Director Ed Zwick has had an extensive and critically acclaimed career directing and producing films and TV shows in Hollywood. Zwick brought audiences “Legends of the Fall,” “The Last Samurai” and “Blood Diamond,” as well as the Claire Danes cult classic “My So-Called Life.” He is back next month, producing, writing and directing “Love and Other Drugs,” a Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway tearjerker.
Q: You’ve developed this resume built around war movies. This is kind of the first romantic comedy you’ve done since “About Last Night.” Why this movie? Why now?
EZ: It is important to say that this is not just where I began, but in television we talked almost exclusively about men and women. That’s what “thirtysomething” was, that’s what “My So-Called Life” was… So I guess I’ve had an opportunity to be expressing that when we were doing a bunch of television. We just haven’t done any TV in a number of years, and I missed it. I think maybe I realized that, having done a few of these bigger movies without the television, I was being painted a little bit into a corner, and I wanted to try and struggle against that a little bit.
Q: What went into the casting decision of Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal?
EZ: Part of my job is to be aware of what actors are out there and what they’re doing, look at their work. I’d seen Annie do Jonathan Demme’s movie (“Rachel Getting Married”) and I’d seen her do Shakespeare in the Park, and she was really fantastic and brave and ambitious artistically. And Jake had done this movie a friend of mine wrote called “Jarhead,” and I’d seen his work before that. I got to know him a little bit and realized that to know him was to have (witnessed) something that movie audiences hadn’t necessarily seen, which is the depth of his charm and his humor and this very attractive male romantic… and I felt, “Oh hey, you know what? I’m going to show that to people.” Because it’s there.
Q: How difficult was it to make the movie true to the year 1996?
EZ: That was the year that this all happened, so it’s really just done in a more subtle way. A flip phone. A pager-and that really becomes the obsessive device, as we all have our phones or PDAs now. A boom box. A pixel camera. Those things, because they’re in the behavior of the characters, give them that period feel without showing a clip of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky or those things that would be emblematic of the time.
Q: Is the competition in the pharmaceutical industry insane?
EZ: Well, it certainly was in that moment. It still is very intense. You guys are young, so you probably don’t spend as much time in doctors’ offices as some of us do as we get older, but the hot girls walking in in their slit skirts and their spike heels, and the guys looking like ex-military, they’re everywhere. And it is a rapidly competitive business. And it’s a consumer business now. Once the FDA allowed them to do advertising on television at this moment that the film describes, it became even turbo-charged. We really wanted to get that across.
Q: Your film doesn’t seem as a straight romantic comedy. How would you describe it?
EZ: That is the problem, isn’t it? You know, those movies that were love stories and also serious were the movies that I cut my teeth on, and whether that was “Shampoo” or some Paul Mazursky movies or the earlier comedies of Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, they were very sophisticated. They’re not dumbed down, they’re not stupid. So, it may just be that what’s happened to the romantic comedy is that it’s been usurped by people who are less adroit at doing it. That sounds self-congratulatory. Why can’t it be complex? Why can’t it be sophisticated? Look at “The Thin Man.” Look at Preston Sturges’ “Palm Beach Story.” Or look at “Philadelphia Story.” These are very grown-up movies. Why can’t a romantic comedy be grown up? It doesn’t have to be about the more trivial parts of life. Love isn’t trivial. Love is serious and also sexy and profane and all those things.
Q: Is there a reason for so much nudity?
EZ: Well, first of all, in my experience, when you’re young and really into somebody, you spend a lot of time lying in bed. It’s pretty simple. But it’s also nudity that isn’t necessarily related to sex. It’s nudity which I think is part of the nakedness of emotion and the nakedness of intimacy, as long as the scenes are scenes and they’re advancing the plot, and they are in the service of the story and not exploitative. When it’s exploitative is in the spy movie, when suddenly he’s with the girl, and suddenly we study her nipples, or the camera explores her ass lovingly in this sort of fetishized way, and you kind of go, “Time for popcorn.” I can see that on the net. I’m not interested. Whereas, if it’s a scene that has a beginning, middle and end, you can kind of say, “Oh.” And you lean in a little bit. When she’s in the doctor’s office and she says, “I have this spider bite,” and she goes like this, and here’s her breast desexualized, it prepares you in that moment when you’re in the movie, and it’s pretty early in the movie. People have said to me they kind of go, “Oh. Hmm. What’s this movie going to be like?”
Q: What made you fall in love with filmmaking?
EZ: I was in love with the theatre. I directed in the theatre throughout high school and college, and I was living in France, and I worked as an assistant to Woody Allen on a movie called ‘Love and Death.’ I was just enchanted by the process. I went to movies all the time in Paris. Paris was at the time the best moviegoing city in the world, where they have all these revival houses and there’s the cinemateque, and it was kind of a self-taught education in film history. I must have seen a movie a day for a year and a half.
Q: What’s the next big thing for Ed Zwick?
EZ: That’s the impossible question. It’s really about trying to make a movie that I would want to go see. There seem to be fewer movies these days, certainly studio movies, that I want to go see. So I’m still interested in making them.
Q: You have your own production company, and you’ve been behind a lot of really critically acclaimed works. What do you want to define your career?
EZ: That I have one. That I’ve been privileged to do the things that I want to do for as long as I’ve gotten to do them. And that’s an extraordinary blessing. I can’t think of a better word. I can’t put a price on it, the idea that I’ve believed in things I’ve done, and they’ve reflected my sensibility or my interests or my world view. And the idea that I’ve been given the opportunity to express that or voice that to the unsuspecting public is an amazing opportunity, and I want what I have, and I’d like to be able to keep doing that. I know, like all things, there will come a day when I can’t, but it becomes all the more precious
