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 Ivan Reitman and Jason Reitman. |
MONTREAL -- It was the most affecting show at the Just For Laughs Comedy Festival, Ivan Reitman and Jason Reitman, sharing an hour talking to each other about their lives.
And when did you and your dad spend an hour doing the same, let alone in front of hundreds of people? Anecdotes at the Just Comedy industry conference ran from Ivan's obscenity charges for his first short film, to Jason's repeated turndowns of directing Dude, Where's My Car? Here's how it went, edited for space.
JASON: Dad, you grew up in Toronto, your family escaped from Czechoslovakia. I grew up in a Hollywood family. At what point did you know that 'director' was what you wanted to do for a living?
IVAN: Well, I told my father I was in McMaster to study music. There were no film courses. I actually didn't realize there was such a job as director.
But I made a short at McMaster and the short caught on. And my partner Dan Goldberg and I produced this film, feature length, that we made for $5,000 that we promptly got arrested for.
JASON: Wait a second, you want to explain that at all?
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IVAN: Not particularly. (Laughs) We thought we were making an art film, but the court didn't agree. Some student at McMaster thought student funds had gone into making it and he was outraged and called a local obscenity squad. We had to pay a $300 fine.
I thought I'd never work again. In fact, I felt that way a few times. My next film was Cannibal Girls, which starred Andrea Martin and Eugene Levy. That's when I learned that, y'know, scripts are very useful.
I started a stage show called The National Lampoon Show, which had John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, Joe Flaherty, Harold Ramis. My contract allowed me to produce a movie from it, and I went to Harold and said, 'Let's work on turning this sketch show into a movie. And that became Animal House. I was hoping to direct. I don't know if they saw Cannibal Girls, but (the Lampoon execs) said no.
Everybody involved in the movie got another job except for me. So I remember calling up my two best friends, Lenny Bloom and Danny Goldberg, and saying, 'I gotta direct. Let's do a summer camp movie.' And to answer your question, it was in the middle of Meatballs that I felt perhaps I'm a director. Bill (Murray) was in my National Lampoon show. He was very busy golfing and playing baseball that summer, but finally the day before shooting began -- I didn't have anybody else -- he did show up.
JASON: Last week at the New Beverly Theatre, they had a double bill of Stripes and Thank You For Smoking, and we went and spoke. And in Stripes, like the fourth or fifth scene, Bill Murray is having a normal conversation with his girlfriend at home and she's topless in it. And I remember thinking this is so strange. Like, there's really no reason for her to have her top off right now. It would never fly today. It seems as though things have cleaned up in a sad way.
IVAN: That was the first time I saw it in a theatre in 25 years, and I think it held up pretty damn good. There was a joyfulness to the storytelling, and it made me realize I wasn't seeing enough movies that had that.
The people deciding what movies are made and the people marketing those movies have more and more to say about every aspect of it, from the development of the screenplay to the cast to how it's cut. It's kind of a brute thing.
What you see is a ton of comic book movies, and every so often a movie like Juno comes out, costs nothing and ends up making a ton. And that comes despite what they're doing, and you should be commended for that.
I remember when Juno was greenlit, you being told, 'Look, I believe in you as a filmmaker, so that's why I'm fine with you making it. But there's no way it's making money.' And you're told this by the head of the studio.
JASON: That's a private story, dad! (Laughs). At that moment I was thrilled. My approach in Juno was 'the few who see it will really like it.'
I feel like you have always known the summer audience. And I feel as though in my 20s, by playing film festivals and making lots of short films, the crowd I knew was the festival audience, and I knew how to make them laugh.
And really Juno was an anomaly, it kind of screwed me up. I wanted to make another Thank You For Smoking, a small lovely movie that made a bit of money. But now it's put an awful lot of pressure on my next one.
IVAN: Yes, success is so hard. (To crowd) My wife and I never realized our son wanted to be a filmmaker. In fact, he was in pre-med.
JASON: God, I would have been a bad doctor!
IVAN: At the end of his first semester, clearly he was in despair. I said to him, 'Y'know, it's okay to take an arts course.' He was at Skidmore and he talked his way into USC two weeks later. He created this desk calendar to be put into the dorms and he went to local pizza joints and dry cleaners and sold advertising. He raised $9,000, and I said, 'That's cool, Jason, what are you gonna do with the nine grand?' He said, 'I'm gonna make a short.' And that's when I realized he's entrepreneurial and he's actually making movies.
JASON: I was very lucky to be alive at a specific time. I saw Richard Linklater's Slacker, Kevin Smith's Clerks, Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket, Alexander Payne's Citizen Ruth, interesting comedies coming out of film festivals. I kind of zeroed in on that, there's a place where I can work, make some short films and submit them. It gave me a safe haven to try filmmaking that way.
IVAN: After the third one, I started saying, 'When are you gonna do a feature? It's time.' Why did you not make a feature?
JASON: I did Thank You For Smoking in the late '90s. A woman, who eventually went to prison, gave me a copy of the book (by Christopher Buckley) and I opened it and it was love at first sight. I got an agent and I said, 'I want to make Thank You For Smoking.' And he looked into it and said 'Well, this is tough. It's owned by Mel Gibson, he's planning on directing and starring in it.'
And I went in and met his company and wrote 30 pages of script on spec and they said, 'Yeah, this is the feel we've been trying for.' I got a call from Mel from his plane. And I thought, 'Wow, this is gonna be easy, everybody said it was so tough.'
And then nobody wanted to make it. Zero. Studios, financing groups. Miramax came close, and then they said, 'Why doesn't the main character go work for the Red Cross at the end?'
And five years went by. I had the opportunity to direct features, teenage romances. Dude, Where's My Car came to me twice. I just thought if I made Thank You For Smoking first, people will know what kind of director I am.
Then one day I got a call from a billionaire -- he'd sold Paypal to eBay for $1.5 billion -- he was a libertarian and he wrote me a cheque. We made the film in no time and from there we went to the Toronto Film Festival.
Dad, you once told me don't worry so much about your next movie. Were there instances where you thought you had something great and it was just okay?
IVAN: I went through almost 20 years where I had no failure. I remember talking to the Ghostbuster guys, and $100 million seemed like such an easy threshold to hit. But it's only a matter of time before you fail.
My great regret is I didn't spend enough time directing. Right after Dave, I produced two movies and directed one all at the same time and none of them got enough of my attention. The produced movies -- Space Jam and Private Parts -- actually turned out pretty good. Father's Day, which was the movie I directed, was really mediocre and didn't do very well.
JASON: Let's talk about Dave. Person after person, different ages, come to me and say, 'You know what film I really loved of your father's is Dave.' What made that great?
IVAN: It was a story that was introduced to me by Warren Beatty, a wonderful story about the talent of the common man. Warners had also sent it to me and I said, 'I love it.' Then they found out Warren sent it to me and they said, 'We can't make it anymore, it'll be too complicated and expensive.' And I said, 'I can't make it without Warren Beatty.' And finally they called back and said, 'Okay, we'll make it with Warren Beatty.'
And I remember calling up Beatty and saying 'Great news! They'll do it.' And then I couldn't get Warren to commit!
So I started looking. I sent it to Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, the whole list and they all turned me down. I finally talked the studio into accepting Kevin Kline and he turned me down too. I said, 'You get to play yourself, you get to play the President, you get to play yourself playing the President, it's really three parts in one.'
Finally he said yes, and he turned out to be perfect. I think it would have been good with any of the actors, but it was magical with Kevin because of his particular light touch. It's probably my favourite film I've made.