Director James Ponsoldt on his PIPPIN film

[jacobsnchz14]

Posted: 8/7/13 at 8:16pm

http://collider.com/james-ponsoldt-interview-the-spectacular-now/#more-274975

COLLIDER: You’re attached to several projects, and I’m always fascinated by how people work when they take on so much. [...] What’s your method of organizing your day when you have so much going on?

PONSOLDT: But I also have really great collaborators. Like with Rodham, I didn’t write that. Young Il Kim did, and he wrote a beautiful script. So I’m reading and giving him notes, and reading it on a plane, I’ll write notes, and give them to him tomorrow, so things like that. On Pippin, I’m writing all the time, or adapting all the time.

COLLIDER: What’s it like working with a musical because on screen they can be really fun, and I don’t want to say “more accessible”, but I like musical movies in a different way than I like stage musicals.

PONSOLDT: Yeah, I would say that with the tone, what’s really great about Pippin, is that it was written by Stephen Schwartz, who did Wicked, Bob Fosse directed the original. But it’s not like dark Bob Fosses. It’s not like All that Jazz or Chicago. The tone is like The Princess Bride or Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It’s an absurdist, episodic take that’s irreverent. At it’s core, it’s a coming-of-age story about a guy who’s 22 and wants to live an extraordinary life, but can’t even figure out what that means and how to make himself happy.

In many ways, I think I’m a good person for it. I mean, I’m not a musical theater dude. Or rather, I don’t watch everything, and love everything, and have every album. The ones that I love—like I’ve seen The Wizard of Oz a hundred times. West Side Story I love. I love Singing in the Rain, I love White Christmas. I love the Dennis Potter ones like Singing Detective and Pennies from Heaven. I love Sondheim. I think now more than ever there’s so much available honesty that you can find on the Internet. You can go on to YouTube and find really, really vulnerable, really verité stuff. It’s not even verité, it’s real! It’s people confessing very private things. In a world with “It Gets Better” videos where people are trying to keep themselves alive and speak out to other people and are really brave and courageous. All the more a cheesy musical seems fake, so it requires a level of honesty to be injected or an acknowledgement of that which is fake and fun about musicals, and it isn’t necessarily escapist. Like there are great musicals like Once, which feel very almost like a mumblecore musical. I love Once. It’s great. What I think is great about Pippin, specifically, and I wouldn’t make this generalization about all musicals, is that it is about how we tell stories and the way stories are very subjective. How we tell some things and leave other things out in the way The Princess Bride is or The Wizard of Oz is, which both have a framing device.

[BwayBaby18]

Posted: 8/7/13 at 9:01pm

Are you allowed to love Sondheim and work on a Schwartz show?

[CurtainPullDowner]

Posted: 8/7/13 at 10:02pm

I wish him luck, but I think Fosse is the only one who could translate this material to film.
I hope he proves me wrong.

[g.d.e.l.g.i.]

Posted: 8/7/13 at 10:23pm

I saw a script from before Ponsoldt was on the project. If it's anything like that script, it'll be really interesting provided they don't screw it up.

[jacobsnchz14]

Posted: 8/7/13 at 10:25pm

What was that script like compared to the musical's book?

[g.d.e.l.g.i.]

Posted: 8/7/13 at 11:15pm

Very close to the Fosse version, with a lot of the Fosse material that failed to make it to the revival inserted. (One big example that I always find chilling on paper and in performance is Fastrada's long, dark monologue basically listing all the reasons she'd have for wanting Charlemagne to be overthrown and killed, delivered with her usual sunny, winking bonhomie, ending in "I don't hold grudges" before "Spread a Little Sunshine.")

My favorite element: the ending was a slight compromise between the Fosse ending and the new "Theo" ending. As in Fosse's (the old ending, whether it was "trapped... but happy" or just "trapped"), Catherine asks Pippin if he feels that he's compromised, if he feels that he's a coward. Once he's said no to both, she asks "Well then, how do you feel?" Then Pippin sings his a cappella "magic shows and miracles" verse and the "Theo" ending proceeds as scripted from there. I just thought it filled out the ending slightly, made it flow better.

As for the overall concept, it was kind of like Big Fish or even (a slightly more sane rendition of) what Ken Russell did with Tommy, very heightened and theatrical, with a lot of imagery on paper that looked like it would really pop on screen, but at the same time singularly appropriate for film.

Updated On: 8/7/13 at 11:15 PM

[PalJoey]

Posted: 8/8/13 at 10:28am

All the more a cheesy musical seems fake, so it requires a level of honesty to be injected or an acknowledgement of that which is fake and fun about musicals, and it isn’t necessarily escapist.

What the hell is he talking about?

[darquegk]

Posted: 8/8/13 at 10:51am

Probably an acknowledgment that the traditional vaudeville and minstrel show trappings of PIPPIN are a little quaint and cheesy on purpose onstage as a stylistic counterpoint both to Fosse's dance modernism and the existential absurdism of the libretto.

[best12bars]

Posted: 8/8/13 at 11:44am

Just tell me he isn't putting it in someone's head.

If that's the way he acknowledges the "fakeness" of musicals, it's been done ... and done ... and done.

I agree with him that all fantasies need to have an underlying level of honesty at their core. The setting may be "fake" but the emotions must be real and ring true.

That doesn't mean you have to "acknowledge" a fantasy world (in this case, a musical world) with a wink and a nod or a dream sequence or an "absurdist" slant.

Fantasy can exist wholly on its own terms, in its own world, with its own set of rules and logic. But the emotions must be kept true and genuine (no phony emotional choices in fantasies, or you'll disconnect your audience quicker than you can watch yet another bad screen adaptation of Alice In Wonderland).

I hope he knows what he's doing. He's on the right track probably, but his communication of a creative path sounds a bit muddled in this interview.

[michellek45]

Posted: 8/8/13 at 11:46am

I really hope that we get a Pippin movie, but this guy's interview doesn't make me think that he's a good person to adapt it.

[N2N Nate.]

Posted: 8/8/13 at 4:54pm

Sorry but I really can't see PIPPIN working on film. It just seems like one of those shows that was never meant for the screen. I would rather just have a filmed recording of the revival.

Updated On: 8/8/13 at 04:54 PM

[ggersten]

Posted: 8/8/13 at 5:17pm

Wouldn't you start with a young man stumbling across a tent. He's feeling lost. He sees a sign that says "Enter and Be Fulfulled!" or "Enter to Discover Your Destiny" or multiple signs. He enters and takes a seat. LP comes on and the entorage performs Magic To Do to the audience - "Pippin responds" he comes out of the audience in response - he is handed a script and ushered backstage where he is costumed and given cues or behind the tent or whatever. He's a quick learner! and the show goes on in front of that audience - so all of the asides are actually done. He could even start Corner of the Sky with script in hand and then toss it aside. He could look at it occasionally.

I realize that won't break the fourth wall of the cinema but that's tough to do, in any event. But it won't be in any one's head. It'll be more like Cabaret. And for the finale - after Pippin is stripped of costume and lighting and band - Leading Player can even tell the audience to leave - and the audience on film will do so! Then Pippin truly will be alone.

[Scarywarhol]

Posted: 8/8/13 at 5:51pm

It sounds like he really, really doesn't understand Fosse's version of the piece...

[darquegk]

Posted: 8/8/13 at 6:37pm

I'm almost certain that the central metaphor, that Pippin is an intricately choreographed old-fashioned theatrical performance, will be and MUST BE jettisoned for the film.

[michellek45]

Posted: 8/8/13 at 6:46pm

I think you're right, darquegk, that turning Pippin away from being an inherently theatrical performance won't work on the film. It's rare that you get the sense on film that the actors are performing to the movie audience, which is kind of the whole point of Pippin (on stage). Maybe Pippin is the audience that the Leading Player's troupe is performing for?

[g.d.e.l.g.i.]

Posted: 8/8/13 at 7:11pm

^ Actually, michelle, he's arguing that that's exactly what they should do if they want a shot of Pippin working on film, hence the emphasis on the words "must be." I happen to disagree, but that's why Greg and I are friends. :P

Updated On: 8/8/13 at 07:11 PM

[PalJoey]

Posted: 8/8/13 at 9:01pm

{soapbox}

When will these hopelessly clueless film directors and (worse!) these hopelessly pretentious British stage directors realize what Mamoulian, Minnelli, Chuck Walters, Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, Bob Fosse and Robert Wise innately understood: that what's remarkable about musicals is not that what seems like artifice is fake, but that what seems like artifice is TRUE.

{/soapbox}

[Mattbrain]

Posted: 8/8/13 at 9:25pm

{soapbox}

Shut up!

{/soapbox}

[g.d.e.l.g.i.]

Posted: 8/9/13 at 10:58am

Yeah, I'm on board with PJ's soapbox, sorry. xD

Also, the pre-Ponsoldt screenplay managed to take a very theatrically based and motivated show and turn it into a film. I'm confident Ponsoldt can do the same. I'm just not sure it would work so well, given the way he seems to be talking about it.