Chris Weitz: Hollywood Chameleon

Director Chris Weitz has one of the strangest CVs in Hollywood. Name a genre and likely he’ll have dipped in his filmmaking toe. Teen comedy? See his pastry shagging debut American Pie, which he co-directed with brother Paul. CGI fantasy romp? Try The Golden Compass, his flawed adaptation of Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights. There’s also whimsical Hugh Grant vehicle About a Boy (co-director), neurotic insect animation Antz (writer) and classy Oscar bait A Single Man (producer). He even jumped on the Twilight bandwagon, directing New Moon, the second (and poorest) of the tween-catnip series. It’s a career quivering precociously between journeyman and hack, but goodwill should be restored with his admirable new film, A Better Life, which attempts to bring the complex issues of US immigration to a wider audience.

Carlos (Demián Bichir – the “Mexican George Clooney” according to Weitz) is a Mexican single dad who’s been living illegally in Los Angeles for sixteen years. He makes a meager living tending Malibu gardens seven days a week, from dawn till dusk. All of which he does to take care of his son Luis (José Julián, making his big-screen debut), a fourteen-year-old with little appreciation of his father’s sacrifices. When Carlos’ truck – his only means of income – is stolen, father and son search the city for it, mirroring the simple plot of De Sica’s Italian neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves.

The Skinny met with the affable director at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, where A Better Life had its UK premiere, to discuss, among other things, US immigration, avoiding making poverty porn and his Zachary Quinto hate campaign.

A Better Life is a change of pace from New Moon and The Golden Compass. Did you consciously seek out a more modest project?

I wasn't necessarily looking to do a smaller movie, but my friend, Christian McLaughlin (who's of Scots heritage, I should say), gave me a copy of this script which sort of came out of nowhere. It was simply the best thing I'd read in twenty years, and if you see that, and you're a director, you have to do it — there's no other way. And, fortunately, because of the vampires, and various other things, I was able to get some backing.

Also, I'm from an immigrant family on several sides: my father came to America from Nazi Germany; my grandfather on my mother's side was Czech; my grandmother [Lupita Tovar], who’s one hundred, came to America when she was seventeen-years-old to be in silent films. So for me, it was also a chance to speak Spanish and to get in touch with my roots.

How does it feel living in a city like LA, where there is such a disparity between rich and poor?

It feels great for me [laughs sheepishly]... I'm sorry, that's a glib answer, but in a way it's a very true one. At the opening of the movie, when you see Carlos working very hard and looking at the ocean, that's where I live. Now twenty miles away, still within the same city, is Mexican Los Angeles, in which there are street gangs. So for Carlos' son, such is gang turf that if he were to walk ten blocks in one direction he'd be in the territory of another gang and in mortal danger. He's not taken care of by the school system, he doesn't think he's ever going to make anything of himself in white America, and so that kind of thing is exactly what fires the despair and nihilism that leads to someone joining a gang. Meanwhile his father is making his trip over to my side of Los Angeles, working seven days a week in order to keep food on the table. So the contrast is extraordinary, but in a way LA is analogues to the way that the world is heading, which is greater disparity between rich and poor in terms of nations, and as long as that happens there's always going to be immigration, and illegal immigration.

It seems that Hispanic people are very underrepresented in American cinema. Were you trying to address that?

The African American audience will go out and back films made by African American directors, and, needless to say, white people are pretty well covered in the culture, but the rap on the Hispanic audience, even though they are 40 million strong, is that they have to go to see movies about white people. If they’re lucky a Hollywood film will throw in a Hispanic policeman or something. What we are trying to do with this film is to prove that there is a way to get to a Hispanic market that can support these sorts of films, but I think it is equally important that an Anglo audience see this movie so that they understand the struggles that a lot of people are going through to stay in this country.

And you avoid the trap of creating poverty porn. The characters are poor, but they have dignity — it is a deeply humane film.

That was so important. One step we took was for [cinematographer] Javier Aguirresarobe to shoot the movie on film; for it not to be a handheld digital sort of deal — a Dogme like film. As much as I love those movies, that would have presented the received notion: that of ghetto life in the US. Nobody ever calls it the ghetto when they live there, and when you go there yourself and get to know it, it's kids playing out on the street and grandmas sitting out on their stoops and somebody running a greengrocers out of the back of their truck and nobody's told them that they’re supposed to be in misery constantly. They have struggles and triumphs and pains of their own, and there's no question that their lives are more difficult, but, basically, what I wanted to do was to make a reasonably sized Hollywood film that still managed to portray people's lives authentically.

You also, thankfully, avoid the Dangerous Minds scenario – there’s no white, liberal saint here to rescue these characters.

It was one of the basic assumptions of the movie that it wasn't going to be a white journalist trying to understand this family, or Carlos' employer trying to help him out. It's a story told from the actual point-of-view of the protagonists, and I was very happy about that. The white characters in this are marginal and yet they are not really villains: they are just people doing their jobs. They have their moments of grace within the picture, and I think that was important because I didn't want to just preach to the choir.

Kind of off topic, but I’m a big fan of Chuck & Buck [Miguel Arteta's deliciously twisted buddy movie where Weitz’s character, Chuck, is stalked by his creepy childhood chum, Buck]. Have you any plans to do more acting?

I used to. I'm very vain, so when Miguel Arteta offered me a chance to be in Chuck & Buck I jumped at it. And then I realised, after looking at it, how bad an actor I actually was, so I don't think I want to do it any more. The one thing that really steamed me was when I didn't get a chance to be Spock in the recent Star Trek, because what with my ears and my eyebrows and everything, I could have done a great job. I've been conducting a whispering campaign against Zachary Quinto to try and get back in with a shot.

A Better Life is on limited release and playing at both the Filmhouse and the GFT until 4 August