'I was the kind of kid who could show up in a full tuxedo and holding a cane': actor Jason Schwartzman Image Credit & Copyright: Emma McIntyre/Contour, Getty Images
The story of how Jason Schwartzman landed the role in his first Wes Anderson film sounds exactly like something that could have happened in a Wes Anderson film. Growing up in Los Angeles, Schwartzman — the son of a godfather and actress Rocky Talia Shire (more famous relatives would follow!) — had no desire to become an actor. However, he considered himself a creative type, and after his mother took him to a theater workshop, he began to imagine himself a playwright.
In 1997, at the age of 16, he traveled to San Francisco for a concert dedicated to his grandfather, the composer Carmine Coppola (yes, there is one more). “It was a formal event,” he recalls, “and I was just the kind of guy who showed up in a full tuxedo and with a cane.” At the reception, the casting assistant, who was working on Anderson's upcoming film Rushmore, was talking to Schwartzman's older cousin, Sophia (Coppola, who would later cast him as Louis XVI in her own 2006 film, Marie Antoinette).
< br />“She told Sophia that she was asked to find a young actor for the lead role: an incredibly strange and implausible teenager who wants to be a playwright, dresses neatly and is in love with an older woman,” he says. «And Sophia pointed at me from across the room in my top hat and tailcoat, flirting with women my mother's age, and said, 'He looks like my cousin.'
Sipping an espresso in a Cannes hotel room, Schwartzman, now 42, still feels like the living essence of a Wes Anderson film. Wearing linen track pants and a yellow shirt, he dryly talks about how he started painting after his wife, fashion designer Brady Cunningham, bought him a sketchbook for his last birthday. The problem, he admits, is that the more he works on the sketch, the worse it gets.
In the 25 years since Rushmore, Schwartzman has become a regular face of Anderson's repertory troupe—those actors and actresses who just seem to fit the director's plaintive, eccentric signature style. His latest film, Asteroid City, features 21 big names, from Anderson stalwarts like Edward Norton and Tilda Swinton to recruits Scarlett Johansson, Margot Robbie and Tom Hanks. At the center of it all is Schwartzman. This is his seventh film with Anderson, and like many of his actors, he has not one role, but two.
First, he plays Jones Hall, a fiercely serious member of an Actors Studio-like collective in mid-century New York. Second is Augie Steenbeck, Jones' final stage character: a recently widowed war photographer who is stuck with his offspring at a children's astronomy convention in the remote desert town of the title.
What follows is a rich and enigmatic group shot of 20th-century America trying to figure out if the meaning of life could be out there somewhere, either extracted from the stars by scientific efforts or dug up on stage through artistic practice. The film is in some ways Anderson's strangest, and after some time to adapt, it turns out to be one of his best, showing the best performance of Schwartzman since Rushmore.
«I felt that I needed hormones height to play this role,” Schwartzman says with a shy smirk, before launching into a tense, slightly unsettling account of his months-long battle to figure out how to play these two very different people. but intertwined parts.
Starting with Anderson's early cryptic admonition — «Think of Stanley Kubrick» in a short phone call; then, four months later, “Think of Elia Kazan,” he dug through his family’s home movie stash to reproduce the vocal cadences of his late father, film producer Jack Schwartzman, tuning his speech from B flat to G every morning played on piano, studied accent, and so on, until he finally figured out where he, Jones and Augie intersect.
Schwartzman in his breakout role in Rushmore (1998). Photo: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo
Curbing his naturally expressive facial movements to play the stoic Augie was a particular challenge. «Literally, I was asking Wes, 'Should I get Botox? Take novocaine? A solution was found: two small, custom-made dentures that fit over his molars limited his jaw when he spoke.
When writing the role for Schwartzman, Anderson was assisted by his longtime associate (another of Schwartzman's cousins) Roman Coppola, the son of Francis Ford Coppola, director of the Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now.
“I understand that cinema is seen as a family business, quoting or quoting,” Schwartzman says. «But actually it is not. When I was growing up, my mom didn't take me to film sets. And in the 1980s, the movies I watched as a kid were Ghostbusters, Steve Martin, Lethal Weapon. They just felt so big. I've never seen any of them and thought, «One day up there, that'll be me.»
The fact that he ended up doing Rushmore with Bill Murray — the comic actor the Ghostbusters goon who became a generational icon must have seemed surreal.
“Yeah, that bothered me,” he says. «It's still like that.»
An Unexpected Journey: With Owen Wilson and Adrien Brody in Darjeeling Limited (2007). Photo: Film Stills
His enduring respect for Murray is evident. “That's how I think of him,” he says enthusiastically. “When I was born in 1980, there were calculators, and I have never known life without calculators. Or copiers. And he is. He's just one of the things built into life.»
But not in Asteroid City. Of Schwartzman's many films with Anderson, this is the first in which Murray also does not appear. The official excuse is Covid: Anderson said that Murray was forced to leave due to contracting a virus shortly before filming. But Murray's absence also follows reports of his history of difficult behavior on set, which gained traction after a female crew member filed a misbehavior complaint on the set of the long-abandoned comedy Being Mortal early last year. (Murray was reported to have later reached a private agreement with the woman.)
Anderson allegedly thought of Murray as the cutesy motel manager played by Steve Carell. But it's also very easy to imagine him as Schwartzman's patrician father-in-law, a role eventually taken (and played to perfection) by Tom Hanks, another 1980s comic book star whose authority came with his gray hair. br />
Did the absence of Murray Schwartzman bother you? And if so, how does the job compare to Hanks? “I didn’t talk about it,” he mumbles. How can I talk about it? He stops to think.
“I mean, Tom Hanks is amazing. But beyond that, on the set of Wes and many others, [Hanks] proved that he can be the hardest working actor and take his job very seriously, and yet he manages to treat everyone with respect and be really cool. And I think, as an example of how to live in this world, it is inspiring.”
An example of how to be in this world: Jason Schwartzman and Tom Hanks in Asteroid City. 87 Production/Focus Functions
Schwartzman admires Anderson's ability to assemble casts. “I think Wes sees things in people that they might not even recognize in themselves,” he says. “He is like a musical arranger who realizes that a guitar part can sound better on bass. He has an ear for orchestration, but with people.»
Schwartzman was recently part of another formidable ensemble: the cast of his uncle Francis' sci-fi epic Megapolis, which was dropped after decades of false starts. Earlier this year. In January, there were reports of chaos on the set, just like in the days of Apocalypse Now: crew members resigned, the budget allegedly ballooned, and there was murmuring about an «unstable filming environment.»
Schwartzman, who plays NYC Mayor Forest Whitaker's communications chief, found it exciting. “If you look at my uncle’s work trajectory, there was always an element of experimentation,” he explains. “And he experimented with that every day.” After one scene, filmed in what Schwartzman would describe as «really wild,» the actor asked his uncle, «How long have you been planning to do this?»
«He said to me, 'I just thought about it then because I didn’t know how to do it differently.” And that's exactly what it looks like,» he adds. «He's the kind of guy who can live in the same city all his life and find a new way home every day.
Nice turn of phrase — and considering the pleasure he takes in making up such comparisons for their own sake, which in time may be applicable to Shvartsman as well. However, now I can't help but imagine him following me on a scooter, sometimes rushing forward or tangentially, just happy to be on the move.
Asteroid City is in theaters now
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