In a summer full of sequels and reboots, finding a movie that feels fresh is a rare occurrence. This summer, that special desert oasis of a film comes from comedian Mike Birbiglia. His second feature-length venture, Don’t Think Twice, is a superb dramedy for many reasons, all of which are laid out in our review of the film.
Last month, The Diamondback had a chance to sit down with Birbiglia and actress Gillian Jacobs, a standout performer in the movie, as part of a roundtable interview. Our questions and their answers follow.
DBK: I’ve never been in an improv group but this movie affected me as a rising senior in college. There are tight knit groups of friends all around me but now some people are getting internships and jobs and meeting the right people and everything like that. As you were making this movie, did you consider someone like me could relate to it that way? Did you want to make the themes universal or did you want to explore the complex dynamic that can really only be true of an improv group?
Mike Birbiglia: Your thoughts were precisely the goal. The goal was, ‘how do I make a movie about the fact that life isn’t fair,’ and improv just proved to be a great metaphor for that. On stage, everyone is equal. But then off stage, everyone has different opportunities and things going on. This person has a bedroom with a big bar that you have to duck your head under.
So yeah, I wanted to play to universality. One of the cool things about the movie is that there’s high school kids and college kids who love the movie and then there was a 75-year-old woman last week at the Nantucket film fest who told me it was her favorite film of the festival. I just loved to hear that because the goal is just to hit human themes and have people respond to it.
DBK: Talking about films that inspired you earlier, you mentioned the phrase “dramatic comedy” and in the writing and in both of your performances there was such a brilliant balance struck between the funny and the real. When you were writing it and when you were acting it, which way did you find you had to balance? Did you say, ‘oh this is too sad and I need to make this funnier’ or ‘this is too funny and I need to get more real’? Or, at this point in your career, do you feel like you can tap into that perfect blend from the start?
Birbiglia: I think it always comes down to truth. You want to act the scene as truthfully as possible. In terms of the laugh quotient versus the cry quotient, a lot of that is in the edit. We had scenes that were uproariously funny that we had to pull back a little bit because we thought it tipped it almost too far into almost a cartoonish comedy.
Gillian Jacobs: I also feel like, in a movie like this, you try to just play it as real as possible and trust that the lines are funny, the circumstances are funny and it will be funny and you don’t have to lean into the comedy of it. When you’re just worried about being honest and truthful in your performance and not trying to sell a joke it really helps with a film like this. Because otherwise you feel the effort of the actors and that’s the antithesis of what you want to feel like in a slice-of-life movie like this.
DBK: In your stand-up specials, Mike, every word and every silence is all perfectly constructed and crafted, so what was the transition like from that to just trusting other people like Gillian with your words and your humor?
Birbiglia: You have to trust. And also you have to keep more of an eye on your vision of the film. In some ways, the thing that’s tough about being the director is like a lot of times these guys would be goofing around in between takes and set-ups and singing songs and laughing but I was never a part of those fun times because I was focused every second of every day on the fact that I have to deliver this movie. Because, if I don’t, it’s all on me. And that’s the hardest thing.
I got a lot of great gifts from [the cast], comedically and emotionally with their performances but ultimately it was very stressful to make sure that the gifts are the right gifts.
Jacobs: And that’s why having two weeks of rehearsal for this movie was helpful, too. It gave you the ability to get us all on board of your vision for it. When a director is clear and communicating what they want, unless people are being combative to be combative, it gives everybody a direction to go in. I’ve seen times when everyone is unclear as to what direction to go in and it creates a muddy result. When you have someone that both knows what they want and is open to good, new ideas you can move efficiently through the day because there’s no confusion as to what we’re making.
Birbiglia: I think Sidney Lumet famously said that most important thing about movies is that everybody is making the same movie. If you have 100 people making a movie they have to be on the same page.
Here are some other highlights from the talk:
On the origins of the opening improv crowd prompt used throughout the film, ‘did anyone have a hard day?’
Birbiglia: I was doing a show at UCB called Mike Birbiglia’s Dream about three years ago. It was a weekly show and our typical prompt was, “Does anyone have a word of suggestion?” One day I was taking the subway to the show and thought well, ‘why not have the show test in real time the theory that comedy is tragedy plus time? Why don’t we try to get people’s tragedies so that we can try and flip them into comedy?’
It’s really been a cool experiment. We did a show the other night actually and asked that question and a woman said she had discovered her dad was cheating on her mom with prostitutes that day because they shared an iCloud account. For like 15 minutes, we couldn’t find humor in it. Eventually we did though and it became cathartic and she sent us a nice note on Twitter. Comedy at it’s best is giving a gift to the audience and the more honest you can be about the realities of life the more real laughs you can have.
On the idea of an ensemble comedy and an improv troupe being like a rock band and what instruments they play in that analogy.
Jacobs: I would be on the egg shaker.
Birbiglia: You took mine. There are going to be two egg shakers in that band.
Questions and answers were edited for length and clarity.
