Jonah Hill on his acting career and his first time directing — ‘Mid90s’
With 15 years in the film business behind him, 34-yearold actor Jonah Hill has made the transition to directing with “Mid90s,” a raw, personal story of his youth brought to life by an array of actors and nonactors. Inspired by filmmakers like Mike Nichols and Barry Levinson, who moved from comedy to drama with equal aplomb, Hill says he held out on tackling his first feature behind the camera because, after all, you only ever get one crack at it. The result is a work that has been compared to the cinema of Larry Clark and Richard Linklater, but nevertheless pulses with its own distinctive voice.
“I really wanted to take time and have patience to wait until I was mature enough emotionally, had my own voice and had a story that really meant something to me,” Hill says. “I was writing a play with Spike Jonze and we would do this exercise where we would talk about the screenplays we were writing and walk each other through the story. Originally (‘Mid90s’) was about something else and it kept flashing back to when the kids were young and skateboarding together. Spike wisely pointed out I was far more exuberant about the flashbacks, the B-story, than I was the Astory, so I kind of just made it all about that.”
Hill has treated his career in the trenches of acting as a sort of cinema studies excursion. He’s worked with filmmakers like David O. Russell, Judd Apatow, Bennett Miller, Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese and the Coen brothers along the way, and he’s soaked up everything he could to help inform his own work as a filmmaker.
“My dream my whole life was to be a writer-director,” he says. “I accidentally fell into this amazing acting career and my life went in a really wild, other
“I accidentally fell into this amazing acting career and my life went in a really wild, other direction.”
— Jonah Hill
direction, but it ended up being incredible, not only because I love acting but because I got this incredible 15-year film school and I got to work with most of my heroes. As an actor, you have the ability, if you want it, to be in a front-row seat to the filmmaking process. I’ve also had the good fortune of being in a lot of bad movies, which you can learn as much from as the good ones!”
Hill lights up when asked about the nuts and bolts of putting “Mid90s” together. He zeroed in on an aesthetic that took cues from Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant,” Martin Bell’s “Streetwise” and Penelope Spheeris’ “The Decline of Western Civilization.” He tapped Christopher Blauvelt (“The Bling Ring”) as his director of photography, who came up under Hill’s all-time favorite in the field, the late, great Harris Savides.
“I feel like apprenticeship and that kind of thing is lost,” he says. “... I believe in that. It’s emotional to me. (Blauvelt) speaks of Harris how someone would speak of a god or a father or a mentor. Blauvelt and I designed an ethic that we didn’t break. The camera wasn’t going to move unless it absolutely had to, and it was for a deep purpose. It wasn’t to show how fancy we are. It was mostly still. We stayed wide a lot. The best compliment Blauvelt gave me, he’s like, ‘Most directors, we design this ethic and they break it out of fear, and we didn’t break it.’ That’s something I’m proud of.”