Daniel Waters and The Fine Art of Resurfacing
The Heathers screenwriter is back in prime form with his hilarious, poignant, and philosophically challenging second directorial feature, Sex and Death 101.
By Terry Keefe
First there were the John Hughes teen films. Then there was Heathers.
To truly understand the impact of Heathers on the teen/high school genre of feature films, it certainly helps to have lived through the 80s. But when it arrived in theaters in 1989, Heathers was like the first blasts of punk demolishing the stale and bloated dinosaurs of 70s rock. It was a black comedy about murder and suicide in a genre where the endings generally featured the nerdy lead winning over their true love at the prom or its equivalent. Heathers, on the other hand, concluded with Winona Ryder trying to stop her romantic interest Christian Slater from blowing up the entire high school. And he actually ends up combusting himself. The dialogue was laced with comedic arsenic, and quickly became oft-quoted. Its influences can be traced directly to hits of today like Juno and Mean Girls, along with blatant rip-offs like 1999’s Jawbreaker. Think the Plastics of Mean Girls were totally original? How very.
Heathers was written by South Bend, Indiana native Daniel Waters, who quickly became one of the hottest scribes in Hollywood, piling up writing credits on studio productions like The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, Hudson Hawk, Demolition Man, and Batman Returns. The latter of that group of films is the only one which really felt like it came from Waters’ distinctive voice and there are many who consider it the best of the Batman series. With most of his other credits, the freshness of Waters’ writing seemed to disappear into what his own bio describes as “a failing-upwards montage of big-budget studio pictures.”
To truly understand the impact of Heathers on the teen/high school genre of feature films, it certainly helps to have lived through the 80s. But when it arrived in theaters in 1989, Heathers was like the first blasts of punk demolishing the stale and bloated dinosaurs of 70s rock. It was a black comedy about murder and suicide in a genre where the endings generally featured the nerdy lead winning over their true love at the prom or its equivalent. Heathers, on the other hand, concluded with Winona Ryder trying to stop her romantic interest Christian Slater from blowing up the entire high school. And he actually ends up combusting himself. The dialogue was laced with comedic arsenic, and quickly became oft-quoted. Its influences can be traced directly to hits of today like Juno and Mean Girls, along with blatant rip-offs like 1999’s Jawbreaker. Think the Plastics of Mean Girls were totally original? How very.
Heathers was written by South Bend, Indiana native Daniel Waters, who quickly became one of the hottest scribes in Hollywood, piling up writing credits on studio productions like The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, Hudson Hawk, Demolition Man, and Batman Returns. The latter of that group of films is the only one which really felt like it came from Waters’ distinctive voice and there are many who consider it the best of the Batman series. With most of his other credits, the freshness of Waters’ writing seemed to disappear into what his own bio describes as “a failing-upwards montage of big-budget studio pictures.”
That montage has come to a close with this month’s arrival of Sex and Death 101, which Waters wrote and directed. It’s not just a return to form for Waters, but also a significant evolution. He successfully blends more traditional strains of romantic comedy with other plot points which are as black as anything in Heathers. It’s a difficult trick to pull off, particularly as the film also has a lot of heart, and a number of larger, more existential issues on its mind. The plot centers on Roderick Blank (played by Simon Baker), a successful businessman who is on his way to being married when he receives a mysterious list of every person he has had sex with to date, as well as every person he will ever have sex with in his entire life. It’s effectively a print-out of every future sure thing, which sounds great at first, until he realizes that the last name on the list belongs to a black widow by the name of Death Nell, played by Winona Ryder, who has been leaving a trail of lascivious men either dead or comatose. The list of conquests was mistakenly, or perhaps not so mistakenly, let loose by a group of employees of a fate-like entity called the Machine, and the film raises some rather troubling questions about the nature of destiny and whether one can do anything to change it.
In the press notes, it said that you had been writing Sex and Death 101 on and off for some 15 years?
Daniel Waters: Well, the one question I can never answer properly is “How long did it take you to write it?” Because it implies that I sit down and say [faux bombastic], “This is the next script I am going to write. And this will be the first day I write and I will write three pages every day until I am done.” And nothing ever works out like that. A lot of the movies I write, I had the idea for them a long time ago. But I’ll basically put off the actual writing of something for as long as I can. I’m like one of those mothers screaming for the baby not to come out [laughs], and finally, it eventually pushes out whether I like it or not. With an idea like this one, this premise, it’s intentionally a bit episodic. So you have a very simple premise and the more you think about it, you go, “Oh, what if this happened and what if this happened…” It’s the kind of movie that you do kind of nurse for a long time in its creation, and you don’t just sit down and write it all at once. What I like about this premise, in general - about a man who gets a list of not only everyone he has had sex with, but also everyone he ever will have sex with – if you think about that premise for five minutes, it sounds like the greatest thing in the world to happen to a guy. But if you think about it for ten minutes, it sounds like a curse and a disaster. Even when I told my Red State family members about it, at first they were like, “Oh, that’s crude and that’s sick and that’s disgusting.” But then, even they get kind of drawn into the idea and say, “Well, what if you fell in love with somebody who wasn’t on the list?” and “What if there was a dude on the list?” [laughs] I can just see them lying awake sweating at night and going “No!!!” [laughs]
Simon Baker gets put through the wringer.
Do you typically work on a number of different scripts at once then? Obviously, not the studio assignments but the labor of love stuff like Sex and Death?
The labors of love are definitely the slow cookers. The orchids that stay in the greenhouse for years and years. I would say that the next three “spec” ideas that I have, are ideas that I came up with during the 80s and which I’ve been nursing, and sniffing, and growing, but which I’m not quite ready to write yet. You know, the whole screenwriter subculture teaches you to have these very simple, beginning, middle, and end structures. “They” say that structure is the most important thing, but to me, a screenwriting book that says “Structure is the most important thing” is kind of like a book about horseback riding that says “Having a horse is the most important thing.” Well…yeah, thank you [laughs], but in actual writing, you’ve got to go a little bit beyond that. Yeah, the beginning, middle, and end…that comes to me pretty quickly, but now [laughs], I’m going to start writing and mess up that beginning, middle, and end. Make it more complicated, go down some cul-de-sacs. I like messiness, you know?
Was the germ of the idea for the film the list he receives of all his past and future sex partners?
In terms of the germ...you know, I see every movie that comes out. Last year, I set my record: 311 first-run, in a theater movies that I saw. I’m very much a viewer of movies. I’ve always said that I wanted to be the male Pauline Kael when I was growing up, but the movies weren’t good enough [laughs]. So I was kind of forced into writing, and so, I come at it as filmgoer. Especially with Heathers….I was seeing a lot of high school movies, but I wasn’t seeing that indefinable high school movie that I wanted to see. So I ended up writing the movie that I wanted to see. Sex and Death kind of came from the same process. You see a million movies about violence. There are more movies about serial killers than there are actual serial killers. But movies about sex…they were kind of in three categories. First, you’ve got the kind of goofy, raunchy, immature, ejaculation movies, where you think sex is something like a beer bong: something wacky and fun. Secondly, you’ve got the commercial romantic comedies where, usually the two characters are sniping the entire movie, then they run after a cab, and they have sex during the closing credits. So there actually isn’t any sex. Or if there is, it’s in what I call the Definitely Maybe Actually love movies. Where sex is kind of like this cute thing, where, first, their feet are touching under the table…. [laughs]. And then last, thirdly, there are the art films where sex is just this agonizing experience [laughs]. Where it’s the worst thing in the world. Usually, it’s two family members with each other, or something equally awful. So, somehow there wasn’t the right sex movie for me. Because I wanted a movie that took sex seriously. That it is a dangerous thing, but it also can be fun. If memory serves [laughs]. Those thoughts inspired me and got me to thinking about making a movie that was like a big circus tent, where I could get everything about sexuality I wanted into. So, from there, the premise started to develop. In real life, you’re on a date with somebody, maybe your third date with somebody, and things are going well. But there’s this weird thing where it’s “Are we just having a great time as friends, or is there something sexual? And wouldn’t it be great if I could just look at a print-out? [laughs] It would save me a lot of emotional distress and some money, perhaps.” And so the story kind of developed from there. And the list could be bliss, or doom. Maybe you got your list and it had three names on it [laughs]. So, first came my need for this movie. Then the idle thought came that I could kind of touch on every possible sexual thing. I stayed away from incest though, you know, and tried to keep cows of it [laughs]. The Elliot Spitzer/N.Y. Governor thing happened last week, and the response from the public was such shock. In this movie, I start Simon Baker off like Elliot Spitzer…he has everything and has a great life. But I’m saying in the film, with a man, deep down there’s always that thing, if you scratch the surface…morality doesn’t come easily. The way they treated Elliot Spitzer was like “Morality and faithfulness should be expected of every man.” Well, no, it’s a heroic thing and you have to really fight for it. It’s funny, because I was just talking to someone who was comparing Judd Apatow’s movies to my movie. And I love Judd Apatow’s movies, but they have a kind of comforting philosophy, in that they start out with these raunchy guys, but deep down they’re sweethearts who are going to be wonderful to their women and learn about love. But to me…I know a lot of guys, and unfortunately sometimes I’m one of them, where we remember Valentine’s Day; we know how to treat a woman; if she’s asking about a haircut, we know to say that we like the haircut. We do everything right, but deep-down, we can be monsters. It’s a less comforting thing [laughs], so I don’t know if it will have the same overall appeal as Mr. Apatow’s movies.
The labors of love are definitely the slow cookers. The orchids that stay in the greenhouse for years and years. I would say that the next three “spec” ideas that I have, are ideas that I came up with during the 80s and which I’ve been nursing, and sniffing, and growing, but which I’m not quite ready to write yet. You know, the whole screenwriter subculture teaches you to have these very simple, beginning, middle, and end structures. “They” say that structure is the most important thing, but to me, a screenwriting book that says “Structure is the most important thing” is kind of like a book about horseback riding that says “Having a horse is the most important thing.” Well…yeah, thank you [laughs], but in actual writing, you’ve got to go a little bit beyond that. Yeah, the beginning, middle, and end…that comes to me pretty quickly, but now [laughs], I’m going to start writing and mess up that beginning, middle, and end. Make it more complicated, go down some cul-de-sacs. I like messiness, you know?
Was the germ of the idea for the film the list he receives of all his past and future sex partners?
In terms of the germ...you know, I see every movie that comes out. Last year, I set my record: 311 first-run, in a theater movies that I saw. I’m very much a viewer of movies. I’ve always said that I wanted to be the male Pauline Kael when I was growing up, but the movies weren’t good enough [laughs]. So I was kind of forced into writing, and so, I come at it as filmgoer. Especially with Heathers….I was seeing a lot of high school movies, but I wasn’t seeing that indefinable high school movie that I wanted to see. So I ended up writing the movie that I wanted to see. Sex and Death kind of came from the same process. You see a million movies about violence. There are more movies about serial killers than there are actual serial killers. But movies about sex…they were kind of in three categories. First, you’ve got the kind of goofy, raunchy, immature, ejaculation movies, where you think sex is something like a beer bong: something wacky and fun. Secondly, you’ve got the commercial romantic comedies where, usually the two characters are sniping the entire movie, then they run after a cab, and they have sex during the closing credits. So there actually isn’t any sex. Or if there is, it’s in what I call the Definitely Maybe Actually love movies. Where sex is kind of like this cute thing, where, first, their feet are touching under the table…. [laughs]. And then last, thirdly, there are the art films where sex is just this agonizing experience [laughs]. Where it’s the worst thing in the world. Usually, it’s two family members with each other, or something equally awful. So, somehow there wasn’t the right sex movie for me. Because I wanted a movie that took sex seriously. That it is a dangerous thing, but it also can be fun. If memory serves [laughs]. Those thoughts inspired me and got me to thinking about making a movie that was like a big circus tent, where I could get everything about sexuality I wanted into. So, from there, the premise started to develop. In real life, you’re on a date with somebody, maybe your third date with somebody, and things are going well. But there’s this weird thing where it’s “Are we just having a great time as friends, or is there something sexual? And wouldn’t it be great if I could just look at a print-out? [laughs] It would save me a lot of emotional distress and some money, perhaps.” And so the story kind of developed from there. And the list could be bliss, or doom. Maybe you got your list and it had three names on it [laughs]. So, first came my need for this movie. Then the idle thought came that I could kind of touch on every possible sexual thing. I stayed away from incest though, you know, and tried to keep cows of it [laughs]. The Elliot Spitzer/N.Y. Governor thing happened last week, and the response from the public was such shock. In this movie, I start Simon Baker off like Elliot Spitzer…he has everything and has a great life. But I’m saying in the film, with a man, deep down there’s always that thing, if you scratch the surface…morality doesn’t come easily. The way they treated Elliot Spitzer was like “Morality and faithfulness should be expected of every man.” Well, no, it’s a heroic thing and you have to really fight for it. It’s funny, because I was just talking to someone who was comparing Judd Apatow’s movies to my movie. And I love Judd Apatow’s movies, but they have a kind of comforting philosophy, in that they start out with these raunchy guys, but deep down they’re sweethearts who are going to be wonderful to their women and learn about love. But to me…I know a lot of guys, and unfortunately sometimes I’m one of them, where we remember Valentine’s Day; we know how to treat a woman; if she’s asking about a haircut, we know to say that we like the haircut. We do everything right, but deep-down, we can be monsters. It’s a less comforting thing [laughs], so I don’t know if it will have the same overall appeal as Mr. Apatow’s movies.
The List of Doom.
There will certainly be people who make the easy comparison, humor-wise, of Sex and Death to the Apatow films. I found myself thinking much more of Shampoo, particularly in regards to how Simon Baker and Warren Beatty are similar kinds of slick operators who get in over their heads with their relationships. It’s been years since I’ve seen Shampoo, but it sprung to mind right away.
Well, thank you. In the 70s, there were definitely these kinds of movies that were much darker….people are certainly still having sex today, but movies in the 70s actually seemed to know what sex was. They seemed to be made by people who actually had sex [laughs]. Today, it seems like the movies are made by these people who think, “Oh, wouldn’t it be funny if this movie had that sex thing we all heard about?” It wasn’t just Shampoo, but Carnal Knowledge, and Paul Mazursky’s movies too. Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. Blume in Love. These are movies that they don’t seem to make anymore which kind of deal with sexuality head-on. Movies now are kind of built around sex, but not actual sex.
Well, thank you. In the 70s, there were definitely these kinds of movies that were much darker….people are certainly still having sex today, but movies in the 70s actually seemed to know what sex was. They seemed to be made by people who actually had sex [laughs]. Today, it seems like the movies are made by these people who think, “Oh, wouldn’t it be funny if this movie had that sex thing we all heard about?” It wasn’t just Shampoo, but Carnal Knowledge, and Paul Mazursky’s movies too. Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. Blume in Love. These are movies that they don’t seem to make anymore which kind of deal with sexuality head-on. Movies now are kind of built around sex, but not actual sex.
Had you considered casting a lead who isn’t as dashing as Simon Baker?
Ben Stiller loved the script and he was thinking of doing it for awhile. I’ve always said that if Ben Stiller had done the film, it would have been the Richard Benjamin movie, and with Simon, it ended up kind of being the Warren Beatty movie [laughs]. Even though every document that describes the film seems to refer to Simon’s character as a ladies man, I don’t think that, initially, he is a ladies man. I didn’t want to fall into one of two traps: I didn’t want him to be the crazy, nerdy guy who gets the magic lamp and goes, “Whoo-hoo, look at this! Boobies for me every night!” [laughs] That movie I didn’t want to see. But nor did I want to see the kind of Jude Law-Alfie movie where he goes, [mock British accent] “I can’t help it. All these women have sex with me.” Where it’s something a guy can’t really relate to. He starts off with a list of 29 names that he's already been with, which, for some of us, is not a bad roster [laughs]. I didn’t want it to be 80 names and I didn’t want it to be 3 names. I wanted it to be a guy who had a healthy sex life. Who wasn’t wanting of a sex life. But I wanted to keep it all somewhere in the middle. Now, Simon is erring a little bit on the side of good-looking, but I realized that was invaluable. I think [having Simon as the lead] makes people more comfortable watching the movie, because it doesn’t feel as exploitative, because the audience is like, “At least the woman is getting something out of this [laughs].” If it were a more relatable-looking guy in the lead, with his shirt off, it would have become too much of a male fantasy, when I wanted it to be a movie that both sexes could enjoy. Also, along those lines….I didn’t want it to be just his story. I didn’t want this crazy, tightly-cut montage of him just having sex with different women. With some exceptions, each woman in the story…we stop and get to know them a bit. And Simon is equally a part of their own journey, as they are a part of his journey. He’s not getting off easy in his journey, with a Bimbo of the Week. It helped us during the shooting the movie also, because when each of these actresses showed up on the set, she’s not a supporting character. She may be a supporting character in the grand scheme of the story, but that day she’s the star of the movie. She’s the female lead of the movie. So you end up getting better work from her, and when it’s all put together on screen, it’s a little bit like a Fellini movie, like 8 ½ or La Dolce vita…they each have a lot of different women, but when each of them is on screen, they make a real impression.
I love that Simon Baker had to get the “Friend Speech.”
[laughs] One of the first questions to him at the Austin Film Festival was “Really? You in the Friend Zone?” It’s funny because I had to do a lot of explaining to Simon what the Friend Zone was [laughs]. He was like, “What do you mean you’re attracted to a woman and she won’t have sex with you? What is this phenomenon you speak of?” I always say that it’s good that the director had a lot of experience with this [laughs] to help explain it to Simon.
It’s a great moment in the Friend Zone for Simon when Leslie Bibb points out some idiot that she casually slept with recently and he’s stunned. “That guy?!”
I’m glad you brought that up, because there are a lot of movies about unrequited love and, to me, the difference between movies about unrequited love and the actual reality of unrequited love, is usually the woman you have the unrequited love relationship with…it doesn’t mean that she’s not having sex with other people [laughs]. People she would actually admit are inferior to you. This is a phenomenon that never gets explored in movies, because you don’t like to have your lead actress be a sexual being. Either she’s having sex with nobody, or she’s going to wait until the end, when she catches up to the cab [laughs]. That’s the creepiness of the real world. These women today – they keep having sex! It’s ridiculous. [laughs]
Leslie Bibb’s speech, when she sort of explains that being “just a friend” to Simon, is far more valuable in her eyes than sleeping with him, is quite sweet and moving. And I’ve never seen the topic examined from that angle in a film. The guy who gets the friend speech is usually depicted as very much on the losing end of the deal.
Ben Stiller loved the script and he was thinking of doing it for awhile. I’ve always said that if Ben Stiller had done the film, it would have been the Richard Benjamin movie, and with Simon, it ended up kind of being the Warren Beatty movie [laughs]. Even though every document that describes the film seems to refer to Simon’s character as a ladies man, I don’t think that, initially, he is a ladies man. I didn’t want to fall into one of two traps: I didn’t want him to be the crazy, nerdy guy who gets the magic lamp and goes, “Whoo-hoo, look at this! Boobies for me every night!” [laughs] That movie I didn’t want to see. But nor did I want to see the kind of Jude Law-Alfie movie where he goes, [mock British accent] “I can’t help it. All these women have sex with me.” Where it’s something a guy can’t really relate to. He starts off with a list of 29 names that he's already been with, which, for some of us, is not a bad roster [laughs]. I didn’t want it to be 80 names and I didn’t want it to be 3 names. I wanted it to be a guy who had a healthy sex life. Who wasn’t wanting of a sex life. But I wanted to keep it all somewhere in the middle. Now, Simon is erring a little bit on the side of good-looking, but I realized that was invaluable. I think [having Simon as the lead] makes people more comfortable watching the movie, because it doesn’t feel as exploitative, because the audience is like, “At least the woman is getting something out of this [laughs].” If it were a more relatable-looking guy in the lead, with his shirt off, it would have become too much of a male fantasy, when I wanted it to be a movie that both sexes could enjoy. Also, along those lines….I didn’t want it to be just his story. I didn’t want this crazy, tightly-cut montage of him just having sex with different women. With some exceptions, each woman in the story…we stop and get to know them a bit. And Simon is equally a part of their own journey, as they are a part of his journey. He’s not getting off easy in his journey, with a Bimbo of the Week. It helped us during the shooting the movie also, because when each of these actresses showed up on the set, she’s not a supporting character. She may be a supporting character in the grand scheme of the story, but that day she’s the star of the movie. She’s the female lead of the movie. So you end up getting better work from her, and when it’s all put together on screen, it’s a little bit like a Fellini movie, like 8 ½ or La Dolce vita…they each have a lot of different women, but when each of them is on screen, they make a real impression.
I love that Simon Baker had to get the “Friend Speech.”
[laughs] One of the first questions to him at the Austin Film Festival was “Really? You in the Friend Zone?” It’s funny because I had to do a lot of explaining to Simon what the Friend Zone was [laughs]. He was like, “What do you mean you’re attracted to a woman and she won’t have sex with you? What is this phenomenon you speak of?” I always say that it’s good that the director had a lot of experience with this [laughs] to help explain it to Simon.
It’s a great moment in the Friend Zone for Simon when Leslie Bibb points out some idiot that she casually slept with recently and he’s stunned. “That guy?!”
I’m glad you brought that up, because there are a lot of movies about unrequited love and, to me, the difference between movies about unrequited love and the actual reality of unrequited love, is usually the woman you have the unrequited love relationship with…it doesn’t mean that she’s not having sex with other people [laughs]. People she would actually admit are inferior to you. This is a phenomenon that never gets explored in movies, because you don’t like to have your lead actress be a sexual being. Either she’s having sex with nobody, or she’s going to wait until the end, when she catches up to the cab [laughs]. That’s the creepiness of the real world. These women today – they keep having sex! It’s ridiculous. [laughs]
Leslie Bibb’s speech, when she sort of explains that being “just a friend” to Simon, is far more valuable in her eyes than sleeping with him, is quite sweet and moving. And I’ve never seen the topic examined from that angle in a film. The guy who gets the friend speech is usually depicted as very much on the losing end of the deal.
There were two speeches in the movie that my female friends say should be on laminated cards. The first one is the speech that Julie Bowen gives to Simon where she basically says, “You’re a nice guy, but put up or shut up. Are you going to be the person that I’m going to spend the rest of my life with or not?” Then the other [is the Leslie Bibb speech]. Because it’s true that a lot of women have sexual relationships, but a friendship is a much more valuable and important thing to them.
Winona Ryder as Death Nell.
Had you kept up with Winona over the years since Heathers?
Yeah, her mad desire for a Heathers sequel kept us in touch. We’ve had a bit of a “Hello, Newman!” relationship [laughs], where she’ll see me somewhere and cross her arms and give me a pouty smile, because I haven’t written Heathers II yet.
She’d actually want to do a Heathers II?
She’s desperate to do a Heathers II. To me, we’re even way past Two Jakes land now though [laughs] ! I don’t understand why anybody would care about a Heathers sequel. But I definitely kept that carrot in front of the rabbit when I asked her to do this.
Ryder (far right) and the Heathers.
Have you come up with any ideas for a Heathers sequel though?
I do give it some thought sometimes because I have this great actress after me to do it. Maybe a couple of years after Heathers came out, I was drunk at a party and threw out this idea that Winona would be working in a senator’s office, for a senator named Heather [laughs]. The senator would be a Hillary Clinton type…I think this was even before Hillary Clinton came to prominence, and she'd played by Meryl Streep. And Winona’s character, her implication to the previous high school murders would be found out. So the government would use her to investigate Senator Heather and all this stuff would happen, and she’d end up assassinating the President. This whole wild flight of fancy. And, maybe like two years later, Winona comes up to me and says, “I’ve talked to Meryl. She’s in!” I’m like, “What? Are you kidding me?” But recently, I’ve been kind of having the idea of doing a parody of those Dangerous Minds-types of films, where the teacher comes in and tries to save the high school. So maybe Winona is a teacher who sees the same dynamics that were in place when she was in high school, and she tries to cure everything. But it becomes this big school massacre. For laughs.
Was it difficult to get her on board for Sex and Death?
God love her, but everything with Winona is a little difficult [laughs]. Especially like getting her on the phone. I think of her as kind of a dark fairy, and in fairy terms, Tinkerbell doesn’t have a cell phone. You’ve just got to let the gods sort of blow her in your way. My producers weren’t as crazy as I was about casting her in the movie, so I had to wear them down a bit. But everybody couldn’t be happier about the final performance.
They didn’t see the built-in marketing hook of your reunion with her?
I think their first concern was about actually filming. Because Winona is a true eccentric. In a good way. I think it definitely helps with this role, because she’s a lovable psychotic. She’s got this raw and wonderful humanity. I didn’t want the crazy, dark femme fatale character. I wanted somebody who was kind of playing at being the dark femme fatale.
She’s able to turn on the sweetness and that definitely works well for the role.
Yeah, there was a lot of stuff that she brought to the role. There’s a great moment in the movie that was totally her, where Simon’s line is “Did he hit you?” [in reference to Winona’s ex] and she goes, “Awww!” Like it’s so sweet that he would ask that.
You’ve got a lot of tones to balance in this and it works –
[Speaks into my tape recorder] Do you hear that, everybody? He says, “It works!” [laughs]
It does. Extremely well actually. What type of preparations did you take to make things blend the way they did?
I’m all about a mixture of tones. For me, you wake up in the morning and you are going to experience comedy, drama, horror [laughs], and that’s every day. To me, doing a movie which is just a drama, or just a comedy, isn’t very interesting, and it doesn’t seem truthful. Especially on this topic of sexuality…sexuality is not something which has just one tone. Everything I do has too many tones. My Batman movie has too many tones. I’m a tonally challenged person. It’s my nature. To me, I can only think of what’s working for me. And to me, the alchemy’s working. It’s kind of like…I do these music compilations every year of my favorite songs of the year and give them to my friends on 2 or 3 CD’s. And it always comes back to me, like, “I love track 8 and 11. But, God, why did you put track 10 on there? It’s just noise!” And other people will say, “I loved track 10, but why did you put those first tracks on there?” So, it’s just my nature. I always say I’m half Luis Bunuel, and half Caddyshack [laughs]. You know? And somebody’s going to be pissed-off at some point. And I just hope that by the end of the movie, there has been more pleasure than shockwaves for them. But I’m not going to run away from that. It’s amazing to me, especially in the world of independent film, that they’ll forgive a sexist film if it’s honest; they’ll forgive a racist movie if it’s honest; but if a movie has more than one tone, they think you’ve done something wrong. Critics and distributors like original filmmaking, but only if it’s original in a way that they’re comfortable with and they already know [laughs] ….which goes against the entire concept of originality. So when you do a movie that has multiple tones, they might go, “Oh, he was trying to do a romantic comedy and failed.” When that isn’t what I was trying to do. My egotistical thing that I always say is… if somebody complains, “He didn’t decide whether it was a comedy or a drama,” then I say, “Well, neither did God.” [laughs]
When you’re writing black comedy, is there a line you know you can’t cross with each specific story? This one has a near-necrophilia moment in it.
I do have to rely on other people for that sometimes. I can tell you that with this particular film…in the original ending, Winona’s character talks about her life and this abusive husband that she had. And there’s this scene where her abusive husband is screaming at her, and he looks out the window and a plane’s coming, and it turns out that her husband was in one of the Towers on September 11th. And September 11th ended up being this great, liberating experience for her, which kind of also messes up her psyche and turns her into kind of a serial killer. Which I thought was really amusing. But my producers were like, “Okay. Comedy and September 11th. No.”
That might be where the line is.
And I fought for it, but I eventually gave in. But now my advice for young writers is, “Always put a September 11th scene in. Because they’re going to want you to cut it, but then you cut that and you get to keep that quasi-necrophilia scene [laughs]."
Patton Oswalt is hilarious in this as one of the custodians of the Machine. When you have someone with his improv abilities, are you tempted to just let him go and see what he comes up with, or did you stick with the script?
The thing is, I think people like Patton are appreciative when there is a script. I’d say that with lots of Patton’s acting roles, it’s like, “Let’s get that crazy Patton Oswalt and he’ll make this great! We won’t even have to write anything!” So, I think that the more that it’s on the page, the more he can go to another level. But obviously, he also did some great improvising. It does get embarrassing for a writer-director, because you’ve written a comic script, but you’re coming on take three, take four, and you’re like, “Okay, Patton, make it funnier.” That’s like your direction to him. It’s embarrassing because you’re all “I don’t need Patton Oswalt’s improv…damn it, I do!” [laughs] He’s there. Why not?
Patton Oswalt
It’s been a few years since your directorial debut Happy Campers. How has your mindset as a director changed since then?
Well, unfortunately for New Line, Happy Campers was kind of my 12 million dollar film school. I hadn’t directed anything before. I hadn’t even held the camera at a wedding. I think it was way too ambitious of a script for me. It was way too many characters. I call it “Jean Renoir meets Meatballs,” but I didn’t get Renoir or Meatballs [laughs]. That was a movie where I think the tonal changes actually did get away from me. Because it was such a big production. I’m certainly not unproud of the movie. I like a lot of it. It’s one of Justin Long’s first major roles. It’s also one of Jaime King’s first roles, and she’s never given a better performance than in this. I learned a lot. It’s funny because all of we screenwriters learn all these tricks to cut down on pages, and to make a really complicated scene seem less complicated. Joel Silver has a line about that – “The Indians take the fort.” [laughs] Okay, it’s one line in the script, but it’s maybe 90 actual scenes in production. Every screenwriter is guilty of “The Indians take the fort” trick. But then, I’m the director now and I get on the set with that and go, “Oh my god, I’ve totally screwed myself.” [laughs] So, Sex and Death was written with much more wisdom in regards to making sure I could get what I had written on film. It was a much lower budget and a much tighter schedule than Happy Campers, but that kept me on my toes completely. I knew exactly what I wanted and how to get it. Which are things I didn’t know on my first film.
You grew up in South Bend, Indiana. What was in the water there that so many good filmmakers came out of South Bend during the same period? You, Larry Karaszewski, your brother Mark Waters -
I think we all had an advantage that there was a TV show in South Bend that we all worked on. It was kind of a baby “Saturday Night Live,” written and directed by high school teenagers, called “Beyond Our Control.” And sometimes, all you need is to know that you can do it. I remember Spike Lee talking about how the most influential filmmaker for him was Jim Jarmusch, not because of his films but because he used to rent equipment to Spike at NYU, and Spike was like, “Wait a minute, if he can get a movie together, then so can I.” One of our guys [David Simkins] wrote a film called Adventures in Babysitting that got sold, and we were like, “Oh, we can all do it!” Sometimes you just need that. There’s a lot of us out here that grew up in the Midwest, and I’ve talked to a lot of them, and it’s funny…. we all sort of have the same story: in June of 1975, we all saw Jaws. And even if our filmmaking paths have not gone the Spielberg route, there was something about that movie that was such a mixture….talk about a mixture of genres! It was funny and scary, and I knew that I wanted to have something to do with the experience I just had. I remember that moment distinctly. That was just a great cinematic experience for everybody of that age. It was just phenomenal.
The story of you writing Heathers while working in a video store is all true?
Yeah, and I was doing it before I knew it was a cliché [laughs]. It was in Silver Lake and everyone thinks it was one of the cool video stores in Silver Lake. I was in the least cool video store [laughs]. There’s a Jon Voight movie called Conrack where he goes to the South and teaches kids. That’s like the video store I was at. Teaching poor children not to rent Zone Troopers just because it’s a new release, and to rent Alien instead. It’s funny, you know, I’ve been talking a lot recently about the importance of naivete. When I came out here, I didn’t read Variety. I didn’t know what scripts were hot and what scripts weren’t hot. I just wrote Heathers because I wanted to see Heathers. And it certainly wasn’t a movie that anyone thought would get made, even though it did get me a lot of attention. Everyone was always like, “Oh, well, what a great writing sample.” But I think the naivete of just writing in the first place was very important. I think a lot of upcoming writers today are just way too savvy in certain ways. They try to think in a manner like, “I hear horror films aren’t hot right now.” Well, my rule is if Variety says something isn’t hot, that’s when you should start writing it. If Variety says something’s hot, then it’s already dead. And Sex and Death was coming after a period when I had done all these big rewrites. I had always said I wanted to write original material, but then I didn’t get around to writing a lot of my original material. So I started coming at it from the view of not even worrying about what’s hot and what’s going to get made. But instead of “Geez, if I want to be this Van Gogh guy and commit suicide, I don’t even have anything in my drawer.” [laughs] So I’d better at least start to write movies I want to see, even if they don’t get made. Kind of go back to that nice, warm naïve place, and that’s where Sex and Death was written from.
Once Heathers broke, you went quickly into those studio assignments and rewrites.
Well, I had the illusion that all writers have. It’s the Burt Reynolds line, “I’m going to do one for them. And one for me.” And then you realize that it’s all for them [laughs]. If you want to do one for yourself, you’ve got to start saying no. The problem is…the kinds of movies I was doing rewrites on, I worried, “Oh no, I’ve got Andrew Dice Clay in this movie. I’d better do this Bruce Willis movie to save my career. Oh shit, this Bruce Willis movie, they only like it in Europe! A Batman movie? Absolutely, I’ll do that!” Finally, you’ve got to choose to get off the merry-go-round.
Your Batman Returns script is well-regarded though. I assume it was a completely different draft from the version by Sam Hamm, who also did a draft?
Yeah, nothing was used from the Sam Hamm script. I love the Catwoman stuff in the film and I feel very attached to that. The movie as a whole…I always say that I’d rather have Tim Burton direct my script unfaithfully than have another filmmaker direct it completely faithfully, because he brings so much to it. But the experience of actually writing it, that’s like having sex while wearing fifty condoms. There are so many buffers, that it’s definitely not you alone in the room with a muse. You have a lot of interference.
Well, unfortunately for New Line, Happy Campers was kind of my 12 million dollar film school. I hadn’t directed anything before. I hadn’t even held the camera at a wedding. I think it was way too ambitious of a script for me. It was way too many characters. I call it “Jean Renoir meets Meatballs,” but I didn’t get Renoir or Meatballs [laughs]. That was a movie where I think the tonal changes actually did get away from me. Because it was such a big production. I’m certainly not unproud of the movie. I like a lot of it. It’s one of Justin Long’s first major roles. It’s also one of Jaime King’s first roles, and she’s never given a better performance than in this. I learned a lot. It’s funny because all of we screenwriters learn all these tricks to cut down on pages, and to make a really complicated scene seem less complicated. Joel Silver has a line about that – “The Indians take the fort.” [laughs] Okay, it’s one line in the script, but it’s maybe 90 actual scenes in production. Every screenwriter is guilty of “The Indians take the fort” trick. But then, I’m the director now and I get on the set with that and go, “Oh my god, I’ve totally screwed myself.” [laughs] So, Sex and Death was written with much more wisdom in regards to making sure I could get what I had written on film. It was a much lower budget and a much tighter schedule than Happy Campers, but that kept me on my toes completely. I knew exactly what I wanted and how to get it. Which are things I didn’t know on my first film.
You grew up in South Bend, Indiana. What was in the water there that so many good filmmakers came out of South Bend during the same period? You, Larry Karaszewski, your brother Mark Waters -
I think we all had an advantage that there was a TV show in South Bend that we all worked on. It was kind of a baby “Saturday Night Live,” written and directed by high school teenagers, called “Beyond Our Control.” And sometimes, all you need is to know that you can do it. I remember Spike Lee talking about how the most influential filmmaker for him was Jim Jarmusch, not because of his films but because he used to rent equipment to Spike at NYU, and Spike was like, “Wait a minute, if he can get a movie together, then so can I.” One of our guys [David Simkins] wrote a film called Adventures in Babysitting that got sold, and we were like, “Oh, we can all do it!” Sometimes you just need that. There’s a lot of us out here that grew up in the Midwest, and I’ve talked to a lot of them, and it’s funny…. we all sort of have the same story: in June of 1975, we all saw Jaws. And even if our filmmaking paths have not gone the Spielberg route, there was something about that movie that was such a mixture….talk about a mixture of genres! It was funny and scary, and I knew that I wanted to have something to do with the experience I just had. I remember that moment distinctly. That was just a great cinematic experience for everybody of that age. It was just phenomenal.
The story of you writing Heathers while working in a video store is all true?
Yeah, and I was doing it before I knew it was a cliché [laughs]. It was in Silver Lake and everyone thinks it was one of the cool video stores in Silver Lake. I was in the least cool video store [laughs]. There’s a Jon Voight movie called Conrack where he goes to the South and teaches kids. That’s like the video store I was at. Teaching poor children not to rent Zone Troopers just because it’s a new release, and to rent Alien instead. It’s funny, you know, I’ve been talking a lot recently about the importance of naivete. When I came out here, I didn’t read Variety. I didn’t know what scripts were hot and what scripts weren’t hot. I just wrote Heathers because I wanted to see Heathers. And it certainly wasn’t a movie that anyone thought would get made, even though it did get me a lot of attention. Everyone was always like, “Oh, well, what a great writing sample.” But I think the naivete of just writing in the first place was very important. I think a lot of upcoming writers today are just way too savvy in certain ways. They try to think in a manner like, “I hear horror films aren’t hot right now.” Well, my rule is if Variety says something isn’t hot, that’s when you should start writing it. If Variety says something’s hot, then it’s already dead. And Sex and Death was coming after a period when I had done all these big rewrites. I had always said I wanted to write original material, but then I didn’t get around to writing a lot of my original material. So I started coming at it from the view of not even worrying about what’s hot and what’s going to get made. But instead of “Geez, if I want to be this Van Gogh guy and commit suicide, I don’t even have anything in my drawer.” [laughs] So I’d better at least start to write movies I want to see, even if they don’t get made. Kind of go back to that nice, warm naïve place, and that’s where Sex and Death was written from.
Once Heathers broke, you went quickly into those studio assignments and rewrites.
Well, I had the illusion that all writers have. It’s the Burt Reynolds line, “I’m going to do one for them. And one for me.” And then you realize that it’s all for them [laughs]. If you want to do one for yourself, you’ve got to start saying no. The problem is…the kinds of movies I was doing rewrites on, I worried, “Oh no, I’ve got Andrew Dice Clay in this movie. I’d better do this Bruce Willis movie to save my career. Oh shit, this Bruce Willis movie, they only like it in Europe! A Batman movie? Absolutely, I’ll do that!” Finally, you’ve got to choose to get off the merry-go-round.
Your Batman Returns script is well-regarded though. I assume it was a completely different draft from the version by Sam Hamm, who also did a draft?
Yeah, nothing was used from the Sam Hamm script. I love the Catwoman stuff in the film and I feel very attached to that. The movie as a whole…I always say that I’d rather have Tim Burton direct my script unfaithfully than have another filmmaker direct it completely faithfully, because he brings so much to it. But the experience of actually writing it, that’s like having sex while wearing fifty condoms. There are so many buffers, that it’s definitely not you alone in the room with a muse. You have a lot of interference.
Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman in Waters' Batman Returns.
Where do you go from here, do you think? Can you go back and write studio stuff on the side, and then still make the more personal works your main focus?
It’s funny when you leave the studio system for awhile. I’m not getting that Spider-Man 8 offer [laughs]. But I’d love to be able to do my own work. We’ll see what happens here. You know the way other filmmakers like David Lynch get off the hook because people go, “Oh, he’s got a lot of tones. But that’s David Lynch! He’s just crazy.”? [laughs] When I first moved out here, people would read my script and go, “Well, maybe if you were David Lynch...” I would love for them to be saying, “Well, maybe if you were Dan Waters, you could get away with this stuff.” [laughs] But I haven’t gotten there yet.
It’s funny when you leave the studio system for awhile. I’m not getting that Spider-Man 8 offer [laughs]. But I’d love to be able to do my own work. We’ll see what happens here. You know the way other filmmakers like David Lynch get off the hook because people go, “Oh, he’s got a lot of tones. But that’s David Lynch! He’s just crazy.”? [laughs] When I first moved out here, people would read my script and go, “Well, maybe if you were David Lynch...” I would love for them to be saying, “Well, maybe if you were Dan Waters, you could get away with this stuff.” [laughs] But I haven’t gotten there yet.
Sex and Death 101 opens on April 4th. Visit the website at http://www.sexanddeath101movie.com/ and the trailer below.
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