Director Marc Lawrence on 'Music and Lyrics'

DATE February 28, 2007 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A

Interview: Writer/director Marc Lawrence talks about his new film,
"Music & Lyrics"
TERRY GROSS, host:

My guest Marc Lawrence wrote and directed the new movie, "Music & Lyrics."
It's filled with in-jokes about '80s pop. The film stars Hugh Grant as a
washed-up '80s pop star who's reduced to performing at amusement parks, and
then an opportunity comes his way. A Britney Spears-type teen star who was
his fan as a child asks him to write a song for her. If she likes it, she'll
record it and debut it in a duet with him. He's good at writing melodies but
he doesn't write lyrics. In the process of searching for a lyricist, he
realizes that the woman who just started taking care of his plants seems to
have a way with words, so he recruits her to collaborate on the song. She's
played by Drew Barrymore. Several of the songs in the film were written by
Adam Schlesinger of the band, Fountain of Wayne.

In this scene from "Music & Lyrics," Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore are in his
apartment trying to write the song.

(Soundbite from "Music & Lyrics")

(Soundbite of piano playing)

Ms. DREW BARRYMORE: And I don't think those chords are right.

Mr. HUGH GRANT: Oh.

Ms. BARRYMORE: It has to sound different than the verse.

Mr. GRANT: Well, what kind of difference did you have in mind?

Ms. BARRYMORE: I don't know. Something sadder, you know? And I still don't
like my line about `places in my mind.'

Mr. GRANT: It's fine.

Ms. BARRYMORE: Fine isn't good.

Mr. GRANT: Well, yeah, we only have time for fine. I tell you what, look,
you--we'll change your line about `places in my mind' if I can keep the chord
sequence into the bridge. Yep?

Ms. BARRYMORE: This isn't a negotiation. It's either right or wrong,
inspired or insipid.

Mr. GRANT: I'll tell you what it is. It's 4 in the morning and we're not
writing the last movement of the Jupiter symphony. It's a song for someone
whose last hit was called "Welcome to Booty Town." Please, get back to work.

Ms. BARRYMORE: (Unintelligible)...won't like it.

Mr. GRANT: Oh.

Ms. BARRYMORE: And it's "Entering Booty Town."

Mr. GRANT: Oh, right!

(End of soundbite)

GROSS: Marc Lawrence, welcome to FRESH AIR.

What was the start of this idea? Like, what idea did the movie start with?

Mr. MARC LAWRENCE: Well, Hugh and I--Hugh Grant and I had worked together on
a previous film, and we had a great time together so we were trying to come up
with something else to do and I'm a failed musician. I play a lot of
instruments badly and I'm obsessed with music and obsessed with songwriting,
and so it--things just sort of took a natural course in that direction. What
would I write about? Songwriting. How could I get music to be an integral
part of a film? And then the idea of a songwriter and combining that with
Hugh and given Hugh's age, when would he have been a songwriter and then the
idea that he would have been a performer-songwriter, maybe a little bit more
visual and more interesting and maybe a little bit less cerebral, in a good
way. So that was the genesis of the thing.

GROSS: So the whole idea of it being about a washed-up '80s guy who had been
in a hit band was because of Hugh Grant's age, not because of your particular
interest in '80s bands?

Mr. LAWRENCE: Unfortunately, that's true. I wish I could tell you that I
was obsessed with Wham! or Duran Duran. The truth is during the '80s, I was
much more likely to be listening to Elvis Costello or The Clash or the Ramones
or The Beatles or the Stones or Talking Heads. I was aware of all those other
bands. They were kind of inescapable, but truthfully, I didn't take them
particularly seriously nor was I a big fan. When we began doing this film and
I went back to do research, which included looking at a lot of those videos
and listening to a lot of that music that I hadn't, that's when I really
started to develop an affection for it, because once you remove the cheesy
sound effects and production effects and, you know, you're watching the video,
you can, by the fifth or sixth time you're looking at it, you can sort of
ignore the tight pants and the insane hair. There was a lot of good music...

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

Mr. LAWRENCE: ...and so I enjoy it more now than I did when I started the
project.

GROSS: Well, there's a song called "Pop! Goes My Heart" that Hugh Grant's
band in the movie, Pop!, records and like that's their big hit from the '80s.

Mr. LAWRENCE: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: "Pop! Goes My Heart." So you had to get somebody to like write this
song so...

Mr. LAWRENCE: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

GROSS: So who did you choose for "Pop! Goes My Heart"?

Mr. LAWRENCE: "Pop! Goes My Heart" was written by Andrew Wyatt and Alana
Vincente, I believe, is the pronunciation of her last name, and Andrew is just
a brilliant and talented songwriter and musician and Andrew wrote not only
"Pop! Goes My Heart" but pretty much all of the songs for the Britney
Spears-type character in the film, and Andrew actually has quite a bit of
experience writing for and producing songs for Britney Spears and Christina
Aguilera and that group of people.

GROSS: Well, let's play the song and then I'll ask you to describe what the
video is like. So here's "Pop! Goes My Heart" from the soundtrack of "Music
& Lyrics."

(Soundbite from "Pop! Goes My Heart")

Unidentified Singers: (Singing) "I never thought that I
could...(unintelligible)...be satisfied. Every time that I look in your angel
eyes, a shock inside means that words you can't describe...(unintelligible).
Something in the way you move I can't deny. Every word from your lips is a
lullaby. A twist of fate makes life worthwhile. You are gold and silver. I
said I wasn't going to lose my head, but then, pop! goes my heart. Pop, goes
my heart. I wasn't going to fall in love again, but then, pop, goes my heart.
I just can't let you go. I can't lose that feeling. (Unintelligible)"

(End of soundbite)

GROSS: OK, so we just heard the song that was written for the '80s band in
"Music & Lyrics" in which Hugh Grant plays a songwriter, and there's a great
video--my guest, Marc Lawrence, directed the movie.

And, Marc, there's a great video that opens the movie...

Mr. LAWRENCE: Great.

GROSS: A great '80s video for this song so I imagine like you conceived and
shot the video yourself?

Mr. LAWRENCE: I did. Once Andrew had written the song, I used that as the
kick-off point for how we were going to construct the video, and I went back
and watched a lot of those '80s videos and they--a lot of them had performance
aspects to them--you know, you see the band playing and jumping around, and
then a lot of them also had acting, if you can call it that, story lines,
which were always just unbelievably over the top, with everyone overemoting
and shaking their heads and just a great theater of bad acting. And so I
thought it would be nice to combine those two, so we came up with that little
story line working off of the lyrics where Hugh's heart is broken because his
girl has left him, and it's so broken that he winds up in the hospital and
then he has a dream about the girl who left him, and then the sexy nurse who
revives him reinstills his faith in love. And he bounces back off the gurney
and it's, you know, it's taken from a Chekhov short story and...

GROSS: And needless to say there's lots of quick edits and there's like black
and white checkerboard background...

Mr. LAWRENCE: Yes.

GROSS: ...through a lot of it. So what videos did you study for this? And
what were certain things you felt like, `I've got to do my version of that.'

Mr. LAWRENCE: Well, Terry, I can let you in on this secret, which is, if
anyone goes and decides to watch the Wham! video "Wake Me Up Before You Go
Go," you will certainly notice some similarities. That was--if there was a
template for it, that was it, and partially because the idea for Hugh's story
mirrored to me kind of a George Michael-Andrew Ridgeley story where there were
two guys in a band and one went on to become a household name and a huge star
and the other one was more likely to be the subject of a where-are-they-now?
show. So that led us to Wham!. And then the feeling of the band of Pop! I
thought should be closer to, you know, a teenybopper sort of a Beatles in the
moptop era rather than anything darker. So I watched all the Wham! videos.
I watched a bunch of the Duran Duran videos and Flock of Seagulls.

GROSS: Well, I want to get back to the soundtrack to "Music & Lyrics," and
one of the songs on here was actually written by your 13-year-old son. How
did that happen?

Mr. LAWRENCE: Well, we paid him so he was happy to do it, and he's--no
he's--you know, it's hard because you're always going to sound like, you know,
my grandparents talk to me about their kids. Everyone's kid is the greatest
but Tom Clyde is a--he's the musician I always wanted to be and--but it's
funny, when he was four, four and a half, he was playing some fairly mean
piano. And my dad, who was a professional musician for many years, I remember
we--when Clyde was four, we heard some Beethoven's 9th coming from the piano
upstairs in my parents' house, and we both looked at each other and went up
there, and there's this tiny little kid sitting there playing it by ear with
both hands and, you know, we said, `Clyde, where'd you learn to do that?' and
he said, `Well, I heard it.' And he said, `I can also do it in this key' and
then he started composing so that's--and my father and I just immediately
began crying, knowing after generations of failed musicians, we finally had a
real one because my mom was a singer and my aunt was an opera singer, so there
was a lot of music, and I had played in bands for a long time. And he writes
a lot of songs and he writes terrific songs, and as I said, he'd written the
theme song for "Miss Congeniality" when he was seven, and I needed a ballad
for this particular spot in the film, and he had already written this song.
And I thought, I didn't know if he'd finished it, but I thought it would be a
good candidate for the movie, and so I asked him to finish it, and he went
into his room, and he, you know, has the whole pro tools set up and, you know,
he produced the demo version of it, and so that became the song in the movie,
and that is Clyde playing piano on it.

GROSS: My guest is Marc Lawrence. He wrote and directed the new film "Music
& Lyrics." Here's some of the song his son wrote. Hugh Grant is singing.

(Soundbite of song from "Music & Lyrics")

Mr. GRANT: (Singing) "It's been so long since I've known right from wrong,
got no job. Sometimes I just sit down and sob, wondering if anything will go
right or will you dance with me tonight. When..."

(End of soundbite)

GROSS: We'll talk more with Marc Lawrence after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Marc Lawrence. He wrote and
directed the new film, "Music & Lyrics," which stars Hugh Grant as an '80s
has-been pop star who is writing a new song and who kind of recruits as his
lyricist his--the woman who's taking care of his plants who's played by Drew
Barrymore.

The dialogue in "Music & Lyrics" is really funny, lots of witty retorts and
caustic asides from Hugh Grant. You're obviously good at writing this kind of
humor. Can you draw on this in real life? Like, can you quip in real life?

Mr. LAWRENCE: Well, I try to do this with my wife but it requires me writing
the setups for her, and she's often not amenable to that. If she'll do the
right setup, I can be phenomenally witty. Yeah, I can. You know, the first
thing that I did professionally was writing on a sitcom, and it was called
"Family Ties." And when I showed up there--and this was shot out in LA. I was
24 years old, and I had just dropped out of law school, and I'd never written
with anyone else. I had just written a few scripts and was lucky enough to
have them like it and flying me out there and, suddenly, I was sitting at a
table in LA at Paramount Studios with five other, really talented, really
clever, really smart writers, and my first day there, you know, we would all
sit around the table together and work on script which involved taking the
script that we had on the stage that week and improving it, and I sat there,
and people were so fast and so funny and so quick, and I remember calling
Linda--was not my wife yet but we were already going out--and calling her and
saying, `I don't think I'm going to be able to do this. It's just too fast.'
And--but, you know, I stayed on the show, and they were nice enough to keep me
on the show, and very quickly, I sort of got into that rhythm and it became
one of my favorite things to do, and TV training--you know, I was at that
show, writing it and producing it for five years, and that kind of training is
really, really invaluable, I think, when you're doing a comedy.

GROSS: Now you got started in your writing career writing for "Family Ties,"
and that happened because you sent them a spec script.

Mr. LAWRENCE: Yeah.

GROSS: What was that script that you sent?

Mr. LAWRENCE: I had--actually, the first script that I wrote was called "The
World's Most Famous House," and it was based on my experiences at college,
living in an off-campus house with some people. And I sent that script out--I
got a book called "The Writer's Market," which I believe is still published
now, and it listed all the agents that you could send the script to, all the
WVA-approved agents. And, you know, I typed my script and I copied it--this
was sort of before computers. It was 1983, I guess. I didn't have a
computer, and put them--I guess about 50 or 60 of them in envelopes and sent
them out to pretty much every agent in that book, and they all came back, not
even rejected, just unread, except for two. One of them was from a lady named
Marsha Amsterdam, who still lives here in Manhattan, and she was a literary
agent mostly concentrating on books, and she said, `You know, I read this and
I liked it. Come on up and talk,' and she became my first agent, and she
said, `What would you like to do?' and I said, `I'd like to write for movies
and television,' and she said, `Let's start with TV because the scripts are
shorter and faster.' And I had not watched television in quite a while at
college or whatever sitcoms were on, so I got a copy of TV guide and I circled
all the sitcoms that were on that year, and I--on a little black and white
television I started watching them, and the two that struck me were "Cheers"
and "Family Ties," and I particularly was attracted to the character that
Michael Fox was playing on "Family Ties," so I went and wrote a script, and
she sent it out, and they called and they flew me out and then, suddenly, I
was there.

And the only other script that was read of those 50 or 60 that I sent out was
by a man named Jack Rawlins, who, of course, is Woody Allen's producer--not
just Woody Allen, but he and Billy Crystal and David Letterman. He said,
`Come on up, I want to talk to you.' And I went up to his office on 57th
Street, sat in this room surrounded by these huge pictures of Woody Allen,
just--I had run out from the job I was in at the time on my lunch hour, and he
walked in carrying two pastrami sandwiches, and he said, `One of these is for
you,' and he sat down and we just started talking. We must have talked for
two and a half hours, and it was everything you wanted show business to be.
This was a man who just loved comedy writing because he loved it, and he
answered all my questions about Woody Allen and about comedy writing, and at
the end of it, he said, `Take a look at this script. I think this is the kind
of movie that you could write,' and it was a movie that he had just produced
and it was called "Arthur." And it was the first screenplay I had ever seen in
my life, and I took that and I ran out of the office, and it was probably
still the most thrilling interview I ever had in show business. So those were
the two people who responded to the script.

GROSS: Marc Lawrence, thanks a lot for talking with us.

Mr. LAWRENCE: It's a pleasure, Terry. Thank you.

GROSS: Marc Lawrence wrote and directed the new film, "Music & Lyrics."

If you want to catch something you missed on our show, FRESH AIR is now
available as a podcast on our Web site, freshair.npr.org.

I'm Terry Gross. We'll close with another scene from the soundtrack of "Music
& Lyrics" featuring Drew Barrymore and Hugh Grant.

(Soundbite from "Music & Lyrics")

Mr. GRANT: "Way Back into Love." Take one.

(Soundbite of piano playing)

Ms. BARRYMORE: I'm--I'm getting really nervous.

Mr. GRANT: You'll be fine. Just use your normal nice voice that I've heard
so much over the last three days.

Ms. BARRYMORE: It's like my throat's closing up. It's like anaphylactic...

Mr. GRANT: It's fine. It's just a three-minute song.

Ms. BARRYMORE: (Singing softly) "I've been living with a shadow overhead.
I've been sleeping..."

Mr. GRANT: Just a little bit louder because this song is intended for
humans. OK? "Way Back into Love." Take two.

Ms. BARRYMORE: (Singing) "I've been living with a shadow overhead. I've
been sleeping with a cloud above my head. I've been lonely for so long,
trapped in the past I just can't seem to move on."

Mr. GRANT: (Singing) "I've been writing all my hopes and dreams away. Just
in case I ever need them again someday. I've been setting aside time to clear
a little space in the corners of my mind."

Mr. GRANT and Ms. BARRYMORE: (Singing in unison) "All I want to do is find
a way back into love. I can't make it through without a way back into
love..."

(End of soundbite)