empire online interview

did you always have robin williams in mind for the lead part of sy?
no - not because i'm not a fan of robin williams, i really like some of his dramatic work. the idea of getting robin williams just seemed silly. through a series of circumstances, his manager read the script and knew that robin was really looking for some new challenges. robin just deeply connected with the script and he obviously really related to the humanity of the script not so much as the thriller aspects to it. he saw it wasn't a comedic, improvisational or sentimental piece and i got really excited. i thought i really might be able to have my cake and eat it here and not just because having someone like robin williams will be a great boon on the commercial side - it was actually way more subversive and interesting than casting the actors i was considering. it was great luck.

when precisely did you actually come up for the idea for the film?
it was an act of imagination combined with growing up on the "lonely man" movies of the 70s as a teenager. i fell in love with a lot of movies in the 70s - it was a great time for a young kid to decide he wanted to be a film director because there were so many incredible films. but i was particularly drawn to those like the conversation, in particular, or taxi driver which is more of a impressionistic, grittier version of this particular type of film and roman polanski's film the tenant. i just thought they were cool, and that there hadn't been one in a while and that you could do one for the 21st century and contain something that was pertinent to now. i've always been attracted to these big megastores, the super-discount stores in america, surreal, interesting, visually striking places - a kubrick film waiting to happen. so i thought, 'who works in that kind of place?' and as soon as i thought of the one hour photo clerk, the whole movie flooded into my head. i literally got the whole three acts of the movie in one go. i was in a bookstore and thought, wow, travis bickle as a one hour photo clerk, and i went to the counter and bought a journal and went to the coffee house in the bookstore and wrote the whole film in this journal in about forty-five minutes.

why did you decide to feature the flashback at the beginning of the movie?
well, i tried it the other way. it was written in a linear way but there was something a little enervated about the first act of the movie. so i sent the film to francis coppola and said it's very influenced by your film, the conversation, but we're a little bit stuck on the first act. i said the problem is it's sort of a thriller and sort of not a thriller. and he sent me back this long e-mail which started "there's no such thing as sort of a thriller." he advised me to embrace that i had made a thriller - it's odd and original enough that if you give it some of the structure that makes the audience feel more comfortable with the kind of the film they're watching, it actually gives you more freedom with the movie.

there's a lot of ambiguity about the character of sy, the photo clerk. What are your personal feelings about him?
i always thought of him as kind of a creepy saint. and i think that's what kept the film from being a regular old thriller. it has all these thriller tropes and elements but i was never interested in making a thriller but almost a love story. i wanted to present sy neutrally and not instruct the audience how they should feel about him. i know that intelligent audiences have really enjoyed the fact that they have to engage with the film and assess their relationships with the characters. that way you're not just watching stuff play out, but actually having an experience with the film. first you feel creeped out, then you feel sympathetic, then you laugh and then you're sad for him - sometimes a mix of both. but it took 13 months to edit the movie because it was very, very tricky to stay on that tightrope. and how do you make a compelling nobody? robin williams just naturally went right on that tightrope and started doing a tango on it.

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