Interview: Drake Doremus

Meeting Drake Doremus to chat about his new film Like Crazy, I couldn’t help but call the director “Mr. Douchebag,” after his breakout feature. “I guess I earned that title,” he jokes. Like Douchebag, Like Crazy is an improvised drama. This new film, which should garner Doremus more attention and accolades, tells the story of two young lovers, Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones, a Gotham Award nominee for Breakthrough Actor) who meet and fall in love. When she ignores the rules of her student visa, however, their romance becomes a long-distance relationship, full of jealousy, waiting, despair, affairs, and possibly heartbreak. Slant recently caught up with Doremus, who discussed the making of Like Crazy, its autobiographical nature, and his thoughts on the dynamics of relationships.

This film is much larger in scale than your previous feature, Douchebag. But it’s still very intimate. How did you conceive the film?

I think they are still part of the same family in many ways; [they feature] some of the same principles and techniques of filmmaking and performance. I just learned a lot making Douchebag, which was kind of an experiment. It was never intended to actually be a movie. The fact that we ended up with a film was very fortunate. Andrew and Ben weren’t actors. With [Like Crazy], it was intended to be something. The idea stemmed from me wanting to explore my feelings and my co-writer Ben’s feelings about long-distance relationships. That was the impetus.

You use handheld camerawork, montages jump cuts, and other visual techniques to compress time and tell the story, which takes place over five years. Can you talk about this process?

It was a difficult thing to do, actually. I really wanted to make it feel like five years. To do that in 89 minutes is difficult, so I devised this idea to make the time jumps very stylized—opposite of what this film is, which is really raw—almost like we are documenting or stealing moments of these human beings and their lives. Then these time jumps are really highly stylized signals to the audience that we’re going to be pulling your hand along, but don’t worry, we’re going to drop you somewhere that you will be able to figure out what’s going on. With the time lapses and dissolves, I wanted to do something stylized so it wouldn’t be confusing when we were jumping forward. It was difficult to figure out what parts to show in the 89 minutes, as opposed to having this rambling relationship. There’s no first kiss, no first “I love you,” no first sex…

Well, there is, but it’s ambiguous. Is this the first kiss?

Yeah, I wanted it to feel like the movie washed over you, as opposed to it being an intellectual experience of breaking down love. I wanted it to be an emotional experience.

How do you think the film conforms/challenges the typical love story?

I think inevitably, I’m influenced by films with the [boy-meet-girl/boy-loses-girl] structure because of the genre. I really tried not to…the films I was researching for this film had nothing to do with boy-meets-girl conventions or anything like that on purpose. Like Breaking the Waves. Y Tu Mamá También influenced a lot of the camerawork in the film.

What is something silly/sincere that you’ve done for love?

Well, I got married. [laughs] That’s one similar thing, and the silliest thing I’ve ever done for love. Being infatuated with somebody.

Are you still married?

No, divorced for years. But I never really was married, because she never really got back in the country, and when she did…

So this part of the story is your autobiographical part…

That part is, but there is a lot of fictional stuff. Jacob and Anna are very different characters; she’s a journalist, and he’s a furniture designer. I purposely fictionalized an enormous amount of material in the film, but some of the circumstances that I’ve experienced in my life I wanted to explore.

How did you work with the actors on their characters, their appearances and their emotions? She cries a lot…

She does. Pushed her to cry a lot. We did a scene where I’d tell Felicity, “You’re crying, but you’re trying not to, so you’re trying to stop yourself, but you can’t, and there’s all this subtext going on,” and then she said, “What? You want me to do that again? I’m going to cry again?!” I think that was a lot for her. It was an emotional time. It was a long short shoot because we had to jam so much in.

We originally worked from a “script-ment,” I guess you call it, 50 pages long, really in-depth. More in-depth than a normal script, because it has all the backstory in it, emotional beats, tons of exposition, tons of subtext, and then a lot of character objectives—what they want in each scene, what they are thinking, what they are feeling—that informs the structure of the scene, and in that, the dialogue comes as a project of how the actors are feeling. We fine-tune that. As far as the characters, we had scaffolding in the “script-ment” for each year that was [indicated]. In year one, this is where the character is at, this is how the character dresses, this is how the character walks, and how the character thinks, and we’d go through different stages. Anna has [hair] extensions in the first few years, then she doesn’t, it gets shorter, neater, as her life becomes [neater]. The characters are fleshed out in the “script-ment,” but they really come to life when the actors start adding some of the details.

Can you give me an example of one?

As the writer, I really wanted to put the onus on her to create from the inside out so many elements of her character. I asked her to write the poem that she reads to Jacob in the bedroom. I’d never heard it and Anton had never heard it until the first take. Anton’s performance in the first take is a genuine performance, it’s a natural moment. Then the speech in the beginning of the movie, she wrote. All those books she gave Jacob, she really put pictures in and wrote them, and filled in the blanks of how much time had passed and she knew what was going on when they were not together.

What do you think bonds Anna and Jacob?

What bonds them over time is an infatuation with a very short amount of time where they either did fall in love or they felt they needed that at that time in their lives. The first three months that they are together is their honeymoon phase. Falling for somebody is what bonds them over the course of time because they are trying to get back to that moment; they are trying to feel that aphrodisiac again.

Do you think it’s possible to recapture the magic of a relationship that begins so intensely?

Yeah, something that begins so intensely, and almost so naïvely with two people who haven’t really experienced a lot in their lives and don’t really understand what it would be like to experience it, and then measure everything against it and always think about getting back to that place, so when they try to get over each other, they can’t, because there’s this idea in their head, this magical utopia land of love, that really doesn’t exist anymore, that they are trying to get back to because essentially they need that in their lives.

Why did you make Anna such a selfish and at times unsympathetic, unlikable character?

Well, I find her likable, I think she’s selfish. She makes selfish decisions because of how she feels about Jacob. She’s not making selfish decisions in spite of Jacob. She’s making them because she loves him. Whether that’s mature love, or understandable love is one thing. I really wanted to capture the madness and insanity of what love drives you to [do]. To me that’s my perspective on it. But to me, there are so many things about the character that I would love to [see] in a woman, so I feel I idealized something there.

Do you think it’s simply distance that drives Anna and Jacob apart?

No, I think it’s growth, not distance. I think distance is what prolongs what drives them apart.

To me, one of the best, most romantic scenes is Jacob and Anna sitting opposite each other, sharing a few last moments together on the train to Heathrow. How did you come up with this idea of the lovers silently expressing their emotions?

The Heathrow scene, specifically, was a very quick vision of the film—one of the first images I thought about—two people together, but apart, and trying to hold on to something. I think that scene epitomizes the film, and what the film is about. Visually it does…

Do you think the film is about class—that if money were an issue, the relationship may have been different?

I think that that plays into it, but I also think that they are spending money they shouldn’t be spending. In my experience, I spent some time going back and forth between L.A. and London when I was in a long-distance relationship, and I was broke the entire time, but I still did it because I loved her. No amount of distance or money can stop something as unbelievably powerful as feeling like you love somebody or actually loving somebody.

It’s funny how you speak in cautious terms about your relationship.

I don’t know, in my version of this story, which is somewhat similar and inspired by it, I don’t know if I really did love that person. I was infatuated by the idea of what we were as a couple and who I felt like I was inside of that relationship, but I don’t know if I was in a very healthy relationship whatsoever, or was a very healthy person whatsoever at all.

What do you think about the concept of marriage? In the film, the characters are prompted to marry for legal reasons and both characters have affairs. Are you criticizing this institution, or just using it for dramatic effect?

No, I think the older I get the more I think the idea of marriage is silly. I think there’s this gray area I really wanted to explore with the film. They are married, but they are not really married. They’ve never lived together ever as a married couple. They haven’t done married couple things. Just because they have a piece of paper doesn’t mean they are married. There is a grayness of what’s on and what’s off. It’s funny to call their [extramarital relationships] affairs. I don’t think of them as that. They technically are, but in this day and age, with the circumstance they are under and the ideas they discuss, it gets confusing. Yes, they are doing things they shouldn’t be doing, and sleeping with people they shouldn’t be sleeping with.

And are you judging them?

Yes, well, they are learning so much, and they are still so young. I think the idea of being with one person, and one person only for a long period of time, or the rest of your life, are concepts and ideas that I’m really interested in exploring right now. Like Crazy started the idea that I want to explore that. The second and third act, we explore that.

Your characters drink some whiskey. Do you like whiskey?

I love whiskey. I love Eagle Rare, Buffalo Trace, Basil Hayden, Bulleit. I like Bourbon, mostly. I’ll drink Makers [Mark] here and there. Knob Creek, you know. Mix it up. I love all those. I love whiskey. Got into it with my dad when I was younger. That whole plot point was me and my dad. And Paul Simon is my favorite artist of all time, so I put him in the movie. One thing I learned after doing Douchebag, and then this, is the more personal you make the film, the more you put yourself into it, the more it is an expression of you as an artist and as a filmmaker. Therefore, hopefully, it will resonate more with audiences because it rings true and rings genuine, and that’s my job as a filmmaker—to make the film as real and as genuine as possible.

What attracts you to someone?

Oh, man. That changes every day. [Pauses] You want the truth? I think, sadly, somebody that doesn’t need me.

That’s a very interesting response. Why would you say that?

I don’t know. I’ve had an interesting year in exploring that question. Intellectually, it may mean one thing to me, but emotionally, I think it means something else.

Let’s think about that. In Like Crazy, does Anna need Jacob?

I don’t know if the characters need each other as much as they want each other. They desire and long to feel this connection with somebody. And that’s what brings them together, as opposed to needing. Their lives are fine without each other—and they are. Absolutely. But they want to feel the way they feel when they are together.

Well, it goes back to that old adage, whoever has the least amount of interest in the relationship controls it…

Yeah, it’s weird. What a struggle! There’s never a way to figure it out. I don’t know. I feel lost in many ways. The reason why I’m making these movies and telling these love stories is because I feel lost and I feel like I have so much to learn. It’s exciting. I get to make films, and talk about love. I’m still very romantic, and very optimistic, and I like dating.

What do you like to do on a date?

The truth?

Yeah, I always want the truth! But you can lie to me, and I’ll still publish it.

I’ll fucking tell you the truth. I’ve got nothing to lose at this point. There’s shit all over the Internet about my life. [Pauses] I like to have a really, really long, profound conversation about the meaning of life. That to me is a great date.

And where would you have this conversation?

In the back of a bar at 2 a.m., when there is no one left in the bar.

What kind of bar, a dive bar or a swanky bar?

Oh, yeah, a dive bar.

I want details…I’ve got to picture this.

That’s great! I’m picturing it now too, and it sounds great! It sounds really sexy to me! I feel like I just went to a therapy session by the way. If I could just chat with you once a week, I’d really appreciate it. You can send me a bill.

I think our time is up!

[laughs]

Actually, I’m out of questions.

That’s hysterical, our time is up! [laughs]