Creative Accomplices: Alex Ross Perry and Jason Schwartzman

By Bailey Pennick

Alex Ross Perry is in the middle of a thought. It's not following just one strand, though. It's a textured and tangent-filled journey about his decade-long creative partnership with Jason Schwartzman. It's the afternoon in New York City and as he talks, light from the window saturates his screen.

After acknowledging that it's crazy that it's been 10 years since they first met and premiered Listen Up Philip at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, Perry steps outside the original bounds of this interview even further to think about how making this film has continued to shape his sense of time within his life. It's a round number, yes, he says. It's just very strange to think of anything as being long ago when it also feels like we're still kind of living in the present reality of making it. I think a lot of my subsequent work is based on some of the connections, personal and artistic, made during that movie And certainly when we were making Golden Exits and Pavements, you were seeing a lot of the same people again on the crew and the cast. So it feels like it never went away. Both Perry and Schwartzman pause, nodding at each other before the writer-director lets out a big sigh.

But, also, 10 years is a long time, he laughs.

Yeah, well said, Schwartzman jumps in from his house in Los Angeles, where that golden hour light hasn't hit the West Coast yet. It's funny what Alex says because it's true! It doesn't feel like that long ago, but maybe that's just because things that are important things to you, they just leave a longer mark on you. You know what I mean?

When watching Listen Up Philip, it is easy to spot exactly what Schwartzman means. Already deep into an impressive acting and writing career (Rushmore, Marie Antoinette), there's an effortlessness to his performance within the world that Perry meticulously creates. Philip Lewis Friedman - a rising fiction writer who decides to lean into his selfish tendencies to the detriment of everyone around him - is an uncomfortably authentic character. Schwartzman, a versatile and generous performer, is given the space to play within the edges of likability to a hostile individual. This level of intimacy could only happen because of how quickly the two artists clicked on their first meeting and how deeply they trusted each other from the jump.

LINK:	https://www.sundance.org/blogs/creative-accomplices-alex-ross-perry-an...
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