Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I had a day at SXSW this year almost entirely devoted to doing interviews for 21. I was able to sit down with star Jim Sturgess, real-life MIT card counter Jeff Ma and the director, Robert Luketic, best known for his comedy work like LEGALLY BLONDE, MONSTER-IN-LAW and WIN A DATE WITH TAD HAMILTON.

Luketic is below and I found him to be pretty open and honest about his filmography. What he has to say about getting in the director’s chair for the vastly different 21 is pretty interesting. Hope you guys dig the chat.

Robert Luketic: I usually hate these things, but I actually like this festival.

Quint: Yeah? Cool, so you’ve gone to a lot of film festivals then?

Robert Luketic: Yeah, but not usually with movies. I’ve been a bit disappointed with some of them. I used to love going to Sundance and it kind of freaked me out last time.

Quint: Did you go this year?

Robert Luketic: Yeah. It’s different…

Quint: It’s getting pretty massive. That’s the only way to describe it.

Robert Luketic: I used to go to Telluride back in the late nineties and even that’s still hanging in there and still feels like a filmmaker friendly festival. Paris comes along and it’s more about shopping and clothes and shoes than about the movies. This one has a good vibe.

Quint: SXSW gets a little crowded, especially at the Alamo. The theater is big but it doesn’t really seat a whole lot like the Paramount which fits thousands, but yeah it’s a pretty easy fest. So this is the first time you have had a movie at SXSW then?

Robert Luketic: Yeah, my movies haven’t really gone to festivals in the past, so it was an honor to have an opening night film and it was real departure for me. I make movies about wedding dresses… You know what I make… I’m sure when the producer said “Robert Luketic is interested in coming on,” they weren’t like “That’s a genius idea!” I had to basically start again and fight for the right to make the movie.

Quint: So somebody had it and you went to after it?

Robert Luketic: Yeah, like Kevin Spacey was producing the movie; Colombia Pictures was making it and I had to go in and really lobby to do it.

Quint: So what did you do to talk them into it?

Robert Luketic: I talked about visually how I was going to handle the movie and what I was going to do to make basically Black Jack games interesting visually, because let’s face it we don’t go to Vegas to watch Black Jack. I’d rather sit in a ditch and put needles in my eye… that’s not fun, right?

Quint: Yeah, if you are going to go watch something, then go watch Craps.

Robert Luketic: Or Poker or something, but don’t go watch Black Jack. It was important to make the Black Jack game visually interesting and that was really how I got them.

Quint: One of my favorite parts of the movie was the first time the lead plays and you actually see the process of him counting cards and for each hand you hear him doing the adding. Was that something that you built?

Robert Luketic: Yeah. The opening sequences and the card counting stuff and the time lapse sequence for the evening… You know in Vegas there are no windows and no clocks anywhere and all of a sudden it’s like “Shit, there’s daylight outside.” Time just slips by you in Vegas, so that was something I wanted to capture. I wanted to capture it, because I’ve had nights there where the nights… “What do you mean there’s daylight outside?” That time lapse sequence was kind of a little piece that I wanted to get that feeling.

Quint: So did you actually get any pointers in card counting? Can your brain crunch the numbers?

Robert Luketic: Dude, you have to have a Pentium chip and you need to be like Jeff Ma. You need to be like a brilliant mathematician. I don’t think the average person can do this. I can’t. I don’t know how you are with math, but I suck and so does Jim Sturgess, the lead guy. He’s a really good actor, OK.

Quint: But he’s really good at memorizing lines then, so he can make it sound like that.

Robert Luketic: We all thought we could, like we would go out at night and Jim and Kate Bosworth and we’d all be like “OK, let’s go” and by the fourth card out of the shoe we were like [Makes Cuckoo noise] Forget it.

Quint: Isn’t it supposed to be easier counting with a single or a double deck?

Robert Luketic: These guys could do three and four, right.

Quint: And the real deal guys are doing the shoes and what is that like six to eight?

Robert Luketic: That’s not really possible. It doesn’t really work with an electronic shoe, no. It’s got to be three to four tops. I can’t do any and we lost so much money. All of the crew, because… I kid you not, here’s my set, right?

Quint: Yeah.

Robert Luketic: Right where you are is an active Black Jack game going on, so the crew is here and sometimes my sound guy would put his boom pole done and throw down a bet. That was just happening all around me, so it was…

Quint: So you shot in real casinos then?

Robert Luketic: Yeah, all real casinos.

Quint: I saw that you shot in Red Rock, right?

Robert Luketic: Red Rock, Planet Hollywood…

Quint: Were you the first production in Red Rock, because that just opened?

Robert Luketic: Yeah, we were the first movie, so we would hit up the Riviera, the Hard Rock, The Palms, and kind of all the cool places that you would want to hang out in. I didn’t want to do like the big Disney hotel stuff…

Quint: You didn’t want to go to Excalibur?

Robert Luketic: (laughs) Oh dude…h3>

Quint: It’s horrible, isn’t it? The Luxor is getting kind of run down now, too, but when I first started going to Vegas I liked the Luxor. That’s where I had my first bit of luck when I was 21, so I have a soft spot for it.

Robert Luketic: Luxor is still nice to go, too.

Quint: To go from the Luxor to anything else you have to go through Excalibur.

Robert Luketic: What about that STAR TREK thing? Is that at Excalibur?

Quint: No, it was at the Hilton hotel.

Robert Luketic: Did you ever do that?

Quint: No, I didn’t do the ride. A friend of mine did. I heard that it was kind of fun, but and the end of its life…

Robert Luketic: They let it die.

Quint: The film was faded and scratched.

Robert Luketic: That’s what it was like when I saw it. It’s like “Dude, that’s so cheesy.” Vegas is incredible. Just being there for a month making this movie, the things we saw… None of us saw grass or anything living for a month and I’m not kidding you.

Quint: I don’t disbelieve you.

Robert Luketic: It’s fucking amazing.

Quint: Were any of the cast set up when you got to the movie? I imagine that Kevin [Spacey] probably brought Kate, since they had worked together a couple of times.

Robert Luketic: Yeah, we identified that we wanted Kate and so we got Kevin on the phone to just call her up and say “Come on down.” I’ve worked with her before too.

Quint: She’s adorable.

Robert Luketic: I just want to pinch her damn cheeks every time I see her.

Quint: I went to the RULES OF ATTRACTION set and there were all of these beautiful girls, like Jessica Biel, and then she shows up just to hang out and wasn’t even shooting the day I was there and I ended up talking to her a lot. I thought at the time that she was going be a big star. It’s not just the eyes, although they are amazing.

Robert Luketic: It’s bizarre. That freaks me out when I look at her, its like “Whoa.”

Quint: She was very sweet.

Robert Luketic: She is still very accessible. She’s a real team player. I tend to attract people like that on my sets unlike bullshit, I just don’t go for it and they know that with me. My actors all know that I just don’t dig that crap. We are so lucky to be in this business that we should make it fun and be respectful.

Quint: I don’t want to dig for dirt or anything, but I imagine having one of your leads on as a producer that it could get a little tense. Was Spacey easygoing?

Robert Luketic: He was there as an actor, but if we needed things done the great thing about Mr. Spacey and his two Academy awards is like if you have a problem or you aren’t getting something you need, Spacey can come on in, pick up the phone and bam it’s done. In that regard it was fantastic. He placed a lot of trust in Dana Brunetti who runs Trigger Street. Dana was very much the day to day… very much the other half of his brain, so Kevin felt very comfortable having Dana around producing while he was away or in London so he could concentrate on his acting. It was a really good partnership and we had Michael De Luca, who is a rock star in my book, literally, and he… Producer-wise we all agreed and got along and everyone was having a great time. It was just a good experience. This was the most fun I have ever had and it’s the most comfortable I have ever felt on a movie ever. I don’t think I really feel comfortable on a romantic comedy; I feel like a freak and it’s weird. People have been so mean about my movies, but that’s alright.

Quint: Especially with romantic comedy, it’s like…

Robert Luketic: It’s so sweet.

Quint: Yeah and you get people that that really offends for some reason.

Robert Luketic: It really pushes buttons, doesn’t it? But life isn’t like that, you know? Life isn’t just tied up all nice like that. It’s never that simple and that’s why I think we really need to look at romantic comedies… something’s got to give here. We need to let it sit for a minute and come up with a new way of approaching it or get more honest and get more real about… like what Judd Apatow is doing. There’s a wonderful honesty to it.

Quint: If you look at the old school romantic comedies like THE APARTMENT, there’s a quality that’s missing, but I don’t know… it all comes in waves. There will be someone who comes along and brings it back.

Robert Luketic: I’m doing something with Katherine Heigl next.

Quint: Oh yeah?

Robert Luketic: Yeah, its a little R rated comedy and it’s called THE UGLY TRUTH and it’s like a really dirty little nasty script. I’m very excited. So I’m just going to keep doing different kinds of stuff, you know… keep mixing it up.

Quint: Are there any other genres that you want to play with?

Robert Luketic: Yeah, I’m working on sort of an international espionage thing at the moment a grand adventure. That’s early days yet, but that’s where I want to end up.

Quint: You think that something like 21 will help you not get pigeonholed into a certain type of film?

Robert Luketic: That’s the idea! There was some method to the madness and I guess this is my way of braking out and getting a chance to other things, because you know there are a lot of great movies to be made and I don’t want to just make one kind.

Quint: So is that all you… you have those two movies on your radar? How close is the Heigl one?

Robert Luketic: We start shooting April 10th.

Quint: So it’s pretty soon.

Robert Luketic: Yeah, it’s like its next week. That’s fully green lit and we are waiting to be shooting.

Quint: Who else is in it?

Robert Luketic: Gerard Butler and John Michael Higgins, Cheryl Hines…

Quint: I love Cheryl Hines… I’m a big CURB YOUR ENTHUSIAM fan.

Robert Luketic: There’s a bunch of people who you might not really know, but they are all good funny ass people.

Quint: Well I don’t know if I’ve got too much more to ask.

Robert Luketic: Cool, well good talking to you mate. Thanks so much.

Quint: It was good meeting you.

Robert Luketic: Take care.

-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com