Greg Mottola: Adventures in Movieland
It’s taken Greg Mottola a dozen years to get back to where he once belonged. In the process, he figured out where he actually wanted to be.
“I had to let go of my fantasy of the kind of career I was going to have,” Mottola says, sipping water in a hotel suite overlooking Central Park. “I thought there was only one kind of filmmaking career I could really respect – and that was not really me. So I had to spend a lot of time getting my head out of my ass.”
Which brings Mottola to “Adventureland,” a bittersweet, semi-autobiographical comedy that harkens back to the quirky originality of his debut film, “The Daytrippers.”
Set in 1987, when Mottola, now 44, was roughly the same age as his protagonist, James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg), “Adventureland” is about the summer of an achiever, forced into slacker mode by financial reversals to his parents. Specifically, instead of backpacking around Europe courtesy of his folks, he must find a summer job to pay for grad school. And the only job he can get is shilling games at a rundown local amusement park. The film mirrors Mottola’s life in a couple of ways.
“I came from a pretty modest neighborhood,” he says. “My dad was a middle manager at Lilco (the Long Island Lighting Company). My grandparents were working-class. I did work at an amusement park, thinking I was making enough to save for a trip to Europe. But it was rerouted into my college fund since you don’t earn a giant nest egg at the end of the summer when you’re making minimum wage.”
The film is a return to the kind of understatedly funny filmmaking that Mottola envisioned himself doing. After “The Daytrippers” earned accolades at Sundance and encomiums for critics, it did respectable business on the arthouse circuit and Mottola parlayed its success into a deal to make a film about a family’s intervention with an out-of-control substance abuser.
“I hit the jackpot with ‘Daytrippers’,” Mottola says. “I wrote a script that Columbia wanted to make and made a deal. It went through the studio process and had a cast attached, including John Cusack. It was greenlit – and then a bunch of things went wrong.
“First, John Cusack was attached to it and he had a movie come out that didn’t do well. And then there was another movie with a similar theme: ‘28 Days.’ And so this little window I had closed on me. It was put into turnaround. And I spent too long trying to get it set up somewhere else.”
The experience shook Mottola – but not as much as what came next: “My dream of being an auteur writer-director was interrupted by a year or two of writer’s block,” he says.
What saved him was writer-producer Judd Apatow, an admirer of “Daytrippers,” who put Mottola to work directing Apatow’s short-lived TV series, “Undeclared.” That led to more TV directing assignments – “Arrested Development,” “The Comeback” – before Mottola’s return to Apatown, as the Apatow universe is affectionately referred to.
Specifically, Apatow convinced Mottola to direct “Superbad,” a comedy that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg had written years earlier: “’Superbad’ had been around for a while,” Mottola says. “No one wanted to make an R-rated teen movie. But Judd said, ‘You’ve gotta make it the way I want.’ He wanted it to feel to young people that they were talking the way they talk.”
At that point, Apatow had the mojo – based on the success of “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” After the break-out success of “Superbad,” Mottola was able to leverage himself into a deal to make “Adventureland.” Even then, however, he had to fight to set it in 1987, as he envisioned it.
“Everywhere I went, they wanted ‘Adventureland’ to be contemporary, to lose the period aspect,” Mottola says. “I refused. It wouldn’t have been fun for me. I wanted it to feel like a story that took place 20 years ago. I wanted it to be melancholy; setting it in the past lends it that quality. I wanted the details to come from the world I knew. I wanted a perspective of looking back at youth.”
Capturing that ’80s feeling was tricky: “Movies about the ’80s tend to be about kitsch. It’s hard to avoid that. You look at the clothes and hairstyles, although it’s not like everybody dressed like a Valley Girl or Madonna. It was a simpler, more innocent time. It was pretty hard to find ’80s cars. Nobody collects them.”
Having found his groove, Mottola is well aware just how tenuous the landscape is for the kind of movies he wants to make.
“The independent film world has changed so radically,” he says. “Getting money is still hard and getting distribution is impossible.
“The tail is wagging the dog. Marketing concerns take precedence over every other concern. If the marketing doesn’t line up, they don’t want it. The landscape has changed a lot. The movies I still like to do are hard. I guess I’d like to do what Steven Soderbergh does: make some big ones and some small ones.”
