Q&A: Young director talks about “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl”

Fox Searchlight’s new film, “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” has garnered a lot of buzz after its debut at the Sundance Film Festival, and with its nationwide release about a month away, director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon opens up about the filmmaking process and why this movie met so much to him.

 

Question: How hard is it when there’s a novel that accompanies the movie?  Does it give you more creative freedom, less creative freedom?  How’s the process going into that?

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon: “Well, I think it has to do a lot with the writer, and that’s Jesse Andrews.  And he is the least precious writer I’ve ever met.  He’s hysterical.  He would be the first person to let something go if it’s not working.  And I started with the screenplay.  I received the screenplay first, which was in very good shape, and then later read the novel, only after I’d gotten the job and found that he and Dan Fogelman would work on the script together with Jeff Sommerville, had really found the right shape and structure for a film. 

            And then it was just about finding little gems in the novel that would get us out of some jams or flesh out of character’s back-story if we needed to, or sometimes just flesh out of character’s back story so you can a talk to an actor and not necessarily have to put it in the script as exposition.  Like who is Marla?  Who is Greg’s mom?  In the movie, she doesn’t even have a name.  In the book, it’s Marla.  What’s her back story? 

            It was never daunting because the script was already in such good shape.  It was just about my collaboration with the writer and novelist, and that was the easiest thing, part of the whole process.  We became very good friends.”

Question: Can you talk about what it was like working with young, mostly unknown talent, along with talent that’s been around, like Nick Offerman, Connie Britton, and just the balance between those two groups of talent?

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon: “Yes.  Look, I have nothing but beautiful things to say.  I wish I had a really juicy story for you, Scott.  But everything was—obviously, first of all, Greg and Rachel, Olivia and Thomas, auditioned for this movie over and over again over the course of almost a year when the movie was about to get off the ground and it didn’t.  So, we got to know each other through that process. 

            By the end, they were auditioning with a lot of many, many, many, heavy, heavy scenes, like 20-page auditions with size from—because I had to make sure that they can handle the humor of it in a way that was effortless, that it felt like they weren’t selling a joke, you know, and the drama without being melodramatic, and still the voice of a 17-year-old. 

            And then over the process of that whole audition, Olivia and Greg and Thomas became very close.  And RJ was the last person to come in.  I was struggling to find Earl, and then I saw his audition tape, and he had this—although he’s very raw and doesn’t have any experience before this.  Certainly Olivia and Thomas have made films.  She’s on a TV show.  It’s quite successful.  But RJ had this unique and very beautiful raw talent.  He embodied Earl, and more importantly, together they complemented each other in the way they needed to, and it was fun to see.  

            So with Thomas and Olivia, with every actor, you treat them, you have to be intuitive to a point as a director and know what they need.  Do they want notes?  Do they want to try it on their own?  Do they want to talk about the character at length before starting?  It’s a case by case thing with an actor. 

            And RJ, little by little, certainly in the big fight that he has with Greg outside of his house, that was one of the most beautiful nights of my life as a director or just as a witness to an actor discovering himself and what he was capable of doing.  He didn’t even know he was able to go that deep.  And some of the scenes, some of the takes that you see in the film were some of the earlier takes, because the later ones just got deeper and deeper and deeper to the point that there was an unbalance and the movie didn’t quite fit.  But it was amazing and magical to see him discovering himself and discovering the talent that he had as an actor. 

            And for the adults, they knew going into it that there wasn’t going to be a green room or a trailer, they may have to do some of their makeup themselves.  And so we chatted before, usually one-on-one over dinner or phone calls, and when they came in, they knew the rules of this shoot, that there was nobody a village, we’re just all going to all hang out like a family, and they embraced it.  And all of them had an incredible sense of humor.  And most of all, they all found the truth in their roles.  Even if Greg’s dad, this woolly eccentric, he found the truth in his portrayal, and he found the truth and the comedy.  Everyone was in the same movie, and that was something that I had to look out for to make sure that it was all well-balanced and calibrated so that every humor came from a real place, and the drama didn’t feel over the top either.”

 

Question: Can you talk about the setting and the way you presented the town it took place?

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon: “It was set in Pittsburgh.  The novel was set in Pittsburgh.  The screenplay was set in Pittsburgh, but if you read the screenplay, it could have taken place anywhere.  I scouted Pittsburgh.  There had been talk to shoot near in New York City, like Nyack, New York, and take advantage of the crews.  But when I visited Pittsburgh, I fell in love with it, the architecture, the texture that was so different, depending on what neighborhood you went to, the verticality of it, that it just started to open up the movie more and more and make it more and more visual.

            Earl’s neighborhood is in a place called Braddock, I think.  In that first flashback, you’ll see the house is bright yellow.  There’s a little bit of a hyperreal quality to that world because it is a memory of them as children, and yellow is the color that we associated and we assigned to Rachel. 

            And then you have the Schenley High School, which is an abandoned high school in Pittsburgh where the writer had actually gone.  And that had a very institutional feel with 20-foot ceilings, neoclassical architecture.  It’s beautiful.  And then you have Greg’s home, and you have her home in Murray Hill that’s beautiful and vertical and on a beautiful hill.  Pittsburgh gave me so many options that became characters on their own and really helped flesh out our actors’ worlds and define them.”

Question: Were there any films you watched beforehand or tried to channel into this story consciously or subconsciously?

Alfonso Goemz-Rejon: “Yes.  To get the job, I put together a mood reel, like a sizzle reel of what I was feeling, so I had to really think in those terms.  I love movies.  I’m a cinephile, if that wasn’t already clear from the movie.  I love movies.  But there are a few films that I saw over and over again for a number of reasons, the lead roles, the characters that reminded me of Greg a little that were in that tradition, and also the economy of style.  I only had 23 or 24 days to make my movie.

            They were Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude, and Mike Nichols’ The Graduate.  Those two movies I saw over and over again because I saw a lot of Bud Cort in Greg, Harold, and I saw a lot of Ben Braddock, you know the Hoffman character, in Greg as well, and I like that approach, these outsiders.  And I liked the way they were treated in both those films.  They were almost in a different world, kind of a different stratosphere. 

            Ours are very grounded.  Molly and Nick and Connie are quite grounded.  Maybe Nick comes closer to the style where the adults are portrayed in say Nichols’ The Graduate.  I liked the looseness of Hal Ashby and the very controlled aesthetic of The Graduate, but it was certainly those two films that I thought this could be in that tradition and certainly The Breakfast Club, that more than anything in the casting of it.

            I love the way John Hughes casts him movies.  They’re so authentic and accessible.  Every one of these kids is so accessible, and I always thought Anthony Michael Hall was someone that I thought about for Greg, even though there was an early push to make him more of a young Jonah Hill because he’s always joking about his weight in the novel and then first drafts of the screenplay.  I think that works so well on paper, but in the film the joke might be a bit easy and a bit broad.  Look, I love everything Scorsese.  I love Powell Pressburger, Woody Allen, of course.  I saw a lot of Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors and Hannah and Her Sisters

            Again, the economy of style and as a scene with a lot of talking, but I needed to keep it a visual—it needed to be.  Because we’re celebrating movies on some level, it needed to be a visual movie, a visual experience, not just masters and over-the-shoulder shots and close-ups.  So yes, those are the films that I saw over and over again.”

 

Question: What was your original goal when you started making this film, and who do you think your intended audience was at the start of filming?

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon: “Well, I never think of who the audience is going to be.  I think it’s just a scary trap to fall into because it was a movie I was going to make for myself.  And it’s horrible to say that.  But I thought it was universal.  I thought the screenplay offered me an opportunity to process loss in a way that I hadn’t.  I had lost my dad shortly—you see it’s dedicated to him.  

            I had thrown myself into my work.  I was directing a lot of television, Glee and American Horror Story, and I was having a great time and experimenting so much, certainly in American Horror Story.  But I wasn’t dealing with anything head-on, my own feelings and who I was and the kind of films I was trying to make.  And when I read the screenplay, I wasn’t trying to make the young adult movie.  That wasn’t my goal.  In fact, when I first started reading it, I thought the high school stuff was really fun, but I wasn’t out trying to make a high school movie.  I just really identified with Greg and his journey. 

            And from the Mr. McCarthy scene when he tells him that people’s lives continue to unfold, you just have to pay attention, I was very moved by that line, and at that point I was hooked on the screenplay, but I was really hooked on Greg.  I really felt I identified with Greg.  I think when you lose a parent, that relationship is always, you’re always a child, so I felt like this lost kid. 

            And at the end, I love how he’s putting himself back together, learning about her after she’s gone, and that was okay.  And I thought maybe I could learn about letting go and I can learn about integration by making this movie.  And so I did it because I thought it was funny.  I thought it was moving, and I thought I could make a good movie out of it, but I mainly did it because I thought I could express myself and tell a personal story, which is very different from television directing.  It’s very machine-like.  So, that’s what drew me to the story. 

            And the production of the movie I found quite healing and therapeutic, just making the movie, being surrounded by people that supported me and protected my vision.  And then at the very end, my producer had the first title.  I was always going to bury it somewhere at the very end, and then we showed it for the first time with that title, with that dedication at Sundance, no one had seen it before.  And that led to questions about my dad, and it forced me to talk about him as opposed to avoid it, and so it’s become a very therapeutic process for me, and it’s deeply personal. 

            And I was doing it so I could bury myself in Greg, and now I’m right there front and center answering these questions about my dad.  But it’s nice because now people ask me about my dad, and his story is unfolding in a really beautiful way, an unexpected way.”

           

            “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” is rated PG-13 for sexual content, drug material, language and some thematic elements. It will be released nationwide on June 12th.