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Jonathan Levine on The Wackness
By Fred Topel | Image property of Sony Pictures Classics
The Wackness is not the first movie about drug dealers and wacky psychiatrists, but it manages to feel original. At least, that is the response it has gotten from cynical critics who would feel free to bash it by comparison should it not meet their high standards. Writer/director Jonathan Levine offered a humble explanation as to why his film might be resonating more than others.
The Wackness
"I think that we were very aware of the pitfalls of this type of material," said Levine. "Once we kind of got a script that we were happy with, the act of executing the movie was just as much about not falling into the traps that other movies have fallen into as it was about realizing the film. So we never wanted to talk down to anyone. We never wanted to do anything cheap. We very much tried to find the right balance between emotion and comedy. We just worked really hard. We tried to resist judging our characters as well. We didn’t give any pat answers at the end of the day. There’s no kind of happy, everyone ends up together thing. We just tried to be genuine and truthful in everything we did, and hopefully that comes across."
Charting the course of Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck)'s last summer in New York before college, the film employs many different color schemes for various effects. "My DP and I discussed very much kind of conveying the sort of hazy memory of the summer. And then the beginning, the kind of the murkiness of the first couple acts, I think mirrors where they’re at, where the characters are at emotionally. And then scenes are very vibrant, I think that’s when we started to kind of open it up. Really once Luke’s character and Kingsley’s character start to get a little more happy, or a little more out there, then we start to kind of open up the color palette a little bit and make it a little more vibrant, a little more saturated and stuff like that. That was why. We were trying to get the haze of memory somewhere in there."
 The Wackness
Levine had directed one feature before, the yet to be released All the Boys Love Mandy Lane. The Wackness is the first script of his own he directed. "I always wanted to write something. I’ve always written little things but I’ve never been able to. Either I wrote the script and it’s like 300 pages long and sucks or I don’t know. So this to me, I just started writing this and it felt like the right thing to do. It was a way to kind of be personal without being too personal, because you don’t want to do the kind of naval-gazing type thing. I just worked on it for a really long time and I was able to take something personal and sort of make it hopefully universal. Once I started doing it I was like, 'This is cool. I’m going to keep working my ass off on this.'"
The film is not directly autobiographical, but he did write what he knew. "The world is autobiographical. That’s the world I grew up in, the music I was listening to, the vernacular, definitely the spirit and the kind of dilemmas that the characters are facing, whether it be trying to get laid or figuring out what to do with the adults in your life. Figuring out if you want to be on medication, if you want to smoke weed, any of that stuff. Yeah, that’s all stuff that I’ve tackled. I never sold pot, none of the real concrete details. Yeah, there was definitely a Stephanie character. That’s how I felt in high school. There was definitely a Stephanie character although now that I’ve seen the movie and worked through it, they can all be Stephanies."
The Wackness opens to theaters on July 3rd.
For the trailer, stills and more movie info, go to the The Wackness Movie Page.
Fred Topel
Sources: Image property of Sony Pictures Classics
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