httpss://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNqEAwcXXxk
Jeff Baena’s sophomore feature Joshy is classified as an R-rated comedy, and while the movie’s cast features several stellar comedic actors, the writer-director considers the film to be more of a drama with funny moments.
Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter about Joshy, Baena also shared his memories of working with Marshall, including the practical advice the filmmaker passed down from Francis Ford Coppola, and revealed that he even tried to get Marshall to make an appearance in an upcoming movie but the director, who died on July 19, was too ill to make the trip to Italy.
After Life After Beth, which was almost exclusively scripted, I wanted to try something new, so I decided to write an outline.
Even if you get people who are more accustomed to comedy and they’re generally not doing too many dramas, I do feel like they can handle the dramatic stuff because I feel like, not to undermine what drama is, but drama tends to work on more of an emotional base level and comedy works sort of on a more layered level.
The necessity to produce something out of that environment, I think is really exciting as an artist, and to collaborate with actors and to really trust each other and know that we’re all giving ourselves over to this and letting it kind of happen, it’s a completely different experience than Life After Beth, w everything was scripted.
I feel like so much of how guys relate to and interact with one another and to some extent have an inability to articulate their emotional state – when something traumatic happens to guys they either avoid it, and in this case most didn’t show up , or when they’re confronting it they’re almost confronting it by obfuscating it with distracting the person and just trying to have a good time.
You worked with Garry Marshall on Life After Beth – that was one of his last acting roles.
At one point he took me on a walk and he said, ‘I’m going to give you the piece of advice that is the most important advice you can get as a director.
I was trying to get him to, in the spring, we were trying to get it to work for him to come out and we found out that he was a little too ill to travel to Italy.