Talking With Jason Schwartzman of 7 CHINESE BROTHERS

I like to consider Jason Schwartzman and I best buddies. Now as to whether he feels the same way, I can only speculate a resounding “Yes.” The following interview took place during the 2015 Seattle International Film Festival, where I first acquainted with the dapper star of Bob Byington‘s secretly hysterical 7 Chinese Brothers and took to asking him soul-searching questions pertaining to his preference for cats or dogs. Join us as we discuss injecting himself into the role, if he’s as snide as the characters he plays, his preference for a lazy day and what it’s like co-starring in a movie with his dog.

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I would’ve had you pegged for a cat person, but apparently, this is your dog co-starring in the film with you.

Jason Schwartzman: In LA, my experience has been that it’s hard to have a cat because of the coyotes. I would never want to have a cat that was just stuck inside all the time, especially because I like to leave the doors open. I like a flow of air. For that reason, and just growing up, we always had dogs. We never had cats. But I worked at a cat shelter for two years; I’d get scratched a lot.

In the film, you play a poetic, drunken, Jack Kerouac-on-a-couch kind of character. He’s the kind of guy who can be unemployed, get punched in the face, but still make you feel shitty about yourself. You have that really snide, wry, dark humor to you. Is that just who you are, or you’re just amazing at playing that?

JS: I don’t know. I think maybe in some way, we all have some version of every one of these things in us.

All the archetypes fighting inside.

JS: You’re just remixing a little bit, the levels for each thing. But maybe, yeah. In my real life, I tend not to react positively to negative people. I think some people just don’t care, and let things roll off them. But when someone’s really an asshole, or really snide, or just someone who’s so ironic, it can be hard for me to connect with them. At the end of the day, I just want to have a nice talk with someone, and have a good time. So if someone’s an asshole, it can really throw me off. But in the work, sometimes it’s really fun to indulge those curiosities.

Continuing on that thread, do you find that there are certain projects that your comedy style doesn’t fit with? Is it hard approaching certain things?

JS: I don’t know about style. I go into everything feeling like it might not be the best, it’s gonna be a bad…let’s just put it this way: I don’t think what you just said; but I definitely will think, I don’t know if I’m gonna help that or do a good job for this. I don’t know if I have a style or anything. I just try to do the best I can.

I feel like this performance wouldn’t work with anyone else in the role, like it was a custom-fit, tailored suit for you.

JS: It wasn’t. He in fact wrote many years before we even met.

So how much did you inject yourself into the character during the making of the film?

JS: That’s a good question. To be honest with you, the hardest thing for me with the movie was only when we were doing this movie that I sort of realized that in the past, I tended to play characters that have a real goal. And they want something really badly. And in this, I realized, “Wow, this guy doesn’t really want anything.” And it was really hard for me. So I think this might have been the most challenging—it was the hardest, in many ways, because there was nothing to really set sights on. It was just enjoying drifting. In life, I can be lazy. I can not work like nobody’s business. But I do like some kind of—even if I’m gonna stay inside all day and do nothing—it’s gotta have nothing with a little purpose.

A little color to it.

JS: Maybe I’ll reorganize a bookshelf, but still just in my underwear. The idea of just sitting around and watching television all day, or doing nothing all day, that’s hard for me.

It’s a little depressing.

JS: Yeah, too depressing. It was hard. Great questions, by the way.

Are you doing a lot of improvisational work on something like this, or is it mostly scripted?

JS: The script was very, very good, and it was well-written. But there were certain things in the movie that weren’t exactly improvised, but they were things in the movie that we tried in different places. You know in the movie, he does this fat guy getting out of the pool thing? That’s something that we literally just tried all the time. We’d shoot a scene there, and be like, let’s try fat guy getting out of the pool … More like modular, but not as much improvisation. It was pretty scripted. There was something about the quietness of it that I really liked. And I liked also that the character was very lonely, but not anti-social. He’s friendly, but he’s just a loner.