Reitman says focus on people, not tech

Jason Reitman would like you to know that in no way is he trying to prove a point with his new film, Men, Women & Children, which uses a large ensemble cast to train a spotlight on Internet dependencies the way Crash did with racism.

“I don’t have a message,” he said. “With my movies, it’s certainly one of my goals not to. Some people thought Juno was anti-abortion, other people thought it was pro. Same thing with Thank You for Smoking, about cigarettes.”

This time out, he says, “I’m not so much interested in the Internet as in human interconnectivity, how we reach out and make contact. How could I presume to have a solution for something we don’t yet understand?” he said. “In 50 years they’ll look back and realize we were the Cro-Magnons at the beginning who touched the black slab. All I hope is that it cre- ates questions and moves people.”

The movie is based on a novel of the same name by Chad Kultgen, a pop-fiction author who has raised hackles for what detractors claim is a tendency to observe everything through a hyper-sexualized male point of view.

Men, Women & Children weaves together several mini-dramas. A husband and wife whose attraction to each other is long gone each seek new thrills in their own way. A cheerleader and aspiring star’s failed-actress mother sells suggestive photos of her daughter online. Another cheerleader has an eating disorder and such low self-esteem that she has hurried, horrid, first-time sex with a callous boy. A 15-year-old boy is addicted to Internet porn. A prim mother goes overboard trying to protect her daughter from online creeps.

That’s a lot of story lines to resolve in one movie. Reit- man’s past films have focused on much smaller, contained sets of characters with at most one or two minor subplots.

“I was really just trying to get my character numbers up, you know, like basketball stats,” Reitman joked. “But actually, I loved the book. It somehow captures what it’s like to be a teen today, to be married on the verge of divorce, to be in love in this new techno-world with a kind of accuracy I couldn’t have accomplished on my own.”

Reitman, who turns 38 on Sunday, recently went through a divorce himself and has a daughter. He grew up as a Hollywood kid, the son of Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman. He was lauded as a promising new talent in 2005 for adapting Christopher Buckley’ s novel about a tobacco lobbyist, Thank You for Smoking.

But he first caught widespread attention with Juno, the 2007 indie about a wise- cracking pregnant teen that snagged an Oscar for firsttime screenwriter Diablo Cody. They went on to work together on 2011’s Young Adult with star Charlize Theron.

He calls Cody “my longlost sibling. Somehow we found each other. On the promotion tour for Juno, we were both still in our 20s, two kids on the road ordering room service and drinking on the studio’s dime, goofing off, and feeling like a band on the run. It was so exciting to watch her go from this gal working at an ad agency and writing a screenplay at Starbucks on her lunch break to getting all the recognition she deserved for that beautiful, articulate voice of hers.”

Reitman is now working on adapting The Possibilities, a novel about grieving written by Kaui Hart Hemmings, whose previous novel The Descendants was turned into the critically praised film starring George Clooney.