Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a long chat I had with Jon Poll. I know that a great many of you probably clicked onto this interview because of the Anna Faris masturbating part of the headline. I would have... I probably wouldn't have seen any other words in the headline, so I understand. Anna Faris' self-pleasuring has to do with Poll's next film, which we talk about towards the end of the interview. CHARLIE BARTLETT is a movie I enjoyed a whole lot and director Jon Poll comes off as very enthusiastic and down to earth. We talk a lot about how he worked with the cast and how the project came into being. I find it especially fascinating that it was between CHARLIE BARTLETT and another script for Poll (an editor on big studio comedies like AUSTIN POWERS and MEET THE PARENTS) to make his directorial debut on... and just what that second script was. This was a long one, so thanks to Muldoon for breaking his fingers transcribing it for me as I traveled. Enjoy the chat!
Jon Poll: I read your lovely piece today and you saw a lot of what we were really trying to do in the movie and I appreciate that.
Quint: No worries. I assume you are talking a lot about the Downey stuff, the Principal and Charlie relationship…
Jon Poll: The Downey stuff! Yeah and that’s one of the most fun things about the movie… Here’s an antagonist who is not really an antagonist and having Robert Downey Jr. play a principal, but a reluctant one, and kind of the whole point of the movie, for us… and it was tricky to talk about this stuff, but it was all about heading to this place where they each saw something in the other that they really liked and they tried to save each other and so tip of the hat for seeing all of that stuff, because that’s all stuff that we hope people just go and laugh and have a good time and then maybe on the car ride home they have something to talk about, but it’s that stuff that’s hard for… We talk about it privately, (screenwriter Gustin) Nash and I. It was a thoughtful and observant piece.
Quint: It all kind of stems from the FERRIS BUELLER feeling of the movie… because there was that rumor of the FERRIS BUELLER sequel and what would they do and all? It’s almost like you took my thoughts on what that would be, that Ferris would kind have been turned in to a kind of Ed Rooney type of character it would have been Cameron who had to save Ferris, instead of the other way around. I guess all of that was on my mind when I was watching Anton [Yelchin] play the role and how much he reminded me of a young Broderick in just how fearless he played the character.
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Jon Poll: He was fearless and it was funny, with Downey, he had responded to the script, but I was on location in Toronto and I was in this van and they handed me a phone and said “You’ve got to convince Robert Downey Jr. to do the movie,” and they are all looking at me, all the crew, through the van, like “Is he going to be able to do it?” The first thing I said to Robert was “twenty years ago, this would have been your part” and he just laughed and went “yeah, I kind of get that Jon.” And look, it was kind of a bold brave and generous choice for him to do this movie, because let’s face it he takes on some real issues in his own life that are reflected here and you know, in retrospect, I can’t imagine anyone else playing this part and… believing some of the things he said. It’s just a gift to have actors like that.
Quint: I’ve been a fan of Downey’s for forever, but he seems to be really coming into this next stage in his career where he’s just so comfortable in his own skin and it’s as though nothing he does feels scripted.
Jon Poll: Yeah and you know what he said? He said “as long as I get to play, I’m happy.” That’s all he wanted. He wanted room to play and man, when you have Robert Downey Jr. you give him all of the room he wants!
Quint: How much did he play? What was the difference between the character in the script and the character in the movie?
Jon Poll: Well, the playing was more in performance than in improv. I’ve worked on a lot of movies that… you know comedies as an editor, that are filled with improve. Obviously the AUSTIN POWERS movies… even MEET THE PARENTS… MEET THE FOCKERS… and 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN… Those are all really heavy improv films and CHARLIE was pretty tightly scripted, but you know there’s always little things that come out… Here’s a good example, the first day of shooting we shot this scene in the bathroom, where he comes in and he finds Tyler Hilton, the bully, having stuffed Charlie in the toilet. So we were talking before we shot the scene about what his relationship was to these kids and I said “OK, Tyler Hilton is the school bully/drug dealer and you know it. You see him in your office more than anyone else. He’s the badass of the school. Now his buddy Jonathan Malen played the part of Jordan… I actually told him “You are kind of like Gilligan to the Skipper” and you see him just imitate his lines… I said, this kid “you don’t even know who he is, he just wishes he was Murphy” and Downey came up with a “OK, I know what to do” and he went “OK, Mr. Bivens, are you out of there? And Mr. You…” You know, we have heard Charlie Bartlett being called “Charlie Bartlett” a hundred and fifty times in the movie… very intentional, where even his mother calls him Charlie Bartlett and any time I was doing a scene, I would always say “Let’s do a take where you call him Charlie Bartlett, like the full name” and so all of a sudden he’s calling him “Chuck” and “Charles…” That’s Downey. Gustin did a really good job writing for each of the characters. We were really lucky, especially on a small indie movie, and other than Hope Davis, I had rehearsal time with everyone and I had Nash there and if he wasn’t there, I would tape the sessions and play them for him and he just got a great sense of who these actors were and was able to write towards each character which is just such an incredible gift.
Quint: So he was tweaking all during the shoot?
Jon Poll: Yeah, he was always writing and rewriting.
Quint: That’s good. I think that would explain a little bit why everything feels so natural and so form fitting with the actors.
Jon Poll: Yeah and it was funny in prep, I think I freaked everybody out, because I said “Just forget it’s a comedy. Don’t ever go for the joke.” It was sort of my job to do things like, you know I’d come up with the little insert shot of “boy’s pharmacy…” and that kind of stuff, so I was looking for jokes, but I never wanted the actors to look for jokes and my hope is that the humor comes from the characters and the situations and not any body trying to do a drum roll and all. I have to talk about Gustin a little bit.
Quint: Please do.
Jon Poll: He was supposed to come on this tour with me, but he was too chicken.
[They both Laugh]
Jon Poll: He knew the writer’s strike was going to end and he was paranoid, because he has actually gotten work and he knew he would have to be back at work very quickly, but he wrote this movie four years ago when he was twenty six. He went to SC film school as I did, quite a few years later than me though, and he was working at Ritz Camera in the Burbank mall in LA and trying to figure out what the hell was going on in his life and hanging out with these teenagers, like some of them worked at Ritz Camera… some of them worked at Hot Dog on a Stick, I love that. He was young enough and looked young enough to hang with these kids and he was curious, because he was trying to be a screenwriter and every week there would be another teen movie and he would ask them how they would like it and they didn’t like them. They kind of felt talked down to by a lot of them and they just didn’t feel like there was any authentic voice for them out in the world and there were two things that inspired him to write the script and one of them was those kids. He was looking to write a movie that they would actually feel was representative of them.
Quint: You know who that reminds me of more than Hughes… That’s what Cameron Crowe did. That’s how he wrote FAST TIMES and that’s how he wrote that one with Chris Penn in the mid 80’s, back when Chris Penn was like a muscle guy. I can’t remember the name of it (It’s THE WILD LIFE), but it’s all very realistic teen movies. That would have probably been a more apt comparison, Crowe instead of Hughes.
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Jon Poll: You know the irony of this? Again this is the stuff that’s a little tricky to talk about, but the movie that I used as a model when I pitched it to everyone to try to get the job was HAROLD AND MAUDE.
Quint: Oh yeah?
Jon Poll: Which obviously has a couple of nods using the Cats Stevens song, but what I was trying to go for was that mix of tone of darkness and light and the fact that you could have a really serious scene with a joke and then a really funny scene that turns serious and that was sort of the tricky part, but in the end if it works it works and if it doesn’t it doesn’t, but it was a good challenge. Here’s the other thing I wanted to say about Gustin… So his dad is… So he’s twenty six and he’s trying to figure out what he is going to do and he had a conversation with his dad late one night and was like “Oh, maybe I should just come back to Massachusetts. I should figure this out… I don’t know that I’m going to get anywhere in Hollywood and I’m tired of selling memory cards.” His dad said to him “Hey, come on, you have a head on your shoulders. I think you have something to say and I think you can work it out. I think you will find a way.” Nash said that he woke up the next morning and he had the movie in his head. It took him a couple of months to write it and actually the first version was “You Can Work It Out,” that’s what he called it and I think some of that optimism that his dad gave him as, not a teenager, but I don’t know how old you are, but from my point of view when you are twenty six, you are still a kid.
Quint: I’m actually 26.
[They Both Laugh]
Quint: The birthday’s on Friday, though, so I’ll be rid of adolescence in a copule of days.
Jon Poll: Well I think some of that optimism, he gave back to Charlie and put in the script and that is something I really responded to and I hope that when people see the movie, they walk out in a little better mood than when they went in and that’s a little bit old fashioned, but I think that’s something that’s tied in through there. Now I have a fun fact for you…
Quint: Sure.
Jon Poll: Adolescence lasts until you are thirty. Officially or chemically or physiologically… I read that in the last year.
Quint: Really?
Jon Poll: Yeah, so you have three more years to fuck around.
Quint: That gives me an excuse not to be responsible! “Hey I’m still just an adolescent…Biology says so…”
Jon Poll: I think I was twenty seven when I finally realized I had to… I was married at twenty-two… I didn’t have a kid yet, but yeah I was twenty seven when I finally realized “Oh, I guess I’m not going to make short films as a living for my life… I better get a job.”
Quint: Were you making the shorts while you were editing? Is that how you made the jump?
Jon Poll: No, I made a bunch of short films when I was in film school and a couple of years afterwards and it’s funny, one of them ended up on IMDB and some people say to me “Now, you’ve made another movie in 1981!” and I say “That was an 8 minute film about a bum who made his home in a tree and the tree killed him, so it’s a little different.” It won some awards, but…
Quint: I hope we can expect to see the feature version of that one.
[They Both Laugh]
Jon Poll: I don’t know, that would be hard to stretch beyond the eight minutes...
Quint: BUM TREE: THE MOVIE.
Jon Poll: I’ve been really lucky. I’ve gotten to work on all kinds of great movies and I’ve gotten to learn from Jay Roach, Danny Devito, Mike Myers, Peter Weir… I’ve worked with Judd Apatow and I’ve gotten to contribute creatively to all of these movies and it’s funny how some people will say “Oh, are you a frustrated director?” and I always reply with “No, I wasn’t frustrated. I was probably overworked, but I was having the time of my life and I just got lucky and I got to a place where I had enough people saying “Hey, this would be a good time” and on MEET THE FOCKERS, I got to direct four weeks of second unit. It’s all invisible and was all the babies and the animals, because all of that stuff with the babies, they would shoot the master with the whole family and then they’d shoot a green screen of De Niro or Ben Stiller over their shoulder and we would cut the scene and then we would go back a week later on the set and shoot the baby, so I really got the bug again. And then 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN I was lucky enough… basically it was like big time film school… I got to hang out on the set with Judd and be called an executive producer and watch him make a great movie and it really got me going. I actually had Universal saying “Hey, you know… We would like to make a movie with you. Jon ,bring us a comedy” and so I read a hundred scripts. I found two that I liked and I brought them CHARLIE BARTLETT and they said “Are you completely out of your mind? Do you really think a studio would make this film? Let alone anyone?” And it was a little darker back then “Is anyone going to make a dark R-rated film about a kid giving other kids drugs?” and I said “No wait, you don’t get it. It’s going to be heartwarming” and they looked at me like I was out of my mind. (laughs) I tip my hat to Sidney Kimmel Entertainment. They’ve made, and I’m sure you know this, but LARS AND THE REAL GIRL and BREACH and UNITED 93, TALK TO ME, KITE RUNNER… all of these movies that a lot of other people wouldn’t make and they were pretty brave and they didn’t shy away from the R rating and they really let us make the movie we wanted to. And I have to thank Jay Roach a little bit, too. Hollywood is a pretty dog eat dog place and Jay is a good friend, a mentor, and a collaborator. He was originally going to direct this movie and I read YOUTH IN REVOLT, which you probably know something about and that was a script Gustin wrote and they are actually making it… Miguel Arteta is actually going to direct it now and I called Jay up and I said “Have you heard of this guy name Gustin Nash? I read this amazing script” and he said “Oh, didn’t I ever tell you about Charlie Bartlett? I just pulled out of directing it this morning. You should read it.” And I read it and I went “wow, this is amazing Jason” and he said “Well, let me call up David Permut,” so he got to call all of these producers and go “Well, I’m not going to direct your movie, but how would you like to talk to the guy who cuts my movies?” I think they were humoring him, but really it was Jay’s generosity that got me in that door and then he stayed on and produced the movie and was a great help and that’s kind of a rare thing these days anywhere in the world.
Quint: Well definitely. I’ve noticed how a lot of people don’t like to stick their neck out for anybody, because if they recommend something and it doesn’t work, that always somehow reflects poorly on them, so it just makes anybody trying to get in… it makes their job a lot harder.
Jon Poll: Yeah, there’s a lot of people asking Jay Roach to produce their movies and Anton… wow…
Quint: Yeah. I’ve liked his stuff for a while, but here he really kind of comes into his own and shows a side of him that hasn’t been on film before.
Jon Poll: Well I knew he could do the kind of intimate stuff, which was really important and I knew he could play drama and comedy at the same time, which is really rare for anyone and look he was seventeen years old. I really wanted teenagers in the movie and of the eight teenagers, six of them where truly teenagers, but he’s just got a quality where it’s kind of like a wise beyond his years and maybe that’s the quite kid you see a lot, but then when it came to the physical stuff, I said “Anton, I want you to go as crazy as you possibly can, just go for it.” And it was funny, I did this… it was another naiveté moment, I met with him and we talked about the movie and I offered him the job at dinner and the next day I got the call from the studio and the producer’s like “Uh, what did you think you were doing offering him the job? Don’t you realize you have to go through the entire casting process?” and so we saw eighty two kids and obviously everyone knew it was Anton. You know it’s a tricky character. I don’t know that anyone else could have pulled it off. I got really lucky with all of these cast members. You know Hope Davis is an interesting one there… I’ve worked on a lot of movies. I’ve never worked on a film where no lines for a major character were ever cut out, let alone scenes… There’s not one line of hers that came out of the movie. We were at NYU the other night doing a Q and A and I said that and she said “That’s because I had so few lines,” which isn’t untrue. I mean it was not a huge part, but she just made it work so well and a lot of that is the whole HEARTS IN ATLANTIS connection. She’s the only one I had no rehearsal with and she and Anton walked on the set… Her first day was the scenes with them at the piano, which I had designed to just shoot in a very old fashioned way, with a wide two shot and a tight two shot… I didn’t want to do overs and make it really cutty and you know, we shot a lot of takes. I tend to shoot a lot of film, but I believed them right away as mother and son and it’s funny she told me the other night at NYU, they have another indie movie with some Danish director where they’re going to play mother and son again and I said “Well, some day there will be a film festival of Hope as Anton’s mother.”
Quint: Well, she’s just going to have to go adopt him now!
Jon Poll: I think so.
Quint: What about Kat [Dennings]? How did you bring her?
Jon Poll: Oh man, well I had worked with Kat on 40 YEAR OLF VIRGIN, but in all honesty I wish I could say I was so smart I new she would be great in this part… I walked in to casting one day and she was there and I was like “Oh my god, it’s Kat!” It was funny, I have a fourteen year old daughter and a lot of the time making the movie, she was in my head and Kat just blew me away. She’s not your typical teen movie girl; let’s put it that way. She’s really a lot of the heart of the film. I don’t know that she has any jokes per se in the movie, but she really grounds the film and to be honest my favorite scene in the movie in their confessional, the two of them… It’s just so simple. They are there and they are talking and what I love about it is that we, the audience, get to see their smiles and what’s going on on their faces as they talk to each other, but they don’t get to see it. Imagine, you have two teenagers hiding stuff and they don’t hide anything and we get to see it.
Quint: People forget the appeal of a Molly Ringwald movie or the appeal of an Ally Sheedy wasn’t that they were supermodels on the covers, the reason why Molly Ringwald became so popular was that she was pretty, but she was somebody people could recognize… Kat’s the same thing. I had crushes on girls in high school that were just like that, like full of life and positive energy and just really cute.
Jon Poll: Right, she felt real. You feel like she is someone you could know, not someone who’s torn from a magazine who doesn’t eat. (laughs) Kat was really amazing and you know another one of my favorite scenes is her and Downey when he calls her on if she is sleeping with Charlie Bartlett and man he steps in it so bad and she just fights him back. She doesn’t back down from her father in that scene.
Quint: And she doesn’t play anything ‘bitchy,’ which is I’m sure the first, easy instinct, to play it smart ass or bitchy. She was always very real in the movie.
Jon Poll: It was funny, because we were always taking a chance with the fact that both adults were substance abusers and clearly had issues, but an important thing to Nash and I was that both of these parents really loved their kids and the kids loved their parents, even though it was all screwed up. The other thing, and I’m going to go back to my daughter and something I was proud of, is that Kat and Anton, or Susan and Charlie sit and talk to each other before they even have a first kiss and I think that’s… I think girls have responded to the movie more than I ever expected they would… It’s kind of a soft film, but I think part of that is they find something to talk about and then the hormones kick in and sure he gets to announce to the world that he’s lost his virginity and, you know, it’s a comedy I hope in the end first and foremost and I hope the other stuff sneaks up on you, but look I’m a lucky guy and I’ve said all along, if I got to make one movie, I’m glad it’s this one and we got to take some real chances and “fingers crossed,” somebody will go on February 22nd.
Quint: Hopefully. You’re timing it right, because there’s not anything coming out to really bury it.
Jon Poll: We’ll be lucky if we are in the top five, but you know we were supposed to come out last August and I’m really happy they pulled the movie, because we couldn’t have competed and at first when they said that they wanted to put it out in the summer I was “Oh, that’s a compliment. You think we can compete?” I think we’re lucky it’s February 22nd. Look, Jack Black’s going to beat us… VANTAGE POINT is going to beat us… SPIDERWICK will beat us… JUMPER will beat us… and JUNO may still beat us…
Quint: How wide is the release?
Jon Poll: We are hoping they can get enough theaters to go into a thousand theaters, which is certainly the widest Sidney Kimmel has ever tried to do, but it’s really tricky. Fox Searchlight really knows how to release and build a film and they’ve spent a lot of money with JUNO and that movie is amazing. That is the other script that I read that I liked a few years ago and I can only hope that the fact that we are not that movie and we don’t have pregnancy or Ellen Page or Diablo Cody, although I have suggested to Nash he take up stripping…
[They Both Laugh]
Jon Poll: In a way, I’m inspired that that movie struck such a chord, because let’s face it, nobody expected it and maybe CHARLIE doesn’t seem quite as odd to your average movie goer now, because that’s a tricky thing and part of my initial pitch on CHARLIE was “Look, I love edgy gritty independent films that are really trying to do a lot and have a lot on their mind, but sometimes people don’t find those movies and they’re not that audience friendly” and I love big Hollywood entertainments. I’ve worked on a lot of them. There’s nothing like laughing and enjoying a film like that, but sometimes they pass through your system quite quickly and I said “Is it possible to take the best of both of those worlds? Can we make a movie that has a foot in each?” and by trying to make it stylish and paced with the real rhythm of a comedy and… hopefully people will walk away and have something to talk about. It was funny, at one of the interviews I had here was a teacher who writes for a local paper here and she said “I almost don’t know what to say to you, because I love the performances and it felt really real, but there are some things I’m really angry about. I can’t believe you have a kid giving another kid drugs in the movie.” I was like “Yeah, bring it on. OK, you get the controversy of that and that’s cool.” That moment when the Eels song is singing “God Damn Beautiful Day,” and he’s walking down the hall after selling drugs, there’s a part of me, too, going “Hey this is pretty cool” and then there’s a part of me going “Wait a second, what did we just do? Are we condoning this?” I think that’s kind of like what life is like. It’s not quite that simple and cut and dried and I think the challenge was to redeem that character and have him be somebody that you might actually want to run into and talk to someday.
Quint: Going through life, you are going to meet a lot of good people and a lot of assholes or whatever, but you very rarely meet those people that are so genuinely good that they just want to help make everybody happy and have everybody be happy around them, where there’s not really a selfish motivation. You can tell that Charlie definitely wants the popularity, but he doesn’t do anything hollow. It’s like he really empathizes with everybody.
Jon Poll: You get it and that’s it. It’s so funny, people in the script stage kept asking Nash and I “Well wait, is he doing this for popularity or is he doing this because he wants to help people?” and we said, “Both!” It’s a human thing, but for me one of the most interesting things in the script and then I was really lucky I got this kid Dylan Taylor. We made the mistake of casting a bully who was 6’2, so I had to go to Toronto to find someone who could beet him up and play a retarded kid and Dylan, he’s 6’5.
Quint: Lenny?
Jon Poll: Yeah, he’s huge! That was my first day of shooting and the studio actually terrified me, because I said “I have a bunch of real kids with Down Syndrome on the bus” and they went “Oh my god, that’s cruel. You’re not really going to do that are you?” I went “Well, yeah I am. I don’t think it’s going to be cruel. I think you are going to like Charlie because he befriends this guy” and Dylan was so good at it. There were only a couple of days of shooting, one the first day of shooting and one a couple of weeks later when we were at the school and there were four or five of the kids on the bus who were challenged and Dylan never broke character and they didn’t know till wrap on that last day that he wasn’t a challenged kid and this one girl cried, she was really touched…
Quint: In the theater, Harry leaned over… My name’s Quint on the site and that’s cool and badass and all, but he kept threatening to change it, especially when I was a teenager, to “Gomer Pyle”… specifically Private Pyle, the D’Onofrio FULL METAL JACKET character, so when Len popped up on the screen, he was like “That was you in high school!” I was like “Fuck you, man!”
[They Both Laugh]
Quint: But at the end it became a gag throughout the entire movie, like Harry would just lean over and smile at me every time Len popped up. You should have seen him laughing when Len was chasing the topless girls down the hallway.
Jon Poll: That’s a great moment. You know what’s funny about him is that he disappears from the movie almost about a half hour in and then right in the last minute of the movie, there’s that one little reaction shot of him at the play and it’s funny, because it always gets a reaction. I used to feel bad, like “Oh man, it looks like we cut him out of the movie…” I didn’t cut any of him out, it’s just that that’s the way his story went. This is pretty funny, at one point Nash and I wanted the riot… The initial script had the kids burning the school down. Now we built that building in order to burn it. We didn’t have the money to do it like Hollywood does, so we would just build it like a tender box and set it on fire and there’s this amazing footage, one thing my daughter’s still pissed off about because I wont put anything on the DVD, it’s like “Here’s the movie. I’m a little bit of a purist. I cut all of that out…” We cut that out and actually the studio suggested it and Nash and I were like “yeah man, you don’t know what you’re talking about. We are in touch with our teenage angst, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” and all of a sudden it’s about Downey and Susan and it’s so much better, but at one point [He Laughs] we actually sent pages to the studio like this: We wanted Len to come and do the school bus and drive it through the building on fire. That was going to be his final moment. I think they thought we were a little nuts at that moment.
Quint: That’s from back when you said it was in the darker days…
Jon Poll: Yeah. Well that we felt was funny, but…
Quint: The fiery short bus…
Jon Poll: It was funny. I was naïve and when I first read the script I didn’t know what “Short Bus” meant and Nash said “Well, you wait and see. I think people will know.”
Quint: There was a big reaction here when they saw him going from the chauffer to the short bus. There was a ripple in the audience.
Jon Poll: That guy was pretty funny, too. We ended up casting him… OK, this is like the best insider girl story on the whole movie! So the first day of shooting Tyler Hilton got to play not the bully, but the guy who goes like that (leans back) and smiles and he met Megan Park that day, who plays Whitney the cheerleader… those guys are still together, which is really a trip and she lives like north of Toronto in London Ontario and he’s a singer-songwriter in Nashville and those guys stuck it out, which I was very impressed by.
Quint: You say they met for the very first time there?
Jon Poll: They met for the first time on the set for the first day of shooting.
Quint: So their first date was their first date?
Jon Poll: Yes, there first date was their first date.
Quint: Awesome.
Jon Poll: Yeah, it was pretty good. It’s pretty funny.
Quint: That’s really funny that that’s the first time that he got into the character.
Jon Poll: Oh I know it was really frustrating to both of us, because it’s like “Well, we haven’t yet established you as a bully” and he’s really a sweet kid. Most of my direction to him was “You are not allowed to smile. You need to be scary. You’re not allowed to smile…”
Quint: I actually got an email right before I left from somebody saying that they just talked to you about an upcoming project about voodoo and Anna Faris pleasuring herself?
Jon Poll: Man, shit travels fast! You guys have your pulse on it! OK, well this isn’t real yet. I mean, I have a deal on it. In fact I’ve gone back and I kind of ghost edit movies now, I don’t take credit anymore, but I help out. Studios think they are hiring me to help out and then I end up just helping the director, which is a kind of nice… I become a buffer for them, but I figured “OK that’s what I’m doing with all of these strikes, I’m never going to make a movie again…or this year…” but I had met on this film and then UA had one of the first WGA deals.
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So I’m going to do this movie, I hope, and we are in negotiations with Anna Faris. I hope they will pay her.
Quint: She’s adorable.
Jon Poll: She is adorable! You know what? I love women that are funny and like that’s what I love about Hope, and women who are unafraid to fall in the mud and this is a real “fall in the mud” movie. So okay… so it’s called SOMETHING BORROWED and as much as I hate wedding movies, it is a wedding movie, so okay you’ve got two twenty something people, a guy and a girl… She plays kind of an uptight conservative doctor and the guy, who has yet to have been determined, is a happy go lucky high school basketball couch. He doesn’t have a lot of ambition, he just enjoys life. You would never expect the two of these people to get together. They meet and fall in love at first site. They rush head long into marriage and a week before they get married, she has to get the approval of her maternal grandmother, who happens to be from New Orleans and happens to have a little Voodoo in the family… So she goes *POOF* puts a curse on them and *BANG* they’re in each other’s bodies and like CHARLIE, there’s a lot of humor and there’s some heart… there’s more humor. It’s a much broader comedy, a real R rated sex comedy. There’s also, I hope, something on it’s mind where we get to play with male and female roles, so just imagine there’s a lot of “Ahhhh” and they freak out and they realize they can’t tell anybody. It’s like FREAKY FRIDAY and we’ve seen that cliché before, but it works. So imagine this guy the next day and he’s calmed down and he’s alone in his apartment and we all know what guys do when they’re alone, right? Imagine being there in Anna Faris’ body, OK, let’s get down to it, so he’s trying to masturbate and really really hard and he just goes “Oh, this is so much more complicated than for a guy!” I just laughed so hard and then the big scene that it culminates in and there’s more real stuff on the way, but this is the fun stuff to talk about, so it’s like a day or two before their wedding and it’s all just a little odd and weird and creepy, but they’re kissing and they’re going “Well, we’re starting to get turned on.” One thing leads to another and they’re getting really excited and then the guy just goes “OK, hold on, I’ve got to lay down some ground rules. There’s no way I’m sucking my own cock!” When I read that line, I was like, “Oh man, if I get to make this movie, this is perfect!” Any movie where a guy gets to say that line…I’m going to get these two actors and have them watch each other and learn about each other and yeah the bulk of the movie, the whole first act they get to be themselves, but most of the movie she’s in a guy’s body and he’s in a girl’s body and it should be a challenge, but hopefully it will be pretty funny. I have my fingers crossed.
Quint: I accepted interviews on THE HOT CHICK, only because I wanted to meet Anna Faris.
Jon Poll: She’s a sweetheart.
Quint: I’m a guy. I’ve got a crush. Leave me alone.
Jon Poll: You know what’s nice about her? She’s really pretty, but again she’s not like this untouchable beauty. She feels like someone you might have known.
Quint: She had just done MAY and that’s what I really wanted to talk to her about.
Jon Poll: MAY? I don’t even know that one.
Quint: It’s a really great… Lucky Mckee. It’s hard to describe, but it’s a very dark movie about an introverted girl. Do you know who Angela Bettis is?
Jon Poll: No, but I’ve heard her name.
Quint: That was her starring role.
Jon Poll: Anna makes really interesting choices…
Quint: You need to check out MAY! Her performance in MAY is… she plays a lesbian girl next door type of thing that this really into this quirky gothic type character and so here’s Anna who is completely not and light and fluffy and all of that, but it’s like before she appeared in LOST IN TRANSLATION where she had that small thing, that’s the thing where it’s like “Oh wow, this girl’s not just a spoof queen.”
Jon Poll: I actually was an editor on SCARY MOVIE 3 and a little bit on SCARY MOVIE 4 and those movies are like lowest common denominator, but what she has to do in those movie is really tough and I was really impressed that she could pull that off. You know, SMILEY FACE I thought was really cool!
Quint: I haven’t seen that yet.
Jon Poll: Well look, it’s really a one joke movie, but the fact that she can take a one joke movie and she’s pretty much in every frame of it stoned out of her mind… The fact that she can make that entertaining at all is really quite a hats off moment to her.
Quint: I’m actually not a huge SCARY MOVIE fan, but for whatever reason I love SCARY MOVIE 2. I don’t know why, but I think it’s because they actually kind of go back to the more traditional spoofing, where it’s like one movie, but they’re not spoofing one film, they are spoofing a whole bunch of films within that one film, like in AIRPLANE!
Jon Poll: I worked on the ones with the Zuckers, not the ones with the Wayans.
Quint: Which is weird, because the Zuckers are the kings of that, but in their more recent stuff it’s like they’ve forgotten. You look at AIRPLANE and you look at TOP SECRET and you look at those movies and…
Jon Poll: TOP SECRET’s a great one!
Quint: They had their own through line and they weren’t just a shot for shot spoof of…
Jon Poll: You know what’s interesting is this time it’s David Zucker producing and Craig Mason who wrote the last two SCARY MOVIES directing. They’re doing a movie and it’s called… I can’t remember. It used to be called SUPERHERO, but it may be called DRAGONFLY… The character is Dragonfly and they tried to make it more of a story movie, because that was really Craig’s point of view “Can’t we make this one have a story, too?” I hope those guys can pull it off.
Quint: I love spoof movies and I love the Zuckers and I think that they can do great things, but I think that they’ve gotten caught up in MAFIA and now it feels more like an episode of MAD TV, where there’s all of these skits where most of them don’t work really, but some of them kind of do…
Jon Poll: The whole scatter shot approach... Basically the idea of cutting those movies is you cut everything out that’s not a laugh and you try to construct those laughs so carefully.
Quint: If you look at TOP SECRET and you look at the jokes…
Jon Poll: The big telephone… that was one of the best laughs in the movie!
Quint: And Peter Cushing where he had the magnifying glass to his eye and then he takes it away and he’s just got this huge eye, but in that whole scene is done backwards. It’s like it was really smart and really funny, but not “Oh that’s great, that’s from DIRTY DOZEN” or “Oh that’s great, that’s from….” I would love to see them do another film like that.
Jon Poll: You know, it’s tough. Comedy changes so much and I think Judd’s made it tough for everybody now, because his movies have kind of set the bar really high, because they have heart and humor and it’s really interesting how he constructs those movies, because he starts with the simple heartfelt story and then makes it as nasty as he can and look at SUPERBAD… The movie stars he’s made. Seth Rogen – movie star. Jonah Hill – movie star.
Quint: Michael Cera even. He took him right out of ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT. I actually got to talk to those guys when we showed SUPERBAD here like two months early and Jonah, Michael, and Chris Mintz-Plasse. That right there was probably my favorite interview I’ve ever done. I just sat down with those guys at the same time and there was completely no structure. We went off on the weirdest tangents and the publicist actually came in going “what the hell is going on in here,” because it was just us laughing. It was thunderous laughter the whole time… those guys are the real deal.
Jon Poll: Jonah was so funny in 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN. He made that one cameo in the store with the goofy shoes and I mean the dailies on that were so funny. I’ve still never gotten around to looking at all of the DVD extras… Judd’s the opposite of me. He sits and shoots stuff for the DVD. He’s far smarter than I am.
Quint: I don’t know, there’s something to that. If I love a movie and I want to buy it on DVD, it’s like I’m kind of torn, because I love the long versions or the ones that he puts out, but he doesn’t put out the originals.
Jon Poll: That was really disappointing to me and I didn’t realize it. I talked to a bunch of people who watched 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN on DVD and they said, “I know it was funny, but it was really long” and I’m like “Yeah, it was like two hours” and they went “Oh no, it was like two and a half.” I went like “What?” and then I went and checked it out and apparently they had released both versions sort of, but they didn’t really… they just wanted to sell the long one. I’m still pretty good friends with Judd, in fact I’ve helped him on another movie since then, but Shauna Robertson, who produces a lot of his movies told me that when they were doing KNOCKED UP they were going to re-release 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN in its original theatrical form, which I mean… I’m an editor. I want to see “the” version.
Quint: I don’t have any hesitation about directors putting out the longer cuts. I love that stuff, but just like Lucas and the STAR WARS movies, you can play with it as much as you want and add as many retarded cg creatures as you want to, but just give us the ones that made you all of the money that everybody loved. It’s not quite the same thing with what they are doing with the comedies
Jon Poll: Well that’s a bit more revisionist than what Judd’s doing.
Quint: At the same time, I would love it, especially with the technology as it is now with people welcoming 2 and 3 disc sets and the hi-def technology where you can fit more information on the disk, I don’t see why it’s so hard to give the buyer the choice of which version they want to watch.
Jon Poll: Here’s the scary one, I remember when we were doing FOCKERS, there were a lot of things that were uncomfortable for Christians in it and look, that’s a pretty mainstream movie, but Jay said “Hey just think in a few years when we stream right to theaters, we can make a version for the south and we can make a version for LA and New York and the ten big cities,” and it’s like “Oh, it’s hard enough to make one movie man, slow down!”
Quint: That’d piss me off, because would they view Austin as the south or is this the liberal area, so we would get one…?
Jon Poll: You know what? The town is just so cool. I’ve got to say that all of the best interviews I’ve had have been here and I went to this funny…
Quint: Wait until you have the food
Jon Poll: Well I just had food in the hotel, it wasn’t that great, but you know the Double Tree… What was it? ME, this cable station, is that right? I went in and all of these guys are just hanging out and there are guitars everywhere and there were like eight guys, like you’re in a rock and roll band. I said “Austin seems like it’s kindergarten for grown ups!” and he really liked that, but it’s like everybody here… it’s just like a party town. I think this is pretty cool.
Quint: We affectionately call Austin “a loophole in the Bible Belt.”
Jon Poll: Yeah, this is not a Bible Belt town, no.
Quint: It’s a very liberal oasis… very artsy… and in the last election it was like they showed all of the Blue state/Red state and then broke it down by counties. It was like red Texas and then right in the heart is little blue Travis County.
Jon Poll: Well, it’s going to be fun. Tonight we are screening on campus at the University of Texas and that will be fun.
Quint: UT is a huge reason why Austin’s got the identity, so I think it will play well to those guys.
Jon Poll: It’s interesting, because we have screened at a bunch of festivals and this is one thing that I love, the two festivals that I didn’t go to we won the audience awards, Maui and Tremblant in Quebec, so French Canadian stoners, they love CHARLIE BARTLETT! I’ve seen the movie play in Italy, where I got to see it play in Torino and that was really funny, because the subtitles were sometimes ahead of the lines, so half of the audience knew English and half didn’t, but like last night we were in Atlanta and it still played and it’s funny, but it played a little more like a drama in Atlanta than it did in New York. In New York it was like this laughfest and it’s just interesting how everyplace is a little different.
Quint: You will love Austin audiences, man. There’s nothing like an Austin audience.
Jon Poll: I’m looking forward to it.
We ended up bullshitting about politics, Austin food, high def formats and other things that are extremely interesting when you’re in a conversation about them, but that come off as a chore to read other people talking about, I think. I hope you guys enjoyed the chat. The flick hits this weekend. I greatly enjoyed it and think you just might, too. Okay, going to start my San Francisco adventures for reals now. Gonna be interesting… keep an eye out for some, hopefully, good stuff out of WonderCon! -Quint quint@aintitcool.com
