Interview: Matthias Malzieu of “Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart”

Posted on October 5, 2014 at 8:00 am

First it was a concept album of ethereally bittersweet songs from the French group Dionysos, and then it was a graphic novel, and now, writer/musician Matthias Malzieu has brought his tenderhearted fantasy love story to the screen in the animated Jack And The Cuckoo-Clock Heart. It is a gentle fairy tale about a boy with a cuckoo-clock for a heart who is told he must never fall in love, but who cannot help falling for a visually impaired singer, available on DVD and Blu-Ray October 7, 2014, with both English and French dialogue.

With some help from a translator, I spoke to Malzieu about creating this omni-media story, which, like “Hugo,” is a fictional tale but features real-life pioneering filmmaker Georges Melies as a character. He said, “Surrealism was the esthetic influence. We made a lot of researches and found a lot of Jules Verne, George Melies, this moment of history when medical things, magic things, and inventions, science, were completely mixed, charlatanism, religion, doctors, scientists -– a fog of sensation between all these things. Everything was possible for real. The story takes place in this moment of history, steampunk, trains, steam machines, first cameras, all these magical machines that seem to have a soul. It brings up the nice problem of the character, a machine with a soul. It has joy like a human, but the technical problems of a machine.”

One of the most striking scenes in the film is a train ride.

“The train is the link between the dream and reality,” Malzieu said, “all the atmosphere and spirits of the movie in one scene, dancing strange monsters, like a dream but scary, dance and silence just after a very loud scene with a lot of punk rock music and movement. Then just rocking in silence with no melody, the poetry and simple human emotion at the same time.” He went on. “The train and the music drive the dreams of escape of the character. The train is on paper to show it is fragile and small and even a breath can move it but it’s exciting. This heart’s way of doing it with human hands, little things we like that a lot of people can see and feel all the mechanics.” He explained that he identified with Melies, a stage magician before he became a filmmaker and pioneer of special effects. “Making a movie was very close to making a magic trick, telling a story with little magic things. The producer and animators are like a magic tool of my own dreams, a human magic tool, always fragile, and delicate.”

He worked with illustrator Nicoletta Ceccoli in creating the look of the film and said it was “like Christmas to receive her messages, a strange train with wings, a character with a xylophone on his spine, not too soft a look, though. It had to be alive but look like porcelain, maybe a little Pinocchio-esque but with very realistic eyes, and bodies not too elastic.”

The opening scene, with a woman trying to reach a midwife before she delivers her baby on the coldest day in history, had to be “intense and funny and mysterious at the same time.” The main character has a clock instead of his heart, “so when I think about the movie I really want to show the emotion that he can bring with his machine. I would like to film a lot of the cogs and mechanical aspects. With this mechanics he can love or not love, be a human and a machine. I like the poetry that brings this together and want to see inside of the heart in a metaphoric way and a real way. The art and mechanics of the character are similar to the connection between George Melies and his camera.”

This movie is “about love in a passionate way.” The lead female character is a visually impaired singer, “She did not trust herself, so when she is angry she has vines with thorns around her. She is supposed to know everything about this emotion but she is scared by Jack who is different, and she rejects him because she is scared of herself. When you are too scared of doing bad things you do bad things. She thinks she can’t risk breaking his heart. She’s scared, not of Jack but of making bad things happen to him.”

Malzieu says the story started with the idea of the character, about falling in love deeply and being different. “In the book, I wrote sometimes love can turn us into a monster of sadness, sometimes a monster of wonder, sometimes similar. A character with a mechanical heart is different so I can talk about the difference between people in a poetic way, and about the fragility. Jack’e heart needs to be wound every morning to stay alive. And love is dangerous. He can’t fall in love but he will try to, and people will try to break his dreams.”

He describes Melies as “a fantastic inventor and magician, like the doctor of love, the opposite of Madeleine,” who builds Jack’s heart. “She’s like the mother. She wants to protect, but maybe too much protecting. Melies is the opposite. He wants adventure and thinks it is good for the health. That’s two different visions of life.” And Malzieu finds appealing “the analogy between the camera and the heart – a machine with soul and emotion,” so he has Melies make a romantic movie inside the movie. He is “the father, the friend everybody dreams to have, clever, funny, creating fantastic things all the time.”

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Interview: Ned Benson of “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them, Her, and Him”

Posted on September 26, 2014 at 3:59 pm

Every story has at least two sides, especially the story of a relationship. Writer/director Ned Benson explores romance and loss from the perspective of the man (James McAvoy) and the woman (Jessica Chastain) in two separate films, “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him” and “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her,” both to be released at the same time next month. First, though, is “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them,” which combines the two. I spoke to Benson about how his leading lady persuaded him to add the title character’s point of view and the famous director who invited him to dinner.

What is it that makes us so curious to look inside the different characters and show us what the other character does not see?

When I started this I had only written a male perspective of it. And Jessica actually asked me some questions about the character of Eleanor Rigby and where did she go, who was she. I knew that I wanted to write a love story, I knew I wanted to make a film about a relationship. And then all of a sudden I was like, “Wait! There’s no better way to show a relationship than get both perspectives of it, both sides of what these two people were going through, are going through.” So that spun this whole other script and that became this 223 page two-part script that an untested first-time director was going to try make with an actor who was about to be in a Terrence Malick movie but had not been seen in anything yet. And my producer is a first-time or a second-time producer so we were sort of three untested delusional people trying to make this movie.

I think we’re all very different and sometimes we narcissistically project ourselves onto other people and don’t allow them to be exactly themselves. I wanted to show the differences and the different personalities of people in terms of the way they deal with things which makes them exactly who they are and ultimately that’s the thing we love about them.

Tell me little bit about some of the visual cues that you used to help the audience keep straight whose view we were getting.

We created different color palettes for each of them. Different production design, different costume design. We created different visual rhythms for each character in Him and Her. So his film has a cooler, more detached feel with a sort of fluid visual rhythm because he is constantly moving. If he stops he’s going to feel something. He is running forward into his life wholeheartedly and running after Eleanor. And she has retreated into this sort of warmer color space with a more handheld feel. Her film is a bit more interior because she’s a bit more interior character. We sit with her and feel what she’s going through more.

I did the same thing with the production design and costume. And then the actors and I worked together to create different intentions for each version of the scenes that overlap. Because there are four scenes that overlap in Him and Her that are essentially the same moment but shots from different perspectives, different angles, different writing, different experiences with the same moment as if you and I are having this conversation right now and we’re each going to walk away with a different perception. Sometimes we misremember, sometimes things emotionally resonate with us more and I just wanted to show that with those moments that the things that resonated more with each of them. So for example in one of the overlapping scenes which occurs in a bar and then continues into a car ride. James is wearing a sort of white light collared shirt in one version of the event and then he’s wearing a dark gray in another version. That played into the color palette that I was dealing with because I was dealing with mood but I was also dealing with memory and how we mis-remember certain things.

Do you consider yourself a romantic?

A cynical romantic yes. I’m romantic in the idea that I believe in love, I just don’t know what it is necessarily in terms of how to do it right or how to make a relationship endure because I’ve never made one endure. I’ve been in long-term relationships but it’s something that’s interesting to me and I love the way love evolves and even though those relationship are over I think both my ex-girlfriends and I all have a great respect and love for each other and that love has just changed.

Jessica and I were in a four years relationship which is how we developed a script together so that’s definitely infused into the story. I have such great affection and respect for her as a person. She’s a wonderful human being and a great collaborator. She’s going to be a part of my life always. Eleven years ago she ran up to me at a film festival with my short playing that she had just seen because she won tickets to it on NPR and said, “I want to work with you.” She had just graduated from Juilliard and done an episode of ER, so that was it. And then we grew together which is really cool.

Why is the character called Eleanor Rigby? Is she one of the lonely people like in the Beatles song?

I was listening to it while I was outlining the script or the story and figuring out what the story was. And just one day I was like, “Wow!” You know because I heard the “all the lonely people where do they all came from” and that mood just sort of infected the whole thing and infected each of those characters because they each were sort of going through their own quiet crisis. So that instilled itself into it and I named the character because of that. But it was also this abstract idea because I’m the child of two baby boomers and my dad got kicked out of high school for stealing a TV to watch the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. My parents gave me this wonderful music education. I look at my parents’ relationship and how I am a reaction to and a reflection of it in a weird way and how that infects my relationships in a good way or in a bad way. So I wanted to use that in terms of these two characters and their parents in the story. In the movie, her parents met at the Beatles concert that was supposed to happen but never happened. So since his last name was Rigby, they named their daughter Eleanor.

How did you use music in the film?

I try not to let music dictate feeling. I would rather let acting and talking do that. There’s a lot of diegetic music existing within the scenes because I love doing math but on top of I that I looked into working with this wonderful composer who when he saw the films decided that he had this great idea to look at scene and see what objects existed in them and then create the instruments based on those objects. So they were based on things that existed within the film and ultimately I wanted a very atmospheric score but sort of like felt very theorial and existed within the mood of peace and sort of acted like a collaborator as opposed to a dictator feeling and then he wrote some beautiful songs on a big beautiful score. We don’t have ‘Oh so much score’ between three films but he did such a beautiful job and that was really cool to experience and get like, I love music in terms of when I write I usually listen to music and it’s a very important part of my artistic process and even when we’re shooting I was playing songs for the crew and what rhythm we’re going to shoot at and I gave playlist to each of the actors in terms of like what their character was listening to what their moods were. It was really cool to sit with somebody and hear sketches and then get to give notes on those sketches and feel like oh you can could push the guitar there a little bit or you could use the glass a little bit more because he create this wineglass instrument.

I think it works always but I think if you see Them first you can expand into these other two films and have those characters in each of these separate films be fleshed out more. And I think if you are going to watch all three that is the way to do it. But I don’t think it matters whether you see Her or Him first it will change your experience because one will give subtext to the next or change your opinions about a character from one to the other. But if you’re into this type of subject matter this type of film I encourage people to try and see all three. I would love that but again it’s sort of out of my hands.

Who are some of the directors you admire?

One is Robert Altman. I met him and his wife at a brunch. I was a kid, a friend of mine was invited and I tagged along. It was in my 20s. I remember I walked outside he was sitting and smoking and he was like, “Come on, sit down” and just we started talking. And I geeked out! I was like, “Could we talk about the multi-track song in “The Long Goodbye,” could we talked about “McCabe and Mrs. Miller?” He sort of looked at me like…”Sure!” And I’m sitting with him, incredible. And then he said, “Why don’t you come to my house?” And I went to with my girlfriend to this dinner at his house in Malibu that he and his wife hosted and Paul Thomas Anderson was there, all these other movie people, and I felt like I was in a Robert Altman movie myself.

What is next for you?

I just know that there’s always room to improve, there is always room to improve in your writing, there is always room to improve in directing. The only point is to make better and better films. I was lucky that I get a chance to make three the first time and I am hopeful my writing or directing will improve in the next one and I hope that I get to make more.

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The Last Leonard Maltin Movie Guide

Posted on August 31, 2014 at 8:00 am

Leonard Maltin was only 17 years old when he was offered the chance to create his guide to movies on television. For many years, I kept the latest copy on my desk and anyone who came into my office could pick a page number at random. If I had not seen any of the movies on that page, I had to buy them lunch. It never happened.

I love that guide, still the best and most comprehensive resource available. And I was very sorry to hear that the 2015 Movie Guide coming out next week will be his last.

Be sure to pick up a copy. And listen to his great interview with Marc Maron, where he tells the story of how it all began.

Interview: Dylan Brody on Comedy, Depression, and Robin Williams

Posted on August 29, 2014 at 8:06 am

Dylan Brody is a comedy writer and stand-up performer dubbed “brilliant” by Robin Williams. It was Williams’ tragic suicide that inspired Brody to write a moving essay about his own struggles with depression. Brody generously took time to talk with me about the connection between comedy and clinical depression, the best — and worst — things to say to someone who is struggling with depression. Brody currently writes and performs regularly for the David Feldman show on KPFK(Pacifica Radio) in Los Angeles., The Drive with Steve Jaxon on KSRO (Sonoma County) and is a regular contributor to John Rabe’s OFF RAMP on KPCC, NPR’s Pasadena affiliate. His material runs on XM/Sirius Satellite Radio’s comedy channels, Pandora and he is a regular contributor to the Huffington Post. He has written for dozens of comedians, including Jay Leno, who has used Brody’s work in his monologues on NBC’s The Tonight Show. In 2005, Dylan won the Stanley Drama award for playwriting. He is a thrice-published author of fiction for the Young Adult market with one of his books, A Tale of a Hero and The Song of Her Sword finding a place in the curriculum at several public schools in the U.S. His book, Laughs Last, is a novel about a stand-up comic. And The Modern Depression Guidebook is a humorous take on how to be depressed, a parody of a self-help book that guides readers to have the biggest, bleakest, most depressing depression ever. Brody was thoughtful, insightful, very funny, and a lot of fun to talk to.

I heard a report on NPR that the only stand-up comic that they’ve identified who was not struggling with some kind depression, OCD, or anxiety issues was Jerry Seinfeld. Do you think that’s true?

That might be true. I don’t know if Jay Leno does. Like any other group of people, comics are all different and I’m sure there are some among us who have found a way to function in the world without also being subject to its sadness. But I think that certainly our profession involves an awareness of every irony, every hypocrisy, and we tend to lean into depression. Both humor and sensitivity are associated with being gifted so there’s likely to be a lot of overlap between those who find their profession in humour and those who find themselves frequently depressed.

Tell me a little about the response that you got for the piece that you wrote and in tribute to Robin Williams and about your own experiences with depression.

The response to that has been sort of extraordinary because first of all I didn’t realize that there were people that I knew very well who had no idea that I struggled with depression. And I suspect part of the issue with depression is that we don’t realize that it’s not as visible as it feels. So there have been a lot of people reaching out saying, “Are you ok? Do I need to be worried about you?”

And no, I’m fine, you don’t need to be worried about me. And so there’s a lot of that coming from people who I actually know. And there’s has also been an unexpected number of direct messages and emails and stuff of people saying “Thank you for saying this.” In the days immediately following Robin’s suicide there was an outpouring of sadness about the loss of Robin and a great number of people, myself included who sought the proper way to pay tribute to him by speaking of their experiences of and with Robin Williams. “This is the man I knew and how this is how his death affects me.” But when I put out that piece which came a couple days after my initial response I was really beginning to think about the larger picture of depression in the world and the need, the real need for people to be open to one another’s suffering and open to what help might be available. The difficulty I think with depression is that in some way it’s like a virus and it is self sustaining and self supporting. It is an illness that wants to survive, the illness itself wants to survive so it tells the sufferer all these lies about how impossible it is to change, how little interest anyone has in hearing about it, it creates within the sufferer the belief that the depression itself is necessary. I got emails from comics saying, “You’re not depressed — how come you’re still so funny?” People have difficulty believing they can remain creative or productive if they’re not driven by depression because depression is telling them this lie. And so to me the real benefit that came out of writing that piece is that it caused people to get in touch with me so I can then say, “No, you can be all right and still be all right. You can be undepressed and still do the work you love and still care about politics and still worry about your loved ones and still have an emotional life without the constant sorrow of alienation and disaffection that comes with depression.”

I was so struck in the beautiful tribute that Letterman did to Robin Williams and at the end the last thing he said was “I didn’t know the man was in pain.” What is the best way to make people feel all right about sharing their experience with depression and what is the best way for the people around them to respond to them?

I think any illness, any disability the natural response is to find coping mechanisms. You can’t function daily if you’re constantly sobbing, you can’t go to a job interview and talk about how miserable you are all the time. There’s a need just to function in the world, there is a need to repress and suppress the outward symptoms of depression and that can become habitual. Many depressed people, I think, do not realize they’re depressed. In 1994, when I went into therapy for the first time in a long time, it was because I had spiraled into a depression. I hadn’t realized it. My wife said, “You have to talk to somebody. You’re absorbing all the light in our home.” And through therapy and martial arts training I was able to quit smoking pot because that was no longer working as self medication. And so I was able to find a way past depression that served me well for 10 or 15 years and then it came back. And I didn’t realize it had come back until I realized the people around me didn’t like me. They were starting to feel like I was being a jerk. And I was being a jerk because I was miserable. All I could see in my work or anybody else’s work was flaws. So instead of being supportive and energetic and enthusiastic when I went into the studio all I was doing was correcting errors. And I never noticed the transition.

Andrew Solomon who I think writes better about depression than anybody said that the problem with it is that it feels knowledge. It comes to you from the same parts of your brain that tells you that it’s time to eat or you shouldn’t cross the street because there’s a car coming. And it’s that same reliable use of speaking to you.

That’s right and it’s very difficult to recognize it as a lying voice, as a voice of an unproductive perspective as opposed to a voice of fact. I know a lot of people who are deep in depression and tell me all the reasons that I should go off my medication. Because they are aware, they feel they’re more aware than I am of all the wrong in the world, of all the political injustices that need to be corrected and so on. There’s a wonderful comic named Rick Overton who talks about how people medicate against depression, if you get shot in the ass with an arrow, you want to go to a doctor and have the arrow taken out, you don’t want to just take something that makes you say, “Oh, what a nice place for birds to perch.” Because he genuinely feels as though the depression is telling him about things that need to be fixed. And if he meditates against the depression he won’t be fighting the fight against these things in the world. And I understand that feeling so well. And all mental illnesses tell you to get off your medication, every one of them, schizophrenics and bipolar and clinical depression everyone of them. There’s something in your brain that’s constantly saying, “Well, you’re fine now, you should get off this medication, you’re fine now, you should go off the medication.” We want to be able to think our way out of the illness. For some reason with mental illnesses you want to get off it, you want to get off the medication, you want to get back to who you’re supposed to be or something. One of the things that has kept me able to stay on my medication is reminding myself that I have remained productive, that I have remained politically engaged, that I’ve remained passionate about things about which I have always been passionate. I just don’t feel hopeless or helpless about them.

What are the helpful things to say to someone who is struggling with depression?

Years ago when Nancy Reagan started her “Just say no” campaign I used to say on stage, “Trying to cure clinical addiction with ‘just say no’ is like trying to cure clinical depression with ‘just cheer up’. ”

The thing that a person can say are these: “You need to see a professional.” “I will still love you if you’re not unhappy.” “You need to find out what’s wrong,.” “You don’t need to be this sad.” In 1994, when I went into therapy at that time I literally came out of my first session feeling as though there might be light at a distant end of a tunnel. I wasn’t better. I wasn’t undepressed. I wasn’t just fine from one session but having talked to somebody who was trained to help with this was enough to tell me that it was possible to see hope and just the possibility of hope can be enough. When engaging someone with depression, I think the words they need to hear are the possibility of hope. “You can let go off your depression and remain yourself. Your depression is not integral to your personality or your humanity.” And everybody needs to be reminded whether depressed not, everybody needs to be reminded constantly that despite their perceived, self-perceived flaws and failures and inadequacies they’re loved and will continue to be loved.

What do you hope people will get from reading your parody self-help book, The Modern Depression Guidebook?

There are a bunch of layers to that book. First of all I wrote it when I was in a deep depression. I really thought if I could get every possible laugh I could get out of this sensation I would cure myself. It did not work. But it did create what I think is a very funny, very truthful book. And a short book, an e-book. In print it won’t be more than 90 pages, maybe less. It is not making fun of depression as much as is making fun of the self-help industry. The premise of the book is: I am not going to cheer you up. If you’re going to be depressed you might as well do that well.

So the book is designed to help you get the lowest possible lows and the darkest possible blues. It has handy exercises to improve your self-loathing, it has lists of things to ponder that will make you feel bad about the universe. It is designed to help you get your mood spiraling downward. It’s like my grandfather who told me, “We’re Jews, we don’t believe in tragedy. We believe in horror, atrocity and injustice and we recognize them all as inherently hilarious.”

There is such stigma attached to depression that nobody knows how to even broach the subject. And it is my hope that through this book and ultimately I hope through the screenplay that I’ve based on it, I can crack that conversation wide open. That by allowing it to be something that can be approached with sense of humor and a sense of irony and awareness of the absurdity that we’re all experiencing the same life on the same planet and some of us can see in it only the darkness, maybe I can create a new pathway towards healing for let’s say even two people. If it’s hundreds or thousands that will be great but two would be a good start.

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Interview: Daniel Schechter, Writer/Director of “Life of Crime”

Posted on August 27, 2014 at 3:59 pm

Newcomer Daniel Schechter, who wrote one of my favorite neglected gems, The Big Bad Swim, worked with an all-star cast in “Life of Crime,” which he adapted from The Switch by Elmore Leonard and directed. It is set in 1970’s Detroit and it is the story of a woman played by Jennifer Aniston who is kidnapped for $1 million ransom. But things don’t go well because her husband (Tim Robbins) does not really want her back. The hapless kidnappers are played by Mos Def and John Hawkes and the husband’s tough, calculating mistress is played by Isla Fisher. Schecter talked to me about re-creating the 1970’s, spending a day with Elmore Leonard, and why we love to watch crooks.

What are the challenges of doing a period film with a very limited budget?

I always say it’s the difference between moving into a furnished and unfurnished apartment. You just have to re-create everything 360 and we had a fantastic production designer named Inbal Weinberg who was even more ambitious than I insisted that she be to her amazing credit. And it creates a great illusion really helps the audience go back in time. The money goes on screen but it doesn’t add more days to your production. So it’s a tough give-and-take. I was also thrilled with the wardrobe. We had a really wonderful costume designer named Anna Terrazas to walk us through the process. She just had to pound the pavement and then go to every vintage place she could find in the Tri-State area. She found us some wonderful stuff. We also really wanted the cast to feel involved in their choices and some of them dressed in things they used to wear in the 70s and some of them wanted to dress like their parents. It was a really fun exploration and conversation. I wasn’t alive in the 70’s, I’m only 32, but I think you just see authenticity when you see it. There are even things in the book that were specific references to what they wore and we would try to take our cue from that.

You assembled an extraordinary cast.

It’s really tough because you want to get your big names but we’ve all seen the films that have so many famous people but zero chemistry or who felt inappropriate for the role. So I think there is a angel hanging over my shoulder that I not only got people that I’m felt really appropriate for their parts but have great chemistry. I’ve never worked with a cast of this caliber but after a few minutes you realize they’re all actors and they really want to deliver and I think one of the reason I chose to adopt this book was because it had seven unbelievably great lead parts in this ensemble. Actors love good parts.

What is it about crime stories that is so endlessly appealing?

It’s why we go to the movies. It’s like we want to see some kind of crime that we don’t have to take any responsibility or blame or fault for. But that I think there’s something especially fun about this because the main character isn’t a criminal. So I think the audience sort of feel like they’re inside Jennifer Aniston’s point of view the whole time, experiencing this crime vicariously. And it’s just sort of timeless. I think that’s what’s so fun about being in the 70s, you’re not dealing with any sort of cell phones or Google or Internet. It really makes it a real pure papers story like a 1970s crime movies which I love. It’s a wish fulfillment, and I also think the pleasure of reading Elmore Leonard’s books is not only getting the experience of committing the crime but being reminded of how real people would behave in those situations. We’ve seen so many films with smooth criminals or elaborate heists in glamorous setting that don’t make any sense but I think that he really wanted to thoroughly ground the experience of a crime or heist a bank robbery with reality and real characters that’s where I responded to the material.

“Guardians of the Galaxy” has a surprise hit soundtrack filled with 70’s songs and now your film also has a fabulous selection of music from that era.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this since seeing “Guardians of Galaxy” because they had every penny you could possibly have to spend on licensing music and we no money at all. I could guarantee the cost of any one of their songs was probably the entire budget for our entire soundtrack not including our score. But I think in a great way it allowed me to discover music that I’ve never heard before and to find gems and make really creative choices in music that I love, that sounded familiar to an audience. It raises the production value. It helps an audience sort of go back in time a little bit so we worked really hard to get the best possible music we could. We tried to get songs that you might know, so we had songs like “Don’t Pull Your Love” and “Let Your Love Flow.” I think that has a bit of nostalgic pull on a specific audience. We opened the film with a guy called Dorondo and I love that song and There is a Frankie Miller song called I Can’t Change It that I’d never heard and now I listen to endlessly on my phone. It’s amazing how some songs are a hit and some songs get lost in time. Some things just don’t come at the right moment and they seem just as good to me.

There’s this song called “Show Me a Man” and it plays over this long tracking shot of John Hawkes walking to the restaurant pretending he was inside of it stealing a car. It’s a very offbeat bizarre song that I thought that I thought Quentin Tarantino would’ve liked. And there’s this great juxtaposition with the lyrics. Here’s a song about a noble great cowboyish type played for a guy who is just a criminal stealing a car. We love this guy and we do feel that there’s nobility to him. There are sometimes you don’t even know why you just put those song on top of the picture and yet it justs elevate whatever I had there before. And then there’s moments like during kidnapping we had a literal needle drop where a record plays and I think we had 10 different songs in there at one point. One song I really wanted was Chicago’s “Saturday in the Park” or something that was reedy like that, iconic and memorable but of course that was like a $75,000 thing we had to make different choice but just the idea of getting featured song like that and have it played throughout the house in different perspectives; you don’t get the better opportunity than that to play with music.

You met with Elmore Leonard to talk about the film. What was that like?

I was really lucky. I went up to Detroit to meet with him for a weekend and we had good food and beers and discussed a lot of his projects, many of which he needed to be reminded of because they were old books that he hadn’t looked at, and things that I had read several times recently. And I got to look at every location that was written into the book. Everything that he writes was set in a real place in and around Detroit so it was fun to see the book come alive in front of my eyes.

What is it about his writing that makes it so instantly cinematic?

Somehow he makes exposition entertaining. I’m writing a new script now and it is such a challenge to make exposition not feel so obvious. He finds a really good reason for those people to be discussing the plot and having the audience be thinking, “Oh that’s what I would say and that’s what I would ask.” There are a lot of people who say that he was the greatest dialogue writer alive which I agree with. Not because he is the quippiest or cleverest but because it just felt so alive. It was like he was just possessed by those people as he was writing it. In my adaptation I was sometimes I would just omit a word and then I would read my script and I wouldn’t love the line. I would go back and realize I skipped a comma or one word and it just threw off the whole rhythm the that’s how good he was, that’s how almost perfect his writing was. Well, I think if you look at “Jackie Brown” which is based in a book called Rum Punch, you’d think, “Wow that stays shockingly close to the original novels capturing characters and dialogue!” And I think I took the cue out of their book and did the same thing. I think people are far less impressed with my adaptation when they read the book. The book was as if somebody gave me a great screenplay and as a director I just had to adapt it a little bit.

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