Interview: Reid Carolin (“Magic Mike”) — Part 3

One of the surprise hit movies of 2012 was Magic Mike starring Channing Tatum, Matthew McConaughey, and Olivia Munn, and directed by Steven Soderbergh. With a modest production budget of $7M, the film grossed $167M worldwide. The screenwriter responsible for the script is Reid Carolin.

Recently Reid and I had an extensive conversation in which we covered a whole range of subjects including his diverse creative background, the production company he and Channing Tatum have, the stunning success of Magic Mike, the craft of screenwriting, and much more.

In Part 3, Reid goes into more depth about the creative process on the movie Magic Mike:

Scott: You mentioned Adam’s sister, Brooke, played by Cody Horn. She seems to represent a polar opposite approach to life to Mike. Mike’s a stripper who lets it all hang out. She’s buttoned‑up and plays it close to the vest. He’s an entrepreneur and she’s got a steady job. He parties down. She doesn’t. What was your thinking in crafting Brooke’s character?

Reid: We wanted somebody in the movie for Mike to look at and go, “That’s the type of person that I want to be. I want to hold down the fort. I want to be a good person. I want to be an honest person. I want to be somebody that says what he means and means what he says.” I think Brooke doesn’t even, really, look down on the stripping or anything, I just think she sees Mike and that world for what it is. She sees through the bullshit she’s talking about, about his life and where it’s going. Because she’s living that tough life and she is just eeking out money for her mortgage and trying to set up a future for herself.

She’s looking for love and not getting it, but she’s looking for it in an honest way, and Mike is not. I think she sees right through who he really is and he can feel that in a way. It’s just intuitive sometimes, when you meet somebody and you know you’re projecting onto them like, “This is the person that I’d want to be with. This kind of person would be somebody that I could have if I was leading the life that I wanted to lead.

Mike’s really a guy who’s looking for love. He’s looking to be loved. He’s looking to prove himself as somebody that deserves it and he’s not getting it because everyone sees him as a sex object.

It’s really the traditional trope of a female in emotional crisis. Somebody who is putting themselves out there and trying to find somebody that sees them for who they really are, accepts them for who they really are, their faults and everything like that. They’re really just being accepted as a sex symbol. We wanted to switch that paradigm and give that to a guy. If they’re a stripper, that’s the perfect thing, because your job is to be appreciated as a sex symbol.

That’s your incentive to keep making people see you in that way. You can’t just switch that overnight. You can’t just say, “Hey. Treat me differently.” You have to get out of that circle and meet the right person and behave the right way.

For Mike, you want it to be the type of character to tweak him and go, “Shit. I can’t get there. I can’t have that, unless I wake up and start being honest to her and myself, because every time I lie or every time I pretend to be somebody else, she’s not going to accept me.” It’s really her job to shut him down over and over, until he comes to her at the end and says, “I’m ready to be a friend and to be honest.” I think that’s kind of the idea.

Scott: That relationship is one of the most interesting ones in the movie. It is a romance story. Early on that he’s obviously interested in her. You pick up at some point where she starts to be a little interested in him. The interesting thing that you do there is you basically withhold that revelation of mutual interest until the very end. I think the last image in the movie is the quick kiss she gives him.

Reid: That’s it. Yeah.

Scott: In that respect, is it fair to say it’s a non‑traditional romance story?

Reid: Totally. I think there are truths about it. There’s lots of existing paradigms that it’s written from. I don’t think we were working from total scratch. I think it is a little non‑traditional for a love story for someone to be shut down for an entire, basically, three acts of story. The last act we’re going to be, “OK. They’re going to get together.” That’s why I think the movie has this other thrust of Mike bringing Adam into this world and training him. As he goes deeper into the rabbit hole, that’s on Mike’s conscience, because he’s made this promise to Brooke to look after Adam.

You’ve got this whole other architecture going on. You have the freedom to develop that love story, not in the background, but as more of a B story. I think if that was completely the A story of the movie, I think you’d have to play with it a little bit more. I don’t know if you’d be able to do it the way that we did it that way.

Scott: We haven’t talked about Dallas, who’s this hugely entertaining character played by Matthew McConaughey, the owner of the strip club, just this over‑the‑top provocateur. He’s almost like an evangelist.

Reid: He is, that’s exactly what he is. He prosthelytizing you.

Scott: That’s funny you say that, because I turned to my wife the other night after seeing the movie again, I said, “Dallas is like a prophet for profits.”

Reid: Yes! This is his church. That truly is how it was written, and I wrote it for Matthew, in my mind, before he was even cast. Chan and I sat down, Steven had some ideas about folks who might be right for the part before we even wrote it. We said we think Matthew would be perfect. He’s like, “That’s a great idea. I don’t know if he’d do it. Just keep sort of thinking about that and I can reach out to him.” I just started writing it for him, in my mind anyway. On the page, he’s using speech that I’ve heard Matthew use before. That’s unique to him, so I really was hoping that Steven could get him to say yes. Which he did without even reading the script, because I knew I was going to write it for him anyway.

Scott: Just thinking on that, you mentioned the word “populist” earlier, and the Dallas character has this evangelical zeal about capitalism. Is there something larger or broader going on there consciously on your part with “Magic Mike” about the American dream, selling one’s hope for success, about success being making money?

Reid: Yeah. Steven was really good about saying, “Look. Don’t try to put anything between the lines here. That will reveal itself.” He did a really good job of not making the movie so on the nose about that. For me, as the writer, that was the thing that I was most interested in about the world. It’s just about how in Florida you can make a buck. No matter how you make it, that’s OK. To me, that’s the reason why we’re in this financial crisis. The idea of making money for money’s sake is more important than how you’re making that money. That is what’s stripping is. Channing got into stripping after he was cold‑calling and selling shitty mortgages to people who could barely pay for them.

Roofing or anything, just doing these temporary jobs in a temporary world where this house gets built overnight, shoddily, sold to somebody then resold to somebody else with some other janky mortgage. Everything’s flipped all the time. Nothing is permanent in that world. It’s all about today and not about tomorrow. That’s the world that was so interesting to me.

I wanted to have this micro‑story about a guy who was looking at his life like he’s a kid in a candy store. He can just take whatever the hell he wants and just make money however he wants. There’s just going to be no consequence to it. One day you realize, “if I’m going to ever make anything of myself, I’ve got to wake up.”

That was the story of America, during the time that we set this movie. We just thought, “Hey. Sell whatever we want. Do whatever we want. The economy’s growing. Let’s just keep making money and flipping things and selling derivatives, even though we don’t really understand exactly what they are.” Then, one day, of course, you find out, “Oh shit. All that crap that we made, now people realize it’s crap. We have to pay for that. We have to wake up and do something about it.” For me, that was the metaphor.

Scott: Hitting that balance is key because so often themes like that can achieve a heaviness, a weight that really just crush the entertainment. But with “Magic Mike,” the mass populous responded to it as an entertaining, fun drama-comedy, yet if you go away and think about it, there’s some stuff going on underneath.

Reid: Yes. I think the genius of Steven is that he doesn’t want to hit you over the head with…I mean, he’s made a lot of topical movies, but he believes in a narrative that works. Whether it’s a genre narrative or whether it’s a straight‑up drama, or a comedy, or whatever. It could be a TV movie, a movie of the week. He believes that as long as you treat it the right way stylistically, and you let the actors do what they’re going to do, and you have an undercurrent of something that you want to say there, that the movie will reveal what it’s supposed to be about. But it’ll still be a piece of entertainment, and I think that it was a really good lesson for me to learn.

Because on “Stop‑Loss,” we made this movie that we really thought was going to be an important movie, we really wanted it to be. We wanted it to be something that really spoke to our culture, and talked about these guys that are coming back from the war and getting fucked over, and having to be sent back by a government that wasn’t treating them properly as citizens.

I think in all that, we got lost. Especially in the second act, and didn’t focus enough on just what makes a movie entertaining. The rest takes care of itself if you make a good movie. I do think movies feel like their directors. If you’re smart and intelligent and you have something to say, your movie’s going to find that tone, and you don’t have to whack people over the head with it.

It was really smart of Steven, to do this movie the way that he did, because we did have some stuff in there, the script, them driving by places where there’s for sale signs up all over the place, and Dallas is talking a lot about money, which he does in the movie. He always talks about money, and there’s even more of that.

At a certain point, it’s like the story just needs to be told. That stuff is happening in the background, and you’ll get it.

You don’t want it to be any more than subtle, I think. If it’s more than subtle, people just start rolling their eyes, and they understand what you’re trying to do.

Tomorrow in Part 4, Reid talks about the remarkable success of Magic Mike and its possible sequel.

For Part 1, go here.

For Part 2, go here.

Please stop by comments to thank Reid and ask any questions you may have.

Reid is repped by UTA.

Twitter: @reidcarolin.