The Wackness: A Conversation with Director Jonathan Levine

Ah, the summer of 1994. O.J. Simpson and Al Cowlings took us all on a ride in a white Ford Bronco, simultaneously shattering our collective innocence and ruining Hertz commercials forever. Forrest Gump taught America a thousand recipes for shrimp and 1,001 clichés about the banalities of life. New York City cops were cracking down on all manner of indecency, Kurt Cobain’s death was still fresh, Major League Baseball was going on strike and very temporarily, the words “Hootie and the Blowfish” were cool and unusual and not just the punchlines to a joke.

For Luke Shapiro (tween icon Josh Peck of Nickelodeon's Drake & Josh, the hero of Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness, ’94 was the summer between high school and college—three months spent selling pot in The Park, listening to A Tribe Called Quest and Notorious B.I.G. bootlegs, getting high with his shrink (Ben Kingsley), trying to stay cool and trying to get laid.

Winner of the Audience Award at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, The Wackness is almost vindication for Levine, whose slasher debut All the Boys Love Mandy Lane generated buzz and a bidding war at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival only to get lost in a distribution morass.

Like The Flamingo Kid for the 21st century, The Wackness is a coming-of-age story that unfolds over one long, sticky New York summer, with enough personal growth, sexual humiliation and kickass tunes to help it stand out from the usual steroid-injected superheroes of the Hollywood blockbuster season. It’s also the only movie you’ll see this year to feature Gandhi making out with an Olsen Twin (Mary-Kate, we think) in a telephone booth.

So how was your actual summer of 1994?

Jonathan Levine: You know, dude, I shouldn’t even tell you. I was a fucking counselor at a summer camp.

If it makes you feel any better, so was I.

Good, good. But that’s not as interesting a movie. I used to work at a summer camp in Maine for like 10 years for the simple reason that everyone I knew was leaving the city over the summer. The summer was always bookended—I would go to camp for June and July and then I’d have May and August in the city. And New York is just so desolate and you almost feel like you can do anything because the same people aren’t around, so you can become a whole new person, which is very appealing when you’re in high school.

So why, given this cinematic opportunity to reinvent your summer of 1994, did you make your proxy a pot dealer?

I don’t know, man. Luke just having graduated and being on the cusp of going to college; that’s a very important crossroads that I wanted to examine. As far as why he’s a drug dealer; I don’t know. I never was. To me it’s a great device to get him to move all around the city and meet people. I certainly smoked a lot of pot in the summer of ’94. Maybe not while I was a camp counselor, but definitely while I was in the city. And I think that has the almost lazy, nostalgic haze to it that underscores the vibe of the summer.

I have nearly the film’s entire soundtrack on my iPod now, but in 1994, I have to admit that I was still bouncing between Pearl Jam and Phish. Why were you going a different direction?

I’m from New York, so that really informed a lot of what I was listening to. I think that was a time when a lot of my colleagues in high school, a lot of white kids, were getting into hip-hop. For some reason, I never really got into the Pearl Jam thing. I later got into Nirvana. And now I’m really into kinda alternative music from that time, like James or Siamese Dream—all of these albums from that era that I didn’t get to put into the movie. The other thing is—and the Mary-Kate Olsen character in the film is kinda reflective of this—I had this very reactionary response to The Grateful Dead. I had no interest in it. I fucking didn’t like it and then I went to boarding school and everyone was taking bong hits in their room and listening to The Grateful Dead and Phish and the other jam bands that were around then that I equally didn’t like. Now I love The Grateful Dead, but I couldn’t even listen to a fucking song for years.

Why do you think that was the moment to be getting into hip-hop?

At the time, there was kind of a recklessness and provocative spirit to rap music. I started getting into rap with Public Enemy; Do the Right Thing was really the movie that turned me on to filmmaking. That recklessness and almost subversive revolutionary something was what I responded to. I don’t know why. I didn’t really have anything to revolt against. As a teenager, I kinda identified that spirit with how I was feeling, just in terms of my worldview. The next step in that was listening to Biggie. He was the single most influential musician for me in that time and place because he was speaking with such frankness about things. Sometimes they were things I understood and sometimes they were things that did not personally resonate with me, but what I understood was his spirit. And when you’re living in New York, that music is the pulse of the city.

The movie is full of browns and greens, of unusually saturated and desaturated colors. Why was that the way 1994 looks in your mind?

The look evolves through the course of the movie. My DP and I had lots of visual references for it, whether it’s the lugubrious murk of the city or later when it opens up and we let more color in as he falls for the girl and things start to get more golden and sunny. We wanted to give the whole thing a nostalgic haze and we produced a lot of that onset with smoke machines and lenses. Then, in the color correction of the film we were able to dictate even more deliberately how the color palette evolved, but it was always our goal to start desaturated and then open it up, while still maintaining the look that movies from that era had—movies like Kids or Fresh. The city tells you where you’re supposed to go with things, especially if you’re outside. All we could do was graft our visual narrative onto what we had, but being on location in the city was the most significant dictator.

And then you have Rudy Giuliani unseen in the background as almost a villain. How did you want to use the idea of Giuliani?

It wasn’t really a political statement in any way. It was about staying grounded to the truth of the times. The reality of being in New York at the time was that you couldn’t go anywhere without somebody bitching about Giuliani, which is another fascinating thing about the period. Since then he’s worn so many different personas. He’s been this amazing American hero and then he’s been this failed presidential candidate; it’s interesting how fast history moves. To me, there was no polemic about how much Giuliani sucks, but for this particular character he was definitely the antagonist. But for me, as a New Yorker, I think he did a lot of great things, too. The Giuliani thing is also an analogue, thematically, for what’s going on with Dr. Squires and Luke. How do you clean up your own self? Do you do what Giuliani did and cosmetically deal with it? Or do you attack the core of the problems?

Sure, there’s the grittiness and authenticity, and sure, the city dictates the movie, but there’s still—and don’t take this the wrong way—the core of a classic ’80s teen movie here, right?

Fuck you, man! [Laughs. Pauses.] Of course, man. I grew up on that John Hughes, Cameron Crowe stuff. From a script and acting perspective, those were the single greatest influences on the film. But the good ones, you know? Like Ferris Bueller and Say Anything and even Almost Famous. I was definitely conscious of it, that there’s a very rich history of these summer coming-of-age movies. I think it’s because that structure lends itself to the themes that we’re working with in this film.

You manage to have Gandhi and one of Nickelodeon’s most popular stars doing drugs together in several scenes. How much fun did you have casting this movie?

It was always something I wanted to do, to basically take people and…not reinvent them, but put them in interesting and different roles where you haven’t seen them before. I like the idea of people having preconceived notions of an actor and us subverting that. That’s one of the great things that independent films can do.

With this movie and with Mandy Lane, you’ve had two very different versions of film festival buzz. Have you learned anything from the experiences?

I’ve learned to go to film festivals and really concentrate on showing the movie to people and hoping they like it. As far as the distribution game goes, it’s not something for me to concentrate on, because I’ll drive myself absolutely bananas. Like you said, we had two different paths for both of these. I think Mandy Lane is coming out toward the end of the year and luckily both films are going to get into theaters and find audiences. That’s really the most important thing. If I could take back all the psychic energy I devoted to who was going to buy the fucking film, I would gladly do that, because all that matters is that people sit in a dark room and like it. The biggest thing Mandy Lane did is that it gave me another film. But when we had sold it for a bunch of money, I thought I was going to be rich and all this shit; and then I was still sitting in my crappy apartment in Echo Park six months later. It’s very important to stay grounded. That’s one of the more important lessons, as I move on with my career—figuring out how to deal with both success and failure, and just continuing to do your thing.

Does that mean that it was easier for you to keep perspective at Sundance with The Wackness?

No. I was super-psyched to go to Sundance with this movie, and then we showed it, and yes, we had interest, but it wasn’t the huge bidding war that Mandy Lane was. And ironically, this film is going to come out first and it’s getting all of these accolades and people love it. So…no. Just because I understand it intellectually doesn’t mean that I won’t continue to fuck up over and over again.

3 films
that inspired Jonathan Levine to make movies


Do the Right Thing
Spike Lee
“I love it for its sense of time and place. It doesn’t pull any punches and it’s also looking at big ideas, but on an intimate scale.”

Manhattan
Woody Allen
“There’s this kind of beautiful, self-conscious romanticism that’s in many ways a beautiful filmic version of the lens through which everybody looks at New York.”

Band of Outsiders
Jean-Luc Godard
“I tell people I like this so I’ll sound smart. For me, Godard is a stylistic visionary; doing stuff with music, sound and image that people still don’t do. In many ways, a Godard movie is like a hip-hop album.”

Cherub Rock
Josh Peck Slangs the Nostalgic Haze

While many older viewers will be getting their first glimpse of Josh Peck as Luke, the mumbling, hip-hop loving, pot dealing anti-hero of The Wackness, those ill-informed moviegoers are obviously outside of the Nickelodeon target demo, where Peck’s work on The Amanda Show and Drake & Josh has been making kids laugh and squeal for nearly a decade now.

Make me feel old—how long ago does 1994 seem to you?

In some ways it seems like forever ago. I mean, truly, I was 8 in 1994, so I was still rocking the shoes that lit up when you walked, and watching Power Rangers and wearing Bugle Boy and shit. But it was also such a defining year in the ’90s as far as hip-hop goes and sort of the cultural impact that happened. If you allow yourself, you’re constantly reminded of that time.

Did Jonathan give you a 1994 primer to get you up to speed?

We started adopting some speech patterns, some language that was used more prominently in the ’90s. While I was in New York—I mean, it’s my hometown; I’m from Hell’s Kitchen, but I’ve lived in L.A. for a couple years now—but when I got to New York for filming, I only listened to East Coast rap. I wanted my headspace to be completely immersed in the East Coast vibe, because New York is this sort of living, breathing thing and I wanted to be completely connected and enraptured in everything that it is. I think my character Luke really represents the city.

This is a fairly major realignment of your image. Have you been looking for a transitional role like this for a while?

I got into this because I love acting and it feeds my soul and I’m really not good at anything else. I’ve always wanted to do material and roles that challenge me and it’s usually the things that scare you in life that are the things you want to gravitate towards. Except for spiders... I felt that with Luke, because I felt we were really in the same place in life. In my acting and in my career, I just want to project truth and put it out there, because I think it’s my responsibility to the audience. Sir Ben [Kingsley] said it best; he said the camera hates acting. And yes, I’m so appreciative for what Nickelodeon’s done for me and making kids laugh; there’s no greater gift in this world. But I also wanted to make sure that I wasn’t typecast into that role for the rest of my life. F