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.