Several weeks ago, VeryAware.com* had the opportunity, a golden one at that, to sit down with actor-comedian-writer Patton Oswalt as he swung through the San Francisco Bay Area for the press tour to promote his latest film, YOUNG ADULT. Directed by Jason Reitman (UP IN THE AIR, JUNO, THANK YOU FOR SMOKING) from Diablo Cody’s (THE UNITED STATES OF TARA, JUNO) screenplay, YOUNG ADULT centers on Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), a self-deluded, possibly mentally ill writer of young adult novels (don’t worry, sparkling vampires and werewolf boys are nowhere to be found) who decides to leave the “big city” (Minneapolis in her case) for the small (as in really small) town where she grew up. Mavis has a plan, a plan with little, if any connection to the real world, to win back her high-school sweetheart, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson). Oswalt plays Matt Freehauf, a long-forgotten high-school mate who functions as Mavis’ (usually ignored) conscience and emotional crutch. He’s more than conscience and emotional crutch, though. Between Reitman’s direction, Cody’s writing (at her best) and Oswalt’s performance, he’s a fully rounded, identifiable, sympathetic character.
Q: Question you’ve never been asked before, I’m sure. How did you get the role? Were you familiar with Jason Reitman? Did you have to audition?
Oswalt: I met Jason at an awards ceremony years ago. I think I was hosting the editing awards or the visual effects awards. And we just started gabbing backstage and we both bonded over our love of movies and the fact that we both own French Bulldogs. I just started getting invited to movie nights at his house. He does a movie night every Sunday. And this script came along. At the time I was working on UNITED STATES OF TARA – that Diablo created – and then he just said, ‘Why don’t you just come in and do the table read?’ He wanted to know how it sounded, you know? And three table reads later when Charlize came in we just clicked. There was something about we were so fun and adversarial right off the bat. That he’s like, ‘That’s what I want.’ So that’s how I got offered it.
Q: How much of your own high school experience playing this role?
Oswalt: I didn’t get beaten up in high school so it’s hard for me to say I didn’t have a bad high school experience. I was not the lead quarterback or anything, but I had a great group of class clown friends. I was in that clique. There was never any, you guys know. There’s never anything as the class clown. There’s always like eight or nine of them and they all kind of compete. I had this great circle of friends. The one thing I could definitely relate to was the idea of if what would have happened if I got stuck in my hometown. That’s like a big, ongoing, reoccurring anxiety for me. I will have dreams about that. Like I get stuck back there. But I have this whole other life. And so that I brought a lot to. Those fears at least.
Q: So the movie taps into the zeitgeisty moment right now regarding the bullying of gay teens, even though Matt is not actually gay. I was wondering how you think Matt would respond to the whole “it gets better” movement?
Oswalt: Holy Shit! Wow! How would he respond to that? I wrote an interesting, I can’t say it because it’s my blog, about one of the things I did in high school when I was a freshman and I was kinda still twerpy. Yes, I do believe it gets better for the people who are bullied. But what I wanted to say was, for a long time I was the bully’s little friend. In order to preemptively protect myself from being bullied, I would join in on bullying someone else and goad and give these really mean lines to the bully to throw at these guys. And I still have a lot of residual guilt for that. You can help it get better by not so much standing up to the bullies on behalf, but by just not helping out the meanness. I think at the most what Matt Freehauf would say is, ‘It gets better for you in the future but it also doesn’t change now.’ And also there was something kind of interesting. When I was living in the Valley there was a guy that did my hair and he grew up gay in Washington state in this tiny, tiny town. He had to hide being gay. He played football and he dated girls and he beat up guys he thought might be queer because he was terrified of people finding out. Then he moved to LA and was like, ‘Screw this!’ and he came out. Now his life is great. He’s happy. He goes back to his hometown to visit his in-laws. They’ve all accepted – they’re fine. It’s all his family. They’re all totally cool with it. And his nephew is there and his nephew is gay. He keeps thinking, “what I went through. What is this poor kid going through?’ He was talking to his nephew like, ‘How is it? How’s high school?’ He goes, ‘It’s terrible. They still oppress us. Our gay- lesbian- transgender club wanted to have our prom and they won’t let us have our prom the night of the actual prom. We have to wait a week. It’s just like the oppression we are going through.’ And my friend wanted to go, ‘You need to shut the fuck up! You have a gay-lesbian-transgender club?! And they’re making you wait a week?! They’re letting you have a prom?! What the fuck are you talking about?’ So it would be that interesting generational thing of like, ‘it gets better, but also I don’t think you know what bad is,’ in a weird way. It will be interesting to see that kind of thing. But, yeah. There’s still a lot of bullying that goes on both ways I think. It’s just the idea of making bullying, shrugging your shoulders as if, ‘It’s a thing kids do.’ No, no. You’re just passing it along because you went through it. If someone could have stepped in to find a way to stop it, you would have been so happy. I’m not saying we’re gonna find the solution immediately. But why not try to fucking stop it? Don’t do this, ‘Boys will be boys.’ Well fuck that! Why is that a thing we shrug our shoulders at? Sorry I didn’t mean to go off like that.
Q: Did you go to public school?
Oswalt: Yeah. I went to public high school in Northern Virginia.
Q: Regardless of whether it’s gender based or sexually oriented or whatever, Don’t you think a war on bullying is like a war on terror? Isn’t it human nature at that age?
Oswalt: I think the best way to stop bullying is to teach every individual kid – whether they’re gay, straight, Christian, atheist, whatever – that guys, it’s a gigantic world out there. Where you are now is not the world. If you don’t fit in, go out. There are plenty of people just like you. They’re everywhere. You’re the girl in the bee costume in that video. And there’s a field of bees out there. Trust me, you’ll find them. I almost feel like, if every high school kid at a certain age in all countries had to spend one year living in a different country with a different family, everybody would just calm the fuck down. The world is so god damn huge. It doesn’t matter. I was lucky enough that – I’m not saying I was smart – me and some other friends, for some lucky reason, I always had an inkling even when things got bad in high school that I knew, ‘I’m not even gonna see these people. It doesn’t fucking matter. I don’t give a shit.’ And it’s weird. A year after high school, if you run into anyone you went to high school with, you all have this unspoken like, ‘What the fuck was that all about? I’m sorry man. Was I a dick? I think I was a dick.’ It’s an unrealistic environment that you’re all shoved into basically.
Q: You talked yesterday about Charlize, in certain scenes, giving you nothing. When you first got into acting, from a stand-up comedy background, I would imagine that would have been really intimidating. Is getting nothing from your co-stars a technique that’s used?
Oswalt: It depends. Again, Charlize is on a level of acting that very few actors are on, in that she is, without commenting on it or over explaining, she just knows what each scene needs even if she’s not necessarily the focus of the scene. It’s impossible for most actors to sit there and do nothing and give nothing back. Because a: it’s extremely unsympathetic and it’s also innervating if you are an actor and you’re not bringing any kind of tension to the scene. The fact that she was so smart to look at each scene and know that ‘this is the scene where I should aggressively not engage with him. And just give him a blank stare. Like why are you going on at length?’ It was so fucking brilliant. I’ve never seen that done so perfectly before. I mean, I know that there are other actors where the other person just did nothing and it makes the scene work because if someone’s not responding to someone, the other person’s getting nervous. That’s a very realistic thing that happens in life. You’re trying to get through to someone. And they’re all, ‘I could give a shit.’ That’s so brutal. I’m describing a very advanced actress in terms of skill and empathy and knowledge of an overall script and how a movie gets put together. Of course for a comedian, it’s terrifying. I’m so happy it was terrifying because it made me better. She was giving me a gift basically. By going, ‘I’m going to make this so uncomfortable for you.’ Rather than going, ‘Now Patton. I’m going to be really mean. I’m just acting.’ She just went, ‘Ok. Lets do it.’ It was so intimidating. Afterwards it was like, ‘Thank God.’ It’s that thing that Bill Murray says where when he learned at the Second City. The first thing – the real lesson you learn as an actor is try to make everyone else in the scene look better. Now if everyone in the scene is doing that, the whole scene will be amazing. If you’re all setting each other up. Then it will be great.
Q: Following up on the previous question, how many takes on average did you have to do?
Oswalt: Not a lot. Jason doesn’t believe in a lot of takes. Charlize doesn’t need a lot of takes. I remember one time, Jason gave her a note… and I can say this because Charlize has said this when we’ve done Q&As, Jason was like, ‘I need you to be way more cunty.’ Then she said, ‘I’ll do it. I don’t think you want it, but I’ll do it.’ ‘Oh no, I want you to do it.’ And oh man, did she do it. Jason reminds me of those old-school pros, because he shoots movies all the time. If he’s not making [a feature-length] movie, he’s making a short film or he’s doing a commercial. He actually likes to shoot things. He likes to make images and sound and movement, which is what a true director wants to do. These guys who say, ‘I want to wait until something special,’ let’s shoot film, let’s just shoot film. Jason reminds me of the old-school guys like Allan Dwan, Delmer Davies, and Michael Curtiz who made five movies a year. It got to the point where…they were geniuses. They could walk into a room and say, ‘We’re going to use this light source, that one, you’ll enter from here, we’ll get you in a two-shot, here we go…’ In other words, there’s less angst, what does this scene mean? Because there’s no angst from the director, because he knows what the fuck he’s doing, the actors can relax and give him better performances.
Q: It’s clear you know a lot about movies. Is directing something you’d like to do?
Oswalt: Someday, yeah, but I’m in a lot of movies now. What I’m doing is what a lot of actors who want to direct do, I just observe all the time. Until I feel like I’ve absorbed it and then I’m going to start. I also don’t know what medium I want to work in. I love these tiny, HD digital cameras that you can shoot less and less obtrusively. Those are the kinds of movies that draw me in. So yeah, eventually I will direct. It’s so fucking hard, an all-encompassing process, not just the months of shooting the film, but the months of preparation, and the months of post-production, and the months of promoting it. It’s so brutal. I just don’t know if I’ve trained enough for the marathon. Jason started when he was a teenager. The one thing in my life that’s [comparable] is stand-up comedy, since I’ve done it since I was a teenager. So what seems intimidating to other people, it’s not because I’m so freaking skillful, it’s because I’ve done it every day of my life for twenty-two years. I better be good at this point. There are things I can do at this point without a lot of preparation. There are directing things that Jason Reitman can do without thinking about that much anymore because he’s done them so many times, ‘I know what I’m going to do here.’ He can glance at a scene and say, ‘We’re going to do it this way.’ It’s so amazing to work with calm pros. It’s not like every movie gives them a heart attack and puts them in a hospital for three months. I’ve got this next thing lined up and between that, I’m going to shoot three more things. I might do a commercial, I might do a video. He just likes shooting things. It’s going to be a long, ongoing process. Scorsese’s the same way. Make a short film. Why not? See how that goes. You have a fragment of a Hitchcock film, I’ll shoot that.
Q: You stay extremely busy yourself with comedy as a base. You’re in TV, stand-up, the occasional film. How do you prioritize film roles with your other work?
Oswalt: I just like creating stuff. As far as prioritizing film roles, it’s not like I’m being offered a lot of stuff. I don’t have to fend off a lot of things. I’ve just had a lot of very lucky accidents. It pretty much comes down to, ‘Where is it being shot? Will it take me away from my family for too long? Is this something that I think is going to be really interesting? And not like anything I’ve done before.’ I’m so beyond genre or budget. I’m lucky enough that I’ve read so many scripts. I’ve written so many scripts that I think I have a better grasp as to what’s a good script. I can read something and think, ‘This is going to be something fun I can do.’
Q: So you’ve developed a following for your live-tweets during the [GOP] debates…
Oswalt: And I can’t do it today due to my schedule. But they’re doing like 900 more of these…
Q: I don’t think you’re going to have a shortage of material…
Oswalt: It’s never going to end.
Q: Do you feel like you’ve done anything to deserve this gift of comedy gold?
Oswalt: Especially this field this year. It’s amazing…In a way, it’s not amazing. Every few election cycles…and I’m going to say this right now, I’m not saying this because I’m anti-Republican or pro-Democrat, but Obama is going to be reelected. Everyone knows it. Nobody can say it. Because all these cable shows…their job is to keep stories moving along. They can’t just go, ‘The Republicans are having a shit year.’ It happens. The Democrats in 2004 had a shit year. And everyone acted like it was going to come down to Kerry and Bush. All the anchors…’We know Bush’s going to win, but we pretend like we don’t know, otherwise we won’t have fucking jobs.’ Now that I’ve seen the other end of the process, it’s going to be interesting to see how they spin this fake narrative…that doesn’t exist. It does not exist. They don’t have anyone. It has nothing to do with Republicans or Democrats. In 1984, everyone except the public knew that Reagan was going to be reelected. There wasn’t even a story, but all the anchors had to pretend there was a story or ‘We’ll be out of a job.’ That to me is more of the gift.
* Special thanks to Courtney Howard for helping to transcribe this interview.
Thanks for the shoutout. Was happy to help.