Within the
first few seconds of meeting Jason Schwartzman, one thing becomes
crystal-clear: the man is as friendly and generous as his titular
character in Alex Ross Perry’s acclaimed indie, “Listen Up Philip,” is
mean and self-involved. Actually, “self-involved” is putting it nicely.
Philip Friedman is such a narcissistic monster that his detachment from
the surrounding world verges on delusional. He antagonizes everything
and everyone around him, especially the people who care about him,
including his long-suffering girlfriend, Ashley (a sublime Elisabeth
Moss). Perry’s script masterfully balances the narratives of Ashley,
Philip and his idol, author Ike (Jonathan Pryce), who
allows the chronically enraged writer to stay in his summer house.
Schwartzman is so utterly convincing in the role that it’s a shock to
meet the gracious actor in person. His demeanor is closer in spirit to
the sunny songwriter he played in “Saving Mr. Banks” than to Max
Fischer, Louis XVI or Philip. None of those characters are the sort of
people you’d want sitting next to you on an extended bus ride. After
talking to Schwartzman for 15 minutes, you’ll want to take a week-long
road trip with the guy.
RogerEbert.com
spoke with Schwartzman about what made Perry’s script so enticing,
making hatable characters compulsively watchable and the joys of working
with David O. Russell and Wes Anderson.
How
familiar were you with Alex Ross Perry’s work prior to working with him?
I had been a fan of his since seeing his 2011 film, “The Color Wheel.”
I was not
familiar with his work. I have two kids now, and it’s not “The Color
Wheel”’s fault that I didn’t know what it was, it’s my fault. I got the
script through the usual channel, which is my agent. He sent me the
script, and it came with a DVD of “The Color Wheel,” which I watched
after I read the script. It was a very claustrophobic reading experience
as it probably is as a viewing experience, and I was really taken with
the care that had been put into it. He took the time to make it a
nice-looking script which made for a nice reading experience. He really
made it so pleasurable and I was so excited to meet him just to thank
him for writing it so nicely. It was full of all kinds of really odd
details that you don’t often see in scripts.
First of all,
it was way bigger than a normal script by 30 or 40 pages. The line,
“Philip enters the room,” might normally be enough for a screenwriter.
Some writers just write treatments, and that’s absolutely fine. This
script is so interesting because it would say, “He enters the room, the
ceilings are roughly 25 feet high,” and it reads more like a play. Then
it’s full of all these details that you’re not even going to see. It
describes this party sequence and at the end of it, it says, “It’s
[Philip’s] birthday.” And it’s never referred to in the movie. That kind
of care was really exciting. Then I watched “The Color Wheel,” and it
helped me make sense of what he was thinking for this film. It was way
bigger in scope but a lot of similar things would be there too, such as
lots of dialogue that was rapid-paced.
I didn’t know
that it was a script that he was offering me to be in. I didn’t
understand the conditions of our first meeting, so I thought, “I’m sure
everyone wants to be in this movie and that he’ll be meeting with a
hundred people.” At our first meeting, I was kind of nervous because I
really wanted to be in it, but I didn’t want that to show. I was hoping
that we would be able to get along because if it was awkward, I don’t
know if I could’ve done the movie. I don’t know if I have the skills to
have done a complicated character like that on my own. There needed to
be an exchange between us.
That sort of specificity in detail reminds me of Wes Anderson’s work.
It’s not
necessary, but it’s appealing. I’ve worked on movies where that wasn’t
the case. I’m not saying I want to talk about [the movie] all day long,
because at some point, you’ve got to start making it, but I do like
having conversations about it. When I read Alex’s script, it seemed like
there were so many options. I just needed to narrow some stuff down.
It’s sort of like when you go to an eye doctor they give you two
options: lens number one or number two. You choose lens number two, and
then they give you two more options based on that. I had to find the
prescription [for Philip] and I wouldn’t have been able to do that if
Alex didn’t know whether it was lens number one or number two.
How were you able to make a potentially unbearable character compulsively watchable without diluting him of his meanness?
When we first
got together, we were having more philosophical conversations. We were
asking, “How mean can he be? When does it become unbearable, when does
it become repellant? Where are those lines?” There are times when we
were like, “Should we add a line here that softens the character?” or,
“Is there a story that he could tell that gives a little contour of
sympathy?” But honestly, all it did was make him passive aggressive. The
whole movie is built on the idea of this guy being this way, so any
alteration just sort of felt slapped on. So basically, the idea was,
let’s just go for it. We’re not going to worry about him being
sympathetic or not. We’re just going to hopefully make him fascinating
or compelling. Those are more the words that were our best case
scenario. Worst case scenario was that he was just completely hatable,
and it was sort of a risk to do it that way. The idea was, let’s throw
likability out the window and find something that still makes him worth
watching. For the first eight pages of the script, during my initial
reading of it, I was like, “Man, I don’t know, he’s so mean.” Then I put
it down because I needed to clear my head. 45 minutes later, I started
wondering about what was going on in his head, and continued reading. I
think there was something built into the character that was sort of
fascinating. He’s so extreme.
His
obliviousness to his own faults make him oddly compelling, as noted by
the narrator, who says that Philip will forever remain a mystery to
himself.
He leaves a
room and he doesn’t even think about what just happened there. Most of
the people in that room don’t exist [in his mind] after he leaves it.
He’s very much in his own head.
One of the
funniest moments in the film occurs when Philip inexplicably hands one
of his creative writing students “a piece of paper with some staples in
it.” You watch that and go, “What’s he thinking?”
He’s thinking
about the girl. He’s thinking of her as a possible new girlfriend. A
lot of times you want to connect with people—I want to connect with
people in my real life—so the idea of playing somebody who’s not really
interested in how he comes off was kind of fun.
The film’s
portrayal of Philip’s intellectual dialect is so spot-on. Where there
certain authors you had in mind or consulted with prior to filming?
That really
comes from Alex. He’s a book reader on a level that I’m not. Since
having kids, I take in books at a much slower pace. Alex’s level of
consumption—his movie intake, his book intake—is much higher. He’s
someone who’s read every Philip Roth novel and has a goal to read a
1000-page book every summer. The literary stuff comes more from him, but
for me, I never modeled Philip on anyone. When I first read it, I
thought Philip was based on a real person and that this was a biopic.
You get the sense that Philip is not the kind of writer who is
autobiographical. When he reveals to [his new girlfriend] Yvette that
his parents died and she’s kind of surprised to hear that, it shows that
Philip is not the kind of writer whose opening sentence would be, “My
parents died when I was this age.” He wants to be more like Thomas
Pynchon or the kind of writer who would write a glossary in the back of
his book. There are other writers I like, such as Ben Marcus and Blake
Butler, who I think Philip would prefer to be associated with.
I recently
interviewed Ger Duany, who played the refugee in “I Heart Huckabees,”
and he told of the confusion onset regarding that film’s overarching
meaning. Did you share in that confusion?
No, the
film’s meaning was always very clear to me. David O. Russell and I had
been working on it for a really long time. He had worked on the script
for years before he gave it to me, and it was a good year and change
before we shot it. He was very gracious to me. I was allowed into his
home and I would go there almost every day and set up camp in a den.
He’d be working on the script and having meetings and anytime he had ten
or fifteen minutes, we’d talk about the movie or go on hikes. You add
that up and it translates to so many hours of his time. I remember
Dustin [Hoffman] saying at one point, “I love this movie. It’s a farce,”
but to me, it wasn’t a farce. It was so serious. This film is about a
guy who so desperately needs to make sense of things in his life that he
hires people to help him through it. It made so much sense to me, and
the film was everything to me for years of my life. I felt like I had
taken so much from the experience. I’m also so happy for David’s success
and that he’s making movies that big audiences are going to see. He’s
one of the best directors living and I love him so deeply. To me,
[“Huckabees”] was not a film of confusion but of clarity. I knew in my
mind exactly what we were trying to do.
David has a
gift for conjuring the illusion of chaos, whereas when you watch a Wes
Anderson film, you get the sense that every mark the actors hit was as
rigidly mapped out as the production design.
Wes’s beauty
is that he gets everyone making the same movie and it never feels rigid
when you make them. It’s specific but not rigid. The thing that I love
about working with Wes is that’s he’s not obsessively trying to
accomplish his vision to the point where it becomes cold. He always has a
smile on his face and is open to ideas and mistakes. He sets up a world
where those things can play out, and it’s a blast. David and Wes are
both so different and both so similar.