Some tasty waves, a cool buzz, and a Criterion edition of the high school classic.
No, no, not a very different cut at all. Because thank God, our producer, Art Linson, who is just such a cool guy … I’d be panicking and panicking, and he’d be going, “Fuck them if they can’t take a joke.” And he just knew that that was not our audience. It’s like, that does not represent young people.Then they decided that they weren’t going to release it wide. They were just going to release it in a couple hundred theaters near Los Angeles.
It didn’t feel like that, because it wasn’t making what I considered a “boy hit.” I mean, I’m glad it made enough for me to continue. I wanted to get into that club of what guys do and what they can accomplish. It reminds me of that story about your first day in high school, the High School of Art and Design in New York. Do you remember that?
It was in Ms. Rosecrans’ class in English and there was a boy that sat next to me, Eugene, and he was always talking about movies. We had to write an essay at one point on what we wanted to do when we grew up. And I wanted to make movies, but I would never say that because I didn’t think it was possible to do. I thought that’s something that a bunch of privileged men in Hollywood do, and I can never do that.