Hey folks. Capone in Chicago here.
Continuing some of my coverage of SXSW, which included quite a few interviews with actors and directors who showed some pretty great films at that little festival in Austin, Texas. One of the biggest surprises for me this year was ADVENTURELAND, which I'll give you my complete thoughts on this Friday, but the bottom line is, I thought this was going to be a fun, dopey comedy about a bunch of teens who work at an amusement park. In truth, that's about half the movie. The other half is a surprisingly serious look at just how messed up lives can get for kids whose emotions aren't fully formed (but don't try telling them that) and who don't have a real support system to help them deal with their painful upbringings. For those Kristen Stewart fans out there, if you're wondering why this talented actress is in this film, it's because someone of her caliber is required to handle the range of pain and self-loathing her character goes through during the course of the film. Writer-director Greg Mottola (DAYTRIPPERS; SUPERBAD; and many episodes of "Undeclared") has become the Cameron Crowe of his time, luring us in to his heartfelt films with humor, and then sneaking in the serious stuff when we least expect it. It's actually really cool that he does that, and I admire all of his work as a result.
Spearheading the goofy half of the film is Bill Hader, who plays Bobby, the co-manager of Adventureland along with his slightly brain-damaged wife (Kristen Wiig). Hader's work on SNL is the stuff of legend, with characters and impersonations like Vincent Prince, Al Pacino, that bizarre Italian talkshow host Vinnie something, and most recently he absolutely nailed a John Malkovich impression that was as eerie as it was hilarious. But what you may not realize is the Hader has had roles both big and small in pretty much the funniest movies in the last three years--KNOCKED UP, SUPERBAD, HOT ROD (sorry, I loved this movie), FORGETTING SARAH MARHSALL, PINEAPPLE EXPRESS, and TROPIC THUNDER. I got a chance to sit down with these two great men, and chat about the movie. Believe me, I could have gone an hour with these guys on so many different subjects, but I wanted to make sure to cover as many topics as I could in our short time together. Enjoy Greg Mottola and Bill Hader.
Capone: One of our guys on our site reviewed the film already and compared ADVENTURELAND to a John Hughes movie, but I disagree. I don't think Hughes ever got as serious as you do in this movie. I say you swing more toward early Cameron Crowe. There are going to be a lot of teenage audience member forced to watch a semi-serious movie. He lured you in with Spicoli in FAST TIMES, but then toss in a terrible loss of virginity moment and abortions.
Bill Hader: Yeah!
Greg Mottola: I actually thought about FAST TIMES a lot doing this because it is that sort of bait-and-switch. There's going to be enough funny stuff, but why not have a story about young people that includes melancholy, loneliness, and other human things that we all struggle with. It doesn't always have to be Freddie Prinze Jr.
BH: Cameron Crowe is a great example, because I remember going to see SAY ANYTHING, and thinking, "Whoa, John Cusack. This thing's gonna be rockin'" And the I was like, "Wow, holy shit. Her dad stole money. What's gonna happen? Wait a minute" It was such a different thing than you thought it would be. FAST TIMES definitely, thought, I think this and SUPERBAD owe a lot to that movie, that you can suddenly turn it like that and do the abortion thing, like you were saying, and it gets really heavy and real. I think the crazy hat trick for this film and SUPERBAD as well, is like the end of SUPERBAD, with Jonah and Mike, and Jonah going down the escalator, and you go, like, Oh! I remember going to screenings of that, and it was my favorite thing outside of hearing the audience laughing was hearing them go, "Oh, man. He's losing his best friend." I think that's what Greg is so good at. I think DAYTRIPPERS does the same thing too, when you watch the sisters walking off at the end. It's such a Mottola touch.
GM: I think I have chronic depression.
Capone: Leave the audience needing therapy.
BH: It's a good feeling; I like that stuff.
GM: I was a kid, as I was watching all the comedies that were coming out in the '80s, I was also first in line to see ZELIG or any Woody Allen movie. I liked the mix of comedy and drama and the bittersweet. That's my favorite tone.
BH: Yeah, it's like the end of ANNIE HALL, where you see them talking but they're broken up, but there's still that thing there. There's this great kind of real things about it, which I like.
Capone: Not to give away the ending of the film, but even the way that Jesse and Kristen's characters leave things, you know they're going to have that moment in her apartment, but beyond that you really don't feel like there's any assurance that they're going to live happily ever after.
GM: No, in my mind, I just hope that James [played by Jesse Eisenberg] feels that his making this move is a good thing for him, even if he doesn't get the girl. That he's said yes to something scary, which is a good thing, because this is based on my memory of my first relationships where I learned that being in love with someone isn't just finding the perfect person, it's loving someone for who they are and accepting their flaws and not running away from them because they have flaws. It was me getting over my naive, romantic ideas. The movie is like a short story to me, and in this little arc for him, that's his growth. He doesn't accept the small-minded suburban assessment of this women--oh, she did something terrible, she's a sexual young woman and therefore she's a slut--the way some people at the amusement park characterize her, and he rejects that and decides that even though she can break his heart and hurt him, he's going to try.
Capone: He is tenacious. He is like John Cusack a bit--a bit socially awkward but not without charm. You have these three characters: Martin Starr's complete outcast and Ryan Reynolds as the smooth, cool guy. But James is right in the middle. He doesn't think he's too nerdy to get these beautiful, wonderful women, but he's not quite confident enough to think he can hold onto them. It's still work for him; it doesn't come easy
BH: He's a mature guy. His character surprises you a bit. I love the moment when he comes up to Kristen and confesses to going on the date with Lisa P [Margarita Levieva]. I remember I was talking to you about that, it was something in the script that I was so surprised about that he did that.
GM: It's so earnest and it's kind of the wrong way to court a woman, but he's honest. He'd rather be honest than be cool. This is the least cool movie possibly. In a way, it's anti-cool.
BH: But him doing that, I think, makes him retroactivity cool. Maybe there's some dude out there who will see that and say, "Wow, if I'm just honest with a girl, maybe she'll like me."
GM: I remember being younger and being really confused as to what I'm supposed to hide from somebody.
Capone: That's such an awful moment, when you realize that sometimes in order to get someone to like you, you have to hold back. When you're young and in love, you just want to be honest about everything. You mentioned last night, that you had a small budget, and after the film I thought, it probably started as a big-budget film until you factored out all of the money you had to spend on music licensing. There is some great music in this movie, starting with The Replacements and all the Lou Reed…
GM: I was going for the AMERICAN GRAFITI three-album soundtrack. One of the advantages of doing a legitimately indie film, and this was a Miramax co-production, you can approach the record companies and license songs at a much better rate. Like with SUPERBAD, it being a Sony film, the cost of "Panama," because Bill fucking improv'ed it, was almost the entire music budget on ADVENTURELAND.
BH: I got to go up to Van Halen when I went to the Rock 'N' Roll Hall of Fame when they were being inducted, and I went up to Van Halen and said, "Hey, can you guys cut us a deal?" [laughs] There's this movie SUPERBAD"… I remember Judd [Apatow] calling me and going, "Hey, way to fucking improvise fucking 'Panama' in the fucking movie. Now it's in the fucking trailer. Hope you're fucking happy."[laughs] Oh, man.
GM: I did remember reading somewhere that David Lee Roth called…who was it that replaced the bass player?
BH: Eddie's son Wolfgang.
GM: Yeah, that David Lee Roth was calling him McLovin' on stage.
BH: "Take it McLovin', take it!" Yeah, Judd was there and freaked out, and emailed us from their concert in Las Vegas: "David Lee Roth just called the bass player McLovin'!" It was a double-mind fuck. I do take credit for "Panama" and that does link it with FAST TIMES. That's the weird Van Halen link between SUPERBAD and FAST TIMES.
Capone: Did you spend forever picking this music?
GM: Yeah, I wrote a lot of stuff into the script, and luckily I was about to get a good deal of that. And there are two genres of music in my mind. There's the kind of cool college radio stuff that they're listening to, and then there's the mainstream, Top 40 stuff. And there's Lou Reed, who gets mentioned in the movie. Growing up in the kind of sheltered suburbs of Long Island, I knew Lou Reed first as this classic rock guy who did "Walk on the Wild Side" and "Vicious," and it was only later when I met cooler, older kids, who turned me onto the Velvet Underground. But if it couldn't be Lou Reed, I was going to take that element out of the story, and luckily Lou's management said yes. They read the script and approved it and liked it. But it always runs the risk of, "Oh, here's the filmmaker making us listen to his favorite music." But I'm going to give them the music that they love, the kind of music that when I was that age and lonely and depressed, gave me tremendous solace. The Replacements, I feel, saved my life in college. When I was in college, I was 19 years old and my hair fell out from alopecia, and people didn't shave their heads back then. I remember the first day walking on campus, and two sorority girls said, "I like clean-cut guys, but not like that." Great, I'm not getting laid at college. So bands like that and The Smiths and Husker Du meant so much to me. It is sentimental, but it was so exciting to discover that sort of stuff. Listening to college radio as a teenager--I listened to Fordham--you could only get the signal in the middle of the night, and you'd hear Television or Brian Eno or Gang of Four for the first time. And then the Top 40 '80s stuff is still with us, the shared experience of pop culture music was such a huge thing then, and it kind of petered out in the '90s. It's something different now. It was interesting walking around the set and going, "Holy shit, I can't believe I'm hearing that song from the '80s in my movie."
BH: That Nu Shooz songs plays all the time still.
GM: I know. I heard that in the middle of Times Square the other day; I don't know from where.
BH: You know the song?
Capone: "I Can't Wait." Oh yes. I actually want to slap you for putting that song back in my head.
GM: I apologize.
BH: That song reminds me of swimming at a community pool in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That was probably around summer 1987.
Capone: I'll admit I have a deep resentment of songs that sound like they can be played with one finger.
BH: Oh yeah. Can you imagine the guy who wrote that playing it for the band? "Hey man, check it out [Bill begins to mimic the keyboard riff of the song]."
GM: And in the video, it would be a gloved finger in soft focus with gauze around the lens, with starbursts.
Capone: Bill, did your mustache help define your character?
BH: Yes. It does help. Something like that honestly does.
GM: We were trying to decide if it looked too fake, and you were like, "Can I keep it, please?"
BH: I wanted it; I thought it was a little crazy. But it does help. The mustache in this movie; the glasses in SUPERBAD. In HOT ROD, it was the visor. You have like those things that make you go, "Oh yeah. This will be fun. This kind of says it all." There was the leather jacket in FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL.
Capone: Did you give it a name?
GM: Tom Selleck.
Capone: It was that obvious?
BH: We didn't have a choice. We had to give it to Tom Selleck.
GM: It had its own trailer.
BH: It did, and it got stuck to my face. It was really cold outside in the middle of October in Pittsburgh, and the glue froze to my face, and I was like, "Oh my God, this is scary." It was cool shooting in October in Pittsburgh because I'm a huge Romero fan, so I wanted to go to the Monroeville Mall, but I never got to.
GM: You can see the sign for the mall in one shot. There's a shot of Jesse and Kristen driving, and in the deep background you see the sign for the Monroeville Mall.
BH: Did you know Greg was a p.a. on DAY OF THE DEAD?
Capone: I didn't. That's awesome.
GM: My first ever job. I went to Carnegie Mellon, so I knew Pittsburgh, which is one of the reasons I set the film there. And I did two weeks as an art department p.a. on DAY OF THE DEAD making zombie vomit, just taking handfuls of stuff and throwing it against the wall.
BH: For Bud! That is like the coolest thing ever.
Capone: I did a horror convention in Chicago a couple years back where we reunited the cast of that grossly under-appreciated movie. I don't know why people didn't like it when it first came out, but I think they've come around.
BH: People don't like it, but I dig it. It's so unbelievably gory. Tom Savini took it to a level where it had never been before or since. No other movie had ever been that gory.
Capone: Were you in Pittsburgh around the same time Kevin Smith was there shooting ZACK AND MIRI?
GM: We were finishing when they were starting.
Capone: Bill, I have to ask a couple things about your work on SNL. The impressions you do, the Vincent Prince, James Mason…
BH: All the people who are dead?
Capone: Yeah, how do you sell that to the writers or in the pitch meetings for each week's show?
BH: Oh, they want to do it. And Lorne Michaels is great because he'll be like, "Alright, let's figure out a way to make this work. The Vincent Price shows were the ones that we somehow figured out--and those are so hard to do because you have to have a holiday and you have to have a host that wants to do an old impression. So the stars do have to be aligned to do those sketches. But Jon Hamm did a great James Mason, and Alec Baldwin came in and wanted to do Richard Burton. I'm just a fan of TOMB OF LIGEIA and stuff like that, and those are so much fun to do and so much fun to watch afterwards. It's like SCTV, the feeling of this makes us laugh, me and Kristen and Fred are just having a blast, and if you get it, great. I mean, we did that one with Alec Baldwin, and the audience was all Jonas Brothers fans, and I remember looking at the audience before we did it and I'm like "Alriiiiight." People either love that sketch of they don't get it. Yesterday this guy came up to me and said, "Man, I like it when you play Dracula." That's nice. They find him funny, but you can tell the people who absolutely love them, or there are those who just don't get it. But that's why I loved SCTV. I didn't know who Merv Griffin was, or anybody like that, but it's making me laugh because he's doing a funny character. "Ooo, can I see the lining of your jacket?" So funny. That's what we like about doing those. My favorite thing is before we did the first one with Eva Longoria, it was my sixth episode, and I was so nervous. And Lorne Michaels came up to me and was like, "Bill, I like this, but why now?" [laughs] "I don't know man, I just like it." It's now or never.
Capone: Greg, I've talked to a Simon Pegg a couple of times in the last year about PAUL. Where are you with that?
GM: We start shooting in June. We are just starting pre-production. We've been doing a lot of tests in the last six months on special effects, and trying to get our head around that. So we have been working on it.
Capone: I didn't realize it was so effects heavy that you actually needed to do tests.
GM: Well, the character of Paul himself is a challenge because we don't want to Jar Jar Binks it up. [laughs]
Capone: Simon said in a perfect world you'd be doing some shooting at Comic-Con this year.
GM: I think if we brought Simon and Nick to Comic-Con it would be like SHAUN OF THE DEAD-like crowds of people ripping their flesh off, because they are so beloved there. We'll probably try to shoot something, maybe second unit stuff, but I don't know if we'll do it with Simon or not. It would be so unwieldy, although thought that could be a lie just to throw you off. We actually haven't figured it out.
Capone: Simon seemed to think that the biggest problem would be showing all of the licensed characters in the background with all the people in costume.
GM: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'd have to paint them all out with CGI or something. "Okay, that guy's dressed like Batman. Can't have that. Those 25 people are dressed like Batman."
Capone: Guys, thanks you so much. It was great finally getting to meet you both.
GM: Yeah, man. This was great.
After the interview, Hader had a break and we ended up talking a bit more about his horror movie script he wrote and gave to Judd Apatow in the hopes he would produce it. Although he couldn't give me any details about the screenplay (other than the lead role would be played by him), he did say that Judd told him he wouldn't be able to really work on the script with him until after FUNNY PEOPLE was done. Should be good. Thanks, all.
-- Capone
capone@aintitcoolmail.com
