Tina Kakadelis
Those who grew up on the indie rock of the early-aughts will have fond memories of Rooney’s Robert Schwartzman. When he wasn’t on stage with the band, he was stealing Anne Hathaway’s heart as the M&M-eating piano player of The Princess Diaries and falling in love with Kirsten Dunst from afar in The Virgin Suicides. Film has always been Schwartzman’s first love and The Good Half is his latest feature.
The film follows Renn (Nick Jonas) as he returns home to attend the funeral of his mother (Elisabeth Shue). The two were especially close, but Renn was not there for her final moments. On his flight to Cleveland, a young woman (Alexandra Shipp) strikes up a conversation with him and he lies about his reason for returning home. This new, interesting person gives Renn an escape when funeral planning with his sister (Brittany Snow), father (Matt Walsh), and stepfather (David Arquette) get to be too much. Schwartzman sat down with Film Obsessive News Editor Tina Kakadelis to chat about his upcoming film, The Good Half. The transcript has been edited for clarity and space.
Film Obsessive: My first question is about the script for The Good Half. It was written by Brett Ryland and it’s his first feature. How did you guys meet and how did the project come across your desk?
Robert Schwartzman: It’s so funny because Brett and I have become very close since the movie’s been made. Personality-wise, we get along as if we’ve known each other for a long time. It’s nice to meet somebody later in your life that you connect with so easily and then it’s awesome when they write something that you read and you love. Maybe that’s why I loved it too because I love him. Similar sense of humor music, and things we like to do. We crossed paths because he was trying to figure out who should direct the movie that he had written that was so personal to him. It was inspired by the death of his mother and he had gone home to make sense of it years ago. He wasn’t sure if he was going to be a writer professionally and he was dealing with all these things. I made a movie called the The Unicorn years ago. I think the style of comedy and the feeling of that movie was what made Brett think that maybe my style could work with his script.
My dad had passed away from the same cancer as his mother. I was much younger than Brett was when he lost his mother. I had a different vantage point of loss. Maybe that was something that he felt comfortable with; his film in the hands of a director that has had the similar experience. It’s scary to take a script that’s so important to you and then to have someone else step in to direct it. It’s like, does this person get it? I’m very respectful of where he was coming from and what he was hoping for. He was also very respectful of where I took it and he’s very happy with the film.
It’s a personal story to both of you. How do you kind of prepare yourself mentally for having to talk about all these difficult things as part of the press for the movie? I imagine it’s quite hard.
I was talking to someone recently about that today. Making this movie for me is part of the process of understanding loss. It’s not like it just goes away. Maybe you have an easier time making sense of it or dealing with it when you think about it, but the wounds of it don’t just go away. Ever. You’re always looking for ways to better understand it or keep it alive. in a way like you want to keep it fresh to the feeling of the person who was in your life. This movie was my way of working through it. Just even having a conversation about one’s experience with grief is part of the healing process. People have come up to me after they’ve seen the movie and brought up someone that they’ve lost recently and how we presented their journey in a way that was familiar to their experiences. It was like honest and I think that’s important. We didn’t make a heavy drama and I don’t know if heavy dramas are even effective at communicating loss. I think it’s those moments of laughing that you go, oh yeah, that’s real.
Definitely. I lost somebody about a year ago and it was quite the emotional experience to watch the film last night. I loved the way that you made the flashbacks feel like they were also happening in the present. It was this really interesting way of playing with time and perception. I was curious about how you, as a director, planned for the look of the flashback and the way that they melded together with the present?
I remember talking to Brett early on and he was asking me specifically about how I’m going to do the flashbacks I had an explanation for how I was going to do it, but I don’t even I did it that way to be honest. There’s a director Michel Gondry that I love who does a lot of really great music videos and has become a great filmmaker. Michel does these match cuts where you match an action and change the camera perspective. It’s this trickery of perspective to create this flow of this crazy, heightened, bizarre conceptual world.
I’m a big fan of match cuts. Before we actually started shooting, I was plotting out the match cuts on set because we had to shoot it a way that would work for the editor. When I direct movies, I think about the edit most of the time. How am I going to cut the scene? What pieces do I need to get out of the scene? I plotted out all the match cuts of how we get in and out of a flashback. Renn’s going to hold up the elephant that he bought for his mom in the hospital and we’re going to cut from the elephant into present day from the flashback. That was the hard part about this movie. How do I best sell the past versus the present? Because the flashbacks were from not that long ago and it would’ve been easier if they were all from when Renn looked like a little kid.
It’s supposed to be not long ago because Renn’s mother was lost to cancer suddenly. In a matter of months, somebody can go from what seems like a healthy person to no longer around. That’s the case with this movie, so it was kind of tricky to make sure we could sell that. I appreciate you shouting that out because that was something that, as a director, that was like a stylistic choice. We also used audio for that. There’s times where they answer the question in the past and then it’s the present. I said to Nick, I need you to look the camera and say your line responding to the dad’s line that we’re going to shoot in two weeks. You’re having to pull up scenes that we’re not shooting anytime soon we have enough time to cut into it.
It’s very interesting that you bring up editing because I was going to ask if you felt like your career in music makes you specifically attuned to the rhythm of editing.
Yeah. No question. I operate Pro Tools and I can make records by myself if I had to. I like having my hands on the software and playing around. When I went to film school, I studied editing and when I started making music, it was already familiar. I started off wanting to make movies and then went into music and then went back to movies. Movie editing taught me music editing. Then music editing helped me better understand movie editing later. I like to drop in music in the scenes and it gives it a certain feeling and the background tempo. I’m very much sensitive to flow, timing, and the rhythm of scenes. For me, that’s everything. Music made me more sensitive to that.
I read that you wanted to make sure that the set felt collaborative to allow your cast to be vulnerable and playful at the same time. How do you create that working experience?
The biggest thing for me is just to make every day important. It’s important to me that everybody feels good about being on set and taken care of as best you can. It’s important that actors can ask me questions. You know, why do I want it to be this way versus this way? I just want to make sure people know what we’re doing, because I think the hardest part is if an actor have no idea what the heck they’re here to do. It’s the worst feeling. For actors, you might feel crazy because you can’t really prepare or you don’t maybe feel respected if no one’s telling you anything. Sometimes communication can be a breakdown of a lot of people. Maybe something didn’t get to somebody because the email got missed. When I would meet with the actors, I would tell them that I want them to be able to try things. I want to be able to experiment. I have a certain way in my mind of how I want it to be, but let’s experiment together and try as long as you’re willing to try.
I think that’s the biggest thing. I’ve heard about stories on set with actors not wanting to do something or saying no. That’s the stuff that I haven’t really encountered, but that would be insane to me. It’s like, what do you do? We had days where some of the actors didn’t quite understand what the scene and we lost time where we could have got another shot. However, we got through it and it made the scene better. At the end of the day, I’m a big believer in whatever happens, happens. We just have to make it work and it’s going to be what it’s going to be. Some of the best things happen that way.
My last question is about the upcoming theatrical screening. You’re also going to do a Q&A with Nick [Jonas] as part of the event. What does the communal theatrical experience mean to you?
It’s really important. I’m a creature of not leaving my house watching everything at home. We’re all like that at times, but every time I go and see a movie in a theater, I’m reminded of that I’m actively participating. It’s just not appearing in front of me where I can take it for granted. Sometimes we just turn something on, we turn it off, we leave, we come back. It just changes the relationship of the experience. I think there’s something nice about signing up to sit there and watch a movie right now and know it’s going to take me away. I’m here, I’m with it. I think that’s really powerful. There’s something that’s really harmful about breaking a movie up into pieces and not investing yourself in it. It turns into a passive experience.
With music, I love playing people music. Like, hey, you got to hear this song. You know, shouting out the harmonies and just being actively engaged. There’s something great about that. The flip side is you have a party and you push play on a playlist. It’s nice and it sets a tone and atmosphere. You can’t really be asked to listen to every little song actively because you’re talking with people, but we just put stuff on and we take it for granted.
Movies should be more than that because there’s something kind of magical about movies format-wise. Like, let’s be a part of this. What we set out to make for an audience member and to be given to theaters across the country is like really, really amazing. People have a chance to drive not very far from home and see this movie on the big screen is pretty great. We intended it to be seen on the big screen. We color graded, mixed, and shot the movie with the intention of the big screen. A lot of the movies that get screen time are like these big IP driven mega, mega million dollar movies and that’s fine. It’s not like it’s one or the other, but unfortunately, it’s become one or the other. Indie movies and more character driven movies just get a little bit left out. The future of theaters is riding on movies like The Good Half getting seen in in theaters.
It sounds like I’m exaggerating, but it’s not a total exaggeration because the better the movies perform in theaters, the more people will put them in theaters. The worse they do, the more they’ll take them out of theaters. If we all want to keep this experience alive, we should invest ourselves in the experience.
Absolutely! Thank you so much and congratulations on the the big screen.
Thank you. Thank you for all the support and the excitement for the movie. Thanks so much, Tina. Have a good one.
