Rashida Jones, Will McCormack, and Lee Toland Krieger talk Celeste and Jesse Forever

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Wednesday, 15 August 2012 19:49

Written by Renzo Adler

Made for a scant budget of less than million dollars, but featuring a great collection of comedy actors, Celeste and Jesse Forver, directed by Lee Toland Krieger and starring Rashida Jones (Parks and Recreation) and SNL alum Andy Samberg, features the usual cinematic cavalcade of twenty and thirty-somethings wandering their way into adulthood and dealing with failing relationships that seem to permeate films these days.

Though Celeste recieved a warm reception from critics, the film's lead actress and writer, Rashida, has recently come under much more attention for her gaffe and backtracking for urging actor John Travolta to come out of the closet. This interview at the SoHo Apple Store with Rashida, co-writer and co-star Will McCormack, and director Krieger offers a glimpse at Rashida before her recent maelstrom of regretful words and hasty Twitter apologies.

Q: You wrote such a fantastic script. Did you write from experience? How much of your life is in this film?

RJ: A lot of it. You have to be a genius to write total fiction that you don’t have a connection with or isn’t from personal experience. But we stole a lot from our own lives and our friend’s lives, with their permission, I think. We just wanted to tell a story about a broken heart and what it really feels like to break up with someone and how long that takes, and to love someone and feel like you have to let them go but you don’t want to let them go.

Q: There are some scenes in the film that are painfully funny, especially when you start dating again. Did those things really happen?

RJ: There are some gnarly, gnarly dates. You haven’t seen it yet, but just remember when I tell you those things really happened to me. You’re going to feel sad for me.

Q: That is pretty sad. Though for one particular guy it’s pretty embarrassing.

RJ: Yeah, it is. You should know who you are.

Q: Rashida, is it important or relevant that as a woman you have to write your own projects?

RJ: Something relevant is happening right now with women in film and TV. It’s great and people talk about it. It’s a trend where 

messy and dynamic. But women have always been messy and dynamic and interesting and they’ll continue to be so.

I’m happy people are taking notice, but I hope it’s not a trend, I hope it’s a reality that will open up. It really came from a place of just wanting to write something with Will, who is my best friend, and we talked about it for a long time. Even though we knew we were writing the part for me, the most important thing was telling the story and telling it in a fresh and hopefully honest way with some laughs.

It’s a very honest film. When you see it you’ll see it comes from a place of honesty and maturity. It has some raunchy dirty stuff, but it’s very different from the raunchy dirty films you see today. It has maturity to it. And obviously the people working on this film have been through relationships before and know what they’re talking about.

Will McCormack: So many relationships. So much pain.

Q: Will, Andy’s character is this man-child type character seen in a lot of films today, typified by actors like Seth Rogan and Adam Sandler. Why do you think we’re seeing this type of character? Where does he come from.

WM: That guy exists. It came from a lot of men and women we knew. I knew a lot of very dynamic successful, ambitious women that dated under-achieving men and I don’t know what that is. Rashida, you have some good perspective. I feel like men are lagging behind.

RJ: The way it’s evolved is that women have been told they can do all these things and that’s great, and the reaction to that is that there’s this new kind of guy that’s feeling somewhat empowered by chilling at home, playing videogames, dating younger women, not committing, dressing in ironic t-shirts like a teenager. I feel like it is a means of empowerment, but I’m not sure it’s that helpful to all the women in the world. But it’s a women’s responsibility to find some sort of balance.

It’s cool to be sensitive; it’s cool to be a guy into dreaming all day. Underachieving sounds like a dirty word. It’s okay. Women were housewives for years and there was no judgment about just raising a child.

That’s a really tough job. I’m giving men permission to do whatever they want to do, but just step it up in the relationship sector a little bit. Commit.

Q: In the movie Rashida’s character is very successful, but Andy is this failed artist. It’s like he’s reliant too much. Lee, when you came across this script, where you certain this had to be your next film?

Lee Toland Krieger: It was pretty instant. I got it late one night, planned on reading it because I heard out great it was. It was a script that had been around the black-list, which is this list of great unproduced scripts.

I read the first page and I thought “let’s see if these actors can write.” I fell in love with it from the first page and whipped through the script that night. I called Jennifer Todd, our producer on the film, and said “what do I have to do to be a part of this?”

And she didn’t say “I’m sending you this script to see if you want to direct this.” She just said “I’m sending you the script.” She was pretty cagey. It was just my luck. I had finally fallen in love with something and she’s just going to say “we’re looking for PA’s and you can come down.”

Fortunately, Will, Rashida, and Jenn gave me an opportunity to meet them and explain my take on it and we all just connected right away and hit the same touchstones for movies we saw this as and off we went.

RJ: We had seen The Vicious Kind, Lee’s first movie, and absolutely loved it. It’s very different in tone, it’s a dark drama about family and heartache, but it was so beautiful, and so delicately discovered the emotional side of things. It was not even a question.

Q: How involved were you in the casting of the other roles?

LTK: It was all three of us. Luckily for me, Will and Rashida are sort of the unofficial mayors of Hollywood, they know everyone, which made everything. We had great casting directors, Barbara McCarthy and Angela Demo, who we forgot to thank at Sundance and we’re still paying dearly.

With their guidance, and the few actors I knew [combined with] the few actors they knew, we knew everyone. Fortunately we just had a great piece of material and everybody loves Will, Rashida, and Andy. We were shooting out in LA and people said “sure, we’ll come out and do a few days of work and make no money and eat bad food.”

But we had a great piece of material, so people were eager to come out. It was very cool to see.

Q: You wrote this character for yourself and she’s not entirely unsympathetic, but in some scenes you think no wonder she’s not happy. She’s demanding and a know-it-all.

RJ: I agree with you, there are a lot of things about her that are not for everyone and they’re magnifications of qualities about me that Will very nicely observed and made larger than life for this character. It gave us somewhere to go. It’s more interesting to watch me to learn a lesson if they don’t know something about themselves.

She’s got a blind spot. She knows she’s right, she knows she can judge somebody on the spot and be right about it, but ultimately it might make her unbendable.

Q: She always thinks she’s right. Was that tough writing and having to say you’re wrong?

RJ: Wait, “she” meaning Celeste, not Rashida. Let’s just be clear.

Q: But did it bring up certain things about your personality?

RJ: Right.

WM: No, it’s like being in a relationship. The idea avails itself. You never push too hard because ultimately I’m right and she’s wrong, or she’s wrong and I’m right, the idea will be right. We’re usually both wrong, and the idea is right a week later. It takes time.

RJ: We collaborated pretty well because this was our first screenplay we had finished and our first screenplay we had worked on together. We were very gentle with each other in that process of sharing ideas. It can be a raw process, sharing ideas.

WM: Having acted for so long, it’s in our DNA to collaborate.

Q: Rashida, for I Love You, Man what was your experience like working with Jason Segel and Amy Adams? And what was it like working with Kermit on The Muppets?

RJ: Jason Segel is a wonderful person and a wonderful actor, I love him, he’s hilarious. Amy Adams is a dream, a professional, she’s so nice. Paul Rudd is the greatest. We’ve worked together five times now, and I would work with him 25 more times.

And Kermit is a great dude.

Q: Rashida, what influence did your parents have on your acting and writing career?

RJ: My parents are very supportive, very unconditional, very non-judgmental. They would have supported me regardless of what I decided to do. It’s nice for them that we have this thing that we can talk about, how we all create things.

My dad would just tell me to follow my heart, do what I love, work really hard, and never think that you know anything. He still feels that way about music and he’s been a musician for over 60 years and he still finds new things every day. That’s what makes him great. Humble attitude and curiousity.

Q: Lee, what did you bring to the script? Did you let the actors improvise?

LTK: I’m a real taskmaster, I run a tight ship. No, I was very fortunate to work with not only brilliant actors, but really genuinely funny people. Rashida and Andy being the most obvious ones, but as you can see, Emma [Roberts] is hysterically funny, Elijah [Wood] is funny, Will McCormack is brilliant and funny.

The reality was that we were making a movie in 23 days, so it wasn’t this Judd Apatow experience; there wasn’t a ton of time. It wasn’t let’s just ride it out and see what happens. It was let’s make sure we get what’s on the page because we love what’s on the page and trust what was on the page and if we had time we could loosen the screws or bring something different.

Often times Andy, Rashida, Emma, and Will would throw ideas and we were able to improve, but not as often as you’d think with a comedy. We had a really great piece of material and we wanted to service that.

RJ: In that particular scene, Emma just added two words to her line and made it a thousand times funnier. It was scripted “you’re pretty” and she added “kind of.” “Wow, you’re *kind of* pretty,” which is so much funnier and so much more descriptive of the character of this pop star that thinks she owns the world.

Q: Rashida, how did you react on the Park and Recreation set when they added the story with you and Tom getting together?

RJ: Aziz [Ansari] is hilarious and I love him, he’s my friend and basically the writers pitched it to us that this is a small town, and in a small town everyone dates each other, and that’s true. LA is kind of a small town and everybody’s dating each other and it makes sense.

We looked at that relationship with a comic value and how different they were and how she’s annoyed but misses it. I’m game, the writing is still good and funny and it works in the scene where he was in shock that I didn’t know who Genuine was. It was hilarious. It was really good acting on my part to act like I don’t know who Genuine is, because believe me, I know.

Q: Will and Rashida, it took 23 days to shoot, but how long did it take to finalize the script and get everything together?

RJ: 35 years.

WM: It felt like a decade, but we wrote the movie pretty quickly. We finished the first draft in four months and sold it in six in 2008 to Fox Atomic, which was a mini-major studio but they went out of business. We got the script back and sold it again, only you don’t get paid again.You don’t get paid much the first time.

We sold it again, meaning Overture bought it and they went out of business. So our script shut down two studios. Then it was set up five or six times in different incarnations and finally we were like let’s just do this with however much money we can get.

We were at this place that is also now out of business and they were going to give us two and a half million to make this movie and it felt shady. We were in the parking lot and we just said “this feels wrong.” I think it was your idea…

LTK: I’ll take credit for it.

WM: You were like “let’s just make it for $50, whatever we can get, but we’ll have total control.” And we did. This great company found us, Envision Media Arts, and we ended up making the film for well under a million. Under $900,000. It took four to six months to write the first and second draft, and then four years to get made.

RJ: We did a few tweeks before we filmed because we had to condense locations and whatever, but we didn’t change it too much from 2009. There were a few references that might be dated.

Q: Rashida, I first saw you in NY-LON, which was more of a serious role, but then you went to Parks and Recreation. Do you feel more suited to serious roles or comedy.

RJ: People say “comedy is really hard.” Look, no. I work with the best comedians in the world and it’s really fun, I’m not going to lie. It’s hard to be sitting in your uncomfortable emotions all the time. Your body doesn’t know you’re acting. Your heart and your brain don’t know you’re acting. You have to shake that off every day.

For me as a human being, I love doing comedy because I get to laugh with funny people all day long. There’s nothing wrong with that. I have a lot of respect for dramatic acting, especially because I’ve never carried a film before. NY-LON was my first lead role [in a TV show] and that was really tough for me.

This was my first lead role in a film. It was a tough experience. I loved it, but I basically cried for 23 days straight. I was cool with it, it was fine, it was contained, it was safe, I was with my friends., but I think I’m going to go with comedy.