Although I’ve done multiple Q&As with both filmmaker Joe Swanberg and actor Jake Johnson separately and together, as well as interviewed both of these lovely gentlemen separately, our recent sit-down last month at the SXSW Film Festival was the first time I had them both across the table from me in an interview situation. This auspicious occasion took place the day after the premiere of their latest collaboration (after DRINKING BUDDIES and DIGGING FOR FIRE) WIN IT ALL, which the pair co-wrote and shot in their mutual hometown of Chicago.
In the film, Jake plays Eddie, a degenerate gambler who plays poker in illegal gambling dens around the city but never seems to end up a winner. One day, a friend of his he used to borrow money from asks him to hold a duffle bag of what turns out to be cash while he goes to prison for a little while. Naturally, Eddie can’t resist dipping into the bag for small loans, a misstep that forces him to lean on both his Gambler Anonymous sponsor (Keegan-Michael Key) and his brother (Joe Lo Truglio) for moral and financial support. Although probably not the best time for this to happen, he also get involved in a new relationship with a woman named Eva (Mexican actress Aislinn Derbez, in her first English-language film).
The film premiered on Netflix on April 7, and it’s very funny, well worth watching, and offers up a truly wonderful acting turn for Johnson. WIN IT ALL is a pitch-perfect exercise in blending comedy and drama, and it may come as no surprise to some that the film marks the first time Swanberg has shot from a fully written-out screenplay (although he still allowed his actors to improvise whenever they wanted, as he tends to do on his shoots).
Swanberg is in the process of preparing for the second season of his Netflix series “Easy,” and expect to see Johnson opposite Tom Cruise in this summer’s THE MUMMY (after positively killing it in JURASSIC WORLD a couple summers ago), while he waits to see if his Fox series “New Girl” gets a sixth season renewal. I should also mention that Johnson voices Grouchy Smurf in this week’s big release SMURFS: THE LOST VILLAGE, and is quite funny in it. With that, please enjoy my spirited and very funny conversation with Joe Swanberg and Jake Johnson…
Capone: Joe, you said you had seen Joe Lo Truglio in QUEENS OF COUNTRY. Did you see that in Chicago?
Joe Swanberg: Well, I actually met Joe in Chicago when he was there with that movie.
Capone: I did too. When you said that during the Q&A last night, I almost shit myself, because I don’t know anyone else who’s seen that movie. It’s Joe and Lizzy Caplan, and it’s great, and it never opened and wasn’t even available for years after.
JS: So I was trying to work with Lizzy at the time, so she was in Chicago and I was like, “Great, let’s meet up.” And she was like, “I’m bringing my friend Joe,” which is how I met Joe. I was in Nashville, at the film festival, which is where I saw the movie. He’s amazing in it, and so is Ron Livingston. It’s really a shame that that movie didn’t get seen more.
Capone: I don’t remember what the festival was in Chicago where it played. It was some place I’ve never been before or sense.
JS: I remember. I don’t think it exists anymore. It was a weird music and film thing in Wicker Park. That movie screened, they had some bands play.
Capone: Over the three films you guys have done so far, has the collaboration changed at all? Do you feel like it’s evolved? That it’s less what it was and more what it is? How has it changed?
JS: I think so. There’s a trust system that wasn’t there the first time. You know, that feeling of collaborating with any person for the first time, you’re like “Alright, who are you? Can I trust you? Are you going to be there? Are you going to do this thing for me? Are you going to come in and be a total dick and treat everybody bad? What is this going to be?” Now we know, which means we can relax in a certain way. I’m thankful that you, like me, don’t like to do the same thing twice. So there’s no part of our collaboration that’s like, “Cool, we just nailed that. Let’s do it again.” It’s like “We got that one. That one didn’t work as well. This thing’s cool, but we’ve done those.”
Jake Johnson: I think absolutely. I think with Joe, what I’ve really loved and has really kind of inspired me to want to stay in this business and keep playing this weird game is that each one of these projects we’re allowed to fully deconstruct it and do it a different way of dong things. With everything else I’ve done in my career, it actually all feels like the same job, but the person opposite you goes from Zooey Deschanel and then all of a sudden it’s Tom Cruise [laughs]. It is different because it’s you, but this is all the same, and it feels the same. People go like “What’s different? I get it, it was a huge set.” But really, it’s the same coverages, the same two shots—the tights, the singles, the this—and the more budget, the more sizes they’ll do, but it’s all the same. And with Joe, it’s actually different. “So how do we wanna tell this story?” Because Joe is confident enough that if we said “Do you want to make a movie about three guys doing an interview?” He’d go, “Let’s do it today.” We’ll go, “What happens?” “We’ll find it.”
But we also say, “Joe, let’s write a 100-page script that’s got a three-act structure and let’s beat it out.” And he’ll go, “Great.” With WIN IT ALL, we did the work. So we said “What happens when we do a traditional, three-act structure with all the turns all the twists, so it’s story, story, story, story. Let’s nail story, so when it’s done, let’s go character, character, character, character.” Rather than “We’ve got character, and let’s see where the characters take the story,” I pitched Joe, Joe and I talked about an idea, and I said “Let me beat it out very generically and pitch it to you.” So Eddie is like this: Character A, hero, meets I think the character was literally named Hero, Girl was girl, Sponsor, Brother, and it was like, this is what happens. These are the arcs. Do you like that diagram of a story? And he’s like, yeah. Now let’s get in and write it together so that arc is real.
Capone: You said last night you guys actually wrote dialogue, even if it wasn’t the dialogue we hear in the film. Was this the most you’ve ever done that?
JJ: Yes. This is the most we’ve ever done.
JS: By a lot.
Capone: Why did you decide to do it that way rather than the way you had done it before, since you still did improvise?
JJ: Because a lot of it did get in. So I can answer from my perspective, and you can answer from yours. I always love being on set with Joe, and I never want it to go away. I want to make as many movies with him as I possibly can. For me, I had an unsatisfactory feeling with DIGGING FOR FIRE, in that we did write it, but all of a sudden I was watching it at Sundance, and the audience had a different feeling than we imagined, and there was a lot of it and I thought like “Ah, fuck.” I don’t want this [gestures between him and Swanberg] to go away, and I thought “Well what if we just make a big change and try this?”
And we both said this experiment might not work. It might not feel like the movies we want to make, and if so, then that’s over and we have to try again. And I also told Joe, “From my end, I want to work really hard as an actor, but I like working hard on story.” But I don’t like working hard as an actor. It gets so boring—take after take. It’s one of the most boring technical jobs. And I go, “I’m going to push you on the story,” but Joe loves writing on set. Joe loves working on set. Joe would do 18-hour days having fun. So I go, “I’ll push you now, you push me then.” So we just stayed on each other, and it was a process that for me was really satisfying.
JS: [pause] That’s not how I remember it.
[Everybody laughs]
JJ: Strike what he said.
JS: I remember Jake saying, “We’re going to work really hard on story, we’re going to work really hard on casting, we’re going to work really hard on set, we’re going to be in the editing room and work really hard.” And I was like, “Yes, Jake! Yes, Jake! Yes, Jake!” And then we got on set, and Jake was like, “I think two takes is enough.” I’m like, “You motherfucker. You were the one pushing me. No, we’re doing eight takes. You said you wanted six sizes, motherfucker; I’m giving you your six sizes”
JJ: I would go, “Come on, homeboy. We’re good.” I got young kids at home…
JS: I could feel him getting mad at me, and I would go, “Dude. I’m the guy who does one take. I’m doing this for you.”
JJ: The thing I didn’t plan is I bought my kids to Chicago. My daughters weren’t sleeping, so I was like, “I hear you, my dude. I’ve got two two year olds who literally didn’t sleep last night. I know we got it, I know you’re an editing wizard. You got it, my man.” And he’d go like, “Fuck off!”
When he’d be in L.A., he’d go, “I feel pretty good on this man.” I’d go, “I think we need another writing day,” and he’d go, “Okay.” And Joe would come to the house. We’d sit and write with our little dorky laptops. We’d send it to agents. I said “I want to send this to UTA. I want to get it to my agent. I respect him. I want to to hear his thoughts.” At first Joe was like, “I don’t send my stuff to agents before.” I’m like, “I would like to.” And my agent came back and said “We need more of a love story to connect with people.” We talked about it, and to Joe’s credit, he was like “then let’s build it.”
So then when we did get to set, I got the pie in my face [everybody laughs]. But honestly, that’s the fun of working together. That’s why it’s nice to keep going back, because we can push each other. We both want to make things we love. So in the end, I would leave and I was like “I’m really glad he pushed,” because if they let me run that set, and everyone was like “Yeah, we did get it,” he might be in post and I might be in post because he showed me an early cut and I have a lot of notes then. I’d be like “Where’s the coverage?” And he’d be like “We don’t have it on that one asshole. You were asleep.” And I was like “Well you should have gotten it, Scorsese. Never listen to an actor. That’s on you!”
[Everybody laughs]
Capone: As much as the dialogue is really great and crisp, I really love those scenes of you when you’re gambling where you’re just yelling at people. Every hand you lose, you have a comment on,. I’ve been at those tables. I know those guys. Those moments are really important to this character. That’s when we find the loser in him.
JS: Those scenes were really interesting to shoot, because I’m not a card player, but I am, as a filmmaker, somebody who would be ashamed to put any movie on screen if we hadn’t have gotten it right, especially because there’s no excuse. So we had a lot of conversations. How do we shoot cards in a new way? There have been a million movies about gamblers. What do we do to make it feel right? And then also, how do we structure a shoot day around what is inevitably a “who knows what’s going to happen”-type of scenario. So we talked approaches.
We’re like “Do we script the card game, literally down to the card, and then shoot it like that all broken up into different pieces?” And then we opted for, let’s overshoot, but let’s shoot real games. Let’s let the flow of the game happen. We know the sequence is only going to be two-minutes long. Nobody wants to sit there and watch the whole game unfold, but let’s shoot 32 minutes of card playing for our two-minute sequence, so we have the thing. Same with the camera, which in all those card games, I mean, you never know how this shit’s going to work. You just have an idea and you try it, but as I started looking at cuts of the card sequences, it felt so good to me because as not a card player, the thing that I worry about is when a movie is like “We’re going to be a poker movie about poker and we’re going to get it all right.” I’m like, “Dude, I don’t even know.”
Capone: I know people that hate gambling movies because they don’t get the poker right.
JJ: By the way, I am that person. That’s why the table at the end, the bit where my character talks about the table being the wrong shape, it’s because when we got there, it was the wrong table, so Joe and I had to have a talk, and we were like “Alright, let’s add a beat to make this about Eddie’s anxiety,” because we have to flip this because if you’re going to that game in real life, it’s not going to be that table with four players on at a Hold ‘Em table. It’s going to be the bigger table, and you’re going to have more players there. So we’re like “Okay, we have to make that adjustment.”
JS: It was a really nice combo of you knowing cards and me not knowing cards, where we could land the movie in what I think is the right spot, because I don’t want to go down the poker rabbit hole, honestly. As an audience member, I’m not interested. What I was always saying and wanting was, I just need to get the sense of how the game’s going. I’m not going to know anyway.
JJ: Joe was our meter because Joe would say “I get this. I get what’s happening.” Because if he gets it, that means other people get it. And at the table, what we were doing is we were playing, but it wasn’t real money, so there would be times where Joe would be like, “This is the sequence where Eddie’s winning.” So even if I wasn’t, I would say to the table like, “Guys, we’re blowing this one up.” [laughs] And then we all knew. But these players who are card players got to act like it’s really fun, we all know that guy, we all knows what happens to that guy when he’s winning and he thinks he’s the leader of the pack. Everyone knows him.
Capone: I obviously didn’t know how this movie was going to end, but if you had died, I would have been okay with that.
[Everybody laughs]
Capone: Here’s why: he died up. He would have died a winner. I think that’s how he would like to go.
JS: In the casket with a big smile on his face.
JJ: That would have been great ending [laughs].
JJ: Nick [Excitement, who plays Eddie’s friend and sideman at the final card game]’s going, “Don’t go.” And he’s like [whispers] “I want to go. I did it!” That’s amazing.
[Everybody laughs]
Capone: It could have gone in any direction, and I think it would have been satisfying.
JJ: What’s funny about the creation of Eddie is that you said he could die a winner because he broke even. This is a true loser where he did it. He did do it. He got all the money back THAT HE LOST. This guy just needs to break even to have a success story and die.
Capone: I play very small-stakes blackjack, and I’ve caught myself chasing that couple hundred bucks that I lost at the beginning for five hours, and if you play like that you never win.
JJ: I’m the same. My whole real experience is I’m always small stakes, so I’m just I’m going $100-$150, but the feeling is real. You leave and you're like “Holy shit, I’m so into it. Imagine if it was my house.” It’s the same feeling just on steroids.
Capone: Let’s talk about Aislinn. How did you incorporate her into your process in her first English-language film?
JS: We both talked to her. It’s always a trust process, but she made me laugh so much the first time I talked to her that I was basically asking her “Are you up for this challenge? I’ll believe in you, but do you want to dive right into the deep end on your first English-language movie? You’re going to take a career risk.” She’s super famous in Mexico. So it was like “You could come fall flat on your face in your very first movie out surrounded by well-known actors. Is that what you want?” And she was so game to go down for it. And you met her…
JJ: We had two wild cards. Joe Lo Truglio, you know what you’re going to get. We knew we didn’t want a lot of drama out of him, but if anybody can really do comedy as well as he can, they can do drama. I felt the same with Keegan. You can’t be that good of an actor and then not play serious.
Capone: He’s a trained actor.
JJ: Both those guys are excellent actors. She was the wild card, because we just didn’t know, but she just brought it. The other one was Nicky Excitement, the guy with the long hair who carries me out at the end. He was the other wild card because he’s got a big part. “You’ve got to be able to bring it. You’ve got to be present. You’ve got to be there,” and I think he murders it. So our two wild cards were Nicky, and Aislinn and they destroy it. And when they did destroy it, we had a feeling like “I think we have a movie here.” It’s like you’re on a team. I know what Joe’s going to do, I know what I’m going to do, I know what Keegan’s going to do, but we don’t win unless these two kill it, and then when they did, we just had this feeling of “Oh yeah!”
Capone: That’s not the first time you’ve had unknown factors in your movies.
JS: No. Totally.
Capone: You live for those wildcards, I think.
JS: Well, it’s the best. As a viewer, it’s always the best. It’s so rare you get surprised or have that feeling. When I fell in love with filmmaking, the kinds of indie films that I was wanting to make were full of unknown actors. I still remember the feeling of watching Steve Buscemi in something for the first time, where I was like “Who is this guy? Where did this guy come from?” All these real faces and crazy-looking people, so I’m always going after that. So when Jake was like “I’ve got this guy, Nick, who you should meet,” I was right away like”Yes.” He’s so good.
Capone: Jake, I have to ask you real quick about the other film you have at SXSW, BECOMING BOND. You have this one little scene in this documentary about George Lazenby, but you play the creepiest creep who ever creeped. It’s so funny.
JJ: Josh [Greenbaum, writer-director] is a guy, I saw his documentary THE SHORT GAME, and I thought it was incredible, and so I did an old-school set-up meeting with him through our agents to just be like “I don’t know if you do anything besides docs, but you’re great.” And we happened to connect, and our families had a lot of similarities, so his wife and my wife became friends, all of our kids became friends, he’s directed a couple of “New Girls.” We had just gotten like close, and then he told me about this project and he was like “Would you do anything in it?” And I said yeah. There was a character in it who watches the lead guy have sex with a girl, a prostitute, and he just sits there eating apples. And I was like “I think that’s a part that was made for me.”
[Everybody laughs]
JJ: But I think that movie’s awesome.
Capone: I love that the whole reason you’re doing that is to make sure the guy the studio is about to hire to be the new James Bond isn’t gay. They think he might be gay because he’s a male model.
JJ: My character comes, and we had a woman on set and we knock on the door, and he’s like, “Hello?” And she drops her coat and she’s totally naked, and she’s like, “Do you wanna have sex with me?” And then I walk in and it’s a shot of them having sex and me eating an apple, and he’s like “You good, man?” And I’m like, “I’m fantastic.”
[Everybody laughs]
JJ: Josh Lawson’s [who play a younger Lazenby in re-creation scenes] such a funny guy. He’s a killer, man. Those bits on that set were so hard for me. Because you can’t help but feel awkward, but she was like, “I don’t even care. It’s just a body.” And we were all like such little dorks trying to be cool [laughs].
Capone: Joe, you said yesterday you’re planning on shooting another season of your series [“Easy” on Netflix], so can you say what neighborhoods you’re going to be in?
JS: Not yet. Not because I can’t say, just because I don’t know yet. I’m still casting and figuring out the stories. Because I live in Chicago and know it, I have to know who the people are before I can say “This is going to be a Bridgeport episode,” because then I don’t want to cast the wrong people and think “Those people don’t live in Bridgeport.”
Capone: Do you assign people as specific neighborhood, like “These people would be best in this neighborhood?”
JS: No, no, no. I’m just casting the right people first, and then plugging them in. I’m compelled to get around the city as much as possible, so taking the neighborhoods we shot in last season and figuring out who’s recurring, I’ll definitely be looking to try to expand out from where we were. But also I’ll be bringing certain characters back.
Capone: Back to this film, I loved the Gamblers Anonymous meeting scenes, because those are I think your most serious moments. I think it’s some of the best acting I’ve ever seen you do. Talk about shooting those scenes and respecting the recovery process.
JJ: In those it was interesting because it’s just a group of extras, and we’re creating a feeling, but we all know what those meetings feel like even if you don’t go to them. We didn’t know what Keegan was going to say. Keegan’s was extra. Keegan’s was just, “Let’s just have him talk about his thing and say something about baby steps. We had written mine out, so we knew that my thing was about saying there are two types of gamblers. There are gamblers who are gambling because they just think they’re Vince Vaughn in SWINGERS, and they don’t know who their real identity is, so they’re doing it to actually just get confidence.
Then there’s another type of gambler that I was interested in and made me sad, and these guys are just addicted to loosing, and I thought it was something, and Joe and I talked about it and we both thought it was something that the audience needs to hear. We all know drinking, we know drugs. “You’re addicted to a substance,” but what’s the substance in gambling? You’re out of money, so the proof that you’re a loser is there. You lost. You have no money. You can’t win. You were up, who cares? We all know you’re going to lose because you’re a loser. So we all wanted Eddie, without Keegan making him say it as a joke, say to the audience, “I still don’t fully believe it, but this must be the thing. If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, at a certain point it’s got to be a duck.”
Capone: What is the Phillip Seymour Hoffman film where he’s basically that guy too? [The film whose name I never came up with is OWNING MAHONEY] It’s phenomenal. It’s basically about a guy who’s been losing his whole life, has a string of luck, wins a ton of money, and they guy who’s running the casino is like “Don’t worry about it. He’s going to lose it.”
JJ: He can’t walk away because that’s not what he’s addicted to. I have to see this movie.
Capone: But there’s a brief moment in WIN IT ALL, during the gambling sequence, where you have broke even. You’re like “I can’t walk away now.” And I’m thinking “Just have the heart attack and get the hell out of there.”
[Everybody laughs]
JJ: That’s right, the only thing that’s going to stop me is that or Nicky Excitement dragging me out.
Capone: Anyway, congratulations. Always a pleasure to see you both.
