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JEFF SCIORTINO: Knight-Ridder Tribune
Former Friends star crosses the Big Pond to direct his first film
AUSTIN — David Schwimmer is best known for playing Ross Geller on Friends, the beloved situation comedy that ended a 10-year run in 2004. But in a career that spans more than two decades, Schwimmer has had a wide range of roles, both comedic and dramatic, both in front of and behind the camera.None of that quite prepared him, though, for directing his first movie. Run Fatboy Run, a romantic comedy starring Simon Pegg and Thandie Newton, opened Friday in the U.S. after a hugely successful run in Great Britain, where it was filmed.Pegg plays an underachiever who dumped his pregnant girlfriend on their wedding day. Years later, after she gets seriously involved with a successful and athletically inclined American, he tries to win her affections by running in a marathon.
The movie originally was to be set in New York, with the New York Marathon as its centerpiece. The location changed when the rights shifted to a London film company.
“I didn’t set out to direct a British comedy,” says Schwimmer, in Austin recently for the South by Southwest Film Festival. In fact, he considered dropping out after the change.
“As eager as I was to direct my first film, I had just spent six months in London,” says Schwimmer, who had co-starred with Pegg in Big Nothing, a 2006 comedy that wasn’t released theatrically in the United States. “I was kind of homesick and dreaded the idea of spending another year there.”
When Pegg agreed to star, it cinched it. “We had really good chemistry,” Schwimmer says of Big Nothing. “We had a great time, and it was just so easy working together.”
The ethnically diverse cast reflects the London Schwimmer knows from visiting. “It is the most ethnically diverse city I’ve ever been in and most international city I’ve ever been in,” he says.
South Asian actors portray the landlords of Pegg’s character. Other nonwhites play small roles. And Newton, who is of mixed race, has mixed-race parents in the film.
The issue of casting was one of Schwimmer’s biggest eye-openers as a director.
When he proposed black actors, executives would tell him, “That’s harder to sell,” Schwimmer says. ” ‘There are certain markets’ — and of course they’re using code — ‘certain foreign territories, that don’t traditionally go to see movies with African-Americans as the leads or as characters in them.’
“So I’m like, ‘What are you saying? Are we just basing our decisions on these markets? What if it’s best for the movie?’ “
And it wasn’t only race.
“What’s really depressing to me is that one of the first actors I pitched out to play Simon’s part when it was set in the states was Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of the greatest actors of my generation, and he’s hysterical, as well as being able to handle all the real emotion of the film.
“This was before Capote,” Schwimmer says. “I was met with, ‘Well, we can’t make a movie for this amount of money with Philip because of this, this and this.’
“They were showing me all the computer readouts of what he’s worth in this territory and that territory,” Schwimmer says. “They did not realize just how depressing that was to me, not only as a director but as an actor, to know that you actually have a dollar amount that you’re worth in every country of the world and that decisions are made by people like that on whether to go ahead on casting you, based not on whether you’re right for the role but based on what you’re worth. There’s something fundamentally wrong about that system.”
Nevertheless, Schwimmer says he enjoyed directing overall and wants to do it again.
He has directed for television sporadically since 1998, including 10 episodes of Friends. Before that, he directed for the stage in Chicago, where he co-founded a well-regarded theater company after graduating from Northwestern University.
That all was preparation, in a way, but Schwimmer says he still found a “huge, huge difference” between directing for film and other media.
“In theater, if you have a bad day in rehearsal, then it’s like, ‘Let’s call it quits for today. We’ll reconvene tomorrow.’ You can kind of regroup that night and think about how you want to handle it the next day.
“But every day of a movie shoot costs, what, $75,000 or something. And you’ve only secured that location for that day. So you better damn well get that scene.”
And, unlike the controlled environment of a theater or soundstage, “doing film, I’m suddenly on location — 50 locations in like 35 days, in the most expensive city in the world to shoot in, on a budget, and with no control over sound, no control over the weather, especially in London, which is crazy, and you have no control over the quality of light, the ever-changing quality of light. And then, of course, extras, backgrounds, looky-loos.
“So it was a lot. And because we were on a budget each day, the pressure of making your day is unlike anything in theater or television.”
Still, he says, he loved the experience — pressure and all. It helped that he had a top-notch cast and a crew that included Richard Greatrex, a well-regarded British cinematographer who was nominated for an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love.
Fatboy “was No. 1 for a month in the U.K.,” Schwimmer says, but he’s keeping realistic expectations for the movie in the United States. Pegg is a big star in England, but his Hot Fuzz was only a modest hit on these shores last year.
“We’re going up against big movies,” Schwimmer says of Fatboy, “and we’re only on, like, 700 screens or something.”
It was a foregone conclusion that it wouldn’t be one of the top-grossing movies on its opening weekend. It grossed an estimated $2.4 million Friday-Sunday. “People keep telling me to look at the per-screen average,” Schwimmer says.
If Hoffman had been cast in the role, the movie’s title would’ve made more sense. Pegg, who wears a prosthetic beer belly in the movie, was a lot less fit when Schwimmer first cast him. In the interim, Pegg shot Hot Fuzz, in which he plays a policeman. He showed up to shoot Fatboy in the best physical shape of his life.
But Schwimmer says he never intended the movie to be a one-joke film about a huge guy running the marathon.
“It’s about him being lazy more than anything,” he says, “not having any kind of belief in himself. The marathon is a metaphor for just finishing one thing he started.”
