It Chooses You (18 page)

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Jason: I’m gonna let it choose me. I just have to be alert and listen.

Sophie: But what if it doesn’t—

Jason: Shhh. I’m listening.

If Sophie was all my doubts and the nightmare of who I would be if I succumbed to them, then Jason could be the curiosity and faith that repel that fear. I went back to the beginning of the script and added this impulsive, superstitious streak of Jason’s — he would meet only Joe, not all the other
PennySaver
sellers, but he would go about his expedition the way I had, on a whim, trying to believe that each thing meant something, and so eventually learning what he needed to know. It took me a little while to resign myself to the fact that Dina, Matilda, Ron, Andrew, Michael, Pam, Beverly, Primila, Pauline, Raymond, and Domingo would not all somehow be part of the movie, but then how could a fiction contain them all? I was now acutely aware of how small the world I’d written was; it had to be my bonnet-sized, tightly clutched version of LA. I knew that if I really wanted to introduce the people I had met, I would one day have to attempt some sort of nonfictional document. (That day has come.)

I wrote a series of simple scenes between Joe and Jason that re-created my experience with him. After Jason and Sophie become fixated on their own mortality, Jason decides to use what little time he has left being guided by fate — first through a seemingly meaningless self-assigned tree-selling job, and then by answering an ad in the
PennySaver
. I wrote three scenes for Joe.

(1) Joe sells Jason an ancient hair dryer (inspired by Dina), and in an unsettling way urges him to come back when he’s ready.

(2) When Jason comes back, Joe shows him the cards he makes for his wife and reads a dirty limerick. He then recalls the terrible things that can occur in the beginning of a relationship. “We didn’t have any problems like that in the beginning,” Jason would say. “You’re still
in
the beginning,” Joe would respond.

(3) Jason visits Joe one more time, and this time he notices Joe has three little hippo figurines that Sophie and Jason also have. And the couch — they have the same orange couch. And they both have the same M.C. Escher drawing of a never-ending staircase. I wanted to use the real-life Paw Paw coincidence, but it seemed too meaningful; these visual details were light enough to slip by, hopefully, and the Escher was my own joke with myself about what I was trying to do — to be almost kitschily surreal and yet also really mean it. Before Jason leaves, Joe gives him a toy for Paw Paw, a ball on a spring that swings back and forth like a metronome.

These three scenes were 80 percent improvisation and 20 percent scripted; Joe was allowed to mostly just talk on a theme, but he had to say a few specific sentences, which I would read to him off-camera and he would repeat. He would wear his own clothes and we would shoot in his house.

It was this quasi-theoretical ninety-third draft of the script that became fully financed, greenlit, in the winter of 2009. I always pictured a fat man flipping a switch by his desk to turn on a green light. It’s easy — you just have to convince him to lift his pudgy little finger. In this instance there was no man, no decisive switch, just a lot of calculations, mostly subtractions, emailed between like-minded companies in Germany, the UK, and France. The bulk of the money would come from Germany, with the stipulation that we hire a German crew, get them all visas and places to live in LA, fly them to America, shoot in twenty-one days, and then fly them back home. Also, a certain percentage of the cast would have to be European, with proof of citizenship — meaning that most minor characters would have accents. And finally, I would have to live in Germany while I completed post-production there in the winter. Great, I said, and meant it, knowing that this was the cost of casting actors who weren’t huge stars (including myself) and one actor who was actually a retired housepainter. It seemed like a reasonable price to pay for getting to tell such a strange story in the most expensive but ultimately most accessible of mediums.
Dankeschön
, I said. Let’s go.

Now that I was counting on him, Joe’s entire existence suddenly seemed pretty precarious. Needless to say, he didn’t have email or a cell phone. I gave his number to my producer, but Joe never seemed to answer. Eventually Alfred drove over to his house and discovered their phone had stopped working and they hadn’t gotten around to fixing it. Alfred bought him a new phone, and I bought a La-Z-Boy chair for Joe’s wife, Carolyn; she had diabetes and the doctor said she needed to elevate her legs. I almost never saw Carolyn — she was a mythical muse to me, the subject of hundreds of poems. I’d read about her titties and even her twat, but she was always in the bedroom with the door closed.

I kept Joe out of a lot of the preparation leading up to shooting. I didn’t really rehearse with him like I did with Hamish Linklater (Jason) and David Warshofsky (Marshall). I didn’t even show him the script, actually. My feeling was that Joe was pretty much going to be Joe on the shoot day, and there was nothing I could do to change that — which was why it might work. I didn’t ask him to participate in the screenplay reading I did a couple months before the shoot; it would be long and agonizing and might give him some bad ideas about what acting was. An actor named Tom Bower read the lines I’d sketched out for Joe. I asked Tom to also read the lines for the Moon; some roles hadn’t been cast yet, so a few of the actors had to play more than one part at the reading. We all muddled through it, and afterward I met with a friend to get her notes. They were many, but she did think I’d made some good changes, especially my idea for Joe to also be the Moon. Which he was, from that moment on.

I’d rather not describe the first week of shooting. When I am anxious I lose weight, and I lost seven pounds that first week. Everything that could go wrong did. Except, and I pointed this out at the end of each day: no one had died.

Then, at the end of the week, my producer, Gina, said she needed to tell me something; it was about Joe. My heart sank. He was okay, but when the location scout was looking at his house, Joe mentioned he’d just gotten a diagnosis of cancer from the doctor and he had only two weeks to live. We were shooting his scene in a week. Gina said she’d talked to him and he insisted he really wanted to do it, but that it was up to me. All our movie problems went away for a moment, and there was just sorrow, a terrible ache for this man and his wife. And I knew there was no way we could go forward with him; it was irresponsible and frankly just scary.

So that was that. I called Joe from the set. He said he felt fine, and I said I knew he did but that I just had to do what I thought was best. “Well, you’re the boss,” he said glumly. I had been used to his chatty bluster, but in that moment I heard the man who had painted buildings for seventy years, a hard worker who was used to being part of a team and doing what the boss said. Some bosses had probably not been very nice.

That weekend I sat in a room and watched elderly actors read Joe’s lines. I was so exhausted that my personal goal was just not to cry during these auditions. The whole idea for the role of Joe was Joe. Most of the lines I’d written didn’t matter; they were just placeholders for where Joe would improvise. When these old men improvised, they drew upon their personal histories — as lifelong actors. They weren’t a boring group of people, but none of them had met their wives at Lake Paw Paw.

After watching one particularly frail man hobble through his reading, I complained to Gina that these eighty-year-old men actually seemed sicker than Joe; who was to say that all of them didn’t also have cancer and just two weeks to live? It also occurred to me now that Joe had been counting on the checks we were about to give him, for his work and for the rental of his house. Had I come into his life, gotten his hopes up, and then let him down — left him to die?

After the bleak auditions, I asked my husband to come with me to meet Joe; I didn’t trust myself entirely. The two of us paced around Joe’s living room, trying to paint a picture of what a movie shoot was like. “A normal day is really long,” I said. “Like twelve or fourteen hours.” “There would be lots of people in here,” my husband said, looking around the tiny house. “It would be like the army coming in and taking over.” “Will they mess up the carpets?” Joe asked. “No, no,” we said, “they’d put rubber mats down, all over the house.” After a while we’d talked over every last detail and there was just nothing more to say. I had to call it. “Well,” I said shakily, “I’d like to do this with you, if you really want to.” “I really do,” Joe said.

We splurged and ran two cameras all day, knowing we couldn’t expect Joe to repeat things he’d done, so each scene was filmed tight and wider at the same time. Then we’d shoot Hamish’s various reactions, which would hopefully bind the dialogue into the fiction. When I asked Joe to sell Hamish the old hair dryer, he handled it like a seasoned improviser, hilarious and real. Much harder was trying to get him to say specific lines, especially “You’re still
in
the beginning.” It was blisteringly hot, the room was crowded, and he’d been working for hours and hours (many of them spent waiting for planes to fly by). It was so hard to keep insisting that he say this particular sentence that had long since lost all meaning. He must have tried fifty times, so sweetly, always missing by a mile and then launching into a monologue about his own early married years, which he remembered perfectly. Finally on one take he said, “You’re in the
middle
of the beginning, right now.” It was a much better and more specific idea — that a beginning could have a beginning, middle, and end.

At the end of his fourteen-hour shoot day, Joe was in good spirits and seemed reluctant to see us all go, especially the pretty women. And two weeks later, he was still very much alive, making repairs on his house. When I was done shooting, I hurried to edit his scenes and record his voice-over lines as the Moon. But Joe continued to not die, and so after a while I relaxed, and as I shaped and reshaped the movie he indulged me with many, many recording sessions. One time I brought my laptop so I could watch the scene before we began the call-and-response process of recording. He seemed disconcerted at the sight of himself on the screen. “Strange to see yourself on there, isn’t it?” I said, turning the screen away from him. “I didn’t realize I was so old,” he said.

At the end of our last recording session, I asked him how he would describe what had happened, what we had done together.

Joe: Well, about six years ago I bought fifty thousand Christmas cards from a friend of mine when he got a heart attack. So I put the ad in the
PennySaver
for the cards, and you came up and knocked on the door and told me you were answering the ad. And then later you explained to me what you wanted to do and asked if I’d be willing to do it.