Paul Weitz - In Good Company

'PIE' DIRECTOR IN GOOD COMPANY.

EXCLUSIVE Paul Weitz/In Good Company Interview by Paul Fischer in LosAngeles.

Paul Weitz may have changed Hollywood's film culture with his American Pie,co-directed by brother Chris, but his later films show no similarity withthat raunchy teen classic. He followed it with the acclaimed About a Boy,and now, minus his brother, Weitz's latest film, which he also wrote, is InGood Company, originally called Synergy. A deft look at corporate America,this is a personal film for the writer/director. Central character DanForeman (Dennis Quaid) is headed for a shake-up. He is demoted from head ofad sales for a major magazine when the company he works for is acquired in acorporate takeover. His new boss, Carter Duryea (Topher Grace) is half hisage--a business school prodigy who preaches corporate Synergy. While Dandevelops clients through handshake deals and relationships, Cartercross-promotes the magazine with the cell phone division and "KrispityKrunch," an indeterminate snack food under the same corporate umbrella. Bothmen are going through turmoil at home. Dan has two daughters--Alex, age 18,and Jana, age 16--and is shocked when his wife tells him she's pregnant witha new child. Between college tuition, the mortgage and a new baby, Dan can'tafford to lose his job in the wave of corporate layoffs. Carter, in themeanwhile, is dumped by his wife of seven months just as he gets hispromotion. Dan and Carter's uneasy friendship is thrown into jeopardy whenCarter falls for, and begins an affair with, Dan's daughter Alex (ScarlettJohansson).

It's not necessarily the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters, but that doesn'tseem to bother the director, as he explained exclusively to PAUL FISCHER.

Paul Fischer: Where did this come from and how personal a piece is this?

Paul Weitz: It is extremely personal but the connections are probably are quitesomewhat tenuous. It came from hearing stories of various people who wereeither fired or whose parents have been fired, who have to readjust theirlives at a point when they probably thought they were probably going to beat the top of their game and getting more and more responsibility. So thecore relationship of the 50-year-old guy afraid of losing his job with thenew 25-year-old boss was the starting point. And then sort of having theboss fall in love with the guy's 18 year old daughter was what made me feellike maybe I can actually stretch it out into a full length film. That a)Felt like a metaphor for all the humiliation that Dennis Quaid's charactergoes through and b) meant that there could be something underneath it whichwould make you wonder when it was going to be found out and when the olderguy might snap and punch the younger guy out.

P.F: I mean these aren't the kinds of movies that a studio willnecessarily invest in, very character acting pieces. Was it difficult foryou to create characters that are believable and don't really care what themoney-makers think?

P.W: Well I do care what the money-makers think for two reasons because Ineed to get the money from them to make the film and because I want tocontinue to make films. I mean honestly this probably is the kind of thingthat the Indy division studio kind of does. But I think that is kind of sadbecause it means that it doesn't get seen by as many people and if I didn'tcare about people seeing my work I would be a playwright. I like the ideathat film is a broad, popular medium and if you discuss something with anysort of facile implications in a film you are just, it is being seen by alarge number of people. What I have found in the case of this one is Ibrought it in and they the studio sort of said do you really want to do thisand they weren't quite sure whether it was a good idea or not but then theyperhaps reluctantly just came up with a number at which it made sense tothem. Luckily, About A Boy was somewhat successful and American Pie hadbeen successful so they could justify themselves taking a risk on me withthis. But it was not initially something I think that they identified with,of course during the course of the filming they went through yet anotherchange of ownership at Universal and I think they began to identify with itmore and more.

Paul Fischer: Talk about the title change from Synergy to In Good Company.

P.W: It does. I got cold feet about the title Synergy for a couple ofreasons. One was I would ask around and people were convinced that it was aScience Fiction term. The second was that I stripped out numerousreferences to it that were in the script that did not make it into the filmso the only references to it in the film are from either Malcom McDowell'scharacter or Topher's character and it is used in it's most negative form,as sort of catchword, this amorphus not sensible catch word. Where as inthe original script I had Quaid's character look it up in the dictionary andfound that is just means sort of working together to each person's benefit.I took that out of the movie so all that was left was the negativeimplication but I ended up feeling like it was a good title for a puresatire like Network, which was not necessarily appropriate for this film andI probably also felt like I didn't want to cut my own throat with the titlein terms of people thinking it was a different kind of movie to what it was.

Paul Fischer: The one thing about your work American Pie perhaps notwithstanding,was the comedic tragic aspect of your writing. Certainly About A Boy was abrilliant example of that, because you are interested in exploring thereality, the realism of humanity as opposed to a hyper reality quite often?

P.W: Well, there is definitely a point in this film were I felt like Ihad to decide whether I was going to base this film on other films or basethis film on some perception I had on what reality was. That means thatDennis Quaid's character for instance does not have some big plot were hetries to sabotage Topher. It was tempting to do something like that and itmight have given his character more of a traditional arc, but I thought itwas interesting to just see this guy almost have a war of attrition were inthe question if his he going to retain his dignity and eventually whether heis going to be able to cope with becoming a father again at the age of 51.And that is the one sort of place where he does have an arc because in thebeginning of the movie he is terrified by that and by the end of the moviehe accepts it and is happy enough to have a daughter as opposed to the sonhe never had. I think also my big hero has always been Chekhov whodefinitely plied that terrain, who wrote things that he considered comediesin the front of his plays. So the idea that there is not much separationbetween comedy and tragedy is an appealing one to me.

Paul Fischer: What was your brother's involvement in this project?

P.W: His involvement was to be a creative producer in that he gave mevoluminous notes and helpful ideas and was a good critic for me of thescript and then of the first cut of the film. The decision to not work withhim on was made simple by the fact that he did not want to do it.

Paul Fischer: Why?

P.W: I think it was after About A Boy he wanted to something on a verydifferent scale and I was interested in doing something on the exact samescale but have it be something that was about American culture I mean theattempt with About A Boy was to have it be a British film, so there was acertain amount of anxiety on my part about a) whether I would be able to dothe job well and b) whether it would upset Chris and somehow threaten ourfriendship. But I sort of realised that if I didn't do it because Chrisdidn't want to do that would threaten the friendship more then if I did doit and it turned out to be the case, that in order for us to continue to bepartners we had to sort of step out on our own and do separate things butstill be supportive of each other.

Paul Fischer: Will you two collaborate again?

P.W: Yeah, I am looking forward to it. Yeah.

Paul Fischer: I wonder how different the relationship will be after...

P.W: It probably would be. I mean in my head it is always the ending ofSpinal Tap where the two of them get back together in Japan and that youknow they love it in Japan. I imagine it will be different but the sidebenefit of separating work wise a bit, it is really hard to be really goodpals with them if you argue them with about a work thing for 8 hours ittends to take the joy out of hanging out.

Paul Fischer: Do you think looking back on American Pie, that film was a way foryou to make a foray into film making?

P.W: Well certainly we had not gone to film school and we were coming atit from a writing perspective, so yeah, we were learning about film making.I think that there was some emotional realism at the core of that movie, inthat there was an attempt to have that be the core. It was still aboutpeople's anxiety about what happens if I go to the next stage in my life andI no longer have the comforts of my 3 best friends, and that they translatedinto desperately trying to get laid. Also I think that there was an attemptto be a little subversive with the genre in that we tried to give the girlsin the movie as much power as possible and let them be the ones determiningwhether they had sex or not, and to talk about sexual life from the femalepoint of view and. Scarlett's character in this movie is very much incontrol of the relationship she has with Topher, so I think there are somelinks between the different styles of movie and we certainly were tryingwith American Pie to have all those ridiculous situations be realisticsituations and not to heighten reality too much.

Paul Fischer: Did you anticipate that that movie would spawn various sequels andkind of a new way of 'shock film' that were made from that movie? There wereso many attempted copycats...

P.W: Ummm, no I don't think we anticipated that there was going to bethat successful. No we didn't. We were sort of operating beneath the radarand Universal was going through a terrible couple of years, where they wereall losing their jobs and making bombs, so we were sort of ignored for themost part.

Paul Fischer: When did that perception change?

P.W: The perception changed with the first preview, it looked like a gangtruce (laugh) at the preview theatre, and I began that preview hating mallrats and ended up feeling like they were my people. They knew that they hadsomething there that was going to be financially successful after, sort of,showing it for the first time, and not until then. They used to call it,apparently at the studio when they went through the daily's they called itQuaalude High (laugh) they felt that everybody was acting unnaturally andfaking it and.....

Paul Fischer: How do you feel about the profit of the film, generating all thesesequels and .?

P.W: I don't really care about it. I think that it is a good way; its amoney making machine for the studio. The only benefit for me is that I canpoint to that and did the casting in 'About a Boy' and say to a studio youshould trust me on casting because I can take an unknown and have it beright for this movie. And while Topher wasn't an unknown he was relativelyunknown to the studio, because they don't really watch TV and I don't reallywatch... I didn't really watch that show either, so it helps bolster myargument that all those people unknown and the film was successful.

Paul Fischer: Was About a Boy ever... was the British press ever hard on you aboutthese 'American Pie people' coming in to quintessentially very Britishstory?

P.W: The British press is at base perverse in a good way and a bad way.So no, I think that they liked the idea of outsiders coming in to do thisfilm. I think it appealed to their sense of the absurd that the guy that didAmerican Pie was going to come direct Hugh Grant in this excellentadaptation of an excellent British novel. I mean the, we probably took lessflack than those people who felt like maybe Hugh was not appropriate.

Paul Fischer: Being an outsider, do you think that being an outsider has helpedthe film like that, and do you still consider yourself to be in some ways onthe periphery of American cinema

P.W: Yeah, we're absolutely on the periphery if there is a thing asAmerican cinema. I think that to some degree it was helpful with About a Boywe cheated a bit because Chris had spent 8 years in England and heunderstood things about it that I didn't. But I think the moment you becomean insider in film, you just make films that are about other films, andthere is always a danger if you are working in Hollywood that you becomecompleted cut off from the rest of the world.

Paul Fischer: Is there a sort of a danger that you repeat yourself?

P.W: There are sort of 2 dangers which are flip sides of the same coin,there is a danger of repeating ones self and there is a danger of showingoff by trying to do something to be different and neither of themnecessarily leads to good film making. I think that, sort of, the piecegenuinely has life then you put yourself in the service of it. And I thinkthere is just as much of a danger of like, trying to do something crazy anddifferent, and interestingly there are certain directors who have achievedlegendary status by doing that, like Howard Hawks, and then there are otherdirectors, most directors who do very different kinds of things who arelooked at as sell outs or they not look good as having a voice...

Paul Fischer: How do you define your voice?

P.W: I'm hoping it is developing. I think that I'm hoping that I'm ableto be accurate about people's feelings, while at the same time having abelievable element of optimism in the films.

Paul Fischer: Do you, writing something; are you writing something at the moment?

P.W: Yeah, I'm writing a couple of things, one of which is, sort of, avery active satire of American Culture and the other of which is a filmexploring the duality of faith and disbelief in American culture now, thatone can sort of, perceive as being such a big part of the last election. Itseems like there is this feeling whether it is true or not, that there ispart of the country that believes but doesn't understand what the other partof the country does, and there's another part of the country that doesn'tbelieve in, doesn't understand why on earth they feel the country isprogressing.

Paul Fischer: You start that after the last election?..

P.W: The night of the election, I locked cut on this and saw the electionresult and came up with this idea, so I'm hoping that it is a good idea thatwill have legs. But that might be the next sort of windmill, until somethinghappens in terms of getting a studio to fund it, a film they don't wan tofund.

Paul Fischer: Yeah, the big studios are frightened of films with politicalresonance---

P.W: Yeah absolutely. I mean, I'm surprised they let me get away withthis one, given what they've gone through

Paul Fischer: Well I guess if it is successful...

Paul Fischer: Now, if you look at your place in film now, verses where you were atthe release of American Pie, how do you chart that progression?

P.W: Well I think that I have the opportunity, and that there's... Ihave enough rope to hang myself now. I can get a movie funded at a certainbudget I hope. So it is up to me now. I mean I think one has to do twothings one has to make a living and then decide whether one wants to decidewhether to be creative as well. So the first part of my career was justtrying to make a living and the second part now, I'm hoping that I don't getafraid; I'm hoping I can do interesting things. It is an enjoyable thing toactually be able to make films a opposed to be doing the 10th rewrite on aparticular comedy that if it gets make, is going to stink anyway!

Paul Fischer: And what about Chris, what is he up to?

P.W: He is getting started on the epic task of directing Golden Compass.He has written, he's been working on the Phillip Coleman novels, which is aseries of novels that he loves and that had a huge meaning for him in hislife, so...

Paul Fischer: Now, will you adopt the same role for him as he did for you?

P.W: Yeah, I'll be sort of there for moral support and to be a soundingboard for him.

IN GOOD COMPANY OPENS ON JANUARY 20.