Q: Some writers turn to directing because they hate what other directors have done to their work. But I thought Nick and Norah'sInfinite Playlist was pretty good...
Lorene Scafaria: I love Nick and Norah's and I love Pete [Director Peter Sollett]. No... there's so many moving parts to it. It really didn't have much to do with that. I've always wanted to direct. I sold it as a pitch with myself attached to direct. I did a lot of theater, so I was comfortable with actors. And I made a short -- I called it "the longest short" -- which was never meant to be in film festivals, but I learned a lot. The writer's strike came and I was only able to go to the set for four days. Usually a writer isn't even invited, but my own people were making it impossible for me to go to the set. I was there for post and all that, but I feel like I missed out.
Q: Post is where you really learn filmmaking, though, isn't it?
LS: Yes. But this time, by the time we got to post, I now had this little fragile egg to protect up until the end!
Q: The music in this film is so crucial, especially Scott Walker...
LS: There were certain things that we got the records but we couldn't get the songs. Our budget for the soundtrack was so small that we had to stretch the dollar. I mean Scott Walker... that was from the beginning what I was desperate for. But trying to convince people that Scott Walker should be the voice of that moment, was... (laughs). Music is so subjective. I don't blame anybody, but it is the kind of thing that brings out everybody's tastes.
Q: Music has this ability to almost record our feelings. You can listen to a song from your childhood and instantly remember time, place, sensations...
LS: It is feelings. I have an easier time writing to movies or TV shows... they're so much less distracting to me, because music brings up so much emotion and many memories for me. It's too distracting. There's that great moment in High Fidelity when he's organizing his albums autobiographically. It's genius! That's exactly what it's like. They really do... they bring you back to an exact time.
Q: Sadly, I wasn't even familiar with Scott Walker until I saw that documentary 30th Century Man.
LS: An ex-boyfriend introduced me to Scott Walker, and that was probably the best thing that came out of the relationship, and so it was that autobiographical memory. But he became that voice for me, so much heartache and soul and power. And those simple lines mean so much.
Q: There have been quite a few "end-of-the-world" movies lately. Did you somehow tap into the mood of the moment when you were writing this?
LS: Obviously it's on people's minds. I sold this in 2008, so I had no idea that we'd capitalize on it. But I did feel it a year ago. I said, we need to make this now... it's on people's minds. I wanted it to be an asteroid because I didn't want it to be a human error, or anything political. When I first started writing, I was thinking of it as a Western, and the asteroid was sort of like the posse on the hill that was coming for them. You can't outrun your fate. That's how the harmonica made into the movie. There are all those late-1990s end of the world movies. When you watch Deep Impact, the moment I felt anything is when Tea Leoni is standing on the beach with her father. In The Day After Tomorrow, you're following Jake Gyllenhaal's crush on the girl rather than anything that's happening in the snow. For me it was less a reaction to end of the world movies than a response to where romantic comedies have gone. I love romantic comedies, but I miss them. They just got very formulaic -- for a reason. You still want to see people fall in love, obviously, but you don't want it to be in that context. The stakes weren't very high. And they're not very romantic.
Q: It's true. I like them, too, when they're good, but so many of them are so bad now.
LS: I wanted the stakes to be high and I wanted to feel real romance. Where they started to go is that the man was the man-child and the woman was kind of this uptight, type-A, organized person. Because that's not me... I've always been more of that free spirit that's drawn to the withdrawn kind of person. That's why I wanted to explore this kind of relationship. And when thinking of who would be the most interesting to watch wander through the end of the world, the guy who has been sleepwalking through life and kind of half-dead is the person who is going to benefit the most from the end of the world.
Q: And he has the perfect name: "Dodge."
LS: It's pretty sick how much I did that. The character Patton Oswalt plays is called "Roache" because this guy will survive somehow. He'll dig a hole and somehow open his eyes. The world will be gone, but Patton Oswalt will be fine.
Q: One of the most remarkable things about this is the way that even the most minor characters become fascinating, because whatever they're doing is so important to them.
LS: My production designer Chris Spellman came up with so much of that. A guy running by with a fishbowl would be so interesting to see, because that's what he's holding onto. These props say so much about these characters that you see for a second. A guy mowing a lawn in any other movie isn't that interesting, but here, it's like "what is he doing?"
Q: I especially love that you didn't cheat the ending. It's so much more powerful when they're just spending their final moments together.
LS: I'm so excited to take that concept: What happens to love when you take forever off the table? It's sort of freeing. If we don't listen to the clocks ticking in our heads quite so much, we won't settle and hold out for something special.
June 14, 2012
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