Interview (Written): James Ponsoldt
An A.V. Club interview with writer-director James Ponsoldt who latest movie is The End of the Tour, screenplay by Donald Margulies, book by David Lipsky, directed by Ponsoldt. Other credits: Smashed and The Spectacular Now.
The A.V. Club: You are a huge fan of David Foster Wallace. Donald Margulies was your professor at Yale. What’s your reaction when Donald sends you his initial script for The End Of The Tour?
James Ponsoldt: It was a range of emotions. I was flattered. I was excited. I was very nervous. Donald was and is someone I deeply admire. He’s a fantastic teacher. He’s an amazing writer. I was hyper-aware of Lipsky’s book, [which] I had read when it came out in 2010. So I knew [Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace]. I was curious about what Donald had done with it. Wallace is a hero to me. There are a handful of people I can think of that have a real emotional hold on me that way as far as what their work has meant to me. Also, I was deeply aware of what he means to so many other people, how proprietary people feel, how much of an interest they have in him or any representation of him.
It was kind of a terrifying proposition, I think. [Laughs.] I’m generally someone that has anxiety and fear when I think of taking on a movie, and I usually try to make movies about things that I’m a little bit afraid of. That’s probably a good thing. When I read it, I was deeply, deeply moved and blown away by what Donald had pulled off.
AVC: Your three previous features have open-ended conclusions. Here you know what happens to the protagonist. How big of an issue was that for you and how did you address it?
JP: Something that Donald embraced in his adaptation and that the film tried to embrace was that Lipsky’s account is not a biography of David Foster Wallace. There’s a very good biography of David Foster Wallace by D.T. Max [Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story: A Life Of David Foster Wallace] that accounts for the bulk of his life.
This is David Lipsky’s very, very subjective take of his time spent with Wallace. It’s his story about spending a few days with David Foster Wallace, who was a stranger to him, and about how Lipsky was affected by that time. We can’t speculate what Lipsky meant to Wallace. I don’t know. But I think Lipsky’s experience of meeting someone that he admires and maybe envies a little bit and maybe measures his own success against — that’s a much more universal experience than trying to dramatize the life of a complicated genius writer. It doesn’t have to be as inside baseball as a professional journalist interviewing celebrities. We’ve all had that experience of meeting someone that means a lot to us — whether it’s professionally or a strange relative, an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend, whatever — and we get that five minutes with them or that afternoon coffee and they’re never exactly what we think they’ll be. Or rather, they’re never what we want them to be because people are incredibly complicated, and people are different things to different people. Obviously, in this case, the whole thing is a very specific experience: It was two men meeting, not in a natural way, [but] a highly unnatural way. [Laughs.] Lipsky was going to write an article about him and that tape recorder was on the entire time.
The audience brings their own awareness into the story, of course, and I think you have to acknowledge that. We had no interest in dramatizing the last year of Wallace’s life. What interested me were these several days that are included in Lipsky’s book when Wallace was enjoying the success of a book that he had worked very hard on. His mental health was in a good place. He was sober, teaching. What Wallace was up for talking about at exactly this moment in time were the themes of Infinite Jest and the themes that consumed him at that time and probably during the bulk of his professional career.
For the rest of the interview, go here.
Twitter: @jamesponsoldt.
Movie website here.
For my interview with the movie’s screenwriter Donald Margulies, go here.