Jonathan Goldstein is the more experienced half of the Horrible Bosses writing partnership. His partner (and this week's Verge designee) John Francis Daley is a Freaks and Geeks alum with a new career in penning comedies, but Goldstein has a varied history in TV writing on The PJs, The New Adventures of Old Christine, and $#*! My Dad Says. He met Daley when he worked as a writer on The Geena Davis Show, a show on which Daley costarred. We talked to the veteran about his box office success with Horrible Bosses, making a transition to a film career, and getting anxious when actors want to improvise.
The Hangover's success got the ball rolling again on Horrible Bosses. Was there any pressure to take hints from that movie when you wrote your draft?
Mike Markowitz had had certain elements that were similar and it was a dark kind of comedy, but we weren't trying to, in any way, imitate that movie -- other than its success.
When you and John Francis Daley signed on, what did you think your parternship would lend the script?
Well, I think for us, the challenge and the fun of it was to make it as grounded as it could be. It's still somewhat of a broad movie, but I think the relatability is I think what's kept it alive for as long as it's been around. The original script had great elements to it, and it was a little broader. We tried to bring it down to Earth a bit.
Congrats on the weekend success, by the way.
For our first produced movie, that was very, very exciting!
Does it make you want to about face and do something completely serious? I suggested a The English Patient remake to John.
Yes, we're doing The King's Speech II.
Back to Speechin'!
You know, studios like to put writers into handy boxes. They like to think, "OK, they've done this before, let's have them do that again." I think we both think that career longevity comes from having a diverse portfolio and because it's fun to shake it up and do different things. That's why we're always looking to diversify. Up until Horrible Bosses, we've mainly been in a PG-13, PG world. We've even done a family film for Disney that didn't go anywhere. Now that we've had this R thing, it's very liberating. You can put your worst instincts on paper in some ways. But are we looking to just do this kind of movie? No.
Which character was your favorite to write for?
I loved that Kevin Spacey character. Before I was a screenwriter, I was a lawyer. I worked at a big firm in New York. There were some very -- let's just say "strong" personalities. They could be very scary with very little. Spacey brings that to that character. You know the scene where he tricks him into taking the drink? Some of those scenes -- they didn't happen to me, per se, but that feeling of dread was always there.
I hear a lot of improvisation went into this movie. Is it hard not to be precious about your dialogue?
It's difficult not to be precious as a writer, generally, and not to be attached to what you've written on the page. That said, when you have people who are good at it -- as I think we have in this cast -- it's fun to watch them elevate it or tweak it. John and I were on set for much of the movie. Kind of like in television where I spent close to a decade, we'd pitch lines and fix things if they weren't working. It was collaborative. A good portion of what's on the screen, the bulk of it was in the script, but the guys added a good amount as well. Seth our director gave them some freedom to play around. That showed, that spontaneity.
Talk about the convergence of improvisation, on-set script tweaking, and adjusting dialogue to fit the actors' voices.
It was sort of organic. Once our cast came together, we were still rewriting scenes throughout the process, and we'd inevitably write towards the voice of the actor. It makes it easier, and you know it's going to land better because you know those people can do it that way. For example, in the cocaine scene where Dale, Charlie Day, has to clean it up -- in the script, there wasn't much there beyond the DustBuster and trying to dump it back in. Seth came to us and said, "Can we come up with fun stuff for them to do and say?" The guys kind of riffed on that; some of it was scripted and some of it was them. I think that scene came out really well.
Were any of your favorite vulgarities or shocking moments left on the cutting room floor?
The studio at no point really said, "This is too dark. This is too disturbing." They were supportive of the direction, that hard 'R.' There were a couple things we came up with that we decided were too dark; like, before the guys decide to [work with] Motherfucker Jones (Jamie Foxx), they want to make sure they think they can do the job themselves. Kurt has a friend with a slaughterhouse, and they figure if they can kill a cow, they can kill a person. There's this crazy scene where none of them can hurt the cow, but we all thought it was too weird. We lost that.
Your partnership with John is interesting. You met while you worked as a writer on The Geena Davis Show and he was one of the costars. How did this all come about?
He had made these short films. He was incredibly precocious, and he had a sense of humor that was just like mine. When I was in high school one year, instead of writing a paper I did a 40-minute film of the camera for the library and it was called Apocalypse Here. We shot it in our high school with a lot of the our teachers in it and the principal and stuff. Everyone watched it, and it was one of those great moments in, like, development. John was doing the same stuff. We kept in touch over the years and quite awhile later, I think in '07 -- we sold our first spec together, The $40,000 Man. We're always on the same page and we rarely argue about stuff. We just shot a short film for Funny Or Die, and it just went up. We hope to transition to directing together, and that was a remarkably easy experience. We were always on the same page. Hopefully that's the next version of the partnership.
It's interesting that you want to move into a new direction when you have a whole bunch of writing projects coming up, including Burt Wonderstone with Steve Carell, Of All the Things, a movie based on a documentary, and a Vacation remake. Oh, and a Steven Spielberg-aided movie called Cal of the Wild.
We're a little in over our heads, but that's a good problem to have. The experience of being on set at a movie, there's a feeling of, "This is good, but I'd like to be the man in charge." It's hard not to feel that, especially since I come from television, where the writer's much more in charge of the material.
Was the shift from TV to movies jarring in that way?
Yeah. I knew it was because I'd always heard it, but yeah, it's a jolt, you don't really have any say in what happens. In television, the director turns to the writers and says, "Are you happy with that?" That doesn't happen a lot in movies.
Tell me about the Vacation remake. What's your approach to it?
We approached in that it has to stand on its own. It has to be a movie that's strong enough to attract people to it, to entertain people who haven't seen the original. It has to be an homage too, for those of us like myself who do love that first movie. Tonally it's a little less broad. It's probably more Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, and it's not a remake. It's Rusty now, taking his kids to Walley World. Hopefully Clark will be there in the end as well. And hopefully it's a new Vacation for a new generation that will live on its own.
In The $40,000 Man and now Burt Wonderstone and Of All the Things, you're dealing with washed-up characters. What's the attraction to that archetype?
I think we're drawn to characters who -- well, it's fun to write characters who are at the peak of their cockiness and get their comeuppance. I think that's a pretty standard model in a lot of comedies. It's fun for actors to do both sides and have that range. It's fun for writers because you get to build them up and tear them down. That's a fun evolution.