At the SXSW Film Festival this year, I was fortunate enough to catch one of the most charming and funny films I've seen in a long time. That movie is SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED, directed by first-time feature filmmaker Colin Trevorrow and written by Derek Connolly. The origin of this work is deceptively simple. A few years ago, there was a real-life classified ad that caught the attention of a great many people. It read: "WANTED: Someone to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. You'll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before."
What the hell? So with only that ad in mind, Connolly concocted a completely fictional story about both the man who wrote the ad (played by the great Mark Duplass) and a team of journalists (well, one journalist and two interns), played by Jake Johnson (from "New Girl"), Aubrey Plaza (from "Parks and Recreation"), and newcomer Karan Soni, all of whom I'll have interviews for you in the coming week. Can Duplass' character actually travel through time? And why does he even want to? The team sets out to discover the truth, which ultimately is just an excuse to learn a little bit about their own issues with the past, present and future. It's a smart and clever film that proves that inspiration can come from anywhere.
I had full run with the filmmakers and cast at SXSW, so let's begin with the creative team, director Trevorrow and writer Connolly. And I believe there are SPOILERS galore, so be warned. Please enjoy…
Capone: I know you premiered the film at Sundance, but tell me about the experience of brining it to SXSW and the Paramount Theatre. I'm sure you've heard the legends…
Colin Trevorrow: Yeah, but I was ill prepared. It was really… Mark said it was going to be really fun. He said it was going to be awesome, but I didn’t know what grade of awesome we were talking about here, and it was high-grade awesome.
Capone: People stood up at the end, which I have never seen. I’ve never seen that before.
Derek Connolly: Really?
Capone: Yeah.
CT: Yeah, we kind of missed it.
DC: We couldn’t see it.
Capone: That’s true, it was before you came out.
CT: Yeah, we got the standing O. It was really exciting.
Capone: The funniest comment I heard--I don’t know if I agree with it--was as much as people loved Aubrey and Mark’s story in this movie, Jake's story was not a subplot, it was like the second plot. It really is, because in a lot of ways Mark and Jake’s characters are both time traveling in a sense. Can you talk a little bit about that second story? You run the risk with a story that strong of almost overshadowing your primary story.
CT: It wasn’t a fear of ours while we were making the movie, because we just saw it as “Look, we will do a metaphorical time travel story and possibly a literal one. These are going to run against each other and with each other.” There have also been reviews that have suggested that that story was unnecessary or that some people didn’t think that it needed to be there. I don’t necessarily agree. I think there's going to be a certain part of the audience that’s just going to zero in on that and say, “This is my side of SAFETY.” There will be people who really focus on Aubry and Mark, and some people love both, and I’m sure some people will love neither. [laughs]
Capone: Hey, I liked it so much I’ve already started talking to the Film District people about screening this in Chicago at some point like later in the year, because I want to put this in front of the crowds that I pull together for screenings, and if they put you on tour even better.
CT: I want to go on tour. This movie needs that.
Capone: I agree. I guess we should talk about the thing that you are probably sick of talking about, which is just sort of where the idea came. More importantly, how did you decide what direction it was going to go in as a fiction story based on that one ad?
DC: It wasn’t really a decision. Immediately when I saw the ad, I sort of saw, like within 30 seconds, the whole story and framing where it felt right just instinctively. I think, because I wanted to be that reporter who went and built this relationship with this guy and figure out who he was, and a couple of years ago, I kind of filed the idea away. A couple of years later, I saw Aubrey in FUNNY PEOPLE. Originally it was Jake’s character that was going to go and form this relationship with the guy, and then when I saw Aubrey, I was like “Oh that makes total sense,” and I just started immediately writing it for her as a character who forms that relationship.
Capone: Did anyone actually investigate the guy who wrote the ad?
CT: Oh yeah. Well we did. We found him.
Capone: But you weren't the only ones?
CT: No, there were people before us.
DC: He’s gotten tons of letters from people who actually answered that ad.
Capone: Is there any similarity between the written and the real version of this guy?
CT: Yes. The similarity is just a way that that thing is phrased. It’s like a haiku. It’s phrased in this beautiful way that only John Silveira, the guy who wrote it, could have had the instincts to write. He does bring his own weapons everywhere. He brought his own weapon to our first lunch together and he’s in the movie, actually.
Capone: Really?
CT: Yeah, do you remember when Aubrey and Karan [Soni] are at the post office waiting to see who picked up the letters? The first guy that comes to the post, the guy with the beard, that’s him.
Capone: Oh, that’s crazy. I think I spotted Lynn Shelton in the movie, too.
[Everyone Laughs]
DC: At the football game, yeah.
Capone: When you’re developing the character of Kenneth, you could have gone 19 different ways with that guy--crazy, dangerous, silly, creepy. How did you work with Mark to come up with that balance that makes him all of those things?
CT: All of those things, yeah. I feel like we just wanted shades of crazy, silly, dangerous, and we had moments, especially in the first half where we are going to get that stuff, but then there’s a real shift. For me, it happens right in the middle of the movie when there’s that home video that the two of them do and he’s talking about how he works out. The first half of the video is sort of crazy, dangerous, silly Kenneth, and then when he starts talking about the mission and how its about love and regret and all of these things, it really to me is the turning point in the movie where we go a little bit more emotional. So the fact that that character is the one that builds that bridge I think helps a lot.
DC: That was the biggest challenge in writing was how crazy to make him and how believable the love story would be based on how… It was a like a scale--if he’s this romantic, then he can only be this amount of crazy, and it was a relationship between those two things.
CT: Yeah, and a lot of that is in the editing room too. There are a couple of different versions of Kenneth that could have cut, and Mark gave us a big range, and we ended up with a pretty good balance I think between all of those things. I think the biggest danger, and this has to do with the ending too is you may not buy what we do at the end of this movie unless it’s earned, and I think that that relationship between the two of them and Kenneth as a character… Like if you’re not buying this guy, we will get laughed out of the movie if we end the movie the way we do.
Capone: You’re not only buying the ending, you’re almost rooting for that ending, which I heard was not the original ending. I don’t want to talk about it too much…
CT: It wasn’t the ending, but the reason why it wasn’t is just that we just didn’t think we could get away with it in a lot of ways, and we want it to be an honest movie, and I think that doesn’t necessarily happen in real life. So everything else in the movie does and then we reach this point where we as viewers were watching it and we're like, “You know what? We want this to happen right now. Hopefully other viewers will want that too. So let’s just go for it.”
Capone: All of the characters in a way have a really damaged relationship with time in general. Can you just talk a little bit about the characters and how they all sort of dysfunction in the past, present, and future?
CT: Yeah, they all need a time machine for a different reason.You have Jake, who's thinking about mistakes he has made in the past. You have Karan, who is looking for a path into the future and what kind of person he’s going to be. You have Aubrey, who also has this very singular deep regret, and Kenneth as well. Both [Plaza's character] Darius and Kenneth I think bond because they both have a turning point in their life where they were stunted in a lot of ways. I think that’s what brings them together, but everyone gets to fulfill their individual time-travel needs over the course of the movie, which I like.
Capone: How did you initially hook up with the Duplass brothers as executive producers? I didn’t know they were involved with this on a production level until I saw the credits.
CT: We just went to them. We had the cast and the source material and the classified ad and the script, and we went with Aubrey and Jake attached, and Mark and Jay came on as executive producers just to help the movie get made. Then as we were going through the process of talking to actors to play Kenneth, there was just this sort of universal like “Wait a minute, why don’t we just have the coolest cast ever?”
Capone: It really is. They are some of the most likable people in general on their respective TV shows or in movies. You’ve also burdened yourself with these incredible improvisational actors. How different is the script from what actually turned into the movie?
DC: I think it’s pretty much the script with great moments added in.
CT: There are no new scenes.
DC: Yeah, but like within the scenes they would find these awesome moments that really just took it to the next level.
Capone: So did you do the typical “Shoot the script,” and then let them go a little bit?
CT: No. We weren’t going for jokes. It wasn’t like a joke off. Until we found the moment in a scene that was the heart of it, if we didn’t have that, we would keep going until we found it. So the scene between Karan and Jake, where he pops his collar and puts his sunglasses on, the first half of that scene is really what the scene was, and the script had set that up, and from there we felt like, “Okay, we can get more out of this." And so we just kept pushing until we found this other layer, which is an older guy teaching a younger guy how to get laid, which is pretty endearing.
Capone: How did you find Karan? He’s great.
CT: He is great, yeah. We had an audition process, and he had never been on camera at all. I mean, he was an actor out of USC and he graduated during the shoot, but we just got him right out of college and gave him a part. It was great, because we shot the movie sort of in two halves, because Mark had to go do BLACK ROCK. So we shot the whole Darius-Kenneth part of the movie--really the whole Kenneth part of the movie--in the first two weeks. It was a 24-day shoot; 24 locations in 24 days.
So we shot that relationship, and what was great about it is that we were able to understand how that relationship was going to play, and so we sort of knew what the movie was, and then we were able to go shoot the other half of the movie and adjust accordingly. But because there was that time, for those two weeks, Jake and Karan were just sort of hanging out waiting to shoot their half of the movie. So the two of them were able to create that relationship that’s on screen in real life, and you could just tell. You can just tell that those guys had a rapport.
Capone: It’s a great because he is an unknown quantity, so we have no idea what to expect whereas the other actors are all in the spotlight. “Where is this guy coming from?” and “I have no idea where he’s going to go.” How was he written? I can’t imagine that that delivery was written that way?
DC: Yeah, he’s really just an odd guy who has these lines peppered throughout. I always saw him as R2D2 or C3PO--like he’s the droid comedic relief.
CT: Yeah, I think we have a whole STAR WARS parallel with these characters. You’ve got Han Solo in Jake, Luke Skywalker in Kenneth, obviously Aubrey's our Princess Leia, then we’ve got our droid.
Capone: Another comment I’ve heard after the movie was how excited people were to see Aubrey smile, because she certainly doesn’t do it that much on "Parks and Rec." You said you wrote it with her in mind? Why did you want her to play this part?
DC: It was old fashioned inspiration. I saw her in FUNNY PEOPLE, and I just wanted to write something for her, and then I remembered that idea that I had. And I wanted to meet her, so I thought if I wrote a movie for her, I might get a chance to meet her.
[Everyone Laughs]
Capone: Did she surprise you?
CT: Yeah, the character in the original script was a little darker and more morose and kind of closer to where she has been in the past, so something that we really worked on is using the expectations that people have of her and what they know of her and subverting those. You come in knowing who she is, and we kind of start with her playing the same character that she’s always played, and then we slowly chip away at it until you find what she's really capable underneath--a lot of that warmth, she brought that. We didn’t know how much she was going to smile, and she surprised us.
Capone: I love the scene where Mark sings to her, because A) He’s got a lovely voice, and B) it’s just a great, unexpected moment that reveals something about him. We think we have him figured out at that point. Tell me about that scene and the song.
CT: The scene was intended to do exactly that, and we always call it our “Muppet scene,” because only in a Muppet film can you sing a song sincerely by a campfire under the stars. [Laughs] So it’s our live-action Muppet scene, and it was written by Ryan Miller of the band Guster. Ryan wrote the entire score and that song as well. We recorded at the end, and the track you hear over the end credits is the full song with Duplass singing.
Capone: Yeah, it’s a nice moment, and Mark told me he learned to play the zither for it.
CT: He learned to play it. It’s a live take. That’s Aubrey hearing it for the first time.
Capone: Yeah, she mentioned that. Does she cry in that scene?
CT: Not in that scene.
Capone: Okay. I know she cries a few other times, but I was having trouble remembering that one specifically. She told me, “I wanted to cry.”
CT: Yeah, it was pretty.
Capone: Best of luck with this. Iit’s a really great movie. Thanks a lot.
