Juno: Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman in Interview

“I have a sick, sick tendency to find comedy in crisis,” admits Diablo Cody. She and director Jason Thank You For Smoking Reitman are in a jovial mood as they greet journalists in the depths of London’s Soho Hotel. It’s a cold October afternoon, and Juno will be making its UK debut in the next few days at the 51st London Film Festival. Only three months later the film will have taken an astounding $100m at the US box-office (from a budget of less than $10m) and secured no fewer than four Oscar nominations, but for the moment it remains a below-the-radar indie that’s testing well and generating positive buzz.

It all kicked off with a blog called Pussy Ranch, written daily by former stripper Diablo Cody (aka: Brook Busey-Hunt). For six months, producer Mason Novick read each new entry and laughed, before finally deciding it was time to drop her a line and ask her whether she’d ever tried writing a screenplay. Cody admits she was initially wary. “I’m just a pragmatic mid-Westerner. Writing movies is not something that we do,” she says, adding, “I didn’t really listen to him right off the bat, I kinda blew him off for a while, and then finally he got to me, and so I started writing Juno.” The resulting screenplay tells the story of pregnant and quick-witted teen Juno MacGuff. Deciding to give up her unborn baby for adoption, the story follows the impact of her decision upon the nervous father-to-be, her family, the couple who will adopt, and of course Juno herself. The screenplay landed on Reitman’s desk, who found he was hooked by the second page: “I thought, ‘Wow, this girl’s got a great voice’,” he says, “and by about halfway through I just thought, ‘if I don’t direct this, I’m gonna regret it for the rest of my life’.”

It comes as no real surprise that Cody draws Juno from her own adolescence (“I consider the character autobiographical in a sense” she says). As a result, she was frequently on-set to make any changes or adaptations that Reitman deemed necessary. “It’s her voice, at the end of the day,” states Reitman. It’s 20 year-old Ellen Page who breathes deadpan life into Cody’s creation. Reitman had, like most people, been mightily impressed with her performance in the controversy-baiting Hard Candy, and from their first meeting her role in the film proved a no-brainer. Page effortlessly nails Cody’s tone, and has been rewarded with an Oscar nomination for her troubles.

Part of the film’s appeal is the comedic tone, the “comedy-in-crisis” set-up that seems to be Cody’s natural setting as a writer, and which has undoubtedly been a major factor in the film’s stunning success. Teen-pregnancy doesn’t perhaps make for the most obvious comedy material, but Cody’s writing generates a distinctly liberating feel that manages to explore serious social themes while keeping the tone light and fluffy. “I always saw comedic potential in the idea of this unplanned pregnancy,” Cody confirms, “I know people think that’s kinda weird.” But it’s a tone that plays to Reitman’s strengths: “I actually think you can deal with more issues in comedy than you can in drama,” he says, “For some reason in a comedy, soon as you get people laughing, you’re able to say things you otherwise were not able to say… Had [Diablo] done this as a drama, it would’ve perhaps just been melodramatic.”

Although the story hinges around Juno’s pregnancy, Reitman believes that wider themes are in fact more prevalent: “What I think Diablo really approached, in a very sophisticated way on this film, more than teenage pregnancy, is the changing idea of what a modern family is.” In making his point, he draws attention to Juno’s stepmother Bren (played by former West Winger Allison Janney), who is sympathetic to her stepdaughter’s plight from the start, and Vanessa and Mark Loring (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman), the increasingly estranged couple who Juno decides will make suitable adoptive parents for her baby. Reitman also points out that all the main characters, at some point in the film, “decide to grow up.” As he surmises, “That’s, I think, what makes it infinitely relatable.”

The Stateside success of Juno has certainly confirmed that cinema audiences have connected with Cody’s story en masse. Cody herself has become hot Hollywood property, and has already been courted by Spielberg for TV show The United States of Tara. Arguably, not since Charlie Kaufman delivered his quirky screenplay for Being John Malkovich in 1999, has a writer been thrust into the spotlight so quickly. With Cody’s cannibal horror Jennifer’s Body already in preproduction, she’s certainly a talent to watch out for.

This article was first published on The Smell of Napalm

Cloverfield: Director Matt Reeves Discusses A Beast For Our Time

“I mean, a giant monster’s absurd, but you have to find ways to make it real.” Director Matt Reeves smiles as he recalls the moment when childhood friend and Lost co-creator JJ Abrams approached him with an idea for a modern, thoroughly American monster movie, inspired by the enduring Japanese cultural resonance of Godzilla. Reeves was understandably cautious, as would anyone who had never directed a feature before, much less a feature that was so effects-heavy, calling for the wholesale destruction of New York City at the hands of a 350-foot beast. But Reeves soon found a hook that compelled him to commit to the challenge. “I think what’s different about the movie is really the point-of-view,” he explains, adding that the production mentality became to “try and find the way this would be shot if the person finding the camera was going through the experience.”

Taking inspiration from the personalised home-movie style so abundant on YouTube, along with sources such as Deborah Scranton’s The War Tapes, a war documentary shot by National Guard troops serving in Iraq, Reeves decided that all the action would be filmed from a single viewpoint, with a character simply picking up the camera and shooting the experience. “This movie is very much made for an audience that does this daily,” Reeves says. The resulting story centres on a group of twenty-somethings whose party is interrupted by an apparent earthquake and then an explosion in downtown Manhattan. Given the task of filming the party, the amiable Hud (TJ Miller) ends up documenting his friends and the resulting chaos as the city comes under attack. Cloverfield marks the first time this style of shooting has found its way into a big-budget production, although of course the micro-budgeted Blair Witch Project employed a similar idea way back in 1999. “The thing about Blair Witch,” Reeves observes, “is that they use that style very smartly to create suspense that will never be paid off because they can’t afford to pay it off.” While there’s the argument that Blair Witch was effective because it lead the audience to create the largely unseen horror in their own minds, it’s undeniable that Cloverfield presents a gripping big-budget alternative to the intimate point-of-view format which, for better or worse, leaves little to the imagination.

While a rough-and-ready shooting style may come more naturally to independent filmmakers strapped for cash, Reeves found instilling a similar sense in his team of professionals was something of a challenge: “When we have a focus-puller and, you know, somebody walks in and hits their mark, and if that person isn’t sharp, then that person (the focus-puller) loses their job! This all has to be messy.” A solution was that TJ Miller shot much of the footage himself as Hud with an actual handy-cam, as did Reeves as he also qualified for the job by being, well, not qualified for the job. Of course, the pros did some of the work too. “Some of it was that we got our professionals to try and shoot to look as bad as what we were doing,” smiles Reeves, adding, “I’d put our professional camera-operators, with their 50-60 pound cameras, in TJ’s clothing so that whenever you saw his feet, that was TJ’s feet, supposedly, or his hands. And basically it was this giant experiment.”

Of course, the cinematic destruction of New York brought its own concerns, in the post-9/11 climate, and this was something that Reeves and his team were acutely aware of throughout. “I think that all really interesting genre films, for me, tend to reflect the anxiety of the time,” Reeves notes, “They reflect our deep-seated fears.” With Godzilla originally presenting such an overt manifestation of nuclear anxieties, released only a decade after Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, it is perhaps inevitable that the first big-budget disaster movie since the 9/11 terror attacks should focus so significantly on individuals merely reacting to a crisis. Indeed, many of the images in Cloverfield strongly recall home-movie footage of the tragedy, including people staggering through dust-covered streets and taking cover in shops as the monster passes them by. As producer JJ Abrams has previously said, “We live in a time of great fear. Having a movie that is as outlandish as a massive creature attacking your city allows people to process and experience that fear in a way that is incredibly entertaining and incredibly safe.”

This article was first published on Close-Up Film