Q&A: Mike White

Mike White had me at "stick your dick in my mouth." The line came during the most notorious scene of his 2000 acting and screenwriting debut, Chuck & Buck, in which a man reaches out to his childhood best friend, with whom he once experimented sexually. Chuck sees it as unrequited love, Buck sees it as best forgotten, and most of the critical community saw it the Big Indie Black-Comedy Shockeroo of the time. Revisiting that scene today, it still provides an entertaining jolt, but you can see the foundations of White’s compassionate m.o.: using characters not usually seen in movies to strike at our most common fears — of betrayal, of abandonment, of loneliness — in that film’s universe, caused by the relationship fictions we come to believe as children.

The same can be said of Year of the Dog, his directorial debut. Peggy (Molly Shannon) is a corporate secretary who is devoted to her pet beagle, Pencil. She’s single and resigned to it; a serious relationship, as she says, "just didn’t happen." She spends every night cuddling Pencil in front of the TV. During the day, she’s surrounded by people who are intensely interpersonal. Her friend Layla (Regina King) is obsessed with her fiancé and upcoming wedding. Her sister-in-law (Laura Dern) is a housewife who vigilantly guards her children against allergic reactions to peanuts and cultural unpleasantness. When Pencil dies after a suspicious run-in with a neighbor (John C. Reilly), Peggy finds herself attracted to Newt (Peter Sarsgaard), a gayish celibate who has devoted his life to rescuing dogs. The anticipated Julia Roberts twist does not materialize, and Peggy goes steadily berserk.

But White makes his points here with quiet devastation instead of stunts. Shannon — who is usually a broad pill to swallow, even on Saturday Night Live — makes Peggy is a sometimes frighteningly real person. The questions White raises about the idea of companionship vs. the myth of romantic ecstasy couldn’t be more relevant.

White is an L.A. native and self-described bisexual whose sideways sensibility has resulted in two great and failed Fox TV series about twisted families (Pasadena and Cracking Up), the tenderly observed Jennifer Aniston redemption vehicle The Good Girl, and three giant mainstream hits (Orange County, School of Rock and Nacho Libre). He talked with Hooksexup about how Peggy and Newt, extreme as they may seem, are making the screen safer for single people. — Michael Martin

There’s a bipolar aspect to your work: you do these dark, complicated indies and huge, pack-’em-in Jack Black movies. Why do you do both?
I like both kinds of movies and can appreciate both. [Laughs] The cynical answer is that I need to get paid. At the same time, when I wrote School of Rock, I really wanted to write something like the movies I saw when I was a kid, when I would go home and re-enact them with my friends. I wanted to write a movie for that kid in me, that would want to start a band or do something creative. That feels like a valid enterprise.

But if I’m making a movie for me now, as a person, it tends toward a more idiosyncratic tone. I mean, I love School of Rock, but when people come up to me and go "School of Rock!" [makes rock gesture] I go, "Yeah!" [rock gesture], but part of me is just, eh. When you just set out to win a popularity contest and you win, it’s not as gratifying.

So how do you write both? Do you have to turn off your mainstream-o-meter?
It’s easy for me to turn that off. The harder part is to go, "This has to work for kids." You have to remind yourself, "This might seem a little too transgressive, this isn’t going to fly." Sometimes other people have to tell you. I’m always surprised by other people’s reactions to my stuff. I never see my stuff as so . . . odd. And then people have the reactions they do, and I go, "Oh." Even with this movie: some people hate the character. Some people think it’s PETA propaganda. It’s gotten every kind of reaction.

My reaction is that this is a really dark film, darker than Chuck & Buck, even. Do you agree with the marketing as a comedy?
I like to bring people in and tweak their expectations. I’ve been to screenings all over the country, and people have been, "This wasn’t the fluffy romantic comedy I was expecting!" Personally, I feel like that’s kind of fun. I like the idea of people saying, "Oh, Molly Shannon and dogs! Let’s go see this cute movie!" and then they’re like [cries] "Ugh! What?"

There’s a direct line here from Chuck & Buck to Year of the Dog, in that both are about people who can’t find traditional relationships and essentially give up.
I don’t know if that’s exactly how I’d characterize it. I think, like The Good Girl, it’s kind of an anti-romance. You expect it’s going to end with her and Peter Sarsgaard kissing and riding off on the bus together. But I don’t think life is necessarily like that. So much of our society is about trying to pair everybody up, and sometimes that isn’t how people’s lives work out.

Yeah, as Layla says, when she’s trying to comfort Peggy,"Even retarded, crippled people get married." Do you think there’s a back-to-the-’50s push to domesticate?
I think it’s not a trend so much as a constant. It’s just natural; it transcends generations. But I do think that as far as movies go, it’s a radical proposition to create characters who don’t end up in a romantic relationship, and someone like Peter Sarsgaard’s character, who has literally closed the book. He says he’s not looking for a relationship, he’s in a relationship with his dogs.

This kind of movie always ends with romantic fulfillment, and I felt like there was an opening here to write something different. I’ve been in relationships, and sometimes you just go, "You know what? I don’t really need this to have a satisfying life. If it’s not going to work out this week, then fuck it." And I don’t find that there are a lot of representations out there that make you feel like that’s a valid decision.

Some critics have said that Peggy, like Buck, suffers from arrested development. Why do you think she’s the way she is?
What I talked about with Molly is that she was someone who had some heartbreak in her dating life. I think there’s something demure and modest about Peggy, and I find with some women who are modest in that way and maybe not the hot lady in the office, that if you don’t put yourself out there, it doesn’t come to you. So she’s not willing to humiliate herself to go out in search of it, and at the same time it’s not really coming to her. So she’s stuck. I certainly know a lot of people like Peggy, who have been searching for relationships and it’s not happening.

Why are your gay characters predominately sad and lonely? Newt has given up on the idea of a full, real relationship, as has Buck.
Well, I think Buck could be on the verge of one. [Laughs.] But I don’t know. I don’t think of them as any sadder than anyone else. Buck is certainly more . . . something than everyone else, but I think of him as happy too. He has his little world. He’s lonely, I guess, but no more lonely than Chuck in his marriage. I just don’t have lots of representations of people who are happy. So the gays don’t get off any easier. Heh heh.

Do you think happy gay relationships are possible? Your work suggests not.
Hell, yeah, I think they’re possible! I’ve been in them, although they don’t last for very long. [Laughs.] I think people can be happy in relationships, certainly. I think there’s a lot of pleasure to relationships. However — not to be too self-helpy — I think your ultimate relationship is with yourself, and if you can’t be happy in that relationship, then you’ll never be happy.

Tell me about the cat who inspired the film.
Well, I was doing this TV show for Fox [2004’s Cracking Up, which starred Molly Shannon and Jason Schwartzman], and in the midst of the most stressful period of it, the stray cat behind my house died in my arms on Christmas Day. I was totally, unexpectedly, like a blubbering six year old about it. Animals are such a source of unconditional affection, it touched something — something that was seemingly innocuous ended up having a profound impact on me and ended up getting me behind on scripts and ultimately this show shut down, and I was like, "If this cat hadn’t died, who knows how it would have turned out?" So I just thought it was an interesting premise for a story.

Anyone who’s had a pet and experienced that unconditional affection — well, it’s not hard to see why Peggy was content with Pencil.

In the beginning when you meet Peggy, she lives alone, but she’s not lonely. I think relationships with another person end up having so many compromises and disappointments that, in the end, it’s similar to what an animal can give you. It’s not this romantic, idealistic version of a relationship; there’s satisfactions. They eat food together, they cuddle together. She’s not getting some intense bargaining conversations out of it.

How did you discover Molly Shannon could really act?
She’s so funny to me, when she’s broad or when she’s pitched down. Remember when she did that NPR woman on Saturday Night Live? I thought it would be funny to let her have a part where she’s more quiet and not so broad as she usually is. I didn’t know she could cry on a dime and do all the things she showed she could do in the movie. She has real range.

You gave Jennifer Aniston a similar platform in The Good Girl.
I love funny people, generally, and I love funny women specifically. There’s so little opportunity for those people to do stuff. Female-driven movies are usually romantic comedies, and there’s a hole there. I also learned from when Jennifer did The Good Girl. People were like, "She’s not going to be able to handle it," and when it turned out to work, it became so much more of a story. People wanted to check it out as opposed to when it’s the same five people who normally do those parts all the time.

You read Freud before doing Chuck & Buck. You’ve said this movie is about obsessive thinking. What research did you do?
Well, my life is obsessive thinking, so it was easy for me to access that. [Laughs.] I like people whose obsessions are out of the mainstream. At the same time, I think then people don’t relate to it. So I wanted to constellate her life with people who have mainstream obsessions, but the way you look at it could seem just as absurd as someone who’s obsessed with dogs. Like Layla with her boyfriend, or Laura Dern’s character and her kids. I think the movie is saying, "People have enthusiasms that are outside of the norm. Hopefully, there’s room at the table for those obsessions too, and they’re not that different than yours."

What’s the target of your obsessive thinking these days?
My obsessive thinking is always slightly creative in the sense that I always need to be working on my next thing or writing. I guess I’m a workaholic obsessive. In order to get stuff done in this business you sort of have to be a little bit obsessed because there are so many obstacles, you have to keep pushing and pushing and pushing, and I feel like the only thing I talk about is my movie. I get together with my friends, and it’s like, "I got a good review from this person and this person," and it’s like, all I talk about is this fuckin’ movie. I mean, who gives a flip? Like, let it go! But then you understand that we all have that sort of thing.

Are you done with TV? Pasadena was great, I thought, a much better show than Desperate Housewives.
Well, there’s a true Pyrrhic victory. [Laughs.]

I mean, I thought it was more deserving of mainstream success than that show.
Out of everything I’ve done, I probably have the softest spot for Pasadena. It was the hardest thing, and it was so much fun from a storytelling point of view. I loved that show. But doing TV, after a while you feel like a rat that presses a button and gets a shock, and I don’t know if I can press that button any more. Every TV experience I’ve had has been a bit heartbreaking, and movies have been really positive. It’s frustrating. Pasadena is as good a work as I think I’ll ever do, and no one’s seen it, and ugh! It’s so frustrating to put so much time into something, and the network just dumps it. There’s nothing worse.

What happened with Cracking Up?
It was one of those things where, at the beginning, they were like, "We want your show!" and then I was doing it, and they were like, "Not this show. We want something else." So the show kept changing, and there was so much fighting, it was not the show I set out to do. Literally by the end, I was like, "I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I don’t know what I’m writing or what’s funny anymore." One of those complete insecure nervous breakdowns. I would just sit at the computer and [seizure movements]. It was like, "Checkmate, I’m done. I don’t know how to proceed."

Fox’s comedy development is not what it used to be. It’s kind of sad.
They went from being the rowdy, subversive Married . . . With Children/Simpsons network to being the American Idol network and wanting to retain the 30 million people who watch that show. So they put us on after American Idol and were surprised that 30 million people didn’t want to watch this bizarre anti-family comedy.

Who’s the next character you want to build a movie around?
It’s hard to say. As I get older, I definitely get more idiosyncratic in my tastes and characters. If people think Peggy’s eccentric . . . You get tired of seeing the same types of people all the time in movies, because studios want more people to relate to them. I just want to see believable people. Once you get past people’s public presentations of themselves, we’re all kind of weird. That’s so much more interesting to me than The Guy Who’s Lookin’ for Tail — and He’s Got a Buddy! Life is always more weird than that. It’s just too bad there’s not an appetite to see more of those kinds of people.