“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
No comments:
Post a Comment