Jonathan Levine graduated from film school three years ago with a
heaven-sent idea for an opening scene: a teenager exchanging weed with
his therapist for treatment. He combined that idea with the sticky New
York summer he experienced after finishing high school in 1994.
Together, the idea and the experience created a film that captures a
world of headphones drowning out an increasingly rigid city, smoking a
lot of weed, and trying to get laid—The Wackness.

The Wackness is quotable without being melodramatic or having
obvious jokes. How did you find that balance?

For me, it was most important that it be entertaining. I was sort of
trying to hide the deep, emotional shit, to have it sneak up on you.
But we tried not to be in any sort of box and really make it about
characters and their dilemmas. And I was also very police-like and
mindful of “this feels too movie.” A lot of it was avoiding and
avoiding. We wanted to avoid anything big, any caricature.

You said you started writing the script for a class assignment. How
did you take it from there to a feature film?

It all kind of retroactively happened. I was like, this kid is like
me so I tried to make him more like me. Then this doctorI don’t know
where he’s coming frombut he’s kind of gonzo and I’ll go with that. And
every successful screenwriter says you’ve got to know what is going to
happen on page 110 before you start writing. I didn’t do that. I wanted
to capture the rambling, anything-can-happen summer, so I said “fuck
it, I’ll just keep rambling and writing.” I think the fact that I did
the movie that way gave it something that it wouldn’t otherwise
have.

Aside from just being of the time and place, how does the soundtrack
of early 1990s hiphop fit into your story?

It’s a lot about the spirit of the music, the fact that there was
this movement at the time. Take Biggie, for example. [Ready to Die] was
frank and blunt. Part of hiphop is that it’s raw emotion and I think
that’s what both Luke and Dr. Squires [characters in the movie]
identify with. It’s not necessarily telling you how something is
supposed to be. A lot of it is “this is fucked up.” That’s all. We’re
not trying to figure out why. First, we’re just going to accept that
it’s fucked up and talk about that. That spirit is not only what the
characters identify with, but it’s also what I was trying to say with
the film.

What was it like to work with Ben Kingsley?

I had no idea what he would be doing when he got to the set, but I
knew it was going to be good because it’s Kingsleyhe’s not going to
suck. I’ve never been around anyone who is as good at anything as he is
at acting. I would give him little notes, but not often. You know, you
feel like you don’t want to be on set drinking coffee and watching the
monitor, but with Kingsley, really, a lot of it was about not getting
in his way.