INTERVIEWS

Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber on The Spectacular Now

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by Adam Stovall

There are people for whom Star Wars will always be their pinnacle of filmmaking. There are people for whom Pulp Fiction will forever be the film that made them love cinema. Lawrence of Arabia, Annie Hall, Videodrome—very different films that all have come to define the life goals and decision-making of ourselves, our friends and our neighbors. What do they all have in common? Emotional resonance. A good movie can be technically brilliant and keep some objective space between itself and the audience, focusing their attention on a brilliant plan or complex plot and taking them along on a ride. A great film, however, chucks that objective space out the window and puts you squarely in the skin of its characters. Their victories are your victories, their defeats your defeats. You sweat and you bleed and you laugh and you cry with them, and at the end, as the credits roll, you say “Now THAT was a movie!”

The Spectacular Now follows Sutter Keely (Miles Teller), an alcoholic who is about to finish his senior year of high school. He’s a popular kid, beloved by all, and always the life of the party; but now it seems everyone is leaving the party, and by extension, leaving him. Enter Aimee Finicky (Shailene Woodley), a shy classmate who has long been invisible to Sutter and his friends. Sutter and Aimee strike up an unlikely friendship, and, well, I probably don’t need to tell you that things evolve from there.

Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber

Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber

Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber Make a Connection

But before it was a film, The Spectacular Now was a young adults’ novel written by Tim Tharp, and published in 2008. Tom McNulty and Shawn Levy acquired the movie rights through their company 21 Laps, which enjoys a partnership with 20th Century Fox. In 2009, Fox Searchlight distributed a little film called (500) Days of Summer, which was written by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber. The film was nominated for a multitude of awards, many of which it won—the lion’s share going to Neustadter and Weber. Eager to continue their partnership with the young scribes, Fox Searchlight sent them Tharp’s novel as a possible adaptation.

Joseph Gordon and Zooey Deschanel in 500 Days of Summer

Joseph Gordon and Zooey Deschanel in 500 Days of Summer

“If we can’t feel what the character is going through,” explains Weber, “if we can’t understand them, then we’re not the right people for that script. We have to have some connection to it, it has to feel real and human to us. Neither Scott nor I battled drinking problems in school, but we knew it wasn’t about that. It was about becoming an adult, growing up, and taking things in your life seriously. That’s something that any teenager, or anyone who’s ever been a teenager, can relate to. That’s what gives a movie the complexity it needs, where it’s about something more than just its superficial level.”

With (500) Days of Summer, Neustadter and Weber had brought a new take to the romantic comedy, a genre they loved, but felt had gone stale. In adapting The Spectacular Now, Neustadter says they saw an opportunity to make a high school film closer in spirit to the ones with which they’d grown up. “Maybe it’s the rating system, and the proliferation of TV shows and everything else, but when we came upon The Spectacular Now, we saw something really interesting: There’s a lot of alcohol, a lot of reality, the teenagers sound very much how we understand teenagers  actually talk, and not how they’re depicted in modern cinema.”

Creative Screenwriting always likes to see movies promoted on the basis of their writers.

Creative Screenwriting always likes to see movies promoted on the basis of their writers.

Weber remembers a location scouting trip in Oklahoma, where the book is set, when they stopped at a library and talked to some kids to get a sense of things. He asked one of the students who was helping out at the library to name her favorite high school movie of all time. “She thought for a beat, and then said ‘Harry Potter.’ It blew my mind. But it also confirmed for us what we were trying to do. We grew up on John Hughes and Cameron Crowe. The Harry Potter movies are great for what they are, but I can’t imagine they really speak to her own personal high school experience.”

“There’s a lot of escapism in the high school movies now,” adds Neustadter. “There are vampires and werewolves and whatever else, which can be super fun, but it’s not the same thing. We were worried for a while that no one would let us make a movie that was just a real depiction of teenagers. But we realized that Searchlight had brought this to us. They liked the book, they were excited, and they wanted to give us a shot. So we looked at each other and said, ‘This is our opportunity. Let’s see if we can get away with it.’”

Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley in The Spectacular Now

Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley in The Spectacular Now

Faraway, So Close!

While their approach to story and character is rooted in immersion, Neustadter and Weber’s process is dependent on distance. “I don’t know how those other teams do it when they’re in the same room. When we’re in the same room, we’ll just play cards or talk about sports,” laughs Weber. “We’d either accomplish absolutely nothing, or kill each other.” Once separated, they’ll break the outline over phone conversations and long email chains. Once the outline is in order, they’ll divide up the scenes in small batches and email them back and forth. This system has the added benefit of showing them which scenes are strong and which need further work. “If there’s a scene we both want to write, we know we’re on the subject,” explains Weber. “The flip side being that if there’s something neither of us wants to write, it forces us to step back and ask ‘If neither of us wants to write it, who’s going to want to read it or watch it?’”

Once they’re happy with a draft, they send it out to their “Crack Squad,” a group of friends and family who read and give feedback on everything Neustadter and Weber write. “The nice thing about the Crack Squad,” Weber explains, “is that everyone has different sensibilities and is sensitive to different things. If we’re worried that we didn’t navigate a particular piece of material well, we know at least one person who will either allay or confirm those fears.” “And we know them well enough at this point, we can tell when they’re saying ‘It’s great, it’s great’ but thinking otherwise,” laughs Neustadter.

The Spectacular Now

The Spectacular Now

If you’ve read Tharp’s novel, then you know that it’s written entirely in first-person, with Sutter Keely narrating. Obviously, this sort of thing works well in a novel, but for Neustadter and Weber, it yielded the first challenge in adapting page to screen: how do you maintain the voice that you fell in love with on the page, while not relying on significant amounts of voice-over? “We talked a lot about how Ferris Bueller’s influence on his friends was not all positive,” says Neustadter. “(Sutter) has a lot of that same kind of magnetism, though not as much as he might imagine or wish he has.” Where a more comedic film might have stayed close to Sutter’s own perspective on his shenanigans, both writers wanted a tone closer to the moment in our lives when we start to realize and consider the consequences of the impulsive decisions of our youth, including those with whom we associate. “He’s the center of the film,” continues Neustadter. “We want to like him, but we also show that he is a bit of an asshole. Not so much that we lose the audience or diminish his likeability, but subtle enough that whatever Sutter’s doing on page 105 would have been unthinkable on page 15, but it feels organic and legitimate and honest.”

Shailene Woodley and Miles Teller in The Spectacular Now

Shailene Woodley and Miles Teller in The Spectacular Now

As much as The Spectacular Now is the story of Sutter Keely, the beating heart of the piece lies within Aimee Finicky, the girl who finds him passed out on a stranger’s lawn one morning, and eventually falls in love with him. By now, the character of the shy, bookworm girl who blossoms under the light of the protagonist’s attention is a cliché, but both writers credit Tharp with making Aimee Finicky fully present on the page, and felt they just needed to protect her from being compromised. “It’d be easy to make her the girl in She’s All That, where you put glasses on her,” Neustadter says. “But she’s totally not that at all. She’s always going to surprise you, and that makes her interesting.” In a nifty bit of synchronicity between life and art, Aimee Finicky would prove to be a catalyst for both the film’s protagonist, and the film itself.

In the beginning, The Spectacular Now was envisioned as a (500) Days of Summer reunion, with Neustadter and Weber once again working with director Marc Webb. As development stretched on, Webb eventually left the project to direct The Amazing Spider-Man. He was replaced by Lee Toland Krieger, who would also leave the project as development stretched on even further. The script, however, remained constant through all of this.

Shailene Woodley in The Descendants

Shailene Woodley in The Descendants

In 2011, Shailene Woodley was receiving rave reviews for her performance in the Alexander Payne film, The Descendants. At every stop of that film’s press tour, when asked what was next for her, she would say, “The next thing I want to do is this script called The Spectacular Now.” Word of this finally got back to Neustadter and Weber, who immediately set to work trying to capitalize on this newfound momentum. “There’s a .007% chance anyone is going to make this thing anyway, so our job is just to write the best script we can, the best characters,” Neustadter says. “A great character is a great part, and we knew that Sutter and Aimee were already great characters from the novel. We were fortunate, though, because I don’t think the movie version of that script works at all if you don’t get the leads perfectly right.” Just as this started with both writers connecting to the book and carrying it forward into their vision of what a high school movie could be, now a whole new set of people were connecting to their vision and carrying it forward into production, with cameras rolling in July of 2012.

Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber at the Spirit Awards

Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber at the Spirit Awards

Screenwriting: The Easy Life

But our story doesn’t end there. Neustadter and Weber remained involved throughout production, just as they had on (500) Days of Summer. By serving as shepherds of the project through development, they were acutely aware of the reasons behind every decision in the script. Thus, whenever complications would arise on set and changes needed to be made, they were there to make sure said changes didn’t disrupt the cohesion of the story.  And since The Spectacular Now was an independent production, compromises were inevitable.

“There were a lot of great scenes in the book, and even in the screenplay,” Neustadter says, “that we ended up unable to do because we couldn’t afford it.” In the screenplay, there’s a scene where Sutter runs into Shawnie, an ex-girlfriend, outside a party. They talk and flirt, eventually climbing into a hot tub, where they make out a little bit. It happens around the halfway point of the screenplay, and illuminates Sutter by showing him in the light of someone who used to know him well, but hasn’t been around for the recent events we’ve been watching. But when you see the movie, you won’t see this scene. Budget dictated it had to go, so Neustadter and Weber went back over the screenplay and found other homes for the lines in that scene they felt were essential or liked too much to lose. “When you do it independently,” says Weber, “those kind of financial challenges become writing challenges that require creative solutions.”

The Spectacular Now

The Spectacular Now

It’s a cliché that every writer secretly (or not so secretly) wants to direct. While it’s important to both writers that they stay involved with their projects during production, they insist they have no interest in directing. “One of the benefits of being a writer is that we can work on a project, and then a few months later work on something different, and then a few months later work on something else that’s completely different from the other two,” explains Weber. “If you’re going to direct, your passion and focus has to be on one thing for maybe two years, maybe more. Creatively, I get restless after a while. Plus, when you’re the director, you have to wake up really early.” Neustadter adds, “We’ve been lucky to work with amazing people who have made our stuff better. When we did the Reality vs. Expectations sequence in (500) Days, I remember being in my kitchen and whipping that up. I gave it to Marc, and he said, ‘This is great! I have no idea how to do it!’ and I said, ‘Not my problem, Marc. You’re the director!’ And it turned out great. Who knows if we would have been able to execute it as well as he did.”

Two People In A Room, Talking

For their next project, Neustadter and Weber are adapting another young adult novel, The Fault In Our Stars, by John Green, which will again star Woodley. Both writers are happy to continue finding ways to take the stories they enjoy on the page and make them into something that will excite and resonate with people on the screen, even while they find themselves maturing and responding differently to films than how they did even thirteen years ago when they were starting out. “When I was growing up, we went to the movies every single Friday, and almost every single Saturday,” remembers Neustadter, “and we were so excited to be there, we’d love the film even if it was bad. There’s something that happens as you get older, the pleasures of going to the movies aren’t what they used to be. Now, I go to see Before Midnight and I go ‘That’s what I’m talking about!’ And I don’t think it’s the movies, I think it’s us, just changing what moves us. I don’t think I’d be able to do (500) Days of Summer now. The histrionics I was doing back then, I’m almost embarrassed now. But you know, look at anyone, look at the Coen Brothers’ films, there’s a maturity that happens over a career.”

“We’ve come to a point where everything is driven by spectacle,” adds Weber. “Things keep getting bigger, and that’s fine, but it’s not what we’re into. At the end of the day, we just like movies about two people talking. We want to tell stories that we want to see and can relate to, that speak to us.”

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Adam Stovall really likes movies. Usually, he's either at the theater seeing the movies that are out, or hunched over his notepad writing the movies he wishes were. He also enjoys a good beer and a good football game. He grew up in KY, but his current whereabouts are unknown.

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