Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
Writer and newbie director Steven Conrad is one of my favorite Chicagoans. He's written a couple of strong scripts in the last few years for THE WEATHER MAN and THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS, and he continues his running themes about men and their job (or lack of jobs) with his latest work THE PROMOTION, his feature debut as a director.
Conrad is one of the most laid-back people I've ever met, and he's also remarkably funny and easy to talk to. But it's his pinpoint insight into the themes of his writing that impressed me the most. The guy's hero and creative inspiration is George Washington Carver; how badass is that? THE PROMOTION, starring John C. Reilly and Seann William Scott, both perfectly dialed back and effective, opens wide this week.
I actually conducted this interview with Conrad in a grocery store not unlike the one his movie is set in. I have to admit, I'm a sucker for gimmicks sometimes. I've been fortunate to have moderated three separate Q&As with Conrad over the last month or so, and each time I've learned something new about his upbringing and ambition.
Hope you enjoy.
Capone: Good to see you again. I've actually be trading the occasional e-mail with Yeah, Seann [William Scott] just to let me know what’s he's up to…trying to let me know when he’s going to be in town.
Steve Conrad: I’ve seen him briefly, and I’m trying to get him back. I just want to film this little promotional bit with him.
Capone: He mentioned that you guys were shooting some viral-like stuff for your website.
SC: Oh yeah, we have stuff up on my site. There’s this one in particular where last time he was here, I was working in my office and needed an image of him to send to some film festival. We don’t have a team of people who do that, so I do a Google search for a picture of him.
And, the first thing that it came up with was this picture of him. He’s, like, 20, and shirtless, and he’s in these really tight jeans, and he’s ripped. And, he’s posing in this really sexy way, so I started to make fun of him, and I said, “Hey, man,” and he was standing in my loft to my right, so I said, “God, how did they talk you into doing this picture?”
And, I turned around, and he was just getting dressed for the day, and he had jeans on, but no shirt, and he’s, like, 20 lb. heavier, and he’s got a gut. I’m, like, “Seann, we should do, like, 10 years later and, like, shoot you in the same poses with your gut sticking out.” He said he’d do it, so I’m trying to get him back to do that.
Capone: But, now you know that between now the time that that happens, he’ll be working out furiously.
SC: Yeah, I’m afraid of that. [laughs]
Capone: Have you been burning to direct ever since you got into the writing?
SC: Yeah, sure. I had done shorts and had an expectation that I’d be able to get in there, but the writing aspect of it really cooled for me, cooled down, way down, so I wasn’t able to write any movies, much less direct any, for a stretch there.
But, when I was able to kind of get my legs underneath me again, yeah, I made it a point to write something, save something form myself, and start to cultivate some relationships with actors where they might trust me enough to shoot something.
Capone: How do you think you did, first time out? When you watch the film, do you go, like, ‘Ugh, that is so amateur’? [laughs]
SC: Yeah, all I see are the deficiencies. Literally, that’s all I see. You know what, though, the weird thing is that it’s not really for me to say how I did. It doesn’t matter.
Capone: Sure it is! You can say it. I mean, other people are going to say it, too, but you just kind of feel like, when you watch it, you feel, ‘That’s not bad for a first time. If it wasn’t me, I’d think it was pretty good.’
SC: You know what, that’s what I tried to do. I tried to imagine if I was switching channels and it came on, would I watch it and then would I like it. It’s hard to say, it depends on what mood I’m in. But, I think I’d respect it, like, I would respect the aim of it, which is to kind of find some heroism where you might not expect it, where it really lays, you know, most of the time…continuing to face the same challenges every day and then surviving those. I would respect the aim of the thing for sure. And then, I would like that it was shot in Chicago. [laughs]
Capone: Yeah, I give it points for that reason. There are some aspect to the movie that people might mistakenly consider lightweight, some pretty taboo subjects are touched upon: the racial thing, the way they talk about the retarded character, and of course, the whole Canadian thing, that’s pretty racy. But that’s sort of a thing with you. At least in THE WEATHER MAN and in this one, you don’t really travel in the safest waters all the time.
SC: Well, a weakness that might come from pulling punches would be…the analogy that I’ve been sharing is that, like, the Charles Bronson movie, remember, where there’s, like, a street gang and there’s six African-Americans and one white guy, and you know that the white guy’s in there because the studio told them to put a white guy in there. You just don’t see it in the world, right? I mean, there are white gangs, and there are African-American gangs, but there aren’t many gangs that are integrated. I just haven’t encountered them.
In fact, I’ve noticed, I have stuff ordered to me, I’ve noticed that some of our content [in THE PROMOTION] that concerns African-Americans, Latinos, some people are made a little uncomfortable by it. And, I don’t know what to say about that except that no one gets off under my consideration. I am as hard on depicting the white board members as being narrow-minded and insufficient as I am in depicting this gang of 19-year-olds as being unsavory and unpleasant in the way their day-to-day language makes the customers feel, which is…It’s all I’m doing. And, if I didn’t bump into it in life, I wouldn’t write about it.
I don’t know, I think there’s so much more hard-earned appreciation that comes from something that’s very deeply considered and not something that’s quickly considered, like you might if you decided to shy away from it. What I like to do is just try to go a little deeper and to rest easy and know that I’m a good person, who’s actually liberally minded, but I like to put it down the way I hear it.
Capone: Your eyes are open at the same time. Your intentions are good, but your eyes are also open. You write what you see.
SC: Yeah, I mean, it’s just hard for me to really write a cop out, I guess. But, you know, I’m a white guy. It’s hard for me to write African-American language. In fact, I worked together with those kids to come up with stuff that felt real to them and comfortable to them as performers. I don’t know what to say about that; there's a landscape to that world that everybody is trying to make little better than…it’s a crude environment.
It’s an environment of males, so it’s a working environment of males, and it degenerates really quickly into that kind of language and that kind of flavor. It was the same…when I was in roofing, like my roofing crew, all of them were white. It was the very same thing. It was just ugly, a day-to-day ugliness of their thoughts I had to escape from. All they did was talk about girls they were never going to sleep with.
Capone: Yeah. I thought there was a reason that Seann’s character never brought his wife to the store.
SC: [laughs] He’d have to walk her through the gauntlet.
Capone: You also never really shy away from allowing the possibility that the audience may not like your lead characters for stretches of the film, again like in THE WEATHER MAN. I leave out PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS only because I know that was not an original story by you.
SC: Yeah, I’m glad, in fact, I absolutely make a distinction totally between that movie and everything else that I’ve done and am doing. It was a writing job I was glad to get, but it was a writing job. It came to mean a lot to me, but it wasn’t an act of my imagination.
But, you’re right, and what I might say about that is…I guess I don’t think too much in terms of whether it’s easy to like the character at any one stage. I just become really fascinated by people who are trying to do something and failing. I think it’s true of each of my characters that they continue to try against really great odds; there’s a Don Quixote thing that I love about life, where none of our dreams are going to come true, our full dreams, which are to be basically successful, good, to have good families, to be honored and respected by our family members, to have peace. It’s probably not going to come true for any of us, that whole package.
So, all of us are really trying and failing, but you don’t have a choice, so I guess trying brings out the worst in us sometimes, like, continuing to face that challenge can bring out the worst in us. But, I try to overcome it with the way that the thing finishes up. I try to find some peace, so you can close the book and then move on to the next one…to try to restore some peace, one way or another. But, it’s a good observation, it’s true.
Another thing that I noticed about the through-line in the things that I do--no one has any friends, like, none of the characters have any friends. It’s weird.
Capone: They’re too busy with their jobs to have friends.
SC: I wonder…I don’t know, maybe it’s true. PUSUIT OF HAPPYNESS, WEATHER MAN, PROMOTION--none of them, not one of my characters has a friend. It’s weird.
Capone: And, they all seem to have this sort of latent anger that sometimes isn’t so latent.
SC: Yeah, I guess that’s why I use voiceover. I got that question about why I use voice-over all the time. I think I use it because my characters never have a friend to talk to, just to lay out that…you know, the Jeremy Piven to the John Cusack…I don’t have that guy, that, like… You know what I mean? They’re movies I like, but I just don’t have, like, that guy.
Capone: Well, Reilly's closest friend seems to be his motivational tapes.
SC: [laughs] Those things are, like…in Montreal, the street fair, there are black market motivational tapes from 20 years back.
Capone: …with unlicensed music. I know a lot of people have asked why you chose to make Reilly’s character Canadian, but I want to know why you chose to make Lili Taylor Scottish, or whatever she was. Was it just, like, the accent she was able to do best?
SC: No, no, no. I encouraged her to do that one. I honestly, I love that accent. It’s, like, Groundskeeper Willie, it makes everything just a little funner. And, I know the movie’s not real, right, you watch it, and it has these exaggerations. And I thought, Everything sounds funner with a Scottish accent, like, when she has to repeat some of Richard’s failures back to him, like the "Black Apple" scene.
It just sounded so much…there was just so much more fun it in when I imagined it with a Scottish accent. And I photographed her differently than most people do, because I find her to be really, like, of the earth and very lovely. And, she’s generally depicted as a little harsher, but, man, she’s a pretty lady.
Capone: Yeah, she’s beautiful. One of the things that I love about this film is that it proves something that I believe about…I think this more about documentaries than features, but that there really aren’t any inherently boring stories--there are just boring ways of telling certain stories--because, when you really look at it, the stakes of this story are really very low.
But, to these guys, it’s their futures, though in the grand scheme of things, it’s a little low-stakes game that you kind of find this drama and humor in. Is that something that appeals to you, maybe not the bigger movies, but…
SC: Yeah, absolutely. The thing I learned in the grown-up part of my life, when I was broke with a child, is that doing slightly better can make a very large difference; doing slightly better in Chicago means the difference between renting a place and buying a place.
You need essentially to make more than $40,000 here, close to $50,000 in order to be able to buy a place. And, it’s hard when you’re stuck at, like, 40 and you’re trying to get to $50,000 a year. So, it doesn’t feel small when you need something. It feels big. So, I guess I’ve become preoccupied by that, because I’ve recognized that in my grown-up life, that when it comes to you and your loved ones, like, a little change in your life can amount to quite a bit.
Capone: Tell me about what your two main actors add to your screenplay. I’m talking not such much about vibe, but what did they bring in traits to their characters, or even words, maybe, expressions.
SC: Yeah. John is just so…his imagination goes to very strange places when left alone. I like to look at things a little differently than John. But, man, John is just [possessed]…like, what he thinks of when I tell him to just go and riff and think of things. He thinks of the most insane stuff. And, I’m really glad to go there with him, because his character is just this weird bundle of deficiencies and coping mechanisms, none of which have worked. We [can] count the many things that that character is or used to be--he’s a recovering drug addict, alcoholic, ex-motor cycle gang member, born-again Christian, tap dancer—and grocer. John brought weirdness that allowed him to exhibit all of the fun weakness that each of those things by itself conveys.
I left him to come up with stuff like crazy. He’s responsible for some of the strangest stuff in that movie--that whole midget conversation on the loading dock when he’s high. He also was great using that accent at the right time, finding little Canadian expressions to pepper his American with. And, beyond that, I think he’s just the best actor in the world.
Seann brought this kind of young energy which I hoped I could…I thought it might be one of those roles where I could take the actor, who was very hungry to do something that was a little more graduated, still funny, but slightly more graduated than the stuff that he’s done to date.
And, I thought he would match up with the story line really well, like, he wanted to be good in this movie very badly. And, in some ways, I thought, it is what he wants, and he was coming at me with a lot of energy and strength to get the role; his auditions were outstanding. And, I thought, I bet I’ll feel that on film. I bet I’ll feel that hunger to improve, like, his life the way he wants, which is the trip of the character. So, Seann brought this useful force to contend with John, who’s older and a more formidable acting presence. If you look at his career, it could be daunting to perform in a two-shot with Reilly. I thought Seann would come at it with some real young strength and a strong desire to earn his place in that frame.
Capone: I’ve always seen him as an energetic actor, but here he actually shows that by dialing back more than I’d ever seen before.
SC: Yeah, it’s really pent up with him. He doesn’t quite know who to unload on. But, I needed him to stay active, even when he’s looking around trying to figure out if he’s getting screwed or not, I wanted it to feel sort of active. He’s got many strengths beyond just being funny.
Capone: There are no jokes in this movie. It’s not like you’ve written a bunch of jokes. It’s just a bunch of incredibly uncomfortable situations that make people laugh. Is there anything appealing to you about the life that these two guys are living?
SC: Oh, absolutely, oh, sure--the devotion they have to the people who come to rely on them. Sure, I hope I come through in my life in that regard. I definitely aim to…at some point surrender personal ambitions in the interest of providing and making life better for other people that you’ve partnered up with. I admire that more than anything else in the world.
Capone: Is there anything admirable about the work that they’re doing?
SC: [laughs] I bet there’s a guy who’s standing in center field at Wrigley Field right now and is bored…you know, he’s thinking, ‘God, I wish I was a rock star’. Every job turns into a Job. So, my job is not a lot different than their jobs.
But, yeah, I didn’t want to remain a roofer only because it presents your life with very few options, [laughs] if anybody didn’t know that about roofing yet. There are few places to go from there.
Capone: There’s no where to go but down, literally. I’m almost obsessed with the CHAD SCHMIDT script that you’ve written. What are the odds it’s going to happen?
SC: I don’t know. I’m going to put it online. I am.
Capone: I’d like to see it, I want to read it, because Seann said it was great.
SC: I think the actor [the film would have to star Brad Pitt in a duel role as himself when he was just beginning to become famous, and as an up-and-coming brilliant actor who looks a bit like him] is talking about directors right now. I’m not sure they have one.
Capone: Okay, so that something you were looking at directing.
SC: Sure, yeah, absolutely. I’m very into it as a piece of drama, like, I wanted to make a 70s movie, like, the 70s movie that I grew up watching when we first got our hand on VCRs, and I watched DOG DAY AFTERNOON…like, a peculiar guy who desperately needs money.
And, I thought, No one’s really making that movie right now. They’re all kind of blowing up. And, I thought, I really want to do this ‘low-fi’, 70s flick. I thought I could come up with an idea that was just a little weirder than that. So, I’m very, very pleased with that one.
Capone: And you've written something more recently.
SC: Yeah, I wrote something called THE EXPANDING MAILMAN. That seems like it’s on its legs. I think that’s going to be the next one, if we have a chance.
Capone: Are you going to direct that one?
SC: Yeah.
Capone: Okay, that sounds good. Actually, one of the funniest things THE PROMOTION is that Gil Bellows is in it, who I haven’t really seen much of outside of any direct-to-video releases. How did you decide on him because he's quite good in this?
SC: Oh, he’s just one of my good friends. Yeah, but what comes along with that is that I’ve seen everything he’s in, and I know he’s excellent, like, really excellent.
Capone: He does sort of embody that corporate douche bag.
SC: Yeah, but in a way where he’s not, like, a hard ass. A way somebody might have gone is like that guy Paul Gleason; was that his name?--the guy who was in THE BREAKFAST CLUB, yeah.
Capone: I don’t think he’s alive anymore.
SC: Yeah, well, that’s another reason I didn’t cast him [laughs]. Yeah, I was looking for a younger version of that guy, who’s, peculiar, but has somehow become an authority figure. Gil is going to be around for good. That guy’s going to work for the rest of his life. He’s just better than anybody.
[The publicist gives us the wrap-things-up sign.]
SC (cont’d): Man, I just want to thank you again. We wouldn’t go anywhere in the world if it weren’t for the blogs and the web sites. Traditionally, my expectations when the reviews come out…I think the traditional review mechanisms are going to get tied up in some of the stuff you found interesting about the movie, but people are not going to be able to get past that, a little bit. So, our life is on computer now.
Capone: That’s partly true, for better or worse. Thanks for talking to us.
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