Last month, during an early round of promotion pegged to this week’s release of his Up in the Air, director Jason Reitman posted to Twitter a cute pie chart cataloguing the topics of every question he’d been asked in interviews. Why? Maybe it was for posterity, or to challenge reporters to be a little more creative, or perhaps it was simply meant as a scathing indictment of modern junket journalism. Whatever his intentions, we wonder if Reitman knew he’d soon be fielding so damn many questions about pie charts.
Among the topics included on Reitman’s original chart were George Clooney, the Walter Kirn novel on which his movie is based, Anna Kendrick, Vera Farmiga, and other things that any decent journalist sorta has to bring up. Reitman told Sunday’s L.A. Times that he hadn’t meant to mock the press, just to make a point about the “rote quality of the interviews.” Chart-mentioning Q&As with Anne Thompson and Roger Ebert prove, though, that it’s still totally possible to glean interesting insight with queries on subjects that Reitman has already addressed 114 times. And would you rather read interviews with writers shamed into asking lame questions like these, which Reitman tells Thompson were ones that came up too few times to impact his pie chart:
“‘Was I the kind of flyer who took my shoes off when I flew?’ I’ve only been asked that once. I was asked to spell Stanley Kubrick once, by a journalist who couldn’t spell it. She also was curious how to spell Hurt Locker. How cute.”
We certainly can’t complain about Reitman’s delightful interview with Film School Rejects yesterday, during which he was only asked about his pie chart (watch it below). But still, where does all of this leave readers like us who just want to know what it’s like to work with George Clooney?
Jason Reitman Throws His Pie Chart Up in the Air [Film School Rejects]
Jason Reitman: Serial interviews and pie (charts) in the sky [Roger Ebert]
20 Questions for Up in the Air’s Jason Reitman [Thompson on Hollywood]
Jason Reitman firmly at the controls in ‘Up in the Air’ [LAT]
