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Decemeber 2009
UP IN THE AIR | Director Jason Reitman, Anna Kendrick, Vera Farmiga, and Novelist Walter Kirn speak about the film


UP IN THE AIR
Press Conference Interview with Director Jason Reitman, Anna Kendrick, Vera Farmiga, and Novelist Walter Kirn
by Stephanie Mohorn


November 30, 2009



From Jason Reitman, the Oscar nominated director of "Juno," comes a comedy called "Up in the Air" starring Oscar winner George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a corporate hatchet man who loves his life on the road but is forced to fight for his job when his company downsizes its travel budget. He is required to spend more time at home just as he is on the cusp of a goal he's worked toward for years: reaching five million frequent flyer miles and just after he's met the frequent-traveler woman of his dreams.

Also cast in the film are Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, Jason Bateman, Danny McBride, Tamala Jones, and Chris Lowell.

At a recent press conference in New York City, Director Jason Reitman, Anna Kendrick, Vera Farmiga, and Novelist Walter Kirn spoke about the film.


Anna Kendrick:
 

Since the Toronto the buzz has been that this will be Golden Globe and Oscar nominated, that it'll be a big hit. Vera and Anna, do you feel that you're competed with one another for
nominations at the end of the year?


Anna Kendrick: I've got a hit out on her [laughs]! I'm going to Nancy Kerrigan your ass.

Vera Farminga: I'm sure that there's no competition.


Anna, you've been working since you were ten but people don't really know who you are yet. Can you talk about where you've come from and what this has done for you?

Kendrick: Sure. I grew up in Portland, Maine and I started in theater in New York when I was twelve, actually. I did a show on Broadway when I was twelve. I started to get into film and television when I was about seventeen and eventually sort of moved to L.A. and tried to work in film. I think it's a little bit weird to start working at twelve and still be thought of as a newcomer. But it's cool, I'd rather be a newcomer than old news. So that's fine.


Can you guys relate any stories you might have about the worst way you've been fired from a job?

Jason Reitman: I've never been fired. I'm frankly very good at what I do. I've never been fired from anything. I've fired people but have never been fired. I fired a seven year old girl once.


What happened?

Reitman: I was directing her on a commercial and she was a bad influence on the other kids.

Walter Kirn: I was fired from my first job as an ice cream scooper. The ice cream scoops were to be made large and hollow so as to maximize profits but I couldn't bear to give my friends hollow scoops of ice cream. At the end of one day my boss came up to me and said, 'Walter, we're going to have to let you go.' I was fifteen. I said, 'Why?' And she said, 'Because you're a very heavy scooper.'

 
Director Jason Reitman

Farminga: I worked for Fetters and Emerson Quiet, Cool Air Conditioning Units as a telemarketer, as a customer service representative and I would field questions and try to help people who would call from across the country seeking advice for their air conditions. I would advise them what to do if their unit was too small, if the BTU's were not enough for the size room that they were trying to [cool]. I would end up chatting about their lives and getting to know them. So I was demoted. I was taken off the phones. Then again I had another telemarketing job for Syracuse University where I had to reach to alumni and for the opposite reason, I wasn't chatty enough. I could sense the moment that they said hello that they just weren't going to be giving and I would hang up.


Reitman: You would hang up on them?

Farminga: I would hang up before even giving them the pitch. So they transferred me to work for Coach (SP?) Pascueloni, doing clerical stuff instead.

Kendrick: I've never been fired either. Somebody just asked me for the first time if I'd ever broken up with anybody over email though, which is a similar question, and I realized that I broke up with my eleven year old boyfriend when I was eleven over email. Not my eleven year old boyfriend.

 

Vera Farmiga
 

Can you talk about the real life laid off people that you used in the movie?

Reitman: Certainly. When I first started writing this movie it was 2003 and we were at the tail end of an economic boom. As I approached the shooting of the film we were now in one of the worst recessions on record and I had to adjust how we were doing these firing scenes. To do it as pure satire just didn't make sense anymore. We were shooting the film in St. Louis and
Detroit, two cities that just got pummeled. We put an ad out in the paper asking if there were people who had lost their jobs and wanted to be in a documentary about job loss. We said a documentary to kind of weed out actors who were trying to sneak into the film. We got a startling amount of responses. We ended up putting sixty people on camera, twenty two of which are
in the film. We'd interview them for about ten minutes on what it's like to lose their job in this kind of economy and then after that we would actually fire them on camera. We'd ask them to either respond the way they did the way they lost their job or if they preferred the way that they wish they had responded.

It was kind of an incredible experience to watch these non-actors improv with one hundred percent realism. The situation was so real for them that they couldn't help but just get into the moment instantaneously. The moment they started to hear us use that kind of legal document that's used to fire people with, the second they would hear that legal verbiage you would see their eyes turn and they would just go there. It was a remarkable experience. I don't think I'll use trained actors in the future.

 

     


Walter Kirn

 





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