David Gordon Green, director of such lyrical and atmospheric fare as “George Washington” and “All The Real Girls,” is making a… stoner comedy? Yup, despite a failed-attempt at Hollywood with the adaptation of “A Confederacy of Dunces,”Green is making what will surely be his most mainstream movie, “The Pineapple Express.” The film re-teams much of the “Freaks & Geeks” team, “40-Year-Old Virgin” producer Judd Apatow, and actors, Seth Rogan (the lead in this summer’s soon-to-be smash, “Knocked Up“) and James Franco (Harry Osborn in the “Spiderman” franchise) as pot-smoking buddies who get mixed up with a drug gang. News arrived today that Amber Heard (who plays the young Charlize Theron in “North Country“) has joined the cast as the girlfriend who tries to make Rogen give up the wacky tobaccky.
Why a stoner comedy for someone more prone to Terrance Malick-esque navel-gazing and poetic camera work? DGG’s wanted to try his hand at comedy for some time and basically has always been jumping at the chance to not become pigeonholed. Well, this film is that chance. ‘Pineapple’ is even being called a “studio stoner action comedy” which sounds even more ambitious that your average comedy. “This project is an opportunity to plant an absurd buddy comedy in a rough-and-tumble action movie,” Green told Variety a few months back. “I’ve always been a sucker for the genre and hungry to fire up a comedy where characters don’t get lost in their own concept.”
Apatow, who has become a major player in Hollywood after a lot of smaller work like ‘Geeks’ and ‘Undeclared,’ has a great attitude about the offbeat choices he uses for his films. “We try to choose directors who will bring a completely different artistic bent to these movies,” he told Chud. “So Greg Mottola, who did The Daytrippers, directed [the upcoming summer comedy] Superbad, and it’s just way better than it ever should be. We’re making the shocking choice to hire artists to direct our R-rated comedies.”
This would probably be a good time to talk about DGG’s great scores that are generally written by David Wingo (also of the atmospheric band Ola Podrida) and Michael Linnen; simple and beautiful acoustic compositions befitting of Green’s usually slow-moving films, but there’s a lot to say, so that’s another post for now (full disclosure: I was tired and wanted to go home, 4/30).
OK, picking up from yesterday. Long before “Friday Night Lights” was extolling the virtues of Explosions in the Sky, Green had used them, Mogwai, Labradford, Boxhead Ensemble and other ambient post-rockers in his films. He’s established a good rapport with musicians; Bonnie Prince Billy recorded an original song, “All These Vicious Dogs” for “All The Real Girls,” and Green told me in an interview with MTV (this part was never published), that Sparklehorse would’ve basically given him music for free if it weren’t for Capitol records having to be involved. The overcaffienated Phillip Glass score for “Undertow” was an unfortunate experiment that didn’t work, but that film did include moody songs by North Carolina locals (where DGG went to film school) Pyramid and Dynamite Brothers. Green said he wrote the entire movie to Neil Young’s “Cortez The Killer,” but could not afford the rights to the song. He’s also talked about using songs by Captain Beefheart and Sixteen Horsepower, but this has not come to fruition as of yet. His version of the “Undertow” trailer used a throttling song by the Refused, but the studio ixnayed his cut (they NYTimes article that had this tidbit seems to have gone awol).
“Snow Angels” premieres June 1 at BAM in Brooklyn, but there’s no word on that soundtrack other than the fact Wingo and Linnen are both contributing incidental music again.
“All The Real Girls” trailer (featuring a slower version of Wingo and Linnen’s “Hot Tub“)
