Actor and musician Jason Schwartzman is a long-time pal of a few of us at Ain’t It Cool News, and there are few interviews we look forward to than one with him, especially when it’s attached to a terrifically dark and subversive film like his latest, LISTEN UP PHILIP, about a young novelist on the verge of popularity who decides the personality that best suits him is being a total prick to those trying to get close to him. And it was actually a bit shocking to me that a genuinely nice guy like Schwartzman could embody and absolute cad like Philip. Chalk it up to great acting.
Since his splashy debut in Wes Anderson’s RUSHMORE (the two have worked together several times since, in such films as THE DARJEELING LIMITED, MOONRISE KINGDOM, and THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL), Schwartzman has gone on to take part in such memorable films as SPUN, I HEART HUCKABEES, SHOPGIRL, MARIE ANTOINETTE, FUNNY PEOPLE, SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD, SAVING MR. BANKS, the HBO series “Bored To Death,” and the upcoming Tim Burton film BIG EYES.
But as created by writer-director Alex Ross Perry, Philip is a whole different breed of monster, who is vicious to his girlfriend (Elizabeth Moss) and looks up to his equally nasty mentor and successful author (Jonathan Pryce). The film is currently in limited release and slowly expanding across the country over the next couple of weeks; it’s also currently on VOD, so you have plenty of ways to experience this terrific new work and an equally dark and wonderful performance by Schwatzman, who I spoke to recently about the film and the jerky character whom he grew to love. Please enjoy…
Jason Schwartzman: How you been? What’s going on?
Capone: Good. It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen you.
JS: I know, not since DARJEELING, 2007. Seven years ago.
Capone: Let’s talk about this movie. My new thing is if I like a movie, I don’t just tell people to go see it, I drag people to go see it.
JS: Oh, that’s cool. That’s so nice. Thanks.
Capone: Since this premiered at Sundance, does it feel like it’s been a succession of interviews where you’ve been defending your character to people?
JS: Well, that’s a great question. Let me think of the right way to say it. I feel that it’s not as much defending. At Sundance, no one had seen the movie, so there’s a trying to define what it might be to people to say “This is what you might be in for.” And then after they screened, you do press and help clarify any questions, because it’s still being figured out. But I think one thing that’s been nice is that it’s had time to cook a little bit before it’s come out, and people have sat with it a little bit, it seems that now I’m not defending as much, but also not having to do any damage control or anything. But it’s become less and less about defending.
Capone: I’m not saying defending your choice to play him; I just mean defending his behavior.
JS: Of course, yeah I know. It’s funny because Alex Ross Perry--we were doing an interview one night, and someone said, “This guy is so unlikeable.” And he goes, “Well, I don’t think he’s unlikable.” And the audience is like, “Ooooo….” And he said, “The people that are unlikable to me in the movie are the people that are the lazy people that are not driven, like the other writer, Josh Fawn, he’s unlikable. He doesn’t care about his craft really, he seems to be lazy, and his attitude is pretty relaxed and casual. That’s the person that’s the bad guy.”
And that got a response from people. I think for me, when we were making the movie, there’s no doubt when I was reading the script, I was seeing some of the stuff that this character was saying, and I was like pretty stunned by it. And a lot of it’s not the socially correct way to be. He mishandles, is what I was going to say. He mishandles everything. I moved to New York a month before we started shooting, and Alex and I went through it everyday, and you just start to really only see it from that guy’s point of view. Elizabeth Moss came a week before shooting, and we were talking about it, and she was like, “I can’t believe Philip would do that to Ashley.” And I was like, “Well, first of all, you also had a part in this.” She was like, “I can’t believe you.” And we got in this debate.
That’s a long way of saying, intellectually I know that Philip is doing things that aren’t the right way to do things necessarily. On the other hand, I really came to love the directness of this guy. He’s not passive aggressive, he’s not lying, or putting a smile on, or trying to play a bunch of people. He really seems to just =be himself, and that was really what I latched on to. And pretty early on, when we were talking to each other, Alex and I would have these long discussions about sympathy, or how much abrasives can an audience take before it becomes repellent, and watching movies. Even just a five-minute what-if about a possible scene where maybe he was nicer or there was a joke, it only made the characters seem passive aggressive. It made it worse.
Capone: Dialing him back made it worse?
JS: Yeah, dialing him back made it worse, because it was too late to dial him back. It was like putting a big smile on something. The whole movie is this extreme thing, and so once we said, “Yeah, it’s just not going to happen that way,” then it really wasn’t about likable, or unlikable or sympathetic. It was just about hopefully can we make a movie that’s compelling and a character that’s fascinating to watch.
Thought that wasn’t the language I was using at the time, that was the unspoken thing, and hopefully people will be curious about watching this type of person. Obviously, he doesn’t end up well in the end of the movie, and I think that’s another thing: any type of redemption we would have done so it would have been like, “Alright, it’s okay to be this way, because everything thing turns out for you,” that would have been false. So that was fun.
Capone: In the early parts of the film, it seems like this arrogance that Philip has got, he’s trying it on for size and seeing how it fits, and it fits perfectly. So once he realizes that he can get away with it, and there aren’t consequences, other than these women leaving him, he settles in. It is like a cloak of arrogance that fits beautifully.
JS: You’re the first person that’s got that, and thank you for getting it. Not to be too grandiose, but there was like a thing Alex and I were talking about just like, I love metaphors. Maybe because I was a Montessori taught growing up, but I love tactile examples of things. If you were going to say five minus four, I might not get it. But if you show me with the beans, it’s helpful.
So we always said this character was maybe like a drug addict, and much like a drug addict who’s experimenting with something and is like, “This feels good, and I’m just having a little, I’m just doing a little.” And then by the end of it, they realize they’re way adrift and addicted. Like you’re saying, in the beginning, the narrator says this is new to him, this behavior, and so in the beginning of the movie, he’s just trying it, and I think it’s fitting so well. And at the end of the movie, he’s totally lost, he’s totally gone.
Capone: There’s definitely a moment with Ike Zimmerman, where the audience recognizes this is where Philip is headed. This is almost exactly where he is going to end up, estranged from everybody, alone. And again, there are people who are like that, and I guess there are examples of writers who are like that. It’s a very isolated pursuit for a lot of people.
JS: Well, it’s definitely an isolated occupation. Jonathan Ames [“Bored To Death” creator/writer] once told me, he quoted [author] Paul Auster, and I’m going to paraphrase it, but I think he said, “All art is the product of one man’s solitude.” And I really feel that deeply. With a writer, that’s the main thing. I think that Alex was saying that a lot of this movie is about loneliness and being overtaken by it, and there are not many professions where that’s the case—writing and painting as an art form.
Capone: I was going to say, not every art form has the phenomenon. With music, people play by themselves, but I think they thrive with other musicians.
JS: Yeah. And playing live, there’s that communal feeling.
Capone: Exactly. So my question is, why do you think Philip is okay with that? Why do you think he’s okay with seeing this template for success and solitude, and submitting to it?
JS: Well, my thought about it was—and again, I know this is weird to say, but this is just my thought—that’s one thing I do love about the movie is I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to someone, or someone on the street said something, and it totally was a great concept of something that I had done. It was like, “Thank you.” For me, my thought on it was that he is the kind of guy who at a young age honed in on this idea of being a writer and had a template of what to do. “I’m going to probably move to New York, probably be in a bunch of miserable relationships, and I’m going to write a bunch of really good books.” At one point when he’s with Yvette, they walk into this bar, and gets sight of the students, he says, “I think it’s good if the students don’t see me outside of the class.”
There are little hints throughout the movie. He says, “Every since I was a teenage, I wanted to fall in love with a French woman.” Or he’ll say, “Ever since I was 14, I wanted to write a book.” There are all these things that he seems to have set, like goals that he seems to have set for himself at a young age. They’re not even goals. They’re just like things that he wants to become.
Capone: Images that say, “These things should happen in order for me to be a writer.”
JS: Exactly. In my mind, Ike Zimmerman was already a writer then, when he was 14, that he was interested in emulating in some way. So all of this is a part of the plan. He didn’t seek Ike Zimmerman out. That all happened by chance. But I think that’s why so much of it is significant. I think the scene with Ike and Yusef, who is his friend, when they’re together talking, I think that that’s the happiest you see Philip being in the movie. He’s just so excited to be with these guys.
Capone: I love the way Alex allows the film to stray from Philip, that we aren't following a single thread. We’re going off on these tangents with these women and other players. It all comes back to Philip, but it makes it possible for Elizabeth Moss not to just play a girlfriend. She’s a central character in a film of her own.
JS: And she’s the lead in Alex’s next movie [QUEEN OF EARTH].
Capone: Right, exactly. I think it’s terrific that he gives each one of these characters their own short film.
JS: Yeah. This is a dorky thing to say, but it’s something you’d appreciate it. Not on purpose, he edited the movie, and then by chance they timed it, and each of the short movies as we say are all about 22 minutes long, but totally by chance. So each person has their own equal thing. For sure when I was reading the script, I was stunned by Philip’s behavior, and I was taken aback by it, but equally I was taken aback by the total narrative shift. And obviously, we see it done sometimes, it’s rare to see it, and there’s an obvious thing, which is that you can see the characters’ effects on each other by their absence a lot of the time.
Capone: We’re watching the repercussions and consequences of Philip’s words and actions.
JS: Yeah. And Philip’s a guy who doesn’t give a shit about repercussions, that’s why it has to go to Ashley, because in his world there is no repercussions.
Capone: But he’s not going to be there when they happen, we know that. So it's great that the director has an active role saying, “We’re going to see the damage this guy has done.”
JS: Yeah, and I’ll tell you too, in talking to Alex who’s a much more of an avid reader. I’m just much slower. It’s a very literary thing, just the nature of a novel. One of the books that he recommended that I read before shooting this movie was called “Young Hearts Crying” by the author Richard Yates, who wrote “Easter Parade” and “Revolutionary Road.” It’s in his zone of the decay of love and dreams. But it has a thing where it’s about young love, and it splits off, and then you follow the girl and then the guy. And he said a lot of this will also came to him when he read this book years ago called “The Recognitions” He said it’s an 1000-page book about an art forger, who for the first 200 pages is the lead of it, and then disappears for like 700 pages, and then returns for the last 100. And so it’s a literary shout out to have these characters disappear.
Capone: Sure. Being the film lover that you are...
JS: Well, I love movies, but Alex, that guy is a real...
Capone: But getting to work with Jonathan Pryce, you understand the importance of that, and the film history with him. When you get chances to work with guys like that or Bill Murray or Dustin Hoffman, or any of these guys that have been around for awhile, do you have those film-lover conversations?
JS: About their work?
Capone: Yes.
JS: Well, this is like a really good, hot topic for me, because first of all, I think it has a lot more to do with this movie than you realize, which is that not only is this behavior that Philip displays very strange. I have a lot in common with Philip in the way that I feel, as I think a lot of people have. The confrontational stuff, I don’t do that as much. But the other thing that I really, really struggled with was if I was to meet like Brian Wilson, and he was to say, “I loved your last album, get out of the city for a little while, come to my house, you can live there for a little bit, and write and spend time with me.” I would not take him up on that offer.
Capone: Really?
JS: I’m sure in some way it could happen, but it would be an afternoon. Philip is a guy who says yes and actually invites himself to stay longer. So this relation to one’s idols is a really tricky thing, because Bill Murray or Dustin Hoffman or Jonathan, people who are in your life because these movies, especially with cable, growing up with cable and seeing these movies so much, it’s pretty nuts. I never really asked Bill, for instance, too much about the work unless it comes up. One time we were in a car together…and Bill is, by the way, not someone that I just like call and hang out with. He means to me what he means to everyone.
But we were in a car together once, and he started to talk about the National Lampoon Radio Hour and working with Christopher Guest, but it was more like him recalling memories. I’ve never really asked any of them questions; I never wanna pry. So if it comes up, if it’s something that they would like to talk about, I would love to have that conversation, but I wouldn't ever say like, “Can you tell me about…?”
Capone: You’re a good listener, is what you’re saying?
JS: Well, I feel like they’ve probably told these stories so many times, and I don’t wanna be, “Tell me, is it true that on this movie this happened?” But again, if they’re going to start talking about something, then I will talk to them.
Capone: It's an open invitation.
JS: For sure. And like whatever I can learn, and it’s not even about learning. It’s just being a fan, like any fan of anything wants to hear a tidbit or something you’ve never heard about something. Especially on these movies that are so iconic, any little story is like, “Ah!” It’s like a bread crumb to a hungry mouse.
Capone: They’re giving me the sign here, so I think I have to wrap up.
JS: Can we do one more? You don’t have anymore.
Capone: I have tons. Are you kidding?
JS: [To the publicist] Let’s do another one or two. Come on, we never get to see each other.
Capone: Did Philip infect in any way? Did he go home with you sometimes?
JS: Yeah. He didn’t go home with me while we were shooting the movie as much, but I do feel that, I don’t know if it was coincidental, but since the movie, I’ve gotten into a few verbal altercations with people, and I don’t know why or how, but there have been times where I’ve said to someone, “That’s ridiculous, and you can’t do that, and here’s why.” It’s something that I’m not accustomed to doing and it definitely feels weird, but I don’t know if it’s because of the movie opening that up and getting my body to feel that feeling.
I remember one time, Alex and I were walking down the street, and we saw this guy standing on the corner in this tank top drinking a smoothie, and I was walking with my hands in my pockets, and they were on my keys, and I said to Alex that I just wanted to take the keys out and throw it at that guy. And he was like, “Good. This is good. We’re getting closer to this thing.” But Philip’s not really a violent guy. It’s funny to me. People talk about him like he’s physically abusive to people or a murderer. But he’s not.
Capone: You’re still working this Amazon show, correct?
JS: Yeah, “Mozart in the Jungle.”
Capone: The pilot’s out has been out for a while. When does the episodes go live.
JS: It comes out December 24.
Capone: That’s soon.
JS: Yeah. It’s really soon. We’re shooting it now, and we have one more week.
Capone: But that’s strictly in the capacity of a show runner, right?
JS: Yeah. We have a show runner, but myself, Roman [Coppola], Paul Weitz, and Alex Timbers. The four of us are really trying to put as much of our ideas into it. It’s been wonderful, and it’s so interesting because I’ve never done anything like this before. We have Gael García Bernal on our show.
Capone: I just saw him in ROSEWATER.
JS: Is that great?
Capone: Very much so, and Gael is excellent in it.
JS: I’m dying to see that. I’ve loved Gael García Bernal since I first saw him. I think AMORES PERROS is the first time I knew who he was. When was that, AMORES PERROS?
Capone: I was just writing about that today. I don’t know. I don’t exactly know. Very late ’90s, maybe 2000? I can’t remember.
JS: Yeah, that sounds right. But what I’m most fascinated by is his ability to improvise. And our show is not a highly improvised show, but the actors are always encouraged to make anything easier for them to say. His ability to roll with everything is amazing to me, because it’s not his first language, but it is like his first language. It’s amazing to me.
Capone: It’s starting to be, for sure. I loved “Bored To Death” so much, and it seems like that would be an easier TV show than many TV shows to adapt to a movie format. Have you thought about that?
JS: Yeah. They’re trying to do it. What happened is that shortly after we got canceled, HBO and Jonathan met about making it into a movie, and he has been trying to do that. He’s writing it. For me, that show is like one of the best experiences of my life, and if I woke up tomorrow and got a call from HBO saying “We’re actually going to do the show again.” I would be like, “Let’s go.” Going to work everyday on that thing and saying those words, it was the best.
It was hard work but it was the best. It was like Ted [Danson] and Zach [Zach Galifianakis] and Jon—you rarely get to meet truly good people that are so hard working, so funny. Also, Zach and Ted and Jonathan took a lot of what I thought about and changed the dimensions of funniness to me. Zach with his ability to do certain things, and Jonathan of course, his tone and the way he thinks, it totally blew my mind.
Capone: HBO just brought back an old show.
JS: They did?
Capone: “The Comeback,” that Lisa Kudrow show, after a lot of years of it being gone. It’s not out of the realm of possibility.
JS: Hey. Let’s go. Let’s get this going. Jesus Christ! Let’s get it going. I’d do it in a heartbeat.
Capone: Great to see you again. Best of luck with this.
