Chris D'Arienzo knows how to make a good first impression. For his feature debut, D'Arienzo adapted Frank Turner Hollon's 2003 novel, Life is a Strange Place, into the comedy Barry Munday, which screened last week at the South by Southwest Film Festival. It's an impressively polished comedy with a stellar cast including Patrick Wilson, Judy Greer, and Chloe Sevigny in the story of a shallow, would-be lothario who loses his testicles in a freak accident...and then soon learns that prior to that he impregnated a woman he doesn't remember sleeping with (check out our review here). Writer-director D'Arienzo was on hand at the SXSW press day to talk about adapting the book and the joys of improv.
How did this project come about?
The book was given to me by my agent, and it was one of those things where you just saw how it could be this really beautiful little love story with really weird, quirky, nakedly awkward characters. I love those movies. I was actually in a band and touring, so I took the book with me and wrote it while I was on tour. When I came back I gave it to my agent, and they were so supportive of it and so great, and they also represented Patrick Wilson. It started falling into place. I think it really came from the actors responding to it, because it wasn't a movie that financiers would be particularly excited about, so it kind of needed to start from a creative place. Once you saw that it was an actor's movie, that actors were finding this interesting, that was the only reason it got anywhere.
Was there a particular moment or scene in the book that you couldn't wait to write or direct your version of?
That's really interesting, I'm sure there was. You know what it was? It was Ginger's character in general. I very much identified with Barry in some of my more douche-ier moments of my adolescence. I see those things you're kind of embarrassed of in retrospect. But I was really intrigued by something I thought was going to be really something special. In a lot of comedies, the female character is often the girlfriend who can't put up with the wacky antics of her guy. What I loved was that the comedy was really driven by the female, in many ways, story-wise. Ginger was the engine of the comedy. So I felt like if there was a way I could execute this right, women would really celebrate this movie, because, weirdly, even though she's gawky and weird, she's an incredibly empowered woman. She really owns it. So that was definitely the moment when I thought, "Well, this could be interesting."
What was your process for sitting down and adapting the book?
Well, this was my first adaptation, and my first directing job, so everything was kind of new. What I did was, I really just went through with a legal pad -- I always write on legal pad first -- and I just went through chapter by chapter and converted everything I was reading into a screenplay. Then I had this unwieldy, huge screenplay, but then it was in a medium that I could understand the editing process of, as a writer. That's when I was able to start pulling away and adding, kind of tweaking it. It was in that process that I knew I really wanted to direct it. There are these movies that I really love, like Harold and Maude, The Graduate, Tootsie; they're tremendously funny movies, but it's really the heart that is in those movies. The real love stories, the real emotions that are happening, the messiness of them, are what really makes them compelling. I used Hal Ashby or Sydney Pollack, once I started thinking about it from a director's standpoint, I started thinking about it from their standpoint and seeing how they achieved what they achieved.
How did you find your style of directing the actors?
I started as an actor and studied improv at the Groundlings Theatre, so I love improv...if it's done right. The key with improv is to be tasteful and to make sure it's always story-related, that it's not just tangents. So I love it.
You don't want people improving just for the gag reel.
Yeah, and you also don't want some unwieldy, four-hour movie because everyone's got a joke they want to bring. It's that stroke of luck when you hire really great actors, the taste comes with it. Everyone improv'd in really tasteful ways and we just found elements that made us all laugh. I think we all share the same sensibilities, so the improv felt very organic. Everyone was so mindful of the script. We all loved the story and these characters, so there was never any improv that was out of ego. I really wanted to make it feel alive and like real people talking, so I was always open to any kind of improv.
Did you guys do much rehearsal?
Not really. I think Patrick and Judy and I sat down for about two days and went through their stuff. So, no, we didn't do much. In fact, the very first scene we did was the scene where Patrick and Jean Smart are looking at pictures and having this very tender moment. They just met. And that's a testament to the actors we had, that you completely buy that these people really love each other. It certainly made my job a lot easier the first time out.
Was it challenging to find the balance between the broader tone and the more subtle stuff?
It wasn't a challenge, it was just something I was always mindful of, because it can bite you in the ass really bad if you don't. You just have to keep a rein on it. Structurally, I tried to be mindful of creating a rhythm to the movie where when you did have something that was heartfelt, it was followed by something absurd and silly, so it always kept you a little off-balance and interested. When I first got the book -- the book is called Life Is a Strange Place -- I didn't want to use that title, just because it kind of lets you know that this is going to be a weird journey. The same thing with casting Patrick. I didn't want to cast a comedian, quote-unquote--
You didn't want to cast Will Ferrell.
Right. Even though I think he would have been fantastic, people would have seen the joke coming. They would have known that something funny was about to happen, and I think the real fun was having actors and situations that surprise, so an audience leaves thinking, "That was funnier than I thought it was going to be." Which is, I think, how you want to leave any comedy.
