It Chooses You - Miranda July [34]
Sophie:
But what if it doesn’t–
Jason:
Shhh. I’m listening.
If Sophie was all my doubts and the nightmare of who I would be if I succumbed to them, then Jason could be the curiosity and faith that repel that fear. I went back to the beginning of the script and added this impulsive, superstitious streak of Jason’s – he would meet only Joe, not all the other PennySaver sellers, but he would go about his expedition the way I had, on a whim, trying to believe that each thing meant something, and so eventually learning what he needed to know. It took me a little while to resign myself to the fact that Dina, Matilda, Ron, Andrew, Michael, Pam, Beverly, Primila, Pauline, Raymond, and Domingo would not all somehow be part of the movie, but then how could a fiction contain them all? I was now acutely aware of how small the world I’d written was; it had to be my bonnet-sized, tightly clutched version of LA. I knew that if I really wanted to introduce the people I had met, I would one day have to attempt some sort of nonfictional document. (That day has come.)
I wrote a series of simple scenes between Joe and Jason that re-created my experience with him. After Jason and Sophie become fixated on their own mortality, Jason decides to use what little time he has left being guided by fate – first through a seemingly meaningless self-assigned tree-selling job, and then by answering an ad in the PennySaver. I wrote three scenes for Joe.
(1) Joe sells Jason an ancient hair dryer (inspired by Dina), and in an unsettling way urges him to come back when he’s ready.
(2) When Jason comes back, Joe shows him the cards he makes for his wife and reads a dirty limerick. He then recalls the terrible things that can occur in the beginning of a relationship. “We didn’t have any problems like that in the beginning,” Jason would say. “You’re still in the beginning,” Joe would respond.
(3) Jason visits Joe one more time, and this time he notices Joe has three little hippo figurines that Sophie and Jason also have. And the couch – they have the same orange couch. And they both have the same M.C. Escher drawing of a never-ending staircase. I wanted to use the real-life Paw Paw coincidence, but it seemed too meaningful; these visual details were light enough to slip by, hopefully, and the Escher was my own joke with myself about what I was trying to do – to be almost kitschily surreal and yet also really mean it. Before Jason leaves, Joe gives him a toy for Paw Paw, a ball on a spring that swings back and forth like a metronome.
These three scenes were 80 percent improvisation and 20 percent scripted; Joe was allowed to mostly just talk on a theme, but he had to say a few specific sentences, which I would read to him off-camera and he would repeat. He would wear his own clothes and we would shoot in his house.
It was this quasi-theoretical ninety-third draft of the script that became fully financed, greenlit, in the winter of 2009. I always pictured a fat man flipping a switch by his desk to turn on a green light. It’s easy – you just have to convince him to lift his pudgy little finger. In this instance there was no man, no decisive switch, just a lot of calculations, mostly subtractions, emailed between like-minded companies in Germany, the UK, and France. The bulk of the money would come from Germany, with the stipulation that we hire a German crew, get them all visas and places to live in LA, fly them to America, shoot in twenty-one days, and then fly them back home. Also, a certain percentage of the cast would have to be European, with proof of citizenship – meaning that most minor characters would have accents. And finally, I would have to live in Germany while I completed post-production there in the winter. Great, I said, and meant it, knowing that this was the cost of casting actors who weren’t huge stars (including myself) and one actor who was actually a retired housepainter. It seemed like a reasonable price to pay for getting to tell such a strange story in the most expensive but ultimately most accessible