I thought it was interesting that you kind of changed the character of Denny a little bit from the book. I think that was the one, to me at least, who seemed different than I imagined.
"How so?"
Physically, he didn’t match what I had in my mind. I pictured Denny as being a very skinny guy, kind of wimpy.
"You know what? Somebody said this to me the other day at the Q and A and I think they even quoted a thing from the book that mentioned that Denny was skinny. And it’s funny because I've read the book 20 times, I always pictured him as this giant beast of a guy."
So you don’t see that there's much of a change between Denny in the book and in the film?
"Well it’s kind of the nature of adaptation. You know, you have the movie, you watched it in your head. I probably missed that word, you know? But I always pictured him this way. I remember in the book, and I’m pretty sure it’s in there, is that he starts out kind of soft and lost. And as he starts to kind of man-up a little bit and show up for this stripper that he falls in love with, Cherry Daiquiri, and starts to build the structure maybe for them to live in, it says that his muscles start to get kind of toned and he starts to get strong. And I also, I love the idea that in the kind of moments when there's real tension between he and Victor, that there's this gigantic guy there who could crush Victor like a bug but never would because that's just not who he is."
Were you able to go through the storyboard process before shooting?
"I would have loved to have, but it was not a luxury that I had. Making a movie like this on a very small budget, under four million dollars, in this day and age in New Jersey and with New York talent is a little bit like somebody pushing you out of an airplane with a parachute that you have to build yourself out of a kit with no directions. And all you really want to do is get it so that there will be something that looks like a parachute that will open in time so that you don't splat. So, you know, there's the ideal version of building a parachute and then there's the one you get. And so we were offered a little bit of storyboarding for a couple of key sequences at the last minute but by then the DP and I had already kind of went to the locations and figured out exactly how we wanted to shoot stuff. We felt like a storyboard would just confuse us at that point."
Did you really have a 25 day shooting schedule?
"It was 25 days."
That's crazy.
"And, sadly, I know people who have had less. It’s on the short end. It’s definitely short for a movie with so many locations and so many characters. Our days were kind of unbelievable and certainly it turns a lot of your process into not figuring out, you know, what's the best way to do this but what possible way can we accomplish this story roughly in that amount of time before we hit the ground with no parachute?"
Why did you decide to direct and write and act in it? Did you want to drive yourself crazy?
"I knew I wanted to adapt and direct. And I wrote it always from the point of view that I would be the one directing it, but I felt like that was plenty and that only the grandest of narcissists would also take on acting in it too. But then the role of the Lord High Charlie, the kind of jackass who runs the colonial theme park, the failed actor guy who can't stop talking in thees and thous like even when he’s in the lunch line, it felt like something I could not in good conscience give to anybody else. And a couple of my friends started salivating over that role and then the casting director said, 'You know you're going to play this.' The producer said, 'You know you're going to play this. You have to play this - nobody else.' And I said, 'Really? I’m just that much of a nut bag that you know that?' : So I took it on and it was probably a mistake just because right when I kind of got the crew listening to me at the end of the first week, there I was in the puffy shirt and the britches kind of trying to order people around. People were just howling at me and ignoring me."
Are you good at directing yourself?
"I'm okay. I was lucky because a couple of the producers were actually… I knew by then that they had really strong taste when it came to which takes. We didn’t even have a monitor with playback generally during the shoot, so I couldn't watch anything again to see if the boom was in the shot or anything like that. But I made sure we had one for those days. Then we didn’t have time to use it for the most part. But I had a couple of producers saying, 'You know, you didn’t see that one and we don’t really have time to show it to you, but you should take our word for it that you want to do another take of your performance.'"
So directing feature films is something you'd always intended to do? I know you did theatre.
"Yes. You know, I'd spent 10 years in New York doing theatre and running a great off-Broadway theatre there and directing some and I loved it. Certainly once I had done a couple of productions in New York it became something that I wanted to do once I moved to LA and acted in a couple of small independent movies with some terrific directors, Nicole Holofcener, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Paul Weitz. I was like, 'I want to do that.' And they said, 'Well you've got to write a script that's good enough that they will overlook the fact, the tremendous drawback that you're attached.' So I started writing and I started writing because I wanted to make a movie. And then I got this movie that I got hired to write, it got made, What Lies Beneath, and kind of cut to five or six years later I kept getting sidetracked. Suddenly I’m on a sitcom with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and I’m working as a screenwriter. But this was always the reason that I had started doing this stuff, was that this was what I wanted to try to do. And so when the adaptation of Choke was finally ready, to me it was a realization of a kind of objective that I’d been kind of quietly in my laboratory, like he-he hah-hah, pursuing all along."
