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Flirting with Disaster (1996)
Starring Ben Stiller, Patricia Arquette, Téa Leoni, and Alan Alda. Cinematography by Eric Edwards. Edited by Christopher Tellefsen. Produced by Dean Silvers. Written and Directed by David O. Russel
David O. Russell interview Flirting with Disaster
Notes from the top three pages…
"Flirting with Disaster" is such a departure from "Spanking the Monkey." It's been called your "great leap" into the Hollywood big time.
I don't even know what "great leap" means, really. It's a more commercial film, if that's what they mean. After making a movie about incest, I think it would be hard not to become more commercial.
I didn't get into film until I was 28, and I'm 37 now. By the time I wrote "Spanking the Monkey" I had done a lot of living, and had had a lot of relationships, and been through a lot of jobs, and had a lot of failures. I had had a whole other life, a whole other career in political work.
So after I made "Spanking,"I thought, "What do I want? What would feel fun?" With "Spanking the Monkey, " it was lugubrious on the set every day, because people were being asked to work with this horrible energy. There's black humor in the movie, but, you know, it's a really gross place to go -- where a mother sleeps with her 18-year-old son. Everybody was kind of in a cranky mood because you're asking them to live with this every day. So I thought I'd like to do something that would just be more fun. But it doesn't mean I won't do twisted dark things again.
http://www.splicedonline.com/features/russell.html
It's no coincidence that Russell, 37, started writing the script when his own son was 1 year old, and that his real-life adopted sister was searching for her birth parents.
"It was a very schizophrenic experience for her," Russell said of his sister. "One minute she thought she found them and felt like she had found the holy grail, and the next minute she was freaking out. And marriage is kind of like that, too. You think it's a holy grail, and it can be a lot of fun at times, but it's also a complicated, messy thing, and sometimes you start to think that maybe another woman could be the answer to your problems. I chose to make fun of all that in this movie. That's basically my formula for comedy: You take the most embarrassing, foolish part of yourself and multiply it by 10 times."
"At the time `Spanking the Monkey' was being distributed, I was like, `Let's seize the moment and write something now,' " Russell said, gingerly buttering a reporter's tape recorder just for the heck of it. "(My sister) was going through this whole comedy of errors with her search for her birth parents, and I just couldn't resist."
DRE: All of your feature films have been a search for self and Huckabees is no different. Do you see that?
RUSSELL: I think that’s just in my DNA. Flirting with Disaster was done after my sister found her birth parents while having a lot of miscues happen along the way.
The films I grew up on in high school, that are sort of my inspiration, were the films of the seventies. They were subversive, original, and had big movie stars in them which is something you don’t see too much of today. You see a little bit of it in independent cinema, but I’d like to be able to do that with the bigger budgets.
NYS:Flirting With Disaster really has that seventies feel to it, and with a cast including Alan Alda, Lily Tomlin, George Segal and Mary Tyler Moore, who were huge seventies stars, it is obvious to see the seventies were a real influence. You didn’t go to film school, did using the seventies as your model help you in your writing?
DOR: Yes. The whole deadpan throw-away style of broad comedy. Like Shampoo or The In-Laws.
Flirting With Disaster—just to create the mood of a light comedy—was a very hard thing to do. Flirting felt more like it was the experience of creating ‘out of control.’ It was this ensemble comedy which is very hard to juggle and keep the tone light, and have enough depth that it feels like the stakes are somewhat real. And I always felt like I was kind of careening out of control and I think that went into the movie.
NYS: It just builds and builds, and the audience is constantly wondering where they are going to go next. But how did you manage to keep all the various characters stories building and evolving. Did you ever get lost during the juggling?
DOR: Absolutely. I rewrote many, many times—many different ways. I like to try things lots of different ways to be convinced that the way I’m thinking of is the best way.
NYS: Now in making a film as dark as Spanking the Monkey, then Flirting with Disaster, did you feel you had to make that jump from something heavy to something light?
DOR: I wanted to. I'm not sure why I wanted to, but I think in part because Spanking could be so dark and sad. I wanted to do something that was more frivolous and fun. And now I want to do something that is heavier again.
NYS: You went pretty quickly from Spanking the Monkey to Flirting with Disaster, a lot of filmmakers end up having a longer wait between projects. Was the script for Flirting with Disaster ready at the time Spanking the Monkey was in release?
DOR: I had it ready by the time Spanking came out. I worked hard to have it ready in time because I wanted to be able to set it up while I still had attention. Because a lot of times your so-called ‘heat' will pass and then it's harder to set something up.
NYS: People want to write stuff that they think will sell and you started out with Spanking the Monkey which was not a commercial story and then moved on to Flirting with Disaster which was more commercial, what do you feel about writing for the market?
DOR: For me the range is between doing something that is more arty and less commercial and doing something that is challenging and original and yet is trying to reach a wider audience.
Budget: $7,000,000
Total US Gross: $14,891,000
Genre: Comedy
Runtime: 92 Minutes
US Release Date: 3/22/96
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Awards: none
Tagline: The Story Of A Man Who Went Searching For His Roots, And Got Tangled Up Along The Way.
Quote: “I don't think you know me well enough to call me ‘Neurotic Guy’.”
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