Audio Interview: Jason Reitman (“Up in the Air”)

This month, I’ll be posting an audio interview with a notable screenwriter each day. Today:Joel and Ethan Coen about their version of the movie True Grit from an interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross. You can hear it here. An excerpt:

GROSS: The main character’s job in the movie, the character played by George Clooney, is talking to people who’ve been laid off and he has to…

Mr. REITMAN: He’s not talking to them. He’s laying them off.

GROSS: He’s lay — yes. Right. He’s giving them the news and then he tries to convince them that this is actually an opportunity for personal growth, that transitions are great things, that, you know, what’s the analogy he always uses, his — the line that he’s so proud of?

Mr. REITMAN: This is a rebirth. Oh, oh, the — that anyone who’s ever set the world on fire has sat where you’re sitting right now.

GROSS: And I mean it’s really a lot of hooey, but he kind of knows it’s hooey but he kind of believes it too — is the impression I get. But anyways, you started this film in 2003 and this was a few years before the big financial meltdown. So the number of people being laid off increased exponentially, between the time you started the film and the time of the film’s release. Were you still working on it when the financial collapse started?

Mr. REITMAN: Yeah. I mean two things happened. One, you know, when I first started writing this script, we were basically in the tail end of an economic boom and I was a guy in my 20s, single, living in an apartment. And by the time I finished writing it, I was married, I had become a father, I had a mortgage and we were in one of the worst recessions on record.

So what started out as a story of a man who simply fired people for a living, and was really a contrarian satire, became a movie about a man who was trying to figure out who and what he wanted in his life.

And in addition to that, I had to cut out all these kind of satirical firing scenes that made sense when I first started writing the movie, but in this moment, don’t make any sense. And it’s not to say you can’t have dark comedy in dark times, you certainly can, but it didn’t make sense for this movie.

While we’re talking about interviews, don’t forget about these: 

Interviews — Video

Interviews — Written

Probably over 300 interviews there meaning a lot of great insight and wisdom into the craft — and it’s all free!