Much of the focus of HBO’s new series Girls has centered around the star-making turn by creator Lena Dunham. And deservedly so. But viewers with a predilection towards ornate quippery and the Criterion Collection will find another reason to be excited during the pilot, if only for a moment.
There’s a scene where Dunham’s character tries to turn her unpaid internship in to a paid job. It doesn’t go how she’d like, and now she has neither an internship nor a job, to say nothing of a clear way to achieve her dreams or at least pay the rent. At the end of the scene her boss tells her that he knows this is going to be good for her.
The delivery of this line is something special. It’s thick with detachment and “couldn’t really give a shit.” But there’s just a hint of an implication that the boss really did like this screw-up, and hopes that things aren’t too rough for her out there. There’s a lot packed in to that condensation.
We don’t get to see Chris Eigeman as much as we’d like anymore, but at least he makes every second count.
Though Eigeman admits that the following statement probably hurts some of his lesser-known collaborators’ feelings, the actor/writer/director doesn’t deny that he’s best known for his work with directors Whit Stillman and Noah Baumbach, in which he tended to play sarcastic, fast-talking smart-asses that usually turn out to be much less jerky and much more vulnerable than they initially appear.
“I do think it’s inevitable. Noah and I made three movies together, Whit and I made three movies together. How do you not? I mean, how do you not?” he says over lunch near his Brooklyn work studio. “I just think that those films, the people who were involved in those films, what they’ve gone on to do since those films…those films now have gravity. Like, an enormous amount of gravity to them.”
The gravity-having films he made with those two directors—Metropolitan, Barcelona, Kicking And Screaming, Highball, Mr. Jealousy and The Last Days of Disco—helped define a certain archetype for ’90s indie filmmaking, that of the dry-mouthed neurotic who hopes that if he keeps the wisecracks coming fast enough no one will notice that he gives more of a shit than he’d like you to think. Those films made him a bit of an icon for the urbane and witty, which strikes him as funny. “Y’know, I grew up in Colorado, and spent my summers in Montana as a ranch hand,” he says. “It isn’t the way that I feel myself.”
His last feature film appearance was the 2006 romantic comedy The Treatment. Since then, he’s mainly been seen in one-off roles for television shows ranging from Fringe to Girls to CSI: Miami. He admits it’s mainly a way to stay busy and work with friends (he’s known Girls executive producer Judd Apatow since they worked together on pilots that never got picked up) while trying to get his own projects off the ground. These projects currently include a movie and a TV series, which he declined to discuss at this early stage. Neither of which he has any intention to act in.
In person, Eigeman is polite (he later walked me to my subway stop to make sure I wouldn’t get lost), self-deprecating and still prone to the sort of rapid fire asides that Stillman and Baumbach harnessed so well. After being asked if he thinks that staying in Brooklyn instead of moving to Los Angeles limited the offers he received, he replied “probably in my early 30s there was a great desire to game the system and like really try to shape my career a certain way. By and large…you can say ‘no’ and that’s the easiest way to shape a career. The easiest way is to not do certain things. Like, don’t do porn…would be the most obvious, the most forward example. Although even that may be changing now. Not for me, that’s not changing for me; I don’t want to give anybody the wrong impression.”
Eigeman still has that thing about him, that essential Eigemanness if you will, but has very little desire to use it “for the moment,” he says. “One of the great things about acting is… I think it’s an Elvis Costello lyric: ‘Don’t wear your heart on your sleeve if you’re speaking off the cuff.’
“And there’s that great thing about acting—you’re wearing your heart on your sleeve and you’re speaking off the cuff. You know, you’re fearless about it and, and it’s great. And I love it. But for whatever reason—maybe it’s because I got older when I got older, and then having a kid—I just didn’t want to do that for right now. I’m sure I’ll go back to it. But right now it’s like ‘eh.’ I’d rather sit in my office and try to write…and that I find just as satisfying.”
Typecasting didn’t help. He quickly got pegged as the Sardonic Highbrow Guy, which a man can only do so much of, especially when his standards for sarcasm have been raised sky-high by first-rate collaborators. “If the first film you do that anybody sees you’re wearing a cummerbund and cracking wise like the demon offspring of Noel Coward, your fate is a little bit sealed. That is what it’s going to be,” he says, referring to his character in Metropolitan, his on-screen debut. “And it was great and I love it. But…yeah (taking a break from acting) is a way for me not to be telling that story. To some degree.”
Midnight Sun
He is currently working on a film called Midnight Sun, which is about the creation of the atomic bomb. That’s the backdrop anyway. But it’s not really what it’s about. “You can’t really make a movie about the building of the bomb about the building of the bomb. You just can’t. Because we know how it ends. We know we built the bomb. It’s sort of stupid,” he says. “That’s a real temptation to fall in love with the bomb as you’re writing about it. So this was a way for me not to do it that way.”
Midnight Sun will follow the adventures of the young people who were brought to Los Alamos to figure out how to end World War II. But really it’s a love story between three characters “and the betrayals that happen.” The film is loosely based on Richard Rhodes’ book The Making Of The Atomic Bomb, which he read on a plane several years ago. (Another Eigeman aside: “it is, perhaps, not the, uh, most politically correct book to read for 14 hours on Japan Airlines. They were like ‘really? Of all the books you decided…you went with this? You’re a genius.’”)
He was struck that the mean age of the people in Los Alamos “was something like 27. I mean, they were like kids. They were literally kids that were asked to sort of solve this problem, end the war.” He had also recently read one of Gary Giddins’ books on jazz, and was intriguied by the parallels. “Musically, swing pretty much dominated in the ’30s. And into the late ’30s, swing is beginning to change over to bebop in the early ’40s, which is exactly when this new science of theoretical physics, particularly theoretical atomic physics, was really coming to the fore,” he says. “And all these young people really understood bebop. They really loved the music. And the two things were very analogous to me. And once I started thinking about it that way, then I sort of figured out that I could do the movie this way.”
He’s spent the last several years getting funding, and has won two different grants, including one from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He has also secured Jesse Eisenberg to star. He’s known Eisenberg since hanging around during preproduction for The Squid And The Whale, but downplays the idea of two Baumbach Men working together meaning very much. (“Every film is so odd and filmmaking is so weird that you think it’s a definable thing and it really isn’t. Even when you get out of the experience you’re a little unsure about what that experience was.”) He’s still getting some of the pieces together, but hopes to shoot the film this September. “Nobody needs to be in the middle of a desert in August.”
The price tag on Sun will be $6.5 million, or “$6 million dollars more than what the first one was.” That film was a low-budget but effectively moody crime thriller called Turn The River, which starred Famke Janssen as a pool hustler with an estranged son. You’ll notice that neither of these films are bon mot-filled but ultimately heartfelt comedies. It can take a lot of work to break out of typecasting. “If this were a romantic comedy set in Phoenix in 2011, I would have a much easier time getting this movie made.”
Eigeman is the type of guy that enjoys a good table read, and when he was a regular on shows like Malcolm In The Middle and Gilmore Girls organized group dinners on Sunday nights where anyone who worked the previous week in TV was welcome. He’s not a jerk, he just used to play one a lot. “I like a no-drama set. I welcome visitors by and large, I like music playing on sets between set-ups, all that stuff. Because as an actor—I’ve worked with some directors who have come from that old-school, jumper-wearing, yelling, barking, yelling and barking…and I just do not like that. That is not a fun life.”
Literary Way
During the period in which he was heavily working in the TV industry (he was in a short-lived ABC comedy called It’s Like, You Know… on ABC and was a season-long guest star on Gilmore Girls), Eigeman flew back and forth between Los Angeles and New York so often that the airline attendants all knew him by name. This eventually got to him. “A lot of actors have a deep, deep strain of gypsy blood in them and I’m not one of those guys,” he says. “I like going to my studio every morning and writing for three hours. When I was young, the idea of flying off to do a movie somewhere held great appeal. And it’s a very sexy…I mean an incredibly sexy notion. I just didn’t wear it particularly well.”
Eigeman had one of the best runs any actor had in the independent film scene of the ’90s. He’s proud of his work, but is forthright about why that era came to an end. “For me and I think for many actors of my generation, there was a time when we could do five indies, four indies a year. We would just beat ’em out. It was always the same 30 or 40 actors and we all knew each other. And that started stopping,” he says. “And part of the reason it started stopping was because people started having families and you can’t really do that anymore. So you have to start taking jobs that actually pay money. And once that starts happening, things change. Like, if you’re only doing movies for art, it’s a fantastically privileged position to be in. But you can only do that when you’re in your 20s. Maybe your 30s. But at some point, you need to get somewhere to live. And you need to support your family. You need to do these things. And I take that stuff reasonably seriously.”
That said, he admits somewhat sheepishly that “I guess I never have taken a job thoroughly for money. Like, a total fuckin’ payday. I think every job I’ve ever taken I’ve taken because I actually believe in it in one degree or another.” Which looking at his filmography, seems more or less true, barring a few commercial spots. One imagines he easily could have cashed out with a million cookie-cutter romantic comedies, best-friend roles or maybe even a buddy-cop gig. But even notable resume outlier Maid In Manhattan was helmed by Joy Luck Club/Blue In The Face director Wayne Wang, and low-budget screwball comedy Crazy Little Thing is better than it should be considering that it stars Jenny McCarthy. Which is not to imply that he has a perfect resume by any means.
“I have been awful. I mean, there have been films that I have been just terrible in and I know I’ve been terrible in,” he says, and gamely offers up an example without any pressing. “I had the exquisite moment of running into Bill Moyers and said ‘I’m going to say something to you that I’m going to wager no one has ever said to you.’ He said ‘I really doubt this.’ I said ‘I played you in a movie (the 2002 made-for-TV film Paths To War) and I apologize.’ And he looked at me again and he was like, ‘Yeah, no, you were terrible! I’m well aware!’”
Eigeman says that the whole neurotic, quick-witted persona thing came so easily to him—ranch-hand experience aside—because he was an English and drama major in college, “which is a very literary way of coming into being an actor. That’s why I always really responded well to Whit’s writing, and Noah’s, as well—it’s very literary.” Fans of Eigeman and his prominent collaborators may miss his onscreen presence (a zingy Eigeman rant really could have put Greenberg over the top), but after the churn he’s been through, it seems unreasonable to begrudge him his own literary explorations. For now, anyway. “Not wanting to wear my heart on my sleeve anymore as an actor and to do it as a writer,” he says, “seems more interesting.” Some roles, it seems, will always be hard to get away from.
Until recently, Whit Stillman had not made a film in 14 years, and as you would expect Eigeman was constantly asked about what happened to him in the interim. He is not in the current Stillman film Damsels In Distress and has not worked with Baumbach since the director came back from an extended break with The Squid And The Whale, though he did call and ask Eigeman permission to nick a line of dialogue for Greenberg. Acting abstinence aside, he has not ruled out working with them again, he just worries it wouldn’t be in their best interest. There’s a reason those gentlemen often cast their muse as a neurotic.
“I mean, I had no plans of doing The Last Days of Disco. Whit and I agreed that two was enough. And it wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy working with…I like working with Whit a lot. But we both thought, y’know, ‘let’s not dip into this role one more time and have it bite us in the ass. And then, I think, like two or three days before production he called and was like, ‘Please do it.’
“We’re all still friends. I would love to work with either of them again. Although Whit and I talked about doing something together in Damsels, but there didn’t seem really anything to do, so we just sort of dropped it,” he says. “But at the same time…it would have to be a very specific thing. I think for them more so than for me. Because I come into with so much…it’s a huge amount of shit. There’s just a lot of friendship and history and so on and so forth that might actually not be helpful. Maybe it would be. I don’t know. But you can see the argument against it.”