'The Wackness': Not Your Average Pot Movie
By Emily Christianson, Hollywood.com Staff
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Thursday, July 03, 2008
Jonathan Levine must have a wild imagination, that or just excellent insight. Who else could envision Ben Kingsley hooking up with an Olsen twin in a phone booth or bubble gum Nickelodeon star Josh Peck playing a high-school drug dealer in Manhattan?
Writer/director Levine does it all in his new film The Wackness about a lonely pot dealer who trades weed for therapy. At the same time, the Sundance winner (Audience Award) takes a nostalgic look back at the music, games and fashion of 1994. We talked to Kingsley, Peck, Olivia Thirlby and Levine to find out more about the dark comedy.
Ben Kingsley
Character: Dr. Squires
Occupation: Depressed therapist and stepfather to Stephanie
Hollywood.com: How much fun was it filming this movie?
Sir Ben Kingsley: Oh, anything that I'm completely un-used to and get to discover is marvelous. Yeah. Also, it's a bonus really because I knew nothing about bongs and I find them terrifying. Therefore it allowed me to allow him to do something as if he'd never done it before even though he's a habitual smoker…it might've been 10 minutes since his last joint or bong. He never quite knows what to do with it.
HW: The sex scenes in this film aren’t your average fair …
SBK: My sexual scenes are there for narrative reasons, to show his appalling loneliness, in a phone booth fumbling with a 20-year-old and in bed with somebody with whom he's been married to watching a porno movie and having sex that's so indifferent. Those scenes are about loneliness.
HW: How did you talk yourself through that phone booth moment with Mary-Kate Olsen?
SBK: My character was drunk. So already my character is not making rational decisions. He's stoned and drunk. She also is. This is what I mean about loneliness. That embrace is not born of conscious affection between two people. It comes out of intoxication so I thought that Mary-Kate's portrayal of a drunk young woman was perfect.
Next: Josh Peck