Over 30 years, Jeff Lipsky has been involved with a who’s who of players in modern independent film history. Starting at age 21 under the mentorship of pioneering indie filmmaker John Cassavetes, Lipsky’s since worked for New Yorker Films, Skouras Pictures and Samuel Goldwyn Films. He also co-founded distribution companies Lot 47 and October Films, an incarnation of which still exists as Focus Features, the distributor behind Brokeback Mountain. Lipsky himself has been behind the launch of such memorable movies as Stranger Than Paradise and Sid & Nancy.
With his 1997 debut Childhood’s End, Lipsky added writer and director to his list of titles. Flannel Pajamas is his follow-up, a semi-autobiographical film that charts the arc of a passionate, rocky relationship between Justin Kirk’s Stuart and Julianne Nicholson’s Nicole. The film had its world premiere in January at the Sundance Film Festival, and arrived last Friday in Columbus. In the middle of a two-day stint in town to introduce screenings of his movie, Lipsky answered a few questions about the process of making it and his potentially clashing careers.
Do your years of working in distribution color your filmmaking, or do you have to divorce that part of your life from the creative process?
One of my uncannily good abilities is to completely bifurcate my life, my career, my M.O. as an entrepreneur and distributor and [my work] as a filmmaker. If I applied any of the lessons I know as a businessman or I let it color the approach I take to filmmaking, I’d make bad movies. I probably wouldn’t even make movies. When I’m on set, when I’m in writing mode, working with actors, the last thing on my mind is anything related to distribution or marketing.
What inspired you to write the film?
The impetus to write Flannel Pajamas was my own short-lived marriage, which lasted from ’89 to ’92. About 10 years after the divorce, I was moving from Los Angeles to New York and as I was packing, I found the album of wedding photographs. I hadn’t looked at them in quite some time and I began reflecting back on the beginning of our relationship. It didn’t begin on a blind date [like in the film], but it seemed magical and it seemed enchanting and perfect.
Maybe I blocked out for many, many years those early days, but I began thinking about how it seemed so idyllic, and if there were any telltale signs. Did I say anything wrong? Did I do anything wrong? Whether we had made compromises to ourselves that really undermine any relationship.
I began talking to friends who were in long-term relationships – good ones – and I talked to people who had been divorced, and there were a lot of commonalities in our experiences, so that’s what propelled me forward with the film. I thought if I created a tapestry of largely fictional characters or situations that would underscore or support the core relationship, I would end up with the anatomy of a relationship that many people could identify with. Not the entire thing perhaps, but a character, a situation, a conversation, and thus far I’ve been very fortunate that that’s exactly how audiences are responding to it.
Did you look for any specific qualities in your lead actors?
Oh my God, um, brilliance?
This sounds almost impossible but I swear it’s the God’s honest truth: When I was writing the script, when I didn’t know whether it would be made or not, your mind starts wandering about who you might want to play these roles, and I immediately said to myself that Julianne Nicholson would be perfect. I was familiar with her work in the independent film Tully a few years ago, in which she was brilliant, and also her comedy work in the last two seasons of Ally McBeal, and this horrific studio comedy with Brittany Murphy called Little Black Book. Every scene Julianne is in is raised to Dostoevskyan proportions. I thought that Julianne Nicholson was an incredibly beautiful woman, but at the same time there was a plainness to her, and I thought it was that exact combination that would make her perfect for Nicole.
And right after I finished writing the script, I was watching the premiere on HBO of a Broadway show that I love, and one hour into watching Angels in America I pointed at the screen and said, “That’s who I want to star in my movie.” And of course that was how I discovered Justin Kirk for the first time.
Then my casting director, on our first day of working together, asked me, “In a perfect world, who do you want to star in this movie?” I said without hesitation, “Justin Kirk and Julianne Nicholson.” She got them the script, they had never met each other. They really liked the script and it led to individual meetings with each of them, and three days after each meeting they said yes.
The most remarkable thing, aside from the fact that they are blessed with prodigious talent, is that the roles of Nicole and Stuart require incredible chemistry between the two actors playing them and they’d never met each other before the first day of rehearsals. And even more daunting was the fact that Julianne had come back from her real honeymoon three days before.
Do you have a favorite scene, or one that you feel encapsulates what you wanted to say with the film?
It’s certainly not my favorite scene – it’s not even a scene, it’s a moment – but there’s this moment that at first glance, won’t even register as anything other than a peripheral, throwaway moment, and if you see it the second time, the subtlety has such incredible reverberation and impact. After Stuart and Nicole are intimate in his apartment for the first time, the next shot is of Stuart’s empty bedroom, and he walks into the room naked, and the first thing he does, being naked, is close the curtains. You completely forget that moment by the time you get to the rather cruel, albeit beautiful moment when he coerces Nicole to undress in front of the naked windows in their high-rise apartment.
It’s one of my favorite things; for somebody to see the film a second time, it’s little moments like that that bring a whole new level of subtlety to it.
Flannel Pajamas is now playing at the Drexel East.
