The career of Alfonso Gomez-Rejon is remarkable and never seems to stop moving. He began his working life as a production assistant for Martin Scorsese on CASINO and as a personal assistant for Nora Ephron on YOU’VE GOT MAIL in the mid- to late 1990s. It wasn’t long before he was a second unit director on such films as BEWITCHED, BABEL, STATE OF PLAY, JULIE & JULIA, EAT PRAY LOVE, THE EAGLE, and ARGO. Between his work on EAT PRAY LOVE and as a second unit director on the pilot for “American Horror Story,” Gomez-Rejon gained the trust of series creator Ryan Murphy, and soon the young director was directing his own “AHS” episodes as well as episodes of Murphy’s other series, “Glee.” In 2014, Gomez-Rejon directed his first feature, a remake of the cult horror film THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN (produced by Murphy). I should also add that shortly before this interview, Gomze-Rejon was confirmed to be directing COLLATERAL BEAUTY, starring Hugh Jackman and Rooney Mara, from a screenplay by Allan Loeb, but we didn't get around to talking about it.
But with his second feature, the Sundance double-prize winner ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL, Gomez-Rejon went for something more personal. Based on the novel by Jesse Andrews (who also wrote the screenplay), it’s the story of Greg (Thomas Mann) and the two unlikely friendships in his life—one with his long-time movie-making partner Earl (newcomer RJ Cyler) and one with Rachel (Olivia Cooke), a fellow high school student dying of leukemia that his mother forces Greg to spend time with. Their friendship is not a foregone conclusion; it’s more of a hard-earned understanding between the two that they are deep-seated outsiders who, in a way, deserve each other. And by the end of the film, the self-absorbed Greg learns to actually care about others in his life in a really touching, painful way.
A couple of weeks before our interview is when I actually first met Gomez-Rejon, when I moderated a Q&A for ME & EARL at the Chicago Critics Film Festival, which I help program every year. I’d first seen the film at Sundance in January, it easily became one of my favorites that I saw that week.
The first thing that comes up in the end credits is a dedication to the director’s late father, whom Gomez-Rejon sees in ever fiber of this story for reasons he’s talked about at length in many interviews (and we broach it as well), and knowing that just crushes your heart a little bit more. When I walked into the room for our interview, Gomez-Rejon was looking at his phone, loading the just-released for AMY, the documentary about Amy Winehouse. He’s a big fan of the late singer and is dying to watch the trailer. “Have you seen it yet?” I tell him I haven’t, so we watch it together, and I immediately realize that he’s getting a bit emotional watching it. So I decided to forego my original first couple of questions to ask him, instead, about the power of music in his life and, in particular, in ME & EARL. And with that rather lengthy prologue, please enjoy my spirited chat with Alfonso Gomez-Rejon…
Capone: We didn’t get a chance to talk about this last time you were here, but tell me about the power of Brian Eno, since we’re on the topic of music. How did you get involved with him to do new music for you? And also tell me about the use of his older music as well, because it’s so beautifully used here.
Alfonso Gomez-Rejon: It’s funny, the fact that we’re here talking about this, because it’s all new to me. This whole new phase of the movie, and you have to talk about it, you have to intellectualize and verbalize all these things that are just emotions and images and feelings. But in that process, you start discovering a lot about the movie. One thing is that the movie is very much about discovery, right? Discovery about yourself, about other people, and I was certain that the score to the movie was going to be scored with music from other movies—400 BLOWS, CONTEMPT, whatever it is, or obscure movies like ZAZIE DANS LE METRO or whatever it is that weren’t super obvious but felt right. And some of that remains here and there, but the whole movie was going to be like that.
Then when the final animated film was scored to Brian Eno—and I selected Brian Eno just to give this little short film a shape—and it was so moving and so powerful when it all came together, and it was our last day of production. We’re projecting this movie and blasting this music over and over and over for hours, and it never got old. It always felt right. It never felt manipulative, which is key for me. It was respectful of your journey, of my journey through it. It was so overwhelming. I did my commentary the other day and I broke down talking about that scene, because there’s so much that I was going through that day, and who I was at the beginning of the movie and at the end, just physically as a person, was so different.
So that was so powerful in such a special way that I remember I told my producer, “I don’t know what the money situation is with the budget for music, but this is really working, and we should look into at least buying the rights to this song.” But I did call my editor and say, “Something really interesting is happening. You should download [Brian Eno’s song] ‘Another Green World’ and see what happens.” Because I was going to go off and do an episode of “American Horror Story,” and he was going to have two or three weeks by himself. So when I saw the editor’s assembly, he had already put in Eno’s “I’ll Come Running,” and a couple of them that didn’t work. They were too heavy. But something was right.
I took about two or three weeks, and my assistant editor was there and put as much of Eno’s music as he could find, which is decades worth of work, into a drive, and I spent weeks just listening and finding stuff and pulling stuff. So by the time Randall Poster came and saw the movie, the music supervisor, like 19-20 cues were there—one, it’s unaffordable, and two, he kept on saying, “We need a composer to come and score it.” He suggested a few names, and I said, “What about Eno?” And he said, “He doesn’t really do that.” “Can we just try?” I kept being the squeaky wheel until eventually he got the movie to Brian Eno’s agent. He got him to see the movie. He was very moved by it, and eventually had a very hard time getting Eno to see it, because he was on tour, he was producing. And finally Eno saw it and was very moved by it and liked the way his music was being used. I was asked to write him an email sent through his agents, and then I woke up the next day with an email directly from Eno to me that was beautiful, and he really encapsulated the movie, because he’s a poet as well. He encapsulated the movie in an email that I have on my wall—I printed it—just talking about those currents, the bitter and the sweet, and how they collide, and how it never underscores the emotion, and that’s what he likes about his music and what he strives for. And then it became a dialogue.
I haven't met him yet, but it was emails. I sent him an email during the day, and I’d wake up with an email from him. If I didn’t get one from him, I’d go back and re-read mine like, “What did I go wrong?” You know? It was one of those things like I put so much thought into my emails and kept them short but with the right words. And then he started going into his vault and sending me things that had never been released, and at the very end, he started writing for us. And some pieces never made it into the final cut. One it was too late to restructure something to a piece of music. We were already late submitting the film to Sundance and getting the final DCP to send it. One of the most beautiful pieces he wrote was the last thing called “Carved in Paper,” and that’s the piece you hear when he skips school in Earl’s testimonial, and the piece in the final credits.
We did hire Nico Muhly to write the opening. The opening was all scored originally “Day for Night,” then I repurposed “Golden Hours.” And then we thought, maybe that is the sound that she’s listening to. So every time you’re in her bedroom, you hear it. So the first Eno track is on his walk to her house. That’s the first time you hear “On Some Faraway Beach,” I think. And the beginning was scored by Nico Muhly. It’s very phonetic, energetic, precise structure to it, which is the movie, and then Eno takes over, and then it ends on Eno for the end titles, and then Nico comes back for the crawl for some recovery. That was the process that we were working on until the very end. And then he re-wrote that piece, re-produced it, because he wanted to be more triumphant, and we’d already submitted the film to Sundance. We were going to Sundance tomorrow, so it was too late. So I said, well, if we have time, we should come back and swap it. And we blasted it, and it was amazing. It’s so great. And then we tried swapping it, and it didn’t work as well [laughs]. The version that was a little sadder and simpler was the better version for the movie. As a piece of music, the triumphant one was extraordinary.
Capone: And I’m sure all the music you didn’t use, you just threw it away and will never listen to it again.
AGR: [laughs] No, he did one thing called “Metal Crash” that was amazing. Another called “Guitar for Earl.” I’ll play you some stuff.
Capone: You mentioned that he got the tone you were going for. How difficult was it for you to make that balance work? Sometimes the funnier it gets in one scene, the more tragic it is in the next scene. Was is already there in the writing? Was that you directing the actors? Was that you and your editor?
AGR: It’s a combination, because Jesse Andrew’s script had this beautiful balance. It might have been funnier than the final movie, I think. The movie just gets reinterpreted and keeps moving, but there’s something that worked in how honest it was. So that honesty was great. Then the casting of it. You cast actors who can sell the humor in a way that’s natural and effortless. More than anything, they can handle the dramatic sequences in ways that aren’t over the top and sentimental. You get a lot of that when you’re auditioning. And you see these kids, especially Olivia, her audition pieces were heavy, and you see her do it in such a way that you believe it’s a young girl, but it’s also a young girl that’s in control of her life, and she does it in a very simple, nuanced way.
Of course in the directing of it, you adjust and you know what feels right—you think you do. And then in the cutting of it, there were some key transitions that were very scary in the cutting room because you have the German industrial dancers on the steps of the high school after they realize that they’ve eaten Ill Phil’s cookies, and Ill Phil is rapping, and threatening him, and then from there you go right into him visiting her after, and she’s going to be bald. That’s a huge transition. We go from German industrial dancing techno to Eno’s…I forget the cue that’s there. And that is a huge transition. And you don’t know how it’s going to work until you start. And then you do it again, and we do it over and over and over again. Then it goes into the “I’m stopping treatment” scene, which is a very long take. And then the next thing is a joke about Julian Assange, but the way he sells that joke is with a lot of anger. He’s not trying to make a joke. He literally can’t fucking pronounce this guy’s name.
So it’s a little of everything, and it’s a process he continues with music and then restructuring or holding on to something a little longer. It’s a process of discovery for me as well. You hope that what your gut is telling you is correct; you don’t know. You start screening it for a few intimate friends and see how it’s working, and then they get engaged, and people are going with it. Or, did we go too far here and then pull back, or maybe the music has to be a little more neutral or noting at all, maybe dry in the “stopping treatment” scene.
Capone: I love that Greg and Earl can knock out these little parody films when no one is going to see them but them, and it doesn’t really mean anything other than having fun because the stakes are so low. But when he has to make this film that means something to him and hopefully will mean something to somebody else, when there are stakes involved and an emotional connection, he has a hard time getting through it. Did you experience anything like that since this film was very personal to you, and you dedicated it to your father. Was there a time when you had a tough time cracking what you wanted to do with this or felt like you weren’t getting it right?
AGR: Oh, sure. There’s so many answers to that question. An example would be the hospital scene, and we have to be careful not to say what happens, but let’s just say the hospital scene was one that I had designed in pre-production. I had designed it in a very stylized way, because that was a very important scene for me, and I wanted it to be this set piece and very visual. When we got to shooting it, I had all my boards on the wall, I had times codes of the times to certain pieces of the animated film, then we started shooting it. I did one rehearsal with the real nurse and said, “This is what’s going to happen. This is going to happen, he leaves, Molly’s going to come in. What would you do, nurse, in this case?” Then the nurse came.
We did one rehearsal with the music and I realized that my approach was completely wrong. All this preparation was wrong way into the scene. It was too stylized. Not only did it belong to the beginning of the film, because that was very controlled, that’s what Greg is, but the film was taking on the shape of Greg and wanting to just pay attention and listen. And I had evolved from the person I was at the beginning of the movie. It was very humbling because you’re like, “Oh my god, this is the scene when I’m expressing myself in the deepest way. Re-living moments that are very hard to re-live.” It’s the last day of production that has gone fairly well; we’re saying goodbye to our cast after this.
Capone: You shot the hospital scene on the last day? Wow.
AGR: Yeah. So I had designed the schedule so I had most the day to do this. We had a very tight schedule, as you know, 23, 24 days. Moving things around, I just asked my AD for time. I don’t want to rush two things: The hospital scene and the Jon Bernthal scene—just pad those days. Nothing’s working, man. Everything’s too stylized. I had these inserts, I had the curtain and silhouettes, shadows of nurses and stuff. It would have been a striking sequence, I guarantee you that, but you probably would have felt nothing. And it just became what it is. Because of what it is, I just had to document it with the steady cam. The steady cam is cool because it has the feeling of a memory. It’s like it’s underwater, very dreamlike, and I’m just going to document it and hold on the actor’s faces and try the simple approach.
So yeah, it’s very humbling, and I think when I was doing it, I was still in denial and adding a layer between me and this moment by designing something very striking visually, and then it was about, “I have to go in. Here we go.” It was very hard to get through that day—very, very hard. And then you get through it and you feel like you’ve gone through something. And it’s also very humbling as a director, because the movie is much more powerful than you.
Capone: I’ve seen that scene three times now, because I saw it again last night, and the thing I always take away from it is her eyes and the look on her face. Whatever else was going on in that scene, I was just waiting for it to come back to her eyes.
AGR: And in the scene there’s a little of that. The were so many details that I’ll tell you, we couldn’t get past that beat to survive the rest of the movie. It was too heavy. So there was that, and then we tried going back and showing more of the film, and then David Trachtenberg, my editor, realized that the first loose assembly of that scene was the one that had the best balance because you as the audience member can choose who to look at, and I still discover things that Olivia is doing—and she’s so in it, and it’s all about her, and you’re looking at her, and it was all about the energy that was coming and the light. All of those were accents, you haven't rehearsed this until you get there. The way the flares were playing, and their relationship to your lens, and the colors that reflected off of here that gave it a 2001 feel that was unintentional. We knew the room had to be all white, and the life came from the details and the patterns, her face is bathed in color. And then you realize, you can’t wrestle this, it’s going to win. Just go with it. I documented that and other key moments, “How do I remember this scene when the nurse kicked me out, this is what I saw, and this is what id did.” It’s really a documentary approach. That’s what it is. It would have been prettier if I’d gone that way, but it didn’t work.
Capone: The last thing I want to ask you about is your whole Sundance experience. I watched it happen from a distance. I woke up that day, and the movie was barely on my radar in terms of things to see that day. And by about mid-day, it was the most important film to see at the festival. At what point were you able to sit back and go, “Okay. We got it. People like it. We made the right calls.”
AGR: I was clueless until the film started to play that day. The last time we screened it was early October for friends and family in New York. Then we were working, working, working on it, working on it, working on it, being obsessive about details, then we get into Sundance, and it’s all about finishing. Even the font that was created for the film, there was a hand-written font—“Oh that’s too quirky. We need something that was our own identity.” Everything, the music—Eno was writing new stuff and how do you replace stuff without seeing if it works? It’s too big of a chance. You’re about to go and you can’t swap a song, and something that was already in as temp might be the best way.
I was very sick leading up to Sundance, so all of a sudden, you had the flu two days before, and you’re up on the stage, all of a sudden you’re there with all these people, and you know all the mistakes in there. That’s all you see. So there we are, it’s like giving birth, watch me. During the process when the movie was screening, like 20 minutes in, 30 minutes in, Jeremy Dawson, my producer, sitting behind me, tapped me on the shoulder because we felt it was catching. People were laughing, people were going with it. It’s really emotional even thinking about it. People were really feeling it, and then by the end, I was feeling it. I had let myself go. I’d accepted that whatever happens, this is the best I could have done. This is my best under these conditions by the filmmaker that I am today. By next year, I will probably do a better version of this, but this is me having to let it go, this is out in the world now. There’s nothing I could do. All the mistakes are there forever, and that’s it.
And then it screened for the first time at my dad’s dedication. It was the first time it screened for my mom, and I hadn’t told her; my sister was there. So it was quite emotional. A lot of my high school friends from Laredo [Texas] had flown in for that. People I’ve known since birth, and they all knew him and they got it. So when the ovation happened by total strangers but being surrounded by people you knew so well, it was all very emotional. That’s when you knew maybe it’s not just us that liked it. It’s a weird movie that talks about Herzog and Powell-Pressburger, you know? Who’s going to get it? Who’s going to want it? Really, that was the thing. Who’s going to want a movie that references that, and are they going to force us to spoof other movies to make it be more commercial? Is that going to happen? It didn’t.
Capone: It’s a little film history class. Hopefully people will be inspired to check out those films.
AGR: I hope so. It was pleasure speaking with you.
