Pride, Unprejudiced

« Just Like Heaven (2005) *** 1/2 | Main | Bullet time: Andrew Niccol on Lord of War (2005) ** 1/2 »

September 17, 2005

The Baxter, screwball and pain: iced coffee with Michael Showalter

John Waters once joked that the only subversive act left to him would be to make a sweet, G-rated movie. After collaborating on sketch comedy with “The State” and “Stella” and the teen-movie parody Wet Hot American Summer, actor-writer-director Michael Showalter wanted to do a 180 of his own, and the result is The Baxter, a romantic comedy of social embarrassment, with soft-spoken characters propelled from 1940s movies into the present day. Showalter’s Elliot Sherman, a nebbish office worker who muffs romance left and right is a gentle cousin to King of Comedy’s Rupert Pupkin: he will get it wrong again and again but he will not stop trying. We talked shortly before its opening about classic comedy and the allure of mortification over iced coffee.

PRIDE: The character’s name sounds like Elliot Nugent or Vincent Sherman, people who made screwball comedies.

SHOWALTER: I love hearing those connections made. Also, “Baxter” is Jack Lemmon’s last name in The Apartment. A lot of people think that’s where it comes from, but it’s not.

PRIDE: To me, it’s just a fun, dumb spoonerism.

SHOWALTER: Yeah. That’s interesting. I always thought of it as a cross between Dexter and bowler, like a bowler hat and the [name] Poindexter.

PRIDE: So how do you do this in the twenty-first century and not turn out a tiresome anachronism?

SHOWALTER: Ummm.

PRIDE: There are modern dorks and fanboys of all kinds, but you’re pushing these characters toward older movie types, starchy archetypes.

SHOWALTER: When I was writing, I was very much attempting to do something that had that old feeling to it. There’s not a lot of technology in this movie, there’s not a lot of modern anything.

PRIDE: So, one of your first times working away from sketches or material that’s essentially a succession of sketches, you wanted to make something more shaped?

SHOWALTER: I wanted to do a well-made Hollywood movie. I wanted it to have the feeling that every little bow was tied, very neatly at the end. It’s an old-fashioned Hollywood story with every I dotted and every T crossed. When you see an old movie, everyone’s in on it. That’s what this movie has. I wanted also to make a movie that was polite and graceful and not gross and shocking. Just something sweet. I tried not to have any cursing in this movie, or anything too bawdy

PRIDE: Is that a reaction to what you’re known for? To say, “I can do something else, I’m not just absurd.”

SHOWALTER: “I can do something else and I want to do something else.” Tare two sides of me. One side is what I do in these collaborations with the guys I work with. I can express that side in the collaborations. But working by myself, my leaning is more toward what The Baxter is, more character-driven, more story, more narrative-driven. Less gross. Less absurd.

PRIDE: I have a friend who refers to another movie as “the beloved Wet American Summer.”

SHOWALTER: I’m sure they’ll be surprised.

PRIDE: Why IFC? Their range of movies is eclectic, especially when you contrast their summer hit Me and You and Everyone We Know with The Baxter.

SHOWALTER: Exactly. I dunno. I think they thought it was an intelligent film that was accessibly in a way that some of their other films may not be. I think they’re looking to broaden into other areas without giving up their independent spirit.

PRIDE: Did the extensive voice-over give you the chance to refine the story until the last possible minute?

SHOWALTER: The voiceover really came at the end. The voiceover ended up becoming more of a character in the movie than I had initially intended it to be. My editor was Sarah Flack, who did Lost in Translation and The Limey. She and I had a really good time thinking all that stuff and retelling the story in this way. In the original script, it’s much more linear. The whole movie palys out [straightforwardly] and not told in flashback. We really mixed the salad in post-production.

PRIDE: There’s a scene in a Billy Wilder film where a bit of voiceover takes care of a narrative hole, and he once say he was told, “You’re breaking every rule in the book!” He said he’d rather break some presumed rule than waste a day or two of shooting for a scene that would drag on just to get the information across. It’s just a fix-up.

SHOWALTER: That’s it. As screenwriters and filmmakers, we’re told never to use voiceover. I don’t have a strong opinion about it. I’m not major, I’m not from the super-anti-voiceover [crowd], but sometimes you gotta do it, for just what you said, that Billy Wilder thing, sometimes you just need… help. I knew [there was] one thing I definitely know how to do. I know how to edit and I know that if you keep trying there’s always a way to figure out how to do it. I was willing to try anything to find, to give it life. To give it some charge. When it was in the first cut, where it’s told in a more linear way, it was missing something. I was missing part of what people will like about the movie, which is that “meta,” that meta-quality to it.

PRIDE: What is it about characters suffering that make for comedy? Elliot ought to be mortified, what he goes through.

SHOWALTER: Yeah, I think certainly in this film, what should be funny about it is cringing. Cringing for him. Basically, there’s something painfully satisfying about watching somebody struggle to get by as much as he does. He’s just in a constant state of getting it wrong.

PRIDE: But when we feel that as a person, those frustrations, you’re dying inside.

SHOWALTER: But that’s a real emotion, that’s a real feeling. I guess it is mortification. You’re mortified for him. ‘Cos it’s just so mortifying to get that shit wrong. I know in my own experience, those are the things that stand out, when you’re at a party and you say the wrong thing and you’re thinking about it for five days, “Did I say the wrong thing, did I say the wrong thing?” That’s a lot of the fuel here. Social anxiety [offers] a lot of fodder, for me, anyway. Elliot has social anxiety but what’s different about him than me, let’s say, is that he’s gonna try, he’s constantly trying to get past it and succeed in a social situation instead of just receding. He’s attacking.

Posted by pride at September 17, 2005 02:51 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.mcnblogs.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/663

Comments

Post a comment