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Director Peter Sollett turned his short film Five Feet High And Rising into the 2003 Sundance darling Raising Victor Vargas, and now he’s moved into studio fare with the Sony Pictures flick Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Thankfully, it doesn’t feel like a powerhouse of a film, and he manages to make a night in New York City feel honest, and not like a slickly produced starfest.

Read through the break to find out what it was like making this movie, why he thinks Union Pool is “retarded,” the skinny on MPAA censorship, and how much improv Michael Cera did in the movie. [He also swears and then apologizes for it, which Karina finds super endearing. -- Ed.]

Wow. Hi. I better have something interesting to say with this recording device. [laughter]

We’ll just add in the edit.

Cool. That’s what I do too.

When you guys adapted this, how closely did you work with Lorene and changing the novel into a script and adding things that obviously weren’t represented in the book?

Lorene was on the movie for probably a year, year and a half before I was. So, she had written a draft that was very true to the book. But, there were a few things that I thought I was going to have problems doing with the movie, with the way that the script was.

So basically, I thought Nick and Norah needed an additional objective, in addition to trying to find Fluffy. So, what we did was we had Caroline go visit. Hardly an innovative concept, the Macguffin, but an effective one and, I think, welcome in this type of movie. So, that was a big one, and we did a lot of work on the opening of the film. It’s an ensemble film, a lot of people to establish. We sweated a little bit about how to organize all the distribution of all that information. So, that’s a little bit different than in the book.

Well, some elements of New York are different. Brooklyn Pool is Union Pool in New York. Did you guys change that on purpose? Or did they not want you to use the name?

Union Pool did not want us to use the name Union Pool, because they want to stay an underground place, which is, quote me, “retarded.” Because, it’s not an underground place. They advertise in the newspaper every week. And they could use the business.

So, when you signed Michael Cera, had the “Juno” sensation happened? How did you…?

No, it was before Juno and before Superbad, so when I met him I’d never seen him in anything, because I just hadn’t caught up with Arrested Development, with the program. So, I was meeting an actor I just had never seen act before. Kerry Kohansky, my producer suggested him to me. I met him, and he was an incredibly sweet, bright, dry wit, who was very soulful and seemed good for the part. And he’s cute as hell. I want to eat him.

How did you choose the music? How did you get a band like Bishop Allen, which a few people know about, but they’re not on MTV. Well maybe they are, I don’t know.

No, I don’t think so. Well we just wanted to try to find the best music you haven’t heard yet. That was our objective. And then secondarily, we wanted it to be the best music you hadn’t heard yet from New York City. And then it had to be the best music you hadn’t heard yet from New York City that was additive to the film and each individual scene. So, that really narrowed everything down. You sort of, creatively what we were trying to do is make a break up mix CD for Tris. And that’s sort of what the soundtrack is. It’s Nick expressing his feelings to Tris, for the most part.

What kind of teenager were you?

You know, not dissimilar to Nick, I think. Shy, didn’t fit in very well. Movies were my escape to sort of explore our wider world. I grew up in Brooklyn and in Staten Island. And when you live that close to Manhattan, you really feel the gravitational pull of the city, but it also seems like a totally different world.

So, I looked at a lot of movies that were set in Manhattan, imagined what it would be like to live in Manhattan. I liked the way it made me feel. I thought well, being a filmmaker must be like living in a movie, which sent me to film school, but also is totally incorrect.

Because making movies is the opposite of living in a movie. You can’t enjoy the movie, because you’re the one putting up a puppet show, so you know what the tricks are. It robs the movie and the movies of their magic in a lot of ways. And that’s sort of something that I really identified with Norah, when she says, “I love music, but I’m afraid if I work in it, I won’t love it the same way anymore.”

And I don’t think the character really totally gets…she’s suspicious that there will be something unfortunate that happens to her relationship with music if she takes that job. But, she doesn’t really know what it is yet. She just kind of senses it. And I did not sense it.

But on the other hand, it’s not too bad. We’re in the Four Seasons. You guys think what I have to say is interesting, or you think somebody else will.

Can you talk a little bit about working with Michael and why you think he’s become so popular so quickly?

He’s an incredibly authentic, sincere soul in a very inauthentic and insincere society. And he’s funny as hell. And I think he’s somehow just really representative of the sort of vulnerable, sensitive, honest inner self that we all carry around in there.

And he’s a very new kind of man, you know? It was very interesting. This was my first studio movie, so it was the first time I really tested a film. Maybe the best version of the film, we couldn’t show too much, kids were trying to understand. But, they were getting where they were bored, where it was clicking for them.

To watch them watch Michael was really a revelation, because just to see the degree to which they relate to him was really encouraging, actually, in a way. Just about those young men and their ability to accept and respect a sensitive guy.

It’s really interesting they just did a box set of the John Hughes movies with extended stuff on it. And back in those days the Anthony Michael Hall character is the one that would seem the most like Michael Cera characters. And he was the geek. He was somebody to laugh at. Now he’s the leading man.

Yeah. Well, if you think about Eric Stoltz in Some Kind of Wonderful… I know It’s not a John Hughes film, but if you think of Lloyd Dobler, in Say Anything. They were doing similar, sensitive guys with arty interests, kind of thing. But, I think that that was lost somewhere in there. And I’m just kind of thrilled that it’s back and that that can be cool to be a nice guy with interests. You know?

Yeah. Michael tends to ad lib, we’ve heard. Does he do that in this film much?

Yeah, tons. And he’s a brilliant improvisational comedian. Want some examples? OK.

OK, written in the script: “So, your friends are all gay, right?”

“Yeah, they’re all gay.”

But, in the movie: “So your friends are all gay, right?”

[Cera says]: “Yeah. They’re gay. Gay, every day, all the time. If somebody’s going to get raped in that band tonight, it will be a guy.”

Here’s another one. He’s so fucking good at this. I don’t even know how he came up with this. Sorry I said ****. In the scene where, it’s all improve, and Kat’s terrific at it too. If Mike does it and Kat’s not supporting, building it around him, then it’s not going to work anyway. There’s a scene where they pull up in the Yugo outside of the Waverly Diner just before they trash the Yugo.

And as written, it was, they pull up. She says, “My dad works right around the corner.”

He says, “Oh, really? Do you want go to in?”

She’s like “Eh, You know what, no, probably not. Let’s just get out of here.” Crash.

In the movie it’s they pull up and he says, “Hey, this is a really interesting parking job, because if another car wants to get in between us and the curb, they can pull right in here.”

And then Kat says, “Oh yeah, OK, I’ll get closer to the curb, just for you Nick, just because you’re so picky.” And she crashes the car.

He goes, “We’re close enough to the curb now, we’re right on it.”

So, that scene doesn’t even have any resemblance. I mean there are tons of scenes where those guys just invented their thing. Ari Graynor, forget about it. Everything she did in the movie was her own invention. Things like, “Guys in a van, talking about going balls deep. Sounds like fun right? But not always.”

And things like, oh and, **** why haven’t we been talking about this… the entire turkey sandwich thing was an improvisation.

So, that was not in the script. That wasn’t even, basically the actor who does a cameo in the scene, Kevin Corrigan. We all liked him, and we asked him if he’d be in the film. He said yeah. I was like, “What do you want?”

He said, “What do you want me to do?”

And we said, “Well, we want to make a scene where Ari talks to somebody in the Port Authority Bus Station.”

He said, “OK, I’ll do it.” And he comes in. It’s like four o’clock in the morning. And he said that he didn’t want to speak in the movie. So, Ari and I are like oh, ****. What are we going to do about this? Because it was going to be, she was going to ask him for money, basically. He was going to reject her, or scare her off or something.

And he didn’t want to speak, so the whole thing was on her to create this whole thing. That whole, that’s like a minute and a half, two minute scene, where she’s emotional. She’s up, and she’s down. She’s like [crying] and then pushes his face all over the place. And yeah, none of that was scripted. All her own invention. She’s really, her whole relationship with gum, the toilet, I know it’s like a high low moment in the movie.

It’s not for you guys. It’s for kids. But, like that whole prolonging the moment where she’s trying to decide whether or not to put her hand in there, because that’s really where the comedy of the scene is. It’s not like you pull a thing out and that’s the payoff. But, it’s like the longer she can hesitate on it, the funnier it’s going to get. So, the whole [sighing] , she’s just brilliant. I just want to see her in another movie.

Speaking about that van, why do these guys have a box full of bras in the van?

It was actually a little bit of a phantom limb from the book and then from the script that these guys were going to… well, the gay burlesque scene was going to be a cross dressing scene. The MPAA didn’t like that. It got pulled back. It got pulled back. It got pulled back. And then it made that bra thing a setup for something that then didn’t pay off. Because the scene got…

So you shot that?

No.

Oh, you didn’t.

But you know, it was sort of censored as we were making the movie. Did I say censored?

Yes, you did. [laughter] But, the MPAA doesn’t censor. [hint: this is sarcasm]

Yeah. Let’s do a sidebar on the MPAA. Learned a lot about that on this movie. Pretty interesting organization.

Was there much that you shot that didn’t end up in the film?

Because of ratings and stuff?

No, no, just because of trimming it.

No, pretty much everything we shot is in there. It was a very short shoot. It was 29 days, and there wasn’t a lot of time to risk investing time in things that maybe wouldn’t make it.

You’re using real, authentic locations. The geography seemed to make sense to me. It seemed like it was pretty logical.

I just didn’t want to walk down the block in East Village and have people say hey, what the ****? Halston Street is south of 14th Street.

Right.

For me, and I know this is probably limited to people who live in Manhattan or have lived in Manhattan, but it always takes me out of the movie when someone takes a left on 14th Street onto Halston Street. But, it does suspend my suspension of disbelief, I guess. I just didn’t want to do that. And it didn’t seem necessary, although it does have a real impact on the making of the movie.

So, were you then having to shoot in the middle of the night then to get access to some of these streets? How did that affect your schedule?

Well, in some ways it chewed up our shooting time. Because if you’re shooting a scene on this street, and then you have two scenes to shoot. Well we never had the luxury of only shooting two scenes on that. But, say if you’ve got six scenes to shoot in a night, the most time efficient thing to do is to shoot one here on the corner, one here on the other corner, one there across the street, one there across the street, not show any of the other backgrounds in the shots, and then go around the corner, turn the big light around, and then shoot.

So, if you decide not to do that, you’ve got a lot of shooting time. Because then everybody’s got a move. So, I just tried to keep that to a minimum.

There was sort of a multi year gap between Raising Victor Vargas and this film. What have you been doing in that? Obviously developing a film like this, but what else have you been working on?

Movies that haven’t gotten made yet. A few different projects. One I wrote with my writing partner from Victor Vargas, a couple of studio movies that they decided not to make, things like that, some television commercials.

Thank you.

You’re welcome.

[Photo courtesy jkarpala]