The Spectacular Now has been in theaters for a month now and has slowly emerged as a quiet late summer hit. The heartfelt, low-key romance stars Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley-- both of them huge up-and-comers with giant franchises in their future-- as a pair of teenagers, Sutter and Aimee, who start a relationship. He's a popular guy with a major drinking problem, she's a wallflower brainiac who hasn't attended a party in her life. In most movies their relationship would be a boundary-crossing scandal and it would all come to a head at prom. But The Spectacular Now, while funnier and tenderer than most real high school experiences, is leagues more realistic than most teen romances-- and leagues more affecting as a result.
After premiering at Sundance-- where a special prize was created for Woodley and Teller-- and traveling to SXSW, The Spectacular Now is winning over audiences across the country, and arrives at a time of great change for its stars as well as its director, James Ponsoldt. Ponsoldt was at Sundance just last year with Smashed, and six years before that with Off the Black, but his career has accelerated significantly since January of this year. He's adapting the Broadway musical Pippin for the Weinstein Company, working to cast the Hillary Clinton biopic Rodham, and at some point dipping his own toe into the broad world of dystopian young adult fiction with an adaptation of Pure. It's a big change for a guy who started off solely as a writer-director, and since I had already chatted with Ponsoldt and Teller about the movie at Sundance, I took the time to talk a little more broadly about Ponsoldt's influences, his goals as he moves on to directing movies based on other peoples' scripts, and his commitments to making movies that feel like they're set where they actually are-- which includes revisiting his hometown of Athens, Georgia and making strip malls look beautiful.
Check out the trailer for Spectacular Now and our conversation below it, and see the movie now in theaters.
I was looking at your Tumblr this morning and you posted something about Say Anything and about Lloyd Dobler. It seems like that movie influenced the way you think about relationships, but is there anything else similar to that?
I mean, like Say Anything really crushed me and I fell in love with Ione Skye and…
How old were you when that came out?
I mean, that came out in ’89, I would have been 11. I didn’t see it until a few years later though. I saw it on video. I mean, this isn’t romantic, but Dumbo and Bambi really fucked me up and stuck with me. Woody Allen stuff, I mean Annie Hall and Manhattan really did a number on me. My mom loves, still, silent movies, so there were a lot of Charlie Chaplin, like City Lights was one that I watched with my mom. City Lights is one that I just remember just crushed me, and then Nights of Cabiria was another one, Fellini and it stars his wife. She plays this prostitute who’s this kind of sad clown and she’s amazing. It’s devastating, this tragic comic and the world shits upon her but she refuses to feel sorry for herself. I mean the end, if you go back and watch City Lights and Nights of Cabiria, they have the best ending ever and there’s like Charlie Chaplin as this sad tramp and there’s this blind girl. At the end of it, it just kind of, the world can be so mean, how do people stay alive and not blow their fucking brains out? How do they keep trying? That feeling of like, God, but people will still get up, and people will still keep trying. Don’t they know to stay down?
Or a book like The Moviegoer or a book like Catcher in the Rye or whatever, where it’s like, but yet people keep trying. It’s like they catch you when you’re at your most low and shitty and alone and like feeling like nobody gets me, like no one has ever dealt with what I’m dealing with. I can think of some albums as well, like Blood on the Tracks or Blonde on Blonde, albums where they catch you at the right moment, it’s like, “Oh no, other people have dealt with it.” They process it. There’s been trauma, recovery. There’s scar tissue. They’re able to articulate it now in like a work of art and it’s worth, life can be really painful, but it can also be lovely and it’s worth moving forward.
I was just going to say, your movies haven’t been quite that painful, like nothing is as bad as Dumbo being ripped away from his mom.
There’s still time.
But, here’s the thing. I just rewatched Smashed this morning and the look on Aaron Paul’s face, like the last shot you see of him, just kills you and it feels like you’re digging at that.
There’s time. I mean, it’s interesting. I’m not a sadist. I mean, there’s films sometimes where I’m like, “That’s so emotionally manipulative.” Film is inevitably kind of, it can be emotionally manipulative. I guess that’s name of the game in some way, but I just feel like such a fierce advocate for the characters and I love them so much, that I like being gentle with them, you know. When I watch a Hal Ashby movie or a Paul Mazursky movie, there’s such love and there’s pain, but like, it never feels like they want to punish these characters.
But you do have to punish, I mean you do punish the characters in this movie.
You have to make life really hard for them, yeah. You have to make life hard for them, but I don’t ever want to feel like they’re a prop or a marionette, and sometimes I see that and I’m like, “Oh, I don’t think he really identified…”
The Lars Von Trier method, not that he’s not a genius, but…
Yeah, I respect it. It’s beyond melodrama. Like when I watch old Nicholas Ray movies, really melodramatic things or even Douglas Sirk is like a really great example of melodrama where it’s like these are types, but he knows he’s dealing in types. That’s kind of what I feel like Lars Von Trier is doing, where it’s almost expressionist. I mean, I love some Lars Von Trier movies.
But you’re making people more than…
I mean, I just think, I want to make characters who you can actually see yourself in and who you’re not feeling like, there’s a sense of distance where it’s like, that’s the other and where I’m like watching someone go through a morality play, you know, almost medieval or dark ages morality play where someone’s, there’s going to be some social injustice, they’re going to get punished and die for all of our sins. For me, there’s like a schism and a disconnect from characters at some point when I see that and I’m like, I get it. You’re making people cry, but people are able to see that movie as something other than something their dealing with in their own life. I like movies that are a little more tricky, that gets their hooks in you. My perverted masturbatory fantasy is that weeks later, months later, someone might be having an experience in a relationship that may be unhealthy, after a night of partying and go, “Oh, fuck.” It’s literally like that moment when that character did that really embarrassing thing. They can find themselves in it and when they can totally find agency and surrogacy in a character.
That's how Fruitvale Station is working for people too, because you have to take the extra step of getting all these upper class white people into this black guy’s head. I don’t know. There are so many different ways to do that.
Yeah, Fruitvale is one too, where I think it will be 20 years from now, it will be one of the movies of 2013, that people are still talking about and some of the reviews have said, you know, something to the extent of, “What did his death have to do with anything that came before it?” You know what I mean? It could have been any kind of death, but I do feel like you’re exactly right. The truth is, it was a senseless and stupid death, but I feel like the real beauty of it isn’t just how Ryan dramatized that last sequence of the death, which is stunning, everything from the subway going out before midnight with the dance sequence. It’s just so alive and so much joy and it’s just devastating. It’s really, I think I heard, it was Coppola I read once said, a great movie, it’s second best scene should be at the beginning, it’s very best scene should be at the end and everything in between should make sense, like the ending of that movie really just bops you over the head. But that’s not the genius of it. I think I read Ray Bradbury once say something like a good story is creating a complicated character and following them throughout a day in their life. He’s a regular guy and he’s dealing with shit and he’s trying to get his life together and it’s a very normal life. I think that’s the beauty of it actually, is that it’s not a sensationalist story, because he’s not a spy. He’s not really, yeah, he slings drugs a bit, but he’s not really about that. It’s a very average life, but like honest and textured and worthy of depicting. That was the humanism of Ryan Coogler. It’s very easy afterward for someone to make a critique of that film and say they should have done X,Y, or Z. He was the guy that became aware of a life, because of a death, but his interest was in depicting the life. He had the interest and he spent the real hard sweat and time in creating that 90 minute story and other people didn’t. You know what I mean? Other people didn’t and he did.
You're transitioning into directing scripts by other people, like with Pure and Rodham? Is it inevitability because just when you want to make a lot of movies, you’re going to have to make other people’s stuff or is it something you really want to move into?
I think I want to do all of it. I want to tell really great stories. It’s funny, my buddy Craig Zobel, did an interview with me for Filmmaker, for the new issue. We were talking about that as well, like if you get someone else’s script, that someone else wrote, that’s great, do you feel a compulsion that you have to rewrite it just to put your name on it or something? It’s like, why would I? As long as they’re willing to put in the time when things need to change, why would I rewrite it? It’s just my ego wanting to put my name there. I’m a slow writer, is the thing. I hope that directing or kind of overseeing a rewrite or whatever, on someone else’s script, that it doesn’t impede me from doing my own writing. I haven’t crossed that bridge yet.
So, are you writing anything new of your own while you’re doing all of these other projects
I am slowly working on an original thing now, although most of my writing has been…
You’re doing Pippin and that’s writing. That’s writing only, right?
Pippin is writing only.
And then Rodham is writing and directing.
No, no. It’s just overseeing kind of Young’s rewrite of it.
Oh, that’s right. It was a Black List script. So that’s the same situation then.
Yeah, and then Pure is writing and then yeah, there’s this original thing set in the early ‘90s that I’ve been working on very ploddingly.
It’s like your thing that you have in the drawer.
Kind of. But it’s something that’s kind of a passion project. It's sort of almost like, not Ice Storm in terms of tone, but as far as a constellation of characters in relation to a very specific place and time.
In the early 90s?
Early 90s. 1991, yeah.
What’s the place?
Athens, Georgia.
Oh, ok. That makes sense.
Yeah, yeah, yeah and kind of a family.
But you don’t know what’s going first?
I have no idea...thats the thing, it’s like I made a feature Off the Black and then went to Sundance lab with another thing and tried to get it made for four years and it was really hard. It was a tough drama about kids and violence and unless you have a trust fund, which I don’t, I can’t pull the trigger and say this is what I’m going to do next. Know what I mean? And you never know what’s going to, sometimes it’s just an actor saying, “I want to do it,” and that’s what makes it go.
But now you’ve got, like the Weinsteins, they have Pippin. They can always be like, “No, next week, you’re going to go make this thing happen.” That’s so different.
It’s so different and after that, and maybe even before that, I had already been in conversations for this other thing I’m doing with them, which is called Forgive Me Leonard Peacock, which is this awesome book. It’s Matthew Quick, who did Silver Linings Playbook and it just is coming out now, which again is a kid in high school, a kid who is going to school with a gun to kill his ex best friend, is how it starts, but it’s really emotional. It reminds me of those Lindsay Anderson movies, like If and I don’t know, like angry young man, and that I’ll be writing and directing.
I thought of Smashed and Spectacular Now as being really different than watching them again back to back just now, I kind of realized that the style is not that dissimilar. They’re both really beautiful, really like small scale. Is the thing that you want to do next, whatever it winds up being, is it a style expansion? Is it a story expansions? Is there some specific kind of, what’s the next challenge thing in your mind?
I think the idea of working within genre and just making things. It’s interesting how I just think of things, I mean, I love genre filmmaking but it’s crazy how when I think of specific genres, like musical, sci-fi, like the ones within those genres that actually make me feel something are very few and far between.
In any genre, really.
Yeah, and that’s a bummer. I think of late, when we talk about sci-fi, we talk about Children of Men, because it’s like actually kind of makes you feel something, and why’s that so hard? When we talk about musicals, everyone is like Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Singing Detective or Singin' in the Rain, because you feel something, or Wizard of Oz, where you feel something. My goal would always be to ground it in characters like with performance that just knock you on your ass. I love the idea of creating, of world-building, I guess, and that’s the fun thing.
To build, like not make it in the real world and build a fake world.
Yeah, or just a distorted version of our world. It’s like you can’t do that a lot.
Because you haven’t really done that yet.
No, you can’t really. I mean, the little kid in me that watched Wizard of Oz and was like, how amazing would it be to create that fucking world or just to like do New York in 1905. You know what I mean? Or whatever, like when I see, when I watch movies like Age of Innocence or something, it’s like man!
Or Washington in the Watergate era for Rodham.
Yeah, well, exactly. It’s a world we know, but we’ve kind of seen it even in films in like All the President’s Men. The movies that I’ve rewatched have been, I have rewatched Milk and Good Night, and Good Luck, but then movies like Patton and Goodfellas and The Fighter. Those are biopics, but they’re so cinematic and visceral that you don’t really think of them as like TV films.
Your movies are really beautiful, but there are a lot of spaces that are not that impressive. And you seem to really put in the effort to make them all look beautiful or to do something interesting with the spaces that aren’t that striking. Why?
Picking your locations is like casting your lead actor, like I put a ton of thought into casting, say, Miles Teller. I do the exact thing in every location. It’s what you’re going to see. The movies that I love the most, locations are one of the main characters, if not the defining character. When people do regional filmmaking, like the Midwest or the South, or depict like a socioeconomic thing, of like lower middle class or white poverty, or things like that, it’s something I’m very acutely sensitive to, because it’s a world that I guess, I know. Nine times out of ten, certainly big Hollywood gets it so wrong in a patently offensive and reductive way. Not everyone wants to see aspirational stories of like bourgie white people in Santa Barbara, you know what I mean, or Manhattan and I don’t know. For the exact same reason I would want to cast actors who look and feel real and not cover up the blemishes, lines in their face with makeup, but actually show, if that’s the map of their life on their face, I really want to underline it and allow them to be them.
Of course, that’s what I want with the locations as well. I bemoan the idea that like, everything is just gonna look generic and, there’s beauty in a strip mall, but if you’re gonna, you should really embrace that’s it’s a really surreal space. It’s a product of where I grew up. I I find I love every city that I’ve ever been to and I just love understanding the soul of a city or a town or a place, and that’s as much as I would want to understand like Aimee Finicky or Sutter, I really want to understand the place and just have a very specific idea of the way the characters relate to that place and the way that it defines them. I grew up with crickets. I grew up in the woods. It would take a car ten minutes to get to school. It was space and sound and it’s like it’s what the internal monologue of my childhood is very different than someone who would grow up here. You either embrace that or you think that movies are story and character, but I think they are story, character, and place.
