Happythankyoumoreplease features Radnor as Sam, a successful New York City short story writer who wants to break into writing more long-form novels. On the way to an important meeting, Sam notices a young boy named Rasheen (Michael Algieri) on the subway who gets separated from his foster family. Sam, not wanting to leave a resistant Rasheen at the police station, lets Rasheen stay at his apartment -- all while trying to win the affection of a bartender-lounge singer named Mississippi (Kate Mara) and weaving through the relationships he has with the rest of the ensemble cast (including Malin Akerman, Zoe Kazan and Pablo Schreiber). Movieline sat down with Radnor late last week for a conversation about his directorial debut, the warnings he received about certain plot points and, like TV co-star Jason Segel has hinted, if he, too, is ready to move on from How I Met Your Mother.
I can only assume that people are asking you if happythankyoumoreplease is your Garden State?
Well, I don't know what [writer-director-star Zach Braff's] intentions were. I don't know him. I understand why people are asking; they are generation snapshots, all that, and we are both on these television shows. A lot of actors I know, and I include myself, there's a kind of restlessness with doing one thing and doing one thing for a long time. And that's one of the blessings and curses about doing series television: It's such a gift and the stability is a gift, but you also are asked as a function of serving the larger piece, you're asked to hit the same notes a lot. And I think if you have that restlessness and you want to do lots of things, that can be a great motivation to do something else. So, part of it, not specifically about this movie but generally about writing and doing other things, was to work those other muscles that were not being used.
I think people get worried when they see a trailer for a movie and it involves a kid. And it's addressed with a mocking line in the film, "Sensitive white guy learns lesson from an African-American child." Are you worried people might dismiss this as Big Daddy 2?
Well... I don't know. I mean, that line is there for a reason. And on some level it's to try to mitigate some of that criticism -- which is maybe a cowardly thing on my part. It's also like, they are self-aware people. And I think that Mary Catherine, she's always a step ahead of everyone. So having her say it was kind of like calling him out. Like, "Oh, you're going to use this kid to grow yourself."
So I think that charge is false to label on my movie because I think Sam obviously cares about the kid and obviously goes out of his way to help him. And you really get the feeling, especially in that last seen together, Sam kind of gives him some advice and you want to hope believe that the kid has forever changed and will forever remember this and keep drawing, at the very least.
Were you consciously trying to give Sam different character traits so people won't compare him to Ted Mosby?
Yeah. I think so, a little bit. But I was really trying to just conceive a role that I felt like I would be the best person to play it. I was trying to write a role that I thought, This will be a good role for me to have in a movie. And no one else was writing it, I figured. Well, I'll just write it. And certainly, maybe unconsciously, there was a lot of like... I mean, Sam's certainly not a guy looking for "Mrs. Right." He's not a relationship guy. He's quite the opposite. He's charming and reckless and irresponsible and boozy and slutty and all those things. I wanted to make him feel kind of dark and messy.
Well, the scene that stands out for me in relation to this is when Sam invites Mississippi to stay with him for three days, but he was obviously just trying to sleep with her right then...
Completely...
So Sam has an asshole side to him. How do you balance the line between an asshole move and making sure the audience doesn't hate the main character?
[Deep breath] That's interesting. It's kind of like I don't want to hate him, in some ways. For me, this particular world, I don't think there are any villains in the movie. Evan Ira -- Annie's ex-boyfriend who has that terrible idea -- when I was auditioning people, some people came in and they were really twirling their mustache. You know what I mean? Like really playing it like a villain. And I was like, "He's not like that. He's friends with these people. He just has a terrible idea, and he's insensitive. But he's not a bad guy." No one in the movie is evil; they're just kind of misguided and getting in their own way. So, to me, it wasn't so much about creating fully sympathetic characters that everyone would love immediately; they're well-intentioned fools who wise up a little bit.
It would have been an interesting plot twist if a character showed up twirling his mustache.
It would have been like, "What? Why is she dating that guy who is twirling his mustache?"
Can't she tell?
That's a dead giveaway! You can hear the audience hissing!
You filmed in New York City. Did that present any problems, considering it's a smaller production?
Yeah, there were sirens -- only when you're filming. There were people who wouldn't listen to PAs and would just walk through shots and stare at the camera. Some people are like, "Oh, you're filming a movie," and are really interested. Some people are like, "I don't care, I'm going." They won't even acknowledge that anything has happened. One guy just wouldn't turn off his music so we paid him off. You know, stuff like that. He was standing in the door and wouldn't leave the door while we were trying to film.
What song was it? Maybe it could have been used?
What was he playing? He was playing something I had -- a French singer -- and I thought, since we like the same music, he was going to stop. No. We had to pay him a couple of hundred bucks. I was like, "Buddy, you just made more tonight than I did." Jerk.
When you're writing, directing and starring in a film, do you feel like there's no place to hide? You can't pawn an idea someone is critical of off on the writer or director.
You know, I had final cut in this movie, which is pretty extraordinary for a first-time director. So it is intensely vulnerable because I have to stand by every frame of it. People gave me great notes and I took the ones that I thought were useful and I didn't take the ones that I disagreed with, so, I do stand by every frame of the movie. But, yeah, it's intensely vulnerable because, on some level, if people don't like the movie, you feel like they don't like you. You know? And that's intense. That requires a bravery that I'm having to cultivate that feels new. Where you're standing in the midst of that and still standing tall and making you not want to leave the house.
Or people take the assumption that every line of dialogue is your personal opinion.
There's so much of that! There's so much weird projection that goes on. And hostilities and praise. Even the good stuff that people say, it all feels weird. It's all just very strange and vulnerable. But I want to keep dong it so I'll just acclimate myself.
So the line in the film questioning Woody Allen for making a movie every year instead of a great movie every few years, is that you or projection?
[Laughs] Well, I clearly love Woody Allen. I think you can tell that I've been influenced by him and, to me, it was an instance of the student ribbing the master a little bit. The guy has made so many great movies and is so influential, but sometimes I wonder, "Maybe he should slow down a little bit." But I'm not super invested in that line, you know what I mean? I don't have a vendetta against Woody Allen. I'm not trying to prove anything. I just thought it was something kind of funny and very New Yorky that Mary Catherine would s
ay.
I don't disagree with your opinion, for the record.
There's also something amazing his vigilance and dedication to just doing a movie a year. I believe him when he says that he doesn't read the reviews. And I believe him when he says that it's about the work. He's clearly not doing it to go to the premiere, schmooze and be celebrated. He does it because he loves it.
There's a funny line in the movie about Kramer vs. Kramer. There's a year that this happened -- I just can't pinpoint the year -- but in what year did Kramer vs. Kramer become funny? Because it has.
Oh [laughs]... I don't know! Yeah. But for years if you said, "Kramer vs. Kramer" people would be like, "Too soon... too soon." But, I don't know! It occurred to me as kind of funny for him to reference it. I also like the fact that he drops references throughout to Rasheen - the kid is clearly not going to like Kramer vs. Kramer. One of the things that is funny about their relationship to me is that he talks to him as if he's a contemporary. He does not acknowledge the fact that this kid is six or seven years old. What's amazing about Michael [Algieri] as an actor is that I wanted to cast an actor who looked like he maybe understood everything he was saying.
Did anyone warn you that audiences might get "confused" because there are two characters named Sam?
No, that wasn't one of the things that people were worried about.
What were people worried about?
I think one of the big concerns was that people would say, "Why does he hold on to the kid?" We were really worried people were not going to suspend disbelief on that. And on the very first cut we showed, I knew we had done something right because that wasn't a big concern for these people. Most people said, "Yeah, I guess, but I just went with it." A lot of it is movie logic. You know what I mean? Someone said, "I don't know that they would put Sam and the kid in the back of the police car together." Seriously, I don't know. Someone said that when there's an arrest, there are always two cop cars. But that's stuff that doesn't help my story. What helped my story was to get them both in the back of my car and be able to have some final words with each other. Sometime you have to sacrifice the veracity of the piece for the deeper emotional truth.
It's a fine line if there's too much of that. I can accept that a radioactive spider gave a teenager super powers. I have a hard time believing that happened plus a space alien lands on his bike like in Spider-Man 3.
Isn't it funny that you can accept one but not the other? Like that one seems plausible. My friend Todd is a really brilliant novelist, and we were talking the other day and he said this great thing about how if you want to ramp up the drama in any story, what you do is you make the figurative literal. So a guy feels like inconsequential in his family, he feels like a bug -- so make him a bug. And Kafka made him a bug -- he turns him into a bug. And relationships, there's a reason we can't be together. Why? Because you're a mermaid. Turn her into a mermaid, that's why you can't be together. I've been thinking about this. I want to find a great story where I make the figurative literal. What does that look like? But also really rooted in a reality. And I think that might be what you're talking about, Spider-Man getting bit and getting powers, sometimes people say that's a metaphor for puberty.
Three things I wasn't thinking of comparing this move to when I walked in here: Kafka, Spider-Man 3 or Splash.
Exactly.
What type of roles are you offered? Are you not pleased with them -- maybe they're too close to Ted Mosby and that's why you had to create your own?
No, I've been offered some stuff that, I don't know, like my enthusiasm wasn't high enough to really commit to it. It was nowhere near my enthusiasm level for this particular project. So, I said no to a movie last year that I thought was really kind of interesting and fun, but I decided to do some theater and travel and write another movie. And I try to stay away from the rat race of "must always be seen" because I really believe there's a time to sew and a time to reap. And sometimes I just really need to be quiet. That downtime is really important to me.
Earlier you mentioned a restlessness with doing a weekly television series. Jason Segel has made it clear in interviews that he's ready to move on from How I Met Your Mother. Are you ready to move on?
You know, the only problem with series television and a long running series -- and, trust me, it's not the kind of thing you want to be caught bitching about... really. Because in a very unstable business you have stability and that's enviable and that's not something I want to wish away. And whatever I'm doing now is standing on the shoulders of the show, and I'm aware of that. So, in the grand scheme of things, it's a unique blessing. But... as a creative person, you can get restless and you can want to do a lot of different things. And if you're feeling that you and what you do is a big keyboard, a series is only going to ask you to play a few notes. And in the landscape of comedy, How I Met Your Mother allows us to have a pretty wide musical spectrum. But it's still not going to work all of your muscles.
So I think the thing is, you know, the girls have babies and the guys are doing lots of other different things. And everyone in their own way is trying to expand their worldview or what they do artistically or what they do personally. And that's all great. You know, I know Jason pretty well, we still laugh a lot. We're not miserable. We're having a good time, you know what I mean? So I think it's just a matter of finding the balance and how you inject some newness into something that could become rote. And I'm still learning how to be more and more effective performer on that show. It's still ever shifting, so I wouldn't say I'm bored on that show -- far from it -- it's more like I just want to do other things in addition to it.
Does a season like this current make you feel better about staying? As opposed to last season that, as a consensus, people felt was pretty bad.
Yeah, people didn't like last season. And [last season] I was editing the movie and launching... You know what I mean? Maybe I was the problem! We figured it out! No, I think that they were trying to do more stand-alone episodes -- more like, "You don't have to know the show, just tune in and enjoy this for a half-hour." But I think one of the great strengths of the show -- and this was from the beginning and maybe it was something the network was worried about -- [is] the serialized nature of it. I think one of the things about How I Met Your Mother is it rewards viewer loyalty. So, if you watch it for a long time, you become very invested in these storylines. I mean, the whole thing is one long winding road towards whatever. But when they did those stand-alone episodes, it's almost like they took their eye off the prize. They took their eye off the unique, kind of strange, unfolding of the series.
And this season, I remember in the first episode it was like, "Oh! This is what we do. This is what we do better than anyone." And almost every single episode this year has been a delight to, first, read. Because I feel like they've all been kind of amazing. And one of the things that Carter and Craig spoke to us [about] in the beginning of the season, they said, "You guys are always asked by
journalists what's coming up, and you never know. So we just want to tell you what kind of the season is going to look like." And one of their MOs for the year is, "We want everyone to grow up. We want everyone to go through some life changes." They told us about Marshall's dad dying...
Which was a great episode.
Amazing, right? They told us that Ted was going to meet someone who would be his nemesis at first, but she's married and she's going to be with us for most of the season. And they said that Barney's going to meet his dad and Robin Sparkles will be back. They just kind of gave us a shape and it felt like they were working more with a bible for this year than they had before. Everyone is really pleased with the season this year, it feels like we are doing what we do really well.
And what's going on down the hall at Two and a Half Men has to be a reminder that things can always be worse.
Yeah. I think we also realize that this is a good situation. People show up on time and it's really like we also know that if we screw up, there's a whole community of people that will let us know. You know what I mean? It's a big functioning organism, and everyone has to play their part and we are all really conscious of that. We've already been through enough of this stuff to know when you have a good thing going.
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