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Our Idiot Brother

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : Following his release from jail, a well-meaning pot dealer (Paul Rudd) wreaks havoc with his three sisters' carefully structured lives.

Opens August 26, 2011

Runtime:1 hr. 36 min.

 

Interview with Director Jesse Peretz, Writer Evgenia Peretz

 

(Q) : This is a pretty typical question. How did you make a transition into film in the first place?
 
(Jesse Peretz) : To be honest, when people say "Well you were a musician," I feel like I was just barely a musician. I was lucky enough to play bass in a punk-pop band. I don't really think of myself as a musician. I was a functioning bass player. But really prior to starting the band in high school I was in a student film as an actor. Literally, I was working in a restaurant as a busboy and I had big crushes on these older ladies who were waitresses – older ladies like 22, 23 years old – who were waitresses at the restaurant, and two of them were going to film school and they needed a teenager to be in their movie.

And I had such a big crush on them that of course I was thrilled to do it, only to find out that my role was this guy whose neighbor finds out I'm a virgin and sends in one of his friends to deflower me. And anyways the very explicit sex scene that we shot was traumatic enough to end my acting career. But that week that we were shooting that movie I was so into the whole process of making a movie, and I was 15 at the time and I remember just thinking this is what I want to do with my life.

So even though I had a really excellent time being in The Lemonheads and I was lucky enough to get to travel around the world, I knew that what I really wanted to do was direct movies, and it was why I left the band just as the band was taking off was to try to get into that. It took a good number of years before I got to make a feature, but I made a bunch of shorts and I made tons of music videos and I started making commercials, which I still do now. In that sense the music was able to help me make the segue because it brought me into the music world and I got to meet a bunch of bands, and all the first music videos I did were bands I was friends with.
 
(Q) : You didn't have a relationship with the older women right?
 
(Jesse Peretz) : No. I had a very traumatic, short lived on camera relationship with her surrounded by crew worrying about whether I was going to have an erection or not.
 
(Q) : David Ryan was actually the first one that you wrote a script with. How did that collaboration come about?
 
(Jesse Peretz) : He was a writer who played drums but he really wanted to be a writer, and we spent all this time together and we loved a lot of the same books. And then I found this Ian McEwan short story and I gave him the story and he loved the story too and so we just started talking about trying to turn it into a script. And literally we had no idea what we were doing. It didn't even occur to us that we needed to get the rights to the story. The first draft of the script was written three years before we got the rights to the short story, so it was a long haul between the first drunken conversation.
 
(Q) : It usually takes five years.
 
(Jesse Peretz) : Exactly.
 
(Q) : You collaborated with your husband, but how did you two collaborate?
 
(Jesse Peretz) : We spent probably a solid month together every day beating out the story and figuring out the characters and all of the stuff that was going to happen. It definitely was really important, even though Paul's character is male and is the central character, definitely it was really important to us that it was a movie where there were really strongly realized female characters. And I do have to credit my sister with writing female characters that were really appealing to actresses out there, and I think it's how we got such a good cast.

This is obviously a bit of a breakthrough summer for women in comedies, but I think in general if you talk to comedic actresses a lot of them really feel like comedies are so male-centric, and oftentimes the female characters are not given a lot to do either comedically or even for that matter in a sort of complicated character wave and dramatically.

Elizabeth Banks said to me, and she was one of the few actors that I didn't know beforehand, so when I had my first phone conversation with her when I sent her the script she was like "Damn it Jesse, I promised my husband I was not going to do anymore independent films, I'm sick of doing independent films. But then I have to get this script." It was clear that she felt like this script was giving her an opportunity to be in a comedy and do something more complicated character-wise.
 
(Q) : I love the fact that there was a lot of female insecurity and then the guy in the center is a straightforward guy. That was really fascinating about that actually.
 
(Evgenia Peretz) : I'm glad that came through because that was definitely our intention. The title is kind of ironic because they're the ones who are fooling themselves or tricking other people or getting all upset, and he's the one who actually teaches them.
 
(Q) : Talk about the casting. How did you end up casting Steve Coogan?
 
(Jesse Peretz) : Honestly, I am such a fan of Steve Coogan to the degree that I never would have had the balls to call him and offer him the part. I had flown out to LA for the prep for 24 hours to have lunch with Elizabeth Banks and just get to know her a little better because I didn't know her, and then have a meeting with Kathryn Hahn, who I was debating between her and someone else casting her in the movie. Incidentally, I met her and fell in love with her in about three minutes. I think Kathryn Hahn is a total genius who is about to explode.

And then I got a phone call from my agent saying "What about Steve Coogan" for the part of Dylan?" and I thought "He'll never do that," and they were like "No, no, no, his agent says that he thinks he'll be into it." Anyways, I then ended up meeting him a couple hours later on my way to the airport. Someone had given him the script and he clearly really responded to the character. He loved Emily Mortimer personally and as an actress and was psyched to work with her.

And we talked about would he play the character as an American, but then he had the idea that it actually was a more rich, comedic ground for him to tread on if instead of just playing a politically correct American if he played that sort of European, British superior character and could kind of delve into that British perspective of looking down on the crass Americans. As we sat there having drinks at the Sunset Marquis he acted out both options for me and it just seemed really funny to me the idea of him playing it as an English character and he was more psyched to do that. It totally fit; it was a small tweak of the script. It was originally written for that to be an American guy.
(Q) : If it was American I don't think it would have worked in that way.
 
(Jesse Peretz) : It would have been a different version.
 
(Q) : I guess it has a more significant impact.
 
(Jesse Peretz) : It was fun having him play an English character.
 
(Q) : Have you ever have someone name a dog a weird name like in this film?
 
(Jesse Peretz) : I met a writer in Australia who had a dog named after a writer, like first and last name, but now I can't remember who it was. But obviously the weirdness of it was part of it, just that it would sound funny. But I've heard people have their dogs have two names.
 
(Q) : When I was growing up in Japan somebody named a child Devil. Can you believe that? It was so controversial and it was broadcast. It happened almost 15 years ago. Everybody complained and then they changed the name in the end. But that was a really crazy thing to name your kid like that. When you made this film was there any film that inspired you? You're used to doing comedy on TV, so was this a challenge to you?
 
(Jesse Peretz) : I did not do much TV. I made four movies, so my experience is much more in films than TV. The Demetri Martin stuff it's more sketch stuff so actually for me it's more similar to comedy commercials that I've done. But my heart is much more in terms of movie making and real characters with emotional arcs.

But I love comedy and I love when you make people laugh and have a joyful ride. I would say definitely if we were going to cite a film influence when we were writing the script, Woody Allen's movie "Hannah and Her Sisters" was definitely a movie that we sort of thought about.
 
(Q) : The relationship.
 
(Jesse Peretz) : Yeah, the relationship.
 
(Evgenia Peretz) : And the tone of the movie, how it was sort of funny but you really get into the story and what's going on with the characters.
 
(Q) : It's pretty much the opening scene when he gets busted selling weed to the cop. You couldn't come up with a funnier concept. That really tells you.
 
(Jesse Peretz) : But I think if you look closely at that scene too it's not so much the dumb guy, it's the compassionate guy. Because when the cop first asks him he's not stupid, and he's not treating the guy stupid. He's being honest and he goes "Even if I did do you think I would tell you?" He's just being like you're a cop; I'm not going to tell you where you can get weed, because you're a policeman. But then the cop pulls such a face and just reaches out to the humanity in him.

Granted, he's fucking with him, but he's like "Man, I've had a really hard week," and that to me is the essence of Ned is that he looks at this guy who looks like he's suffering and he's thinking "I can either choose to believe him or not believe him and be the cynical ass that thinks this guy is just trying to bust me, but you know what, he looks like he's in pain and I'm going to be compassionate."

And so to me I always was really excited with the concept of the scene, because I do think on the surface it's like what an idiot, but then it really is the ultimate compassionate thing where I'm going to take a risk because this guy is hurting. And then I really do feel like Paul to me really delivered that. He turned that corner in a way that I think really lets you instantly know who this guy is and what a good guy he is, even if it's a little idiotic.
 
(Q) : It tells you about the character. This comedy has so much compassion. But it's really kind of hard to balance out the dumbness and the compassion.
 
(Evgenia Peretz) : It was definitely something we kept in mind. At what point was it veering too much into stupidity where you would be like "Ugh, I don't like that character." You had to ride that line.
 
(Q) : Were there a lot of things that weren't working?
 
(Evgenia Peretz) : Yeah.
 
(Jesse Peretz) : I think a little bit in the script writing. But I think that by the time we were shooting, because it's also very important to Paul to be able to connect the dots emotionally for his character. He's not the kind of guy who wants to just go for a cheap joke and throw the emotional reality of his character under a bus for big laughs.

We did one last pass of the script with Paul, and really I would say the only thing that we did was really try to make sure that he could really believe that the compassion and humanity of his character would lead him to make all the stupid decisions, as opposed to just stupid shit to make people laugh and ultimately run the risk of throwing people out of the movie.

 

End.