The Right Men: Ivan and Jason Reitman
By Andrea Simpson, Special to Hollywood.com
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Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Ivan Reitman: With Thank You For Smoking, you actually sat down and wrote a screenplay for something that you were not hired to do.
Jason Reitman: My agent said, “What kind of films do you want to make?” And I said, “I want to make Thank You For Smoking.” He said, “That’s going to be tough. It's owned by Mel Gibson” (laughs from audience)... It was in development hell. It actually moved to the television department, many scripts had been written. I wrote 30 pages over the weekend and I sent it to them and I said, “This is what it could be.” And they liked the pages and they hired me. Mel actually called me from his plane. We talked for half an hour—the first 15 minutes were about the script and he thought it was ballsy and cool and the second 15 minutes were about digital filmmaking and how it was going to change the world. And he invited me to watch the new Star Wars film with him at the Skywalker Ranch and that invitation never followed (laughs from audience)…This was 2000, and for four years nobody wanted to make that movie.
Ivan Reitman: What did you do before that?
Jason Reitman: I started directing commercials. For four years I was doing one a month and I was making a living as a director, which was very exciting. One day I got a call from a guy named David Sacks, who is the creator of PayPal, and he and his partner sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion dollars and now he wanted to make movies. He loved the script and basically wrote a check for $6 million.
Ivan Reitman: How did you feel when you were finally on the set with real actors?
Jason Reitman: I love my actors, but the actors are almost props on commercials. The star is the product. I did Outback Steakhouse where the star is the Blooming Onion! It's a whole different ball game and that was a very unique film that every week someone new came to set… it was the hardest thing I've ever done and even though it was what every child wanted to do, even though I'd been dreaming about it for years and it was wonderful and it was fun, it was also exhausting and tough and scary. But it was wonderful.