Interview: Austin Chick (August)

Midway through the film AUGUST, Tom Sterling (played by Josh Hartnett) steps up to a podium in front of a large crowd, his prepared speech in hand. The paper he reads from is blank, however. He pretends to dramatically rip up the “speech” and instead delivers an impromptu vision of the future of the Internet that brings down the house. “Winging it” is Tom Sterling’s business, bringing him fortune and ultimately, failure.

AUGUST is set in the month before September 11th, 2001 in New York City. The champagne and caviar lifestyle of many dot-com start-ups is failing but confidence in a turnaround is high.  The audience, knowing that the towers will fall within a few weeks, has an outlook for the characters far different from their own.  Director Austin Chick was drawn to this dramatic irony and took on the project as an exploration of a specific moment in time in New York City.  

Chick is a New Yorker and has seen his Williamsburg Brooklyn neighborhood taken over in recent years by the rich 20-somethings that AUGUST centers around. Raising the rent and turning much of the neighborhood into a fancy restaurant row, these Internet moguls and investment bankers have a way of pissing off the old guard. Chick may not be so happy with his new neighbors, but like any curious director he is compelled to see their point of view.

Austin Chick

Laura Newman: Why New York City for this film?  It’s a story about dot-coms and you’d think it would be a Silicon Valley, LA movie.
Austin Chick: I didn’t write the script so it wasn’t a choice that started with me. My interest in the story had more to do with it being a New York story and capturing a very specific time here toward the end of the market crash but before 9-11. Even though the market had been crashing for some 18 months at that point, there was still this strange sense that it was all going to turn around. There was still a lot of these 20-something “millionaire on paper” kids who where living the decadent life. I feel like that finally ended with 9-11. The dot-com story could have been set in any number of places but it was the way the script captured this very specific moment in time that interested me. 

LN: What’s been happening in your life between this film and your last XX/XY which came out in 2003?
AC: It was at Sundance in 2002 and IFC took a little over a year to release it. [Since then] I had been working on a couple of different things that for various reasons didn’t get into production. There was a movie called LOVE IS EASY which I was going to shoot a couple of years ago. That’s one we got really close on and then had a hiccup in our casting and it ended up falling apart. At one point I was going to direct that movie BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD and in the end I was a producer on it. I worked on a number of things, some writing work and there were about 3 films that I was suppose to have directed but for various reasons didn’t come together as expected.

LN: So what is it about this picture that made it fly?
AC: It’s interesting, AUGUST, it seemed had come together a couple of years ago and then for a number of reasons it fell apart. At that time there was a different cast. I didn’t expect AUGUST to be my second film. I had started work on a new thing, an untitled thriller set in the Hamptons. Three friends find a bunch of money and think they can keep it without anybody knowing and of course they’re wrong. I thought that would be my second film and it was a surprise actually that suddenly August came back together.

LN: Who made that happen? Do you have a team that you work with regularly?
AC: I don’t have a team of producers I work with regularly. Ultimately it’s something that I’m hoping to find, a life long producing partner. There were a couple of producers on AUGUST at that point. The first producer involved was David Guy Levy who’s an LA based guy. He had optioned the script and sent it to me because he saw XX/XY and liked it. He and I developed the project over a period of roughly a year. I worked with Howard, the screenwriter, giving him notes and ultimately ended up doing a bit of re-writing myself. Then it got to the point where I felt the script was ready to go out.

LN: At what point did Josh Hartnett come on the film?
AC: Josh came on a couple of months later. We had a couple of meetings to discuss the material and the character because obviously it’s a different character from anything he’s played in the past; much more verbal, aggressive, proactive character rather than a passive character. So, it took a number of meetings before we both felt like we were on the same page about what it meant for him to do that role. It was around January or February of ‘07 that we finally decided we were going to move forward and make a movie.

LN: What was your style with him on set?  Did you direct him a lot or did he do what he wanted?  Tell me about that.
AC: Josh is a really great guy. He’s got a lot of ideas and we had spent a lot of time prior to being in production talking about the movie and the character. He definitely brings a lot to the role. It was a really tough shoot; I’m not going to lie. It was super, super fast. The budget on this movie was five times the budget on my previous film XX/XY and yet we had about half as much time to shoot this film. So that was kind of a rude awakening. I didn’t realize how little time we were going to have. So, everyday was a challenge both for me and for everybody. For Josh it was especially challenging, he’d never been on a movie that shot in this few days.

LN: What was it like three weeks?
AC: It was 24 days. I think that the shortest shoot he’d ever been on was 36 and everything else had been much, much longer. Even 36 was a rarity for him. Not only that, but this is a character who probably has more lines than all of his other roles that he’s ever played put together. 

LN:  I’m curious about David Bowie.  Who thought to bring him in for this one scene?
AC: I wish I could say it was a brilliant idea I had but it was actually something that came a little bit by surprise. He wasn’t’ somebody that we had thought about. Bowie is somebody that, probably more than any other artist, influenced me when I was growing up. So, when we got this call, and it was literally a call that came out of the blue, it was totally amazing to me. We got a call from his agent asking if we would be interested in considering him for the role. Ultimately it wasn’t that easy. It was sort of a long process to get to a yes. But yes, it came out of the blue.

LN:  Let’s talk about the music, it really shows the emotional state of the characters, considering that they hide what they feel a lot of the time.  Was the music part of the script writing and development process?  
AC: I always knew that it was going to be a music heavy movie. I had met Nathan [Larson, the composer] a few years back and really liked him and his work. He lives in the city but his studio is in Williamsburg, right around the corner from me. I always knew that it was going to be both score heavy and also that the source music was going to be a really important part of the film in terms of placing it in that time period.  The style of the music was something that Nathan and I developed in post but the decision for there to be so much music was something that I had made long before we even started shooting. In XX/XY there is almost no music, no score in that movie. I think that knowing whether you’re making a movie that’s score heavy is something that you need to have made before shooting.

LN:  Why is it so important to place it in history?  We see the twin towers, we see all these news stories on TV.  Why this moment in time? It’s even specific to the month.
AC: I feel that that moment leading up to 9-11 was a turning point in our history as a country. The Tom Sterling character, in a way, represents a sort of American hubris, a stereotypically American attitude that we can bully and talk our way through any situation and get what we want. That was something that when I first read Howard’s script had a lot of resonance. And specifically that character who I think represents a generation; that young first dot-com bubble generation. There is this kind of arrogance that I thought he captured really well.

LN: Well, it seems like a really appropriate moment to put it out since we may be in a similar situation right now with the market and people loosing jobs.  
AC: Yeah, and I feel like in a way it’s a product of what happened then and certain aspects of what occurred then have never really been addressed or examined. I think 9-11 made it possible for people to kind of side step or ignore what had been happening in our economy prior to 9-11.

First Look Pictures opens August in New York and Los Angeles on July 11th.