Daily Dialogue — January 16, 2016
TERMINATED EMPLOYEE 1: This is what I get in return for 30 years of service for my company? And they send some yo-yo like you in here to try to tell me that I’m out of a job? They should be telling you you’re out of a job.
TERMINATED EMPLOYEE 2: You have a lot of gall coming in here and firing your number one producer. And then you’re going to go home tomorrow and make more money than you’ve ever made in your life, and I’m going to go home without a pay check. Fuck you.
TERMINATED EMPLOYEE 3: I just… I guess you leave me dumbfounded. I don’t know where this is coming from. How am I supposed to go back as a man and explain this to my wife that I lost my job?
TERMINATED EMPLOYEE 4: On a street level, I’ve heard that losing your job is like a death in the family. But personally, I feel more like the people I worked with were my family and *I* died.
TERMINATED EMPLOYEE 5: I can’t afford to be unemployed. I have a house payment. I have children.
TERMINATED EMPLOYEE 6: I don’t know how you can live with yourself, but I’m sure that you’ll find a way while the rest of us are suffering.
STEVE: [on the verge of tears] Who the fuck are you, man?
RYAN BINGHAM: Excellent question. Who the fuck am I? Poor Steve has worked here for seven years. He’s never had a meeting with me before, or passed me in the hall, or told me a story in the break room. And that’s because I don’t work here. I work for another company that lends me out to pussies like Steve’s boss, who don’t have the balls to sack their own employees, and in some cases, for good reason. Because people do crazy shit when they get fired.
— Up in the Air (2009), written by Jason Reitman & Sheldon Turner, based on the novel by Walter Kirn
The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Surprise. Today’s suggestion by Katha.
Trivia: A large amount of the people we see fired in the film are not actors but people who were recently laid off. The filmmakers put out ads in St. Louis and Detroit posing as a documentary crew looking to document the effect of the recession. When people showed up, they were instructed to treat the camera like the person who fired them and respond as they did or use the opportunity to say what they wished they had. A way to discern who are the actors and who are the real people is that the real people do not have dialogue with George Clooney or Anna Kendrick, as they were shot separately. Jason Reitman did this intentionally, feeling that the real people would freak out Clooney and Kendrick.
Dialogue On Dialogue: Commentary by Katha: “These are the first lines of the movie, real people talk about their feelings being fired (despite Steve, who was played by Zach Galifianakis). You can feel their surprise and their shock as if it already had happen the moment before. And as they talk directly into the camera, it puts us in the shoes of the protagonists. This is what he hears everyday as he is messenger of the bad new‘s surprise. Though this are documentary scenes they are still selected and therefore kind of written in the editing room.
These talks give the beginning of the movie a great counterpart. This version of the script (which can find here) starts with Bingham‘s“ What‘s in your backpack“-speech (here is the clip) where he suggests to burn all the ballast. In the movie it comes after we‘ve seen really people which will loose houses and perhaps there families. This scene gets more irony in the movie version.