Mark Waters Interview, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

Celebrity photographer Connor Mead (Matthew McConaughey) loves freedom, fun and women...in that order. A committed bachelor with a no-strings policy, he thinks nothing of breaking up with multiple women on a conference call while prepping his next date.

Connor's brother Paul is more the romantic type. In fact, he's about to be married. Unfortunately, on the eve of the big event, Connor's mockery of romance proves a real buzz-kill for Paul, the wedding party and a houseful of well wishers -- including Connor's childhood friend Jenny (Jennifer Garner), the one woman in his life who has always seemed immune to his considerable charm.

Just when it looks like Connor may single-handedly ruin the wedding, he gets a wake-up call from the ghost of his late Uncle Wayne (Michael Douglas), the hard-partying, legendary ladies man upon whose exploits Connor has modeled his lifestyle. Uncle Wayne has an urgent message for his protege, which he delivers through the ghosts of Connor's jilted girlfriends -- past, present and future -- who take him on a revealing and hilarious odyssey through a lifetime of failed relationships. Together, they will discover what turned Connor into such a shameless player and whether he has a second chance to find -- and this time, keep -- the love of his life.

MoviesOnline sat down with director Mark Waters and screenwriters Jon Lucas & Scott Moore to talk about their new romantic comedy, “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.” The film also stars Breckin Meyer, Lacey Chabert, Robert Forster, Anne Archer, Emma Stone and Michael Douglas.

Mark Waters made his feature film directorial debut on the dark comedy indie hit "The House of Yes." The film premiered at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, where Parker Posey won a Special Jury Prize for her performance. Waters' next projects were the romantic comedy "Head Over Heels" and the VH-1 original movie "Warning: Parental Advisory."

He then scored with the back-to-back hit comedies "Freaky Friday" and "Mean Girls." "Freaky Friday," starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan, earned a 2004 Critic's Choice Award nomination for Best Family Film and brought a Golden Globe Award nomination to Jamie Lee Curtis. "Mean Girls," written by Tina Fey and based on the Rosalind Wiseman book Queen Bees and Wannabees, became one of the most talked-about films of the year and won three MTV Movie Awards, including one for Lindsay Lohan as Best Actress.

Waters followed in 2005 with the fantasy comedy romance "Just Like Heaven," starring Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo. Last year he directed the acclaimed family adventure "The Spiderwick Chronicles," adapted from the popular children's book series, and, following "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past," he directed the FOX television pilot "Eva Adams."

Waters also recently served as a producer on "500 Days of Summer," starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. The offbeat romantic comedy premiered to acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival and is slated for a July 2009 release.

Lucas and Moore most recently teamed on the hit holiday comedy “Four Christmases,” starring Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon. Among their upcoming projects is “The Hangover” for director Todd Phillips, starring Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, Heather Graham, Justin Bartha and Jeffrey Tambor, set for a June 2009 release.

Here’s what Mark Waters, Jon Lucas and Scott Moore had to tell us:

Q: Which one of you is like this guy?
 
Mark: (Jon's) the best looking.
 
Jon: It's true.
 
Q: Do you know someone like Connor?
 
Jon: No.
 
Mark:  It's all wish-fulfillment. (laughs)
 
Jon: We're all happily married. This is none of our lives.
 
Mark: Even in our 20s, we just looked at guys like this and thought let's imagine a guy... we all knew that guy in college who slept with lots of women and none of them hated him for it. They were like, "We shared time; he's really awesome." You're like, "How does he get away with that?" And that's why we cast Matthew. We figured he has that in spades.
 
Q: Was this supposed to come out during the holidays because it seems to have a lot of snow?
 
Mark: (laughs) There's snow in it? Visual effects! It was always meant to be a riff on "A Christmas Carol" and we shot it in Boston in winter, and Boston for New York, and also we shot in Newport (Rhode Island), because it was set in Newport. When all was said and done, it just came down to the fact that Warner Bros and New Line liked what they saw and thought that it could play in this marketplace and because of the fact that they released "Harry Potter" movies which are set in winter, they figured nobody really cares (that it's coming out in spring). There used to be this whole opening sequence about Christmas getting torn down and midgets and fat guys lining up at the unemployment office. We kind of said we're not going to do that anymore but we'll just make it seasonal but not Christmas.
 
Q: Whose idea was it to time travel via the bed?
 
Jon: It was definitely ours.
 
Scott: I don't really remember who came up with it but it seemed like one of Connor's tools: the bed.
 
Mark: Also, because it was Uncle Wayne's bed too. We figured it was a bed that had a lot of history in it and it should become his mode of conveyance. To give some major credit to these guys (the writers), I read this script for the first time back in 2003, I believe. The movie that was eventually shot was remarkably close to that script. All of these gags like the bed going through the wall and plummeting down in front of the house and all these things were in the very first draft of it. And the bed riding up to the school. All these things.

Scott: And the script stayed largely the same because when he would give us notes, we would do them really poorly.
 
Mark: I wasn't always attached to it. Interestingly enough, there were other directors involved with this over time. Then, I remember I would touch back down onto the project. At one point, I was going to make it with Vince Vaughn. In my notes, I remember this being great once. There was a great scene with a bed flying through the wall. What happened?  Then they'd dig up their old file. Same thing with Matthew. Matthew got hold of the very first draft, and a lot of his notes were like can we put this how it used to be in the first draft. It had a kind of subversive energy to that very first draft which often happens in development, things just get more ... the more logical, the more boring. It's easy to put logic to screenwriting and say it's more logical and more smart for them to do this and this, but it's not as cinematic and not as fun and energetic a lot of the times. You kind of have to put logic aside and say what has the right energy? That's what this had.
 
Q: Which came first? Did you think of doing a take on A Christmas Carol and then you had to fit a character into it that would work? Or did you think of Matthew's character first and then thought it would be a great take on A Christmas Carol?
 
Scott: Jon and I enjoy writing a cynic or a flawed character that you have to fix. We did a little bit of work on "Four Christmases" which Vince Vaughn is definitely a flawed character. They're fun because they’re saying everything you want to say and then they have to have somewhere to go. We like doing these Scrooge stories where there's this guy who's a cynic who comes around, so we thought let's do Scrooge then. So that was sort of the genesis.
 
Jon: We're not that creative or that smart.
 
Scott: The idea of that scenario is to steal from people who have been way smarter before you and Dickens is a broad target to hit.
 
Q: Do you see this as the ultimate chick movie even though it’s got this male fantasy at the center?
 
Mark: For what it’s worth, as we were making the movie, we really thought we were operating in the genre of magical comeuppance comedy. All the movies we watched as references were like "Liar, Liar," "What Women Want" and all the "Christmas Carols." So this is about a man's redemption through magical means. Because his redemption is about how he deals with women, and his relationship with this woman who got away, and then once we cast Jennifer Garner it became clear, oh wait, her force of personality and star power suddenly demands for the movie to centralize around that. Hence, it becomes a romantic movie and a romantic comedy with a magical comeuppance structure.
 
Jon: I think there's also the female wish-fulfillment, where you get the bad-boy and you're the one that breaks him, you're the one who finally gets him to settle down. There's a lot of divorces that prove that doesn't work but there is that element of she's the one that got away which a lot of these player types often have, and they're trying to sleep their way back to that girl and they never quite get there. On the flipside, there's that woman and the doctor who’s there who’s the perfect option, and he does all the right stuff, but there's always the one you had that real chemistry with.
 
Mark: One of the saving graces of this, and I told them when I first read this, is the redemption of the character is based on how he ends up treating his brother. In the classic rom-com, the guy is running through the rain to get to the airport to stop the woman at the gate, and in this he's running to stop his brother's fiancee, and his heroic act is saving his brother's wedding. The moment when he's a redeemed character is when he's giving the toast at his brother's wedding that he tore apart and then saved. (The redemption isn't about the Jenny character.) She's able to say, I can watch you become a mensch and still feel like there's still more distance you have to travel to earn me back. It's not like it's a fait accompli at the end of the movie that she's necessarily going to be with him.
 
Q: Was it a challenge to make him redeemable at the end?
 
Mark: He's Matthew McConaughey.  No joke. Vince Vaughn, who's really funny, you worry whether you would ever be able to get back ... the guy would be a little bit like, saying the exact same lines, it may just be too harsh. There's something about Matthew's charm and the fact that he is the kind of guy who gets away with murder with women that you kind of go, they were halfway toward forgiving him before, and now that he's kind of become a mensch, I think they go there. That’s one of the reasons it has an odd structure in the third act. The end of the movie goes on a long time. Every time, during development, we said, let's chop down this third act, it's too long. But then you realize on a weird level, like Scrooge, once he becomes a good guy you kind of want to bathe in him being a good guy. You want to see if it takes. Is he a momentary good guy or not? This person who has changed really has changed on a deep level and you want to see it for more than just five minutes and see him do right by a few people and then you’re able to believe it.

Q: Who came up with the lesbian line about Barnard?

Scott: (laughing) It’s a great school by the way. I totally support Barnard.
 
Q: How did you know the chemistry would work?
 
Mark: (joking) They auditioned, believe me. You don't know. It's all just fabricating things in your head and hoping that it works. The thing I liked about the two of them -- I'd actually known Jennifer for years as a friend -- and Matthew I'd only met for the first time -- was that they were both athletes. I thought that it boded well for the two of them as romantic partners as well as acting partners because they had this competitive streak where they both wanted to outdo each other. I generally like actors who have an athletic background or used to be on teams because they don't have a diva attitude. They’re like, give me the ball, coach, what do you want me to do? How are we going to get this ball into the red zone? They have this kind of team approach. Most of their scenes have a quality of, ok, she has the ball, and you're trying to take it from her, and the scene is a competition and I'm going to challenge both of you to try and win the scene. ... Often times you’d have to say let’s do a version of this in rehearsal where we’re not even doing the dialogue. Let’s do it purely like you’re trying to win and now let’s go back and do the dialogue with that in mind. They got into that. There's a fun of play of competition in it that they did well with. Plus, they just look good together. Who knew?
 
Q: Was Michael Douglas purposely imitating Robert Evans?
 
Mark: (to the writers) I don't know where you got that. It's so weird.
 
Jon: That was in the script. We just wrote it like parenthesis, Bob Evans.
 
Mark: Robert Evans glasses and Robert Evans jacket -- it says that in the script. Michael was extremely happy because the glass frames that Robert Evans wears are one of a kind now. They actually don't make them anymore. So it was a big thing for our prop and costume department to get a hold of these frames. As soon as he put the frames on, and he was with his wife, and she was just gleeful. She said, "You look just like Bobby!" Because they know him personally. (Michael) was walking around taking pictures with the ascot at the costume fitting and he was just there. He didn't need any convincing to do the part.
 
Jon: We're pushing for a spin-off because we could just write him for days.
 
Mark: The sad thing about Uncle Wayne is that just for pure story pacing we had to cut pages. The scene in the bar, for the DVD, we cut together the eight-page version of that scene where his lessons to the kid are much more elaborate and vulgar. That's something to look forward to. We should get (Evans) to the premiere. He'd totally come if Michael called him.
 
Q: Can you talk about the scene involving the wedding cake?
 
Mark: Jennifer came up with this idea of what if I'm doing a dance with Daniel, and the dance scene is spinning out of control while (Connor) is trying to control the cake. It was really Jennifer's script idea that she gave us and they implemented it really nicely. Matthew committed physically to it, because there's no stunt double. He did some dangerous [stuff]. He actually did the thing -- it's in the outtakes too -- of him actually plummeting to the floor and the cake falling. He had this classic silent comedian commitment to doing that physicality. You can't teach anybody to do it. It's just really funny.

Jon: It’s funny when you write things like that. They’re not really funny on the page. It’s like the worst kind of writing, but you find when you test these things, the physical stuff gets the biggest laughs over and over again along with your clever little Ivy League Barnard jokes. (laughs) No one really cares.

Q: Who is this movie for? It seems like it’s an object lesson for lotharios as well as a cautionary tale for women. Do you think there’s more of a lesson for women than there is for men?

Mark: I don’t set out to make any movie to teach a lesson. If anything, it’s who is it going to entertain and if it turns out it has some illumination about your life, great. It makes everyone kind of reflect on their list. Everyone has their bar with the line up of people, both men and women, and you reflect on here’s the group of people that I’ve known in my life. How did I treat them? Did I do well and can I do better? Whether sometimes you’re the Jenny and sometimes you’re the Connor, just knowing there’s a way to treat people in romantic ways that’s good and bad. Hopefully that’s where it lays.

Scott: I don’t think there’s any kind of heavy handed lesson but I think there’s a very simple message that’s for anybody. I think “A Christmas Carol” is simply about how happiness is not through being greedy and being a miser, that being generous and charitable is the root of happiness. And this is a very simple concept that happiness in love doesn’t come from being protective and not putting yourself out there. True happiness comes from taking chances and loving people. So that could be for men and women hopefully.

Q: How difficult is it to strike a balance between the drama vs. the comedy in the movie.

Mark: When Michael Douglas saw the movie, he called me and said, “I was laughing throughout and I was kvelling at the end.” I said, “That’s great.” And I had to call Jon Shestack, my Jewish producer, and I said, “What’s ‘kvelling’ mean? I hope it’s a good thing.” He said, “It’s laughing through tears.” I was like, “Oh, that’s good.” In essence, this was something that was built into every draft of the script. When I read the script for the first time, I cried when he (Matthew’s character) was talking to Lacey (who plays the bride, Sandra) by the SUV back in 2003 sitting alone in my room And every time it got sent to me again by our persistent producer, I would go like, “Ah, really? ‘Ghosts of Girlfriends Past’ is back?” And I’d read it and I’d be crying again at that scene and I thought something about this clearly works because I’m kvelling everytime I read this scene.
 
Not to be immodest about our movie but I think it's Matthew's finest work. That scene by the SUV when he pulls around is just beautiful. We’re watching the dailies and the whole crew is crying. This scene has a certain kind of simple beauty to it and selflessness that makes the scene work, makes his character work and makes the movie work. It was something that was always there on the page.
 
Q: How involved was Matthew's in the making of the movie?
 
Mark: He had just produced his first movie, "Surfer Dude," when he came to make this movie. It was great because he had this real appreciation of how hard a process it is to make a movie, not just be the person who's in your trailer and comes out and stands on the mark and delivers the lines. His greatest instinct as an actor and filmmaker is to protect what's good. Sometimes you think you made it better simply by making it different and occasionally he would say, no, you just moved laterally on this and frankly the original version works better, and being kind of stubborn about it, it actually ended up helping the movie sometimes.
 
Q: For the screenwriters, how do you have the stamina to stay with something like this for five years?

Jon: Well you don’t do it for free. It’s not a volunteer job so it’s your job. I think a huge factor of what you do…writing the script is the fun part. It’s just gravy. And the hard part is the system and working through the machine and how collaborative it is. I do think in this case, and the sad thing is I would probably say this anyway if this wasn’t true so you really shouldn’t believe a word I’m saying right now, but in the case where you have a great director and you have a cast that is positive and psyched to come to work every day, it gets better with every one. Every group endeavor has this dynamic. When everyone is great, there’s no limit to how much fun it is.

Scott: And I think to make it through the long development process or all those years, this one in particular Jon and I came up with the idea. We pitched it as an idea and wrote it so all the way along it was our baby. In those five years you’re taking jobs where you’re working on other people’s scripts and rewriting them and stuff and you’re not quite as invested. So whenever somebody would call and say Mark’s interested, you’d get real excited. So it actually wasn’t hard to work on the project. I think an interesting thing about the development is back in ’03 when we met Mark and he was interested, Jon Shestack said “What about Mark Waters and Matthew McConaughey?” and suddenly you have this idea that that’s a perfect fit. That’s a great movie. And then it sort of falls apart and becomes different people and different directors but you always have this idea of this great movie. So when it came back around, it felt like it was meant to be.

Q: What’s on the blooper reel? This must have been a fun set so what happened that was funny?

Mark: I just approved the gag reel. There’s not a whole lot of the really boring line screw ups that are always annoying on blooper reels. If anything, it’s like when you’re doing things that are physical with physical comedy, dancing, stunts, having them screw up is always amusing. It is unquestionably fun to come to work on days where you have 50 models working that day. We have to line the 50 models on the bar and now we need to figure out where to put the 30 models in the photography studio. The crew is very energetic on those days and doing good work.

Q: Was there a celebrity photographer who inspired the character of Connor?

Mark: To some degree but I feel like there certainly were celebrity photographers that we watched like video footage and YouTube footage of Annie Leibovitz and Herb Ritts at work to see their operating methods. But there’s nobody who’s as heterosexual as Connor Mead. It is that kid in the candy store who has this amount of access and is also a guy who appreciates that access, only not quite as pervy as Helmut (Newton) was.

“Ghosts of Girlfriends Past” opens on May 1st.