It was somewhere on a lonely highway in Ohio, around four. AMwith a rain machine while I was filming White Noise. I think I felt Oh God I don't know if I like doing this. This film was very difficult for me for several reasons. We filmed during COVID-19which was a big part of it. It was such a difficult time. I'm proud of this film, but it was very difficult to make. Then when I wrote “Jay Kelly” I went [to London] and worked on Barbie with Greta, and filming that movie was a really great shoot. By watching her – as she had done with me many times – she led by example. I had a really good time, so I thought, well, maybe I do still like it. I think this is a case where you need to check yourself again. Because this is what I dreamed of, this is what I always wanted to do, and I've been doing this for a long time. So I was kind of like, Well I only do it because I do it? You know, maybe I want to click Restart. So part of the energy of “Jay Kelly” is my love for the medium—the films themselves, but also the making of them.
I remember reading about pajama parties on the set of Barbie. It must have been a completely different atmosphere.
I didn't go to them, but yes.
I think they were only for girls. But things must have been completely different. I'm thinking about how you shoot the scene with the car in the river in White Noise.
It was hard. Yes, it was really difficult. And it's not my favorite thing to do at the movies.
In fact, it's almost an action movie.
This. I did it because the material required it. Sometimes I write something, and then when I'm directing it, I kind of realize: Oh, now I have to interpret what I wrote.. With this film in particular, I realized too late how ambitious it all was – too late for my own enjoyment.
That is, it is difficult to write something and say: I will fall in love with cinema again. I mean, it might not pay off.
The first line of “Jay Kelly” is: “We're getting close to the end.” I kept thinking: If I saw this in the script, I would think of a Beckett play. It's something of a farewell sentiment. So while the entire film is a love letter to cinema, you also get the sense of a mature artist who feels the same way about his work as Jay Kelly.
Things are running out This is another aspect of the film. And it was implicit in my feelings about I like it?? Plus, now that I'm older and have a family, I have other things to do that I could spend more time on. AND: I love it enough? And this feeling of approaching the end of life too. I mean, in Jay Kelly they face the end of the film, but Jay Kelly also faces his mortality.
I spoke to Ian Parker, one of our writers, who wrote your profile is great twelve years ago, and he reminded me of something Greta said, and that's how the first lines of your films essentially tell you everything that's going to happen in them. At the beginning of The Meyerowitz Stories, Adam Sandler tries to parallel park and says, “Do I fit?” Let me add here that you are the poet laureate of parallel parking.
And I didn't get my driver's license until I was forty.
And at the beginning of Greenberg, Greta tries to merge into a traffic jam on the freeway and says: “Will you let me in?” “The Squid and the Whale” begins with one of the sons saying on the tennis court, “Mom and me against you and Dad.” It feels like a conscious decision to give the viewer CliffsNotes for the film before it even starts.
