| By Fred Topel
In Theaters November 11
|
Jon Favreau became the guru to single guys everywhere when he wrote and starred in Swingers. When he made his directorial debut with Made, he showed an evolution towards adulthood. Now he’s two movies into a career as a children’s filmmaker, with Elf launching a Will Ferrell franchise and the new Zathura going where Jumanji didn’t dare.
“I think having kids made my frame of reference change,” Favreau said. “If you look at Made, the movie I did before I had kids, there’s a lot of cursing in it. It was a strong R, there was violence in it. And you have kids and just everything shifts a little bit. And I’m also not the new, edgy guy anymore. I’m not the hip guy doing the buddy dating comedy movies. There’s new people doing that. So now I have to use my strengths which are I understand the process of filmmaking. I think I’m bringing something fresh to a movie of this size. But if I was doing little indies now, I don't know that I have a voice for that anymore.”
Don’t think Favreau has sold out though. Call it evolution. “I think it’s just a natural progression. After challenging the establishment, you then become the establishment. And it’s not just me. I see it in my friends, like Vince Vaughn. He’s doing Wedding Crashers, made a tremendous amount of money, with essentially the same style of humor that we were using in Swingers that made less than five million dollars. I think the times change as we become the establishment and our tastes become more commercial because the people who grew up watching our stuff are now part of the marketplace and we more closely represent the mainstream.”
Zathura is Chris Van Allsburg’s follow-up to Jumanji. Instead of the jungle, this board game launches a group of kids into outer space. A fan of classic sci-fi, Favreau was right at home with Van Allsburg’s visuals.
“This movie was an excuse because of the style of Chris Van Allsburg’s book and all the drawings from the book and the fact that this game, we made it a ‘50s tin toy as opposed to just a board game with dice. It was an excuse to use all the imagery from all the old science fiction movies. So it wasn’t just a matter of getting to do science fiction. It was getting a chance to do science fiction in the style of the movies that were doing it when I was growing up. And we took free reign to tailor it to however we wanted, knowing that even if it didn’t look great, it would still look appropriate.”
That means that minimizing CGI may look less realistic, but it feels more connected to the classics. “The biggest thing that we did that departed from how movies are normally done now is we decided to shoot the spaceships in the way they would have in the old Star Wars movies as opposed to the new Star Wars movies. Instead of just pouring money into a CGI budget, we built miniatures and did motion control and shot it on a miniature stage and comped it together. That was the most fun for me because that’s really like getting to do it the way they used to do it and it’s just fun. Then you have something to hang up in your house.”
You’ll see a house floating in outer space, but you won’t see it blast off, because that’s not how it was done back then. “It’s a discovery. You wouldn’t get that really cool shot that they used in Close Encounters where the little kid opens the door and the light’s coming through it. The paradigm for the imagery really is as much grounded in Wizard of Oz as it is in anything science fiction. And Wizard of Oz is really a parable for a dream. Every movie should be seen as though it could be a dream as well. The images and the impressions that you get I think really unfold quite well, the way [screenwriter] David Koepp has conceived it. And the more literal you got with it, the less impressionistic you got, the more it became an intellectual journey as opposed to an emotional journey which I think movies, you have to feel movies. You can’t just understand them.”
With three movies under his belt, Favreau now sees himself more as a director than an actor. “Acting’s fun but I don’t like living out of a suitcase and the opportunities I get as a director are much more interesting than as a character actor or supporting actor. If people want to hire me and I’m available, I love to do it. I try to do at least one thing a year. But much of the time as a director, you have to be watching over some aspect of the process, so it takes somebody like Vince producing a movie to make the time for me to fit in to do anything substantial.”
Vaughn’s upcoming comedy, The Breakup, reunites the Swingers duo. “I think it’s always going to be some version of that with me and him because he was, at least when I worked with him, I wrote scenes for us. With this, he was like, ‘Okay, just come, just do this.’ I said, ‘There’s two lines here. Is that really what you want?’ ‘No, we’ll do something.’ Sure enough it turns into like four page scenes. But that comes very easily to Vince. If you saw his work in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, those were all tiny like quarter page scenes that he rewrote into these huge set pieces in the makeup trailer. So me and him together, we have very similar sensibilities and we bounce off each other well. So I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I know the stuff we shot was a lot of fun.”
As for his other kids’ movie, there are plans for an Elf 2, but not with Favreau. “Will is on board from what I understand to do it, but I think you get one Christmas movie as a director in you and I don’t really have much more to say on that. I was very happy with Elf. I wouldn’t know where to go with it from that point.” |
