Mike Birbiglia is one of my favorite people right now, both to talk to and to just watch. He began getting well known as a stand-up comedian who more resembled a guy doing a one-man show talking about his life. His gifts as a storyteller made him a popular feature on Ira Glass’s “This American Life” series on NPR, and one of those stories/one-man shows/books become Birbiglia’s first film as writer-director, SLEEPWALK WITH ME, which arrived after he did some supporting roles in films like CEDAR RAPIDS and YOUR SISTER’S SISTER.
After the success of SLEEPWALK, Birbiglia began popping up everywhere from “Girls,” “Orange Is the New Black,” and THE FAULT IN OUR STARS to Joe Swanberg’s DIGGING FOR FIRE and last year’s hit TRAINWRECK, in which he played Amy Schumer’s brother-in-law. Birbiglia continued to tour as a comic and for his one-man show “My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend,” but during all that time he also kept an improv group, “Mike Birbiglia’s Dream,” going at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade in Chelsea, New York. A couple of regularly appearing cast members of that troupe, Tami Sagher and Chris Gethard, show up in Birbiglia’s latest film as writer-director, DON’T THINK TWICE, a tremendous film about a hard-working improv group that also features characters played by Gillian Jacobs, Keegan-Michael Key, and Kate Miccuci.
Although the film is set in the world of improv, it does not make fun of the lifestyle, although it does admit that this career path does not lead to many other career’s in the world of entertainment, and for some that may be fine. For others, it’s traumatic to admit that your dreams of making a living at comedy probably won’t happen. The film is about admitting when it’s time to give up and start living and enjoying life, and it’s fantastic. I had a chance to sit down with Birbiglia and his co-star Jacobs at SXSW in March. This is the third or fourth time I’ve chatted with him; my first time with her after being a devoted “Community” fan, and they were great together. With that, please enjoy my talk with Mike Birbiglia and Gillian Jacobs…
Capone: When I saw you last year in Chicago for TRAINWRECK, you wouldn’t really talk about this movie. You were being very secretive and coy about it. So when I walked into the film last night, I had no idea what it was about.
Mike Birbiglia: My God. That’s so funny.
Capone: And just having come off the Del Close documentary [THANK YOU, DEL: THE STORY OF THE DEL CLOSE MARATHON] the day before, I was like holy crap, you made a movie about improv.
MB: I was [at the DEL CLOSE screening] too.
Capone: I know, I saw you there. Did you even know that doc was going to be here?
MB: Janet [Pierson, head of SXSW Film] told me. I don’t even know if I’m allowed to say this—Janet accepted the movie 21 hours after I submitted it, which I’ve never even heard of and is the opposite of everything in my career. I’m still waiting on some phone calls on some things I applied for 10 years ago.
Gillian Jacobs: The calls are coming. Keep waiting.
MB: And she said “Actually, there’s a documentary we’re programming that we think is great programing with it,” the DEL CLOSE film. And I’m actually in that. I’m with Amy Poehler and Nick Kroll backstage. I don’t even know why I’m in it. The director Todd Bieber emailed me and goes, “You’re in it, very briefly.”
What’s amazing is the Del Close Marathon is where I really started seriously improvising with Tami Sagher and Chris Gethard, who play Bill and Lindsay. It was probably three or four years ago when we started doing this show called “Mike Birbiglia’s Dream,” and then I got into improvising a lot more and went back to my college roots. I improvised all through college and a few years after. Then I moved towards stand-up and making movies and circled back. The reason I circled back is because after I made SLEEPWALK WITH ME, I realized that the way that I learned how to be a film director was all the principles of improv that are at the beginning of the movie. The rules of improv: saying “Yes” and how it’s all about the group and collaboration, and I went “Oh my god, I love improv.” It taught me so much that I didn’t even know.
Capone: It’s funny when you begin the movie with Del Close’s rules of improve, I thought, “Wait, I can pass this test because I just learned this yesterday.”
MB: [laughs] That’s funny.
Capone: The decision to set a film in this world, where did that idea come from, because there have been movies that the behind the scenes of a TV show and about the world of stand-up.
MB: Including [SLEEPWALK WITH ME].
Capone: So this is the other half of your life. Talk about the inherent differences.
MB: The seed of it came from a conversation with my wife, who’s a poet, and she and I are always in dialogue about ideas and books and film and theater. We see a ton of stuff and discuss it endlessly. She had this observation when she saw me improvise at Del Close Marathon. She goes, “It’s so amazing that your stand-up friends are so mean to each other and hierarchical—this person’s the headliner, this person’s the middle act. Literally they’re called the middle act.
[Everybody laughs]
GJ: You know where you stand.
MB: You’re in the middle. And she said, “Your improv friends are all equals on stage. This person’s a sitcom star millionaire, and this person lives in a one-bedroom in Bushwick with five dudes on an air mattress, but on stage you’re all equal.” And I was like “That’s a movie.” I was convinced of it. The moment she said that I was like, that’s a movie. And I wrote this thing on my wall because I thought it was a cool idea. I wrote “Art is socialism, life is capitalism.” And I was like “That could be a movie. You could make a movie just on that idea., and an improv group could be that metaphor.” Even the chairs are the metaphor. I wrote “musical chairs” on my wall and tarted making pictures of like, “This is what it would be with six chairs, five chairs, four chairs, three chairs, and one chair.”
Capone: And the idea to use both your improv friends and people who haven't done it before, why did you want to mix that up and what was the importance of not having it just be the people you’ve worked with before?
MB: It all comes down to chemistry. You want a group of six people who feel like believable friends. You want a romantic couple to feel like a real romantic couple. It’s so crazy how a lot of it is putting pictures on a wall next to each other, and do you believe these people are together? There are so many different variables to it. Lena Dunham, who’s a close friend, read the script and she goes, “Gillian Jacobs is Sam.” And I went and I watched everything. She’s brilliant in everything, but I don’t see Sam, and Lena was like, “Well, Gillian can do anything.” It ended up being the most prophetic thing anyone said about the whole movie.
Capone: Talk about the crash course, the training in improv. Was there a specific moment you remember or a particular day when you feel like something clicked for you, that you said “Now I know how to turn on that part of my brain or open up that part of my brain”?
GJ: Yeah, so we had two weeks, and for Kate Micucci and I, it was really the first time ever to do improv in a formal way. I don’t know if there was one moment that clicked, but certainly working with [improv teacher] Liz Allen was a really profound experience beyond just like learning about improv, but it was like one of the best acting classes I’ve ever been in.
MB: For all of us, it was.
GJ: It was also very refreshing for me, because I’ve had a lot of bad experiences with teachers. So to go back and have a really cathartic, supportive experience that made me feel that level of excitement that I used to feel about doing theater when I was a little kid, about being in plays, that was really lovely. Also I didn’t know Tami or Chris at all, and I had never seen them perform, so realizing how profoundly talented they both are, that was really exciting. That’s what I love about this movie: everyone is good on stage. It’s not like a group where there’s a weak link, and you’re like “I get why that person didn’t get ‘Weekend Live.’”
MB: Some screenwriters, prominent screenwriters, pointed out at certain points of the script, “Miles has to be much worse than Jack. Right now, he’s as funny as him.” And I go, “It’s subtle.” Everyone, as Del Close says, has to play to the height of your intelligence. Everyone needs to be at the height of their talent, and it has to be this fractional that that person makes it and that person doesn’t.
GJ: Because that’s life.
MB: That’s life.
GJ: It’s not like one person isn’t successful because they’re better most of the time. It’s so many combinations of factors. So the fact that Tami and Chris really shine as improvisers in the film, you understand why these people stay together as a group, why they like doing these shows together.
MB: And why it’s heartbreaking that it doesn’t work out for them the way they want.
GJ: Yeah, I thought that was really exciting.
Capone: The interesting thing about the dynamic is that, even the way they fight, it feels more like the way a family fights, than the way co-workers fight. It’s very personal.
MB: Totally. It’s through jokes, yeah.
Capone: There’s lots of passive-aggressive behavior going on.
GJ: You can go to that red button, like in the fight between you and Tami.
MB: She had to come to me in between takes and be like, “I don’t mean this. This isn’t me. This isn’t Tami.”
GJ: But you wrote it. You made her do it.
MB: “You don’t have it, Miles. You never did.” [laughs] How masochistic is that for me to write?
GJ: Yeah, more, more.
MB: “You don’t have it Miles!”
[Everybody laughs]
GJ: You just externalized our inner critic and put it in the mouth of somebody else.
MB: It’s just hitting me that that’s what I wrote. I wrote it so that someone comes at me and says, “You don’t have it.”
GJ: Yeah, my therapist would have a lot to say about that.
MB: Oh, yeah. Mine too.
Capone: How was it being on the receiving end of that?
MB: It was hard. We got kicked off the street that night by the cops.
GJ: Do you remember the drunk man who was heckling us? He was this guy, these two drunk people left a restaurant. It was late at night. And he walks by and goes, “Well, this is clearly a student film. That’s a terrible frame, that’s amateurish. This is terrible.”
MB: Heckling. Heckling.
GJ: No, but loudly for minutes, walked away, came back, and did it some more. And we are under the gun. We’re being kicked off. We have 20 minutes to finish the scene and this drunk man is saying, “Clearly this is a student film, because that’s a terrible shot.” We were like, “Fuck you.” But also, we were shooting in New York.
MB: It was two in the morning, our permit ran out at 2am, and the cops showed up, and our AD begged and goes, “Can we have one more take?” He’s an amazing AD. He comes in and he goes [whispers], “Alright, guys. We’ve got one more take, so we’re just going to roll camera. We’re never going to call cut. It’s going to be a 20-minute take where we do the scene from all sides and get all the coverage.” And that’s what we did.”
Capone: That’s indie film making.
GJ: Yeah. “And clearly an amateurish frame.”
MB: Yeah, exactly. Right?
Capone: But was he right? That’s the question.
GJ: No!
MB: No, no. The framing’s great. The framing’s phenomenal.
GJ: No, it’s a great scene. I used to live in New York. I did a lot of indie films in New York, but I haven’t worked as much there recently. it’s like “Ah, welcome home. Intelligent heckling, but still so wrong.” Not someone going like, “Fuck you.” Someone going like, “Your framing’s off.”
MB: When Gillian and I first met on Skype, I was like, “It’s going to be really low budget indie stuff.” She was like, “Shoot in the subway? Shoot in the street? Steal shots? I’m game. Whatever you want to do.” It’s raw.
Capone: For a lot of people seeing this, this might be their first exposure to this level of the improv scene and professionals doing it. What are you hoping people take away from the artistry that goes into improv?
MB: I think that I wrote this thing on my wall when I was writing the film, “What happens when life gets in the way of dreams?” And I feel like, in a lot of ways, that’s what the film is about, and I think that’s okay. I want people to feel hopefully a catharsis of “We don't all have to have the same dream, we don’t have to have our dream come true in the exact way that we imagine it, because it can’t.” Even the person in the movie who’s dream does come true is struggling.
GJ: I also feel like Mike gave us this book, which you see my character read in the film about the history of Second City.
MB: “Something Wonderful Right Away.”
GJ: Yeah. And the very first days of it, it had a social purpose. It was supposed to be about reflecting people’s lives and their community back to them, and I felt that theme, the greater good, the importance, the power of improv, I felt that through Mike and what respect he has for it. And by having me and various people quote people from that book, you feel that this was created in a spirit of real optimism, and it was supposed to be of service to the community. Even though it can also be making people laugh and being very funny and being very witty and clever, there is a greater purpose to it.
MB: I know how much of a cinefile you are, as we are, Craig Mazin has this great line on the Scriptnotes podcast. I don’t know if it’s his own thing or if he’s quoting somebody. Craig Mazin says, “The difference between TV and film is that TV is a chemistry experiment, and movies are a biology experiment.” In TV, you can keep tinkering. Season 2 you can go “This chemical works with this and this chemical works with this. Let’s try this chemical.” Biology is one shot. You put this life together and you go for it, and it is what it is. And it crashes and burns, like improv. Some movies are great, some movies are terrible. You put so much heart into it. But in some ways, I’m a real cinefile and I resisted going to TV for a long time because the things that movies make me feel are so profound. For me, if you go into something and spend 90 minutes with someone and you meet a group of people, you experience laughter and sadness, and then come to a resolution with those characters all within 90 minutes. For me, that’s the most special experience.
Capone: One of the things I learned from the DEL CLOSE documentary was that Del believed what separates improv from all other acting art forms is that it’s of the moment. It’s isn’t meant to be captured for the ages, but you’ve done that, the DEL CLOSE MARATHON movie has done it. Before I saw your film, I saw Zach Woods, and he was actually talking to Chris…
MB: Here?
Capone: Yeah, he was here. Just yesterday, before your screening. But Zach didn’t know he was in that documentary. He knew he was interviewed for it, but I said no it’s not an interview. All your improv is in it.
MB: Tons of his stuff.
Capone: I told him, and he was like, “Oh, they actually have improv in the movie?” I’m like, “Yeah.” He didn’t seem happy about that. At first I thought that was a weird reaction, but then I thought maybe it’s because of what Del said, because some people maybe think it shouldn’t be filmed.
GJ: Well, we’re also self critical.
Capone: And then he started grilling me. “How much am I in it? What am I saying? Do I sound like a dumbass?” And I had just met him.
MB: He is one of the absolute best. As an improvisor, he is uncanny. You’ve seen him, right?
GJ: I’ve never seen him improvise, but I saw him in IN THE LOOP, Armando Iannucci’s movie, and I was like, “Who is this person?” Then when he was on “The Office,” I was on “Community,” so we were at some NBC party, and I basically ran up to him and was like, “You are amazing!” Then I learned he was like boy wonder at UCB in New York.
Capone: So what is your feeling about filming improv?
MB: For us, it was very important that we film it. We created the aesthetic with Steadicam, so the camera itself is like another player on stage.
Capone: Right. Those sequences are shot differently than the rest of the film.
MB: Yeah. It is really important. We did these readings to get the movie in shape. It was like 10 or 11 readings in my house. I’d invite my favorite filmmakers to come over. Phil Lord came over, Jorma Taccone came over, Marielle Heller came over, Greta Gerwig came over at one point, and she was like, “I have no notes. I love this movie. Spend a lot of time thinking about the aesthetic of how you shoot the improv scenes.” And we did. Me and [cinematographer] Joe Anderson spent an extraordinary amount of time asking, “How do we do this?” because it’s important that we feel like these are our friends, that it’s not this objective theater piece that we’re distant from.
Capone: Congratulations and best of luck with this. It was really great to meet you.
