Thank You For Smoking, a satire about the crazy life of tobacco lobbyist Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), opens this Friday in Seattle. The movie set off a storm of gossip on the film festival circuit because (1) A bidding war at Toronto left it unclear whether Fox Searchlight or Paramount had won distribution rights (it was Fox), and (2) A sex scene with Katie Holmes and Aaron Eckhart mysteriously disappeared on the projection booth floor at Sundance (it’s back, and it’s tame). When Annie Wagner interviewed director Jason Reitman, she made him write a haiku about the controversy.
ANNIE WAGNER: I imagine you’re getting a lot of similar questions on this press tour, so I’m gonna start with a battery of questions that don’t demand complicated answers. Ready? What’s it like being the son of a famous director?
JASON REITMAN: Fortunate.
How old are you?
28.
Are you for or against smoking bans in public places?
Against.
What do you think of Jack Abramoff’s fedora?
Unwise.
You can expand on these things if you want, later on.
I understand.
Is your movie Republican?
It’s libertarian. I’m not going to tell The Stranger that it’s fucking Republican! They’ll be like, don’t need to read any further! I hope the libertarian idea takes the best from both worlds. That it’s just people that don’t want to be told what to do.
That’s the old-school conservative critique of the Republican Party right now.
Right, and I think it’s a critique of both parties right now. Democrats want to tell me what to do, and Republicans want to tell me who to worship.
Your movie is possibly the only movie with a sex scene in which a Mormon is doing a Scientologist.
I hadn’t realized it until now. You’re right! Wow. I think you’re right. Of course, that was all on purpose.
So you were an English major at USC. Do you know how to write haikus?
Oh fuck. I took one poetry class.
Okay, well, it’s not poetry really. It’s just syllables, right? Have you ever done this before?
I wrote a haiku maybe in high school but not in college.
That’s fine you don’t have to be skilled.
Because I’m about to write a haiku…
Yes, would you be willing to write a haiku on the subject of what happened to the missing sex scene at Sundance?
How many syllables?
5 for the first one, 7 for the second, 5 for the last one.
It’s not going to be, you know, airy-fairy woodsy stuff, because, you know.
I’m totally against the traditional haiku subject matter.
No natural stuff.
Yeah, no water, no pebbles.
[Silence while Reitman composes his haiku.] Okay, can I give you background before the haiku? The background is that there were all these theories on why the scene went missing, and what actually happened was a projection error. Okay. You ready? [Poetry voice:]
I like my story
Because it is the truth but
It sounds like a lie.
That’s very nice.
Thank you. An absolute pleasure. Of course, I wrote that days ago.
You knew that question was coming.
Yeah, this is my haiku practice. Keeps you warm.
Let’s talk a little about the script itself. So Mel Gibson’s company had dibs on it for a long time. Did you submit the script to his company?
Basically, the book came out in the early ’90s. Mel Gibson bought it when it was still in galleys. He just fell in love with it. And this wasn’t the you know The Passion’s Mel, this was more the Lethal Weapon, wild-guy-smokes-a-lot-of-cigarettes-dangerous-sexy-Australian Mel. He bought the book. And he really loved it. I think he had great intentions for it. And he didn’t option it—he outright bought it, and hired a series of writers to try and make it into a big Warner Brothers expensive Mel Gibson comedy. Something that would cost a lot of money. And that was essentially its flaw. They couldn’t get it right because the writers had to write it safe enough so that it could be a big studio movie, and every time they did that they basically cut its balls off. The film became too soft and not dangerous enough. They spend over a million dollars developing it, but the project was dead. I got the book as a gift in the late ’90’s, fell in love with it, and once I got an agent, I told him I really wanted to do this.
So had you read previous versions of the script.
I started to read them and then I stopped because I realized that would probably be a bad thing if I knew too much of the previous drafts. But I had read coverage and heard enough that I knew exactly what was going on, and I said you have this wonderful project and it deserves a faithful adaptation, and you need to be making a movie like Citizen Ruth, you need to be making a movie like Election.
What about those movies appealed to you?
It was two things. Citizen Ruth was an enormous influence for me on my version of Thank You for Smoking in that Citizen Ruth is a movie that’s not about abortion but uses abortion as a location to examine the kind of mania people get when they want to tell others what to do. And I think smoking cigarettes is a very similar issue to abortion in that way, and I tried in this movie to make cigarettes the location to observe the behavior of people when they feel they know what’s best for others. But on the whole they were small movies that cost very little and because of their cheap price tags they were able to stay faithful to their intentions. I wrote a script, and after I turned it in, I got a call from Mel Gibson, and I thought, I’m on the road, I’m making a movie. But we couldn’t get anyone to make it, no studio would touch it. We were making a movie that doesn’t apologize for itself—the main character doesn’t have a third act awakening where he realizes what he’s doing is immoral and goes to work for the Red Cross. And every studio wanted that, no one wanted to touch this film unless Nick Naylor was going to realize what he was doing was wrong. And I couldn’t do that, cause I don’t think what Nick Naylor is doing is wrong.
Do you think our society needs lobbyists?
[Sighs.] Does our society need lobbyists? Wow, that’s the first time I’m answering that question. That’s a tricky, tricky question. We certainly don’t need them. But I do think that they are helpful—not in the way that Nick Naylor does his job, because Nick is really more of a public spokesman, he’s someone who kind of deflects the tough questions. What a lobbyist does, what Jack Abramoff did, is try to move legislation with the power of money. And that’s pretty wrong. But there’s another side of lobbying, which is creating research and background so politicians can argue their point of view. And I think that actually could be helpful. At the core what a lobbying group is, is a group of people who believe in something so strongly that they’re going to use whatever necessary to move mountains and make law. And there’ve been times in our history when it’s taken those types of groups to do what’s right. So in that sense it’s necessary.
So let’s talk about casting. What were you looking for in Nick Naylor?
The most important thing he needed to have is a knack for saying very subversive things that don’t go off target. In In the Company of Men, Aaron Eckhart proved that he can basically be a monster, and still be incredibly sexy. And that’s what Nick does for a living, and it made a perfect match.
What about his son, Cameron Bright?
The kid just needed to come off honest. He has a lot of big language and adult language and it couldn’t come off like an episode of Kids Say the Darndest Things. When we were casting that’s what we were seeing a lot of, little kids with cute voices saying this big dialogue and it was funny—but it was silly. Cameron has the ability to say things that come off completely legitimate. He has these fantastic eyes, which kind of just breathe honesty.
They make him look like an alien too.
Well yeah, used in another way, they make him look like the son of the devil. But other directors have certainly taken advantage of that—don’t get me wrong, when I hired Cameron Bright, I got a lot of “The creepy kid from Birth?”, and you know he’s doing more movies like that too. Now, in Running Scared there’s apparently some really tough scenes, but I just think he’s great in this. And he’s a hundred percent charming. I’ve taken this to Toronto and Sundance now, and the places where people really thawed is when Cameron starts talking and emulating his father. That’s when crowds go crazy and it lets you know how charming he can be. But I don’t know, we’ll see how his eyes mature over time.
Or what kind of contacts he gets.
I mean, it’s funny because I imagine becoming adult a one day and if you’re a girl going out on a date with him and he gives you a look, you’d just be like, “I’m not sure if he’s attracted to me or if fire’s about to come out of the top of his head to summon the devil.”
I think we can probably wrap it up then. Thank you.
Thanks. Very unusual questions. I presume that’ll be the only haiku I write today.
