Jason Reitman Grows Up With Young Adult

Way back in 2007, director Jason Reitman, then on an indie hot streak following the success of his satirical dark comedy Thank You for Smoking, teamed up with a little-known former blogger named Diablo Cody to make a movie.

The result was Juno — a quirky dramedy that made teenage pregnancy the stuff of sarcastic one-liners. A critical darling of a film, it won Cody an Oscar for best original screenplay and made star Ellen Page an it-girl and Reitman an it-director.

Everyone’s done some growing up since then. Cody wrote Jennifer’s Body and wrote and produced The United States of Tara. Reitman was nominated for two more Oscars (following his nod for directing Juno) for adapting and directing Up in the Air.

So it seems only right that the reteaming of Reitman and Cody — who dealt with growing up too fast on Juno — would tackle not wanting to grow up at all with Young Adult. (See what they did there?) This time their protagonist is Mavis Gary (played by Charlize Theron, nominated Thursday for a Golden Globe for her note-perfect performance). Mavis, a one-time high school queen bee from small-town Minnesota, has become a ghostwriter of tween fiction. She returns to her hometown to win back her happily married former beau, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson).

During her selfish quest, Mavis discovers that you can never go home again. She does, however, find some things she missed out on in her high school days — like a peculiar friendship with self-professed geek Matt (Patton Oswalt), who suffered a vicious beating at the hands of bullies as a teenager.

The R-rated film doesn’t really offer many easy answers — or any answers at all, for that matter — about what wisdom is supposed to come with age, or why some of us never get over high school, but it does offer a brutally honest (and dark) look into what we all wonder about when we remember the most popular girl in school.

Wired.com sat down with Reitman recently to find out what it was like to work with Cody again, how much he trusted Oswalt’s nerd instincts for the character of Matt, and what it was that drew him to make Theron his lead. (Hint: She tells dirty jokes.)

Wired.com: What was it like working with Diablo Cody again?

Jason Reitman: Different, frankly. On Juno, she had never made a movie. She hadn’t even moved to Los Angeles yet. She was living in Minneapolis. On set, she was like a kid in a candy store. I mean, I think she maybe even asked if she was allowed to eat the craft service. I mean really, this is such a new experience for her, and by the time we made this — and this is just a few years later — she’s had a successful show on Showtime, she’s written many movies, produced a film and has done tons of television, tons of interviews, and now she’s a different person. And yet there was still so much joy to working with her. She writes a lot, more screenplays than anyone knows about, and she’ll just send me scripts. I’ve read scripts I don’t think anyone else has read. And this one, there was something just startling about the third act of it that I really responded to.

Charlize Theron plays Mavis Gary in Young Adult.

Photo: Phil CarusoWired.com: You said she sends you stuff. Is there anything else that you would like to work with her on down the road?

Reitman: Perhaps. I don’t know yet. You know, I found that after the first one, I didn’t know if we’d work together again. But now I get the sense that each of us will do our own growing up, and then we’ll make another movie. And we’ll do a little bit more growing up and then we’ll make another movie. And hopefully this will be these kind of little islands along the way.

Wired.com: Do you think people will be surprised that this is the second iteration of your partnership with her? Young Adult is much darker than Juno.

Reitman: They are kind of getting prepped enough at this point that I think they realize it’s going to be different. You know, I guess, if you didn’t see the trailer, and you didn’t see the poster, and you didn’t read anything about the movie, there’s a chance that somehow you’d go to this film knowing that it was a reteam of the two people who made Juno and really be surprised. But, we’re trying to be very clear in every way we can that this is different.

Wired.com: One of the other things that is striking in the film is its different take on the idea of nostalgia. Mavis isn’t nostalgic for home necessarily, but just for this one part of it, her former boyfriend. Was that an intentional theme going into it?

Reitman: Yeah, I mean, perhaps. Most people are nostalgic in a way that they’re fond of the past, but they still are happy that they are where they are now. You know, when you say, “Oh, high school was this or that,” you don’t want to go back. No matter how much you loved high school, you don’t want to actually be back in high school. I certainly wouldn’t. But this character is actually trying to get back there. You know? Most people, I think, when they think of like a moment in their life when everything is working and they think of that as in the future and at some point they’re gonna find it. She really is looking for the on-ramp to try to get back to 17 years old and is doing it every way. She’s doing it by, you know, listening to teenagers, writing about teenagers, watching teenagers on television, dressing like a teenager, and finally going back and actually getting her teenage love.

Reitman: I think I’m just naturally attracted to female characters. I can’t really speak to why — it just happens, and maybe it’s because I don’t want to always be telling the same story, and most of the male stories have been told and a lot of the female stories haven’t, so there’s just this instinct, “Well, I haven’t seen this film so it becomes something that I would actually want to do.”

Wired.com: Tell us a little about working with Charlize Theron. She pretty much has to carry every scene.

Reitman: It’s really lovely. She’s fearless, which is great because some actors are really scared. And a lot of the work as a director is just convincing them to do things. And with her, there’s no convincing, she’s completely confident. And she’s really funny. She’s darkly funny in a way that people seem to forget. They forget her on Arrested Development. They forget when she did Between Two Ferns with [Zach] Galifianakis. And the first thing, the first time I met her, one of the first things she told me was a really dirty joke.

‘The first time I met [Charlize Theron], one of the first things she told me was a really dirty joke. ‘ Wired.com: What was it? Can you tell it?

Reitman: I can’t. Sorry.

So she really endeared herself to me with her trust and her sense of humor. And honestly, the biggest one was her fearlessness. It’s hard to play a character that’s this corrosive and not do something to tell the audience that you are not this character. Guys get away with it more, they are kind of permitted to play nasty characters, and you love them for it. But, it’s harder for women, and we’re harder on them, so they tend to wear prosthetics, or have some sort of strange character trait, or something with their wardrobe that lets you know, “OK, this is absurdist.” And Charlize doesn’t do that. She goes, “No, this is me, let’s go.”

Wired.com: The film has a very open-ended conclusion. Were there other alternate endings?

Reitman: A little bit. The most important scene in this movie, the reason why I made this movie, is the scene at the breakfast table with Sandra (Collette Wolfe), [Matt]’s sister. Once that scene’s over, the movie is over. I mean I even toyed with the idea of just rolling credits [there]. You’re good here. Credits. That’s a little too brutal. So we toyed around with different ways that you could go from there and found a happy medium.

What was important to me is that you realize that she did not change. I didn’t want to give this inkling of, “Oh, and she’s going off to a better life, and she’s gonna figure things out, and she’s growing up.” It needed to be clear that she did realize something, but she was ignoring it. Which is, I think, what most people do. Most people see a documentary about the meat industry and then they become a vegetarian for a week. You know?

Reitman: Oh yeah. I mean he suggested the taking the figurines and reassembling them with other parts, as a parallel to his broken leg. [Editor’s note: Matt’s leg is permanently injured in the attack he suffered in high school.] He went out and worked with a physical therapist who not only taught him to walk, but, like, taught him about his injuries.

Oswalt ‘suggested the taking the figurines and reassembling them with other parts, as a parallel to his broken leg.’ I think he did more work on this character than any he has ever done, and nothing comes close. And he came up with dialog all the time. So, he knew it. I think he is the reason this movie works. Because it’s one thing to do a character portrait of a difficult, broken, mean woman, but you need a perspective, you need a way in. And he is strangely like the point of view of the audience.

Wired.com: He sees why Mavis is not appealing in some ways yet finds that empathy we’re supposed to feel toward her.

Reitman: Well, he’s kind of broken and flawed and mean himself. The way I described it to [Oswalt and Theron] was always two people in love say, “Oh, he loves all the same things that I love.” And with them it’s, “Oh, he hates all the same things that I hate.” There is strangely something bonding about that. I find that usually when I’m with someone and if we are just talking about the things that we both love, it’s kind of a boring conversation. But, if we are talking about things we both hate, we are now really close. You know?

Wired.com: What about Patrick Wilson? He does sort of the opposite take on what did in Little Children with this movie. Did that play into his casting at all?

Labor Day ‘has such a good cast that if it doesn’t work, it’s really on me.’ Reitman: Well, considering how handsome the guy is and how actually charming he is, he has an amazing ability to be bland. And he has an amazing ability to toe a line and not react and seem normal, and that’s what I needed. I needed a guy who could have all of this energy come out from Mavis, and you’re expecting him to either slap the girl or show interest in her. And he finds a way to just keep on putting one foot in front of the other, so that you can get all the way to the end of the movie without him reacting. It’s a really — it’s like a stealth bomber. It’s a really tricky thing to do.

Wired.com: What are you working next?

Reitman: I’ve got a script called Labor Day, that I adapted from a Joyce Maynard book. And it’s a straight drama; we start shooting in June with Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin. It’s such a good cast that if it doesn’t work, it’s really on me. You know every time I say, “It’s Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin,” people are like, “Whoa, nice.” If it sucks, it ain’t their fault.

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Young Adult is currently playing in select cities. It opens nationwide Friday.