Economic reality changes director’s approach to film
TORONTO — Writer-director Jason Reitman readily admits he can identify with the blithe loner who lives out of a carry-on bag and fires people for a living in the romantic comedy-drama “Up in the Air.”
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But the 32-year-old filmmaker is also honest enough to admit he knows nothing of what it feels like to lose a job.
It was easy directing George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a guy who flies from city to city, sacking employees for downsizing corporations and reveling in his mobile lifestyle, free of such excess baggage as family, personal commitments or a home mortgage.
“The sad thing about me is that I actually do agree with these characters of mine,” Reitman said during a roundtable interview with reporters in September at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Reitman is no stranger to sympathetic anti-heroes, having found the human side of tobacco lobbyist Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart) in 2005’s “Thank You for Smoking.”
“So, that’s the heartbreaker, saddest probably for my wife, who has to be married to me, is that I probably do think like Nick Naylor of ‘Thank You for Smoking,’ and I do think like Ryan Bingham of this movie. And that’s why I like to bring humanity to them. I like to bring humanity to the characters that are vilified in other people’s movies.”
As an example, Reitman said he’s not a fan of Michael Mann’s “The Insider,” a fact-based film about a tobacco industry whistleblower. Beating up on “big tobacco” is too easy for the likes of Reitman. He’d rather find good in a seemingly unscrupulous spinmeister.
Same goes for Clooney’s self-centered, self-indulgent corporate terminator in “Up in the Air,” whose biggest goal in life is to accrue 10 million miles in the air and become a member of the world’s most elite frequent flier club.
“Certainly there’s tons of films about main characters who believe in the idea of family,” Reitman said. “I’d much rather hero-ize the man who says, ‘No, no, life is much better alone; you have it all wrong.’ And often I’m just dealing with a part of me that actually feels those things, or at least is tempted.
“I’m married, I love my wife, my daughter’s incredible, but I would be lying if I didn’t say every once in a while I’ve thought about the idea, when I’m walking through the airport, what if I hopped on that plane to who knows where, and I just landed with nothing and nobody, and just started fresh. And I think just as Ryan Bingham says, I think there is something exhilarating about that concept. I would have to imagine there’s a part of every person that feels that way. It’s easier for me to write that almost as a personal diary.”
An Oscar nominee for directing 2007’s “Juno,” Jason Reitman, son of director Ivan Reitman, confesses he was much more cynical when he first started adapting “Up in the Air” for the screen from a novel by Walter Kirn.
“I started writing this as a 24-year-old who was satirical and libertarian and unmarried when I started writing the first act,” he said. “We were in an economic boom, and I was a satirical writer. I was writing a satire, and the original firing scenes were satirical scenes. They were funny scenes.”
But Jason Reitman’s life has changed since then, and so has the economic climate.
“(The firing scenes) stopped being funny,” he said, “and I realized I needed to make those scenes more dramatic. I just simply knew I did not have the life experience to make these scenes as authentic as possible. And I thought the only way to make this feel real is to use real people.”
To that end, the production company ran newspaper ads in Detroit and St. Louis, two cities hardest hit by the economic downturn, looking for people who had been fired from their jobs and were willing to relive the experience in front of a motion picture camera. So, many of the men and women Clooney’s character fires in the film are real people, re-enacting their real-life reactions when they were handed their pink slips. Some show quiet resignation; others shout angrily or weep or throw tantrums or all of the above.
And their pain is obviously real.
“I don’t know what it’s like to be 53 years old, to have done the same job for half your life, and to suddenly think, ‘OK, I live in a city where half the population does what I do, and we’ve all lost our jobs, so it’s not exactly like I can go find another job (snapping his fingers) like that,’” Reitman said. “I have too much respect for all the people who went through that situation, to sit there and try to come up with bull—- dialogue that just doesn’t pay tribute to how scary that must be.”
Travel and accommodations provided by Paramount Pictures.
