Writer-director Theodore Melfi has a great story about finally getting face to face with Bill Murray, after spending months attempting to get his script for ST. VINCENT in front of him and then talking to him on the phone. I didn’t ask Melfi to repeat the story during our interview because our time was limited, and you can search pretty much any other interview with him available on the internet to read it. But I can verify it’s worth the search.
But the story with Murray only matters after your realize that the reason the elusive actor made himself available to Melfi was because the ST. VINCENT screenplay gave him a chance to play a character that isn’t quite in his usual wheelhouse. Vincent can be nasty without being funny; he’s not secretly a role model for the young man (Jaeden Lieberher) put in his charge by a struggling single mom (Melissa McCarthy) living next door. The film is about a man rediscovering his worth in the world after the person who used to remind him of it daily is long gone. And while the film is a bonafide crowd pleaser, it doesn’t resort to cheap sentimentality to reach into you heart and squeeze.
I had the chance to sit down in Chicago with Melfi last week to talk about assembling his incredible cast (that also includes Chris O’Dowd, Naomi Watts, and Terrence Howard), and the real-life events that sparked the ideas behind ST. VINCENT. It was great to chat with Melfi, whose only other feature was 1999’s WINDING ROAD, which I’ve never seen or even heard of. ST. VINCENT is in theaters now, so please enjoy my talk with Theodore Melfi…
Capone: Hello, sir. Good to meet you.
Theodore Melfi: Good to meet you.
Capone: I’m sure you’re tired of telling the story about getting Bill involved, but why hasn’t someone—I know it’s coming—made a documentary or writen a book collecting all the different stories about adventures in getting Bill Murray in their movies. We’ll call it THE 800 NUMBER.
TM: FINDING BILL.
Capone: I can’t believe that hasn’t been done yet, because everyone has a variation on that story.
TM: Everyone. Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, everyone.
Capone: But the interesting thing is a lot of those people, once they’ve him on his team, he’s easier to get to do the next one. Are you scrambling at this point to have another script that he’d be good for?
TM: Yeah, I mean, the thing about Bill is you have to have exactly the right thing. He’s only done one movie with Sofia [LOST IN TRANSLATION], because if you look at her movies after that, she hasn’t have the right thing.
Capone: There hasn’t really been a place for him in what she did after that.
TM: Yeah, so I don’t know if I have the right thing yet, but if I do then yeah, of course. Come on, Bill Murray.
Capone: What about your remake of GOING IN STYLE?
TM: I don’t think I’m going to do that.
Capone: That’s off the table now? But you wrote that.
TM: I know, but I need a break. I’m worn out. You’ve got to be in absolute love with it.
Capone: Right. You don’t believe in “strike while the iron is hot”?
TM: I think that’s a bunch of bullshit, right? Who cares? This is Bill Murray who told me this: “Life is your own. Do with it what you want to do with it.” And right now I’m on this tour for months, then come February I’ll start thinking about something else.
Capone: As a director, do you think you’ll always do something that you’ve written, or could you ever consider directing other people’s writing.
TM: Oh, yeah. I’d love to do something else. Being the writer and the director adds an extra pressure of some sort, and it makes you also forced to be the smartest guy in the room, and you don’t want to be the smartest guy in the room all the time. Sometimes you’re forced to be, but you don’t want to be by choice all the time, because then if you make a mistake, you have so much to live up to, and other people have great voices. If you shut yourself off to other people’s voices, I think you’re fucked. Other people have great voices.
Capone: How are you going to learn?
TM: Yeah. Who’s better than me? Millions of people. Millions of people are better than me.
Capone: Yeah. And conversely would you ever take one of these scripts that you’ve done and pass it off to somebody else?
TM: I already have. I gave a script called EL CAMINO to a friend of mine that’s a director. It looks like I’m going to give GOING IN STYLE back to New Line for someone else to direct. I love doing that. I love writing. My day job is directing, so if I have to say what am I, I’d have to say I’m first a director, because that’s my actual day job. That’s what I actually get paid to do; I’ve done a zillion commercials. So I get paid to do that, right? And writing was always something I just loved to do and never got paid for until recently, and now I’m getting paid for it, and I’m trying to decide what’s more fun, but they’re both equally fantastic.
Capone: You made your last feature in the late ’90s. And you’ve done a ton of shorts since then. Have you ever been tempted to expand one of the shorts, or do you just like that format?
TM: I’ve been asked to expand ROSHAMBO, because I love that. It’s a mocumentary about rock paper scissors.
Capone: It sounds so familiar, it’s hard for me to believe I haven’t seen it.
TM: It’s won Best Comedy at Malibu and a bunch of places. It’s really funny. I love it. It’s a small world, so it’d be more like a Christopher Guest movie, which I love. And then people wanted me to remake I WANT CANDY, which is this story of this really sexy nanny who comes to live with this family. But I don’t know, I have a dozen feature scripts in a drawer.
Capone: So you are one of those writers who just has a drawer full of scripts.
TM: I have a drawer full of scripts. Yeah, I keep writing, and half of them will never get made, but that doesn’t matter.
Capone: But a couple of your scripts, including the one for ST. VINCENT, were on the black list for awhile. How does that happen?
TM: So, when a script goes out on the spec market, it goes around town quickly because people are trying to buy it. So, if people start to like it, it gets passed around all over town. At the end of the year, all these people who are members of this black list vote on what scripts to read, what are their favorite scripts of the year, and so it’s an insider kind of thing.
Capone: I know Vincent the character was based on your father-in-law who had this miraculous turnaround with your wife. Can you talk about getting to know him and deciding that he’d be a good template for this guy.
TM: He was dastardly, to say the least. He had five children and didn’t know one of them. And then when he reconciled with my wife, I got to see a part of a human being you never get to see. He changed 180. He and my wife became like best friends. They talked almost every night on the phone. I got to watch a relationship begin again from ground zero and grow to the most beautiful father-and-daughter relationship I’ve ever seen. Certainly one I didn’t have. And then he got cancer, and my wife was with him the whole way until he died, and then we were at his funeral at the cemetery, and a couple of the kids were there, like two or three kids. And that’s it. There were maybe five people at his funeral, and I was sitting there, and my wife was crying, and she gave a speech about him. She said, “You all know him for how you know him. But I’m going to tell you this man was a saint, and he changed my life in the last 10 years that I’ve known him, and I’m so happy that I’ve known him and I wish you would give him a chance in your heart now to know him.”
And it was the most profound thing to watch a man who served his country have nothing. He was homeless the last couple years of his life, had cancer, and was just sucked into the mess of the healthcare system, bounced from hospital to hospital because he had no money, and my wife holding his hand while he was dying. How he had such a value and meaning for my wife, and I said to myself, “That’s a story and that’s a character worth talking about.” Except I don’t want him to die. I want him to get that before he dies, the value in his life. I was just so inspired by their relationship.
Capone: It’s really about this guy who has completely lost the value in his life, and this kid is the only one who bothers to even look into what he went through. He had a woman in his life that gave him that value, and she went away, and that’s hard to kickstart on your own, to really find those things on your own. You really see yourself through other people’s eyes, and this kid finally gives him that and gives him this magnificent speech at the end.
TM: For me, it’s about value of humans and how quickly we assign a tag to someone, that that’s who they are, and then they become that, and they loose all sense of their value. Especially as they get older, 55, 65, 75, and you’re getting a fucking social security check and nothing else. We’re like, “What did I do?” Right? People come up to me and say, “Oh, I saw the ending coming.” And I say, “You’re very smart.”
Capone:“Thanks, genius.”
TM: Did you think it was going to be a crappy life for Jimmy Stewart in the movie IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE? A movie to me is about a journey, and this journey is about showing a man his value. If you believe it and buy it, the movie affects you. If you don’t, you don’t.
Capone: I’m just trying to figure out when the term “crowd pleaser” became a bad thing.
TM: But that's what we went to the movies for. That’s what we went for. To have an emotion. Right? We went to have an emotion. If you’re not having an emotion of some sort, what the fuck do we have a movie for? It’s art. It’s like looking at a painting and saying, “I feel noting.” You’re brilliant. “I’m reading a poem, I feel nothing.”
Capone: I don’t think this is typical of what Bill Murray usual brings to a film, which is sarcastic wit, a one-liner here and there. This is something a little harder, a little uglier, and it almost feels like he’s playing older. When you’re directing him, how do you direct Bill Murray?
TM: First of all, let him do what he feels in his heart, what he feels in his body. He’s such an instinctual actor. But there were times when I said, “Bill, we can go harder here.” So we did a couple of takes where he said, “Well, I don’t want to be yelling the whole time.” And so I said, “Well, get close. Try that.” And he’s like, “Okay.” And so we do it, and some of those are in the movie and some are not. You ride the line, because at the end of the day you can’t make him so dislikable that he can’t be liked throughout the movie, but it has to be crusty at the beginning and grow to it. So I keep him on point, really.
Capone: Once he’s on board, and I assume he was the first one on board, did it make it easier to get the rest of your cast? I’ve got to imagine there are very few actors will say no to working with him.
TM: I know. Not to be arrogant, but once we had Bill Murray, it was like shooting fish in a barrel for everyone. He’s Melissa’s comedy icon. Period. And she was like, “Ahhh!” When she met him, she didn’t even know what to say. And the same thing with Naomi. Naomi was petrified of him and loved him. Jaeden is one of his biggest fans in the world, so it became like dominos.
Capone: Melissa’s interesting, because she has almost no jokes in the whole movie. She’s not the comic relief at all. She’s this terrified mother who’s barely keeping it together. Do you consider it a leap of faith to let her take on a role like that?
TM: They said, “Who do you want for Maggie?”, and she was the first person that came out of my mouth.
Capone: Really?
TM: Yeah. And they said, “Are you crazy?” Harvey Weinstein said, “I don’t buy it.” And I said, “Why don’t you buy it?” He goes, “She’s a broad comedian. I don’t buy it.” If anything this is the straightest person in the movie. This is a hardcore dramatic role. And I knew her background. I said, “Well, she comes from nine years of off-Broadway, dramatic theater before she went to California and got into the Groundlings.” No one knows that. So nine years of dramatic theater, training in drama, goes to Groundlings, finds a niche that she's fantastic in, and she’s great at comedy. I told Harvey that, and he goes, “Well, I don’t buy it.” I say, “Well, what if I get her to audition?” And he goes, “Okay. Get her to audition.” So I call Melissa and I said, “Melissa, who the fuck am I? But I’ve got to ask you, please, please, please would you consider auditioning?” And she goes, “Hell yes1” So I put her on tape Friday, sent it to Harvey on Friday night. On Monday morning, he calls and says, “I don’t say this often, and you probably won’t hear me say it again, but you’re right and I’m wrong. She’s a revelation.” So she knew she could do it; I knew she could do it; she did it.
Capone: It’s interesting because as much as people give Harvey crap for certain aspects of the way he works, he isn’t afraid to have someone step out of the pigeonhole that they have occupied for however many years. I was going to ask you if she actually had to audition, because that’s the only way I can imagine her getting that.
TM: Now she won’t have to do it again.
Capone: That’s good for her. Jaeden’s a really interesting actor because he’s new enough and young enough that he doesn’t have any bad habits yet. Tell me about finding him. What did he have that you needed for this character?
TM: We looked 1,600 kids across the country and around the world. Could not find him. And the reason we couldn’t find him is because child actors can be unbearable, and if a child actor is bad, your movie is ruined. We all know this. So the kids we were seeing were too precocious, too cutesy, or 100% Disney-fied So I’d go home and I see a Super Bowl commercial for Hyundai where this kid is getting bullied by some guys on a soccer field, and he goes and assembles a geek squad of heroes and comes back and kicks some ass. And I said, “That kid, you’ve got to get him in.” He’s from Philly. They bring Jaeden in, and he is what you see. Just nails it. Jaeden doesn't know how to manipulate. Jaeden doesn’t know how to act in the bad sense of the word “act,” in the bad sense of the word. He only knows how to be, and Bill only knows how to be, so together, Jaeden has a solemn, calm center, which I’ve never seen in a kid before in my life. He’s remarkably in the present moment all the time, like Bill, so he just responds and reacts. And we rehearsed like crazy—20 days at least.
Capone: You actually have a character in this film that’s a hooker with a heart of gold. Right out of the playbook, but you play with it a little bit. How did you connect up with Naomi Watts for that role?
TM: Naomi was actually Harvey’s idea, because we were stuck. We couldn’t think of anyone. The character was originally African American, and we thought that was going to be just too ridiculous. We couldn’t find the right actor anyway. And I said, “How about we make her Russian?” And Harvey instantly said, “Naomi Watts.” And I said, “Okay. I didn’t know she was funny.” So he said, “Well, meet with her.” And I met with her, and she was hilarious, and I said, “Well, let’s give it a try.” I don’t think she has a heart of gold. [laughs] She’s the most abrasive character in the movie.
Capone: But she takes on the role of caregiver too at a certain point, So you don’t actually know what you’re going to do next at this point? You’re just going to ride this out.
TM: I have THE TENDER BAR with Sony that’s going around town. I have a TV series called “The Mancinis" with Jon Favreau directing.
Capone: Is the pilot already been shot?
TM: No. We’re in the middle of pitching it. It’s at NBC. I’m going to write it, Jon’s going to direct it. Here’s an example of me not directing my own work.
Capone: There you go. Thank you. Great to meet you.
