Up In The Air - Jason Reitman interview

JASON Reitman talks about some of the challenges of adapting and directing Up In The Air, working with George Clooney and confronting the film’s many themes: from someone trying to make a connection to the issues of unemployment. He also discusses how he changed as a writer-director over the five years he was adapting the screenplay and why getting the film’s aerial photography proved trickier than at first thought… He was speaking at a UK round table held during the London Film Festival.

Q. Is it true that your personal life influenced the final script for Up In The Air?
Jason Reitman: I related to this character in more than a few ways. When I started writing the screenplay, I was writing it more as a corporate satire. But over the six years I was writing it my life really evolved. I went from a single guy living in an apartment to a married guy, with a daughter, who is a professional director living in a house with a mortgage. My perspective just changed and I inevitably had to write the character differently and start discussing the things that are important in life.

Q. Such as?
Jason Reitman: Well, I don’t know what’s important in life. I’m just begging the question: “What is?” I have the same question as you.

Q. Did you have to re-write what you’d already done?
Jason Reitman: Oh yeah. Look, when I went back and re-read the script five years in, having not read any of the scenes up until then, it was like watching myself grow up. I looked at the writer I was when I wrote Thank You For Smoking and it was less sophisticated and more satire – a simple contraire-ian out to have some fun.

Q. You said that the part was written with George Clooney in mind. Did he take much persuading?
Jason Reitman: You know, I thought there would have been more, to be honest. But he read the script and his response was: “I just read it, it’s great; I’m in.” That was the conversation.

Q. Given the current economic climate, were you ever worried that a film like this might remind people about losing their jobs?
Jason Reitman: Well, I never thought I was making a movie about job loss. I saw it as a backdrop to a bigger story about human connection. So, no… it’s funny because I thought about doing a couple of movies about Iraq. There were a couple of movies I really loved the screenplays of but I never did because I thought: “Why do I want to add one more to the stack on Iraq.” But I always thought this would be an infinitely relatable film. It didn’t spend a lot of time in the woes of this recession. It’s more about one man’s journey. And you get the other side of it – you’re firing people, so you’re not worrying about people losing their jobs.

Q. Do you think people will find it hard to sympathise or empathise with George Clooney’s character because of the nature of his job?
Jason Reitman: You know, I only get interested in a movie when I think that there’s going to be an enormous stumbling block and how to empathise with the main character. I like humanising really tricky, morally unlikeable characters.

Q. And yet bringing some real people and real experiences does bring it home…
Jason Reitman: Well, I wanted to treat what was going on authentically. What I wrote originally was more corporate satire and more funny… but when I came to shoot it I just thought: “There’s nothing I can write that would be authentic enough.” And I was right. These non-actors came in and said things that I would have never come up with, and they said it in a way that I would never have known how to direct them to do. There was actually something very cool about that mix of blending actors and non-actors… I see why Steven Soderbergh does it and I’d be intrigued by doing it more.

Q. So did you give them free reign on what they said?
Jason Reitman: No, they’d come in, they’d sit down at the table, we’d interview each one on things like: “How did you lose your job? What was it like? Who did you tell first? How’s it impacted your life?” And after about 10 minutes of that we’d say: “And now we’d like to fire you on camera, and we’d like you to either respond the way you did on the day you lost your job, or – if you prefer – the way you wish you had.” Each one would turn into an improv scene where they’d either get angry, or sad, or funny.

They’d just start asking about things from their severance to “why me?”, “have you looked for other jobs in the company?”, “how many months have I got?” They’d ask all these questions and our interviewer would have to be very quick on his toes. But they went with it in a way that I would never have imagined they would as none of them had any acting experience.

Q. Was the ending of the film your ending, or was it the same in the book?
Jason Reitman: Oh, the screenplay is now actually quite different from the book and the ending is very much my own.

Q. It’s very un-studio like. Was there ever any pressure to make it more audience friendly?
Jason Reitman: No and I was surprised, actually. I expected somebody to switch the ending, or at least ask me to, but no one ever did. I think the combination of Juno’s success and George Clooney’s involvement made it so that, for whatever reason, people backed us. We just kept moving forward and no one ever questioned it.

Q. Were you also taking a little bit of a shot at more conventional romantic comedies with this?
Jason Reitman: No, because I don’t see those films. I really, really… it’s funny, I can sit through the worst horror film ever made! But even a quite good romantic comedy… I remember my wife used to drag me to them and the way I got out of going anymore was to, when they made jokes, go: “[Exaggerated laugh] Oh my God! He thinks that she doesn’t know… that he actually…” I had to keep doing this in the middle of movie theatres until finally she stopped taking me!

Q. Did you shoot the aerial photography yourself?
Jason Reitman: No, but I was very involved in it and it was a pain in the arse, let me tell you. When I envisioned it, I thought it would be easy. But it turned into a very complicated ordeal. We went out many times, we had lots of test footage… the first batch of footage was unusable, so we had to go again and do things like place a digital camera on the wing. You couldn’t get the camera to point straight down, so the pilot would have to get the plane to go into a dive to get the shot. It was very complicated and I was very specific. But in the end I was very happy with it. Usually, when you see footage from the sky in a movie it’s from 5,000ft – it’s helicopter footage. But I wanted plane footage – I wanted it to look the way it looks when you see from out of a plane. And we finally accomplished that.