Counter Service: Jason Schwartzman talks Shopgirl
In the pocket of my recollection that’s reserved for my childhood cinematic memories, it’s amazing how stubbornly and consistently a gurning white-haired loon can be found running about causing havoc. For me, and probably for a generation, Steve Martin was the movies. Whether it was the over-stressed dad of Parenthood or the useless not really wannabe hero of The Three Amigos, or perhaps when I was a little older the highly strung fireman of Roxanne or the jerk of The Jerk, he’s there, causing mayhem. A few years ago a flatmate introduced me to some of his extremely coked-up standup from the early 80s, and it is unwatchably brilliant, particularly his frenetic banjo solos.
Strange, then, to see the current incarnation of Steve Martin, coming off of a decade of flops (nothing after the criminally underrated LA Story has been worth watching) as a fake-tanned highbrow ‘witty’ writer of novellas, a man who writes for The New Yorker instead of Mad magazine. Shopgirl is a sombre character study, an attempt to tell a story more about emotion than action. It is generally the tale of an older man (Martin) who whisks a much younger girl (Claire Danes) off her sales assistant feet, and how insistent disconnection and distance can sometimes really mess with what love might be. Truth told, it’s mostly an indulgent ego piece for Martin, and would fail miserably were it not for the ever-amazing Claire Danes, and the boy who plays her competing love interest and comic relief, Jason Schwartzman.
If Martin is an idol of my childhood, Jason Schwartzman is the idol of my geeky early twenties. His turn as Max Fischer in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore gave him a place in the hearts of geeks and freaks the world over. The son of Talia Shire, and a cousin to the Coppola family, he is Hollywood royalty once removed, but exists in almost purely indie spheres. He’s worked with David O. Russell and Sofia Coppola, and was the drummer in Phantom Planet, and is thus kinda responsible for the theme tune to The OC.
Shopgirl is probably Schwartzman’s highest profile role to date. It’s not often you get to interview somebody whose poster has been gracing your wall for what seems like forever, but the inner geek in me soldiered on. Possibly the most genuinely nice movie guy I have ever interviewed—and I’ve had a few—he revealed that even in the giddy heights Hollywood, the 80s oeuvre of Martin meant just as much in the Shire/Schwartzman/Coppola households as it did in mine.
I guess you must have grown up in the same 80s that I did, in which Steve Martin is a massive memory of your childhood?
More than a memory. I did, I grew up in the eighties and my family, what we would do every weekend is go see films, and that’s how we would bond and spend time together. Because we were all kids, the only movies we were allowed to go see were comedies, and Steve Martin was basically in all of them. Not only did he bring me joy and my family joy in the theatre, but I’ve got so many great memories of the drive home from the movie doing lines from the film and making each other laugh, and renting the movies, and watching them on Saturday nights with my brothers.
These are the great memories. I remember, from Three Amigos, me and my two older brothers, we had that whole little dance memorised, and we would come and do that for our parents while they were eating dinner, we would do it in our boxer shorts or whatever and make them laugh. Those are just priceless memories, and to me that’s what moviemaking’s about, it’s almost less about the movie and more about the car ride home, and a family trying to make each other laugh.
So were you concerned at all, with these great memories of The Three Amigos, that you’d then be making a film with the aging, stern, serious, Chekhov-esque Steve Martin?
No, because I know how good he is, because I know he’s an amazing man, an amazing comedian and an amazing dramatist. I felt like I was in great hands and I wasn’t nervous to get this Steve Martin, because it’s all Steve Martin, and it all comes from the same place, which is his heart.
I was just nervous, not because of any Chekhov Steve Martin, but because of how much he means to me. I was more starstruck than anything.
Was this obviously a very personal film for him? He’s the producer, the writer, the novelist, the star. It must be quite a presence a work with on a film like this.
Without question it was personal, he put so much love and time into it and wrote the book then thought about adapting it, and adapted it, produced it, starred in it, it meant so much to him, you definitely want to make him proud. But one of the incredible things about him was that despite how personal it was and how much time he spent with it, was how trusting he was in all of us, and especially in Anand Tucker the director, giving him the piece and saying “here you go, this is yours now.”
And giving you the responsibility of being the funny guy in a Steve Martin film…
Yeah, well at least trying to be funny. That was a hard pill to swallow, that one. The idea of me trying to be funny in a movie that also starred Steve Martin is like Keith Moon asking you to play drums on his record. Shouldn’t you do that?
Tell me about the character you play, Jeremy.
He basically is this young amp stenciller, which isn’t a real job, because I asked Steve Martin, I said “so I’m playing an amplifier stenciller? so, that’s.. is that a real thing?”. And he’s like “nope, made it up”. He’s a young guy who meets Claire Danes character in a laundromat and basically kind of falls for her. His part of the movie is in the beginning not getting it right with her and making a fool of himself, and then it’s his growth apart from her while he goes on tour with a band and listens to a bunch of self-help tapes, as he says in the movie, he reads a lot of books on tape.
The character himself, it was basically the most fun I’ve ever had playing a character because he speaks from his heart and he only knows what’s in front of him. He doesn’t overthink anything and he speaks oftentimes without thinking about it, or the repercussions of his words might have on people around him. He’s almost a kid, like how a kid can say something like that hurts your feelings or is offensive but you never hate the kid because you know he’s sincere and doesn’t know any better. I think that the character I play in the movie is a little bit like that, because he often says the wrong thing or is sometimes neglectful or inconsiderate but he’s saved by the idea that he’s not an ill-hearted person, that he is sincere and that he does really care for Claire Danes’ character.
Claire Danes, she’s an actress who seems to bring some kind of effortless integrity and watchability no matter what she’s in—Terminator 3 she just made entirely watchable. Now she’s a friend of yours, but what’s she like to work with?
I wouldn’t even call it working with her, I just call it being with her, she is effortless and she has dignity. You know, she’s an intelligent person, I think that comes through in all of her performances, she’s a good heart, and I think everyone can relate to her, man or woman, because she’s not afraid to feel emotions in front of people as an actress and she’s brave.
I must say that I had this incredible script Steve Martin wrote, that’s almost, you know how you can have a blueprint for a house, this is almost like a blueprint for a person, and then Anand Tucker, the director and I tried to kind of build that person and make it three dimensional, but I must say that the real Jeremy came to life when they yelled action and I looked in her eyes. Things started happening that I could never have planned on happening, weird tics and physical things started to happening from being with her in the scenes, that just shows you how great an natural she is, it just brought it out of me. The character was almost like invisible ink inside of my veins and she was like lemon juice and brought it out. She just has it, and I’m just blown away by how amazing she is as an actress. I don’t know how she does it, I think she’s just natural, I think she has a good heart.
You’ve worked with some iconic indie directors of the last ten years, Wes Anderson, David O. Russell and such. Here you’re working with Anand Tucker, who’s really only made one major film (Hilary and Jackie) and that was seven years ago. Tell me about him.
Well I couldn’t have made the movie without that guy, I tell you. He’s like… you should meet him, I mean, he’s incredible. He has so much energy, he’s so sweet and kind. And his style of directing is really wonderful for me because he’s a gentle guy, and he’s kind of unfraid as a director, he’ll try. He’ll try it. That’s his kind of thing, ‘let’s just try it’. He tried to make a movie about feelings, and that’s a tough thing to do because feelings are very abstract, as you know, and so I don’t know how he did it but he had it all kind of figured out. He wanted to make a melodrama, that’s what he told me, and I was down for that.
How Jeremy pops in and out through the film, he’s there and then he’s not there, and then he’s there, we get thirty minutes of Steve and Claire and then Jeremy comes in, that’s kind of what it was like for me shooting the movie because the way the schedule worked out. I would come in, I would do a scene with Claire, I would leave for a week, I would come back in a couple of days later, do three scenes, and so even though I had read the script, I was very unaware of what Claire and Steve were shooting, and what their chemistry was like.
You don’t even actually share any scenes with Steve Martin.
No, I don’t. So I was kind of out of the loop, just like Jeremy is in the movie. I didn’t know what was happening, and so for me I was a little bit concerned, like I don’t know how big to make the Jeremy character, how do I keep him from being over the top or goofy and how do I keep him from undercutting what Claire and Steve are working towards.
If they do these really emotional and truthful scenes and I come on and just make an ass of myself, it kind of erases everything, and I trusted Anand, because he was there every day, and he did have the overview, and he knew what he was getting with Steve and Claire, and he knew what their chemistry was like, and he was great at giving me the correct dose of Jeremy, like he was great at saying this is how much we should do in this scene of that guy, and I trusted him. And that trust is all you need when you work with someone, that’s what saves you.
You also get to be roadie for the great Mark Kozelek in this film.
Oh my god, isn’t he the best?
What was with that, what was he doing there?
I don’t know what he was doing there. Anand loves him, and I love him, it’s cool because I get to play a young guy who goes on tour with a band who admires a singer and is inspired by a singer, and that’s not hard to do when you’re with that guy, because I think he’s great and I look up to him very much as a musician and as a guy.
Yeah, I saw him last year in Perth, it kind of struck me he was a little bit of a grumpy sort which surprised me, but it shouldn’t, because he wrote some of the most beautiful and grumpy songs I’ve ever heard.
Maybe he was just having a tough night, I found him to be super nice and sweet, and just awesome. Between takes, he was playing Red House Painters songs, and solo songs, and it was great.
Are you still Max Fischer to most people, and if you are, do you mind?
Oh yeah, I mean, that character and that movie and that moment, that changed my life completely in the most positive way. It’s almost like my life was an hourglass and right when that movie came, they turned it over. It was a point of departure for me from the rest of my life, and how can I hate that?
It gave me not only that wonderful experience but the friendship of Wes Anderson, who’s basically my best friend to this day. So without that, I wouldn’t be in Sydney right now talking to you.
And having worked with the Steve Martins, Bill Murrays, Dustin Hoffmans and Al Pacinos of the world.
I know, so how could I ever turn my back on an amazing thing?
But you did walk away from being a drummer in a potentially successful band at the time to do that, do you miss that?
I didn’t walk away to go act, I can tell you that honestly. When I left the band I wasn’t making any movies, I was having actually a tough time with that, and I just left because it had been basically ten years, and I just needed to move on for myself. The decision to leave the band was a tough one to make because I was going to basically be leaving a situation where I was playing music with my friends. That was hard. What made it okay was that I wasn’t turning my back on music. Music I could always make and still do and will always have and will always be there for me. So that’s okay, and I still, and I must play music every day, and try to write, and I need that just like people need to eat food, it’s part of my life and part of my daily routine. But yeah, it was tough to have to say “hey guys, I can’t play with you anymore”. That was sad.
Tell me a little bit about Marie Antoinette just quickly.
Well I haven’t seen it, and the process and the product of making a movie are two different things, so it could be many things, but I do know that what we shot was a very intimate tale of decadence of power.