Director Jay Roach and writer John McNamara just wrapped a collaboration on "Trumbo," a movie about the 1940s Hollywood screenwriter who was blacklisted for his political beliefs during the Second Red Scare.
But Dalton Trumbo wasn't just any Hollywood screenwriter: He was the best — or the highest paid, anyway — of that time. Responsible for writing (and continuing to write, under pseudonyms) some of the biggest hits of the era, his oeuvre includes the movies "Spartacus," "Roman Holiday" and "Exodus."
So were Roach and McNamara scared about portraying such an unassailable genius? Not really. Like any working writer, Trumbo had to churn through a lot of paper to get to his useable material, which was something that Roach and McNamara could relate to. As Roach told The Frame: "If you haven't failed, you haven't worked long enough."
Read more of Jay Roach and John McNamara's conversation with John Horn below:
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
Why do you think Bryan Cranston was the right person to play Dalton Trumbo?
Jay Roach: He’s very Trumbo-esque. He’s very passionate about ideas. He doesn’t just say what he thinks; he performs his ideas with so much gusto and beautiful language, and humor, that he had a lot more overlap with Trumbo than anyone else we talked about.
Dalton Trumbo was a complicated person — personally, politically, professionally. Even if he was branded a Communist, he cared a lot about money and material possessions. So was he the first limousine liberal?
John McNamara: You can think of him as the precursor to China. China is a country that is wildly, successfully capitalist — but I think Trumbo is more moral and ethical than China can be at times.
We talked to [Trumbo's] daughters a lot. Jay and I really suffered over how much hypocrisy and contradiction [he exhibited]. The daughters [said] he never was bothered by this. It was never an issue. He just lived how he wanted to live.
Roach: And we portrayed that in the story. We cast Louis C.K. as a more hardline lefty who busts [Trumbo] for his hypocrisy and really questions his fortitude because he doesn’t think he's committed to true Communist ideals. And in fact, he wasn’t. A good Communist would have figured out how to spread his own wealth. He was more like a modern-day liberal, to be honest. He joined the Communist Party in ’43 when we were allied with a Communist country. And he mostly joined, as he put it, as a reaction to the rise of fascism, and sort of in support of workers’ rights. He was very active in the union movement.
Let’s talk about Trumbo’s body of work. He wrote some great movies like “Spartacus” and “Lonely Are the Brave.” But he also wrote some really bad movies — “Rocketship X-M,” “The Prowler,” “Emergency Wedding.”
McNamara: Look, he wrote some bad movies. And he wrote some bad movies that were big-budget movies. I actually don’t love “Exodus,” so there’s a joke in the script at its expense because I think it’s a bloated mega-epic.
He was kind of all over the place. I’ve had a long, checkered career myself. If you IMDb me, you would see some things that I would love to bang my head against the wall [for], and get amnesia. Sometimes you have to just take a job! And I think Trumbo always did good work — sometimes they were just really bad ideas.
Roach: But his batting average is pretty good when you think of films like “Roman Holiday.” And “The Brave One,” which I had never seen, is a weirdly beautiful little film. He was so talented, and I think part of it was he always wished he could go back to writing novels. He was so well known for “Johnny Got His Gun.” In all his letters, he’s making a plan to get through the current writing "assignment" and get on to a novel. But when he really did bite into a script like “Spartacus” — which he wrote millions of words [for] to get to the few that they turned into a movie — he was pretty extraordinary.
So John, I won’t ask you about “Fast Lane” and “Vengeance Unlimited.”
McNamara: Again, “Fast Lane” — no comment. “Vengeance Unlimited” is pretty good! . . . Believe me, you could name others.
Roach: We all have them. If you haven’t failed, you haven’t worked long enough.
"Trumbo," starring Bryan Cranston, is currently in theaters.