Although he’s the hottest young director in town, Jason Reitman was pre-med at college. Fearful of living in the shadow of his enormously successful director father, Ivan Reitman, he decided at an early age to choose another path. In the end, however, genes won out and Jason found himself with a camera in his hands. With critical hits like “Thank You for Smoking” and Oscar winner “Juno” under his belt, the 32-year-old filmmaker just may surpass his father before he’s done.
This weekend's “Up in the Air,” has festival crowds buzzing, making it a likely contender in this season’s Oscar race. Based on the 2001 novel by Walter Kirn, George Clooney stars as Ryan Bingham, a hatchet man who travels the country firing employees whose bosses don’t have the nerve to do it themselves.
Reitman talked to TheWrap about firing people, his father, his career and his theatrical pas de deux with the media.
Bingham is like a sociopath who grows a heart by the end of the movie.
Ryan Bingham’s not a sociopath. Ryan Bingham’s a sensitive human being. Ryan Bingham’s a man who understands that people need to be fired. Nobody holds on to a job forever. Everybody dies and everybody at one point usually gets fired from something. So he’s just good at what he does and he does it with a sense of dignity and it permits him to live the life that means most to him -- which is a life, seamless, in the air, on the road, hub to hub.
Ever fire anyone?
Yeah.
And?
Firing somebody is one of the worst feelings on earth. You’d have to be completely insensitive not to empathize with somebody that’s losing his livelihood. There’s no good way to do it. The only thing you can do is be as straight as possible, take ownership of the firing as you do it and to give the person a sense of finality so they can move on.
You had to rewrite all the firing scenes.
When I first started writing this movie seven years ago, we were in an economic boom, and by the time I finished, it was one of the worst recessions on record. The scenes I'd written were satirical, somewhat like “Thank You for Smoking,” but they didn’t make sense now.
I realized that I should reach out to the community and find people that had lost their jobs that were willing to go on camera and be a part of the film. We put an ad out in the paper. We got a staggering amount of responses. Put 60 people on camera, 22 of which are in the finished movie. We sat them down at a table. Interviewed them for about 10 minutes on what it’s like to lose their job in this type of economy, and then we would fire them on camera. We’d ask them to respond by saying whatever they did the day they lost their job or, if they preferred, what they wished they had said.
