INTERVIEWS

We Are Your Friends: A High-Pressure Partnership

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By Matthew Wade Reynolds.

Meaghan Oppenheimer

Meaghan Oppenheimer

Max Joseph

Max Joseph

Filmmaker Max Joseph and Blacklist writer Meaghan Oppenheimer had never even met, never mind worked together when they plunged into a writing partnership under a high-pressure deadline to turn out DJ drama We Are Your Friends, starring Zac Efron, Emily Ratajkowski and Wes Bentley (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Closing out another summer of prequels, sequels, tentpoles and spinoffs comes an intimate romantic drama, which nevertheless earns the description “pulse pounding.”

Set in the world of EDM, or electronic dance music, We Are Your Friends tells the story of a struggling young DJ named Cole Carter, played by Zac Efron, working dead end jobs by day and searching for the elusive track that will make or break him by night. Loyal to his club-hopping friends but feeling trapped, Cole connects with the talented and enigmatic James (Wes Bentley), an older, established DJ who encourages him to step out of his comfort zone with a more daring approach to his music. Things grow more complicated when Cole falls for James’ girlfriend Sophie (Emily Ratajkowski) as she cautions him not to abandon his true self in his search for success.

The film marks the feature debut of director Max Joseph (MTV’s Catfish), who co-wrote the screenplay with fellow newcomer Meaghan Oppenheimer, based on a story by Richard Silverman. Creative Screenwriting talked with Max and Meaghan about the process of working together for the first time, how their solo efforts launched their careers, and why there’s no substitute for the clang and clamor of the real world  – not to mention pool parties – when it comes to inspiration.

This article combines two interviews.

Zac Efron and director MAx Joseph on set of We Are Your Friends. Photo by Anne Marie Fox

Zac Efron and director Max Joseph on set of We Are Your Friends. Photo by Anne Marie Fox

We Are Your Friends presents a convincing portrait of the club scene – the excitement but also the edge. Is this a world either of you are familiar with or was it strictly research?

Meaghan: We both did a lot of research into the music world. I don’t come from a background of electronic music whatsoever. I worked in night life in college but not as a DJ or as a promoter or anything. I think Max is a bigger fan, than I was, going into it.

Max: I was already a fan of electronic music. The music-driven, coming-of-age film was kind of drilled into me. I’m an only child, both my parents worked and I was home alone a lot, so I would watch the same VHS tapes over and over and over again. Most of them were music driven: “Flashdance,” and “Footloose,” and “La Bamba” were probably in heaviest rotation.

Meaghan: I think it was important that I wasn’t an electronic obsessed person, because my focus was on the more universal themes, and the characters. I want people who love electronic music to love the movie, but I also want other people to love the movie. I don’t love football, but I love football movies!

Meaghan, you come from a theater background, with your script The Remains on the Blacklist, and Max, much of your directorial work has been in the world of documentaries. How did you come to be involved in the project?

Max: I got a call from Working Title Films. They had a script (from producer Richard Silverman) but they wanted to start from scratch-ish. They had seen some of my short films, which all have electronic music. I pitched them a loose version and I said the only thing is I don’t want to write it by myself. We read a bunch of scripts and one of the executives at Working Title met Meaghan at a barbecue, in L.A.

Meaghan: I said I was a writer and she said send me your script and I sent her The Remains and that’s how I met Working Title. It’s so funny and I know that’s not the best advice for anyone because it’s like “Okay how do I make that happen?” At that point it had already been making the rounds. But I don’t think I would have gotten this job if I hadn’t been at that pool party that day.

the black list

What was it like being thrown together?

Max: At first it took a little bit of getting used to. She’s very strong willed, and likes her ideas a lot. It took some careful dancing and syncing up at the beginning to find our rhythm.

Meaghan: I think there’s always when you’re writing with someone and you’re used to writing alone that there are moments where you’re going to disagree. But the good thing with Max and myself is that we both really just wanted the script to be its best.

Max: The first time we met, one of her ideas, just from the outset, was the mentor character, James, and the love interest, Sophie, should be in a relationship, and there should be a love triangle there. I thought that was brilliant, that’s amazing. Aaand you’re hired!

How did you divide the work? Did you trade off pages? Rewrite the other?

Max: I wish it was as planned out and as strategic as you just put it.

Meaghan: It was definitely a challenge just in the sense that he was away doing Catfish a lot of the time. We were passing the script back and forth, and that is obviously hard. We both just made the absolute most of our time and we didn’t waste any moments.

Max: What I loved about working with Meagan is that I was like, don’t hold back; don’t edit yourself – let me edit it. Then she would see my version of it and say, oh, it would be a lot cleaner if we took out that thing. So we both kept on streamlining each other.

Meaghan: That’s the big difference between Max and myself – he’s a huge night owl and I have to wake up at 6am and have my sunshine.  I basically didn’t have much of a life while we were on deadline.

Max Joseph Yaniv Schulman in Catfish

Max Joseph and Yaniv Schulman in Catfish

There is a strong alpha male quotient to much of the film, with Cole and his friends posturing and muscling their way into clubs, looking for fights. This is in contrast to the storyline with Sophie, the beautiful and sophisticated girlfriend of Cole’s mentor James, and she’s revealed to be much more soulful and emotionally vulnerable than at the outset. Are those two sides to the story the result of your own differences and backgrounds?

Max: Just to speak to that – a lot of people just assume that since we were collaborating that oh, Meaghan is the voice of the girl, and I was the voice of the guys, which is not at all the case. Meaghan is really good at writing guys.

Meaghan: I have a lot of guy friends, and have brothers, and I was raised by a dad who had three brothers. I come from a very, very male-centric family. And I definitely didn’t want (Sophie) to be the token beautiful girl or the token prize, but have her be flawed in way, and be sort of lost. I think I probably also saw some aspects of myself in that, in her decisions.

Max: Meaghan really brought a lot of her experience to that. She’s not necessarily Sophie, but she knows about that. While we were writing the movie, every time Meaghan told me about her life, I would be picking and choosing things she said, little situations she described: That should be in the movie, that should be in the movie, that should be in the movie! (laughs)

What separates this film from so many others is its mature view: Cole is loved by his friends and can’t be himself around them, and Sophie is in a confining relationship with James, but suffers initially on her own. And yet they don’t provide each other with all the answers either.

Meaghan: We wanted to make it clear that Sophie had been living a life that’s not really her own. Sometimes you have to go back to the bottom to start anew, but there is a pride and dignity to that, when its like okay, I’m not going to take what’s handed to me anymore. It would have been too movie perfect for her to walk away with her dream life at the end.

Max: We really resisted the idea of making it a real romance between the two. We wanted the thing that bonded them together to be that they are at the same point in their life, that she is co-dependent on James and he is co-dependent on his friends. And that in the end it’s not really a love story as a friendship story.

Meaghan: We really wanted it to be about friendship, and how do you make a friendship from childhood mature into adulthood as you all start to change.

Emily Ratajkowski as Sophie in We Are Your Friends

Emily Ratajkowski as Sophie in We Are Your Friends

The film does a great job balancing depth with exhilarating musical sequences – such as the pool party where Cole draws partygoers out onto the dance floor by subtly synchronizing the music beat to their heart rates, accompanied by animation.

Meaghan: Max had read some interview with a DJ that talked about the 128 beats per minute and we both thought it was really cool. And Max is such a visual guy and he had this idea of being able to see the heartbeat. And it’s funny, we actually wanted – maybe I shouldn’t tell this story – we actually wanted to do a lot more in that scene, with their heads exploding. But there was an SNL skit with their heads exploding and we thought, oh, we can’t do that now.

A big talent behind the scenes is veteran music supervisor Randall Poster, and another memorable sequence shows Cole running through the neighborhood collecting everyday sounds – a spinning quarter, the humming power lines, helicopters overhead. Did that come from the music department or the script?

Max: It was all written out, very tediously in the script. We added the helicopter, that wasn’t originally part of the song, nor was the breathing. That came in basically in the second version of the script.  The first draft he just plays a great show – which is not quite as exciting.

It’s a neat moment when his headphones give out and he rips them off, just listening.

Meaghan: I lived in New York for five years, and it was that thing that God forbid you don’t have your music in your ears. And I remember a teacher of mine saying, you should just leave your house someday without your music and just listen to the world and be present. That stuck with me.

Zac Efron as Cole in We Are Your Friends

Zac Efron as Cole in We Are Your Friends

What were the notable influences in your life? When did you know you wanted to be storytellers?

Max: I was always a movie nerd. Both my parents worked and I was home alone a lot, so I would watch the same VHS tapes over and over and over again. When I was 14 a friend of mine for my birthday had given me Robert Rodriguez’ Rebel Without a Crew, the diary of how he made El Mariachi. Upon reading that I was sold, hook line and sinker. After high school I went to Brown University in Rhode Island, where I studied creative writing and English literature, in place of going to film school necessarily. I knew I would be watching movies now matter what.

Meaghan: My mom tells a story of how, when I was really, really little before I could actually read or write, I would staple together pages of paper and scribble lines and say, look this is my book! (laughs). I have a love of theater. I went to NYU and realized very quickly that you have to work in film and TV before you can make a living in theater. I think theater is so much more of a writer’s medium. You can’t cheat as much.

Who are your favorite playwrights?

Meaghan: Sam Sheppard is definitely my favorite for dialogue. It has the sloppiness that real human speech has but it’s also so incredibly poetic and sharp. He has a real brutality to him. Curse of the Starving Class is one of the most beautiful, horrible things I’ve ever read!

Joe Hanley and Rose O'Loughlin in the Abbey Theatre production of Curse of the Starving Class, by Sam Sheppard

Joe Hanley and Rose O’Loughlin in the Abbey Theatre production of Curse of the Starving Class, by Sam Sheppard

Documentaries are making a big splash these days. Is there something writers can pick up from watching nonfiction?

Max: I spent a lot of time in Hollywood writing in isolation, working in the bubble of L.A. Nothing beats getting out in the world and meeting people, doing something, going to a place you’ve never been before. I’ve met so many people – I would observe their frustrations and their insecurities and their hopes and dreams and I ended up absorbing all of that, that went into the characters in the movie.

Now that you’ve been immersed in the DJ world, do you notice things you didn’t before? Ever heard someone and thought, that guy’s not doing it right?

Meaghan: Absolutely! I was at Comic-Con this year, we were at a party and I was being such a snobby brat about the music, the whole time, because… it just wasn’t good.

Meaghan, your script The Remains earned a spot on the coveted Blacklist, the informal collection of notable screenplays compiled by industry executives. Is a character-driven drama still the best way to get noticed, even if Hollywood focuses on epic, action properties?

Meaghan: Coming from a theater background, everything is character driven. You can have the biggest action movie in the world and I still think that films that people are going to love are going to have characters you can connect to. That’s why people go to the movies.

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Matthew Wade Reynolds has been a writer, journalist and Hollywood development executive for most of the waking hours of his adult life and all of the dreaming hours of his childhood. <br> <table> <tr> <td><a href="mailto:Matthewwadereynolds@yahoo.com"><img src="http://creativescreenwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/email.png" style="height:25px"></a></td> <td><a href="mailto:Matthewwadereynolds@yahoo.com">Matthewwadereynolds@yahoo.com</a></td> </tr> </table>

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