"I killed my first prostitute at the age of three and since then I’ve been scaling back on the Hollywood brat thing,” jokes Jason Reitman.
As the son of Ivan Reitman, director of such runaway 80s comedies as Stripes and Ghostbusters, it’s probably just as well Jason is good-humouredly self-deprecating about it.
“I started being around sets very early,” he says. “When I was 13 got a job as production assistant on one of my dad’s movies. It should have sucked and been hard work, but it’s a meaningless position when you’re the director’s son. No one really asks you to do any thing. It’s like, 'Hey Jason. go grab that cable. If you don’t mind. If you’re not too busy. Please sir.'”
The on-set pampering doesn’t seem to have gone to his head. Lounging unshaven in a baggy plaid shirt, he carries none of the airs or vices one would expect from Hollywood royalty.
“I’m a really boring guy,” he stresses. “I went on my honeymoon to Italy and still managed to come home without drinking wine. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. People always assume that I’m going to be arrogant and have a drug problem. Well, you know, I don’t have a drug problem.”
Despite his unusually clean lifestyle, Jason’s debut feature is Thank You For Smoking, a goofy satire with a morally dubious tobacco lobbyist as its protagonist.
“It’s a movie about talk and spin in general,” explains the 29-year old. “Lobbying and cigarettes happen to be a sexy subject matter because every one is so opinionated about it. In the US everyone has an opinion whether you should or should not smoke. What upsets me is political correctness people telling other people how to live, that really came into the fray with cigarettes. I wanted to use cigarettes in the way that Alexander Payne used abortion in Citizen Ruth. The movies aren’t about abortion or smoking. It’s a kind of location to look at the mania around those things. I don’t smoke, but I don’t want people telling me what to do. It should be a question of personal responsibility.”
Based on a novel by Christopher Buckley, Thank You For Smoking revolves around Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), a roguish cigarette spokesman attempting to be a good father and ethically problematic trouble-shooter at the same time. Written as a stream of bon mot and asides, the film is broad enough to have taken $22 million at the US box-office while maintaining a devilish giddiness right until the end credits.
“In the late '90s a very smart woman gave me the book as a gift and said this book is written for you,” Jason recalls.” Well, Mel (Gibson) loved the book too and bought it and hired a series of writers to make it into a big time comedy. It never worked because an expensive comedy was never able to be as subversive as the material needed to be. My pitch was to make it very small. I came in when the project was basically dead and said we should make this really cheap so we wont have to apologise for it. So I wrote 25 pages for free and they loved it and they hired me. Then it took five years to find someone to finance the film. No studio would do it. I kept getting asked to change the ending so he’d see the light or join the Red Cross or something awful like that. You’d think these things would be easier when your dad’s a director.”
Jason’s fortunes changed when independent financer David Sacks – the multi-millionaire co-creator of PayPal – took an interest. But there was still the problem of wrestling the project away from Mel’s people.
“It was messy. It took David a year getting the rights for the screenplay from Icon and the rights of the book from Warners. There’s a horrible tradition in Hollywood where no one wants you to have success with their project. It is almost better to hold onto it and eat the cost than to actually break even and let someone else have a success.”
His script’s worth is made apparent by the cast list. Robert Duvall plays an ageing tobacco baron. Katie Holmes is a succubus scout-reporter. Maria Bello is the alcohol lobbyist. Sam Elliot is an ersatz Marlboro Man. William H. Macy is Eckhart’s smug nemesis. And how did Jason persuade them to sign on the dotted line?
“Cocaine and cash,” he quips. “Actually I wrote them all letters. The letters spoke from the heart, and talked about why I liked them, what they meant to me and how they would fit the role. Robert Duvall said in the call back how much the letter meant to him. Robert Redford turned us down but wrote a lovely letter saying how much he loved my letter. So that was cool.”
Oddly, given the subject matter, the film doesn’t feature a single person lighting up.
“I didn’t want people walking away thinking the movie was pro or anti smoking,” he says. “And it’s too distracting to have characters smoking and doing things with their mouth on screen anyway.”
But lots of films have smoking in them, I point out. In The Godfather they never seem to stop eating and that doesn’t distract from the action.
“That’s true. So let’s just say that nobody smokes in my movie in the same way that nobody uses the word mafia in The Godfather.”
Good enough. He’s too nice a chap to argue with. Besides, I don’t want to burst his bubble. Having beavered away for years on low budget award winning shorts for the festival circuit – far from possible taunts about nepotism – he’s still visibly excited about getting his first feature out.
“I was seven when I went to the set of Ghostbusters,” he smiles. “And they had wrecked the streets of Manhattan. I remember thinking, 'Wow, so this is what directors do. I want to make movies.'”