Writer-director Andrew Bujalski has spent a great deal of his career being misunderstood by the masses, and I’m guessing he’s cool with that. With his first few films—FUNNY HA HA, MUTUAL APPRECIATION and BEESWAX—he was lumped in with the the Mumblecore filmmaker movement, which makes sense to a degree, but his works always seem to have a bit more going on than the typically aimless (on the surface) angsty, hipster releases of the time. But it was 2013’s COMPUTER CHESS where the Austin-based Bujalski’s tendencies began to come into real focus and get recognized.
COMPUTER CHESS is one of those great “This is what happens, but that’s not really what it’s about” films that Bujalski has been perfecting in the 10 years leading up to it, but something about him form-meeting-function approach really connected on this piece about an early 1980s convention of computer programmers pitting their machines against each other that managed to dig deeper into the minds of the characters than I ever suspected it would. It’s not just about defying expectations, but also concerns the earliest signs of computers’ roles in our lives—good and bad. If you haven’t seen it, you’re overdue.
Bujalski’s latest, RESULTS, is a bit of a jolt for his long-time admirers, if only because it feels so damn accessible, and that’s not at all a negative. Using known actors (Guy Pearce, Cobie Smulders, Giovanni Ribisi, Brooklyn Decker) and showing a real touch for lighter comedy, the filmmaker has chosen the world of personal training as his latest forum for folks that lead very different lives but are still trying to find ways to connect, even if doing so makes no damn sense. I’m being a bit vague here, I’ll admit, but I’d love for you just to stumble upon this film one day and see it unexpectedly. Or just go see it because it’s really very different than anything else out there; and it happens to be very funny on top of that. I caught up with Bujalski at the SXSW Film Festival in March, and he was a real pleasure to chat with. Please enjoy my talk with Andrew Bujalski…
Capone: I was reading an article about you yesterday, and someone said you have “a talent for letting big ideas work themselves out in mundane ways.” Is that a fair statement?
Andrew Bujalski: Well, I’ll take it! [laughs]
Capone: I think they meant it as a compliment.
AB: Maybe it says something about me that can’t hear anything but a compliment. I hope that’s true.
Capone: It’s rare you hear the word “mundane” as a compliment, but I think it is in this case.
AB: Yeah, but I get it. I mean, to me that’s where interesting stories are. Obviously, it’s probably a tenant of screenwriting 101: “Let’s see what happens when we put ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Let’s see what they’re going to do.” And I always feel like, wait a minute. Let’s put ordinary people in ordinary circumstances. Because that behavior to me tells you much more, if you want to learn about someone’s character. If the question is, when the pressure is on, are you going to be a hero or a villain, well, that’s binary, first of all. And yes, it’s compelling, and obviously we’ve seen a million movies that can make really good dramatic fodder out of that. But when the question is subtler than that, then the answers have more texture to them than “Am I going to save the world or not? I am. I’m a hero.”
Capone: You get to know most people by what they do day to day, not when the pressure is on.
AB: Yeah. Those are the real decisions, when it’s not even clear what the outcome will be. That’s where someone’s character is and that’s what I’m interested in.
Capone: I think that point certainly speaks to this film. What are the mundane things about love that you’d like us to learn? Because this is a mundane version of love. I think it’s terrific that you have taught me something I should have known my whole life: That everybody loves and falls in love in very different ways, and rom-coms have made us think everyone does it in the same way.
AB: Holy shit, man. Well, yeah. You’ve answered your own question.
Capone: No I haven’t.
AB: No, you have. I think that’s exactly right, and I think that certainly I’m not necessarily the guy to write the book on romance, but my own experience of it is that, for one thing, as much as I love to hear people’s love-at-first-sight stories, my wife and I, when we met there wasn’t the slightest spark of romance between us. [laughs] I think I thought she was hot, but was intimidated by her; I’m still intimidated by her. I don’t think she thought much of me. And then I moved away for a long time. It was eight years between meeting and it even occurring to us that we could kiss. And while that’s certainly not as romantic a story, it’s reality.
Capone: That’s the speed most of us work.
AB: Hey, I’ll take the love that I have, because I like it. And it’s fucking complicated, as everybody knows, and it’s not predictable, and the idea that love conquers all, that has a sound of finality to it. The only thing that conquers all is death.
Capone: Another way to say it is, love defeats everything, which is really bad.
AB: Yeah. The game keeps going. Even after love is conquered, if love wants to stay on top, it has to keep working. And I like the idea of doing that. Here’s a romantic comedy—and it is a romantic comedy—but at the end when the lovers kiss and come together, their problems are not solved. In many ways, their problems are just beginning, because now they have to live with each other.
Capone: That’s what I was thinking at the end: Their troubles are just beginning. They are going to have to work at this every day that they are together. I guess they decided, at least for the time being, that that’s worth it.
AB: Absolutely. That’s the “conquering,” deciding it’s worth it. The two of them are smart enough to know what a disaster they are for each other. And romantic comedies, they’re all built on this thing that “We’re going to give you all these mechanics to show you why these people shouldn’t be together, and then we’re going to toss it out the window at the end when they kiss.” And there was some part of me that thought, “Wait a minute. That’s good stuff. Let’s hang on to that.” There are good reasons for them not to be together, and it is a triumph that they’re going to kiss anyway.
Capone: Placing this story in the self-improvement world is almost hitting it right on the head. Trainers are all about the outside; these people clearly both have anger issues and hair-trigger tempers, and they have internal improvements that they are so desperately in need of. Was there something about that particular world you were fascinated by?
AB: Well, it’s all around me here in Austin, for sure. And some of it, too, part of it came from my anxiety came from thinking about how to work with professional actors, because it drives me nuts when I see—and I keep picking on him; I don’t mean to pick on him; He’s a great actor; I’m a fan, for sure—a George Clooney miscast as the down-on-his-luck schlub. To me, it’s like, look, you’re great. I love your work. I will never believe you as a down-on-his-luck schlub. So part of it was me thinking, “If I’m going to get pretty, fit people, maybe I can just ask them to play pretty, fit people.” Getting Guy Pearson and Cobie Smulders to play personal trainers, I thought that makes sense. I’m already in the zone. And there’s a lot of weird overlap between the life of an actor and the life of a trainer. They have a lot of similar struggles in their careers.
Capone: Working with higher-profile actors, did you have to make any adjustments to your shooting style, or were they pretty aware of how you do things?
AB: Yes and no. Essentially with anybody you work with, no two professional actors are the same, no two non-professional actors are the same. So the job always is one of trying to find a common language with whoever you’re working with, trying to learn how best and most effectively to communicate with them. So what we’re setting out to do essentially doesn’t change. It’s about trying to get something honest and interesting on the screen, no matter who you’re working with.
Of course, first of all, my feeling going into it was that you get a different kind of tone of performance from a professional than you do from a non-professional. So I designed the script with professionals in mind. If I had taken this script and tried to make it with non-professionals, I think it would have been a terrible idea. I think it would have been an equally, or probably more terrible, idea to go try to make COMPUTER CHESS with professionals. They were both designed for who I was looking to get for them.
So at a molecular level, I wrote this with professional actors in mind. And then on set, of course, it’s a different process. When I’m working with somebody who’s never acted before, or who acted in a junior high play and hasn’t since, they don’t bring a specific process to it. From moment to moment, it’s a comfort zone. I actually love working that way, because it’s elemental. You’re really just talking very, very basically about, “Here’s what’s happening in the scene, here’s where you’re at, what do you think about it? What does that do for you?” Whereas obviously actors, because they have to, because it’s their career, I developed a whole new sympathy for the actor with these guys because they work in professional environments, which frankly aren’t always pleasant or really receptive to an actor doing actor’s work. They have to be bulletproof.
If that’s your job, you have to be able to show up on set, and if the set is fucking chaotic and if the director is an idiot, if the script doesn’t make sense, you have to make it work. And they know how to do that. That’s great. It’s also a little scary, because it means they do come in bulletproof, and sometimes you do want to deconstruct that and actually get some vulnerability back into what they’re going. Everybody has a process, and it's all different. In a way, it’s wonderful and hilarious. They’re all great actors, and they all work great together, but Guy Pearce’s background, Cobie Smulders’ background, Kevin Corrigan’s background, and they’re proclivities as actors, are three very different flavors, and that was the fun. Trying to mix them together and see what we came up with.
Capone: You mentioned you had written this with professional actors in mind, and some of the words that have come up in the reviews out of Sundance were ones like “accessible” and “mainstream.” Does that make you cringe? Or was that in anyway something you were striving for?
AB: Both. Yeah, it would be disingenuous, and I also hate it when people don’t admit their ambitions in that regard. I mean, I have two kids, I thought it would probably be nice to make five figures on a movie, so that was for sure part of it. But by the same token, I also know if I’m going to get out of bed early in the morning and go do this everyday, it has to be something that’s exciting to me.
Capone: No one is accusing you of compromising, they’re just saying this is actually something that a lot of people might go see.
AB: I don’t know, we’ll see. I’ve had all types of identity crisis, and I’ve had all kinds of moments in the last year where I’ve thought, “Am I best served, or am I doing my best work trying something that is glossier and slicker than is maybe my natural inclination?” But then I had an ear infection at Sundance, so I didn’t watch it because I didn’t want to be hacking on people in the theater, so I watched it for the first time with an audience last night. It was a funny experience just to sit there with the audience, because for the last year, I’ve been worrying about this being too mainstream, and now I’m sitting here watching it, and it seems awfully weird to me.
Capone: It is!
AB: And probably it’s not mainstream enough, if I’m going to keep feeding these kids.
Capone: Honestly, Kevin Corrigan makes it the right kind of weird, and he’s my fucking spirit animal.
AB: Me too, me too.
Capone: What does he add to the mix?
AB: Yeah, he’s every bit the actor’s actor, as much as Guy or anybody is. He’s just a fucking eccentric. But Guy Pearce is more eccentric than Kevin, but you don’t clock that looking at him, because he’s gorgeous and very articulate and charming, but they’re both weirdos.
Capone: He’s done some whacked-out movies. He has no fear.
AB: No fear. Well, I think he has the same fear I do: of real success, because Guy is clearly someone who had a bite of that apple of like “Do you want Brad Pitt’s job, do you want to be a leading man?” And I think he tried it, and he’d rather go do some weird shit, and god bless him.
Capone: Cobie is amazing in this film. I didn’t see UNEXPECTED, but I’m going to go see it here in a couple of days
AB: I haven’t seen it either. I’m dying to.
Capone: I’m going to check it out in the next couple of days. I didn't watch her TV show. I just know her from small bits here and there. Did you audition her?
AB: Yeah, yeah. Well, because I’m an idiot, she’s only in things that are super huge, like “How I Met Your Mother” and THE AVENGERS. And of course I haven’t seen “How I Met Your Mother” or THE AVENGERS, so I didn’t really know her work, but you get pitched a list of actors, so I looked at some of her stuff and I was very compelled by her. We had a Skype conversation, and I liked her a lot. It’s always a little nerve wracking when you’re a bozo indie filmmaker, and you’re dealing with somebody who is massively successful, and you say, “Would you be willing to do a screen test?” There are agency politics you have to be careful about if you ask that, if she’d be allowed to do it. But she was cool with it. I went out to L.A. and just ran a scene with her. I got an actor buddy to come out and run the scene with her. It was one of those things where we did one take with it, and at the end of it, I thought, “Well, I guess I should look professional here and ask for another take and come up with some correction to give.” But I got what I came here for. I could see the movie now, because I knew I wanted Guy to do it, I knew I wanted Kevin to do it, and that was the piece that I needed—who would pull this together?—and it was such a joy to find here.
Capone: Looks like they’re wrapping us here. Thanks so much for talking.
