Last Thursday, the Wesleyan Independent Filmmaker Series screened the Oscar-nominated film “Up In The Air.” Even better, it was free. Even better, director Jason Reitman (“Juno,” “Thank You For Smoking”) came to give a question and answer session after the screening. For those present, this Q & A quickly devolved into a combination of stand-up and Reitman’s life story, which was both hilarious and riveting. Sad you missed it? You should be. Luckily for you, The Argus was there to transcribe the high points for you:
So I got waitlisted at Wesleyan. You think a man known as the one just described would have gotten into this place. Michael Bay got into Wesleyan. You know that? What did Bay have on his resume that I didn’t have? I’ve been trying to figure that out since I got here. I could have had my name out there etched in the concrete, with Joss Whedon, Paul Weitz, and Miguel. Hhh. I may not get over this one, I may not answer questions or…I just have to get over this one. Although I don’t think I could have gone here because I have been here for only an hour and my allergies are killing me. My head is about to explode. I have a box of Kleenex and for the next hour it’s just going to be snot city.

So, I’m the son of a famous director. My father’s name is Ivan Reitman. He directed “Ghostbusters” and “Twins” and “Kindergarten Cop;” he produced “Animal House” and “Old School.” Like most of you, I used my dad’s camera, learned how to make videos. But by that time I was applying to college. Uh. Wesleyan. I don’t even get a mezzanine? That’s fine. I’m going to build like this five-story building at USC—It’s funny actually, at USC, they brought me into this room…and there was this menu.

And they wanted directors to pick a room then name it for [a specific] dollar amount. It was the sickest thing. I told them if they would give me the women’s bathroom, I would be the happiest dude: The “Jason Reitman Women’s Lavatory.” Name your price, guys. In fact…if Wesleyan would give me an honorary degree, I would totally put up the money for a Jason Reitman Women’s Bathroom. Just throwing it out there.

When it came to applying to schools, I went pre-med. I was scared of the idea of becoming a director and…I knew the presumption of the way people think about famous directors. Like if you’re the son of a famous director, more likely than not you’re talentless, you’re a brat, and you probably have an alcohol or drug problem, and that’s really the ongoing opinion. And I thought, why would I enter a profession where this would be the presumption of me? Why would I enter a job where in success I would basically live in my father’s shadow and failure would be like a very visible thing?

And if I went pre-med and no one would ever ask you, “Why would you become a doctor?” Like, “He’s a doctor, really?” And I was doing awfully. I mean I’m a bright enough guy. I was doing well in school. I had good grades—REALLY makes you wonder how I didn’t get in here—but I was doing awful, and I didn’t care. Apparently I really didn’t want to help people.

My father came to visit me at school and he said, “What are you doing?” And I said, “I’m scared. I’m scared of being compared to you for the rest of my life. I’m scared of people just kind of presuming I’m like some talentless brat.” And he said, “Being scared isn’t a reason to do anything.” And he told me a story from when he was my age. I was 17 years old. When he was 17, he grew up in Toronto, and I guess he had gone to Montreal and he had submarine sandwiches that hadn’t hit Toronto yet. He came back to Toronto and he went to my grandfather and he’s like, “Dad, dad! You have to give me the money to open up a submarine sandwich shop. They haven’t hit Toronto yet, they are in Montreal and they’re the most popular things. If you give me the money we could make a fortune.”

My dad was going to be like the Marco Polo of submarine sandwiches. And my grandfather, who was a Holocaust survivor who came to Canada with nothing, basically a refugee and worked at a dry cleaner and a carwash, had it within him to tell my father the following. He said, “Ya know son, I’m sure these sandwiches are very good. And if I gave you the money to open up the sandwich we would make a fortune. And your mother and I would be very happy. But your mother and I don’t think there’s enough magic in it for you.”

It was off that advice that my father went to college. He was a music major, he got in on a music scholarship, started a film club, and became a filmmaker. He actually became one of the most successful filmmakers of all time. And so he said this to me, he said, “Jason, there’s no more noble a profession in the world than being a doctor. If you want to be a doctor, your mother and I would be so over the moon we’d be proud of you. But I don’t think there’s enough magic in it for you. I think you’re a storyteller. You have to follow your heart.”

And it was off of that advice that I left pre-med and I switched schools to USC. Actually I went three days before the spring semester. The head of admissions couldn’t see me, so I waited outside and walked her to her car and convinced her to let me into the school. My argument—I was from L.A.—ended, “Help me come home.” And she totally bought that. And I enrolled in USC and I was an English major and a Creative Writing major. I got involved with the paper, and I was in the improv troupe, and I had a radio show. At a certain point I realized I wanted to make films.

I remember seeing “Clerks” for the first time and thinking. “What is this?” “This doesn’t look like any movie I’ve ever seen.” Kevin Smith refers to the “Clerks” phenomenon as many directors going, “Wait, that counts?” And it’s true. I mean I’m funny and I just need a camera. And then I saw “Pulp Fiction.” I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. And it was movie after movie, and when I started seeing all these guys they seemed to be coming from the same place.

They came from these film festivals, which started in the ’80s with Soderbergh and the Coen Brothers. They gave birth to this kind of movement to this place in American cinema that made me excited to be a director. What worked for me was that there was something strangely democratic about this process. If it’s good, it plays; if it doesn’t then it won’t. And if it’s really good, who knows you may win a couple of awards. Somehow, I could shed my name by entering this process. While most people [participated in] these film festivals to break from obscurity, I did it to be anonymous. I made one short film; I sent it in, it played like five film festivals. I made another one. On the third short film, after I won a couple of awards, something just clicked. And I knew where I was at and who I wanted to be. And then I had a good break. I started directing commercials—bad commercials. If you saw some of the commercials I directed, you would say, “Jason, you are never allowed to direct ever again.”

At the same time, I got an agent. He asked me to give him a particular genre I was interested in. I said I wanted to make “Thank You For Smoking.” It was a great book, and I wanted to turn it into a movie. The woman who gave it to me said, “This book was written for you.” And crazy enough, like two years later, that same woman went to jail, but before that, she was right. I started reading it and it was love at first sight. I remember reading the first line and being completely taken by this character and the politics. Before this I wrote five horribly written screenplays and got all these bad words out of me, and then this book came along and just opened my eyes to what I wanted. So my agent set up this meeting and before we went in he told me this is going to be tough, Mel Gibson owns the rights to “Thank you For Smoking.”

His idea was originally to direct and star in “Thank You For Smoking.” And his company had spent a fortune on it. So this happens a lot in Hollywood. A book will come out, and it’s kind of like a hot book. And there’s this war over it and you spend a lot of money: there’s option money, which is like a certain amount of money to own the rights for a year. Then you hire this writer and then he’s not good enough so they hire another writer. And after all that you’ve spent like two million dollars, and you’ve gotten nowhere. It happens often in cases with a book, like “Thank You For Smoking.” You try to take something that’s subversive in its nature and try to turn it into something like an accessible Sandra Bullock comedy, which it just isn’t.

And then what happens is they get to this place in the development process, which is like in a love relationship, where you look at it and you go, “We have a lot of problems. I’m sure if we worked a lot on this, then there’s a way to figure this out…Or I can just try someone new and just start fresh, you know. Clean slate.” And that’s what they do. They often kick it to the side and go do a new project. These studios have just vats of books that are drowning in money and I’m sure all the time you read a book and you go, “Well this is a great book, why haven’t they turned it into a movie?” They’ve tried. It’s just sitting under a pile of money.

And that’s where “Thank You for Smoking” was at. After that weekend I met with them, told them this is where I was at, this is the direction I wanted to go with the movie in. And they said that was good. They loved it. It was crazy because everyone said it would be so difficult, but everyone at Mel’s company liked it and Mel liked it. Mel called me from his plane to tell me how much he liked it. We had a 30-minute conversation while he was mid-air and I thought that making this movie is going to be nothing. But five years went by, and nobody wanted to finance this film. No studio, no mini-majors, no nobody. Nothing was gonna happen on this film.

And in that time, I just still kept on directing commercials, made short films. I actually found the book “Up In The Air” during that period, when I was desperate to find something to work on. Movies were being offered to me to make, but they were the wrong movies. What often happens is that it’s easier to make your first film than your second. Because the industry is so set on trying to find someone new, fresh, and exciting that they will believe in someone upon seeing a short film or like a tiny cheap feature that makes a splash at film festivals. But once you’ve made a studio movie you are going to be set in the path to making movies like that for a long time.

[…]

So I get this call from this guy named David Sacks. He and his partner, the creators of PayPal, sold PayPal to Google for like a billion dollars. And he calls me up and says he has some extra spending cash and he wants to make movies. And he fell in love with my screenplay and wanted to invest in it. He was the typical new money in Hollywood. He showed up in Los Angeles and bought a Ferrari. And bought the house they shot “Pulp Fiction” in. And we had a meeting in his house; he didn’t even have furniture yet. We sat on folding chairs in his house and he wrote me a check for six million dollars. And that’s how my first movie started.