By James Mottram
“I picked it up at the airport a few years ago, mainly because it was short,” director, James Schamus, laughs of Philip Roth’s novel, Indignation. “I’m a very slow reader, and I just fell in love with it. I fell in love with the characters, and I thought, ‘This might be a Philip Roth novel that you can make a movie out of.’” Though films have certainly been made of the revered American author’s work (among them Portnoy’s Complaint, The Human Stain, and The Humbling), the results have been decidedly mixed. “He’s tough,” Schamus smiles. “It’s really tough to adapt his work. The genius of Roth is this intense, perverse honesty, which envelops the narrative, with a consciousness that is not necessarily shared, even by the most self-conscious narrator or character, and so his characters are often abrasive or tough to live with. But there’s a lot of love in there, and there’s a lot of honesty. But it’s very difficult to do in cinema if you have an abrasive or tough character, who’s in front of a camera.”
A 1950s-set coming-of-age drama about a working class Jewish kid (Logan Lerman) from New Jersey who is confronted with culture shock whilst attending a small Ohio college, Indignation also represents something of a coming of age for the 58-year-old James Schamus. Though an industry veteran – he’s a longtime producer (Brokeback Mountain, Sense And Sensibility) and screenwriter (penning many scripts for director, Ang Lee, including Eat Drink Man Woman, The Ice Storm, and many more), and for many years was the CEO of production house, Focus Features, once the prized “indie division” of Universal – this is Schamus’ first time behind the camera. “I found myself happily unemployed,” he laughs when asked what prompted him to direct. “I got fired from my studio gig, and I was always planning on at some point transitioning away from the studio world. I had a blast directing the film! I really love the job, and that is no self-servicing whatever. But I was planning on doing it a little later, after my youngest daughter had finished high school. So I found myself unemployed, and my youngest daughter was off to college, and I had a screenplay that I was really enjoying working on finally, and my wife said, ‘Why not give it a try?’ So it was that simple; it wasn’t some life plan, and some of my friends, who could have directed it, were busy doing other things, so that made it easy too.”
Was it hard to adapt to the new job? “What I liked about adapting to this new job was that it was hard,” Schamus replies. “So it would be dishonest to say that it was so hard, because it was so much fun. But part of the joy of it was doing stuff that I hadn’t had a chance to do before. There was one thing specifically that nobody had ever asked me to do in movies. And that was where to put the camera, which seems like a normal thing – it’s done millions of times a day, all over the world, on TV, film, and commercial sets – but it’s actually terrifying. The screen is a blank canvas, and I felt this existential dread at trying to figure out what exactly was that frame, and how to establish when somebody was coming into it, and where they were. And then I just prepared, and prepared, and prepared, and got over that fear. That was part of the biggest fear.”
When asked the obvious question of whether Schamus probed for advice from any of the powerhouse arthouse directors (such as Todd Haynes and Todd Solondz) with whom he’s so closely worked over the years, the filmmaker shrugs. “I did pay attention on-set, over the years, and I realised a couple of things,” Schamus says. “One was that advice is a really overrated category. It is! What’s the best piece of advice that anybody ever gave you? Can you remember it? Can anybody remember one piece of advice? We’ve all, at a moment in our lives, said, ‘I need some advice!’ But the concept of advice is really weird! Because whatever people tell you – and it could be the best advice that you’ve ever heard, this is the crazy thing, but it’s true – the exact opposite is also often true. Right? ‘Do what you love’ might be really great advice! But it turns out in your life sometimes that it’s really cool to try to do something that you might not love, and it’s an incredible experience! So it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s the advice. Do something you don’t love.’ It really works for everything. It’s unbelievable. It also works for all religious precepts that can be said in one sentence, like ‘We are all one.’ But of course the opposite is the exact thing, like, ‘You need to find the real you.’ So I took advice, but it was more a sense of just camaraderie, and a sense of just being there.”
Screenwriter, producer, studio executive, and now director…James Schamus’ path through the filmmaking jungle could hardly be described as a typical one. “It’s potentially incredibly humiliating,” he laughs of his unlikely career. “I really understand that! Let’s be honest, I’ve been moving sausages through the sausage factory for 30 years, and I’ve been having a great time too. But it is quite a different thing when, at the end of the day, it’s your movie. I didn’t take a ‘Film By’ credit though, which is not to say that I’m not completely into auteur directors doing that. And, of course, working with auteur directors is how I put my kids through college, so I’m totally into it. But I also thought, ‘It’s just a great job! This directing thing is really fun.’”
Indignation is released in cinemas on August 18. Click through for FilmInk’s interviews with the film’s stars, Logan Lerman and Sarah Gadon.
