a SIFF 2009 interview

Summer Stock
Director Marc Webb Goes Looking for the Love in Heartbreak

For a guy making the transition from music videos and commercials to feature films, (500) Days of Summer director Marc Webb is a very happy guy. Coming off what can only be described as rapturous reactions out of January’s Sundance Film Festival, I caught up with the young filmmaker when his movie screened during the Seattle International Film Festival and let's just say his enthusiasm hadn't tempered.

Director Marc Webb on the set of Fox Searchlight's (500) Days of Summer

“I’m certainly not oversaturated with all the press stuff right now, that’s for sure,” commented Webb with a huge smile as we sat down to start our chat. “To get to talk about a movie I’m really proud of; I have a good time, let’s leave it at that.”

The story of two young twenty-somethings, wannabe architect Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and free-spirited secretary Summer (Zooey Deschanel), going through the many stages of a love affair, the buzz building around the picture has been through the roof. And for good reason, the film as loving and as winning as anything I could have hoped for.

Not that my opinion was the one that had the young director buzzing the most. While originally from Wisconsin, the majority of Webb’s family now lives in the Seattle area, coming here a sort of defacto reunion. “It was my dad’s birthday yesterday,” he chuckles, “and we celebrated by going to the screening. [Thankfully] he liked it. He loves The Graduate, it’s like one of his favorite movies, so I think he appreciated [the film] because he had some subconscious connection to it because of that. In fact, he’d always talk about it while I was growing up so he probably thought he was responsible for my making it in some small way.”

I loved that Webb brought up Mike Nichols’ 1967 classic because the similarities between the two are virtually impossible to ignore. Yet while both talk about relationships and blow up the usual romantic comedy conventions to smithereens, their outcomes couldn’t be any more different.

With that in mind, I ask him if those similarities and the opportunity to play in that sort of sandbox was what initially drew him to writers Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber’s screenplay. “I think it was the first script that I read that seemed like it would be fun to make,” he admits candidly. “But I also thought it would be fun to make. I related to it. I’d been in that situation before and I think sometimes movies about love are either really sentimental or sort of jaded and cynical and brutal. I felt this [script] was sweet but not obvious, and that I liked, that I enjoyed.”

“There is one line I think really exemplifies this. [Tom’s friend] Paul I think says at one point, ‘She’s better than the girl of my dreams, she’s real,’ which I thought was really meaningful and I related to it. There are just lots of things in the script like that, and by the time I read the last page I was like, I’m in, there was no question. I was in.”

With all that in mind calling the film an ‘anti-romantic comedy’ like some have is hugely misleading. It breaks conventions and doesn’t follow the usual Jell-O mold we’re, yes, but as for as cinematic romances are concerned this one still has a lot to say about the heart and its surreal machinations. If anything, it is a romantic comedy about unrequited love, and considering some of the best that genre has ever offered like Brief Encounter or Once fit that very description this doesn’t seem like a bad thing.

“Wow,” Webb laughs almost with a slight blush shaking his head. “Once. Really? That’s a fantastic movie. I’m not so sure about that one.”

“But you’re completely right,” he agrees. “It’s billed as an anti-romantic comedy, but anytime somebody says, ‘anti-romance’ we’re like no, not at all. It may be about this idea of love that is a little immature but it’s still very true and I think a lot of us can relate to. I always think of it as a coming of age story masquerading as romantic comedy, if you want to get technical.”

“I do like the idea of it being billed as a romantic comedy because I want the audience to go in expecting that [Tom and Summer] will end up together. I mean, the whole movie is about Tom’s expectations and what he thinks love is and how that is subverted. If the audience goes in thinking they’re going to end up together than I think it is more satisfying in the end, you hopefully go on a deeper, better ride.”

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel in Fox Searchlight's (500) Days of Summer

It is those very plays on expectations that gives (500) Days of Summer its impact. The film opens with a glorious shot of Tom and Summer holding hands on a park bench. From that point on, the storyline travels to and fro examining the different stages of the relationship, the protagonist going over every single step of it trying to figure out how things went so off the rails. The thing is, by the time that scene travels back again to beginning, a huge part of me didn’t want to see the pair reunite, the travails of the young love they endured more than enough to keep me satisfied.

“That’s an important thing,” Webb interjects. “[Tom] is not exactly a mature guy. He mistakes vanity for romance. It’s sort of laziness in a way. There is a scene about 25-minutes into the movie and they’re at a karaoke bar and it’s been an amazing night and he tells her, ‘I think you’re interesting, we should be friends.’ If he were a fucking man he’d kiss the girl, he’d put himself out there, and instead he’s paralyzed by that.”

“But at the end of the movie he asks the girl out. It’s very simple, but the beginning of the movie he’s afraid to ask the girl out and at the end of the movie he puts himself out there and is willing to be rejected and handles it like a man. That’s [Tom’s] Arc. It might seem minor but to a dude it’s a huge deal, it’s how you become a man in some small way.”

I find it interesting that we’re discussing the maturation of a young man in his twenties when after the success of films like Knocked Up, Step Brothers and I Love You, Man the trend seems to revolve around the thirty, maybe even forty-year-old children. It’s almost like Hollywood has decided to celebrate immaturity, and while some of these pictures have admittedly been terrific the thought of enduring more of them hard to swallow.

Webb’s debut flies in the face of this trend, almost going in the opposite direction by showing men can retain their youthful vigor without missing out on all of life’s adult lessons. “I think that one of things that was important to us when we were talking about casting was that we wanted to stay young,” he states emphatically. “Joe was about as old as you could get before his behavioral would become intolerable, even pathological. I mean, any older and it would have been like, wake the fuck up, you know what I mean? So this was something we were conscious of.”

“Listen, people talk about extended adolescence and all that stuff and I suppose there is some truth to that but [the film] wasn’t so much about that as it was about what we are conditioned to believe love is as a culture, what we’re fed and what it actually is. It is much more confusing and difficult and seasonal but no less beautiful for its complexity. I’m not saying we’re a super complex movie or anything, but that was our pop suggestion, our hint at that idea, and I think we managed to do a pretty good job doing just that.”

As we talk, my mind can’t help but comes back to the film’s structure. Thanks to its nonlinear tract, the plot is able to bounce along in a variety of interesting and unexpected ways, and while it retains its sweetly subtle innocence that doesn’t mean it isn’t without its fantastical flourishes.

“There are certain tonal shifts throughout, that is true,” Webb responds. “I don’t always like watching the begging, actually. Not because I think they are bad but more because the first few minutes it’s almost like we’re saying we’re going to go down this traditional road, and it’s sort of setting up certain trope. But then the dance sequence says we’re going to be a little bit more whimsical, while the reality-expectations sequence brings it into a more dramatic territory still without taking things too seriously.”

“I like those modulations in tone. I like that it increasingly becomes more grounded. But it is a slow burn even though the movie is short, only about 90 minutes long. I like that we were able to do that, though. I think it works well for the story.”

And how hard is it to hit those shifts in tone and know that you’ve succeeded in bringing them off? “I think there is a guiding principal that it has to be real in the moment,” says the director. “There has to be emotional continuity. I think there are also things that come into focus while editing, structural concerns, you don’t want to be redundant.”

Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel share a tender moment in Fox Searchlight's (500) Days of Summer

"You can never predict completely accurately how much will be related to audience until you’ve shot the material and taken a look at it. We shot a couple of scenes that we cut out when [Tom] is on his downward spiral but we realized these moments became sort of redundant in terms of the storytelling and we took [them] out.”

“There is this ‘Worst Mornings Ever’ sequence where before dancing and a cartoon bird takes a cartoon shit on his shoulder. It was funny and we liked it but structurally it was unnecessary. Pacing became a really important thing as I think there is a rhythm or a cadence that people tend to react to and we just tried to keep the metronome ticking appropriately. I think it slows a little throughout the movie but it still has to have some level consistency in terms of how the audience is going to be able to follow and track it.”

The other key to these tonal shifts are the way Webb and the writers play upon memory. Looking at our own lives, I wonder how many of us recall our high and low moments in the exact order in which they took place. The truth of the matter is we seldom do, jumping here to there in our brainpan subjective to the way we feel and how we're reacting to those around us.

“You’re totally right,” he agrees. “There is a bigger code to the movie and that is that it is told entirely from Tom’s point of view. It is a subjective experience. That is way you can have a dance sequence, that is why you can have split screens and that is why you can have a narrator because you’re inside somebody’s head. The ‘Summer Effects’ sequence is his fantasy of what she is, whether or not it is true is immaterial and what is important is that he believes it to be true. Part of that subjectivity is because of that nonlinear structure.”

“But I think trying to take some sort of issue with that structure is a poor argument to make. I mean, Annie Hall did it, Two for the Road did it, it’s the oldest trick in the book. Ultimately, it serves another function in that it leads the audience to expect certain thing and then it subverts those things which is exactly what Tom is experiencing and part of the conceit of the movie is that play on expectations.”

With time running out our conversation takes a detour towards influences and the films and filmmakers which inspired Webb, especially the ones who influenced him making this. Some like Annie Hall were obvious, other’s like Vincente Minnelli’s 1953 classic The Band Wagon not so much. And yet, once you hear him say it the more apparent the correlation becomes, both of them having a rich devil-may-care rapture which seems to spring right out from the center of the protaganist.

“There was an era I think that style of film belonged in,” he explains, “that sort of past-war ‘we’re happy to be alive’ vibe, that sort of embracing of the joy. I’ve always like that. It’s tricky because you don’t want to be labeled as too cute or too sentimental, but every time there is a dance sequence in a movie I just can’t help but love it. I wanted to bring that love to this [movie], that joy, even though maybe some of the subject matter we were toying with couldn’t have been anymore different.”

Understanding his point it seems casting was key, and I imagine that part of him still can’t quite believe just how lucky he was to have Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel along for the ride. “Definitely,” he instantly agrees. “You just look at Joe and Zooey’s movies and, well, it’s impressive what they’ve accomplished. Then the combination of the two from a credibility standpoint is just fantastic. They bring so much to the table.”

“But just from the craft of acting and being able to work with people who are very thoughtful with character and yet aren’t very overexposed to a mass audience is really fun. It’s exciting to work with actors who are just that engaged to the material. I think they’re still on the upswing, you know, so they’re really enthused about doing [the work].”

“In the end, you can’t cast from the standpoint of trying to pick a person from this or that list, you have to cast the dynamic and you have to cast the pair. They had been in Manic together so they had known one another for a long time which was important and the dynamic they had onset was the dynamic they had in the movie in some way. It was the engine of the movie, that chemistry, and it was a lot of the fun. So much is said in the way that he looks at her and the way she doesn’t look back. It really was a fantasy.”

Gordon-Levitt, Deschanel and Webb discuss a scene on the set of Fox Searchlight's (500) Days of Summer

At the end of the day, it won’t be film festival audiences who have the final say on the success or failure of Webb’s debut, it will be the ones hitting the multiplexes when it sees its wide release. And what does the director think people will be saying when they walk out of the theater?

“Happiness lies within not in the big blue eyes of the [person] in the cubicle down at the end of the hall,” he answers with only a partial hit of sarcasm. After a brief chuckle, he ultimately anwsers the question seriously with simple directness. “I just want [audiences] to be reassured. I want them to think. I want them to feel something. Anything after that is a bonus.” 

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