Interview: Director John Wells is Hired For ‘The Company Men’

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CHICAGO – John Wells is a familiar name to televisions fans. As executive producer of “ER” and “The West Wing,” his combination of drama and humanity has left a mark in TV’s evolution for nearly a generation. His first feature film, “The Company Men,” covers the same human territory, with a story “ripped from the headlines.”

Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones and Chris Cooper star as executives in a shipping company who are “downsized” post the 2007-08 economic collapse. When equivalent jobs prove hard to find, each has to find a way to cope with the indignities of perceived overqualification, ageism and guilt associated with not producing the American Dream.

Cinematographer Roger Deakins (right) and Director John Wells on the set of 'The Company Men'
Cinematographer Roger Deakins (right) and Director John Wells on the set of ‘The Company Men’
Photo credit: Folger/The Weinstein Company

John Wells was in Chicago recently to promote the film, and his large, compassionate personality came through as he spoke to HollywoodChicago.com about the ills of modern American commerce and the toll it takes on the nation’s personality.

HollywoodChicago.com: What type of serendipitous timing led to this script, which you also wrote, being your feature directorial debut? What is the origin of the story, and why were you so passionate to tell it?

John Wells: The origin of the piece comes from something that happened to a member of my family. That was the impetus for what happens to Ben Affleck’s character, but it was changed from the actual experience. My family member was laid off, as were 5000 people in his company, and he has an MBA and an electrical engineering degree. He started telling me what he was going through, the little indignities out in the job market, with a lot of things I didn’t know about, like outplacement.

That led me to going online and posting notices on chat rooms that had to do with downsizing and employment chat rooms for executives. I told them I was interested in writing about this, and if they were willing to talk about it, they could contact me. I got a couple thousand responses. We culled through the anecdotes and stories, and had a researcher get in touch with a lot of people directly.

It was an accidental experience, because I did a first draft and put it away. Two years later, around the economic problems of 2007, the researcher called me and said the idea was heating up again. I did a substantial amount of new research and rewrote the script, and was showing it to actors just as the credit crisis hit. The cast responded to the idea of doing something that was really going on in the world. Interestingly enough, all of them also had someone in their personal lives, by the time we were making the movie, that was going through the experience. That allowed it to come together.

HollywoodChicago.com: There is a certain morality and point-of-view regarding American business in your screenplay. What kind of collapse or adjustment would it take for the leaders of American commerce to change their beholden nature to the shareholder towards a better relationship with their workers?

Wells: These things are out of balance. I think we have a situation, when formerly the way that people bought stock in companies was for a long-term alliance and investment, that now that we have everything from day traders to nano-second electronic traders. This creates a pressure that has become about the stock price and the individual executive’s own compensation because of that price, and the sense we used to have that there was an agreement between the employer and the employee has been undercut.

I think the market itself will have to correct it. We have now what is called an ‘anorexic’ nature of companies – the focus away from the worker means that a lot of talented people just leave companies or are being forced out. The disadvantage of that is when the workers loses a sense that there any kind of security in their job or that the company they’re working for is not in any way looking out for their interests, then they jump at any other opportunity. So what will happen is that companies will end up with younger workers replacing the older workers, but will have no loyalty to the company. That means that there will be a constant trading of employees and the good ones will always leave. Like anorexia it will eventually kill the host.

HollywoodChicago.com: Kevin Costner was playing against type in this film. What did he understand about the working class character that made his desire to pursue the role?

Wells: Kevin came up doing manual labor, as did I. We had a lot of conversations about it. I was a carpenter and he was a carpenter, we both had our old tool belts. [laughs] He called me after having read the script. He responded to the character, and told me that he wanted to play the smaller role. I was surprised and delighted that he wanted to do it, and that is actually closer to who Kevin is, than a lot of the other roles that he’s played. Both of us, for example, like the ‘new wood smell’ of a house under construction. [laughs]

HollywoodChicago.com: The women in ‘The Company Men’ are archetypes – the dutiful wife-on-the-edge-of-a-nervous-breakdown, the society wife, the ballsy mistress and the saintly supporter – what was the message that these women communicated about modern life in the realm of the universe you created?

Wells: I found that the women I interviewed, as is often the case, fit into those categories routinely. [laughs] Archetypes and clichés are there because they absolutely exist. We kind of live out the things that we think we’re expected to do. That’s what I found in the research.

The one role that I was uncomfortable about in the film was the wealthy wife. I had to cut her back in later drafts. One of the scenes that I had wished that I shot was her divorce proceedings. She and her husband are doing a deposition and there is a break in it. They end up in the hallway talking to each other, and he asks her how did she become the person that she is. Her reply was ‘I became the person you wanted me to be.’ I think that is the reality.

Kevin Costner (Jack) and Ben Affleck (Bobby) in  'The Company Men'
Kevin Costner (Jack) and Ben Affleck (Bobby) in ‘The Company Men’
Photo credit: Folger/The Weinstein Company

HollywoodChicago.com: The ending of the film has a fantasy element to it. What were you trying to communicate through this optimism and what were you trying to tell America?

Wells: The ending was part of a re-occurring theme. I’d originally written the script about the steel industry, and found out there was no place left to shoot it, there were no mills left. One of the guys I spoke to was an executive in the steel industry whose company was bought out by a foreign interest. The mill closed down and he made a lot of money, but he ended up feeling like he’d let everybody down. So he started a specialty business, and was able to re-employ about ten percent of his former workforce.

I think the way out of this ultimately will be through job creation, and that job creation will come from people finding various niches, innovations and doing what we’ve always done best in this country…be entrepreneurial and bring some people on. Job creation will not be how many people GM or Ford takes on, it will be through hundreds of thousands of smaller business.

HollywoodChicago.com: Your first major television assignment was on the show ‘China Beach.’ Since you were fairly young when the Vietnam War came to a head and an endgame, what did you personally learn about the war in researching and actualizing the series?

Wells: I was in elementary school and junior high school during the war. I was actually one of the last group of guys to get a draft number in high school, around 1973. But it made a tremendous impact on me because so many of my friends older brothers were going off to war.

John Young created China Beach with Vietnam veteran Bill Broyles, and they started introducing us to a lot of people who’d been there, so I spent a lot of time talking to vets. That’s when I started to realize as a writer how important it was to research and listen to people’s stories.

It was a central event for people my age, who lived through the Kennedy assassination, watched events unfold on television during the Martin Luther King assassination, and the riots that followed. We gained a social consciousness, but also a sense that we missed out on being old enough to have participated in the actual change. That effected a lot of my writing, what I’m interested in writing about, that we need to be engaged civically.

HollywoodChicago.com: Since you’ve done high level cop and doctor shows, how do you think those types of shows have skewed the American cultural perspective toward the authoritarian figures of the doctor and the cop? Has it perverted those relationships or perhaps enhanced them?

Wells: I think there was a period where those relationships were perverted toward hero worship and sanctity. During the early television days, through the 1960s and ’70s, those characters were portrayed almost god-like. They never made mistakes and always did the right thing.

It was a long evolution away from that, but it came to fruition with Steven Bochco [“Hill Street Blues”] in the 1980s and what they were doing on St. Elsewhere. That here are people who make a lot of mistakes, but are trying to do the right thing most of the time. They have complicated lives and all the same type of problems that everybody else does. And that I think has been ultimately helpful to this notion that they are just people. We do a much better job of portraying it now.

HollywoodChicago.com: Finally, what areas of the human psyche has yet to be served by your perspective? What do you want to express about humanity that you haven’t explored yet?

Wells: I don’t think I’ve touched on that much, to tell you the truth. The depth of emotion that is able to be delved into by novelists and short story writers is a form of rendition that is very specific to place, time and consciousness. And in those smaller formats, they don’t have to appeal to a larger audience. The reality in television and film is that you are trying to bring in a larger group of people, and one of things I miss from theater is that you could do something more specific and localized. Even though ‘The Company Men’ is a smaller film, I do end up emotionally throwing a larger net.

”The Company Men” opens everywhere on January 21st. Featuring Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, Chris Cooper, Mario Bello and Kevin Costner. Written and directed by John Wells. Rated “R”

HollywoodChicago.com senior staff writer Patrick McDonald

By PATRICK McDONALD
Senior Staff Writer
HollywoodChicago.com
pat@hollywoodchicago.com

© 2011 Patrick McDonald, HollywoodChicago.com

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