Talking about music, let’s go to your soundtrack. I love how you tie in Biggie Smalls; it’s great watching Luke discover him.

I’ll never forget the first time I heard Ready to Die. For me that was always in the script and very important. Biggie to me is like listening to Bob Dylan. It’s stuff you don’t hear in rap – he’s very vulnerable and very confessional. He’s got a song called Suicidal Thoughts – he’s not fucking around, he’s serious.

Which was unheard of. I don’t know if people today realize how big that was at the time –

Even today it’s unheard of. It’s so vulnerable and so much of rap is about bluster and about guns and hos and how much you’re getting laid and how great your rhymes are. And yes, that’s in Biggie too – if he was just Suicidal Thoughts it would be too depressing! But it’s really progressive. Nas does it to a certain extent. I really like Jay-Z – he’s not as lax as a lot of people are. Meth does it, Wu-Tang does it, but nobody did it like Biggie.

Who do you like today? I feel like hip hop today is like rock in the 70s – it’s a lot of new dudes who are still around, who are sort of doing it, there are a lot of new dudes who aren’t that great, and then there’s some interesting underground stuff that might go somewhere.

I don’t really have a good answer to that question that wouldn’t ruin my street cred because I just stopped listening. Lupe Fiasco I listen to once in a while, Jay-Z and Kanye West are good at what they do. It’s just been marginalized – the sophisticated stuff is different from the popular stuff, where it used to be one and the same. Now A Tribe Called Quest would be underground. It’s just like everything, as it becomes more influenced by money and corporations it all gets put in a box and it gets harder to do anything artful or creative.

Isn’t it kind of nutty that it’s been 30 years since hip hop was born and there are still people saying ‘That’s just noise,’ or ‘You’re a white guy who listens to hip hop?’ That seems to me the most insane…

But what if that’s me now? I’m complaining…

You’re the old man now.

‘Kids today! Their music isn’t like 1994!’ It’s come a long way and achieved a lot of credibility, but a lot of the music today undermines that credibility too, because it’s just not about anything. It’s like trying to make a case for Britney Spears. Which I have no intention of doing.

So your next film won’t be about your days in the dance clubs in the late 90s?

No, but I’d love to make a movie using all Britney Spears songs. Wouldn’t that be cool? As a joke I guess… Like I’m Not There but with Britney Spears.

You have the horror film, you have the coming of age film, you’re writing a psychedelic spy thriller – is this the career, jumping around from genre to genre?

I guess. The next decision I make I’m postponing because I’m not really there yet, and it’s much harder. Once I made Mandy I knew I wanted to do something from my heart. Now that I liked The Wackness so much and liked how it turned out, it makes the next decision so much harder. Hopefully I’ll write something that turns out good and just do it. But I don’t have any sort of plan.

So it’s just whatever catches your fancy?

I’ve started to realize I want to write something. I’ve been reading a lot of scripts – a lot of good scripts – but I think I want to write something. I’m just very disillusioned.

Is that how you want to be, always writing your own stuff?

Not necessarily. If I read something better than I can write, I’ll do it. It just depends. Right now I’m getting all coming of age movies. I’m just disillusioned. I want to go up more in budget, too – and who wouldn’t? You get more money, more days… But I did two in three years, so I’m kind of tired.

A little time off.

A little time off and then I get into writing. But even a day like this is totally exhausting.

A lot of our readers will, unfortunately, never have a chance to see The Wackness in theaters – we have a lot of people reading from outside of the major cities where the indie films play. So for them it’s all about the DVD. Do you have any plans for the DVD release?

We have a lot of deleted scenes, because I cut like an hour out of the fucking movie.

Really? What did you lose?

Unfortunately we lost a lot of good stuff, some good subplots. We cut a couple of things with Famke [Janssen], we lost a couple of Shapiro’s fantasies – there’s one orgy scene. That party scene at the beginning where he’s looking down at all his classmates, it turns into this Satyricon-like orgy. That’s cool. But hopefully they’ll get to see it [in theaters].

The problem is the small markets – if you’re living two hours outside of a big city, this will just never get to you. All they get is Iron Man.

It’s such a bummer. If you’re in LA, you don’t realize that the rest of the country…

I live in LA now and I grew up in New York City, so my whole life has been like this. Across the country, especially in these rural and suburban community, they only get the blockbusters. A lot of the smaller films I champion I don’t get responses on until they’re on DVD and people write to thank me for turning them on to a movie.

That’s cool too. Seeing it on DVD is cool too. Some of my best memories are in college coming home at night and popping in Reservoir Dogs.

You have a tough slot this year, as an indie film going up against the big guys in the summer.

I feel pretty good. I mean, I’m totally terrified, but I think myself as a filmgoer I’m aready sick of big films. The week we get to most people will be a week or two after July 4th, and I’m hoping there’s some blockbuster fatigue. As much as many movies this summer look pretty good, a couple more Indiana Joneses and we’ll be psyched for… I mean, I saw Once last year instead of Die Hard fucking 4.

That’s a good example of a movie that a lot of my readers ended up only being able to see on DVD.

I don’t know a lot about this stuff, but hopefully it’ll find an audience because, of our Sundance class, we’re the first ones out. As much as those other movies, like Choke and American Teen and Hamlet 2 are great, I like that we’re the first out of the box.

How was the Sundance experience?

I don’t know. It’s intense. That’s the only way to describe it. By the end, when we won the audience award and we found distribution and all that stuff, it was thrilling. But at the beginning, you’re in this condo – and everybody is sick, first of all.

I know. Every human being in Park City is sick that week.

Everyone is dying. You can’t just focus on ‘Do you people like my movie?’ you have to focus on ‘Will they buy it,’ ‘Did you get a call from this person?’ It’s intense, man. And to be honest, that whole time people were telling you why they’re not going to pay this much [for it]. You’re getting a lot of feedback that is negative. You don’t go to Sundance with a movie as a piece of commerce – that’s not what Sundance is for, it’s for independent spirit and independent films. The only time you can negate the commerce aspect is when you can talk to people who have seen your movie, or when you’re sitting in a theater with people seeing your movie. And unfortunately, 99 percent of the time when your movie screens, you’re dealing with other bullshit. But that’s my fault, too. I have to ignore that.

The Audience Award is like the coolest one, because it means it connected with people.

It’s awesome. It’s great. It’s what it’s all about. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine we would get it. I kept waiting for a shitty screening and it didn’t happen. The end of that experience was very cathartic and a release. By the end of the week, when I knew there was nothing else to worry about… The character in the movie is very similar to me, I’m very neurotic about stuff and I was very much focused on negative things, and once I realized there was nothing negative to focus on, we had fun.

Are you getting big budget directing offers or are you still in the Sundance group?

I don’t know. I think within a certain type of movie I could definitely make a big jump, which I don’t know if I want to do. But if it’s something similar to what I’ve done before, yes, I’d be able to go bigger.

Would you do a comic book movie?

Hell yeah.

What do you like?

That’s the thing, all the good ones are gone. I’m really into Marvel and most of the cool Marvel ones are done.

But they’re hiring cool people. They’re not just hiring action hacks, they’re hiring good people.

I think they’re doing really good. They have Matthew Vaughn on Thor –

He’s off. It’s open!

Thor is really boring to me. The most excited I was when I thought they were going to do Fantastic Four set in the sixties.

So who’s your favorite character?

Iron Man. My comic book phase ended right around Secret Wars II. It was all Marvel guys. Avengers I would love to do. When Sam Jackson came out at the end of Iron Man – I was so fucking excited!

At this point I had already eaten up almost 40 minutes of Levine’s day, so I bid adieu. I will say that after the tape recorder was off he mentioned that his agents wanted him to take meetings about a certain Marvel property that would be so up his alley it got me incredibly excited when he told me. He wasn’t familiar with the property, as it was after his time, but I told him to take that meeting. Who knows, maybe we’ll hear something about it some day.
I can’t believe it’s July and The Wackness is still my favorite movie of the year. I thought by now something would knock it off the top spot, but nothing has even come close. In a lot of ways this feels like Once all over again to me – a movie that I saw early in the year, talked up endlessly through the release and then couldn’t shake in the second half of the year.

The only things The Wackness really has in common with Once is the fact that they’re both honest, real movies that are very music-focused. Director Jonathan Levine wrote this movie, set in New York City in 1994, a weird time when my hometown was transitioning into one of the safest big cities in the country, a real change from where it had been just a few years earlier. Luke Shapiro, played by Josh Peck, is an outsider in his high school, only getting invited to parties to sling some weed. He ends up selling pot to a therapist who pays him with free sessions, and falling in love with the therapist’s daughter. Yeah, it’s a coming of age movie set in the summer between high school and college, but there’s more to this movie than just the usual tropes.

The Wackness is the first film you’ll see by Jonathan Levine, but it’s not his first film. He directed the very interesting horror movie All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, which the Weinsteins bought… and promptly sat on for two years. The movie eventually ended up in the hands of a company called Senator, but who knows when the hell it will actually see the light of day. Mandy Lane‘s a good first effort, and Levine shows lots of talent there, but The Wackness is a major step up for him as a filmmaker.

I sat down with Levine in his hotel room during the press junket for The Wackness here in LA; apparently I was the only journalist who asked for a print one on one with him, and we ended up talking for more than a half hour. This interview is a breezy conversation, the kind I wish I could always have. I really appreciated this opportunity, because I feel like when it comes to Levine’s third or fourth film I’ll be fighting tooth and nail just to get ten minutes with him.

The Wackness opens this weekend in New York and LA. See it instead of Hancock. It begins platforming out after that.

I heard at Sundance that the Weinsteins wanted to buy this.

Yeah.

That’s ballsy.

They’re ballsy. That’s why they’re successful. They kind of extended an olive branch to me, and I accepted, because what am I going to do? I don’t want to hold a grudge. But I also don’t want to make the same mistake twice!

Obviously with a film like this there has to be a heavy layer of autobiography. How heavy is that layer?

The world is very specific to the world I knew growing up. The way this kid felt in high school, his social status. I don’t know where it starts and stops. The details, the plot of it, is nothing I’ve ever experienced. But the world and character, yeah.

I grew up in New York City too. And in 1994 I was 21 years old –

You look young, dude.

[laughs] Thanks. I guess. But that was like my best year, and it was cool to go back to that year, when Times Square was just starting to turn into Disneyland, which is a cool thing you capture. But why was it 94 for you?

It was 94 first and foremost because of what I knew. But when I began writing it I realized all these amazing things had happened. Even now I just keep thinking about the fact that from OJ to Giuliani to Kurt Cobain to hip hop transcending race and culture and becoming this movement… that’s really why. But purely when I’m writing I do it because it feels right, and afterwards I figure out why it was right and do it more.

How did you hook up with Josh Peck? He’s so incredible.

He’s awesome, right? He just auditioned, man. He came in and I had never seen Drake and Josh and he was just so good. He had a true authenticity that felt very right to me, and beyond that he also kind of has a vulnerability and an accessibility. As much as it resonates on a certain level with people from New York and people who were that age in 94, or peope who are that age right now, I wanted it to transcend that stuff and be about the emotions these characters are going through. These are movies I love, but there’s a group of Sundance movies that are about the coming of age of rich people in New York, and one of the things that makes this movie sort of more accessible is that it’s not about rich people, first of all. While there are rich people in the movie, it’s not this rarefied, intellectual, rich world. Something we were very conscious of avoiding was making it inaccessible to anyone, and that’s what’s great about Josh – you see him and you just empathize with him right away.

The interesting thing about Luke is that he’s, for lack of a kinder term, a wigger. But he’s not your stereotypical joke wigger, he’s not a kid who’s vamping black. He’s a kid who loves the music.

That is something innate [in Josh]. That’s part of why we cast him. I think it’s something innate in growing up in New York. We never wanted to be cheap or do any caricatures or anythig like that, and mostly when you see white kids who are into hip hop in the movies, that’s what you get – wearing big day glo clothes. That’s something I never experienced. Growing up we would just talk like that and it wasn’t… now I guess I would talk differently in an interview or with my parents than how I would with my friends, but it was natural. And I think part of what Josh has is the ability to be natural with that.

Mandy Lane is going to be seen?

I hope so, man. [laughs] I’m watching my words less and less with that.

How fucking frustrating is that? Your second movie is out before your first.

I know. But can you imagine if neither of them were out? I’m just so happy to be doing this here with you, and honestly it makes me appreciate this more. If I never had the opportunity to make The Wackness… There are people who worked on Mandy Lane that are still waiting for it to come out, and they need it to come out to do things for their careers. That sucks, man, and that to me is the number one reason to get it out there. At this point I’ve kind of divorced myself from it emotionally and to Senator, who are the ones who will distribute it, I said, ‘Let me know when it’s coming out and I’ll work my ass off to promote it.’ But in the meantime I can’t even think about it.

From an artistic point of view is it frustrating that your second movie is out and you’ve put all the lessons you learned on Mandy Lane into effect here, but when everyone sees what they think is your second movie it’s actually work you did before you maybe had everything figured out…

It would be weird if they were similar, but they’re so different… And yes, I learned a lot of lessons, and yes, I’m a better filmmaker on The Wackness than I was on Mandy Lane, but they’re so different I hope no one can tell. Mandy Lane is such a unique story and it was for me to interpret, but there are so many more parts of it than in The Wackness, which is just my personal things. So in this scenario it’s the best case scenario of a bad thing. I’m not that bummed that [The Wackness] is my introduction to audiences because it’s very much who I am. I think that ideally it helps Mandy Lane.

It’s kind of cool to come out with a very good horror film these days, but it’s also very easy to get stereotyped, so maybe if Mandy Lane had been first people would have pigeonholed you as a horror guy.

Exactly. And that is what was happening. I was getting a lot of horror scripts, and as much as I wanted to make another movie, I didn’t want to make another bad horror movie. But I hope to make another horror movie too, it’s just there aren’t that many good horror scripts out there right now.

You have anything lined up next?

I’m writing a script for Big Sony called Echelon Vendetta, which is an adaptation of a book. It’s kind of like Bourne Identity on acid. It’s like a spy thing involving peyote and terrorism – it’s cool. It’s really cool. I’m in the process of whittling it down from 160 pages before handing it in to Sony.

You want to direct that?

I’d love to, but I’m not sure it’s realistic. It’s like a big, big movie.

Do you feel ready to jump into that kind of big movie?

It’s the same lessons, I think. It’s the same approach – being very prepared.

[Levine’s Bloody Mary arrives. He is extremely excited to have gotten one]

It’s refreshing to see a director getting this psyched about having a Bloody Mary delivered to their hotel room.

Guess how much?

That? Fifteen.

Thirty.

Thirty? Man. They send us around to visit sets and shit and they give us a per diem when they do, and thank God, because hamburgers are 40 bucks at these hotels.

It’s crazy. Do you think that undermines your ability to be objective?

Not necessarily. Sometimes. I don’t like to review movies when I’ve been to the set, if I can avoid it. Sometimes I can’t avoid it – with really big movies you need to have the review. But part of it is also trying to compartmentalize and have that experience in one part of your brain and the viewing of the movie in another. Sometimes it’s hard – I was on the set of the new Indiana Jones movie and how does the excitement of that not contaminate you a little?

Did you give it a good review?

Jesus no. It was bad.

It’s weird because Spielberg does stuff that’s so good and then he does stuff where you’re like, isn’t anyone around him telling him no? ‘Hey man, you might not want to do a CGI monkey scene.’

That was totally Lucas’ idea. But back to your movie! One of the things that’s great about your movie, and this was not a surprise to some people, is how good Method Man is. He was amazing in The Wire, and he kills here.

It’s exciting for me to have someone like Method Man or Mary Kate [Olson] show they’re good actors. As a filmgoer I like taking these icons that you might have preconceived notions about and putting them in this thing. It becomes so much more charged. It’s the same thing as using music – in many ways it’s kind of a cheap trick, but it calls up so many great associations. Same way, talking about Indiana Jones, the best part of the movie is the old music. Or the Hulk trailer, how they used the music from the TV show. Everyone was bitching about the trailer but now they’re like ‘This is so good!’

Next page: Two white guys talk hip hop and Levine muses on the Sundance experience.