PAUL REISER: That’s in the questions.

PAUL REISER: I know.

PAUL REISER: She kind of reminds one of Helen. There’s something very similar about Elizabeth Perkins.

PAUL REISER: I didn’t know that, and in both cases I was surprised. When I had in mind somebody, the actresses, the look I had in mind for Jamie Buchman was totally different than Helen. But who don’t choose who you love, love chooses you, as they say in country western songs. And Helen walked in, and you know, it feels correct. Though I never pictured anybody like her looking like her, but that’s who it is, and I don’t know if I had anyone in mind for _. But I was really lucky because Elizabeth Perkins called and said she had read the script and would love to be considered, and I was like, "Yeah! Ok!" How do you write that accent? [Repeats himself] Yeah!

PAUL REISER: I said thank you, yes. That is what I said. We made this movie for $17, and nobody got anything. So it never dawned on me that we would get real people. But she’s great, and there wasn’t all that much for her to do, but every time she’s onscreen she’s great. And Olympia Dukakis, she totally grounds that movie, even before she gets there.

PAUL REISER: This is true.

PAUL REISER: I don’t know; which movies are you referring to?

PAUL REISER: It’s funny, because I wouldn’t call it a road trip movie, and yet I clumsily did to people before I wrote it, because I always knew, the bare bones was there, I knew dad would show up on my door, and he would say "Hey, I don’t know where ma is, ma left me," and we would somehow get in the car. Originally I actually thought that we were going to get in the car and look for mom. Then I thought, that’s nuts, you don’t do that, and you certainly don’t drive at a leisurely pace. You call the FBI, the police. So, I always knew there would be a car, and I knew that somewhere in there would be a baseball game, and a pool hall, somewhere there’s going to be some drinking. I don’t know a lot of road movies. I did think of Rain Man a lot, and I love that movie. I guess it’s certainly a road movie, but again you weren’t watching the road part, you were watching the relationship.

PAUL REISER: Ok, all right, good then. I remember pitching it before I wrote it, I pitched it to a big producer, and I said, "There’s this father and son, and they go on a road trip," and he said, "All right, can I stop you here and tell you what I think?" And I said, "Well, I guess, yeah." As opposed to letting me finish, even though obviously I know you’re saying no, let me go on anyway. He said, "I don’t like road movies." I said, "Ok, thanks." So it’s not a road picture, but it certainly does what a road picture does.

PAUL REISER: Right, and this question, looking for mom, it always sort of struck me, like I remember Twins, which I always thought was such a funny premise, just so great. I’ve never seen something pitched so quickly. Schwarzenegger, DeVito, twins, people are laughing at just that. Everything was really funny, until they went on the road looking for mom. I was really losing the movie there, not that I didn’t think it was great; I’m just using it as an example. But wherever mom was, whether she’s in some health spa in Phoenix, or a retirement home, I don’t want to find mom. No place that she could’ve chosen to go is going to be interesting.

PAUL REISER: Yeah. Diner was the first movie I ever did, and I remember Barry Levinson talking about why he made that choice not to show the wife, the bride at the end of the movie. There’s been so much talking about it, you’re expecting some joke, that you’re expecting she’s ugly, she’s fat, she’s beautiful, whatever. Whatever it is, it’s just going to be too odd, and you’re perfectly right, it was symbolic, the white gown and the veil. Once I finally popped that problem, it was like, ok, mom didn’t go to the place, that’s not the thing, its why did she go, and why she did what she did, and that was of interest.

PAUL REISER: In the derogatory sense, if there’s negative value to the word "road movie", I wasn’t trying to do that, nor was I trying to avoid it. But I did know that it was going to involve the two of them in a car for a prolonged amount of time. If for no other reason, I wanted them to have these experiences and you don’t have them if you stay home. You’re not going to sit down and have an eight-hour talk or a 72-hour talk with your dad.

PAUL REISER: Right. This woman told me, women like to bond face to face and men need to be shoulder to shoulder. They like to shoot together, or drive together, go bowling together, and to a degree I thought that it was really interesting, and a really good point, that eye contact is going to be oft-putting, especially if it’s father and son and there’s heavy shit in the air. But if you’re driving, you have plenty of time, there’s no rush. And even when there’s a lull in conversation, it doesn’t feel like a lull, because you’re taking in the scenery, or you’re stopping for a pee, or stopping for a bite. There wasn’t enough eating in this movie. I thought there would be a lot more restaurants, more ordering. I was surprised when I watched it that there wasn’t more.

PAUL REISER: It wasn’t really eating, it was ordering. I love to see people order. And we did have one scene that was cut. We stole a piece of it for the montage, but it was just after they wake up in the country, and he was eating cantaloupe.

CHRIS NEUMER: Oh yeah, you had like a half a circle spoon, or something like that?

PAUL REISER: Yeah, it was in slow motion, we spread it out. But that was a longer, deathly silent scene, it was beautiful. The whole thing was just miserable, waking up in the country alone. You know, we wake up in the country before he rides in the car, and he’s just being buggy, taking the pits out of the cantaloupe one by one, and looking at them like, "Fuck this, this is going to be a long day."

PAUL REISER: And it was just him looking at me, but it was an unnecessary scene, and it was dull. But the idea of him trying to get what he likes from the waitress, now, a Jack Nicholson toast —

PAUL REISER: There’s almost nothing I wouldn’t like Peter Falk to do. There was a scene we shot when they go in to buy the allergy medicine, and there was a kid who was just extra zippy cheerful, "Paper or plastic today?" Peter Falk — "Whatever, it doesn’t matter." I can’t remember how we did it, but he just kept pushing it on him, and he was like, "Whatever." And the guy just kept wanting an answer. "What’s the difference?" "Plastic." "Well, all right, paper." Just the image of Peter being annoyed by such a mundane thing, but it had no business with anything, I just wanted to hear Peter say, "You know it makes no difference, just make it plastic, all right, make it paper." There’s very little that Peter Falk can do that is not entertaining. He eats entertainingly, he has mood swings that are entertaining, and he’s silent entertaining. Somebody asked me at the screening, well what is it about Peter that made you want to have him do this? I’m so tired of trying to find new ways to say it, there’s just a frequency I get, I like him. But everybody likes Peter. And someone said, oh, he’s a scene stealer, and Peter seemed surprised at that. And I said, well even when you’re not talking, they’re always watching you. That’s true. He’s magnetic and he’s always real. You’re never going to see him not know what to do, or acting bad. He’s just got grounded, real, beautiful acting chops. Go on, try to think of something he could do that would not be funny.

PAUL REISER: No, because it’s not a sequel, but in many ways I’d say this character isn’t that different from Paul Buchman. He’s devoted to his wife; he’s devoted to his family.

PAUL REISER: No, I didn’t think that. I didn’t go out of my way to make my character interesting for the sake of interesting. I knew it was going to be different because it wasn’t my story, it was about Peter Falk. The truth is, Paul was the funny guy, and it was so nice to play serious. The truth is some of my favorite stuff of Mad about You was when we took those surprises: when we had trouble going to bed when she lost the baby, when we were flirting with other people. The painful, the dark side of it is equally as interesting to me.

PAUL REISER: Right.

PAUL REISER: No, not really. Sometimes something interests me, and I think, wow, I’d really like to learn how to do that, and I’ll push myself through it, even if I’m scared. But I won’t chase it.

PAUL REISER: Yeah. I’m working on a show that I’ve wanted to do for a long time, I’m co-writing it with a friend of mine. There’s a very different type of structure, trying to turn it into a half-hour comedy, it’s a one-camera film, but it’s a very different structure and I’ve never seen done before. I know it can be done. It’s just multi-character, multi-plots to make it funny. And it’s about how random people affect each other without knowing each other, and that actions have consequences. That something you do might affect someone who’s never met you, like you said this, and you miss the light, so the guy behind you misses the light, which causes the guy behind you to be late for his thing. And to me what’s fun about this is the randomness, you’re never quite sure where to look, it’s like a shell game. Like, oh, do I look over here? Nope, we’re actually following this guy.

PAUL REISER: And in that case, networking is involved. Well, we need to know who to follow. I’m trying to thread that needle, keeping a lot of characters spinning, and a bit of suspense, but at the same time, not make them dizzy. Give them what they want, a little bit at a time, so they keep coming back every week. So it’s a challenge, and I don’t know quite how to do it, but I’m going to figure it out. Here’s an example, so there’s the need that I want to do it, and then I’ll figure out how to do it. But to challenge myself to do something just because I’ve never done it, that doesn’t feel right. No, I didn’t think people would think it was like Mad about You but I think a lot of people associate that with me, there’s certainly a consistency to my stuff. And I think it actually was all leading to this movie, and this in fact pre-dates Mad about You by a decade.

PAUL REISER: This was shot two years ago, fall of 2003, so almost two years ago. But it pre-dates — in its inception; I had that idea in maybe ’84. I don’t know how seriously I tried; I think I moved like 20 or 30 pages once, picked it up every year or two, to try to take another whack at it. But there’s a line in the movie where Peter says, "Why is it so important to you what happened with your mother and me?" And I said, "What are you kidding me? That’s my life, that’s the big YO. And he says, "Your wife should thank me, because if I didn’t set such a bad example you wouldn’t be knocking yourself out for your wife." And in many ways I think that’s true, and that’s why on Mad about You, I was always kind of intrigued about my parent’s relationship, interested in seeing that, and knowing that they used to be 20-year-olds, and 30-year-olds. Where does that go, were you really like this 50 years ago? Did you become this because of each other, what goes on? So I think that’s what made me focus on relationships, and made me whoever I am as a guy, a husband, and a father. Whoever I am, it has made me that. And here, I’m just going right to the source, I’m going to just jump into it, really look at mom and dad. So as much as it’s a father son movie, Peter and I are in 90 percent of the film, I don’t think that’s what it is. It’s really the son trying to push the parents together.

PAUL REISER: That’s very Peter Falk.

PAUL REISER: Would you like a cigar?

PAUL REISER: Acting wise, dramatically? No, as producer it was very different in the beginning and Raymond was very open about, "Listen, this is your thing."

PAUL REISER: Yeah it is. But in this particular case, it’s because it’s my family’s story. So I wasn’t going to suddenly wake up and say, "Can you put in an amusement park?" Having said that, there were a couple meetings I missed, and I didn’t see the location before we got there and I was like, "Whoa!" But you know that’s part of the reality of making movies, "Can we swing the angle this way so we get a little bit more?" I’d say there were two, maybe three instances like that —

PAUL REISER: Oh, the stadium for the baseball game. I always pictured a bigger ballpark, like a 7000-seat stadium. And Raymond fell in love with this ballpark that was about 400-seat, and there were houses in the background, and he thought it was so funny that there would be houses overlooking the stadium. And I said, yes it is funny, but it just looks like a park now. So I just thought, ok, it might not be minor league, it might just be the championship of this town, it does not make a difference. But by the time I’d got on it, that ship had sailed, we’d bought the location, and I thought, "Oh fuck, ok." And then I tried to put my hat on, take the producer hat off and play the scene. And that’s a big reason why I didn’t want to direct. I already spent years putting my gut into this, let me get someone else to collaborate, someone else to figure out the shots, and bring in some creative ideas, and he brought in terrific creative ideas, he’s a writer so he also had some very helpful tweaks to the script, and instructed, you know, "Put a scene after that." And I would say, "Gee, why would I do that, it’s perfect the way it is." And then he would push me and I would do it, and say, you’re absolutely right. So there were things like that, and I was happy and grateful to have him. I used to implore him, please, tell me, too much, too little, tell me as an actor? I can’t always tell how I’m coming across, you’re pushing too hard, you’re hitting the joke, it’s too lack of energy, too mean — whatever it is, whatever the color is that you want to adjust. So I was certainly happy to have another set of eyes.