Until today, I'd somehow and quite miraculously managed to avoid any direct contact with the solipsistic bore that is Jason Reitman, confident in the knowledge that he was already well taken care of by the cadre of sycophantic film bloggers curled obediently at his feet, content to snatch up whatever pie-chart crumbs or slivers of contemplative self-regard should happen to tumble from his constantly moving lips. Well, that was nice while it lasted. Roger Ebert has just posted a series of short video conversations with Reitman -- in Chicago for his aggressively tweeted audience with Queen Oprah -- and while the legendary film critic assessed the Up in the Air director as "forthright and thoughtful," I probably would have gone with very different adjectives. Here then, in no particular order beyond that of awfullest to awfullest, are Reitman's ten most monstrous quotes.
1. "This movie that I'm writing right now -- I know what actors I want for it. I'll be able to go to them easily, and presumably it will be easier to greenlight than my first movie, or my second."
2. "It's easy to get caught up in a moment and think, 'Oh, I've been offered some giant studio film or a superhero franchise or some actor wants to meet with me about a project they want to do.' And it's easy to get caught up in a moment because it's flattering. But you can't do a movie because it's flattering. You have to do it because it's in your bones."
3. "My personal gut test is when I think about the movie that I'm considering, if when I think about someone else directing that movie it feels worse than that same director having sex with [my wife] Michelle, that's how I know I need to do this movie."
4. "The thing I'm writing right now, if someone else made it? I'd want to kill them. If someone else made Up in the Air or Thank You For Smoking or Juno, I would have wanted to rip their head off. I need that same sort of passion for every project I take on."
5. "Hopefully I will carry that fire as long as possible. It seems that most directors don't. For whatever reason, most directors don't."
6. "I was talking to Cameron a little bit ago, about how the tentacle in The Abyss was the first step of an evolution that led to the character in Terminator 2... I feel as though Thank You For Smoking was the first step to making Up in the Air."
7. "I needed to go through a three-film journey to make Up in the Air, that said so much of what I wanted to say about the politics of this economy, the politics of midlife crisis, and female midlife crisis vs. male midlife crisis, and the complex identity crisis that working women go through. All these ideas, and they kind of [began in] Thank You For Smoking and built to Up in the Air."
8. "Everything I've wanted to turn into a film becomes something new and different when it becomes a movie...Each time I work with an author, I say to them, 'A book and a movie are different things.'"
9. "I had a take on Confederacy of Dunces, for example. But I've never had a take on Catcher in the Rye."
10. "What I do feel is that Up in the Air is the most indicative film of 2009. It is the portrait of 2009. And when you look at this State of the Union that happened a couple of days ago, that was all about unemployment being at its highest since 1983, and all about job creation, and you realize how this film is kind of a portrait of America right now...I hope that doesn't come off arrogant. I really don't mean it that way."
ยท Jason Reitman in conversation [Roger Ebert's Journal]