Director James Ponsoldt on his PIPPIN film

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.

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.

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

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?

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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.

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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.

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

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

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?

{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}

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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.

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