Ben Younger

I don’t think it’s been done enough to be a cliché. Has it?

Yeah, just Woody. No I don’t think it’s a cliché. Even in Woody’s movies, the shrinks were more cliché than this one. He had strict Freudians with couches in their office. Prime is a very realistic portrayal of a psychoanalyst. It wasn’t the stark room with the leather furniture and I’m proud of that.

Well my Mom’s a shrink, so I definitely was able to draw from that but I don’t know what kind of shrink she is. I’ve never been in the office with her.

No. Not really supposed to from what I understand.

That’s the advantage of being with an agency like CAA. They just can make things happen.

No Meryl was attached to the movie for a long time before that.

Yeah it was. But I actually got past the nervousness a little bit earlier than that because we spent quite a bit of time rehearsing.

I don’t think so. I think they were more for me. I was finally able to relax around Meryl because it was such a big deal for me. I’ve worked with a few big names, but she’s the one that made me nervous. I thought I’d make ten movies and work 20 years before she would be in a movie of mine.

No. She identified with the part. Obviously on set we would play with lines and stuff but she liked the character.

Bryan earned it in his audition. There were a lot of guys the studio wanted us to look at with a lot more name recognition but Bryan battled it out. It was like American Idol, just round after round he just kept coming back.

Yeah, I was on that for a few episodes. They came to the set and shot us.

Yeah, we did an episode where Bryan got drunk and showed up to set the next day kind of still drunk and Meryl gave him a talking to. It was pretty funny.

It’s great man, I love it. I fought really hard to shoot Boiler Room in New York. But it’s funny, once you do get to shoot a movie in New York, there’s a little bit of a precedent thing going on. So it wasn’t as hard to convince Universal. Plus Meryl and Uma really wanted to shoot in New York. That always helps.

We didn’t have a lot of money for this movie. It was under $20 million. So much of the money goes above the line so you don’t have it personally. Combine that with the cost of shooting in New York and then Meryl and Uma having sizable salaries. It came out to be pretty much the same. It’s not like I got a trailer on this one, everything was the same for me. The difference was that I had five or six extra days.

I was not going for a broad romantic comedy. I wanted to make a sophisticated love story.

It wasn’t like getting Boiler Room made. That was a struggle. With Prime, Universal signed on pretty fast. They liked the more adult material and then once you get stars attached, everyone feels a little safer going forward.

That’s a complicated one. Would I have liked to have seen the marketing done differently? Yes. I wish the marketing had more reflected the true value of the movie. I understand why they did it and I even got behind it at the time. Maybe in hindsight we shouldn’t have done that. I guess our strategy was that the more sophisticated adult audience is going to find this movie on their own. They don’t need the advertising so why not try and make it seem a little broader and bring in a younger audience. But I don’t think we reached the younger audience anyway and I think we could have reached more of an adult sophisticated audience if we had marketed the movie accurately. But no movie get marketed accurately. There’s no trailer you’ll see and go “Yeah that was a pretty fair representation of that film.” It’s just not like that. Also Prime has surpassed 50 million dollars already worldwide.

Thanks.

I think they’re not actually. American cinema is pervasive around the world. Look at France for example, they used to make these tons of incredible movies and now it’s slowed down. Films like Cache and Swimming Pool are great but they are smaller movies. The blockbusters are all from the US. Uma is tremendously popular overseas, a lot more than she is here. Overseas Uma and Meryl in an intelligent movie generates excitement. Whereas here, like you said, it is 15 year old kids who go to the movies opening weekend.

You hear an artist say that you make art for yourself and then you find your audience afterwards. I certainly believe you shouldn’t be writing for an audience. I definitely write the things I want to write. But I don’t want to make films in a vacuum. If someone gave me a $100 million and said go make whatever you want, I’m sure what I would make would still be something that people would want to see. I’m not interested in alienating anyone and my tastes aren’t so off the path that I’d make some weird video installation, because that’s not my interest. Even when you market a movie to a broad audience there’s still no guarantee. Prime wasn’t seen by as many people as I thought would have seen it. So now I’m starting to feel that I should push in the other direction. You might as well just make the movie you want to make, fight for that cause and then truly let the film find its audience.

I imagine that when you finish your movie, you find a reason to tell yourself why the movie is going to do great; whatever movie it is. After Boiler Room all I could think was, “Oh this movie is right on the pulse. This is exactly what’s going on in the world. The market’s blowing up. There are tons of these places around. Everyone gets calls at home from these telemarketers. This movie’s going to make a $100 million.” Then it makes $16 million. For Prime, Demi’s dating Ashton and I could give you probably four other examples of older women with younger men. So again the movie is very topical, got my finger on the pulse and then, still it wasn’t bad, it made $28 million. When it comes to good movies, it’s not necessarily about the material. If you released Prime a month later or earlier I think that could have changed the numbers by ten million dollars.

That’s really what I’m saying, just get away from that, make the movie and then people will end up seeing it. See that’s the great thing about DVD. Not many people saw Boiler Room in the theatre but the entire world seems to have seen it on DVD. Everyone knows what that movie is. You get a second life with these DVD releases, which is pretty great.

I’m getting a lot of offers, but it’s all exactly what I just did. All romantic comedies.

No, the movie put that kind of business out of business. The movie was like a catalyst. I got a letter from the president of the NASD saying something like that the movie reached more people than he ever could. AARP put out a whole thing on it because a lot of the victims were senior citizens.

I got a movie fully financed called 17 Bullets, it’s a Mexican Western that takes place in the late 1800’s. There are only seventeen shots fired in the whole movie, that’s why it is called 17 Bullets. It’s very high concept and a cool movie.

No I developed it with these two writers but we did a lot of work on the script together.

We’re going to do it all in Mexico. But I don’t know where. We haven’t done a tech scout yet.

No.

I’m going to learn it.

We don’t need a studio. We got our ten million in cash. So we’re just going to go.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck