Bringing Up Bogdanovich: Peter Bogdanovich on his new comedy She's Funny That Way

Peter Bogdanovich’s cinema is one of elegy; he’s always looking back. “I guess a certain number of my pictures have an elegiac quality,” the 75-year-old veteran of American cinema tells us by phone from his Bel Air home. “Making period pictures is interesting because you’re recreating something that existed, but you’re also trying to find a contemporary interest in that past. When you do a film set in the past you illuminate the present in some way, by the changes in behaviour patterns and so on.”

He has transported us into the past in period pieces like The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon and Daisy Miller, but even in his films with contemporary settings there’s a sense that he has one foot in cinema history. Take, for example, his debut feature Targets – one of the finest productions made under the tutelage of legendary B-movie cheapskate Roger Corman – which juxtaposes a gun-nut’s killing spree with the story of an ageing horror star (played by ageing horror star Boris Karloff) who realises his scary movies are an anachronism in modern, violent America. In the film, the horror star’s agent (played by Bogdanovich) actually says the line: “All the good movies have been made.”

Speaking to Bogdanovich ahead of the release of his new picture, She’s Funny That Way, there’s no doubt that he agrees with his character’s sentiment. “I don’t have much interest in the contemporary cinemas,” he admits. Comic book movies? “They bore the shit out of me,” he says. “Once the special effects department have proved they can CGI anything, I lose interest. It’s fake.” Modern comedies? “There’s nothing to them once you eliminate the things that most comedies today rely on: body fluid humour, or shock value, you know, somebody getting their cock caught in a zipper – those kind of jokes don’t amuse me.” He reckons that this is what happens when you get older: you reject the new generation’s pop culture. “Whatever kind of films your childhood is full of you tend to gravitate back to those.”

Jennifer Aniston, Rhys Ifans, Imogen Poots, Will Forte, Kathryn Hahn and Owen Wilson in She's Funny That Way | image: Lionsgate

This may explain his penchant for returning to the cinematic modes of the past. And one genre he’s often drawn back to is the screwball comedy (most famously with 1972's What’s Up, Doc?), those quick-talking romantic farces from the 30s and 40s, which usually revolve around a live-wire woman running rings around a straight-laced dope, and it’s the period he’s channelling in his latest. She’s Funny That Way centres on Issy (Imogen Poots), a New York call girl, whose night with her client Arnold, a wealthy theatre director (Owen Wilson), ends with a happier ending than usual when he offers her £30,000 to give up turning tricks and follow her dream of becoming an actress.

It’s hard to imagine this Pretty Woman premise playing well without the screwball spin. Bogdanovich creates a movie world so far from our own reality that we forgive the seedy scenario. That the story is told to us in retrospect by a slightly older and wiser Issy, who’s now a successful actress being interviewed for a magazine feature, adds to this distancing effect. “The framing device, the wraparound we call it, it helps to personalise it a bit,” says Bogdanovich. “On the face of it it’s a kind of troubling story, and I think by having her tell the story it sort of makes it more human, and warmed it up a bit.”

In true screwball-style, the plot is a labyrinth of convolutions and coincidences. At one point, Issy’s belligerent shrink (Jennifer Aniston) points out they live in a “city of eight million people and everybody knows everybody.” The day after Issy gives up prostitution she goes for an audition. Guess who’s directing the play? Arnold, of course.

Bogdanovich piles on the comic complications, including Issy’s ex-client who’s nuts for her, a private eye who looks like he’s straight from a Pink Panther movie, and Rhys Ifans as an unlikely matinee idol who’s also acting in Arnold’s play and wants to rekindle an old love affair with Arnold’s wife. While watching the film we stopped taking notes and started drawing Venn diagrams. The result looked like a maniacal spirograph sketch.

As all screwball comedies should be, She’s Funny That Way is bright and breezy; it feels light as a feather. Getting it made, however, proved a Sisyphean task. The original draft was written sometime in the late 90s: “Louise Stratton and I wrote it for John Ritter [who'd acted for Bogdanovich in Noises Off and They All Laughed] to play the theatre director. Louise would play the escort and Cybill Shepherd would play his wife.” They were all set to make it in 2003 when Ritter died suddenly. “It was a real shock and a tragedy, he was a dear friend of mine and a wonderful actor. We put it on the back burner for a couple of years because we couldn’t find an actor who could play it.”

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"Somebody getting their cock caught in a zipper – those kind of jokes don’t amuse me” – Peter Bogdanovich

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The film was eventually recast, but finding a successor to Ritter wasn’t easy. Given how sleazy the character is on paper, the replacement had to have very particular qualities to make him palatable. “It needed someone who was attractive and charming, but not threatening,” explains Bogdanovich. “And when I met Owen Wilson, I just thought he’d be terrific. We did a rewrite for Owen; we took out some of the physical humour that John Ritter was particularly good at.” Wilson’s comic skills, Bogdanovich suggests, are more verbal. “He thinks like a writer. He would often ad-lib a number of things in the script, and we would almost always keep them.”

The initial idea for the film goes back much further: to the late 70s, and the set of Bogdanovich’s Singapore-based character study Saint Jack. The 1979 movie tells the story of a Stateside dropout (Ben Gazzara) who wheels and deals with the Singapore underworld to open a brothel. “Dealing with that world I got to know some of the local escorts and we used them in the picture,” recalls Bogdanovich. “A couple of them told us they wanted to stop being escorts, so we gave them money so they could give it up and go home.” That’s when Bogdanovich had his brainwave. “I thought: wouldn’t it be funny to give somebody money to stop being an escort, and if the guy was married and got into trouble for it.”

As much as Bogdanovich is skeptical of modern filmmaking, it’s the clout of two up-to-the-minute filmmakers, Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach, who helped get the film made when they came on as executive producers. The Last Picture Show director is clearly very fond of both of them. “They’re fans of mine and I’m fans of theirs,” he says “They call me Pop and I call them my sons.” Bogdanovich has another influential fan in fellow cineaste director Quentin Tarantino, who has an outrageous cameo in She’s Funny That Way.

Maybe Bogdanovich getting a leg up from the filmmakers who grew up worshiping his movies is some sort of cinema Karma. After all, Bogdanovich famously put up his own movie hero, Orson Welles, in his LA home for years when the legendary filmmaker was down on his luck. And he is still trying to do right by the Citizen Kane director, three decades after his death. Bogdanovich’s next feature to be released in cinemas won’t be one of his own productions, but The Other Side of the Wind, the unfinished and thought lost movie Welles had been toiling on for most of the 70s, which Bogdanovich has been tirelessly trying to restore and complete. “I expect we’ll finish the film for Orson sometime before the end of the year,” he tells us. A true cinephile and a real survivor from Hollywood’s last golden age, we hope the good Karma continues to shine down on him.