There is a point in Greenberg when Greenberg looks around a backyard pool party in L.A. and exclaims, “All the men out here dress like children, and the children dress like superheroes.” A pleasure in writing the character was coming up with these rants. I don’t always disagree with him—and I maybe agree with him more often than not. Sort of like I felt about Bernard, Jeff Daniels’s character in The Squid and the Whale. When Bernard dismisses A Tale of Two Cities as “minor Dickens,” he’s arguably right. But in Greenberg’s case, his rants somehow run out of steam. He’s too tired to finish some of them. He has so many different criticisms going at once. And they’re all really about protecting himself or feeling out of place or insecure. But because there’s plenty real and imagined to take L.A. to task about, because there’s plenty in the culture to criticize, he can hide behind that. It’s like railing against the Bush administration or something. You can mostly be right. But there’s a certain point where if you’re Greenberg, even the most staunch liberals would get tired of listening to you.
The opening shot of the movie is a place I often walk my dog—he’s a shepherd-collie mix—near Runyon Canyon. The shot begins with the city and tilts over to find Florence walking a German shepherd. I didn’t actually intend that to be the opening of the movie. The script opened a different way. But when we were cutting the movie, I thought, This feels like the movie. You see the hazy city—you see West Hollywood and downtown in the distance—and then we find this woman in the midst of this serene dog walk in these mountains. It seemed so Los Angeles. So I said, “Why don’t we start the movie like that?” And we ran credits over it, like movies did in the ’70s. It wasn’t until later that I realized how it captured this real sense of Los Angeles: this city-country thing happening all at once.
Then you go from there to Gower Gulch. Florence is doing errands for the family along Sunset. I think the feel for this movie wasn’t what felt beautiful but instead what felt personal. I’d done this in Brooklyn when I made The Squid and the Whale, and I suppose I followed a similar track with this, which was to pick locations that had meaning to me. I love how odd Gower Gulch is. Where else can you find a Rite Aid with a western theme?
Lucy’s El Adobe is a place Jennifer loved growing up, and she still loves it. Some people see it as just the Mexican restaurant near Paramount, but she really has an emotional connection to it. So we go there sometimes. That was our first day of shooting, the scene of Greenberg eating at Lucy’s.
And then there’s the orange blow-up man—you know, that huge flailing figure that seems to move when a fan blows air into it. I’d seen a bunch of them while driving on La Brea. They’re kind of dreamy, and then they’ll convulse in a way that feels unpleasant. When I went to a car dealer on La Brea where I’d seen one, they didn’t have the guy I wanted anymore, so I found him—the orange one—and brought him back to re-create the scene.
Sometimes a location is true to you, but it’s been overshot. I went back and forth on Musso & Frank because I thought, Is it too classic? But because it’s Greenberg’s birthday in that scene, I liked the majesty of Musso’s working in contrast to his anxious mood. And then of course it all ends with him storming out after the waiters sing him “Happy Birthday.” We used all the real waiters there. And real regulars. We tried to do that everywhere. At Musso’s, Lucy’s, the Sake House, we used real people.
Any errands Ben Stiller does in the movie, we shot for real. We had a van with curtains, and we hid the camera and put Ben out on the streets. When he’s running out of Jons Market on La Brea, that’s real. When he’s mailing letters, he’s really at the post office. When he’s walking on La Brea with the Hasidim outside a Jewish temple, those are all real people.
