Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (49 page)

Judd:
With a movie like
Where the Wild Things Are
, you get incredible praise and vicious attacks. How do you keep your center when you have both?

Spike:
The thing I’m realizing is that I just don’t start to make another movie until I feel clean again from the last one.

Judd:
That can mean years in between.

Spike:
I took a while after
Where the Wild Things Are
before I was ready to start again—it was almost a year after we released it before I sat down to write. I had all the notes for it. I had two years of notes for what became
Her.
But I let myself take time before I sat down to write, until I felt
excited
to write—excited in that feeling of curiosity and wanting to get into this for myself.

Judd:
Because you do get a kind of post-traumatic stress from making these movies.

Spike:
It maybe seems obnoxious to say that, but it’s true.

Judd:
I think it’s because you’re so vulnerable. You put so much of your heart into it and some people are deeply moved and touched, and other
people could give a fuck. Twitter is a funny expression of that. You can get so much praise and then just someone’s just like, “This was forty minutes too long.” You know.

Spike:
It’s like, “Meh.” (
Laughs
) I love that, that you can work on something for three years and somebody will give you just three letters: M-E-H. It makes me think of two things. One of which is, I feel like my job really isn’t to know how many people are going to like something. My job is to know what a movie’s
about
to me, and to know that I need to make it. It’s somebody else’s job to say, “Okay, that budget makes sense or doesn’t make sense.” Once they gamble on it, that’s their gamble and I’m gonna be their partner in it, but we have to support each other. That’s how I feel with Megan Ellison. I feel like we are partners. And then the other thing made me think about what you were talking about before, the anxiety of not being able to get another movie made. I don’t want to come off as flippant about that. Because it is an anxiety I had, of course. But it’s my job to not let that anxiety affect the creative decisions. That’s not fair to the movie.

Judd:
So you decided to make a movie about a guy who wants to fuck a computer. Am I going to get to work again? (
Laughs
) Seriously, though. What do you take from the success of
Her
? You know, what I notice from a lot of people is that…I feel like, as creative people, we’re all on this journey to get comfortable with who we are, to understand who we are, to find a way for our art to express that. And as the years go by, you can see the journey that people take to be themselves and find themselves, whether it’s Garry Shandling as a comedian who then does
The Garry Shandling Show
, which then turns into
The Larry Sanders Show.
Or Louis C.K. being a comedy writer who works for Conan and does stand-up until he suddenly reveals himself and does
Louie.

Spike:
I love the story of Louis C.K. I love the story of him finding his voice when he’s thirty-five and, like, and a lot of it having to do with his kids, having kids, and—

Judd:
Just realizing that’s interesting. See, I never thought I was interesting. I stopped doing stand-up because I thought,
Jim Carrey’s
interesting.
I could write jokes for him. I could work on a movie with him. But
my
feelings? Not interesting.

Spike:
And when did that change?

Judd:
My Maurice Sendak moment happened with Warren Zevon. I wrote a movie with Owen Wilson in the late nineties and I went to meet with Warren Zevon about scoring it. I was talking about handing it in to the studio and being anxious about getting their notes. And he looked at me like I was crazy for even getting notes, or wanting notes, or caring about what the notes would say. He’s like, “What do you care what they say? That’s not what this is about.” And then I just clicked in, like:
Oh
, that’s
what it is.
And then even as something as silly as
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
perfectly captured my neurosis, how insecure I felt and how much like a freak I felt. You’re just hiding in your cubby, afraid to interact with the world. And as soon as I let go, everything went better. The second I made that adjustment, my career took off. But it took me forever to believe, to get my self-esteem out of the gutter enough to think that my story, my thoughts, were interesting. And I felt that when I watched
Her
, which is such a personal expression of a worldview and how you feel about other people and relationships. And then the world rewards you because you went all the way. And it leads to success and an Oscar. Do you look at it that way? Like,
Wow, I finally did it all alone, I fully committed?

Spike:
It’s so complicated. There’s so many thoughts and feelings I have about all that. One of which is maybe slightly defensive. Which is: I feel like
Her
is not a radical departure. Maybe it was, I don’t know. But to me, it was just the next step like any next step that came before—following what I had to do. But I have to say, I don’t think I could’ve written
Her
in my twenties. I don’t think I could’ve written screenplays like that in my twenties because I didn’t understand everything you’re talking about, in terms of exploring yourself through writing. I couldn’t even have written the story you wrote to get into college about all the teachers having sex with you. I don’t think I knew how to go that raw. I knew how to explore things I was curious about. My daydreams, my fantasies—as I said, I’m a late bloomer. When I think about certain writers, like the Coen Brothers
or Paul Thomas Anderson, they came out writing those things so
young.
That’s incredible to me. But I also want to say that most everything I’ve done feels personal to me. Even the two movies that I did with Charlie [Kaufman] or the music videos—a music video that would start with a song that Björk would send me, and I would try to make it my thing. It’s all an extension. They are all personal to me, because that’s who I was and what I was interested in and trying to explore at that time. Maybe that’s a little defensive. But it’s a bit of a defensive answer because, you know, I just finished doing a lot of interviews about the movie and that point was made a lot: This is the first thing that wholly came from me. Which is, you know, true in some ways. But
Wild Things
feels like it came from the same place, to me.

Judd:
There’s something about being alone in the woods.

Spike:
Yeah, so now that I’ve been defensive, I’ll answer your question. I think
Wild Things
was the beginning of that. And after
Wild Things
I went and made a few short films that was like, I wanted to sort of exercise that muscle of having an idea that came purely from my own imagination and my confusion and my excitement and wasn’t inspired by something else, that was inspired purely by my gut and heart. I was excited by that. I’m excited by giving myself permission to write what’s in my daydreams.

Judd:
What do you think people took from
Her?
Like what do people talk to you about when they say they’ve connected with the movie?

Spike:
Um, what…I’m not sure….I think to answer that question honestly makes me anxious because I’m still recovering from six months of talking about that movie. Maybe I’m a bit fried right now since it’s still fresh. It took a lot out of me. But to be clear, I’m so grateful for the response it got, the reception it got. And grateful that I get to make movies and that anyone is interested in talking to me about it in the first place. But it’s also complicated just because of how
much
I’ve had to talk about the movie and—

Judd:
The experience of making movies is—if you do work that’s personal, you’re putting yourself out there in a way that people don’t understand. They really don’t. I made a movie with my family and it was made up, but
it did cut to the core of everything we’re debating and worried about and thinking about. And it takes years to recover.

Spike:
Yeah. I feel ridiculous to complain about it but I’m just giving myself time to recuperate. Making a movie takes so much out of you, but it also gives you so much. When I lock picture—it’s like a relationship ending, and there’s something bittersweet about it, too. It’s a love relationship in one way, in terms of negotiating what you need from it, and what it needs from you. It’s also a parent relationship, in that you can’t need too much from it. You have to give to it unconditionally and you have to allow it to be who it is—not to put your needs on it. And then you let it go—it graduates high school and you send it off into the world; you’ve done everything you can do. When I finished
Her
, I thought,
Okay, I’ve done everything I can do to give this as much love as I could give it and now it’s gonna go off and be what it’s gonna be. If it gets loved I’ll be proud and if it gets hated it’ll hurt, but I also know that what I have done with my friends and collaborators will never change.
That is what the movie is to me, that’s my relationship with my movie…the experience and life I lived with it.

Judd:
It’s deeply sad that it ends. If I think about anything I’ve done—when we made
Freaks and Geeks
and it ended, I thought:
How do I keep these people around? How do I keep these ideas around?
I never recovered in a lot of ways. I miss making
Funny People.
I miss going to see Sandler every day and talking about it. It’s devastating. I mean, I come from a divorced family. It’s devastating that each experience comes to this…instant violent conclusion, and then you’re alone again in your room. So many of those ideas went into
Her.
I’m such a—I’m fascinated by relationships, self-help, the struggle we all have, and I thought—in the last thirty-five minutes of that movie, you brought so many ideas together in such an elegant way, that are really hard to capture. The idea of loving your ex, even though it doesn’t work. And getting to that place where you feel like you understand why it melted down, and it can’t work but…It’s like an impossible thing to express. I don’t think I’ve ever seen people talk about it in that way. About letting go and what it means.

Spike:
I don’t know what to say.

Judd:
Am I in the ballpark of what you were exploring?

Spike:
For sure, for sure. You know, relationships are so infinitely complicated. And I think that intimacy is equally so….I was trying to write about all of that, trying to write about it in as complicated a way as I knew how at this time in my life. As you said earlier, every day we’re in a different mood and see things differently. And our emotions are so completely convincing to us, so I tried to write about all the confusion of that…but also the way we believe things so truly—the way, there’s the moment, you know, where Joaquin is talking about how he is never going to feel anything new again. And he believes it so convincingly and then, the next day, he’s believing something totally new. And feeling that with complete conviction that that is true, too. Luckily, we have these irrational emotions, emotions that make life large and—it’s just not like this series of rational decisions and logic. It’s the magic of it and the poetry of life. I don’t know. You saying that definitely moves me. When you’re talking about the idea of loving your ex, and being able to hold on to that amidst all the other feelings of being heartbroken or sad or missing something that’s gone—something dies when a relationship ends. It is a death because that thing that was the two of you together was alive and now it won’t be and the only two people who really knew that thing that was alive are the two of you. No one else knows.

Judd:
I think about my girlfriend from high school and all of our dreams at the time and I almost…You know, a lot of times I’m tempted to reach out to her but I don’t because it’s almost, it’s so
present.
It doesn’t feel old. It feels brand-new. I’m always afraid to see exes in front of my wife because I feel like she’ll know in my face that I’m as devastated today as I was the day that girl broke up with me. Do you think it sometimes takes making a movie—do you feel like you evolve in your personal issues as a result of making a movie like
Her
?

Spike:
Yes, every movie, I’m working stuff out.

Judd:
Joaquin Phoenix is so amazing in
Her.
It’s just so tight on him, and he does so many amazing, funny things. And it’s so intimate.

Spike:
So many times I felt,
I just don’t want to cut away from this performance. I just want to sit here on this take and be close and feel him.

Judd:
In the writers’ room on
Larry Sanders
, we would always have this debate: Would you rather work with someone who is easy and not as good or someone who is a pain in the ass who is a genius? There were writers in that room that would say, “I’ll take the easy guy, life’s too short.” I was always like, “Nah, you’ve got to go with the genius.”

Spike:
Or you are really lucky if they’re a genius and easy to direct, like Meryl Streep or Rooney Mara. They are easy and amazing and they work in a different way. I don’t even understand it. Somehow they are both emotionally in tune, totally real in the smallest moments and completely directable and able to make the smallest or biggest adjustment from take to take.

Judd:
It’s not pure pain. But some of those pure pain people are remarkable.

Spike:
Like Gandolfini. He was so raw. It was so exciting to work with him, but it was intense, too. Scary even, because he would get so upset at himself if he did something that felt false. But what he gave me and that character and the movie was a piece of himself. He breathed his life into the film with all his heart and pain and sensitivity. I loved that man.