Jason Reitman
Jason Reitman
Jason Reitman is a Canadian-American film director, screenwriter, and producer, best known for directing the films Thank You for Smoking, Juno, Up in the Air, and Young Adult. As of February 2, 2010, he has received one Grammy award and four Academy Award nominations, two of which are for Best Director. Reitman is a dual citizen of Canada and the United States. He is the son of director Ivan Reitman...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth19 October 1977
CityMontreal, Canada
CountryCanada
And over the course of the last six years, as I've directed more features and commercials, I've become better at articulating exactly how I want the audience to feel.
The first set I remember was 'Ghostbusters.' It was a scene in which the street erupted. I remember even at seven years old thinking, 'Wow, if you direct a movie, you can break the streets of New York.'
When I look at 'Napoleon Dynamite”s style I'm reminded of how I spoke when I was an eight-year-old boy. It was just like capturing the essence of, 'Duh!' It was just like the stuff that I would say when I was like eight, nine, ten years old.
I remember when I was like 19 years old and I started a desk calendar company to pay for my first short film, just so I could say one day that my daddy didn't pay for my first short film. And I really established myself in the film festival world.
Everything I've wanted to turn into a film becomes something new and different when it becomes a movie... Each time I work with an author, I say to them, 'A book and a movie are different things.'
When you make a movie, you do it so piecemeal. You're doing it, not only scene by scene, out of order, but shot by shot, line by line. And there's this idea that the director has the whole thing in his or her head and they're going to somehow weave it all together in the end.
This is a movie more about spin and talk and lobbying than it is about cigarettes.
I didn't want it to be another one of those movies. I could have made it five years ago if I had changed the ending.
I'd like Hard C to be a modern day National Lampoon -- a name that is immediately recognized as a standard for unique subversive comedy.
Politically correctness is just a polite way of saying lying, and they're tired of turning on the TV and seeing people who are so terrified of their arguments being invalidated by a simple word choice that they don't say anything.
Aaron's the guy you follow into battle. He's broad, he's got a strong chin ? a man's-man kind of persona. Very few actors ... can say subversive things and come off charming. Robert Redford and Paul Newman were guys who could do that.
There were a couple of thousand people who saw the film at Sundance without the Katie Holmes sex scene. I implore all of them to now go back and see the movie with the Katie Holmes sex scene.
I hear the way people talk about the children of famous people. They're not treated very well. The presumptions are usually quite awful. So I tried to establish myself with a couple of movies. After 'Juno' I thought: 'I think I've defined myself enough as my own director that I'd love to work with my father.'
'Looper' is about what your 55-year-old self would tell your 25-year-old self over a cup of coffee. It's about finding love in the third act of your life. It's about overcoming trauma and the idea of true sacrifice.