Writer/director Jonathan Levine was born and raised in New York and graduated from high school in 1994, just like the lead character in his second feature film – The Wackness. But while Levine admits to many similarities between himself and Luke Shapiro (played by Josh Peck), he's quick to point out that unlike Luke, he never sold marijuana. Levine's The Wackness, which won the Audience Award at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, follows the fictional Luke as he sells pot in the park and trades drugs for therapy sessions with a shrink who, despite his 50+ years, hasn't yet grown up.
"The world is autobiographical," explained Levine. "That’s the world I grew up in, the music I was listening to, the vernacular, definitely the spirit and the kind of dilemmas that the characters are facing – whether it be trying to get laid or figuring out what to do with the adults in your life. Figuring out if you want to be on medication, if you want to smoke weed, any of that stuff. Yeah, that’s all stuff that I’ve tackled."
Levine can't point to any major turning point in his life that prompted him to write The Wackness. Instead, it was just that he always wanted to write, and writers like to write what they know. "I just started writing this and it felt like the right thing to do. It was a way to kind of be personal without being too personal, because you don’t want to do the kind of naval-gazing type thing," said Levine. "I just worked on it for a really long time and I was able to take something personal and sort of make it hopefully universal. Once I started doing it I was like, ‘This is cool. I’m going to keep working my ass off on this.’"
Wearing multiple hats on the project was a bit nerve-wracking, but Levine handled it well. "It’s like anything else with directing. You have a very deliberate plan about how you’re going to get to, how you’re going to make something realize something. You get to set and everything is not exactly what you thought, because it never is. The act of making a movie is the act of reconciling your expectations versus the reality of what is going on. And so then at the end of the day though, I think it’s very much reflective of the original script. But it’s a great deal of pressure, I think, especially being the writer too, to accurately depict the thing I wrote."
"It’s interesting because you think it’d be harder, but it’s a lot easier to say something sucks when you did it yourself. So I can go, ‘That scene sucks. I can take it out of the movie.’ And people are like, ‘You’re sure?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, I wrote it, I know it sucks. Just take it out.’ So yeah, it wasn’t that hard. It was just about me kind of getting my perspective on it," said Levine.
The Wackness features an interesting assortment of actors, including one who's normally seen on family television and one of the most famous young actresses/personalities in the entertainment business today. Levine cast Josh Peck, the star of Nickelodeon's Drake & Josh show, because he believed he had it in him to play a loser type of guy the audience would connect with. "In spite of the fact that he’s like this good-looking kid and really kind of together, is he’s got this vulnerability," offered Levine. "He really does, and he’s able to laugh at himself. He’s able to take risks, and I just recognized that from the audition. It’s a shame he’s so good-looking. But, whatever. That’s his cross to bear."
And Mary-Kate Olsen was an inspired casting choice as a free-spirited hippie into drugs and men of all ages. "Mary-Kate, that was a really cool idea. It’s like as a filmmaker it’s nice to be able to kind of take people and, you know, you may have preconceived notions about them, and put them in role that you wouldn’t expect to see them in. I think to a certain extent we did that with Sir Ben as well. And so we just offered her the role and she was down, because she’s cool. I think she saw it as a good opportunity to sort of kind of expand on her image as well. The good thing is that she’s talented, otherwise it wouldn’t have worked."
Levine credits Sir Ben Kingsley with helping to get the film into production. "It was a quick process but without him it wouldn’t have happened. We offered it to him and then he essentially was cool with it. He really responded to the script. That was it. But the movie would not have existed without him," revealed Levine.
"He was our first choice, yeah," said Levine. "But, you know, it takes a lot to get to that point. We needed to get the script ready. But it was a very kind of charmed process for me. And then after Sir Ben attached, that’s when everyone else kind of fell into place."
The Wackness isn't the first movie about a teenage drug dealer, but it feels very original. "I think that we were very aware of the pitfalls of this type of material," explained Levine. "And so once we kind of got a script that we were happy with, the act of executing the movie was just as much about not falling into the traps that other movies have fallen into as it was about realizing the film. And so we never wanted to talk down to anyone. We never wanted to do anything cheap. We very much tried to find the right balance between emotion and comedy. We just worked really hard. We tried to resist judging our characters as well. We didn’t give any pat answers at the end of the day. There’s no kind of happy, everyone ends up together thing. We just tried to be genuine and truthful in everything we did, and hopefully that comes across."
