So The Avengers was like this huge superhero production, and really exhausting, I would imagine. After making it you should’ve taken a vacation, but instead you made another movie. I wanna know why, and what’s wrong with you.
There is something horribly wrong with me. I admit that fully. I’m not exactly sure how it happened. I was in New York at the end of the shoot of The Avengers, in the beginning of September. It had been about seven months since I’d slept for a full night. I was so crazed, and Kai, my wife, and I were talking about the vacation we were gonna take for our 20th anniversary of bein’ sweeties. We had October free, so we were going to Venice. Then we started talking about Much Ado—neither of us can remember how it came up. And Kai was like, “You know what? Make the movie. Venice isn’t sinking that fast.” I said, “Honey, there’s no way I can adapt the script and put it together in a month.” She’s like, “Yes, you can.” So I started talking to people about it. Then I realized how much work it would be and I was like, I have gone insane. This is a terrible idea. But at that point I’d already started getting people to commit, so it was like, I gotta put my head down and do it. It’s one of the weirder decisions I’ve ever made and absolutely the best.
That’s good.
Yeah. What if it turned out the other way!
That would suck.
It was exhausting, but it was the kind of exhaustion that feeds you and makes you strong. I mean, I’m very excited about The Avengers, and I hope people will be like yay! for that film, but you know, you make a movie like that piecemeal, a tiny bit at a time, and then you assemble those pieces, and half of what’s going to be great about the movie is not even built yet, because it’s special effects. And then I get to do this other thing, where I’m shooting by necessity about eight to 10 pages a day of just…meat. All the interactions, all the dialogue, all the silly, all the fun, all the visuals—they’re all there. They’re accomplished by the end of the day. You don’t go, “Oh, excellent! We got him walking into the room. Tomorrow he’ll say a word.” It’s a completely different experience.
You’ve worked with a lot of the actors in Much Ado before, and you filmed it in…I believe I read 12 days? on a shoestring budget and in a single house. Does that kind of seat-of-your-pants spirit come through in the movie at all or will it be like The Avengers: Shakespeare Edition?
[Laughs] It definitely will come through—though hopefully not so much that people go, “Wow, this looks like they shot it fast!” But yeah, it is literally homemade. ’Cause it was my house we shot it in.
Oh, wow!
Yeah. My wife designed the house. She’s an architect. That was another reason we finally decided to make the movie. I was like, I have the space, the whole movie takes place in one location. And I happen to live in it, and it happens to be beautiful. I mean, I’m in love with that house. My only regret was that we didn’t have any kind of rigs or steady cams or anything like that, so I couldn’t move from space to space as much as I wanted to. Because part of what’s beautiful about that house—and what I like about a film—is the flow.