Interview: Greg Mottola
Nice interview courtesy of WGA.org with writer-director Greg Mottola talking about the recently released Adventureland:
There’s no denying Greg Mottola has comedy chops, but narrowing the field more than that proves difficult. His writing and directing debut was the darkly indie The Daytrippers. From there, he went on to direct episodes of every critically-adored-yet-cancelled-in-its-prime television comedy in the last 10 years, including Arrested Development, The Comeback, and Undeclared, where he fell in with Judd Apatow, who then gave Mottola the helm of the profane-yet-commercial Superbad.
He returns to the independent world as the writer-director of Adventureland a highly personal coming-of-age story centering on a misspent summer at an amusement park circa 1987.
Here are some choice excerpts from the interview:
How do you go about balancing depth-of-character and humor? Which needs to take priority?
It depends on the tone I’m after. I always intended Adventureland to be much more of a bittersweet, slice-of-life comedy/drama compared to Superbad, which was a comedy first-and-foremost, with some emotional nuance thrown in there to round it out.
In Adventureland I set out to make something where the behavior feels very much like real life, not a heightened version of it. Having said that, absurd behavior exists all around us — but I tried to make even the Bill Hader & Kristen Wiig scenes feel grounded.
How does writing such a personal film influence your creative process?
I once read an interview with Fellini where he claimed that he couldn’t remember his own past, so he made it up. I feel like I did a bit of that: took people from various parts of my past, then imagined them co-existing in this little carnival world for one summer. The most personal stuff is how I make fun of my own youthful foolishness in the character of James. I definitely needed to be cured of some of my own earnestness and delusions about how relationships work. There are certainly moments in the film where the James character makes me cringe, so I guess those are the most autobiographical. Of course, it changed a bit to suit Jesse Eisenberg — but anything awkward that James does around a woman in the movie, you can assume I did at one point. I’m cringing again.
And here’s the trailer from the movie: