Sometimes you only realize you've grown older when you pause to look back.

For Jason Reitman, the 32-year-old director of the satiric Thank You for Smoking and the teen pregnancy comedy Juno, that time has come as he publicizes his latest film, Up in the Air. It stars George Clooney as a commitment-phobic efficiency specialist who begins to question his solitary, dehumanized lifestyle.

"I see myself in the character in too many ways," Reitman says. "I Twitter and I text. I'm equally guilty of using technology to distance myself from people. Over the six years I wrote this, I got married. I'm a father now. I made Juno. My perspective on life changed. And so in a strange way, you watch the arc of the film and it matches the arc of my life the past six years."

That's not all that changed in the period it took to adapt Walter Kirn's novel, says Reitman, the Montreal-born son of Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman. So did the tone of the screenplay as the recession made what was originally a snarky satire suddenly a much sadder and serious story.

Reitman went so far as to take out newspaper ads in Detroit and St. Louis in the hopes of interviewing laid-off workers. He then incorporated 25 of those testimonials into the movie.

"It was amazing to have these 25 people who spoke authentically about job loss," he says.

"But I got to the end of the movie and I realized I forgot to ask them a very important question: 'If you are in your mid-50s and you're living in a city where everyone does the same thing as you and you've all lost your job and you're searching for purpose on a daily basis, what gives you hope? What gets you out of bed in the morning?' I never asked that. So we actually brought a few of them back in and that's the stuff at the end of the movie -- them talking about what gives them hope.

"It was strange to suddenly see them six months later. We first interviewed them at the point where it was as bad as it got. Some of the people, they had lost their job three days before they walked in. It was now six months later, they came in, we had a new president, things were beginning to change -- you could feel a difference in the climate. It's not perfect, but things are getting better. And I could feel that from the people."

Even if he acknowledges those closing hopeful moments are likely rosier than the reality people face.

"I don't think it's as lovely as that scene presumes."

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