Say you’re most famous for making a comedy in which a teen boy has relations with a pie. How do you convince producers to let you adapt a smart British novel about the decidedly non-raunchy relationship between an aging bachelor and a 12-year-old boy?
“We softened them up by them having bought the film for 3 million bucks and not getting it made for three years,” Paul Weitz said over lunch recently in Chicago, referring to the rights to Nick Hornby’s best-selling “About a Boy.”
“Also, there’s a voodoo associated with having had a successful film that makes studios think that everything you touch might just make a lot of money, whether or not you’re working in a completely different vein from what you’ve worked in before,” added Chris Weitz, who co-directed “American Pie,” as well as the Chris Rock comedy “Down to Earth,” with his older brother Paul.
A lot of convincing
Even after the Weitz brothers won over Tribeca Productions (Robert De Niro’s company), Hornby and attached star Hugh Grant, they still had to get backing from a skeptical studio.
“When we brought it into Stacey Snider, who’s the head of Universal, she said, `I really don’t get the tone of this film. What are you trying to do?'” Paul said. “And we said, `Well, we’re going to try to make a film that has a similar tone to [Billy Wilder’s] `The Apartment,’ and luckily for us she got the reference, and she said, `OK, go ahead and do it.'”
“Yup, that was it,” Snider said on the phone, agreeing with the filmmakers’ recollection. “When they walked in the room, we were passing [on the project]. We were taking the meeting as a courtesy. And when they left the room, they had persuaded us. It’s a testament to them that they were so eloquent and passionate in their arguments.”
The Weitz brothers — and Grant — thus got the opportunity to turn in their best work to date. “About a Boy,” which opened Friday, plays like an assured romantic comedy even though it’s really something different and richer: the funny-serious story about a 38-year-old selfish cad who invents an imaginary son so he can impress single mothers — and eventually strikes up an unlikely friendship with a boy (Nicholas Hoult) whose mom (Toni Collette) is clinically depressed.
Paul and Chris, both in their 30s, are third-generation Hollywood. Their parents are former actress Susan Kohner, an Oscar nominee for “Imitation of Life,” and fashion designer/writer John Weitz. Their grandfather, Paul Kohner, was a legendary agent who represented such directors as John Huston, William Wyler and Wilder.
They were thinking about Wilder as they discussed translating Hornby’s novel to film.
“Something about the premise struck me as really Wilder-esque, this guy who invents a child to meet women,” said Chris, the smoother of the brothers (he resembles a more round-headed Christopher Reeve). “It’s so immoral.”
“The thing with `American Pie’ was, can you have something be that raunchy but still have it be really sweet and essentially like the most naive film of the year?” said Paul, who’s a bit scruffier and raspier. “With this it’s like, can you have something that cynical and ironic and still have it be hopeful by the end of it?”
In the minority
“High Fidelity,” Hornby’s London-set novel before “About a Boy,” was made into a movie with an American star (John Cusack), an American setting (Chicago) and a British director (Stephen Frears). For “About a Boy” the actors and locations remained British, and the filmmakers were the only Americans on the set.
“We didn’t make any effort to translate anything,” Chris said. “Trainers [British slang for sneakers] remain trainers, and nappies are the term for diapers. We’re hoping that if the movie’s funny enough, people aren’t going to really care whether they have funny accents or not.”
They said they also restored elements from the novel that had been dropped in the original script by Peter Hedges, who retains a writing credit.
“It had an American living in London with all these friends who he would sort of express his inner life to,” Paul said.
“We really like Peter Hedges as a writer, but we didn’t want to take the movie in the direction that his script went,” Chris said.
“One thing was that this character is meant to be quite isolated in our minds, yet in order to express the inner narrative of Hornby’s novel, all of these quirky friends had been invented to ask him, `So how did you feel when you went on that date with a single mom?’ And that didn’t make any sense to us. So in came the voice-over and out went the friends.”
Going to voice-overs
The voice-overs, by Grant and Hoult, are a change from “High Fidelity,” in which Cusack spoke directly to the camera.
“We didn’t think that the breaking the fourth wall in `High Fidelity’ worked particularly well,” Chris said. “It threw people out of the movie.”
But “High Fidelity,” he added, “was truer to the letter of Hornby’s book than we were.””
Although “About a Boy” is faithful to the novel at first, it completely changes the ending, ditching an epiphany involving Kurt Cobain’s suicide and adding a school recital climax.
“We didn’t 100 percent know whether this was going to work, what we did with it, and that’s the scary thing,” Paul said. “Sort of saying, `OK, we love this book completely but we’re going change the ending,’ and you could end up sitting in the editing room going, `Oh . . . we screwed up.'”
The brothers agree that “About a Boy” is a step up from “Down to Earth,” last year’s “Heaven Can Wait” remake starring Rock, who wrote that movie with his partners.
“I don’t think we brought our A-game to that movie,” Chris said. “We didn’t make much of it visually. So for us creatively it was a bit of a failure, although it was a success in terms of box office.”
Working with Grant and Rock proved to be a telling contrast.
“Chris is such an accomplished stand-up, which means that he’s used to crafting and perfecting and being in absolute, complete control of his material, which he works on endlessly,” Paul said. “Hugh is actually more prone to improvise, oddly, than Chris Rock is. Chris Rock’s act seems improvisational, but it’s the product of a refining process. Hugh has some very nice vices, which allowed us to bond with him.”
“He drinks,” Chris said with a laugh. “Chris actually has no vices whatsoever. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t smoke. The only thing we had to bond with him about was the Knicks, and the Knicks were going downhill bad. So it was too depressing.”
