In L.A., oddly, that kind of stolen shot is easier to get. Even with Ben being so well known, in L.A. no one is on the streets because everyone’s driving, so no one’s looking at you. In New York that’s more difficult. I think with stolen shots you get something that you don’t get when you hire extras and have them pretend to talk—an energy that you can’t fake. I mean, in Midnight Cowboy all that stuff of them walking through the city was stolen, and it feels that way. I like it in movies when people look in the camera, and you realize, Oh, they were shooting this for real.
Have you ever noticed that you see the bases of palm trees—the parts at eye level—more than you see the entire thing? I tried to show that in the movie. You don’t go around looking up that much. It’s the same thing in New York. I’ve spent my whole life there, and I still see parts of buildings that I can’t imagine I never noticed before.
Harris Savides, my cinematographer on Greenberg, also shot Margot at the Wedding with me. To capture the look of L.A. we talked about our own experiences of the city and the light at different times of day and the seasons. We also had film references. We looked at totally disparate movies, like Heaven Can Wait and an adaptation of Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays, which is hard to find, but we got a print of it and screened it. I think Jordan Cronenweth, a great cinematographer, shot it. And it’s beautiful. It doesn’t work, really, as an adaptation of that book. But the look is really beautiful. And I’ve always loved how The Long Goodbye, the Robert Altman movie, looked. Before I even knew L.A., it felt like such an interesting glimpse of L.A. They flashed the film in that movie, which softens the contrast and somehow enhances its L.A.-ness.
So we shared a lot of L.A. things that we liked. But then it came down to telling the story we set out to tell. You go into it with a lot of ideas—“We should shoot this ideally at this hour!”—but in the end, you shoot when you can.
At the risk of revealing too much, Jennifer and I had a dog who did get this illness that was similar to what the dog Mahler gets in the film. And while our dog was at the veterinarian—a vet’s office where, by the way, we would later shoot some Greenberg scenes—they sent us to a pharmacy to fill a prescription. And the song “It Never Rains in Southern California” was playing in the pharmacy. I must have heard it before, but I felt like I hadn’t. I said, “This is a really good song.” And Jennifer said, “Are you kidding? They used to play this on the radio in L.A. every time it rained.” Ben says that in the script, and he also says what Jennifer said next: “And what’s the other song? ‘Burn Baby Burn (Disco Inferno)’—they’d play that during wildfires!”
Initially I thought “It Never Rains” would play in the beginning, when Florence is driving. But then I used the Steve Miller Band’s “Jet Airliner” instead and had Ben play “It Never Rains” for Florence later in the film. I just had a moment that happens every so often—I’d imagine it happens to you—where I realized, Steve Miller was good.
Another night, driving back from Lucy’s El Adobe, we were listening to some alternative radio station and the LCD Soundsystem song “New York, I Love You, but You’re Bringing Me Down” came on. And the voice of the song felt like another version of Greenberg. It’s a great song. That whole record—the Sound of Silver record—is great. I ended up getting the record and listening to it while I was writing, and it became another voice of Greenberg and an inspiration.
So I went to James Murphy, whose band it is, and asked him if he’d be interested in scoring a movie (he ended up writing songs and the score). This is before we shot Greenberg. And we really hit it off. We met in New York, but he had just been in L.A. He said he shared a lot of Greenberg’s observations. He said, “I was at a sushi restaurant the other day in L.A., and this guy had his feet stretched out in the aisle and he was just making himself at home. And I was like, ‘Just treat it like your living room!’ ” I thought that should go in the movie, so I put it in.
