They got progressively more competent, but not more inspired or original. I messed around and wrote a lot of comedy scripts that weren’t very good, just really mediocre comedies. Then I started writing while I was still at The Onion. Siegel: Yeah, you can fill up a page in about 30 seconds, the margins are 3 inches on both sides and it’s just that narrow column in the middle which is kind of a breeze when you’re used to a full page of text. There were fewer words per page, which appealed to me. I really like screenwriting and really responded to the form. I had that repetitive motion and I had overdeveloped one muscle and needed to use other parts of my body or brain. I had been there for 8 or 9 years at that point, so it was really refreshing to have the opportunity to use this other part of my brain. That came along at a time when I was kind of getting tired of doing The Onion. We did a movie at The Onion called The Onion Movie which was this ill-fated, Hollywood-destroyed sketch comedy movie that I was one of the co-writers of. Siegel: Well, I left The Onion in 2003 and then I transitioned into screenwriting directly from there. ![]() COURTESY FIRST INDEPENDENT PICTURES.įilmmaker: How did you transition from an editor at The Onion to a screenwriter, and how long that had been percolating? ![]() ROBERT SIEGEL, WRITER-DIRECTOR OF BIG FAN. The film is ultimately something of a surprise, as its humor is slyer and more subtle than we might expect and Siegel interestingly avoids the darker, more obvious direction his script could have taken, instead choosing a nuanced, bittersweet narrative for Oswalt’s poignant and lovably pathetic Paul.įilmmaker spoke to Siegel about the personal nature of Big Fan, his transition from topical satire to movies, and his very unusual introduction to Star Wars. Big Fan is a smart and thoughtful exploration of American sports fandom, a modern religion of sorts, and what happens when allegiance to that guiding force is tested. One night, Paul and his best friend Sal (Kevin Corrigan) spy Giants linebacker Quantrell Bishop (Jonathan Hamm), and when they follow him to a club, Paul gets beaten up by his idol. The movie’s eponymous protagonist is 35-year-old Paul Aufiero (Patton Oswalt), a perpetually single parking garage attendant still living at home with his mother and whose dull existence is made meaningful only by his all-consuming passion for the New York Giants. There’s a pleasing circularity about the fact that Siegel was inspired to direct Big Fan because of The Wrestler, and even began shooting his own movie the day after Aronofsky’s wrapped. Aronofsky commissioned Siegel to write the script for The Wrestler (2008), the Oscar-nominated movie which would become his first script to make it to the big screen. After writing a number of as-yet-unproduced comedy scripts for studios, Siegel was approached by director Darren Aronofsky, who who’d been impressed by Siegel’s screenplay Big Fan. It did, however, introduce Siegel to screenwriting, which he chose as his next career. One of the paper’s less successful side projects was The Onion Movie, a sketch comedy film which was finally released on DVD in 2008 but was conceived and written long before Siegel left The Onion in 2003. In 1996, he became editor-in-chief and began masterminding a major expansion of the paper, putting it online, making it a national and then international publication, and conceiving a number of Onion books, including the hugely successful Our Dumb Century (1999). In addition to working for the local newspaper and volunteering at Madison’s public radio station, Siegel started writing for a small satirical rag that was given away free in the town’s coffee shops, The Onion. ![]() ![]() in History, after which he followed his then-girlfriend to Madison, Wisconsin, where she was studying for a PhD. Born and raised in the Long Island town of Merrick, Siegel graduated from the University of Michigan 1993 with a B.A. COURTESY FIRST INDEPENDENT PICTURES.įor someone who says his main creative motivation is boredom, Robert Siegel has done rather well for himself. PATTON OSWALT IN WRITER-DIRECTOR ROBERT SIEGEL’S BIG FAN.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |