Hey folks. Capone in Chicago here with my interview with director Jonathan Levine, writer-director of THE WACKNESS, which opens wider this week, as well as the long-delayed and beautifully realized horror offering ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE, which I was lucky enough to see a couple weekends ago Chicago's own Flashback Weekend horror convention.
I was lucky enough to meet Jonathan at an AICN midnight (more like 1:00 a.m.) showing of THE WACKNESS during SXSW. The film truly surprised me with how funny it was, how much the soundtrack rocked my world, and how ultimately moving the entire endeavor really is. It sneaks up on you and surprises you. I did this interview before I realized that Quint had just done one with Jonathan and WACKNESS star Josh Peck a couple days earlier in Austin. I asked Jonathan to stop me if I asked any of the same questions as the lovely Quint, and strangely enough he never stopped me once. I know it seems like this site has been pushing this film to a disgusting degree, but the plain truth is that we all just dig this little movie, and we think you will too. The big movies don't need our help to get butts in the seats; films like this one do. Check out THE WACKNESS, and you'll see what all the hype is about. Here's Jonathan…
Capone: I know that you talked to Quint recently, but honestly I wanted to just say “hi” again since the last time I had talked to you it was like one in the morning.
Jonathan Levine: Yeah, that screening was kind of a bummer for me. It went OK, but you remember the tape broke, right and then it was daylight, so by the time we were all out of that room it was like three in the morning.
Capone: The sun was almost ready to come out.
JL: Oh my God.
Capone: I think I told you at the time, I still hadn’t seen MANDY LANE, but I’m seeing it at this Flashback Weekend next weekend.
JL: You have got to let me know what you think, because it is interesting to me having people see them in this order, which is not the way it was intended, because for me I learned so many lessons from that movie that I then incorporated into this movie and this movie has a bigger budget… I worry that it might feel less polished, but I think that that’s part of its charm actually. I think that hopefully they are different enough that none of the things I am worried about will matter.
Capone: I was going to ask you about that. Is it weird to have the second movie coming out first?
JL: For me it’s OK. I think for me this one is my personality through and through, so it’s fine that this is sort of my introduction to film audiences. I think it’s kind of nice actually, but I think it’s OK. I think they are very different and I think that the biggest bummer that MANDY LANE’S not out, for me, is not a personal thing, because I have actually had the opportunity to make another movie, but there are like 50 talented people who worked on that movie, cast and crew whose careers are, not on hold, they are still moving forward, but it would definitely benefit their careers to have the fucking movie out, so it sucks man.
Capone: I feel like this THE WACKNESS is a great introduction to who you are; you didn’t write MANDY LANE, so it’s not as much, but still very much a part of you, but I like the idea of seeing it in this order, because THE WACKNESS is so personal.
JL: As far as this scenario it’s as good as it could be. If someone told me I was going to make a movie in 2006 that was not going to come out until after the movie I made in 2007, I’d be like “That’s kind of weird,” but I actually think it will make sense. I think it will be OK.
Capone: So how old are you now?
JL: I’m 32 as of yesterday.
Capone: Happy birthday.
JL: Thank you.
Capone: So 1994 [the year THE WACKNESS is set] means something different, especially where you grew up.
JL: Were you born and raised here?
Capone: No. I’ve lived here for more than 20 years now, but I’m from the D.C. area. By 1994 I was out of college, but in college is when I discovered hip hop. You were in high school then?
JL: Yeah, I was the same age as this kid.
Capone: So was 1994 like a significant year or was it a significant year to you?
JL: It didn’t start out that way. For me, I started out writing about it, because it was the year I graduated high school, no more than that. And then the more I started looking at it, like a lot of the writing process of this movie, I just started doing things without thinking about it, from my gut and then I retroactively went back and brought things out or toned things down depending on what I thought the movie was. Once I started looking at the year 1994, it was amazing between O.J. and Kurt Cobain’s suicide and hip hop moving into white culture, sort of moving across racial boundaries and…
Capone: Giuliani becoming mayor…
JL: Yeah, Giuliani becoming mayor and also, there are all sorts of things and the more we have been on the tour, the more I have been thinking about like 1994 for independent film was a really big year and I think sort of one of the years that… or at least the place that American independent film was at really influenced me growing up--whether it was Spike Lee or Steven Soderbergh or Tarantino coming later that year with PULP FICTION-- it was a very important time for American cinema, not mainstream American cinema, but getting to the sort of creative apex of American independent film.
Capone: In 1994, were you even thinking about independent film?
JL: I was watching them.
Capone: What were you watching? What were the things that you remember seeing that year?
JL: Well I certainly remember seeing PULP FICTION very well, and I remember, maybe I was just getting turned on to it on video, but DO THE RIGHT THING was a very important… that was 1989.
Capone: That was while I was living in New York, so yeah I lived in New York for a couple of years and that came out while I was there and I went and saw it in theaters.
JL: Wasn’t that sort of a fabrication that there were…
Capone: Nothing happened when I saw it, other than just cheering, but I saw it at a theater in the Village, that’s where I was living.
JL: That must have been a cool experience.
Capone: It was. I was like “I’ve got to see this movie, I’m in New York.” I wrote down some film titles that came out that year. REALITY BITES also came out that year, which I thought also might be something you would have liked.
JL: REALITY BITES is actually one of my favorite movies. I have lists of my favorite movies that are the favorite movies that I like to talk about as a director, which are usually the more pretentious, like Godard and shit, so I don’t sound too much like an idiot. Then there’s like the REALITY BITES type movies and John Hughes movies and Cameron Crowe movies that influenced me so much, but having gone to film school, you don’t really talk about those, you know? But yeah REALITY BITES was absolutely huge and actually, if you go back and watch it, it is really good.
Capone: Yeah, I revisit it ever so often, yeah.
JL: He’s a good director, man. Ben Stiller is a good director I think. CABLE GUY is fucking awesome…
Capone: I’ve seen a bunch of clips from his new movie, TROPIC THUNDER, and it is outer space crazy. I just wrote down a lot of indie titles that came out that year. HOOP DREAMS came out that year, which I imagine for a lot of kids was a big deal if they actually saw it. SWIMMING WITH SHARKS was another one.
JL: Do you have FRESH on it?
Capone: No I don’t, but that’s a really good one. I remember seeing that.
JL: And KIDS, well KIDS was the next year. What else have you got?
Capone: OK, those are the smaller films, because that’s also the year that FORREST GUMP came out and SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION and SPEED; Redford’s QUIZ SHOW. You're a benefactor of Sundance… TRUE LIES…
JL: TRUE LIES is awesome.
Capone: I scribbled some titles down, because I was wondering a the time what was influencing you as opposed to when you look back and see.
JL: Well, it’s interesting. NATURAL BORN KILLERS came out that year as well, but that year is very much defined by FORREST GUMP versus PULP FICTION at the Oscars, sort of the new guard of PULP FICTION versus FORREST GUMP, which in many ways was what people felt was a reinforcement of conservative values, where as PULP FICTION was this really aggressively out there thing. It’s interesting how it’s like another exemplification of the crossroads of that time and I like them both. I love PULP FICTION, and FORREST GUMP I think is just pretty good, but I think FORREST GUMP is a valid movie.
Capone: At the time, I thought it was one of the coolest movies I had ever seen, even from just a special effects point of view.
JL: And the ground he covers and the music. It’s very, very good if you don’t get into the… I don’t know… the people who say it’s “against Vietnam” I don’t know or if it’s “for Vietnam?”
Capone: I guess people probably thought it was for it. Anything that sweeps the world, there’s a huge backlash, so the backlash is the measure of the success I guess. I was talking before how I discovered a lot of the music that is in your movie when I was in college, but I was aiming myself more at the militant stuff.
JL: Like Public Enemy.
Capone: Yeah, like “Fear of The Black Planet” was like the changing album for me, but then I see some of the music you had in the film, I had this Tribe Called Quest album for sure… Nas, I bought that right away, because I had read some awesome reviews it… Biggy’s album… So to hear these songs in this movie, it’s almost distracting to me to hear the music and try to pay attention to the story, too, because I haven’t heard these songs in so long and to hear them all together in one place just blew my mind.
JL: You’re right that it’s distracting.
Capone: I don’t mean that as a criticism.
JL: It’s not; it’s actually something we had to be very aware of. There were sometimes where we would have to take the verse out and just loop the chorus, because we wanted people to pay attention to what the hell was going on, but anytime you have an opportunity to look at a time that has not been looked at yet and use this music that was very much--both the soundtrack to my own growing up and also the soundtrack to this kid's life. The energy of hip hop and to be able to work off of that is really an incredible thing, because it’s so… You mentioned Public Enemy, and Public Enemy I associate so much with those Spike Lee movies, it’s just this “In your face. We are going to fuck shit up,” you know?
Capone: They convinced me that revolution was coming with just a couple of albums and “Fight the Power,” I thought “Oh my God, there’s going to be these huge race wars or something.”
JL: They were right, it just took twenty years and it’s just going to happen a lot calmer, and with a senator from this state [meaning Barack Obama]. There were right, and it’s good that no one had to break out the weapons.
Capone: I didn’t get in too much into the party music, although I remember LL Cool J’s “Momma Said Knock You Out” is one of the greatest records I had ever heard and it took me a few listens to realize there wasn’t a single bit of swearing on the whole record.
JL: LL Cool J never swore until more recently.
Capone: I remember thinking it was so the opposite of what everybody else was doing; this was right around then when 2 Live Crew was hitting, and I didn’t really get into that, but I kind of just remember this explosion. And I never put on the affects that Luke [played by Josh Peck] does in this movie. I just listened to it with my walkman and got into the culture through the music.
JL: That, in many ways, is how Kingsley gets into it, you know? He identifies with not just the message, but also the soul of it, and that’s sort of how I got into it, although I must say I did talk like Luke when I was that age.
Capone: But you lived in New York, so what choice did you have? What was it like schooling Josh in this music? It must have been a blast.
JL: Here’s the thing: he knew most of it.
Capone: Really?
JL: He knew most of it and he had most of it. He grew up in New York too, and it’s not that that was a prerequisite for casting, but it gave us a short hand that we wouldn’t have otherwise had. I think we were talking to Method Man [who co-stars in THE WACKNESS], which was fucking cool.
Capone: That must have blown your mind that you would get him in your movie.
JL: It’s amazing.
Capone: A lot of the guys you liked back then are actors now.
JL: It’s great, yeah, but what he said and I can’t remember if he said it to me or Josh, but he said at some point like “You can’t teach hip hop; it’s just part of you” and Josh had that soul as a part of him, and Olivia did too, and I guess Kingsley did too as weird as that is. I remember the first time we were shooting this scene with Kingsley where he is… it’s part of this drug dealing montage where he’s like “Now how much marijuana can I get?” He wanted to know what music was going to be playing under the scene, and I didn’t know the exact song and my brother was on set with me and he worked in the production of the movie and he went up to Kingsley, gave him the earbuds to the ipod and he was bumpin' Biggie, and I remember Kingsley was just bouncing his head like on his second day on set like “Oh, that’s lovely.”
Capone: Now Kingsley, he’s in like a movie a week right now, like I didn’t even realize he was in this Mike Myer’s thing [THE LOVE GURU].
JL: This guy was just telling me that it wasn’t good…
Capone: I missed the screening, because I was at a concert that night, but…
JL: What concert?
Capone: The Swell Season, the couple from ONCE, the two people that won the Oscar.
JL: Really?
Capone: Yeah, they were just in town earlier this week.
JL: I’ve been playing that “Falling Slowly” song on repeat on my ipod. That movie is great.
Capone: It is and I had seen them before, but this was a much bigger and formal setting.
JL: I think it’s so cool that Jon Stewart brought her back out.
Capone: That was one of the greatest moments in Oscar history as far as I’m concerned. So as I was saying with Kingsley, how do you convince… My brother lives in Seattle and they just had The Seattle Film Festival and they were playing your movie and they also played like three other movies that he was in during that festival, because they honored him. He had like a fistful of new movies.
JL: He loved it by the way. He told me he had had a great time.
Capone: That’s cool, but like how do you get someone like him? How do you convince him that “this” movie is one of the many that he takes on in a given year?
JL: By the time I met him, I didn’t have to do the convincing. It’s interesting that we were able to get the script to him, I think partly because of MANDY LANE and partly because we had funding in place and partly because a lot of the agents we were showing the script to were like “Dude, that was me. That was my high school,” and so they got really behind it and they got it to him. He is very diligent and he reads scripts very quickly, some actors you get a script to them and it takes forever and he read it and I went and met with him and the thing that he said to me was he was so impressed by the tenderness of it, which is fucking weird, especially for someone his age to be reading this and getting the tenderness of it. I thought that was remarkable ,and it’s not that he is that old, but I think someone looking at him and being like “Oh hip hop? I just don’t know…” He connected to the emotion of it and he connected to that ,and that to me was wonderful and that just set the whole tone for his relationship with this movie, he’s sort of the heart and soul of the film. So once I heard that come out of his mouth, I was like “OK, I think he’s probably going to do this movie. That’s awesome!” It wasn’t like I was like convincing him, I think when I met him he had already decided he liked the movie and just wanted to make sure I wasn’t a serial killer or something. [laughs]
Capone: Strangely enough, my next question was that I realized while watching it the first time that the comedy is almost like a Trojan Horse to get you to this really heartbreaking story.
JL: That’s a really good way to put it man, Trojan Horse
Capone: And Quint has been telling me about it since Sundance and he was absolutely right, but then there is this other part that is really going to grab you by the heart and just squeeze it, and he uses this drug dealing and the music in some ways to man up a little bit, I guess, and the stuff with him and Olivia just by themselves and things not going so well, that is really uncomfortable to watch.
JL: That’s where with an audience you can feel the audience’s relationship to the film kind of change, and I think it’s very nice, because I think that it surprises people. It’s kind of halfway through the film or maybe a little bit later than halfway through the film, but it’s when they start to go out to Fire Island. I think for me it’s really cool to set up expectations and then take it two clicks to the left and tweak it, and I think as an audience it tries to keep people on their toes in a way to keep them very engaged with the film. But the movie doesn’t work unless you connect to the characters emotionally and in spite of the style and the music and all of that stuff, it’s always about characters, and that goes as far as any movie with giant explosions and CGI characters. It’s about people feeling for people on the screen.
Capone: Those were also the scenes where you remember how young this guy is too, because he is doing all of these grown up things and hanging out with grown ups, and you are like “wait, he’s just a kid.” Was that you in a nutshell?
JL: That was the challenge of writing it, was getting into the heard space of making a mistake and not knowing you are making a mistake. A lot of times in movies I think people sort of rate characters, because they are maybe seventeen or wise beyond their years or dumber, and a lot of times the characters in this movie they do the wrong thing for the right reason or the right thing for the wrong reason. It was just putting myself in the headspace of those characters, but yeah a lot of it is me, or a lot of it is my just looking at myself and being like “God, you’ve done some stupid shit man, let’s put it in the movie.” [laughs]
Capone: It must be great to just draw from your own experience than have to create something from total scratch.
JL: Or like take something and just make it even more intense and make fun of yourself even more, like it’s all about being able to laugh at yourself.
Capone: How would you classify the relationship between Luke and his doctor? It’s certainly not safe to say it’s doctor-patient.
JL: You know, when we were editing it, I told my editors it was a buddy movie like 48 HOURS. [laughs] I don’t know, I think it’s very much a give and take. I think at various points one needs the other more than the other needs them, and I think that it’s about meaning and it’s about friendship. It’s not so much about father-son, I don’t think.
Capone: No. They are both pretty immature.
JL: Yeah, exactly. I think the core of it is that you can come of age whether you are the age of Ben Kingsley or the age of Josh Peck, you can still come of age or you can think you have come of age and then wake up 10 years later and realize you didn’t learn any lessons at all, you have forgotten everything you have learned. That’s what it has done for me. I’ve had moment in my life where I’m like “I’m a grown up! I’m an adult!” and I’m like “Oh shit, I did it again? I fucked up with that girl or I said something stupid to my friend.” It’s sort of about remembering the moments where you came of age and staying true to those, you know?
Capone: The one thing that becomes very clear is that neither one of them knows crap about women and one of them has been married for how many years?
JL: Well that's all from this guy [points to self] right here. [laughs]
Capone: It’s funny that they are both sort of on equal footing when it comes to women. The one thing I also remember almost even from the first frame is that there is a real kind of lush, dusky look to the film, and it’s more than just pot smoking in the air. There is some serious atmosphere going on in this movie. Where does that come from? How does that fit in? Is that memory?
JL: It’s sort of the haze of memory. It’s a lot of having an eastern European cinematographer…
[Everyone Laughs]
Capone: That would probably have more to do with it.
JL: [laughs] The person who shot it is my friend. A lot of the people who crewed on this movie were friends from film school and Petra [Korner], who actually shot a short film I did and is just amazing--she is shooting Wes Craven’s movie [25/8] now--and we talked a lot about the kind of haze of memory and we talked about the murky grittiness of New York, and I think that is sort of where it came from. It kind of evolves through the course of the movie. It starts much darker and it opens up when his work opens up when he goes to the beach or whatever and it opens up a lot. But I didn’t want it to have a glossy look to it ,and we always wanted it to feel like a movie, not something you could categorize with “Oh this looks like a comedy,” because that is one way we could have gone and I also wanted it to feel like the movie is from 1994 like FRESH and KIDS and have that look to it.
Capone: I guess now that when you brought up FRESH that the first thing I think of is it does have the similar look to it. It really is, I wouldn’t say gritty, but a gritty kind of polished or a polished kind of grit. I remember it looking much more elegant than what you would naturally assume the subject matter would call for. Was there a particular filmmaker or movie that you were like “Yeah, that’s sort of the vibe I would like to get.”
JL: I’m trying to think of what we watched. Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN, a lot of Spike Lee’s stuff. Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN, DO THE RIGHT THING, REQUIEM FOR A DREAM. All of this stuff sort of influenced us style wise, although we didn’t go as aggressive as a lot of that stuff and then I’m trying to think of what else we watched. Those were big ones, but I think those more so just kind of less specifically and more kind of broadly tonal from a style perspective we wanted to capture what they had and then we would juxtapose it with the nostalgia of a Woody Allen movie or we tried to infuse it with that. What else did we watch? GREAT EXPECTATIONS, just because that’s real deep.
Capone: The recent one?
JL: The one directed by Cuaron. The Ethan Hawke one. That we looked at more for the romantic New York. I think it’s [Emmanuel] Lubezki who shot it. It’s beautiful though. I’m not sure how good the movie is. We definitely watched a lot of stuff. I can’t think of any other ones.
Capone: Those are good ones. I’m a little old to have seen Josh’s TV show…
JL: Me too.
Capone: Was there something about him? You said that he knew a lot of this music already, but was there…
JL: That’s not it. It helped, but what it is about him I think is that it’s a combination of this authenticity, the fact that he just identified with this character and was not afraid to got to… Have you seen MEAN CREEK?
Capone: Sure.
JL: You can even tell in that movie, he is not afraid to go to a dark place. He’s got guts that actors of his age do not have. He is not afraid to show himself as vulnerable or unsympathetic, and I think that that is the biggest thing that differentiates him from everyone else who walked into the room. But beyond that I think he’s got a sort of vulnerability and a soul to him that when you look at him on screen, you just feel for him, and this character in many ways could have come across as very unsympathetic, because first of all his occupation is not something that we all tend to think is… We don’t all want to be friends with a drug dealer, and second of all, he very much wears his hip hop persona as a cloak, as a defense mechanism. And unless it reads as a defense mechanism, if it reads on screen as who he really is, then we are fucked, you know? If it reads as a defense mechanism, then all of the sudden you can see all of the things that are going on inside of his head that are creating that defense mechanism and then you feel for him and you empathize with him and he has the ability to do that. It’s very nuanced and complicated, plus he is funny and for me, with a character like this, you never want it to go too naval gazing dark bleak, and he’s got a lightness to him that allows us to go through this journey with him without wanting to put a bullet in our brain.
Capone: I guess same question about Olivia, because she hadn’t been in the things she had been in when you get to her.
JL: She had told me about JUNO. We had gone to lunch and she mentioned JUNO and I said “Oh that sound like a nice little movie.”
[Both Laugh]
JL: Olivia also has very similar qualities to her that are like what I saw in Josh. I remember Olivia, I even looked at her headshot and was like “That!” She just radiates New York to me and reminds me so much of girls I grew up with, but she has this uncanny ability to sort of bring her personality to a character, yet she’s not playing herself, but she is bringing as much of herself to the character as possible and then kind of putting herself into the headspace of the character. So for me she had a very challenging role too, because like we were talking about, I don’t know women at all and it’s very difficult for me to write women, so it was that much more of her responsibility to fill in the blanks and make her character sympathetic, because her character fucks over our main guy. And she really was so good and understood her character’s motivations to the point where I start to understand the motivations, even when I hadn’t probably when I was writing it and to me, its a great credit to her that her character is so sympathetic. It’s all about her.
Capone: I remember after the film was at Sundance that every write up that people did made reference to it as the film with the Ben Kingsley/Mary-Kate Olsen make-out scene. So I’m waiting for it and when it happens it’s like “I can’t believe that’s what people focused on,” but isn’t that weird? The movie is about so much more than that, but that’s what people were focusing on.
JL: I think it’s fine. I think it’s cool actually. I think it works out very nicely, because its like one of those attention getting things that you need as an independent movie, you know? And yes, of course, it's totally irrelevant to the movie, but I think the way we treat it is sort of like this throw away thing and I think that if people want to focus attention on it, if that give the movie more attention, then great. And I think that if people go in expecting like a fucking sex scene then…
Capone: I wasn’t thinking that, but I was even thinking there would be more making out and its like not really anything.
JL: For us it was in there way before Ben Kingsley or Mary-Kate were cast and within the context of the story it makes perfect sense and so I don’t know. If people go see it, because of that, awesome.
Capone: Whatever puts butts in the seats, that’s right.
JL: That’s our version of like THE INCREDIBLE HULK.
Capone:I’m sure that Quint asked you this question but…
JL: By the way you guys haven’t asked the same single question. He took me to the Salt Lick, which you didn’t do. Actually he interviewed me once and then it wasn’t an interview though, we forgot to talk about anything, we just hung out.
Capone: That’s right, Salt Lick, the greatest…
JL: It’s cool, now it’s like you guys are more powerful than anyone.
Capone: If you say so, but there were pluses and minuses to being more underground
JL: Wait, you were going to ask me a question and I totally interrupted…
Capone: What I was going to ask you was, I saw you in March and it’s June, do you have some ideas for what is coming up next for you?
JL: I wish I did… Well, I’m adapting a book for Sony for like a bigger movie. I’m not sure if it’s something that they would want me to direct or if it’s the right thing for me to direct, but it would be a step up in budget. And it’s really very interesting for a movie of that scale, but I’m just starting to figure out what I want to write for myself. It’s hard though, because for the first time I understand why directors take time off in between movies, because there are a lot of directors these days who make a movie a year and for me I was actually just talking about it this morning to a friend. It’s like when I do it, it’s like going to war, like a fucking personal battle and I can’t imagine just clocking in and clocking out, which is how it would have to be if I did it every year, but I think what is going to happen is I’m just starting to get a few different ideas and I just want to give them time to percolate, but I want to write something maybe not as personal as this, but something that is sort of about where my head is at and so we will see. I also want to make a 3D movie, so we will see if those two happen to match up.
Capone: Who doesn’t?
JL: I think it’s so awesome that people are making those again and they are cheap. You can do one for the same price, well not the same price, but a little bit more…
Capone: When is MANDY LANE coming out? Do we know when it’s coming out now?
JL: No idea.
Capone:I don’t even care, because I’m going to get to see it and that’s all I care about.
JL: You get to see it man. I mean let me know what you think man, because it’s different.
Capone: I’ll funnel my comments through Brian [Udovich, co-producer of MANDY LANE and THE WACKENSS].
JL: Is he going to be here?
Capone: He is supposed to come and introduce it. I think.
JL: Now that I’ve been here, I sort of understand a lot more about Udo. He’s a total White Sox guy. I want nothing more than to go see the Cubs, but I can’t fucking believe that they are doing the series this Friday.
Capone: I know, it starts tomorrow. I lived in that neighborhood.
JL: So you are a Cubs fan?
Capone: Yeah.
JL: Fingers crossed man.
Capone: Jonathan, those were all of the questions I came armed with, and I actually have another interview in like 40 minutes.
JL: Who are you interviewing?
Capone: David Strathairn on the phone.
JL: That’s awesome! OK then you've got to go, but it was great to see you again.
Capone: Good seeing you again too. I'm counting the minutes to see MANDY LANE. Thanks.
Capone
capone@aintitcoolmail.com
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