If you want to get that true independent film spirit, just talk to Miguel Arteta.
The director of such indie hits as Star Maps and the Sundance Film Festival fave and Independent Spirit Award winner Chuck & Buck knows what it takes to make a truly original independent film–and he sticks to his own quirky sensibilities.
Yet, as many good directors do once they start gaining notoriety, Arteta is starting to get bigger budgets–and bigger stars.
His latest film, The Good Girl, is his biggest undertaking so far. The film stars America’s sweetheart Jennifer Aniston in a role that is a far cry from her perky Friends persona. She plays Justine, a woman with a dead-end job at a discount store and a pothead husband (John C. Reilly) who wants to escape from her dull life–and she thinks she may have found her ticket when she starts an affair with a fellow worker, Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal). However, things do not go as planned and soon Justine has to make a choice between running away–or trying to make her life work as-is.
With help from his longtime collaborators, producer Matthew Greenfield and writer/actor Mike White, Arteta gets to the heart of these damaged characters. He talked to Hollywood.com about the thought processes behind making The Good Girl, what it takes to make a film in 33 days and working with Aniston, who transformed herself into the downtrodden Justine.
What is the Sundance Film Festival experience like?
Miguel Arteta: The Good Girl was privately funded, like my other two films, so we’d die without distribution. So when it is played in front of an audience for the first time, it’s nerve wracking. It’s a tough audience, with every major critic and major studio sitting there. It can be very scary.
Does that indie spirit still run through the festival?
Arteta: I hope so. I think The Good Girl speaks to that. There was a lot of rumbling at the premiere–“Jennifer Aniston’s in this movie”–and people were a little suspicious of our street credibility. But she won them over. I hope that when people watch this movie, they realize what she did, which I was really moved by–she came and joined our world.
How did you come up with Jennifer Aniston as a casting choice?
Arteta: Well, I had seen a small film she did called Office Space. She was hysterical, but she was also grounded. When Mike White gave me the script and we were thinking about who could play [Justine], someone who hates the world and wants to escape her life, we thought about some of those dark indie queens who’ve done these kind of roles before. Then we decided we should go a different way and I wanted to cast Jennifer. America’s sweetheart is the good girl gone bad.
She doesn’t really go bad, so to speak…
Arteta: Yeah, you’re right. It’s a little more complicated than that. But it’s still fun to see someone so likeable make so many morally ambiguous choices.
How did you de-glam this star of NBC’s hottest series, who’s married to Brad Pitt to boot?
Arteta: [laughs] She worked really hard physically to transform herself. She’s a happy person, the kind whose hands go everywhere when they talk. She wore wrist weights for month before shooting, on her wrists and ankles. She hunched down and really trained herself. She came prepared and when the cameras starting rolling, I was so happy. The glamour was gone. She was just a faceless person across the counter. We were shooting in a real store in Simi Valley [California] and people would come in and try to buy things from Jennifer. But when they heard her voice and looked up, it was like, “wait a second, that’s Jennifer Aniston.”
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Did Brad Pitt come on the set much?
Arteta: He came towards the end. He’s very supportive and proud of her. He thanked me profusely, saying “I’ve been waiting for someone who really believes in Jennifer, to do something different.” He couldn’t have been more supportive. And yes, they are in love.
Explain the thought processes behind The Good Girl.
Arteta: I was inspired by Madame Bovary, a Madame Bovary of the mall culture. She dreams of a better life, and the quality of her dreams is questionable. The movie is also about escape. The Retail Rodeo where they work is a metaphor for a prison–their boss is kind of like the warden. And then you have the two inmates [Justine and Holden, played by Jake Gyllenhaal] plotting their escape. The rules of a prison escape movie were our guiding structure. Mike [White] writes about damaged people with such humor and compassion that you get it right away, without too much explanation.
The film is also very realistic and original in the fact that is doesn’t go for the pat ending where everyone rides off into the sunset.
Arteta: Yeah, most of us don’t have the courage to radically change things in our lives. It’s what can we do with what’s at hand and this is what [the character] Justine does. I don’t like movies where everything gets wrapped up neatly. I always find movies where the characters contradict themselves are more interesting. I think when Hollywood makes movies they think every character must make sense and I just get bored. But, like in this movie, when one character does one thing and 10 minutes later does something totally contradictory, I wake up. I come out of my seat, wondering, how do you connect those dots?
How do you shoot a film in 33 days?
Arteta: It’s nonstop. I exhausted the actors to the point they were crying. Poor Jennifer. Mike’s scripts are so subjective, which means the main characters are in every scene. She was working 16 hours a day, two days of Friends and five days with us. She was coming apart at the seams and crying and I was like, “Yes! Use it!” At the end of the shoot, she said, “You kicked my ass!”
Are you used to that fast pace?
Arteta: There were moments were I wanted to break down and cry. But I’ve learned to find some corner of the set and cry there for a little bit and then come back, saying “Let’s go!” There something about being so tired that you connect right to your instincts. There’s no thinking, “Should it be this or should it be that?” You’re so tired your heart just tells you what it’s going to be. Gut-level decisions come right out.
What makes the partnership with producer Matthew Greenfield work?
Arteta: I had met Matthew, whose produced everything I’ve shot, in the hallways of Wesleyan University [in Connecticut]. He had sort of a tired walk that made me feel like this guy could produce anything.
From a tired walk?
Arteta: There seemed to be no bulls**t. A no-nonsense kind of a guy. Very bright with a sort of cranky disposition. I fell in love with him and we started making movies. We are very much like a dysfunctional marriage. We communicate a lot–there have only been a few days were we didn’t talk at least 10 times a day. On his honeymoon, it was a hard thing to put those boundaries on our relationship. But we worked with our therapists, and decided we could get through three weeks without talking. It made us feel like his marriage has a shot.
His wife must be a very understanding person. But I take it that you are not married.
Arteta: I am not. Nobody understands what I do. And I kind of understand where my ex-
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girlfriends are coming from. I wouldn’t want to date me. I’m too wrapped up into my work.
Independent filmmaking is your life, but are you ready to make a big Hollywood movie if they offered it to you?
Arteta: Are you asking if I’d become a studio slut?
Yeah.
Arteta: I think you can be a slut and be classy at the same time. There is a crop of filmmakers out there who are making these kinds of films, like Monster’s Ball and Being John Malkovich, and audiences are embracing them. So the studios are following suit. There is a happy middle road. And the king of that road is Steven Soderbergh. He shoots things himself with really small crews, a very intimate environment. He is forcing the studios to realize, we don’t have to work like we always have in the past. We can do it our own way.
What advice would you give an inspiring filmmaker who wants to make his own kind of film?
Arteta: Don’t be nervous and don’t look at imitating other people. You have to realize that the biggest asset you have is your own weird, oddball point of view. That’s your weapon to get into this business. The moment you start looking outside, you start devaluing what you have to offer. You know those weird, peripheral thoughts that come into your mind everyday that you just dismiss? If you glob onto to those, you have a rich piece of work. And that’s what people want from you. [Hollywood] doesn’t want you to be as good as someone else.
The Good Girl is playing in limited theaters.
