The Right Men: Ivan and Jason Reitman
By Andrea Simpson, Special to Hollywood.com
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Wednesday, October 29, 2008
As the saying goes, like father, like son, and in Hollywood today there is only one father-son team that has kept their love of comedy all in the family.
Jason Reitman, the Oscar-nominated director of last year’s little movie that could, Juno, is also a second-generation Hollywood director, the son of Ivan Reitman, who produced Animal House and directed comedy classics such as Ghostbusters, Meatballs and Stripes. The Reitmans recently sat down with each other (and surrounded by 150 curious movie fans) during the Los Angeles Film Festival where father and son had an intimate conversation about their illustrious and budding film careers.
Here are some excerpts from their trip down memory lane.
Jason Reitman: I'm actually going to ask you questions that I’ve never asked before, which is tough...What was the moment that you realized “I can do that” as a filmmaker?
Ivan Reitman: I didn't realize that there was such a job directing. It was about a year after we came from Czechoslovakia, we escaped. I was about 5 and a half. I had a thing about films even back in Czechoslovakia. I had a slide projector with Disney cartoons and in the evening we were escaping and I was putting on three pairs of pants and three shirts… all of our possessions were going to one suitcase… In fact, I remember taking the slide projector and trying to get it to fit into the suitcase and my parents taking it out. When I went to college there were no film courses. I entered university in the late ‘60s and I just wanted to get a general arts degree. I thought I was going to do music. In fact, my original desire was to compose music for movies. Once I got into the university I decided I was just going to be active and that meant joining all of the clubs. And the first club I joined was the Drowned Society and I directed my very first semester. [The play] was called An Evening with Carl Sandberg...There was [also] a film club at school and they were making short films and I became part of that club. I made my first film during the third year I was in university and it was called Orientation about the first days of a freshman student at university. It really has two or three scenes that had since evolved into scenes that were in Animal House.