One more actor to discuss: I’d seen Utkarsh Ambudkar in movies but had never fully noticed him until now. He pops in this movie, coming on as a broad comedy character in the beginning—a strange guy squatting in this swanky house and making sex jokes about the cartoon “Doug”—but he ends up doing some great acting. Tell me about casting him.
Weirdly, he and I went to school together with Brittany but didn’t know each other. He sent an audition tape, which was incredible. People have been falling in love with him, and I’m so thrilled. He’s a tremendous actor and a great romantic leading man. He’d never had the opportunity to play a role like that before, which sort of goes into the spirit of the whole film. The script takes characters that are broad comedic archetypes and slowly peels back their layers so we’re seeing the wholeness of their humanity. I wanted to do the same thing with the actors. I wanted to take actors known for playing sidekicks and deepen them, so they felt like they had the gravitas and pathos of full humans.
One of my favorite scenes is Brittany is contemplating joining this NYC gym. ‘SNL’s’ Mikey Day quotes her the gym rate and she responds, “You know we can do this outside, right?” Are there moments in your life, as a longtime New Yorker, where you’ve realized you didn’t have to buy into a particular system to do the thing you wanted?
You make it work! If you have to do jumping jacks and you have neighbors who work the night shift, then you do your jumping jacks at night. It feels like that’s the ticket to success: that a ‘no’ is not a stop sign; a ‘no’ is a yield.
You’ve said “Brittany Runs A Marathon” is a movie about a character who, for a time, has an obsession with weight loss and not that your movie is obsessed with it. So as a director, how are you thinking about underscoring that distinction?
It was important that anything having to do with weight loss or body image came from her point of view. I’ll give you a concrete example: you know in the movie when she’s running down the subway stairs and the guy finally holds the door for her? If I had put music behind that moment, it would have put a value on it. If I’d put upbeat music behind it, the movie would have been saying this is a victory. If I’d put sad music, the movie would have been saying this is an unfortunate side effect or this is a danger. I needed that moment to only be telegraphed through watching the character. That’s her journey and her relationship to the effects of weight loss and how she’s perceived [by others].
Another example is in the club in the beginning: she looks in the mirror at herself before she goes with a guy. I needed the audience to be with her and see what she was seeing. This is what this woman feels, and because of how she feels, this is what she does.
So from those examples, this was on your mind a lot in the filming and editing?
Well, I’m making the movie from a place of love for the character. I’m not necessarily hypervigilant about this during the process, but I do have it on my radar. So it served as bumpers. Music was a big part of that. When a new layer of post-production comes on and people are making new choices, if it’s going into the new lane of a movie that valued any take on body image, I knew I needed to get back in the other lane.
I have an Amazon Studios question, maybe a little industrial…
I’m excited about the new Kindle.
Not that industrial. In the wake of “Late Night,” another big Sundance buy for them, I heard a lot of people opining that Amazon perhaps just didn’t care that much about its films’ box office performances because of the end game being Prime’s library. Do you have any insight on those priorities?
All I know about our process is that I wanted this movie to have a theatrical release so people could see it in a communal way, and I feel total support from the studio in that.
But as to what they care about more or most, do you know?
You know, in some other life I would work in an office over there and know, but they’re very communicative with me and it feels like we’re all on the same page with the same goals.
Last one is a total IMDB question, Paul. You wrote and produced an episode of the “MacGyver” reboot on CBS?
Good for you! You’re the only person who’s asked. I was on an overall deal at CBS.
What does that mean?
I was working on a pilot of my own about policing in a racially segregated town. I got a phone call in the middle of the night that said, “We need you to move to LA tomorrow and start working on the pilot of ‘MacGyver.’” And when you’re on an overall deal, that’s sort of the agreement, that you work for the studio. I’d never seen an episode of “MacGyver” in my life. I wrote a pilot, though, and at that point, the studio was determined to keep that thing going, and I was along for the ride.
And what did you learn from that ride?
I learned a lot about how ownership in a show works and how long you need to stay on it to have ownership in a show.
“Brittany Runs a Marathon” arrives in theaters tomorrow.