While Jeremy, Jason Schwartzman’s wacky character in Shopgirl, can be perceived as perpetually drunk, it was really co-star Claire Danes who was drinking between takes.
“I had to do a shot of vodka before the scene where Jason and I kissed,” Danes tells the crowd during a question-and-answer session after the screening of Shopgirl at the 41st Annual Chicago International Film Festival Oct. 11. “To be making out with your friend is really strange.”
At the screening and at a joint interview at the Penninsula Hotel the next day, Schwartzman and Danes’s mutual platonic obsession with one another is apparent. Danes plays with Schwartzman’s hair and can’t stop giggling at his jokes while declaring it was a “thrill” to work with the star of Rushmore and I Heart Huckabees.
“He’s really present and imaginative,” Danes says. “It’s exciting and I was just following him and trying to keep up.”
Schwartzman in turn notes that Danes brought out the depth in his character.
“When I got out onto the set and I started to act with Claire, that’s when the character came out of me,” Schwartzman says. “A lot of my character came from her, highlighted inside of me. I might have had Jeremy’s skeleton, but she was like the X-ray machine. To work with her was so natural.”
The two real-life friends star as two-thirds of the love triangle in Steve Martin’s adaptation of Martin’s 2000 novella Shopgirl. Set in Los Angeles, Danes stars as Mirabelle, an unassuming sales clerk from Vermont who spends her days sitting behind the counter at Saks Fifth Avenue selling gloves she could never afford. She has romantic attachments with both Ray Porter (Martin), a middle-aged millionaire who keeps Mirabelle at a distance, and Jeremy, a quirky amplifier designer, who appears to lack direction at the beginning of the film.
While the change in the character of Jeremy is most externally apparent, Danes says all of the characters grow up throughout the film.
“It’s really a coming-of-age movie for everyone involved, even the old fogy,” Danes says, referring to Porter, a character Martin is said to have loosely-based on himself. “He’s supposed to be a grown up when we meet him, but he’s really limited and terrified of investing in another person and loving completely. It’s hard to call yourself a man if you can’t do that.”
Schwartzman also enjoyed portraying the personal growth of Jeremy, whose evolution is depicted in a number of scene-stealing moments.
“He wants things, and (Mirabelle) says, ‘Just do it’ and all of a sudden he has a goal,” Schwartzman says. “At the beginning it’s just a frustration and a desire to do things; he doesn’t know how to do those things. It’s just about believing and making the things you don’t see happening happen.”
Schwartzman says he wishes he could share Jeremy’s lack of inhibitions.
“I wish I had more of his ability not to be so censoring,” Schwartzman says. “You get a gut reaction and automatically contradict it with logic or consequence. But he’s great because he only knows what’s in front of him, which is dangerous but inspiring.”
Portraying the growth in the quiet, ethereal Mirabelle was difficult, Danes says.
“In the beginning I was careful to play her as someone who was stuck, really stagnant,” Danes says. “(Director Anand Tucker) told me not to be fidgety, to remain still and appear kind of plastic. That movement would be meaningful and apparent, and finally in the end when she becomes more realized and expressive, then we can enjoy that satisfaction and experience that evolution.”
Danes adds Maribelle’s stationary environment proved difficult as well.
“It was a challenge for me to play somebody who was so quiet and receding and she’s also on-screen all the time and has to remain compelling and entertaining,” she says. “I was really nervous people were not going to stay with me when I was standing behind that bloody counter.”
Despite these difficulties, Danes credits the rich descriptions in Martin’s novella for making it easier to portray Mirabelle and make her stillness come to life.
“Steve created such detailed portraits of these people,” Danes says, noting that Martin specified exactly how Mirabelle should drive her pick-up truck. “Oftentimes writers aren’t so skillful or generous, and I have to compensate making those choices myself. But this time, I got to be a little lazier.”
Schwartzman also credits Martin as an inspiration and notes that watching Martin act in movies such as Roxanne and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels subconsciously affected his own acting.
“Growing up in the ’80s, my families would bond on seeing movies and because I was a kid I could basically only see comedies, and Steve Martin was in basically all of them,” Schwartzman says. “He’s a part of me in a lot of ways. I don’t know life without him in it.”
Medill junior Diana Scholl is a PLAY writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
