Interview: Andy Borowitz of The 50 Funniest American Writers*

Posted on October 25, 2011 at 3:59 pm

Andy Borowitz really understands what it means to be funny. He is the first recipient of the National Press Club’s humor award and his @BorowitzReport Twitter feed is constantly circulated with LOLs. His new book is The 50 Funniest American Writers*: An Anthology of Humor from Mark Twain to The Onion, an instant best-seller and sure to be a popular gift for the holidays. It is filled with favorites, surprises, and surprises from favorites, like a gem of a short story by the late John Hughes that has not been in print for decades and was the beginning of his “Vacation” series of films. This book provides guaranteed happy laughter for anyone who reads it.

Who was the first author you read who made you laugh?

Woody Allen. It was the early 1970’s, when his first prose collections, Getting Even and Without Feathers, came out. I couldn’t believe someone could be that funny. I still can’t.

What made Twain’s approach to humor so different from earlier writers?

I sometimes think Twain is like America’s Shakespeare because he writes about human beings in a universal way that transcends time and geography. You read humorists who came before Twain – and after, for that matter – and they seem very bound to their time and place. We recognize ourselves in Twain’s characters. And even his political humor, which one would expect to seem dated, isn’t. Example: “Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

Is there an American style of humor?

I’ll defer to Mark Twain on that one. He wrote in his essay “How to Tell a Story” that American humor was essentially deadpan – the storyteller is funny because he appears to be serious. That’s true of Twain, and also true of The Onion – so maybe he has a point there.

Do funnier politicians win more elections?

Almost always the opposite is true. Case in point: Bob Dole. He was elected to the Senate many times, but whenever he ran for national office, his taste for a mean or cutting remark seemed to undermine him. You always got the feeling that Dole would sacrifice a million votes if it meant getting a really good one-liner off. I think if I were a politician I would be just like him. I would lose big-time.

Why are writers like George Ade and S.J. Perelman so often overlooked?

In general, humor is an evanescent thing. When I was reading material for the book, I came across many humorists who were huge in their day and are practically forgotten today. It was one of the joys of this assignment to be able to resurrect some of them. George Ade’s most popular series of humor pieces were called “Fables in Slang,” and it’s not hard to see why humor pieces written in turn-of-the-century American slang are a little hard to get now. As for S.J. Perelman, he specialized in literary parody, and some of the things he was parodying aren’t so well known today. In general, I think humor falls out of fashion more quickly than other genres. Some of the funny writing that’s beloved today may be incomprehensible to readers fifty years from now.

How did you find that early piece by John Hughes?

I met John Hughes in Hollywood in the early 1980’s, right before his first film, Sixteen Candles, came out. (We were going to work on a movie together but like many things in Hollywood, it never happened.) He told me about his days as an advertising copywriter – a job he hated – and how he submitted pieces to National Lampoon to get his start in comedy. So when I started working on the anthology, I went back through the National Lampoon archives looking for Hughes pieces. The one I chose, Vacation ’57, is one of the funniest short stories ever written, in my opinion. (It also was the basis of the successful Vacation films starring Chevy Chase.) It hasn’t appeared in print since the 1970’s, when it appeared in the Lampoon. Some readers have said that The 50 Funniest American Writers is worth buying for this piece alone. I heartily agree.

Molly Ivins wrote very topical and often very local pieces. What makes her work so funny for people who have no connection to the politicians she wrote about?

She has a real kinship with Mark Twain, I think, in that she finds the universal in the specific scoundrels she’s writing about. A few years before she died, I did a show with her in Austin and every joke out of her mouth slayed the audience. I love this one: “Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be President of the United States, please pay attention.” Eerily timely today.

You made the unusual choice to include stand-up comedy. Do you think that reads as well as it comes across when it is delivered live?

Well, I didn’t exactly do that. I didn’t write down transcripts of stand-up routines, because that would be totally lame. It’s obviously much better to enjoy stand-up comedy in performance, and thanks to DVDs and YouTube, that’s very easy to do now. I only considered published writing by stand-ups. (An arbitrary distinction, I know, but everything about this anthology is arbitrary.) I read books written by comedians – George Carlin, Wanda Sykes, Bernie Mac, Larry Wilmore and Lenny Bruce are included – and only used selections that were funny on the page. In the case of Bruce and Wilmore, the writing I chose was never a part of their stand-up acts – it was written to be read, not performed. As for George Carlin, he was a bestselling author many times over because his writing is laugh-out-loud funny.

Where should we look for today’s best humorous writing?

I love The Onion, although I usually avoid reading it because I don’t want any of my fake news at The Borowitz Report to overlap with theirs (sometimes we do come up with similar ideas, which is inevitable). Young writers like Sloane Crosley keep churning out funny books (Sloane also writes a funny blog for The New York Times). The New Yorker, which has published everyone from James Thurber and Dorothy Parker to Woody Allen and David Sedaris, is always finding new comic voices, like Yoni Brenner and Amy Ozols, who I think are hilarious. And there are always funny new writers turning up on Twitter and elsewhere online. The nice thing about the Internet is that the magic of crowdsourcing acts as kind of a curator: if someone is writing something funny somewhere, it’s only a matter of time before people find it and share it with others.

Was it as much fun to curate this book as it seems?

I’m glad that the fun of the project comes through. I had a blast. The Library of America is the best publisher I’ve ever worked with. It’s a nonprofit, too, so none of us were in this to make money – we just put all our hearts into it and tried to put together something we’d love and be proud of. What’s surprised me is that at the end of the day, the book turned out to be a bestseller. On its very first day of publication, the book was #8 on Amazon and the #1 humor book in America. That totally took me by surprise. I guess the lesson for me in all of this is that if I want a bestseller I should get Mark Twain and The Onion to write it for me.

Will you do a sequel?

It’s possible. I write in the introduction that this book is by no means definitive; it’s just a playlist of fifty pieces of writing that make me laugh. Do I have enough favorites for The 50 Other Funniest American Writers? Absolutely.

Interview: J.C. Chandor of ‘Margin Call’

Posted on October 21, 2011 at 8:00 am

J.C. Chandor wrote and directed “Margin Call,” a sharply-scripted thriller about one night at a never-named Wall Street firm. The top executives discover that they are at risk of catastrophic failure and have to decide before the markets open in the morning whether they or their clients will take the losses. The movie stars Jeremy Irons, Keven Spacey, co-producer Zachary Quinto, Stanley Tucci, and Demi Moore. It is specific enough to make some very pointed commentary on the financial meltdown but universal enough that its themes of betrayal and externalized costs could be set in any industry or indeed in any organization.

How did you come to write about the financial meltdown?

I had written several different things in several different capacities but had never done anything even sort of remotely topical let alone completely topical. This was being written for myself to direct so it was from a very personal place, not a Hollywood script to go out and sell. A lot of what has become the strength of the project and drew people to it came from an odd place, from production restraints I placed on myself to keep the budget realistic.

I’m a total real estate junkie and took time off to set up a partnership to renovate an old building and it happened to be on the other side of the real estate bubble. The godfather of one of my partners was a very prominent investment banker, a ground-breaker, an intellectual, invented the concept of a real estate hedge fund, a whole new model. He intervened in his godson’s life and about halfway through our project came to him and said, “Those offers you’ve been getting to buy the project half-completed — take them. I’ve been leaving millions of dollars in deposits on the table because it is time to get out.” We took his advice, mostly because we were having trouble with one of the other partners but also because we had the feeling things were not going well in the markets. We just broke even and felt like a defeat at the time but a year and a half later I felt I had a new lease on life.

As things really started bubbling to the surface I thought back to that man and what it was like to be walking around — you never know for sure, but he felt pretty strongly things were bad enough that he had to take a financial hit to avoid a worse one and warn us. I thought it was an interesting issue to look at it from the inside, and do a small character-driven story about investment bankers as they see what they thought their lives were about changing in a deep way and what their responsibility was, all those things that were a little bit unsaid in the film but that the actors and I knew were all there. I have only so much time, so much energy, this skill set, and this is what I’ve used it for.

It has the setting of a drama but it feels like a thriller.

To be there on that day was an interesting limited view into a wide problem. It’s a ticking time bomb structure, which is a thriller by its very nature. The one total deviation is that 45 minutes into the movie you know the bomb can’t be defused. The drama is who will they hand the bomb to?

Do you see them as villains?

What most people would choose to do in this scenario is what these characters do — to look out for themselves. To look at it in the macro viewpoint, they made the decision when they walked into the door coming out of Harvard or wherever they were to use their time and skills and very intense intelligence and education and have the big majority of those people get siphoned off into this world. People who have already made that choice when they walk in the door it is unrealistic to expect them five, ten, fifteen years later to make a different choice about who to take care of.

Your father worked on Wall Street, at Merrill Lynch. Did he guide you at all on the script?

For superstitious reasons I didn’t show the script to anyone in my family. I’ve had a lot of false starts if you know what I mean! I didn’t really tell my family I was doing this until we were really at the point of no return. But what I learned from my father and from friends over the years is the toll that it takes on the people who stay behind and keep their jobs when others are let go. It’s one of the only businesses that even in their best years still culls 5-10 percent of the workforce every year purely for motivation. The people who last are the ones who play the game correctly. For certain characters like Spacey’s it’s not about greed; it’s about survival. For others like Simon Baker’s and Demi Moore’s it is about ego and the way you define yourself.

I originally wrote the scene when it wasn’t the big dramatic day, yet. It was supposed to be more run of the mill, but as things developed in real life by the time we shot it, it became too subtle.

The way it was revised though, gets Stanley Tucci’s character out of the building, and that is important for the plot.

The fun thing about Stanley’s character, Eric Dale, is that I have a hard time naming characters and I usually use names from people in my life. Eric Dale just worked and it is amusing for him because every character says the name through the film as he becomes the symbol of the paranoia that the information will get out.

I won’t give it away, but I wanted to tell you how much I liked your ending — you took something of a risk and it paid off.

The ending and the music are the things most people feel comfortable having an opinion about. For me, the movie started with the ending and then you figure out how you get there. Kevin Spacey would say something different but for me the most important thing is what’s behind him, the house. It became very important to understand that in his mind, he did need the money. No matter what you make, the way people rationalize their connection with money is almost identical. As Paul Bettany says in the film, “You learn to spend what’s in your pocket.”

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Interview: Will Reiser and Seth Rogen of ’50/50′

Posted on September 30, 2011 at 8:00 am

Will Reiser and Seth Rogen were friends who worked together on “Da Ali G Show,” making fun of everything and everyone, especially the powerful. So, when Reiser got cancer, they took it on in the same spirit. Finding their own experience as survivor and friend very different from the transcendent and saintly stories they had seen in movies and thoroughly annoyed by all the people who asked Reiser if he had a “bucket list,” they decided to write their own movie. It is not a factual re-telling of the real-life story but it is an authentic portrayal of the feelings of young men who have not even figured out how to live when they are confronted with thinking about the possibility of death. Can a man who is not very good at taking care of himself take care of his friend?

Resier’s character is called Adam, and he is a producer at NPR. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays the role. Rogen’s character is named Kyle and is played by Rogen himself.

Reiser and Rogen sat down with a small group of journalists at the Georgetown Ritz hotel to talk about the movie. As he was “going through the ordeal,” Reiser said, he and Rogen talked about how different the experience was from anything they had seen in a movie. But people’s impression was formed by the movies. They’d ask him about “My Life” or “The Bucket List.” “To punch you in the face is the first thing on it,” said Rogen. They wanted to make a movie where the audience does not cry all the way through and the person doesn’t die at the end. “Tonally,” said Rogen, “not the procedures.” Reiser said that in movies the cancer patient “has this great clarity, understands life and who they are, comes to terms with all these issues with family members and dies the next day. For me, it was dysfunctional and crazy and no one really knew what to say and then I got better and was left with this aftermath of all this.” He felt comfortable writing about personal things because of his close relationship with Rogen and Evan Goldberg, even though it was his first screenplay. “I’m so aware of all the laughs are in the movie,” Rogen said. “I’m so not used to having a movie that bums people out for any length of time. So when I’m watching it, I’m like, we’ve got this thing and this thing and then we get a big laugh and get these people out of this.” They agreed that the biggest laugh is when the immediate reaction from Adam’s mother, played by Anjelica Houston, is “I’m moving in.”

“It’s less that the scenes actually happened to me and more that it draws thematically on what happened with relationships,” Reiser told us. “And also the way in which my friends and I used humor to cope. At that time I was very neurotic and worried about everything. Seth would describe me as annoying.” “Used to be,” Seth broke in. “I didn’t have the ability to express what I was feeling and kept everything bottled up inside. That emotional arc — Adam is very much an extension of me and what I went through. The MRIs, those are my real MRIs. And we worked together and he’s my closest friend and what the doctor said, that all really happened.” “The question we asked ourselves was not ‘did this happen,'” Rogen said, “but ‘is this like something that would have happened?” “Did this feel real?” Reiser said. “Are these conversations we could have had?” “There was a scene in an early draft where the character went to talk to a rabbi,”said Rogen. “We’re like, would you do that?” “I have not been back to synagogue since I was bar mitzvahed,” said Reiser. “But the last scene in the movie, changing the dressing, that really happened. He’s very squeamish. A lot of that scene we figured out as we rehearsed it.”

The one role where they insisted on an audition for was Rachael, the girl Adam is dating, played by Bryce Dallas Howard (“The Help”). Adam’s illness puts a serious strain on the relationship. “We knew it would be tricky to be able to play that character and not have her be a bitch. You see that bitchy girlfriend character in so many movies,” said Reiser. “Or a cartoon,” added Rogen. “Not necessarily that you would sympathize with her, but intellectually you would understand what she is going through.” Canadian actor Serge Houde plays Adam’s father, who is struggling with dementia. Joseph Gordon-Levitt came in at the last minute, arrived at 11, stayed up all night talking about the part, and was rehearsing and getting fitted for the costume and wig two days later. “We don’t want a guy doing a Will impression,” said Rogen, “but people say he’s exactly what Will was like at that age. He never asked him behavioral things, but he did ask him about emotional things.”

Rogen and Reiser have different approaches to writing. Reiser begins with the characters. “I really agonize and spend a lot of time my characters and doing a lot of research. If I find myself forcing it, it’s because I don’t know the characters.” But Rogen begins with a scene ideas and things he wants to put in the movie. “We make a lot of lists. Right now we’re working on an apocalypse story, so we made a list: sinkholes, demons, exorcism. And then funny ideas come out of it. Sometimes the characters are the last thing that’s developed.” They said the therapy scenes were among the hardest to write, especially the last one, where we see the growth of the young therapist played by Anna Kendrick and her ability to call Adam out on his behavior and see his situation more clearly. Rogen kept sending it back for rewrites. Reiser said the line in the movie he is proudest of is when she says to Will, “Your mother has a husband she can’t talk to and a son who won’t talk to her.” Rogen laughed. “A lot of moms got a lot of calls after that one.”

They are working together with the “50/50” director, Jonathan Levine, on another movie based on Will’s life, “Jamaica,” about a vacation he took with his grandmother.

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Interview: Claire LaZebnik of Epic Fail and Families and Other Non-Returnable Gifts

Posted on September 27, 2011 at 3:59 pm

Claire LaZebnik is the witty and wise author of two new books, both highly recommended. Families and Other Nonreturnable Gifts (for adults) is the story of Keats, the “normal” child in an unconventional family with poetically-named siblings Hopkins (a brilliant doctor) and Milton (a reclusive computer geek) and divorcing parents who disapprove of her long-time boyfriend. Epic Fail, for YA (young adult) readers, has the daughter of the new principal of a tony prep school meet the son of Hollywood stars in a Pride and Prejudice-style romantic comedy. LaZebnik is as much fun to interview as she is to read and it was a treat to get her to answer my questions.

You are a big Jane Austen fan — which book is your favorite? How has she influenced or inspired you?

My favorite Austen novel used to be Pride and Prejudice, because it’s the most unabashedly romantic of them all. Darcy and Elizabeth spar so beautifully while they’re falling in love–the romantic tension is phenomenal. I’ll never get tired of rereading it. But at some point after college, I started to prefer Emma. Emma is such a wonderfully flawed heroine. She’s conceited and overly-confident and a snob, but she’s also smart and beautiful and lovable. And Mr. Knightley is . . . <happy, dreamy sigh because words can’t capture how I feel about him> . . . There’s just something about the way he’s guiding her and loving her and forgiving her all at the same time that I find even more romantic than the Elizabeth/Darcy sparring thing. But I had to grow into that.

Austen’s inspiring because she was limited to writing about the world she knew, which was a very restricted world of parlors and teas, but she still managed to capture an entire universe of human behavior.

Also, Austen wrote in her sister’s house, in the midst of chaos. I do most of my writing downstairs, surrounded by the family and pets, in the midst of chaos. If she didn’t complain, I’m not going to. (Okay, that’s a lie. I always complain.)

When you began Families and Other Nonreturnable Gifts, the story of upheavals in the life of an unconventional family, did it start with an image or a character or an incident?

With a contrast actually: I wanted to contrast a middle-aged mother who’s dating a bunch of different men with her young daughter who’s in a longterm relationship. I like that they both play against people’s expectations.

Why do we all feel like outsiders in our own families at times?

When you’re a kid, you buy into your family’s mythology. You believe that the way your family does things is the right and proper way to do them–maybe even the ONLY way to do them. Then you leave home, go to college, fall in love, get to know other people’s families, go into therapy . . . and you suddenly have a different perspective on your childhood. You walk into your old home and realize that there was nothing universal about your upbringing, that it was specific to your family and that certain aspects of it probably could have been better. And once you realize that, it can be strange and alienating. You can go home again but you’ll never look at it quite the same way.

How do you have a first-person narrator tell a story so that the reader understands some things before she does?

A friend once told me that even though her boyfriend was difficult and jealous, she loved him and intended to marry him. I could tell she was actually trying to gather the courage to break up with him. Sometimes we telegraph our intentions before we even acknowledge them to ourselves. And that’s what happens with my narrators sometimes–they manage to communicate to the reader their underlying emotions without stopping to examine them.

You have some vivid and sympathetic portrayals of characters with social interaction issues, not often seen in novels. What does this add to the story?

I just think it’s realistic: I know lots of people who have mild agoraphobia or autism or depression, and there are times when these things can really interfere with forward momentum. So I find that interesting to include in a novel, especially since how their family members deal with it–whether they’re supportive or enabling or dismissive–reveals a lot about those characters too. And I think readers really root for someone who’s struggling to overcome any kind of inner paralysis.

Do you have a particular audience in mind when you write?

My editor, mostly! I’ve had the same editor for my last four adult novels. She’s wonderful–smart and receptive and kind–and I feel like if I can please her, I’m on the right track. She’s also kind of the target audience for the book–she’s young, and well-read.

Why does Keats, the “normal daughter,” remind you of Marilyn in the old Munsters TV show?

Cousin Marilyn was the odd man out in the Munsters, because everyone else was a monster and she was blond and pretty and human. Keats, who’s competent and lucid and socially outgoing, feels like she’s the weird one when she spends time with her brilliant, quirky, incompetent relatives. Normalcy is relative: out in the world, Keats is normal, but at home she’s the oddball.

How did you pick the three poets that inspired the names of the main character and her siblings?

That’s such a good question! I didn’t even realize how much I was hoping someone would ask that until you did. Yeats is my all time favorite poet, so I would have liked to have named my protagonist Yeats but that’s just TOO weird. No one even knows how to pronounce it. But Yeats makes me think of Keats . . . and that seemed much closer to a real name. So she became Keats. Hopkins wrote my favorite line of poetry, one that’s stuck with me for decades–“There lives the dearest freshness deep down things“–so I’m fond of him. Plus, Hopkins sounded like a cool name to me. And Milton is a real name, and also one of the greatest poets of all time, so he seemed like an obvious choice.

What has surprised you most about readers’ reactions to your books?

Their concern about characters I haven’t thought that much about. I don’t want to ruin anything, but one character does get his heart broken in this novel, and several people emailed me to say, “I’m very worried about him–please promise me he’ll be okay.” Someone even asked if he could get his own sequel. In all honesty, I hadn’t given him another thought once he was out of the picture . . . but it’s kind of gratifying to know that readers feel that invested.

Your books are very funny — what makes you laugh?

Many things make me laugh, but my kids most of all. Like, a few months ago we were all trying to figure out what movie we should go to and my husband and I wanted to see “127 Hours,” so we were describing it to the kids, and my 11-year-old son said, “I don’t think I should see that movie and I don’t think I should have to be the one to point that out.” Every time I think of that, I start laughing again. He was so right. And it was such a great way to put it.

What was the first piece of writing you got paid for? What did you do with the money?

Wow. I’m not positive, but I think it was probably an essay I wrote for GQ magazine. My sister was a magazine writer at the time and they asked her to do an “All About Adam” essay (I don’t know if they still have that feature–women writing about men) and she was too busy but she told them they should give me a shot at it. So I did and they bought it and that was the beginning of my magazine career. I think it was like a dollar a word, so a few hundred dollars, maybe? I’m sad to say that I’ve never been one of those people who earmark earnings for something special. I always stick checks in the bank and they just become part of my savings, although sometimes I will think, “Well, that last check paid for this” when I buy something indulgent.

What’s the best thing about writing for a YA audience?

The fan mail. I get the most mind-blowingly wonderful emails from teenage girls. They care deeply about the characters and really want to connect with me to discuss them. And a lot of them are interested in a writing career, so I love having the chance to encourage that. I answer every email I get. If someone’s taken the time to write me, I’m going to let her know how much I appreciate it.

Your characters often use humor to connect with or deflect each other — how do you create the humor personality of each character?

My romantic leads tend to “find” each other through their similar senses of humor. I often have the main characters tease each other in a way that other people in the book just can’t keep up with. I’m not interested in snarky or nasty humor–there has to be a positive and playful energy to it. And they have to know when it’s time to be serious. Not everything should be a joke.

What is it about the Elizabeth/Darcy conflict that makes it so enduring and relatable?

I don’t know if I’d say it’s relatable so much as it’s a truly satisfying fantasy: I mean, the most sought-after bachelor in your social circle falls in love with you AGAINST HIS WILL. He knows he shouldn’t, but he can’t help himself. It’s the most romantic thing in the world! And the reason he falls in love with her is that she’s so funny and smart. Honestly, there are so many clunky romances these days where you never actually see the attraction, where the authors assume that having characters be rude to each other is the same as Elizabeth and Darcy sparring. E and D are never RUDE. They’re smart and witty and have good conversations, even before they fall in love.

How is high school like Austen’s insular communities?

There’s a clear hierarchy to both, one that might not be obvious to outsiders, but is very clear to anyone inside the community. And those social divisions are almost impossible to cross or change–it’s very rare for someone in one group to fall in love with someone in another, and if it happens, it sends ripples throughout the entire community. Plus everyone knows everyone else’s business–it’s virtually impossible to keep a secret!

Interview: Jason Keller of ‘Machine Gun Preacher’

Posted on September 22, 2011 at 3:56 pm

Jason Keller wrote the screenplay for “Machine Gun Preacher,” based on the true story of Sam Childers, whose book, Another Man’s War: The True Story of One Man’s Battle to Save Children in the Sudan, tells the story of his journey from biker to preacher to fighting to protect the children of Sudan and Uganda from genocide.

How did you get involved in this project?

Almost four years ago one of the producers called me and said, “I just heard the most amazing story.” Sam was coming to Los Angeles so we met. I didn’t know if I wanted to do the movie at first, as electrifying as the story was. What the story let me to was Central Africa and I wanted to drill down and understand what the LRA is and about the child soldiers, and I couldn’t not write the movie.

That is such a large, overwhelming topic — how do you create a movie script out of that? How do you decide what to leave out?

I didn’t want to write a political movie. That wasn’t what touched me as I started to learn about Sam’s life and Central Africa. I think of myself as fairly well-informed. I read the newspaper, I’m constantly watching the news, I always challenge myself to learn about things that are not easy to learn about. And here was a part of the world I thought I knew and as I got deeper into it there was an emotional response to what I was learning. Innocent civilians being slaughtered and no one was doing anything about it. I wanted to do a movie that would make people inspired, even angry, but not clutter it with politics.

What I’m proud of is that it isn’t so neat and tidy about Sam or about Central Africa. There are no easy answers. Sam’s not a great guy, even now. It’s not a story of a bad guy turned good guy. It’s about a human being who decided to make different choices, but he’s still flawed. He’s still violent. He’s still intimidating. He’s still making mistakes. It’s that messiness I responded to as a fellow human being.

You had quite a challenge with making this a movie that will appeal to a mainstream audience. You have a religious conversion and you have problems in Africa. How do you make those accessible to a wide audience?

Both of those issues are scary for Hollywood and to some degree to audiences. We didn’t avoid those issues but we told a story that didn’t try to tell you what was right or wrong. I didn’t take this project on to defend the way Sam does things. Do you agree with him? Let’s talk about it. You might disagree with the religious components of this movie but let’s talk about it. Let’s spark a conversation. That’s the only way that we’re going to stay vigilant about these issues that are so vital.

Gerard Butler gives an extraordinary performance.

He has the physical presence for the role and like Sam he comes from a tough background, was going down a bad path early in his life. He’s a perfect fit.

You lived with the family for a while in Pennsylvania. What was that like?

It was crazy. Every time he’d come to LA, we would meet. As I was being pulled deeper and deeper into the story I realized I needed to go where this guy lives, see the church he built with his bare hands, meet his family. I slept in their very modest house tucked out of nowhere in Pennsylvania. I even slept in the church once, just to get the feeling of it.

That was the thing that really hooked me when it came time to commit to writing Sam’s life. There are far too many amazing tales and he could tell you stories that would make your head spin around. I listened to those, eagerly, for months and months and they were interesting and important. But it wasn’t until I grasped the price that that man pays and that his wife paid and continues to pay for what he does over there. Once I got that, it punched through all the other stuff and I was able to see that raw truth, that’s when Sam and the family came into focus for me and I knew this was the story I had to tell.

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