Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
John Wells has had a fascinating career that bounces back and forth between television and movies, and often both at the same time. He was the executive producer (and occasional writer and/or director) of such shows as "China Beach," "E.R.," "Third Watch," and "The West Wing," and still produces "Southland" and the just-debuted Showtime series "Shameless," a dark comedic show about an impoverished Chicago family, starring William H. Macy and Emmy Rossum.
Wells is also a film producer, having had a hand in such movies as THE NOTORIOUS BETTY PAGE, I'M NOT THERE, GIGANTIC, INFAMOUS, AN AMERICAN CRIME, FAR FROM HEAVEN, ONE HOUR PHOTO, PARTY MONSTER, THE GREY ZONE, THE COMPANY, THE PEACEMAKER, and many others. But in all that time, he has never directed his own film until last year, when he took a 10-year-old script he wrote during the dot-com bust, updated it, and made it into the star-studded THE COMPANY MEN, three very different stories about men at different levels of the same company dealing with getting laid off. The film stars Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, Chris Cooper, Maria Bello, Craig T. Nelson, Rosemarie DeWitt, and Kevin Costner, and I happen to think it's a eye-opening perspective of the current economic downturn. But more than that, it's about how adaptable people can be in crisis situations, and it's one of Affleck's best performances in year (and I'm including what he did in THE TOWN, which I also really loved).
I had a great time talking to Wells, and I hope you enjoy our talk…
Capone: It’s good to meet you. I didn’t realize until I was doing research for this interview that you were an executive producer on "Shameless," which obviously shot a lot here. I has the pilot recorded, but I hadn’t watched it yet. So, I got up early this morning to watch it just to make we could talk about it a bit.
John Wells: [laughs]You watched that this early?
Capone: It definitely woke me up.
JW: I don’t think it’s normally like morning viewing, but…
Capone: For me there’s no such thing as evening or morning viewing. Everything just needs to get watched at some point. So let’s talk about the film. I’m a fan of just about every one of the shows that you have ever had a hand in, and they are very much shows about people at work.
JW: Yep.
Capone: So I found it kind of fascinating that this film was about taking that away from somebody It’s certainly been a common belief of mine and many other critics that seeing someone on the job tells you more about a character than somebody telling you about the character or someone describing themselves with words. It is a very telling character-establishing point. So, to take that part of your identity away is a huge thing. Can you tell me about how, after building a career on showing people at work, you chose to make your first film about taking that away.
JW: Absolutely. You've hit on what really interested me about doing it. The impetus for doing it, not that it’s his story, comes from something happened to my brother-in-law and my sister. He lost his job, he has an MBA, an electrical engineering degree, and he started just telling me about how disorienting the experience was and all of the things that surprised him after it happened. His company was taken over by a Swiss firm, and about 5,000 people lost their jobs in the merger on a single day.
And he started talking about how he knew it wasn’t his fault, yet he felt he had done something wrong and that he was ashamed even though it had nothing to do with him and the difficulties of reinventing himself. I went on to some websites--some downsizing and job-search websites--and went into the chat rooms and just put in these little things saying “I’m a writer; I might be writing about this. Do you have any anecdotes or anything you would be willing to share with me? Just drop me a line.”
Capone: How long ago was this?
JW: This was almost like ten years ago now. It was during the “dot-com thing, and I got a couple of thousand responses in a week. So, I started contacting the people who seemed the most likely people to tell you stories. I’m kind of a reporter on my own in that I’m out doing research. It was just that thing that I heard that you're talking about, which is how disorienting the experience was, that so much of an individual's identity in this country is tied up with what they do. It’s one of the few places in the world where you go, and the first thing somebody asks you is, “What do you do?” And that men in particular, more than the women--not to say that what’s going on in the economy isn’t difficult for women as well--talked about really losing their sense of self, about their identity and their sense of self respect. And because we define so much of ourselves through our work and because I’ve written so much about people defining themselves through work, I became really fascinated with this idea of “What happens when you lose that?”
Now, I did a draft of it and then I kind of set it aside. I hadn’t quite gotten it right, and then in 2007, the researcher I had worked with on that first draft said, “I think this is heating up again.” So, I went and did a lot of new interviews, because the circumstances had changed quite a bit--the business circumstances changed. I rewrote about 65 or 75 percent of the script and then found ourselves making it right in the midst of what turned out to be this very deep and “We’re-not-yet-out-of-it” recession. So, something that I thought I was kind of doing to reveal what some people were going through turned into something that almost everybody has gone through, if not personally, then with someone they know well.
Capone: Does it bother you when you see a film or a television show where a character's occupation is identified but never shown?
JW: I’m so research heavy that I want to know a lot about it, so I can write about it. If we believe that people identify heavily with what they do and that that’s a big part of their identity, then I think it’s hard to write about a character without knowing what that is and letting that sort of seep in to what they are doing.
Capone: It’s interesting, in the scenes with Ben Affleck and Kevin Costner, Costner isn’t in the film as much as Ben Affleck, but I feel I know as much about him because so many of their scenes are just watching them work, and those are great scenes. Those might be my favorite scenes in the film actually, because you learn something about the adaptability of people under these extreme circumstances.
JW: Yeah, and one of the things that I heard over and over again in my research that I tried to put in the film is this sense that, again, of something you are touching on, which is we have a society in which we sort of are expected to be very individualistic and to look out for ourselves. But the reality is that a 100 years ago you couldn’t exist without depending upon everybody around you, and we still are in exactly the same situation, we just pretend that it’s different. So, when we hit any kind of adversity, the people who are going to pull us through are our family and our friends and colleagues, community, people that we know. I talked to people about their lengthy job searches, and the vast majority of people do get back on their feet through the auspices of somebody in their family or a friend.
Capone: Right. How different is this version of the script versus the one you did 10 years ago?
JW: Substantially different. The first one really was just about Ben Affleck’s character and also was kind of an anti-capitalist scream to tell you the truth. [Laugh] I kind of read it and said, “You know, I think there’s probably a little more balance needed here.” So I ended up interviewing a lot of CEOs, actually, in the last round and the Tommy Lee Jones, Craig T. Nelson, and Maria Bello characters all really rose up out of that research and became much more central to the story.
Capone: Craig T. Nelson in particular, I make no apologies about hating that character with all of my might. I used to work in that corporate environment and I knew guys like that who made decisions like that. “Who makes the most money? Okay, those guys are gone, because that saves us the most money.” Merit never factors into it.
JW: I didn’t make up a single bit of that. Amazingly enough, and I was a little amazed by it--and you probably find this in your reportage--people always want to explain themselves. So I started calling CEOs and saying “I’m doing something about downsizing and I would love to hear what your thoughts are on the necessity of it.” All of that stuff that Craig says I just wrote down. I didn’t make that stuff up. The entire last scene that he has with Tommy Lee in the lobby of the building when he’s defending it, that came from a conversation I had with a CEO who I actually rather admire and is known for his staunch support of Democratic candidates and social programs and save the earth and everything else. He said everything single thing. I didn’t make up a single thing; I wrote it all down.
Capone: While you do focus on the different strata of this one particular corporation, were you concerned about trying to get an audience to feel sympathy for some of the people higher up in that company, who are doing the firing, until they themselves get axed?
JW: [laughs] I don’t know if I succeeded at it or not, but it’s one of the reasons why I didn’t write it about the blue-collar workers. Blue-collar workers in this country have been taking it in the neck since the '80s. What’s new in this recession and started in the dot-com recession--although there was a lot more sort of avarice in the dot-com recession--but what’s new about it in this is that this is happening to all of the people who feel like they had done everything right. They went to school, they didn’t just get a high school education and look for a manufacturing job; they went to college and got a post-graduate degree and did what they were supposed to do. They succeeded or did well in their jobs. They were getting good performance reports. This is about cutting the meat out of corporations now. This isn’t about “Here’s a little fat over here and here’s a little fat over there.” This is about people who thought they were doing everything they were supposed to do in the pursuit of the American Dream.
So, the challenge I tried to set myself in the writing was to write characters that you don’t necessarily like at the beginning and that you come to. Whether or not you end up liking Gene McClary, the Tommy Lee Jones character, or the Chris Cooper character or the Ben Affleck character, I think you do begin to feel empathy for them and understand that they actually have… You want them to get some comeuppance, some schadenfreude, I think how you pronounced it. You want them to get it and then at some points, I’m hoping that you feel uncomfortable about how much you hope that that would happen to them, because you start to realize “Alright, here are human beings who have problems and have egos, and there’s some narcissism that’s involved, and yet this isn’t fair.”
Capone: Well the Chris Cooper guy is in the middle, and I think you probably feel the worst of all for him, because he clearly thought he was in this until he wasn’t, until he was ready to retire or die. he was a lifer.
JW: It looked like he destroyed that social covenant. There was a covenant in between employers and employees that I personally think the destruction of that is going to be detrimental to American productivity, just in the straight-forward “Is it good for your business?” way. There was a big recent Harvard Business Review article, and I think they are trying to coin a new term called “the anorexic company,” in which you basically, in pursuit of quarterly earnings and high-level executive compensation, you are taking the intellectual capital out of the middle of the company. And what’s going to happen with the younger workers--and is starting to happen with the younger workers--is that they no longer believe that they are going to be protected by their company. So if you get a better offer or any kind of other opportunity, you take it, because nobody is looking out for you except for you. Well that’s really difficult for companies in the long term, and I think that unfortunately the real--and I don’t want to minimize anybody’s difficulties that come out of this horrible recession we are in now-- people that are really taking it in the neck and who are going to have the most trouble recovering are workers who are in their 50s and early 60s.
Capone: In hearing you talk about collecting stories from people that this has happened to, it’s a similar story to --and you might have heard this before--what Jason Reitman did in preparation for UP IN THE AIR. Were you carefully watching that film when it came out to make sure it didn’t cover the same ground. You had to be starting up when that was getting popular.
JW: Yeah, the scariest thing was George [Clooney] came back. I had written and directed one of the last episodes of "E.R.", and George came back to do it. So we were kind of shooting the shit around the set, and I hadn’t seen him in a couple of months, and I said “So what are you doing next?” And then he said he was doing this thing, and he told me what it was and I was like “Really? I was kind of thinking about doing that too.” He was kind enough to let me read the script, which I think now nobody cares about, but at the time I don’t think he was supposed to. [Laughs] He didn’t let me take it, but I read it on the set a bit and realized “Well, it’s a similar film, but not the same film.” And what I tell people about it is Jason did that wonderful thing at the end of that film with interviewing real people and putting that footage in. I always tell people, “If you were interested in what happened with any of those people that he interviewed once they walked out of the room, that’s what this movie is about.” [Laughs]
Capone: You have the benefit of having your film come out at the same time that your cinematographer, Roger Deakins, has another movie out [TRUE GRIT] that he will probably win an Oscar for.
JW: Dear God, I hope so; he really deserves it.
Capone: For the kind of film COMPANY MEN is, it’s mostly interiors. It seems a strange choices for him, but he makes it look so good.
JW: He was originally a documentarian and so he brings that desire to not be intrusive or to make the world that he’s lighting and photographing seem artificial in any fashion, so he removes that artifice from it, which is a huge part of what I think makes the films feel so real and legitimate.
Capone: Talk a little bit about how you pulled this cast together.
JW: [Laughs] Pure luck.
Capone: Did anyone sort of give you an idea of what drew them into wanting to be a part of this story?
JW: Yeah, I had this experience I don’t think I’ll ever have again--and Roger was part of it--this kind of making up the list of the people I would love to have be in the movie and send it to them and have everybody say yes. But I think that the experience that the actors had in doing it was that--and they all sort of told me this--we had started to pull the movie together and I sort of sent it out. Ben said yes in the fall of 2008, late fall--it was right around the election. Then we started trying to make it that next year, but once we started to try and really make it, we were in the midst of the TARP [Troubled Asset Relief Program] and the credit crunch, and I mean things were just getting worse and worse. A lot of the actors told me that one of the reasons that they responded to the material was that they felt that this was happening around them and just as artists they wanted to participate in saying something about what they were watching on the evening news every night. And in this case, I literally just sent it to everybody I wanted to be in it and people just kept saying yes. And I think that’s a large part of it.
Also, honestly, 10 years ago, not necessarily on this subject, but every actor of this caliber would have four or five or six or seven more seriously minded dramas sitting around on their desks to choose from with all different kinds of topics that were relevant to what was going on in the world or some kind of a social situation, and in the last three years or so, you’ve got one or two at most. The movies just aren’t getting made, and you probably feel that just in what you see. So it means that people who want to do other kinds of work to go along with the more commercial things that they are doing--and I just mean the kind of more mainstream commercial pieces they are doing--there are fewer things out there that they choose to do. That’s to my advantage with this film. [Laughs]
Capone: Speaking of people on the down swing, lets talk a little bit about "Shameless." This seems so completely different than what you’ve been up to on television before. Why did you want to make a story about these folks in particular?
JW: Well, it’s social satire. It’s mean to be over-the-top good filthy fun, but it also has kind of a social satire element underneath it. Paul Abbott [the creator of the original British version of "Shameless," which just began its eighth season], who did the show, said it’s based on his family’s life. He’s a wonderful British writer, who also did "State of Play" and a bunch of other things. We were talking about doing something else, and he showed this to me about eight years ago, and I said “I think this could work in the United States and I think it could work because it’s a completely over-the-top social commentary about how screwy our economic system is for people at the bottom of the economic ladder.” There’s a lot of that if you watch more of the episodes.
Capone: So far, it doesn’t seem that over the top.
JW: [laughs] That’s the interesting thing. It’s all satirical and quite over the top, yet I can’t tell you how many people have said to me “Hey, he reminds me of my dad.” I’m like, “Your dad’s on the floor in the kitchen all of the time?” [Laughs] But it has all of those elements of things about trying to deal with and talk about. We go way over the top on the teenage sexuality, yet we have this prudish notion about what children or our teenagers are doing, which is not realistic. They are actually much more sexually active and doing things regarding drug use and alcoholism and trying to scam the system to stay alive at the margins. But at it’s core it’s about family and the way in which, no matter how crazy the units are, we all pull together and make a life for ourselves.
Capone: How much of it do you actually shoot in Chicago?
JW: Bill [William H. Macy] is married to Felicity Huffman, and they have two young children, and they have two young children and she’s on "Desperate Housewives." He loves Chicago, but he’s said, “I can’t be away from family that much.” So, we will have shot about 20 days here and by the first season is over. We take three trips out of the 12 episodes and shoot material for it, and we’ve been shooting in wintertime, because we shot the pilot last year in winter. We’ve been trying to stay in continuity, but I have to say we might move into the spring or summer for next season, because we're going to be here in about a week and a half shooting and freezing our tails off. I did that a lot on "E.R." We shot here a lot on "E.R."
Capone: I was about to say, this is like a return for you, but I wasn’t sure how much you actually came out when the "E.R." guys were here.
JW: I came out a lot. I’ve got all of my Woolies, believe me.
Capone: Okay, excellent. Well, thanks so much. Great to meet you.
JW: Nice to meet you, and thanks for coming down.
-- Capone capone@aintitcool.com
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