Humorous Joke Story
I've been anxiously anticipating Jason Reitman's third film, Up in the Air, from the moment I first read about the project. With George Clooney on board I was practically giddy, so imagine how excited I was to have the opportunity to talk to the director himself when he stopped in San Francisco during his promotional tour.
The film is one of the many buzz-worthy December movies, and it opens in limited release this Friday. Reitman talked about everything from Clooney to the economy to how he handles garnering so much acclaim for his first three films. Here are the highlights:
- On traveling: I love travel and there’s a reason I started doing this movie — even when I started doing commercials I’ve been a psychotic frequent flier, so I enjoy it. I enjoy having the itinerary, going to the airport, I enjoy the being nowhere and unplugging which being on an airplane allows you to do.
- On whether or not he fell victim to one of Clooney's pranks: No, there wasn’t, I’m sorry I wish I had a better story. But we were making a movie at the end of the day. And it was a shorter shot — maybe he’s used to these Ocean movies where they have time for fun, but we were hauling ass, so no fun stories.
To see what Jason had to say about working with his father, Ivan Reitman, and how he's grown since making Juno, just read more.
- On whether he intended to make a film about the current state of the economy: No. First of all, it’s based on a book, so I found the book seven years ago and I started adapting it and it basically took me six years to write, and I never intended to make a movie about the economy. The economy doesn’t interest me as much as [it's] just sort of a backdrop or metaphor for human connection, which was more important to me and that’s what I wanted to tell a story about. But certainly as the world changed and we went from an economic boom to one of the worst recessions on record, I had to take it seriously and scenes that were originally humorous were scenes that I had to make authentic and real and dramatic. And that’s why I started to use real people for people who’ve lost their jobs, people who actually lost their job instead of actors. I never wanted to be Michael Moore, as much as I respect him as a filmmaker. He has a tendency to try to give you answers and try to push people to believe something, and my point of view is to push people to be as open-minded as possible and not judge, so I think I have agenda-less films and hopefully they act more as a mirror so you simply see yourself in it.
- On using "anti-heroes" in his films: I don’t know why I'm drawn to anti-heroes but I certainly am, I made three films. The first one [Thank You For Smoking] is about the head lobbyist for a big tobacco, second one’s [Juno] about a pregnant teenager, and the third one’s about a guy who fires people for a living. So for whatever reason I guess I’m somewhat contrary and I enjoy humanizing tricky characters. There was a line in the Thank You For Smoking book that said working for Greenpeace is easy, working for the Red Cross is easy, try working for big tobacco — that’s a job. And I can’t help but think the same way to a certain extent about filmmaking. Humanizing good people is kind of boring and I don’t really see the value in it. Showing romance of two people who are just kind of charming and deserve each other, what’s the work in that, what’s the value in that? Humanizing tricky characters for me is exhilarating and making audience films out of indie subjects excites me. At the end of the day I don’t know why I’m drawn to it.
- On why Up in the Air is more deeply personal than his previous films: Each one of my movies is addressing a question I have for myself. Thank You For Smoking was about being libertarian and having a heart at the same time, Juno was about the moment you decide to grow up and it was personal for me. I had a child right before I started Juno and I felt like I was going through all the character’s experience and I was constantly drawing on my own emotions while making that film, but this was a script that I wrote over six years, and six very important years. When I first started writing I was single, I was a commercial director, I basically had zero life responsibility, and over six years I became a feature film director, I got married, I have a beautiful daughter, and I started to learn what was important in life, at least for me. And when I first read the script (because I would never go back and reread I would just go forward over those years), so five years in when I finally went back and read it, it was like watching myself grow up and watching myself re-evaluate what was important to me and I could watch my own sophistication change. So to have a film that speaks to so many questions I have, and perhaps the most important question of all — where do you find purpose in life and what do you want in your life, who and what do you want to play your life with? That makes it exceedingly personal, and you never know, maybe two years from now I’ll say this was the most important film, but I can’t help but think that they are very transformative years in my life and they get encapsulated in this film. You don’t have a question, you just have a camera.
- On other actors he'd like to work with: I really love Laura Linney, I really love Rachel McAdams, love Joan Allen, I love Matt Damon, I think he’s actually really great . . . who else? I like Jonah Hill a lot, I like Seth Rogen. I mean, everyone I’ve worked with is great. Right now it becomes one of those hard things where, do you ever have that thing where you have old friends and you meet someone new, and then you have that new friend then you want to spend all this time with your new friend, but you also want to spend time with your old friends? I think that’s kind of how it is with actors. I got all these actors that I’ve already worked with that I really want to work with again. I worked with Rick Allen again, and Allison Janney, and Anna Kendrick is phenomenal and I want to work with her again, and Danny McBride. And then there’s the new group, and it’s like, if I work with the person I’ve already worked with, it’s like I already know how great they are and I know won’t be disappointed. I do get excited about working with new people.
- On writing roles for actors: It’s kind of cool, I never know if people are going to say yes, there are plenty of people that will certainly say no, but there is a very good chance of them saying yes and that’s an exciting way to work. This movie I wrote for eight of the actors that are in it. It was cool to write for George and for Vera and for Anna and Danny and Zach and J.K, and Bateman, to know that they’re going to show up, it’s a cool feeling to have as you’re writing.
- On working with his father Ivan Reitman for the first time: It's interesting because I avoided working with my dad for a while because I was so sensitive of being accused of the idea of nepotism, and it’s been important to me for so long to establish myself on my own. I remember when I was 19 years old I started a desk calendar company to pay for my first short film just so I could say one day my daddy didn’t pay for my first short film. And I really established myself through the film festival world, starting at Sundance and lots of film festivals and really took on a different style of film from my father and made my first two movies on my own, and really it was once after the second film that I felt, "OK, I think I’ve established myself as a director now and I’m going to go do a movie." But it’s something I’ve been looking forward to because I love my father and we have such a strong bond and I look up to him as a filmmaker and a storyteller, so it was great and when I see the credits and it says produced by Ivan Reitman and Jason Reitman, my heart swells. It’s really really cool.
- On how he's grown as a director: There’s nothing like "Oh, that was the day I learned to do this," it’s more so you just become a more sophisticated filmmaker. I mean, look, the job is this: I have an idea and I want the audience to feel something specific. I want at each moment to articulate something in a way so that I make you laugh here, and make you envious here and I make your heart swell here, romance here, you feel heartbroken here, and as a director you get better and better at nailing those moments specifically. So when I look back at Thank You For Smoking, I see broad strokes but some of the detail work is not as strong as my last film. And that’s just over three films, so my only hope is that as I continue to make more and more films I’ll get better and better at making them, because you make 2,000 decisions a day as a director, sometimes more, even if you’re not even thinking about it, even if you’re responding to something. So you just become better at making these tiny, tonal decisions that if you add them up almost like a binary thing, they amount to the feelings so that when the joke happens or the line happens or the moment happens or when the song comes in, the audience feels it right there.
- On handling success and awards show buzz: Well look, first of all it’s wonderful. And film festivals are really how I establish myself as a director, and I counted on them to give me legitimacy. So when a film festival honors me it really hits home for me, and as far as moving forward — I never a make a movie with the intention of some sort of award or nomination or whatever it is. I really just try to tell movies that are in my heart and I know when I respond to something — I read a book or an article or something and I have an instinctual response to it and I just try to follow that all the way through and I’ve been lucky. So far, [I've made] three movies people seem to like, but there’s a bad one waiting around the corner for me. Honestly, it happens. And my hope is that as long as I make movies for the right reasons, the ones that fail won’t hurt as much as if I made a movie for the wrong reasons, like I made it for money or something big, then I imagine the failing would hurt more.
When I first laid hands on Gail Carriger’s Soulless (Orbit, 2009), I began to wonder if the book had been written specifically to irritate me.
1. To start out, the novel is urban fantasy. Already we’re on bad terms.
2. Also, there are vampires.
3. Too, werewolves.
4. And romance!
5. In case that’s not enough, Carriger mixes in a Victorian setting and a hint of steampunk. Neither of these inherently annoy me, but combined with items 1-4:
6. The novel is heavily weighted down by trendy genre elements.* In my experience, this usually leads to books that are poorly constructed, badly integrated, and the literary equivalent of a chess club stereotype wearing star-shaped sunglasses – trying much too hard to be cool.**
Soulless should be like combining salmon and chocolate while I, in this metaphor, am an ichthyophobe with no sweet tooth. However, it appears that skilled chefs can pair salmon and chocolate. And sometimes a novel that’s full of everything wrong can go terribly, tragically right.
Soulless is the first book of the Parasol Protectorate, with the next book, Changeless, due from Orbit on March 30, 2010. The novel begins when a young Victorian woman, Alexia Tarabotti, finds herself alone in a library with a vampire. For any other unmarried miss, this situation would be frightening. However, Alexia has no soul which means that vampires can’t eat her and, in fact, her touch temporarily turns supernatural creatures into humans.
There are three types of supernatural creatures in Carriger’s universe: werewolves, vampires and ghosts. Werewolves come in packs, and vampires come in hives, but somehow this vampire doesn’t seem to come from anywhere. Alexia gets caught up with the Bureau of Unnatural Registry, or BUR, in helping to investigate this strange appearance as well as a number of strangely coincidental disappearances.
In the interview at the back of the book, Carriger reports having asked herself, “if immortals were mucking about, wouldn’t they have been mucking about for a very long time?” She considers the cultural implications of supernatural interference: “Those absurd Victorian manners and ridiculous fashions were obviously dictated by vampires. And, without a doubt, the British army regimental system functioned on werewolf pack dynamics… [and then I] realized that if Victorians were studying vampires and werewolves (which they would do, if they knew about them)… technology would have evolved differently. Enter a sprinkling of steampunk…” (p. 364)
In my opinion, most traditional urban fantasy fails because it doesn’t consider the long-term, global ramifications of its conceits. This isn’t helped by the fact that a great deal of urban fantasy poses a secret underworld filled with werewolves and vampires (or fairies and elves) who covertly affect the real world. Small-scale stories revolving around this conceit can be fine, but secrets are difficult to keep, and many stories pose so many supernatural events of such import that it strains credibility to believe that magic could remain a secret. Buffy – to take an at-hand example – made a joke of it. But non-humorous texts are out of luck if they want us to believe that people die every night from vampire bites and yet no one ever notices.
Carriger’s world is one in which vampires and werewolves are fully integrated. They interact with and affect politics and society, and in turn are affected by them. For instance, there’s a post specifically designated for a werewolf to advise the Queen, but simultaneously the alpha werewolf is constrained by high society mores.
Soulless also benefits from the fact that Carriger doesn’t seem to have approached the elements of her book as disparate. As she says, Victorians investigating magic lends itself to steampunk; one genre element follows from another, creating the sense of a fully integrated world.
The novel’s action-oriented main plot takes place against a Jane-Austen-like background. Alexia, the product of her mother’s first marriage to a – gasp – Italian, is a spinster with a number of unflattering traits, such as her blunt speech and tan complexion, all of which make it clear she’ll never find a proper English husband. Nevertheless, she falls in love with one of the country’s most eligible bachelors, the werewolf alpha Lord Maccon.
No, wait. She doesn’t fall in love with him. She can’t stand him. No, I’m sorry. I mean, he can’t stand her. Wait. He’s in love with her – that’s it. It’s just that he’s strong and manly, but also messy and uncivilized. While she’s proud and intractable, but also busty and tenacious. Wait, are we reading Pride and Prejudice with Werewolves?
Soulless’s treatment of romance in its early chapters is the novel’s only major misstep. The text improves once Lord Maccon and Alexia acknowledge their romantic feelings – although there is one awkward, late-chapter sex scene that occurs in the middle of an action sequence, which could have been dramatically shortened while still serving its purpose as a release valve for romance and humor. But the early romantic sallies are winceably cliché. As soon as a male character gazes upon the heroine with a passage like–
Miss Tarabotti might examine her face in the mirror each morning with a large degree of censure, but there was nothing at all wrong with her figure. He would have to have had far less soul and a good fewer urges not to notice that appetizing fact. Of course, she always went and spoiled the appeal by opening her mouth. In his humble experience, the world had yet to produce a more vexingly verbose female. (p. 8-9)
–we readers know where we’re headed. We don’t need tingling near her abdomen or stirring he can’t explain, interspersed with fury! at his lack of manners and yet–! to guide us along the way. Carriger so facilely avoids other clichés that it’s a shame this one mars the text.
Overall, though, the Austen elements are charming. Carriger’s Victorian voice is sharp and funny. Witty observations provide a plethora of humorous clashes between action sequences and rigid etiquette. The descriptions of Victorian fashion are very nice for those readers with a weakness for bustles and lace, and I suspect I’m not the only one since the book is marketed with a Victorian dress-up doll flash game.
If there’s one weakness the Victorian voice lends itself to, it’s the underdevelopment of Alexia’s mother, step-father and sisters, who play the compliant foils for unconventional Alexia. Their insipidness is fine at the beginning of the book, but grows less convincing as their roles increase near the end. Still, this is a small complaint and easily remedied. Hopefully Carriger will toss them a few lines of character development in one of the sequels.
Other characters are created quite well. Alexia, for instance, is a fun and well-portrayed heroine, full of vigor and flaws. She, her friend Ivy, and their friendship are memorably captured in a few sentences: “Ivy Hisselpenny was the unfortunate victim of circumstances that dictated she be only-just-pretty, only-just-wealthy, and possessed of a terrible propensity for wearing extremely silly hats. This last being the facet of Ivy’s character that Alexia found most difficult to bear.” (p. 33) Lord Maccon and his assistant, Professor Lydell, are good characters as well, although Lord Maccon is at times brushed in with slightly-too-broad romantic strokes and could use a little more development within his archetype. The best character is the vampire Lord Akeldama, an outrageous gossip-monger with a penchant for gaudy attire whose underlying intelligence and immortal weariness are deftly revealed as the novel progresses.
In the end, Soulless is not a profound novel. It imparts no revelations about the human experience. I don’t expect it will change anyone’s life or that I’ll remember the plot intricacies in ten years. But it was a fun, adventurous romp that diverted me for a few hours. I might even read it a second time. I will certainly pick up book two of the Parasol Protectorate and I look forward to meeting Alexia Tarabotti again in 2010.
–
*It seems possible that Carriger began writing with the intent of forecasting what tropes would be popular a few years down the line. If this is the case, kudos to her for guessing correctly.
**It should go without saying that any of these things can be done well. It’s just that while 90% of everything is crap, I find these tropes to suffer from even worse odds. Nevertheless, here are some successful examples: Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (vampire), N. K. Jemisin’s “Red Riding Hood’s Child” (werewolf), Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “The Ant King: A California Fairy Tale” (urban fantasy), and Paula Guran’s anthologies of romantic fantasy which contain Coates’s “Magic in a Certain Slant of Light,” Parks’s “Moon Viewing at Shijo Bridge,” and Copley-Woods’s “Desires of Houses” (romance). Michael Swanwick is famous for combining disparate genre elements with strength and grace, and I was recently impressed with new writer Tina Connolly’s “Moon at the Starry Diner” for successfully condensing an epic plotline and several incompatible tropes into a short story.
Gallery:
> |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Video:
Bookmark it:
