A depressed man and a dead body become the best of friends, and in the process teach each other about the meaning and joy of life. And that’s pretty much all you need to know about the plot of SWISS ARMY MAN, the first feature from music video pioneers Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (collectively known as Daniels), who also wrote the film. The film stars Paul Dano (as the breathing man) and Daniel Radcliffe (as the friendly corpse), two of the most game actors working today for being a part of this beautifully strange and ultimately heart-gripping work. I had a chance to sit down with Daniels recently in Chicago, and we got deep into their extraordinary film, which will likely be one of my favorite films of 2016. Please enjoy my chat with Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert…
Capone: Let me just start out talking about Daniel Radcliffe for Manny. It’s fascinating to watch him not use the tools of acting—there’s very little vocal change, expressions, gestures, all the obvious things that actors use. How did you know he was your guy? Did you audition him? Did he try out a few things before you decided he was the guy? Or did you just know?
Dan Kwan: It’s a really weird thing when you’re starting out as a first-time director, asking big actors to come on board, because you’re not allowed to ask for am audition because that’s considered bad taste. It’s really odd. So it was really hard for us to figure out what Manny needed in a performer. We knew that we wanted someone who obviously was a risk taker, which Daniel Radcliffe is for sure. He’s probably one of the more interesting performers we have today, doing all sorts of things, not only in film but also on stage. He’s always challenging himself, which is really awesome. We knew we wanted someone who could sing, and he has done some Broadway musical work.
We also knew we wanted someone who the audience would be endeared to. It’s such a strange role. They’re not allowed to do much, like you said, so having someone who is just immediately endearing was pretty key for us. And Daniel Radcliffe, from the moment we met him on Skype, we were like “Oh my god, you’re the sweetest man we’ve ever met.” In fact, he inspired us to make the character even more endearing, because once we saw how he was in real life we’re like “Let’s just capture this personality and try to funnel it into this strange character and make it that much more sweet. Then finally, the bonus thing, was if we can do some sort of stunt casting thing on top of all those things, that would be awesome to have someone go “What is he doing in that movie?” [laughs]
Daniel Scheinert: Yeah, it makes the first chunk of the movie more engaging, because you’re watching a guy drag around a corpse, sure, but you’re also watching Dan Radcliffe and wondering “Is he going to talk? Why is Daniel Radcliffe in this movie? Did he really do that? That’s really him right there.”
DK: Yeah, there’s an interesting narrative to the whole thing that makes it that much more confounding, which I think is really exciting. In the end, it was a happy accident that all those things came together with Dan Radcliffe, but the biggest thing we were looking for is, we cast Paul first and asked him who’s someone you’d love to work with? You’re going to be working with them very intimately and you know actors better than we do, because you know that world, you’ve talked to all those people. Who do you think would be right for this role or excited about this role? And Dan Radcliffe was already on our short list, and Paul suggested him because his girlfriend Zoe [Kazan] did that movie WHAT IF.
DS: And we’re like, “Oh, he starred in a movie opposite your girlfriend, and she had good things to say?” I mean, that’s a pretty high compliment.
Capone: I think he’s going to get most of the attention, but Paul, I don’t think he’s ever been funnier than he is here. And it’s strange because it comes out of this desperation about his life initially. Not to ruin anything about the end of the movie, but there’s that moment where he says, “That was me,” and that is the funniest line reading. I’ve never seen a guy more quietly proud about something.
DK: He was on “Late Night with Stephen Colbert” last week and he did the pitch line of like and said “The directors pitched it to me as the movie that starts with a fart that makes you laugh and ends with a fart that makes you cry.” He didn’t crack a smile, he didn’t laugh, and he was just like so sincere. He was like, “Think about that! Just think about that!”
DS: The audience was dying with laughter, mainly because Paul was just so dry about it.
DK: There were folks commenting about it saying, “Paul Dano is so hilarious; he didn’t even crack a smile. I have to see this movie.” And reading those, I was like “Yeah, that is what’s incredible about Paul in this movie. He gets the joke then he takes it seriously.” He dances that line of never winking at the camera, but understanding humor just enough to take his honest performance on the route that’s going to make you laugh. It’s really smart. He’s a very smart guy.
Capone: I love that you leave it open as to whether everything we’re seeing is just in his head, is either just delusional because he’s so desperate for a friend, or just because he’s starving, or whatever. I’m not even convinced at the very end that we’re still not in his head. You leave it up to us to decide. Tell me why that was important to leave that open ended.
DK: It’s one of those weird things that just happened naturally while we were in the process of writing. We don’t go into any of our projects with any big ideas, except for the silly ones. We allow everything to happen and fall where it falls, and we tried versions where we tried to explain a little bit more, or infuse it with a little bit more objectivity, and it really killed the magic of the movie. I think what we ended up realizing is, as long as it’s emotionally coherent and pulled you along, that it wouldn’t, at least for us, take you out of it, and instead it would kind of allow you to fall deeper into the strange dream of this story.
DS: So logic mattered less than emotion, as we were ranking them. There were things we felt really passionately we needed to make clear. We wanted to make sure this movie wasn’t ambiguous to a fault, like one of those frustrating movies where you completely check out. We really wanted to have a tight E.T.-esque spine at times. And that was hard to find, that balance of what’s good ambiguity and what’s bad ambiguity.
DK: We definitely tried versions where we leaned into what we thought audiences would expect. “It was all in his head the whole time” or “He hung himself at the beginning, and the rest was a fever dream.”
Capone: That was my third option, that he’s dead the whole time. But ultimately I decided “I’m not going to be that cynical about it.”
DK: Yeah, exactly. I think at one point we made a joke about it in the script where Hank is very self aware of the fact that “Maybe it’s just all in my head and I’m dying right now.” Even then, it all felt like too much and took away from the magic of their relationship, and what it feels like to find someone or something that you can connect with, whether it’s all in your head or it’s an actual thing that other people can experience as well. It’s still special.
I think for Hank and hopefully for the audience that will be enough. For Hank, it doesn't matter which one it was. He’s had a profound experience and now he can kind of continue on with his life and hopefully he can forgive himself enough to move on. Whether or not society forgives him or not, who knows? At this point, it doesn't really matter.
DS: The shortest version in my head of all that is that I love movies that can be a little bit of a litmus test, where you can leave the theater and the audience has to choose whether to be optimistic or pessimistic, as opposed to prescribing the moral.
DK: Your reaction almost tells you a little bit more about yourself.
DS: Right, that’s the highest compliment that people are talking about it.
Capone: That’s why I said what I did in my introduction yesterday: If anything makes you uncomfortable about this film, figure out why, because may tell you something about yourself.
DS: That was a great intro. I really loved that. I hadn't heard that before, but it’s really special.
Capone: You mentioned you wanted somebody who could sing, and the use of music in this is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, because a), it’s part of the story that they sing together and that Hank teaches Manny these songs and melodies. But also, anytime there’s music in the film, I always believe they can hear it, even the score. This’s part of their story, because Paul is walking him though these movie scenarios, and all the music we hear is the soundtrack to those. Sometimes they sing it, hum it, dance to it.
DS: I think early on when we were writing the movie, we got excited about the fact that we all live our lives as if we’re like the star of our own movie, and that we could do our CAST AWAY could be an exploration of that, as opposed to man vs nature. It’s about man grappling with the story he’s telling about himself, so without it being too post-modern we were pretty excited that the music would be a narrator, like Hank narrating his own life. And when music came in, it would tell you a little about him. It wouldn’t just be the director prescribing an emotion; it would be Hank feeling certain things.
DK: That’s why the first half of the movie is really interesting, because the music is very self serious and moody, and yet there are farts happening. Like the sequence where he’s dragging the body at the beach and there’s just farting, the music is so haunting and sad.
DS: And we tried versions that were more upbeat.
DK: Yeah, but it just made sense. There’s a really weird contrast where our character is just miserable and he’s like dragging around this farting body, and it’s not funny at all to him. He thinks he’s in another movie, when really he’s in this movie. He believes he’s in a Sundance film, when really he’s in something else. Those contrasts were really funny.
But still, it was really fun to find that tonal balance, but the other end of things, more simply, it was an exploration of the fact that we all sing in our heads all the time. These are melodies that would get stuck in your head if you were stuck in the middle of nowhere, and singing to yourself is just as embarrassing as anything else in the film. That’s why you sing to yourself in the shower. That’s why people sing to themselves in the car. But you would never do it with people around, because it’s just another small social taboo.
Capone: …in a film filled with them. Hank says it a lot too: “That’s bad talk. We don’t talk about masturbating, we don’t fart in front of someone.” Let’s talk about that—the idea of defying societal expectations. You start out with a lot of farting and vomiting water, and it’s almost like you’re daring the audience to like the film from the beginning. At the screening last night, the first couple of times Manny farts in the water, there was a guy just down the isle from me that’s like, “Come on!” And by the end of the film, it’s a meaningful noise of expression. Hank is teaching Manny what it is to be alive, and, of course, he’s teaching himself that too.
DK: Exactly. I think one thing we tried in earlier drafts is to really hide a lot of that stuff. We knew we wanted the movie to be about a farting corpse, but we were ashamed of that too as we were writing it, so we tried to bury that in the writing, so there wasn’t that much of it and kept it pretty simple and filled it up with other interesting things. But then it just felt wrong, and the premise of the movie almost felt like it didn’t fit into the film as we were writing. So we eventually decided we had to lean into the body humor against our better judgement, and what we realized we were doing was, in some weird way, bathing people with these things like farts, boners, and the scatological, hopefully to the point where it lost meaning, so the film could fill in new meaning for them.
In a really weird way it’s a strange meditation. When you really do think about it, you have to re-examine why did that guy go, “Come on!” the first time there was a fart. Because the worst thing you can do as a filmmaker is put a fart joke in a movie, because it’s the lowest common denominator, it’s the easiest, cheap joke ever. It’s frustrating because we were aware of the fact that there’s so much immature humor here that eventually it loses its humor, and people get angry until finally they start to realize the sounds lose meaning, then our characters come in and re-contextualize and give you something really beautiful and sweet to think about. Hopefully by the end, the next time a movie has a fart in it, you’ll remember this movie and how it tried to challenge you in that way.
Capone: “The next time you hear a fart sound, you’re going to think of our movie.”
DK: [laughs] Yeah, I hope so.
Capone: Let’s just talk about some of the most creative aspect in the film. One is how you came up with all the different ways that the body could be used as tools. That little dance that Paul does with Manny’s body at the end to start the fire is wonderful. He’s clearly done it many times.
DS: I’m so glad you called it a dance.
Capone: That’s what it is. It’s very choreographed. He’s clearly rehearsed it and done it many times.
DS: Yeah, that was a goal of ours. We wanted it to escalate to a dance. We were admittedly bummed that we didn’t have more opportunities to do it. That was like our one chance. “This is them when they’ve got it down pat.”
DK: You’ve seen their relationship hit the peak.
DS: Yeah, It comes very naturally to us and our creative process to come up with silly blocking and weird body gags. In a lot of ways, that was like the easiest part. We get frustrated with the story and just try to return to that well and be like, “Let’s just have a little bit of fun now. Let’s come up with like a funny fight scene or la funny way to use this body.” It’s a very creatively fun thing to bounce between to be like, “Let’s talk story, now let’s take a step out and talk visual gags.” The first draft had 20 times more powers and way too many fight scenes and gags. The hardest process was whittling it down and finding the ones that had a heart to them and an emotional worth, which was scary at times, because we had to throw out some of our favorite bits.
Capone: Such as?
DS: [laughs] Very long into the script writing process, Manny had hair that you could rip out just like a tape dispenser, so you could pull it out, and we were going to have these 30-foot-long wigs and have them hang from the trees like spider webs of mangled, wiry, Daniel Radcliffe hair.
DK: At one point when the body washes ashore, he was going to have a big hole in the back of his head, and Hank would be able to look through the back of his head and adjust his eyeballs and use it as binoculars. Another version of that was the sun would go through the back of his head…
DS: Like a magnifying glass, so he can start fires, almost like laser beams. So it took us awhile to realize that a lot of this movie is about things that we’re ashamed of and things we don’t talk about, but laser eyes aren’t that. “That’s not very shameful. Let’s save that for a different movie.”
Capone: I will say, the biggest gross-out reaction to the film was not the farts; it was to Hank shaving with Manny’s teeth. Having that much hair in his mouth seemed to get people.
DS: Oh really? Yeah. We actually changed that since Sundance. That’s one of the only things we recut. Because a lot of people were like, “Why did the beard disappear?” And we were like, “The shaving is too subtle.”
DK: It was something that needed to be bigger. Radcliffe was so excited about that scene. He had so much fun with that.
DS: Yeah, he’s like, “Put more hair in my mouth.” He was so into it.
Capone: The other part that goes toward your creativity is building all of those recreations, especially the bus set. That taps into the things that are important to Hank. Talk about creating those.
DS: For folks who haven't seen the movie yet, as Hank tries to remind the corpse what life is like back home, he builds sets to try and remind him. So we took him out of the world, and it was really fun to try to not only talk about the world without seeing it but try to recreate it. What you maybe picked up on was, when you make movies, everything’s pretend. It’s so funny how you can move a camera from pointing at the guy this way to pointing at the guy this way and suddenly a cheap set that you built in four hours can suddenly look so great, and we wanted to take that to the utmost degree.
DK: It’d be like a fun metaphor for imagination in general, with just the right attitude, it all jells together, and if the emotion is there, then it will work.
DS: I love when people compliment the production design, because in a lot of ways, we spent a long time figuring out how shitty we could make it. We’d have to push them to say, “No. Let’s make it dumber. More garbage. Make it uglier, but not from this one angle.” Because that’s kind of the fun of it. It was very important that it felt like Hank could have built all of this. Sometimes our team we’re too talented. We’re like “That looks like it took you a week, because it took you a week, and it looks beautiful, but we can’t use that. We need it to look like a man drew a smiley face on a milk carton. That’s it.” Then we’re going to put beautiful music under it and photograph it beautifull.
DK: It was like a happy accident when we were hiking through the woods in these beautiful locations, and we just saw trash everywhere. One of the most beautiful images I saw was in a big redwood trunk there was just like a half-drunken, 2-liter Orange Crush bottle. This bright orange thing in this beautiful redwood forest. We’re like “This makes perfect sense for our film. We should work with that.”
Because the whole film is taking trash and the things we try to hide and the things we don’t want to be associated with us and reconstituting it to something beautiful and trying to redeem those things. So using trash to recreate what life is like back at home and what home is felt like a really strong, interesting image. On top of all that, the memory he’s recurring himself is actually a really lonely memory. It’s when he’s happiest, but then it’s also a picture of an incredibly shameful moment, and turning that into something beautiful seems to be really interesting. And it reveals a lot about Hank as he’s doing it, which we thought was a fun way to explore what his life was like back home.
Capone: Best of luck with this. I can’t wait to see what you do next.
