James Ponsoldts The Spectacular Now injects a refreshing dose of authenticity into a high school romance. In this interview, Ponsoldt talks about the bigger role actors have in the overall story, as well as how he weeds out pretension.
Perhaps because Hollywood films are so fixated upon stamping their products - er, movies - as clearly existing within preset genres, with nary an off-brand moment throughout, its unfortunately common for filmgoers to assume that all films fall into neat categories, like DVDs in the Blockbusters of long ago. James Ponsoldts convention-defying new film, The Spectacular Now, is - in such a cultural climate - a welcome breath of fresh air, vacillating through various genres (romance, coming-of-age movie, teen comedy) with matter-of-fact abandon.
What Ponsoldts film ultimately exposes is that such genre categorizations are themselves nonexistent - just illusions created to make it easier to sell movies. A funny, saddening, unexpectedly wise picture, The Spectacular Now follows the travails of two high school seniors (the superb Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley) trying to figure out the world - and each other - over the course of their unexpected romance. Recalling not so much John Hughes sharply-pointed teen films of the 80s so much as it does European entries to this realm from the 60s (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and The 400 Blows come to mind), the soft touch of the films direction is a brave choice at a moment when so many teen-centric pictures have all the subtlety of an acid bath. I had the chance to sit down with Ponsoldt recently to discuss his film.
Tribeca: The way your film is lit reminded me a lot of Gordon Willis's stuff in Annie Hall a lot of it is very dark. A lot of romance films, like Nicholas Sparks-type films, have this look to them - James Ponsoldt: A glossy, dewy hue to them.
It always blew my mind when I was a kid that there were separate sections for comedies and then for dramas in the video store. That's not life.
Tribeca: Exactly. And this is so far from that. How did you discuss the look with your DP? JP: You know, I heard an interview that Harris Savides gave, and in at least his relationship with Gus Van Sant, he said that they didn't light for characters specifically. They would light rooms and let people move in and out of them. It always blew my mind when I was a kid that there were separate sections for comedies and then for dramas in the video store. That's not life. From the time you get up to the time you go to bed, it will probably be kind of boring and a lot like the day before, but there might be a really great moment, where you eat a really great cheeseburger, or you see a great movie, or you talk to your mom. Or there might be a really tragic moment of something you've never seen before, so there's always a little bit of light and a little bit of dark to everything.
I like a value system that's much more democratic. The emotional values of the characters can ebb and flow. Let them all have moments that are about themselves. As far as the collaboration with Jess Hall, the cinematographer, he's brilliant, he's British. He's shot a lot of stuff in North England, where everything is just grey, and you have this soft greyness. It's a lot different in Georgia in August, when we shot. It would be like, sunny, thunderstorm, sunny, thunderstorm. I had loved a lot of the stuff that Jess had shot on anamorphic 35 which this was. I really loved Son of Rambo and we just shared a value system that was about using really really natural light.
It's only in really bad movies and bad TV that everyone is in a medium close-up.
Manhattan was a movie that we watched together, talking about how it lets characters go in and out of rooms and in and out of shadow. It's okay if you can't always see everybody perfectly. It's only in really bad movies and bad TV that everyone is in a medium close-up. It's also about being in Georgia in late summer. It's not bright green. It's still kind of brown and muggy. And there was almost no makeup in this movie, and the characters were sweaty and zitty, as some teenagers are.
Tribeca: You were talking about how life doesn't have genres like sections of a video store, and that definitely comes across. There were dark moments, funny moments. Some of them were romantic but it's not just a romance film. When you live in the US and you watch a lot of Hollywood movies, you're coded to read films in genre because Hollywood sells products and products need their genre constraints. How do you go through different narrative realms while still maintaining a narrative cohesion, so it all feels consistent, tonally? If some actor has an emotional scar I don't want to hide it. I want to highlight it.
JP: You kind of hit upon it. My favorite teen movies aren't John Hughes movies. They're really complicated moving films, like Ozus works, stories with young people, old people, which kind of dignify all those characters. I never look at a movie like, Here's the funny scene, Here's the serious scene. I mean obviously there are some movies where that was the thought. But I think it comes down to the worldview of the storyteller and how you populate your film with actors. I mean obviously some dramatic lines are spoken by Bob Odenkirk, who some people might know from Breaking Bad but also from Mr. Show. Hopefully it never telegraphs that this is an indie romance or a comedy or drama. Hopefully it's somewhere in between and somewhere off kilter. Any scene can go in any direction at any time, which is why you have to keep watching.
Tribeca: When you're working with the actors, do you give some sort of indication on what the tone of the film will feel like? JP: I spend a lot of time casting
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James Ponsoldts The Spectacular Now injects a refreshing dose of authenticity into a high school romance. In this interview, Ponsoldt talks about the bigger role actors have in the overall story, as well as how he weeds out pretension. 
