TALKING MANIC: An interview with Manic director Jordan Melamed, co-writer/co-star Michael Bacall and star Joseph Gordon-Levitt. By Memo Salazar 5/12/03

(From left to right): Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jordan Melamed, Michael Bacall

Jordan Melamed's Manic is a product of the digital revolution: low-budget films that take advantage of an inexpensive medium to capture a reality somewhere between documentary and fiction. Like the Italian neo-realists of yesteryear, these filmmakers eschew conventional film techniques such as dramatic lighting and melodramatic dialogue to tell their tale. Manic succeeds wonderfully, holding together incredibly well despite having little plot or production values to keep the eye busy, as most big-budget films feel the need to do. I interviewed Melamed along with writer/co-star Michael Bacall and star Joseph Gordon-Levitt recently, and found them to be incredibly humble, direct, and passionate about this project they devoted so much of their time to.

Watch the 9 minute video interview from foolfactory.com here:
http://www.foolfactory.com/haus/movies/misc/manic.mov

(Read the review of Manic)

Melamed: From the beginning, Michael and I wanted to make a film about teenagers that showed that teenagers would respond to complex characters and things that are ambiguous and things that they were really experiencing in their lives. We didn't use the script in rehearsal because we didn't want to exhaust those lines -- so we worked on the characters... the first step of the improvisation was that Michael made some rescripting after the rehearsal and we actually incorporated parts of that into the scenes... If you read the script and see the film, it's the same movie, and yet, we were able to flesh out the film more by doing improvisation on the set... only in a digital film could you capture that kind of nuance...

That much is clear. The dialogue flows with incredible ease; most of it is spoken by teenagers and sounds like teenagers, unlike the "teenspeak" babble that surrounds most Hollywood teen movies.

Gordon-Levitt: The way that people write teenagers to talk is insulting. When I read the script for Manic it was in the midst of other scripts... and they were all absolute bullshit.

Melamed: Michael is such a great writer that his dialogue is so real that you can't tell the difference between some of the written lines and some of the improvised lines...

The film takes place in a home for "troubled youths." The actors, all playing parts of teenagers with socially unacceptable behavioral issues (usually violent ones) had to act alongside kids who really did have lives like the ones they were portraying. In our short conversation, I asked the actors about the pressure of working in front of them, trying to do their job without coming off as poseurs when surrounded by the real thing.

Bacall: Being around those kids actually took a lot of the pressure off. Once you can see where they're really coming from and how they relate to you-- not just "let's talk about your problems" but "let's talk about whatever"... it's not like they're some crazy species or anything.

Melamed: Puttling themselves back into a situation they'd already experienced, they were remarkably comfortable -- comfortable talking about their experiences on camera...

Fair enough. One thing that stood out for me was the ending. Without giving it away, I can say that it was definitely fitting, and thankfully didn't go down the stereotypical roads of either "everyone's happy" or "everyone dies." Probing along those lines, I asked them if this was an issue they wrestled with throughout the writing process.

Bacall: When I first started working on the script, I was coming at it from a much more hopeless place than it wound up. Jordan and I went through quite a few rounds of screaming at each other at Starbucks... I guess I was mostly doing the screaming... to get it to that place. But he had the right instinct to create a more ambiguous ending tonally. I was kind of a younger punk at the time and I just wanted everyone to feel blackness and despair...

Melamed: The hardest thing was to keep it realistic and provide a sense of hope. Every time you start to push away from realism and have only an hour and a half to tell a story you do start to go towards that world of epiphany and fantasy and we so wanted to avoid it. At the same time, I hate films that just pound you over the head that life is shit. Well, we know that, so... why are you telling me the story? All of us are proud that we were able to find an ending that gives you hope without compromising Lyle and say that Lyle is about to go meet Robin Williams and go have a good hug.

As we chatted, I realized that these were people with a genuine passion for telling good stories, not for being big stars. This was especially true of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who's been acting since childhood and is already a somewhat recognized name as a main character in the tv sitcom Third Rock From the Sun (not that I had any clue what that was before the interview, but that's just my pop-cultural ignorance.) His "Hollywood Sucks" stance, far from some attempt at sounding hip, rang true when he spoke of what he loved and hated about movies.

Gordon-Levitt: I think it's a strength of [Manic] that it's not that narrowly protagonistic; Lyle's story wouldn't come off if all the other stories didn't work. That's one of my least favorite Hollywood conventions -- "here's the hero, and all the other characters are just functions to move it along." It's just useless and lazy. "You're going to be the girl he has sex with, and you'll be the girl that... whatever." I really like the scene where Lyle and Tracy get to make out. I think that sex and that sort of physical love is probably the most mistreated thing that Hollywood has perverted, and I think it's had a serious effect on why we live in such a sexually perverse society... and why people are so uptight about it. I really like how in our scene, it's not some string-section montage. It's… you know, we were making out, and they shot it, and that's it.

As his star "rises" does he plan to look for more indie roles?

Gordon-Levitt: I've been doing mainstream projects all my life. I'd jump at the chance to do a decent studio film if it gave me the power to get a project like Manic made. I wish I had more power, but you don't get that kind of power unless your film makes trillions of dollars… so go see Manic so that the film can make trillions of dollars and I can skip this fucking studio middleman!

Bacall: I don't want to sound like a corporate asshole here, but we believe, because we've seen it first hand, that this film has massive "crossover potential." Teens flip out when they... "flip out"…? Okay, I think I'll stop there, but you get what I mean. They really do respond… very emotionally at times.

Gordon-Levitt: I had a kid come up to me at a film festival -- probably 16 or 17 -- and he told me "I've been in that place, and I've done what you did" -- he said "you" meaning Lyle -- "and I saw the movie two days ago and I came back to see it again today." It was important to him. I've been acting for 16 years and I've done a lot of jobs, and I'm proud of some of them, but I've never had anyone tell me that my work was important to them. I've also never in my life so actively promoted a movie -- I've always kind of run the other way from publicity -- but I really want people to see this movie.

Help an actor out… go check out Manic before it disappears from the theaters. It really is a great film.

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