The Ultimate Playlist
Caroline: “I found Jesus.”
Norah: “What??”
Caroline: “Jesus! He’s much taller in person.”
Set in some of New York’s most popular nightclubs, Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist features music by Vampire Weekend, Band of Horses, Bishop Allen, Devendra Banhart, The Real Tuesday Weld, Shout Out Louds, and We are Scientists. Andrew Miano says when they put together the soundtrack, they looked for “the best music you haven’t heard before.”
“Linda Cohen, our music supervisor, had a very difficult job,” says the producer. “She had to come up with a lot of ideas for Pete and myself and a couple other people like Myron Kerstein, the editor, who are all music freaks. But it was also one of the most fun aspects of the movie. As far as getting the bands for the movie, they were really awesome up-and-coming New York based bands that Pete was a fan of.”
Sollett says he was looking for two things in the songs “In a way, we’re handing over a playlist that expresses how we feel to everyone who sees the movie. It was important that we find great pieces of music that weren’t familiar to most people. And on another level we wanted to find songs that were true to how the characters are feeling in the scenes.”
Nick’s playlists are carefully constructed creations that give the listener clues into his inner life. They also are the reason Norah falls in love with him without ever meeting him. Making a playlist, according to Sollett, can be a superficial exercise or a way to reveal oneself through the words and music of others. “You can just be generally sharing music with someone. But then there’s a more pointed way of doing it. The song selection and sequencing are telling a story. For lots of people, myself included, when it’s difficult to express yourself verbally, you can do it by putting together a collection of songs and sharing it with someone.”
The cast has their own experience with playlists. Kat Dennings even admits to making a special Halloween playlist for her boyfriend. “I recorded some Halloween songs with Garage Band for him,” she says. “I made the instruments with my voice, I did everything. I remade “Monster Mash” for him with his name in it.”
Rafi Gavron says his personal playlist would consist of Bob Marley, Al Green, Otis Redding, Marvin Gay, Eryka Badu, Q Tip and Naz. “I love all the stuff before ’98 when hip hop died. I’m all over the board. If it’s a good song, I listen to it.” Actor Jay Baruchel is looking for a girl who loves My Bloody Valentine. “That would be as if the clouds parted and the face of God shined down on me,” he says. “If I ever find a girl with a playlist that has My Bloody Valentine, New Order, Joy Division and Godspeed You Black Emperor, I will try my best to marry her.”
And, says Kerry Kohansky, that is the feeling at the heart of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist. “It’s about music-the effect it has on people, the bond it creates, the memories it stirs up. Nick and Norah are musical soul mates. Their love of music is what brings them together. Music is what makes them fall in love.”
The opening scene of the film features a live performance of “Screw the Man,” The Jerk Offs’ signature tune. “In terms of the actors as musicians, I got lucky,” says Sollett. “Most of them actually are musicians to some degree. Michael is an accomplished guitarist. He plays very well, and sings with a very, very sweet voice.”
While Cera had played guitar before, he had to learn to adapt to the bass for the movie. “It was scary at first,” he says. “We only did a few days of shooting in front of people where we were playing music, but it was the first scene we shot. In the end, it was kind of fun being up there.”
Rafi Gavron had never sung before, but according to Sollett, he was a natural. “As an in-studio musical artist and on stage, he was fantastic,” says the director. “Perhaps he was living out some rock and roll fantasy, or maybe he has some closeted past as a musician, I don’t know.”
Gavron remembers that first day as being incredibly chaotic. “I was so scared at first. I was thinking, `How am I going to do this?’ I’m on stage screaming into the microphone in front of 100 extras who were brilliant. I got the energy from them. They really just played it out and had so much fun with it that I felt comfortable on stage. I found myself doing all these very camp moves on stage with a microphone and ripping my shirt off. I had a bunch of lovely gay guys in the front of the audience who were so encouraging. I never knew I could have that much fun.”
Aaron Yoo grew up playing music, but had never attempted the guitar before. “I took some lessons,” he says. “I was practicing so much that first week that I was ripping the skin off of my fingers, because I didn’t really know how to strum properly. I spent hours just running through these riffs, then the challenge was translating that into an actual performance in a real club.
He says they all took the performance very seriously. “We all had our different takes on it. I have some friends in bands that I stole little pieces from. It was pretty intense for our first day of shooting. But it was a great way to get it started.” The trio’s co-stars have nothing but praise for their performance skills. “They’re really a good band,” says Dennings. “And by the end of the night, the extras were all singing the song and everybody loved it. I think it should be on the radio now.”
The song, “Screw the Man’” was referred to in the book, but written especially for the movie. “We needed to have the song to open the movie,” says Miano. “The minute we got Rafi into the studio to record it, we knew we had it.”
“`Screw the Man’ is an awesome song,” says Ari Graynor. “No one could get it out of their head, it’s really that catchy.” Atlantic Records will release the “Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist Original Motion Picture Soundtrack” in stores and online on September 23rd, 2008.
Driving Through The New York Night
Tris: “It wasn’t hard to find the only Yugo in the city.”
Nick: “I think it’s the only Yugo in the country.”
The locations for Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist are a travelogue of New York City’s high and low life, from famed downtown punk club Crash Mansion to Grace Church, Electric Ladyland Studio to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, Veselka coffee shop in the East Village and that venerable purveyor of late night hot dogs, Gray’s Papaya. Getting the settings right was essential to the filmmakers, even though it might have been less expensive and logistically problematic to shoot in, say, Toronto and try and make it look like New York.
Producer Andrew Miano was adamant that the film be shot in Manhattan. “First, as a company, we try to keep films here, as opposed to going out of the country,” says Miano. “More importantly, the city has a pulse of its own, whether it’s seeing the Empire State Building in the background or navigating the traffic or other things like that you can’t get anywhere else.”
Even so, every night presented a different challenge, according to Kerry Kohansky. “When you’re dealing with a finite budget, and a finite amount of time each night, you have one chance to make the shot. But New York has this frenetic energy that was so fitting for this film. That’s what Nick and Norah’s night is all about.
“We’d be shooting down on the Lower East Side at four in the morning,” she goes on. “People would be coming out of the bars or just walking around. Even though we hired extras, we didn’t even really need to, because there was just all this crazy energy that fueled our shoot. When we were shooting and wrapping at six in the morning, it felt like the night had just ended. And that is kind of the way you feel when you’re out and about in the night in New York City.”
Ari Graynor found the experience of shooting on the city’s streets exhilarating. “New York is so special,” the actress says. “It’s my favorite city in the world and it has an energy like nowhere else and the fact that we’re getting to be here and to showcase that and be a part of it is really incredible.”
“I don’t think it would have been as much fun anywhere else, because in another city everything would be shut down,” says Michael Cera. “In New York, other people are still awake when all of this is going on.”
The city lent its special “glow” to the film, even in the cinematography. “A lot of the film is handheld,” says Peter Sollett. “Almost all of it is shot with long lenses, a cinema veritè feeling. But with the long lenses at night especially, you get a very shallow depth of field and lights start to feel very diffused. Things begin to look very romantic, with soft warm feeling. “There’s a scene where Nick is getting a phone call. He hangs up the phone and he looks at Norah who’s standing on the corner, trying to hail a cab. The shot looked sort of abstract and colorful. It seems like there are a lot of lights floating around Norah’s head. And those are actually just normal New York City traffic lights and street lamps, but with those lenses, everything starts to look very glorious.”
Nick and Norah make their way around New York in Nick’s 1980’s Yugo, a bright yellow contraption of questionable reliability. “The Yugo is a rare Yugoslavian budget automobile from the late `80s,” says Sollett. “They don’t make them anymore and it’s very, very difficult to shoot in something that tight. The crew was on a little bit of a learning curve.
“For the driving scenes, we usually dragged the Yugo onto a flatbed truck, and surrounded it with cameras, but there were times when we had to get cameras in the car. In the scene Caroline locks herself into the car and we wanted to shoot from her point of view. It was quite a feat.
“It’s a very, very tiny car,” he continues. “Since Michael and Kat were actually just getting to know each other, many situations that they were experiencing in these close quarters mirrored what the characters were going through. They were thrust into this high-pressure situation in this little car where they needed to relate to one another, and things were moving a little bit too quickly for things to be comfortable. So in a lot of ways, the acting challenge was part and parcel of the characters’ challenge.”
Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (2008)
Directed by: Peter Sollett
Starring: Michael Cera, Kat Dennings, Rafi Gavron, Aaron Yoo, Alexis Dziena, Ari Graynor, Zachary Booth, Jonathan B. Wright, Justin Rice, Christian Rudder, Darbie Nowatka, Giorgio Angelini
Screenplay by: Lorene Scafaria
Production Design by: David Doernberg
Cinematography by: Tom Richmond
Film Editing by: Myron I. Kerstein
Costume Design by: Sandra Hernandez
Set Decoration by: Sara Parks
Art Direction by: Chuck Renaud, Amy Beth Silver
Music by: Mark Mothersbaugh
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic material including teen drinking, sexuality, language and crude behavior.
Distributed by: Columbia Pictures
Release Date: October 3, 2008
Visits: 98
