her extra-curricular activities?

AP: David Russell told me he loves this yearbook thing. I told him the idea of it was to give the impression of someone who is so excited about how many pages she appears in, in the yearbook – ‘Oh, look, I’m here and I’m here and here.’

It seems like the film really gets going when Jim McAllister reveals to us that Tracy Flick has been having an affair with his colleague. We are introduced to his fellow teacher by him saying, ‘Her pussy gets so wet.’

AP: That’s the inciting incident …

In the book the revelation about the affair comes much later.

JT: That was kind of tricky, unravelling the chronology of how that story is told in the book and how we wanted to adapt it to the screen. It took us a while to figure out. Walter Murch says in his new book with Michael Ondaatje that Election is one movie that successfully uses flashbacks within flashbacks. But he still advises against trying it.

At one point Jim and Tracy have duelling voice-overs, talking about how much they dislike each other.

AP: Yes, that’s when I freeze-frame each one of them as they present their case about the other.
JT: Again, it’s about the control thing. Even in the world of the movie they have the ability to stop things.

Do you think a lot about transitions when you’re writing?

AP: Always, about how to link them and to make them clever or fun. We write a lot of directorial stuff into the scripts like fade-in, hard cut, dissolves, visual wipes.
JT: Working with the director makes that easier, but it’s just good screenwriting to be using cinematic tools to tell the story.

You made an effort to show that Tracy is not as well off as Paul. She takes the bus and he drives his brand new truck to school. How important is social realism to you guys?

JT: We think a big reason many movies are not successful is that the writing and directing, often unconsciously, aspire to create by the ‘movie version’ of the story. ‘What would happen in the movie version? What would it look like?’ And the end result seems fake. When we’re writing, we do our best to ignore how we’ve seen a situation play itself out in movies, and think instead of how it would really happen. We try to begin with the raw materials of life, not the raw materials of other movies.
AP: I always get the question ‘Why are you shooting in Omaha?’ I think one of the reasons is precisely this: we’re declaring that this is a real place. Since it’s so specific it feels exotic to a lot of people. So that puts pressure on us as filmmakers to be specifically real, not just real.

Can you give me an example of this?

JT: When Jim gets into his car, Tracy approaches, waving her petition. Jim is caught in his seat belt, which slides up the door’s frame as it closes. That’s a good example, on the directing level, of what we are talking about. On a lot of movies they would rig that seat belt so it wouldn’t come into the shot because it’s distracting, but it’s actually one of the best things about this moment.
AP: Here it was perfect that it just so happens that the Ford Festiva has that feature. It was funny and thematically appropriate.

Where are you picking up your dialogue from if you are not getting it from overhearing conversations at the local high school? For example, when Jim says, ‘When things went all haywire with that election.’

JT: I think that’s more of a Midwestern construction. Tracy sprinkles a lot of SAT vocabulary words into her speech, which she usually misuses. Things like ‘unconscionable travesty’. Or getting her expressions mixed up like ‘He’s had everything handed to him on a silver spoon.’
AP: Or like in Citizen Ruth, ‘We’re committed to the afterbirth. We’re committed to her afterbirth too.’ [laughs]

There is a funny moment when Jim is frantically running around, trying to prepare his hotel room for an affair while his students take a pop quiz. I like how he goes to his local Walgreen’s to pick up his romantic knick-knacks, sparkling wine and Russell Stover’s chocolates.

JT: In the script it was Whitman’s.
AP: There’s another scene that we cut out where he goes to the library and picks out this special poem that he wants to read to her. The only thing that remained of that was the shot of that book in his hand.
JT: Which is kind of great because you don’t really know what he was thinking. But it was a beautiful poem, actually.
AP: An unpublished Elizabeth Bishop poem.

Was Jim’s bloated bee sting meant to be a physical representation of what is happening inside of him?

JT: It just came from an impulse to have him get injured, but without any idea about what it would represent. When we thought about it later we realized that it worked on a lot of levels.
AP: But we didn’t think, ‘We should find a physical representation of his interior malaise.’ Jim just said, ‘Something should happen to him here. How about he gets stung by a bee?’

At the end of the film Jim McAllister moves to New York City and he gets a job at a museum. Can you tell me something about the ending?

JT: We shot a new ending several months after the film was finished. We all agreed that the original ending, which was straight out of the book, was adequate but it didn’t work as well as it could have … it’s strange, because two days before shooting, the ending was the one thing the studio said we needed to rewrite. They wanted it to be more explicit. Against our better judgement, we changed it and it ended up being too schmaltzy. Not horribly so, but we’ll never know how our original version would have worked.
AP: The rest of the movie turned out so funny that a poignant ending seemed odd to many viewers.
JT: So we set about writing a new ending which would be more in keeping with the rest of the film. It was a tortuous process. For some reason there was this mandate from the studio that Jim McAllister had to become a teacher again. First we made him a park ranger but they demanded that he had to be a teacher. It was bizarre to us, we couldn’t figure out why that was so important. I had just been to the Museum of Natural History and I love all of these dioramas. When Alexander came to New York to work on the ending I said, ‘Why doesn’t he just get a job working at the Museum of Natural History?’ So when he says in the voice-over ‘That’s right, I’m teaching again!’ it’s specifically in there so the studio would approve it.

And what about taking the ending further, so that Jim McAllister sees Tracy Flick step into a limousine while on holiday in Washington D.C.?

JT: In a way that sequence really tells us that it is Jim McAllister’s movie.
AP: We also shot her looking out of the limo, thinking her thoughts about him.

Why did you omit that?

AP: It just didn’t feel right.

 

New York, New York

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