Jason Bateman’s happy to be busy. A stint on TV as Michael Bluth in Arrested Development helped reinvigorate his career and now film roles have been coming his way fast and furiously. But Bateman’s not about to complain about all the work. “I'm very, very lucky and just trying to do things that will help me stick around longer,” said Bateman at the Los Angeles press junket for the quirky – and critically acclaimed – comedy film, Juno. “I'm not looking for the quick hit that might in failure escort me out the business. So I'm happy with small, tasteful things like Juno that speak to longevity as opposed to celebrity.”
Juno tells the story of a smart and determined teenager named Juno MacGuff – named after the wife of Zeus, not the Alaskan city - who gets pregnant and decides to give up her baby to a couple looking to adopt. Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman play Vanessa and Mark, the potential adoptive parents.
Juno marks the second film released in 2007 featuring Garner and Bateman. The two were also in the action drama The Kingdom playing FBI agents investigating a terrorist attack on an American base in Saudi Arabia.
Juno’s definitely more of a comedy than The Kingdom, however Bateman and Garner are responsible for most of Juno’s more serious moments. “I guess our story is sort of the most blatant adult storyline,” said Bateman. “We want to be parents. We have had trouble getting pregnant. We are now looking to adopt. That on paper sort of says, ‘Well, this is a little bit more of a dramatic through-line.’ I mean, giving your kid up for adoption I guess is not necessarily comedic, but you have a 16-year-old dealing with that so there is an inherent fish out of water thing that lends itself well to comedy.”
“Our thing was much more serious, so perhaps that was used as a grounding mechanism for all of the other sort of eccentric elements to Diablo's script and dialogue. I mean Jennifer and I, I think, always saw our storyline as something that wasn't part of the comedy and to play the real and to play the drama of it without being too precious. My character's going through something that is a little bit of a push-pull, so there can be some funny stuff in that too, as far as the discomfort of him having to grow up and being reluctant about that. But there's something kind of heartbreaking about that. At least I thought that there was.”
Bateman continued, “That is a concept that was certainly very familiar to me, having just become a new father or was about to, I can't remember. But the idea of, ‘Are you going to step up and become a new adult or carry on being an experienced young adult?’ There [are] a few points in one's life where you can actually make a proactive step to go to the next stage. Having a kid is definitely a blatant one, so that was something that was an easy thing to play dramatically and vulnerably and humanly. I don't know. It was not difficult to be good in this movie because the script was there. Jason Reitman didn't let us suck, or at least if we did, he didn't put it in the movie.”
In order to sell the illusion of a happily married couple, photos of Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman grace the walls of their home in the film. “It was funny and it was quick,” said Bateman about the portraits hung on the walls of the set. “That was Jason Reitman saying that he's got the same thing in his house, or his parents' house. That was a spur of the moment idea. It's something that he did cringe about every single year, but something that his mother insisted that they do. He thought that maybe our family sort of would emulate that. So we had fun with that. It really helped sort of decide what kind of characters we were going to be, how we were going to play our characters, a certain level of domesticity and cheesiness. He was willing to take that on the chin so it was fun.”
There’s a point in the film where Juno’s plans to place her baby with Mark and Vanessa hit a snag. Audiences are left to puzzle out for themselves what exactly is the relationship between Juno and Mark. “That's something that Reitman and I went back and forth on,” explained Bateman, commenting on their relationship. “There's two ways to play this. One way to play it is much more of a sort of salacious through-line and the other is is his attraction to Juno is more of a sort of kindred spirit, sort of a peer sort of dynamic, something that he's missing in his marriage and is wanting to experience a friendship with her, as opposed to getting in her pants.”
Bateman admits it wasn’t fun for him to play something so internally vague. “I prefer to know which way I am, and then just play the vagary of it. But he wouldn't give it up. He wouldn't tell me which way. He said, ‘Well, you know, if the movie went on another month or something like that, maybe they would go out on a date but I don't know how that date would go.’ I'm like, ‘Well, what does that mean? Are they going roller skating or are they going to a romantic dinner?’ ‘I don't know.’ ‘You've got to tell me.’ ‘No, no, not really.’ So we kind of tease each other a little bit about that, and ultimately it just kind of became an exercise for me to just kind of dance the middle and let him kind of build it in the editing room. I'm not sure which way it is. He wanted to leave it ambiguous for the audience, to let them decide what Mark's intentions were.”
Speaking of relationships, Bateman has fond memories of his own first love, a girl named Amy. “We kissed in the treehouse in, I think, it was first grade. It was first grade or kindergarten. I think it was first grade and we did a very risqué thing of tying our shirts in, I don't know how you describe it... You take the bottom of it and you loop it through the neck and then you pull it down and create like a garter. I don't know how cool that is for a guy, but I thought we were making progress.”
Page 2: Jason Bateman's Upcoming Movies
