Hey all. Capone in Chicago here, to deliver the loud and clear message that not only is the upcoming release (500) DAYS OF SUMMER a really cool movie, but its director, Marc Webb, is a really cool guy. He has made what I consider to be a rare animal in the romance genre a film--the romantic tragedy. Oh sure, there's humor galore, dancing, singing, and two of the most likable actors--Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel--working today. But Webb's ambitious objective seems to be showing us both of the romance timeline, and everything in between, in search of that exact moment when things start to fall apart. It's a remarkable little film, and Webb's vision is remarkably clear for a first-time feature director.
Webb has been a top music video director for more than 10 years, working with everyone from Santana to the Backstreet Boys, Good Charlotte to Green Day (including their latest "21 Guns" clip), Maroon 5 to Counting Crows, My Chemical Romance to Hilary Duff, Ashlee Simpson, Fergie, and Miley Cyrus. Music plays a huge part in the success of (500) DAYS OF SUMMER, but even the sequences without it are strong thanks to Webb's sure-handed direction and a pair of performances of two imperfect people.
In our talk, we cover all of the emotional landmines that the films offers up, but we also discuss the architecture of Los Angeles (which figures prominently in the story) and what's wrong with most romantic comedies today. Amen to that. Here's the exceedingly cool Marc Webb, a guy I see more great works coming from in the future.
Be warned: There are big-time SPOILERS!!! concerning the end of the film that are discussed during the course of this interview.
Capone: A friend of mine who went to Sundance this year told me back in January that your film was the best thing he saw at that festival. And at SXSW a couple months later, he and I were at a screening of a film called WOMEN IN TROUBLE, which Joseph has a small part in, and we happened to spot him in the lobby. And I've met Joseph a couple times before, so I said to my friend, "Do you want to tell him what you thought of 500 DAYS?" And he said sure, and I think he was thrilled to actually get to tell the guy that he was in the movie that he loved the most. The reaction to this film has been overwhelmingly positive. That's got to be incredibly satisfying.
Marc Webb: It's pretty awesome. I mean, listen, here's the truth. It's an awesome feeling, but it's such a collaborative effort. It was a lot of people coming together who were at a certain place in their career--namely the beginning--except for Joe, who's been doing this forever, but he and Zooey will be around forever. It's funny because no big studio wanted to do the movie, and to me "indie" is a weird word for me, because we always thought this was a pop movie. It was sort of surprising that no big studio wanted to do it, to be totally honest, because it's funny and it's relatable. But what's sort of interesting about it is that there's no sort of high-concept idea, and the fact that people relate to it, I think, because there's no high-concept deceit. It's just two people that we know going through experiences that we've all been through, and it's very, very simple when you break it down. And I think that's what the power is, that we try to be so honest about our experiences. It's not about war, it's not about wild animals attacking you. It's just this simple thing, and it's just been a really fucking great ride so far.
Capone: When you call it a "pop" movie, to me that means it's got something for everybody, it's accessible. What do you mean by that?
MW: That's a good question, and it's something I struggle with. I'm uncomfortable with the term "indie" because indie means different things to different people. And there are movies like MYSTERIOUS SKIN, that Joe did, that is truly indie and made for $500,000 to $600,000, done totally off the grid. And we were a little bit more mainstream. But in terms of our…I mean, Fox Searchlight is great because they just left us alone, and we didn't have the type of interference a big studio would usually offer or force upon you. And our actors come from that world, and our aesthetic--probably because our budget was so low--danced with that, in that world. But in terms of "pop," I like the idea of it having a certain rhythm. I was looking through my iTunes yesterday, and Bob Dylan was listed under "Pop." And I thought it would be "Folk" but it was listed as Pop, and I thought, "That's kind of cool." And I think that pop has become this dirty word, and I thought that you could make something accessible without it lying, basically. There's some honestly in it. That's sort of what I think of when I think of pop.
Capone: Pop also implies, in the music world at least, nothing too heavy, nothing too complicated. And in your film, that is not the case. There are some really heavy moments.
MW: I think you're right, I think you're exactly right. Pop tends to…you think of soda, especially if you're from the Midwest. You think of sugary stuff that's going to rot your teeth out. But to me, it comes from the word popular, and that's okay. The fact that people like it, movies that have meaning to people are pop movies. Who hasn't gotten a certain feeling from STAR WARS? Who hasn't inspired by SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, which I think is a pop movie. A very typical conceit, but people want to be inspired, and I think that can very much be the domain of pop and pop culture.
Capone: You mentioned your cast, I think at this point in their careers, your two leads are a catch to get right now. Joseph's been doing some incredible work in the last couple of years, and Zooey is just Zooey, and she can do anything. Neither one of them are big enough that they wouldn't look at your material, but they might be in a couple years.
MW: I hope so for their sake. Man, I remember when they first signed on, and we realized we were going to make the movie with them. We never really go officially green lit. We're still not green lit; it was like, "We'll give you enough money for another week." But when I realized they were going to do the movie, I was like, "Oh my God, what a dream come true." They don't have the kind of baggage that a lot of actors do. Joe in particular has steered so far from doing anything pop that he was just not an obvious choice. And there was a way to cast this movie in a more goofy, funny, comedic kind of way, and I think there's so much whimsy and craziness going on that you needed someone who could maintain a very thick emotional gravity and reality, and he's so good at that. He's so good at making it feel real. And that sort of kept our movie both afloat and tied to the ground. Plus, the other thing is--and this is the secret--you can't cast a movie, a romantic two-hander, with a person from List A and a person from List B. You have to cast chemistry. And they had been in MANIC together, so there was something there, but when I met Joe and he talked about Zooey, you could tell: there's my movie. And he was the first guy who was really didn't dismiss the script. A lot of other actors were like, "Yeah, well, it's not ANNIE HALL." No kidding. We should be so lucky. But he was like, "I know what this is. I know how to make this work, and I know why you're telling this story." And we talked about a lot about why we were doing this. And he believed in it, and that was such an important thing.
Capone: You mentioned his ability to add weight to something, but there's that discussion about them being Sid and Nancy, and Zooey says she's Sid, and he says, "So I'm Nancy?" But the thing is that conversation makes sense because he is the more outwardly emotional of the two. I don't mean to imply he's been emasculated, but he is the one who wears his emotions much more on the surface.
MW: You're totally right. Listen, romantic-comedies, nine times out of ten, have a female protagonist, and they're told from the woman's point of view. Sometimes they split the point of view, but for the most part they are designed for women. So if you have a romantic-comedy, which I think is the closest label for this, genre wise…it's funny, when we were shooting the karaoke scene and someone said, "Oh, you're switching the gender roles around." I never really thought of it that way. I'm a dude, and this scene relates to my experiences as a fucking guy. But there are a lot of those hints along the way. "So I'm Nancy." "She's a dude." Nowadays, women are so much more empowered in society than they were 50, 30 years ago. It's post women's lib. I work for women all the time, and I collaborate with women all the time. The gender power play is a different thing. It's the post-feminist generation in a way. I think it has less to do with gender roles and more to do with this person is young and their ideas of love are a little bit old fashioned. And it’s about that negotiation rather than a guy doing whatever. Joe's said in interviews, which I really like, that it's very easy for women to identify with him, because he's such a man, he has this Cary Grant-ish quality--maybe not in this role, he's more Cusack-ian [laughs]. I think I just invented that word.
Capone: I think you just did.
MW: But he's a dude, but we're not making a 1950s rom-com.
Capone: I'm sure that the structure of the film is coming up the most in these interviews. I assume that was in the script, but why does it work better that way than simply telling the story in a linear fashion?
MW: That's a good question. That's something that as we were developing this we asked.
Capone: And will there be a feature on the DVD where we can watch the events in order?
MW: That's a good idea. You know, the assistant editor actually cut it in order as an experiment, and I never saw it. But I think, truthfully, if you took the scenes and put them in order, you would get bored after Day…it wouldn't make sense from a storytelling perspective.
Capone: The fact that you'd know where it was going would make it a little dull.
MW: I think you're right and you're onto something, which is really the important thing. There are two things: one the movie is told from someone's point of view, and you remember things in a subjective way. You don't remember relationship or anything in a linear way. You jump from place to place. The second part of that, which is sort of the underlying narrative theme, is this movie is about expectations. We as the filmmakers want to guide the audience's expectations in a certain way. That's why we open with that scene and that image of the ring. There's some shenanigans; we're pulling a fast one in a certain way. But that's what you do when you fall in love or when you're going into this experience, your heart is messing with your mind and the way you see things. And the reality of things become totally subjective and nonlinear, and you feel like you're dancing in the streets. It's all based, not on the objective reality of the situation, but on the emotional reality of the circumstances.
Capone: It's more like memory.
MW: Absolutely, you're totally right. There's sort of a memory cue. And we tried to make the jumps less arbitrary, like the elevator scene. We wanted to have visual cues, or sort of inspiration to drive you from memory to another, little bridges. It's true: memory works in that way.
Capone: How long did you guys struggle to come up with that particular Hall & Oates ["You Make My Dreams Come True"] song for the dance sequence?
MW: That was actually one of the things in the script, but in the script it was originally a parade, with Mayor McCheese and Grimace, but McDonald's wouldn't give us the rights because they didn't want their food to be associated with sex, which I thought was hilarious IKEA was totally all about it; McDonald's was like, No way. Originally, Hall & Oates was scripted into it, but they didn't give us the song until the very last minute. So we started thinking, should it be Wang Chung, should it be Duran Duran. I actually had a conversation with Nick [Rhodes] from Duran Duran, and it didn't quite work. I don't think our agendas were the same, but it was very flattering that they would consider it. But the Hall & Oates think evolved. It started out as a parade, and it was sort of funny. But I'm a sucker for old musical, there's an energy to a lot of them that I think is really fantastic, like WEST SIDE STORY, that Jerome Robbins sort of thing. It's really interesting to me, speaking of pop. I was dying to try that, and I'd done some of that in my music videos.
Capone: It's funny, going into the movie, I didn't know anything about you, but after that scene, I thought, "This guy has either done music videos or commercials or both."
MW: [laughs] I hope that was a good thing.
Capone: My thought was that only someone who had done something like that before would have the balls to pull it off in a feature.
MW: That's smart, because in weird way, it is like Music Video Directing 101. It's the most simple thing to do in a music video; I've done it a million times. But in a movie, people are like, "Wow! Shocking!", which is really kind of great. At Sundance, it was kind of magical to see it with people who were seeing it for the first time. There was a vocal "what is this?", but there was a joy, you sensed that. There was a buzz in the room. And there's that moment when he sees his reflection, and I won't give that away, it's an afterthought when we were shooting it, and it's one of the more memorable moments in the movie for people. There's not enough dance in the world, you know what I mean? It's such an easy way to get people to smile.
Capone: There's also something interesting you do in the film that doesn't happen nearly enough in romantic films, where people actually relating and discussing the music that's playing in the room, in the world. I'm not talking about dancing; I mean those moments talking about The Smiths in the elevator. Music is a binding force in relationships, and it can also be a battleground.
MW: The songs, they can mean different things, like the way we use "She's Like the Wind." Part of the reason he falls for her is because she likes The Smiths, which is the worst reason to fall for a girl [laughs], not only because it's just music, but it's The Smiths. Watch out! But the other part of that is that you don't get to choose the music until after the movie is done. And we tried really hard, and Scott [Neustadter, co-screenwriter with Michael H. Weber] wrote in a lot of music, obviously The Smiths stuff he wrote in, The Clash. I tried to be really vigilant about choosing music and getting rights to music before we started shooting, which allowed me to conceptualize sequences around the music, which is what I do with music videos all the time. So when we were doing the Reality/Expectations sequence, I'd already had an animatic of that built around that song. I knew the timing of that, when her lyrics would go, when I could double up instrumental parts for there to be an emotional visual something to happen on screen. So that was really important. The Wolfmother montage, there's that ball hitting thing, which we wouldn't have been to do if we hadn't chosen the music beforehand. The Hall & Oates scene is obviously a prime example of that. And not only that, but to communicate to the actors, this is what this scene is going to be, or these are the three or four songs I was listening to when I was breaking this down or Scott was listening to when he was writing. It really helped the actors cop on the tone.
Capone: I've heard of directors playing music before they start shooting just to get the mood right for the actors.
MW: Well, the other part was, on set, the opening narration, there's a shot in the beginning--it's in the trailer actually--that goes from Joe to Zooey, and we were playing Marianne Faithfull's "As Tears Go By," which Zooey brought in. They're both very music driven, Zooey and Joe both will listen to their headphones before shooting a scene; it gets them into the headspace.
Capone: I've spent absolutely no time in Los Angeles. This is the first time I can remember where the architecture of Los Angeles plays such a huge part in any movie. You emphasize the older, less visible buildings. And it's such a huge identifying trait for Joe's character, he's in love with the architecture.
MW: If you've been downtown, well, nobody really goes downtown. There's more reason now to go downtown, but everybody thinks of L.A. as Hollywood and Beverly Hills or Venice or a guy juggling chainsaws, but there's a whole world that predated the film business. There were other industries there. What I think is really interesting about downtown is that there's somebody who…if you look at CITY LIGHTS, the Chaplin movie, that's all downtown L.A., and it's still there. But somebody had a lot of hope and then forgot about it, and that's Tom [Gordon-Levitt's character] in a nutshell. He sort of finds beauty in the past.
Capone: You did mention that he's old fashioned in his romantic thoughts.
MW: Yeah, and in his tastes. When we were thinking about what kind of architect he was, we ended up at the end of the movie, the thing that he's drawing in the little montage is a little more modern, because he's evolving a little bit; we wanted to have some sort of demarcation. But he appreciates the old, pre-war architecture that is in downtown, like the Bradbury Building, where we shot the last scene. It's a fucking amazing building.
Capone: I was going to mention that. If I ever get a chance, I'd love go to the Bradbury Building [best known as Deckard's apartment building in BLADE RUNNER].
MW: It's the weirdest thing. Film buffs are like "BLADE RUNNER."
Capone: I recognized it from the tile, actually, before I even spotted the elevator.
MW: [laughs] That's really funny. The other thing about that building is the color palette. If you look at the poster, there's this big blue sort of theme when it comes to Zooey. And at the end of the movie, it's the first time you see warm colors and red, except for a couple times.
Capone: Were there any of the 500 days you shot that aren't included in the final film?
MW: Yeah. There's one scene where he goes around town--this will be on the DVD--and sees Summer everywhere, like on TV sets, walking down the street, on the bus, which we actually used in the trailer but didn't include in the movie, which we've gotten some flack for, understandably. Whatever. I totally get it, and it would fit in our movie. It's just, we had already told that story, and we just cut it out. And then we did a worst-morning-ever sequence that was sort of parenthetical to the best morning ever, the Hall & Oates thing, where the cartoon bird takes a cartoon shit on his shoulder. And he pushes a guy over who's carrying beer. It's funny.
Capone: That reminds me of the two sequences we see where he talks about the things he loves and then hates about Summer's laugh, teeth, hair, those sort of thing.
MW: Right. I love Summer; I hate Summer, those sort of things. I mean, you can only ask so much of an audience. We were like, we've got to keep it fast because if you don't you'll lose the audience like that [snaps his fingers]. You want to keep it really dense, really fast, really quick. so there are a few of that whimsical sequences we actually cut out.
Capone: This is one of the few films I can think of that goes from romantic comedy to romantic tragedy. That's really where it goes.
MW: Tragedy is such a heavy word [laughs].
Capone: But Tom is shattered. I think that's the reason the film works. Romantic comedies have been done very well and very poorly in man different ways for decades. It's the aftermath that is rarely tackled in such a way that you aren't certain they're getting back together.
MW: I think you're right. I wouldn't have done the movie if it ended any other way. For the record, I don't like it when reviewed let on that they don't get back together in the end, because I think it hurts the experience, because some of our really good reviews say, "It doesn't give anything away to let you know that they don't get back together." And I think it does, because the people going into aren't as sophisticated as most reviewers are. When then narrator says, "This is not a love story," that's a cue for reviewers to know, at least for some people, that this might not end well. But when I read it the first time, I certainly didn't think that. But how else was it going to end? The two last scenes are really what give the movie its soul. There's a lot of fun parts to it, but it's those two last scenes…
Capone: When you say the two last scenes, you're talking about the bench scene and the job interview?
MW: Exactly. And the bench scene is that conversation that you never really get to have. I mean, you have it in your head.
Capone: The ever-illusive closure.
MW: Exactly. Which is like "Fuck. Really?" And that's as good as it's going to get, but somehow that ending…I remember reading it for the first time and there were three pages left, and I'm like, "Am I missing the rest of the script?" And then they ended it, and I remember very specifically, I was sitting at the L.A. Farm, which is a restaurant, and I finished reading the script and I read that last line, and I was like, "Yes. I'm going to do this movie." That was that. I don't know how else you end the movie. Some people say, "You should just not use the last scene." And I'm like, "You're fucking crazy." Because how do you end that in a way that's not a lie, but it also has hope, and I think that's the great gift of Scott and Michael, they figured that out. That's lightening in a bottle, you know?
Capone: Okay, admit it. You were a little worried because these were the two guys that wrote PINK PANTHER 2.
MW: [laughs] Well, there's a whole story behind that, which I could tell you off the record, but that hadn't come out yet. In fact, they got the PINK PANTHER job off of (500) DAYS OF SUMMER.
Capone: Alright. Well, it was great meeting you.
MW: Yeah, I really appreciate you coming out, thanks.
-- Capone
capone@aintitcoolmail.com
