Michael Patrick Jann, former creative mind behind MTV's short-lived sketch comedy show The State was the lucky gent allowed to helm the Drop Dead director's chair. Besides getting to aim his cameras at Kirstie Alley, Ellen Barkin, Denise Richards, and Kirsten Dunst, Jann was also able to visually poke fun at the denizens of Minnesota, expose the inherent silliness of the beauty pageant realm, and oversee the choreography of a massive vomiting spree. Not bad for his first gig on a feature film, eh?
IGN For Men's Spence Abbott sat down with Jann to discuss the challenges of filming a fake documentary, the subtle nuances behind directing a bunch of young women in a mock beauty pageant, how to film the perfect group vomit sequence, and why he didn't taste the lutefisk.
IGN For Men: Why did you choose to do a mockumentary for your first foray into feature films?
Michael Patrick Jann: It seemed kind of perfect to me and it seemed like the kind of venue where I could be a lot more creative because of the disconnected nature of a documentary. There's so many scenic rules and formal rules that you don't have to adhere to, that you can just chuck away when you're working in the documentary format. One of the things I really liked about this movie was that, to me, it was kind of a challenge. It wasn't structured. There wasn't much about it that played like a regular movie. I also thought there was a challenge for me to shoot it in a way that it could be like a documentary, but still would make the audience feel like they were within a fictional world. Like that feeling you get at a regular movie, like bridging the world of reality and fiction. To me it doesn't look like other fake documentaries. The visual motif of the movie most of the time is to try and create what I call spontaneous tableaus. What we were trying to do with that was create a kind of picture, almost like a snapshot, that would let the audience know right away what part of this world they are in and at the same time not make it feel like an AT&T commercial. [We were] trying to 'keep it real,' as they say. And one of the reasons that was really important with this movie is that so many of the jokes and so much of what's effective for the audience depends on having the characters come onto the screen and knowing who they are right then. I figure that for most of these characters you've got 3 seconds. You need to figure it all out after 3 seconds because the material is gonna spin off of who that character is. This is a very character driven film. So I felt that there was a lot of opportunity [for creative expression within the 'mockumentary' format].
IGN For Men: So what was it like making a movie sans CGI, especially in this day and age when most flicks are so FX driven.
Michael Patrick Jann: It's not as flashy. But actually, there is one CGI shot, which nobody will ever notice, so I'm not gonna tell you. But it doesn't bother me. I kind of get my special effects bang out of the laughs. That's where it's at for me. I mean some guys get hired and build their whole careers on being able to do a good car chase or a good action sequence. That's how they create their big audience moments. Mine are from laughing.
IGN For Men: How was it making the transition of working on a television series like The State, where you were the triple threat of writer, actor, and director to working on a film that was written by someone else?
Michael Patrick Jann: It wasn't that bad, actually. I've been really lucky. I mean pretty close to right out of college I was given a venue [The State, which aired on MTV back in 1994] that I controlled almost entirely. Which at the time seemed natural and normal to me. Even then that was a big group of people, an 11-person group. But as a director you're always working with somebody else. You're always wanting to come up with a great idea yourself, but if somebody else mentions something, you don't want to be closed off to it. Ultimately, [as a director] I look at it like my responsibility is just how it comes out at the end. Like I don't care where the good ideas come from, whether they come from me, someone else, or whether it's an accident. I guess it was John Ford who said the best things in pictures are always accidents. And that, sometimes, is the case. A lot of times you put together a crew of creative people who you want to work with. And the idea is to make this community of people the people who make the movie. It's kind of like this carny trash aesthetic. And everybody kind of does their thing and ultimately it's my responsibility to choose which ideas go into the realization of it, but also to set the tone and have the over-arching command.
IGN For Men: You effectively become the ringmaster, to keep in tune with the carny theme.
Michael Patrick Jann: [laughs] Yeah.
IGN For Men: How did you approach the subject matter?
Michael Patrick Jann: Well, Lona, the writer was a former Minnesota Junior Miss, so my whole point of view was that I see this in a very sincere way. I didn't want to go in and do it like a Jim Carrey movie. I mean it's obviously a movie that's broadly funny, but my approach was to be sincere and to not make the movie a piss take on characters. I wanted to be sincere about who they were, whether that was good or bad, and not to be judgmental. Which is why people perceive the movie as mean when actually what I think it is, really, is non-judgmental. In a way it's a warts and all kind of deal.
IGN For Men: What did you do to prepare?
Michael Patrick Jann: I did a lot of pageant research. Visual research mostly and some tonal stuff. More or less as validation, in a sense. It's such a crazy, absurd world. In my approach to the movie I was trying to be pretty sincere in terms of the reality of it. I didn't want to ham it up, but the movie is absurd because it's based around an absurd world. And the characters do absurd things but it's always based around the warping effect of striving for success via this ridiculous beauty pageant. In that sense it's very sincere, even though the characters are doing really absurd things. And the researching of the beauty pageants was more of less like 'Oh yes, this really actually is a crazy absurd world.' I mean the ladder dance scene is right out of a Junior Miss contest from like '84.
IGN For Men: Have you gotten any flack from any beauty pageants across America? What about flack from the folks in Minnesota?
Michael Patrick Jann: Certainly not from Minnesota. They were real happy to have us there and we had a really good time shooting there. It was a real benefit to be able to go there. The only beauty pageant flack that we got came from the final sequence of the film, the the State Beauty Pageant in the hotel. We shot that whole sequence in two days and it just so happened that on the second day we were there, there was an actual pageant there called Princess Kay of the Milky Way, which is based around dairy and happens the same time as the Minnesota State Fair. It's actually quite famous because they have this really kind of silly thing that they do, which is every year the Princess Kay and her court, after they're chosen, go down to the Minnesota State Fair and they sit in this round Plexiglas see-through chamber that rotates and is refrigerated...
IGN For Men: Don't tell me they milk cows...
Michael Patrick Jann: No, it's better than that. This guy sits there and sculpts them in butter. So everybody who wins this thing eventually ends up with a sculpture of their bust in butter that is on display. And people come and watch it. It's kind of silly and I think people realize that it's kind of silly. Anyway, so their banquet was literally going on in that hotel at the same time we were shooting. And all the signs that were up said 'Please bear with us through the filming of 'Dairy Queens' [the original title of Drop Dead Gorgeous]. We'd put those up the day before, but they went and whited out the name of the movie [laughs]so the people coming in wouldn't see it. Like they weren't gonna notice that there were 50 other beauty queens over here. But even better was the big scene with the vomiting. Literally, I swear to God, we shot that whole thing in 15 minutes. It was just like we had to be out of there so it was 'Everybody to the bucket of oatmeal, get a cup, you there, you there, you there, and Action!' Vomit, vomit, vomit, vomit. As we were setting up the scene, all the girls were getting into place, and we were yelling on the megaphone 'Move to the left, no go over there! we were trying to do the whole damn thing in 2 takes. And as we were doing that the Princess Kay girls came through the lobby and got in the elevator. The doors closed and it was 'Okay, Action!' And then the doors opened on one of the floors and all they saw when they got out of the elevator were a bunch of my beauty queens running up to the balcony and going 'Blahhhhh!' and they freaked out because the didn't know if that was their queens or our queens, whether it was real or fake. It was pretty wild.
IGN For Men: Once again you were blurring the lines of reality and surreality.
Michael Patrick Jann: Totally blurring!
IGN For Men: The other scene that really stuck with me was the high school cafeteria serving lutefisk. Did you by chance partake of it during your shoot?
Michael Patrick Jann: No I didn't. Actually I couldn't bring myself to try it. It's pretty nauseous. When we were shooting in the cafeteria they were actually cooking all of the food that we were using in the scene. So I'm sitting there on like a little apple box with my monitor up against where the lutefisk was cooking and lutefisk is nauseous, it's not for the faint of heart.
IGN For Men: Tell me about it! My grandmother is both Norwegian and from Minnesota and lutefisk is like the traditional Norsk dish. She cooked some for me once and I gotta tell ya, it's nasty, definitely an acquired taste.
Michael Patrick Jann: Clearly an acquired taste. It's like fish jello and it's briny and whatever. It's not my bag, let's put it that way.
Spence Abbott slathers Vaseline on his teeth so he can smile all the time
