By Bailey Pennick
Alex Ross Perry is in the middle of a thought. It’s not following just one strand, though. It’s a textured and tangent-filled journey about his decade-long creative partnership with Jason Schwartzman. It’s the afternoon in New York City and as he talks, light from the window saturates his screen.
After acknowledging that “it’s crazy” that it’s been 10 years since they first met and premiered Listen Up Philip at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, Perry steps outside the original bounds of this interview even further to think about how making this film has continued to shape his sense of time within his life. “It’s a round number, yes,” he says. “It’s just very strange to think of anything as being long ago when it also feels like we’re still kind of living in the present reality of making it. I think a lot of my subsequent work is based on some of the connections, personal and artistic, made during that movie… And certainly when we were making Golden Exits and Pavements, you were seeing a lot of the same people again on the crew and the cast. So it feels like it never went away.” Both Perry and Schwartzman pause, nodding at each other before the writer-director lets out a big sigh.
“But, also, 10 years is a long time,” he laughs.
“Yeah, well said,” Schwartzman jumps in from his house in Los Angeles, where that golden hour light hasn’t hit the West Coast yet. “It’s funny what Alex says because it’s true! It doesn’t feel like that long ago, but maybe that’s just because things that are important things to you, they just leave a longer mark on you. You know what I mean?”
When watching Listen Up Philip, it is easy to spot exactly what Schwartzman means. Already deep into an impressive acting and writing career (Rushmore, Marie Antoinette), there’s an effortlessness to his performance within the world that Perry meticulously creates. Philip Lewis Friedman — a rising fiction writer who decides to lean into his selfish tendencies to the detriment of everyone around him — is an uncomfortably authentic character. Schwartzman, a versatile and generous performer, is given the space to play within the edges of likability to a hostile individual. This level of intimacy could only happen because of how quickly the two artists clicked on their first meeting and how deeply they trusted each other from the jump.
As Perry and Schwartzman reminisce, they don’t dwell on production details — barring a few references to the Sundance Film Festival scramble to get the whole thing finished by January. Instead of the normal industry fare, they readily bring up meals they’ve shared, conversations they had before the cameras even rolled, or the feeling of the seasons changing and how that continues to bring Philip back into their streams of consciousness all these years later.
“I remember like leaving the edit room every night and it just getting darker earlier and earlier, but just being so excited,” says Perry. “And I remember standing in the store with the fixings I bought for potato leek soup and receiving the call from Sundance on some chilly November night and it’s just very vivid.”
“Even as you say that, it’s funny how much of the movie is also connected to food,” Schwartzman says excitedly. “One of the first things that Alex and I did when he came to LA — one of the greatest memories — was we made our own seitan. He cooked this great meal at my house.” The biggest smile appears on his face. “That was the first time I’d ever heard of liquid smoke!”
Perry laughs as Schwartzman takes over the storytelling reins. “I couldn’t wrap my head around like, what’s liquid smoke? And then that meal just being so wonderful and sitting there and talking about the movie and I was just excited about this new phase in my life. Because I knew when I met Alex, I’m like, this is a friend of mine. This is someone that I’m going to know forever, you know?”
Schwartzman’s loyalty to Perry and liquid smoke (“I still use it and that’s the Listen Up Philip smell in many ways!”) has been unwavering since they started this conversation on that first meeting in New York about Philip. “[That meeting] never ended,” laughs Schwartzman. “Because every phase of the night, having these meals in different places and walking to them and talking about the movie, it was kind of like what [usually happens] over months and years of time, [all] happening just in one night. That laid the groundwork or the blueprint for one thing never really being enough for us.”
Even now, after two Sundance Film Festival premieres (Listen Up Philip and 2017’s Golden Exits), the pair continue to inspire each other in big ways and small. “One of the things I’m the most excited about whenever I see Alex is that I know I’m going to laugh,” Schwartzman says with a grin.
“I mean, no pressure, but I know I’m probably going to walk away with two links to something that I’m going to forward to everyone that I know afterwards.” And while some of these recommendations are for things like the exact model of Perry’s grandfather’s 50-year-old typewriter that he wrote the first script of Listen Up Philip on (which Schwartzman then bought and later talked to typewriter aficionado Tom Hanks about), they also include copious amounts of prank videos on YouTube.
Much like the pair’s enduring friendship, this conversation meanders down fascinating and delightful avenues. The results are never expected, never dull, and sometimes involve actual avenues. “We were just in Venice recently, and my wife [and I] were trying to find Alex in these streets of Venice,” veers Schwartzman. “And it’s like, this is so cool that our worlds in our lives have landed us in this bizarre place where we’re in a city with no cars. And I’m looking for someone that I’ve known for 10 years and more now, and I’m excited to find them.”
The director was also at the Venice International Film Festival for the premiere of Pavements, Perry’s upcoming film about the iconic indie rock band Pavement. The experimental biopic-musical-documentary not only resembles his detailed, earnest, and sprawling friendship with Schwartzman through its mosaic-like structure, it was partially inspired by it. Both were regular listeners of author Bret Easton Ellis’ (American Psycho, Less than Zero) podcast around the time of Listen Up Philip and loved connecting over episodes, Ellis’ influential writings, and the way he spoke. The appreciation was mutual; Ellis liked Philip and agreed to moderate the film’s Q&A at 2014’s Sundance NEXT FEST in Los Angeles. On that trip Schwartzman planted a seed that would sprout nearly a decade later as this ambitious multifaceted film.
“Do you know what Stephen Malkmus’ voice sounds like when he’s doing interviews?” Perry recalls Schwartzman asking him before he admitted he didn’t immediately know what Pavement’s frontman sounded like outside of mid-show banter. Immediately recommending Malkmus’ episode on Ellis’ podcast, Perry and Schwartzman became obsessed with the musician’s unique way of talking. “I’d been a fan of the band, and listening to this podcast with Jason took my appreciation of [Malkmus] to a whole new level,” says Perry. “And that level was the first thing I tapped into when I was approached about the movie. And so then right away I was like, ‘Jason, you’re not going to believe this, but like, I have this project coming my way.’”
The word “project” is an understatement. Pavements simultaneously tells the story of Pavement’s history through a biopic entitled Range Life (Schwartzman playing Matador Records founder Chris Lombardi), present through documentary footage of their second reunion tour (Schwartzman plays himself), and their influence through the 2022 staging of Perry’s own Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical. Producing this film was a behemoth, but observing with Schwartzman on Philip’s set helped Perry make sense of how to proceed.
“Well, again, the best way to answer this is by referring back to Listen Up Philip,” the director explains, adding another twist within this braided conversation. “One of the lessons I learned from watching Jason come to set every day for a year on Listen Up Philip, including days he wasn’t working … [I realized] the role of this person, whoever is number one on the call sheet, their job is to set the tone for the entire movie … to create a cohesive space for collaboration.”
Schwartzman’s actions inspired changes to Perry’s own process: “On Pavements, I didn’t have that because I was making this movie over the span of two and a half years with nobody who was there every day, really, except for me and Rob Kolodny, the DP. So, that has to be my job because I’m the only person who’s present for every day … I learned that lesson from watching what he did on that movie 10, 11 years ago. So then making this movie now where I’m like, I have to teach myself a new process, was really just kind of what I wanted. But, again, I had the bedrock of, like, Jason’s in it.”
Schwartzman is hunched over his computer, taking in Perry’s words while looking around his room. He starts snickering to himself. “I love that I’m the bedrock,” he says. “I mean, Pavement, I would think, would be the bedrock.” Perry cracks up, shaking his head.
For each of them, that first collaboration on Listen Up Philip has been a bedrock of sorts for their personal and professional lives. “It’s like this weird process of just everything,” says Perry, trying to get back on track on his original train of thought about what a decade of collaboration with Schwartzman has meant. It’s hard for him to quantify because the collaboration that was first sparked on an endless day in New York has never slowed. “Everything that we’re talking about just becomes this conversation of like, Have you ever seen this? You should check this out. Let’s look this up. What are we doing? And that’s extended from like Jason saying, like, ‘Oh, you got to watch this YouTube video —’”
“And I think it’s fun,” says Schwartzman, finishing Perry’s thought. “Because when you know someone like Alex, I think tidbits present themselves …You start to get excited about finding things for people, you know?” As the pair talks about each other, the level of genuine respect and admiration is refreshing. Perry and Schwartzman speak each other’s language fluently because they never let the conversation end.
“It was such a significant movie and moment in my life,” says Schwartzman. Unlike most of the conversation, he’s at a loss for many words about the impact of Listen Up Philip on his life. “Like the best and I’m just so grateful for it. Like Alex said, it still feels like the beginning of something to me in many ways.” He pauses, searching for exactly what he wants to say. “But yeah, I just feel — it just feels so alive still. I can just remember so much of it as if it were, not yesterday, but like a few weeks ago.” Perry agrees.
For these two, 10 years is just a blip.
