Getting to Know... Big Fan's Robert Siegel

Although you might not know the name "Robert Siegel" now, you likely will soon, if only due to sheer ambition. As a writer for The Onion, Siegel worked his way up to editor-in-chief in a mere two years. After leaving the absurdist newspaper to pursue screenwriting, Siegel quickly found himself in the company of Darren Aronofsky, who asked him to write The Wrestler. His directorial debut and the reason he met Aronofsky in the first place, sports drama Big Fan, which stars Patton Oswalt, is released in limited theaters today.

Paste: Can you tell me what it was like growing up in Long Island?
Robert Siegel: It was Jewish. [laughs] You know, typical New York, Jewish, suburb. All white, mostly Jewish.

Paste: Were you into writing growing up?
Siegel: Yeah, typical creative writing and drawing. You know, making smartass comments to my friends. I wasn't a cool kid or popular; I sort of laid low and hung with my friends. I didn't really go into the city. Some kids growing up on Long Island would go into New York City every chance they got. I was one of those kids that feared the city and stuck to my suburb. I'm trying to think of something interesting to say. [laughs] It was a nice, suburban childhood.

Paste: What eventual prompted your decision, then, to go so far away for school at the University of Michigan?
Siegel: There were a lot of New Yorkers who went there. There was a very strong contingent of Long Islanders, definitely a lot of people. There weren't any big schools like that in the East that have that kind of classic, big campus with fraternities and sports and that kind of thing. Not that I was going to do any of that stuff, but it fit my image of a stereotypical college in a good way. I liked it. I wanted a huge school where I could get lost and reinvent myself if need be.

Paste: Did you know what you wanted to do at all, or were you planning to figure it out once you got there?
Siegel: I don't think I knew. I always dabbled in writing. I wouldn't say I was driven or had any idea where I was heading. There was the time I thought about being a lawyer... I didn't really have a dream from age 10 or anything. I just wanted to go out and... Let me think. I need to start doing a better job with this interview. I haven't hit on anything usable yet. I went to Michigan. I started writing there. I guess I did always dabble in journalism. Let me start over.From a young age, I always had two interests: comedy and journalism. No. On campus, I wrote for the Michigan daily paper. I worked my way up to women's field hockey. That's the beat I got to. I did stand-up comedy a couple times. I did a little writing for this sketch-comedy troupe. But I didn't really get too serious about writing as a career until later.

Paste: You ended up with a history degree, right?
Siegel: I still think of myself as an English major, but I wound up getting sick of English and I switched to history kind of late in my senior year. I don't really strongly identify myself with a history major, but I have an interest in history.

Paste: What did you want to do with that at the time?
Siegel: I didn't know what I wanted to do even after college. Like most people, I didn't know coming out of college with a liberal-arts degree. I had this vague notion I would become a lawyer like a lot of my friends. I mean, you ask any 20-year-old what they're going to do with their life and they probably can't answer it.

But I started to find direction when I moved to Madison after college. I lived in Chicago for a year and then I moved to Madison, Wis. where my girlfriend at the time was getting a PhD in English at the University of Wisconsin. So I took my history degree, packed it up and headed out to Wisconsin. Madison actually turned out to be a really perfect city for somebody with my vague ambitions of doing something in the media, something to do with writing. When I got to Madison, I started volunteering and freelancing everywhere I could. I did arts and entertainment coverage for the local paper and wrote for the alternative weekly and volunteered at radio stations and I started writing for The Onion. At the time, The Onion was just one of four or five things I was doing. By day, I was working at the children's museum there and in my spare time I was writing a feature story for the alternative news weekly and going to meetings and writing headlines for The Onion. In retrospect, it seems obvious that The Onion would've been the thing I was pursuing exclusively, but it was a tiny, little campus thing.

Paste: Do you remember the first time you picked it up? What you thought of it then?
Siegel: It was probably in the entry way to a coffee shop on State Street, you know, a Starbucks or whatever. There would just be a pile of them in the entry way to sub shops and stuff. I don't remember the first headline [I read]. It was black and white and more silly then. I said, "This is awesome."

Paste: You wanted to be a part of it from day one?
Siegel: Yeah, I called up pretty immediately and said, "I want to contribute." They said, "Sure, yeah, come on down." I submitted, like, 10 headlines, and they were good enough to get me in there. At the time, it was just kind of a hobby for everybody. I think there was one paid position. If you were the editor, you got, like, maybe $100 a week or something. The rest of us were meeting in someone's apartment and pitching ideas. I just loved it. A lot of the same people I met at that first meeting are still there today.

Paste: Did the thought ever cross your mind that you wanted to run that someday? That you wanted to make it your thing?
Siegel: You know, I didn't really think of it as something, that I took it that seriously that it was something that could be a career. Even the idea that it could be a job didn't figure too prominently in my thinking about it. It was just kind of fun and exciting. I loved the people and trying to impress them and make them laugh.

But as time went on... By 1996, I was an editor, so I must've had some ambition. I don't think of somebody that walks into an office and says, "Someday, I'm gonna run this place." But it sort of was there, partially by default because I come from... As an East-coast Jew, I think I have a certain amount of ambition in my DNA that maybe the Midwestern Lutherans I was surrounded by lacked. They would probably agree with that. It's hard to describe the people there without resorting to stereotypes like "slacker" and that sort of thing. I was sort of the obvious candidate to run it next after the editor who left. The guy who ran it before me, not coincidentally, was also an East-coast Jew who was going to school there. He left, but he went on to run The Daily Show; he was the executive producer there for a few years.

I loved it. I just had this natural inclination to write more and contribute more and do more, and that kind of just meant moving up the ladder. It wasn't done in any kind of Machiavellian, mercenary way. It's the sort of place where ambition is a little unseemly. It wasn't the kind of place where you wanted to overtly climb the ladder. It wasn't even a ladder; it was more like a step stool. I was editor from '96-2003.

Paste: And you decided to pursue screnwriting, is that right?
Siegel: I just wanted to try something new, exercise a different part of my brain. When you're at The Onion, you see everything in headline form; you process the entire world in headline form. It can drive you crazy after a while. I was just ready, after nine years of headlines rattling around in my brain, to process the world in a different way. Around the time I was starting to think about leaving was when we started working on the ill-fated Onion movie, and that was my first experience with screenwriting and I really liked it. Something about the format just agreed with me, and I started writing screenplays at night on the side during my last couple years at The Onion. They were terrible, and gradually got not terrible. I was still at The Onion when I wrote Big Fan. Big Fan was my first good screenplay. It was certainly my first makeable screenplay. Before that, I was writing a lot of comedies. Just because of my background, I assumed I should be writing comedies. They were OK; they were just mediocre. I don't think I wrote anything particularly special or original. Probably, if you submitted them to a studio, the script reader at the studio would pass on them and say, "Third-rate Judd Apatow wannabe." It just wasn't my voice. For some reason, it just didn't click. But then I had an idea for what would eventually become Big Fan. It was not a comedy, or, at least, I don't think of it as a comedy, and I wrote that, and it just kind of clicked in.

Paste: And it was the reason that you ended up meeting Darren Aronofsky, correct?
Siegel: Yeah, it floated around Hollywood for a long time. At the time, it was called Paul Aufiero, and a lot of people in Hollywood really liked it, and at some point, I guess, it crossed a desk of one of Darren's executives at his company, Protozoa. I met with him and he was interested in directing it for a while. We probably met for about a year; we kicked it around and talked about developing it. He was pretty occupied at the time with The Fountain. But periodically we'd touch base on Paul Aufiero. Eventually, he dropped off. At one point, it was set up for him at Fox Searchlight, and he backed off of it, as directors do when they have a number of things on their plate. Then it bounced around to other directors. But as the months turned to years and my own screenwriting career was progressing, I became less and less attracted to the idea of giving it up. It was the one script I had that I actually owned and controlled because I wrote it on spec, so it didn't belong to a studio. I must like being in control. Since at The Onion I started out as a writer and moved up to a position where I could boss people around and make decisions. And it went a similar way with the writing. I wrote for studios and then I got this urge to be the one in charge, which led me to directing.

Paste: Did the success of The Wrestler help motivate you to decide you could do it on your own?
Siegel: At that point, I'd already decided. What led me to that? I don't know. I just wanted to try something new. A lot of the motivation came from being locked away in my apartment, chained to a keyboard. Writing is extremely intense and extremely solitary and extremely unpleasant. I love doing it, but I also really hate doing it. Directing is the exact opposite. It's external, it's extroverted, it's collaborative. I find it physical rather than mental. A lot of it is just about stamina and being mentally sharp and making decisions. Editing was a lot like directing; I found it used a lot of the same skills.

Paste: After you had finished writing, and you started to put the process in motion to make the movie, how did you decide on Patton Oswalt specifically for the role?
Siegel: I definitely was a big fan of his standup. I'm almost tempted to say he's the best standup in America today. Certainly I would put him in the top two or three with Chris Rock. I think he's unbelievable. I've seen him live probably four or five times, and every time I'm just astonished by how masterful he is and how goddamn fucking funny he is.

But why did I cast him? I knew I didn't want to go the Charlize Theron in Monster route, where you cast a big star and then ask them to gain a few pounds and kind of form into someone drab and pudgy. I hate that and I don't buy it. So... [laughs] I wanted someone who was genuinely drab and pudgy. No, he just looks the part. First of all, I know he could go dark just based on his whole persona and all of his standup comedy. And I knew he could go dark without losing the audience, while maintaining a likeability. There's something about him that's not just likeable, but loveable. He's just loveable. You just wanna hug him. He's cuddly and cute, even when he says the most bitter, nasty things, he still comes across as cute and cranky as opposed to a bitter, awful misanthrope. A lot of comedians who do that kind of humor, I couldn't say that about. There are people who say nasty things and come off nasty. He just magically stays likeable no matter what he says. You root for him and relate to him.

Paste: So what you're saying is you're hoping viewers will want to hug Paul Aufiero.
Siegel: Just give him a hug. Um, sure, quote me on that. [laughs] He just physically looked the part. I knew I wanted somebody short. It was important to me for him to be someone small in the world. I wanted the football player to tower over him. I wanted the world to tower over him. Any scene when he was standing next to someone, I wanted the person to be taller.

I don't know, when you cast, when you really cast well, the list becomes very, very, very short for most roles. There are generic leading roles where you could plug in any number of leading men into, but when you're talking about a character that's drawn with detail and is specific, usually that list narrows down very quickly to just a tiny handful of people. If you gave me a list of 20 people who were kind of in the ballpark of a Paul Aufiero type, I'd probably eliminate 18 of them.

Paste: In his interview with me, Patton mentioned there being moments where he instinctively tried to be funny when it wasn't really called for. Do you feel like he struggled with that at all?
Siegel: I wouldn't say he struggled; he always got it. The bulk of his acting was on King of Queens, but I don't think of him as a sitcom-y guy. He understood perfectly the type of movie I was going for. We both are fans of '70s movies, all that sort of stuff. He could talk for hours on any number of '70s character actors; that's one of Patton's many areas of geek expertise. He's an enormous, enormous movie buff, incredibly knowledgeable. Way more than I am. So we were on the same page. But he definitely had some residual reflexes from King of Queens, probably, in particular. As a comedian, he has the impulse to go for the punchline. Sometimes I would have to steer him away from delivering something as a joke. But he always, within a few takes, was like, "Oh, you're right, I get it," and then he'd do something perfect.

Paste: Something I feel like he does really well in his standup that may've been utilized in a slightly different way is channeling anger and frustration into a different form of entertainment. I'm sure in playing this character that was a part of it.
Siegel: That was a huge part of it, and a huge part of why I casted him. He's definitely in touch with his inner, angry nerd. He knows nothing about sports, Patton doesn't, but I knew he could apply his own obsessive interests to the movie. When Paul would go on some rant about some coach's decision on fourth and one to go for it or something, [Patton] doesn't even know what I'm talking about, but he knows it's the same as, "In Avengers 115, Galactus..." He could apply that kind of psychology. It's just caring way too much about something that most of the world doesn't give a shit about, whatever that thing happens to be.

Paste: Did he express any concerns to you about playing such a prominent dramatic role, going into it?
Siegel: If he had concerns, and I've read in interviews that he was worried he couldn't pull it off, it didn't really show. It's his first leading role, and I think it was an adjustment for him. Usually for a movie, he blows into town, does three days of funny supporting role and takes off, goes back to L.A. I think it was definitely an adjustment to do 15-hour days for three weeks straight carrying the entire movie. But he seemed to trust my faith in him. If he was worried, he didn't really show it.

Paste: It sounded like, from the way he described it, the production was very guerrila in a sense, which I'm sure was very exciting but also very stressful.
Siegel: Yeah, it was totally stressful and exciting. It was one of those El Mariachi or Clerks kind of low-budget, do-it-yourself things.

Paste: Did you run into any shaky situations or tough spots?
Siegel: Yeah, every day. I'd go to bed at night not knowing where we're going to shoot the hospital scene the next day. Or we'd be shooting in the murder capital of Staten Island and kind of dance around mentioning that to the actor's managers.

That was also, probably truthfully, another reason I cast Patton was because the kind of filmmaking we did, I probably couldn't have gotten away with with a star and an entourage. A bigger star might demand that he have a chair, a trailer, a place to change. It was a very low-budget production, so beyond food, beyond burritos, we didn't provide very much. It was hard enough getting the movie done without having to deal with managers screaming at me. Patton deifnitely was willing to roll with everything we threw at him. We put him up at the Staten Island Hotel. It's called the Staten Island Hotel because it literally is the Staten Island hotel.

Paste: Like, the only one?
Siegel: Yeah, the hotel in Staten Island. I didn't actually go there myself, but I'm quite sure it wasn't... They didn't have room service, for starters. A lot of stars might want something like that.

Paste: Did Big Fan teach you any specific lessons?
Siegel: I will hire a script supervisor next time, which I didn't have in this one, which will prevent things like finding out in the editing room that the character isn't wearing his jacket in multiple takes. I'm really pretty happy, though, considering it was essentially a glorified home movie. I'm really happy how it turned out not doing it through a studio. I didn't have to deal with all the shit you normally have to deal with. I had tremendous creative freedom. The challenge for the next one will be to figure out how to keep all the good things about it while having a bigger budget and more support.

Paste: Despite certain setbacks, then, it sounds like, in a way, you were spoiled with this.
Siegel: I really was, yeah. I didn't have the pressure to cast the wrong actor. Casting is a huge, huge part, I think, of what makes a movie a success or a failure. More than people even realize. Casting is a real headache when you're dealing with a studio, because what they will generally want to do is cast the biggest star possible that will not outright ruin your film. They want the biggest star that won't be outright wrong for the role, rather than casting the person that is the very human embodiment of the role. For example, had The Wrestler been done through a studio, I'm absolutely convinced they would not have had it be Mickey Rourke, who, in my opinion, was absolutely perfect for the role. There were a lot of other people they would've cast who could've been kind of believable but wouldn't have been that guy. I could see them wanting Bruce Willis, for example, just off the top of my head. That'll be a big challenge.