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Jack Goes Boating is a tale of love, betrayal, friendship and grace centered around two working-class New York City couples. The film stars John Ortiz (American Gangster), Daphne Rubin-Vega (Broadway’s “Rent”), Amy Ryan (Gone Baby Gone) and Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote), with Hoffman making his feature directorial debut. Bob Glaudini (“A View From 151st Street”) adapted his acclaimed Off Broadway play for the screen.
Jack (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Connie (Amy Ryan) are two single people who on their own might continue to recede into the anonymous background of the city, but in each other begin to find the courage and desire to pursue their budding relationship. In contrast, the couple that introduced them, Clyde (John Ortiz) and Lucy (Daphne Rubin-Vega), are confronting unresolved issues in their marriage.
Jack is a limo driver with vague dreams of landing a job with the MTA and an obsession with reggae that has prompted him to begin a half-hearted attempt at growing dreadlocks. He spends most of his time hanging out with his best friend and fellow driver Clyde and Clyde’s wife Lucy.
The couple set Jack up with Connie, Lucy’s co-worker at a Brooklyn funeral home. Being with Connie inspires Jack to learn to cook, pursue a new career and take swimming lessons from Clyde so he can give Connie the romantic boat ride she dreams of. But as Jack and Connie cautiously circle commitment, Clyde and Lucy’s marriage begins to disintegrate. From there, we watch as each couple comes face to face with the inevitable path of their relationship.
From Page to Screen
Jack Goes Boating began its life as a play produced by LAByrinth Theater Company. The creative home of former co-artistic directors Philip Seymour Hoffman and John Ortiz, the group includes some of New York’s most respected theater artists. Written by LAByrinth company member Bob Glaudini and directed by Peter DuBois (current artistic director of the Huntington Theatre Company), the play started with a critically and commercially acclaimed Off Broadway production starring Hoffman, Ortiz, Rubin-Vega and Beth Cole.
Glaudini says the idea for the story originated in what he calls a personal catastrophe. “At first, it was about a relationship between two of the characters that was one of the most hateful, ugly, awful things I could imagine,” he says. “Fortunately, as I wrote, the characters wouldn’t let me do that. But one of the themes that has remained throughout is that even if you are able to forgive a betrayal, you may still not be able to reconcile it.”
The playwright asked his colleagues at LAByrinth to take a look at his script. “I remember thinking it must be special because he had this sparkle in his eye,” says John Ortiz. “We workshopped it at the Summer Intensive, a retreat the company does every year. Everybody flipped over it and we decided to mount it as a production. All the stars were aligned in a perfect way.”
Even before the production opened, producer Beth O’Neil saw the play’s potential to become a feature film. “I read it in 2005 just after I produced another play by Bob Glaudini called ‘The Claiming Race,’” she remembers. “When he told me he had a new play, of course I wanted to read it. It was amazing. I would describe it as an unconventional romantic comedy about ordinary working-class New Yorkers, people we don’t usually get to see in films or plays. The characters were so vibrant.”
O’Neil urged Glaudini to adapt his work for the screen and took an early draft of the play’s script to Peter Saraf of Big Beach Films, believing that its quirky sensibility and emotional resonance would appeal to the producer of Little Miss Sunshine and Away We Go.
After reading the first draft of Bob’s screenplay, Saraf had the opportunity to see LAByrinth’s production of the play and this further ignited Saraf’s interest in the project. “Big Beach likes to make movies that get to the heart of the human experience,” says Saraf. “We like movies that are entertaining, but that are really about the ways in which people connect.”
Producer Marc Turtletaub adds, “Jack Goes Boating is an unusual love story in that it’s about three couples: a marriage that is reaching its end, a new romance that is blossoming and also the friendship between the two male characters in the film, Clyde and Jack, and what it means to them. The writing was already incredibly cinematic and it was easy to see how it could be opened up.”
O’Neil, Ortiz, Glaudini, Hoffman and Hoffman’s business partner Emily Ziff met with Saraf and his partners, and Bob and Phil agreed to begin the hard work of creating a film from the play, with Hoffman signing on to direct his first feature film. Involving LAByrinth in the workshopping of the screenplay was a natural and productive step in the development process. O’Neil recalls, “They workshopped the screenplay two years in a row at LAB’s Summer Intensive in Vermont.”
For Glaudini, returning to the script provided a new kind of satisfaction. “I got to revisit the work,” he says. “The experience of the play was overwhelmingly positive, but re-imagining it as a film gave me an opportunity to sharpen and focus it even more.”
Working with notes from the producers, Glaudini reshaped the original material into his first screenplay. “I was fortunate enough to work alongside Phil while I was doing it,” he says. “As the director, he processed the notes in ways that worked for him, and we continued the draft based on that. I don’t think writers often have the opportunity to shape the scenario with the person who is forming the artistic vision for the film. It was a kind of a rare collaboration.”
“Bob is an incredibly adept and collaborative writer who is very good at thinking in different mediums,” says Saraf.
“It was a natural choice to have Bob write the screenplay,” agrees Ziff. “Who better to see this through? The characters and story began with him, and he knows it all better than anyone. I can’t imagine how anybody else could have realized it so fully as a film.”
Jack Goes Boating is Philip Seymour Hoffman’s first foray into feature film directing, but he is an accomplished stage director and brought those skills to the project. “Phil did something I’ve never experienced on a film,” says Saraf. “He had a very long rehearsal process, not just with the actors, but with the director of photography, the script supervisor and the first assistant director. They not only worked on the performances and the script before they got to set, they also worked on the blocking and where the camera would be. The core team arrived incredibly well prepared and aware of what the task ahead would be.”
Hoffman had been interested in directing a film for some time, but taking on the dual roles of actor and director proved daunting. “As a director, I had to be available to the other people,” he says. “As an actor, it’s a small movie with four main characters. In a lot of scenes, there are just two actors, so you’re half the acting. That was tricky. No one should be thinking about themselves that much through any given day. It’s just not healthy.”
Fortunately, says Hoffman, he had plenty of help from his co-creators. “Our producers Peter Saraf and George Paaswell were on the set to provide support the whole way,” he says. “Bob Glaudini was there every day to support us and to be a watchful eye if we needed to do any changes in the writing. I wanted him to be aware of what had to happen and make sure he was part of it. Everyone on the film was personally involved, which made shooting it really satisfying. It wasn’t just another job.”
Saraf adds: “Bob and Phil have a working relationship already from LAByrinth, so they have a kind of shorthand. It was fascinating to see what a collaborative process it was.
“Working with Phil has been an incredible experience overall,” continues the producer. “It was a joy to watch him take the unparalleled instincts he has honed as an actor and translate that into directing. It’s not an easy feat, but Phil is a natural filmmaker, passionate and practical at the same time. And he’s incredibly well prepared.”
“Jack Goes Boating is funny, but the humor comes from real situations, not jokes,” adds Turtletaub. “It’s about real people, all of them very sympathetic in their own way, who are struggling with what it means to be in love, what it means to be committed to a relationship. Audiences can expect to come to the movie theater and see incredible acting by a cast that could not be more perfect in a story that will make them laugh.
“And it will give them the opportunity to incorporate their own story into what they’re seeing on the screen,” says Saraf. “I think that the best thing we can hope for when we go to the movies is to be able to identify with what we’re seeing up there and take something of it away with us.”
The Cast
Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Jack, a lonely limo driver in search of a soul mate. “Jack is a guy who’s probably had a few relationships in his life, but nothing really substantial,” Hoffman says. “Fear has dictated his comings and goings during the first half of his life. He’s not stunted or anything; it’s all fear. He actually is kind of a cool guy.”
Like the other characters, the part of Jack changed during the evolution from play to movie. “I’m glad I played the part before even though it was much different,” says Hoffman. “I think if I hadn’t it would have been a lot harder. Jack’s not like me in a lot of ways, so there was some serious work that needed to be done, specific work to make this guy come off the way he does.”
Comparing the two experiences, the actor says, “When you’re working on a play, you try to explore the things that might only be implied and fill in the blanks. In the movie, we got to literally explore a lot of different environments and interactions that couldn’t be seen in the play. That made our performances in the film more subtle. We started to see other things as we explored. I was really able to go back in there and look at the part in a different way, a way I ultimately thought was better.
“Actors are responsible to the people we play,” says Hoffman. “I don’t label or judge my characters. I just play them as honestly and expressively as I can in the hope that people who ordinarily turn their heads in disgust might think, ‘What I thought I’d feel about that guy, I don’t totally feel right now.’”
Reprising their roles from the stage, John Ortiz and Daphne Rubin-Vega, play Clyde and Lucy, Jack’s best friends in the movie, “They’re essential. They’re amazing actors and they’re quite stunning in this film.” says Hoffman.
John Ortiz has appeared in feature films including American Gangster and Public Enemies, but is well known in the New York theater community for his eclectic stage resume, including the recent Public Theater production of “Othello” in which he played the title role opposite Hoffman as Iago. “Working with Phil for the past 15 years has been truly inspiring,” says Ortiz. “If I have an artistic brother, it’s him. Playing opposite him allows me to go to amazing places as an actor, and the give and take between us is really special. It goes beyond any expectations.”
Clyde, who works with Jack as a limo driver, and his wife Lucy are trying to give Jack a jumpstart romantically. “Jack’s one of those lonely guys whose friends always wish had someone special in his life,” says Ortiz. “He’s a great guy and it’s always a mystery to Clyde why he’s alone.” Meanwhile, Clyde has come to a point in his life where he is trying to decide what comes next for him. “Clyde’s a complicated fellow,” says Ortiz. “He’s a guy who unfortunately is not in the place in his life that he aspires to be. He’s hitting 40, he’s having some marital problems and being a limo driver is not the career he envisioned. In the course of the movie, he is actively trying to deal with all of that in as constructive a way as possible. I call it a coming-of-age story for people in their 40s.”
No one was better suited to lead the actors through the film than Hoffman, says Ortiz. “As a director, Phil is tough, which I think is an extension of him as an actor. What makes him tough is his quest for truth. He’s smart and insightful, and extremely specific. He’s also not afraid to try many different things even if he may not exactly know what it is that he’s going after.”
Daphne Rubin-Vega, who originated the role Mimi in the Broadway musical “Rent,” plays Lucy, Clyde’s ambitious wife. “Lucy is a hardworking person,” says the two-time Tony Award nominee. “She’s blunt, straightforward and she gets things done. Right now, she’s really frustrated. I don’t think that the other characters know the huge changes that are about to happen in their lives, but Lucy does.”
Clyde and Lucy are Jack’s best friends, almost his family. They set him up on a date with Connie, a co-worker of Lucy’s. “It’s a story about relationships,” says Rubin-Vega. “Clyde and Lucy have made Connie and Jack a bit of a pet project as a way to get outside their own problems and frustrations with their relationship.”
The actress says having worked on the play gave her a huge advantage in the film role. “I came to the table with so much information, even though Lucy has changed a lot from the play. This need to change, to make something happen, has become much more urgent. There were a lot of new things that we discovered working on the film.”
When asked how it was to work with Hoffman as a director, she points out, “Phil the actor and Phil the director are not two different people. Phil is a high voltage individual and I adore working with him, because he’s very clear, he’s very specific and he gives a lot of guidance. He never stops rolling up his sleeves and working so it’s really exciting to try and keep up with that. He sets the bar high and we all try to keep it there.”
Lucy introduces Jack to Connie, a single woman she has just started working with at Thomas Mortuary, where they sell grief seminars to funeral directors across the country. Amy Ryan, who plays Connie, is a new addition to the foursome.
“Connie is not very good at her job,” says Ryan, an Oscar nominee for her searing performance as a drug-addled, neglectful mother in Gone Baby Gone. “With luck and perseverance, she’s getting through it. Connie’s the type of person who misconstrues a lot of situations. But she’s working through that, trying to look at things more positively.”
Ryan came into the mix already knowing Hoffman, Ortiz and Rubin-Vega socially and having worked with Hoffman on Capote. “It was intimidating to join such a well-established group,” she admits. “But they didn’t beat me up the first day of school or anything like that.
“Since we had the luxury of rehearsing extensively, I had time to get to know them better,” the actress says. “We blocked it all out and talked about the scenes. I think even John and Daphne and Phil were rediscovering themselves. Many things had shifted in the script and they had as many questions as I had.”
Ryan marvels at Hoffman’s ability to balance his duties as actor and director. “There’s such great precision to what Phil does,” she says. “He stayed in character, while he was keeping an eye on everything else.
Actor and director Tom McCarthy (The Visitor, The Station Agent) took on the role of Dr. Bob, the owner of a funeral parlor with a side business offering self-help tapes to other morticians. “A telemarketing business run out of the basement is his get-rich-quick scheme,” says McCarthy. “There’s something very humorous about his earnestness. He takes it very seriously.”
The fact that the film tackles themes that are prominent in McCarthy’s own directorial efforts, made the project very attractive to him. “The stories that I’m drawn to are about despairing people who meet in an unusual way in an unusual place and form an unexpected bond that helps them work through some things together,” he says. “And I really appreciate the dark, wry humor that this piece is full of. I found it to be a really original and compelling script.”
McCarthy has long known many of the actors and relished the opportunity to work with them. “The process feels intimate because the people feel connected and invested,” he says. “That raised the bar for everyone. I had to find a way to fit into a family that was already set up, but it was a really warm and supportive environment. Our director had a way of eliciting the best from everyone in a subtle but direct way.
“I go to the movies to see original characters and original stories,” McCarthy says. “I don’t care how big or how small the movie is. I want to see people connect and I think this movie provides that in a very original, very funny and, at times, very dramatic way.”
Salvatore Inzerillo, a LAByrinth company member who has appeared on “Law & Order,” had the opportunity to create another character, The Cannoli, Clyde’s rival for Lucy’s affections. “I had seen the play and there were a lot of jokes about The Cannoli, but he never appeared,” remembers Inzerillo. “Being able to bring this guy to life was pretty exciting stuff.
“He’s head pastry chef at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Hence ‘The Cannoli.’ Like Clyde and Jack, he comes from a blue-collar background, but he’s achieved more. It plays nicely off the struggles both Clyde and Jack are having in their lives.”
Of his fellow cast members Inzerillo says, “Bob has a wonderful gift for painting everyday characters with very real eccentricities and weaving in some very dark humor. And if Phil says jump off this cliff, I don’t need to look down. I’m just going do it. I have absolute trust in him.”
Ziff believes the filmmakers could not have assembled a better cast. “We were completely blessed,” she says. “The camaraderie of the actors working together to make the film was palpable throughout.”
New York State of Mind
Jack Goes Boating was filmed in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, at New York landmarks including the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, Grand Central Station, Bethesda Fountain and the Lake in Central Park, Hunter College and Greenwich Village, as well as many less famous locations. “It is a classic New York film,” says Hoffman. “There are certain films that belong in certain places. It’s shot quite beautifully and it’s shot like New York should be shot, which I credit completely to Mott Hupfel, the director of photography. I can’t imagine working with anyone else if I direct again.”
Producer Saraf believed strongly that shooting in New York was essential to film’s success. “I loathe the idea of having one place to double for another,” he says. “You’re constantly fighting the reality of the world you’re in, which adds a burden to filmmaking that’s unnecessary. These characters are absolutely true New Yorkers and don’t belong anywhere else.”
Production designer Thérèse DePrez, a longtime New York resident, took the task of creating this view of her hometown very seriously. “I always strive to find locations that nobody’s ever shot in before,” she says. “I try to find the really obscure locations, the best places for these characters that also work within the needs of production.”
DePrez drew inspiration from a collection of snapshots of the city, which she put together into a presentation for the director and producers to give them a taste of her personal New York. “I am constantly taking pictures of things like random signage, people and what they are holding,” she explains. “I’ve been collecting those photos for at least 15 years now and they’ve yielded some really great details, some of which I wouldn’t believe were real if I didn’t have the picture. For this movie, I pulled out some of my favorite New York moments.”
The images included pictures of people who reminded her of the characters, different New York locations, winter scenes and the palette she envisioned using. “I wanted to show Philip my ideas for the visual tone of the movie to make sure we were on the same page,” she says. “It wasn’t simply a look; it was the feeling I think the movie evokes. Some of the pictures are comical, some of them are very realistic, and they all represented ideas about how to shoot New York in a singular way.”
Because shooting in New York presents it own set of challenges, from over-exposed locations to daily transportation, the producers decided to bring in Deprez and location manager Jeff Caron early in pre-production “We were able to power scout,” she says. “We hit the street running, with a hardcore agenda to find all the different hubs for the movie, especially in Hell’s Kitchen. I found a great deal of inspiration on those initial scouts from the people in the neighborhoods and how they live.”
Producer Ziff says the decision paid off. “Jeff and Thérèse did an amazing job of sourcing places that we haven’t seen before on film. It’s going to challenge audiences to see New York in a new way. I don’t know how you could tell the story anywhere else. So much of who these characters are and how they see themselves is a reflection of what it is like to live in this city. It’s a city built on the constant interplay between different classes and different cultures, and that is part of what drives these characters and complicates things for them.”
Tom McCarthy, who set his 2007 film, The Visitor, in New York City was impressed by the way the filmmakers captured the unique texture of New York. “For my office, they found an amazing old funeral parlor,” he says. ”It used to be a mansion that sat on farmland. I think it was built in 1840. New York has all these hidden gems that create such a rich palette of place.”
That particular setting presented a situation the production designer had never encountered before, one that required quite a bit of resourcefulness to resolve. “The house was perfect in terms of the space,” says DePrez. But the basement, which we needed to use, was full of vintage horse-drawn carriages that had been stored down there for years. They had to be disassembled before they were removed, but who knows how to do that? We finally found an Amish group who knew how to dismantle and move horse carriages. It’s the only way we could figure to clear out that location.”
As a New York resident, DePrez says one of her pet peeves about films set in the city is the unrealistic way in which characters’ apartments are often portrayed. “The apartments always seem huge!” she says. “It would make no sense for our characters with their economic backgrounds. I used to live in Hell’s Kitchen, like Clyde and Lucy, so I know the layout of a railroad apartment. I know all the details, the molding, the layers of paint and the airshaft out the window. Those kinds of details are what I’m most proud of in this film.”
Because so much of the movie’s action takes place in Clyde and Lucy’s apartment, the filmmakers decided to construct that location on a soundstage. The couple lives in a typical New York railroad flat, where each room leads directly into the next, all of them lined up like cars on a train. Walls designed to be removed or “fly out” gave the director and cinematographer the freedom to shoot the action as the actors moved from room to room, coming in and out of frame as they went.
“The way Mott and Philip shot it is still very realistic, but the point of view they could get through, say, taking the medicine cabinet off the bathroom wall and shooting through that mirror is something you could never do on a location,” says DePrez.
The specific sense of place created by shooting in the city was appreciated by the cast and crew, many of them native New Yorkers. Born and bred in Brooklyn, John Ortiz says, “There’s just nothing that makes me madder than a movie that takes place in New York and then all of a sudden you see snow capped mountains in the background,” says Ortiz. “It’s almost a cliché about how beautiful it is to shoot something in New York, but it’s true. This is a truly magical city and when it’s captured on film there’s just nothing else like it.”
One of the movie’s central metaphors presented itself to the filmmakers in a moment of New York serendipity. “When we were scouting Central Park and the pond was completely frozen over,” Deprez remembers. “It was a sea of white snow and I stood there with Philip and said, ‘Imagine the rowboat sitting out there in that sea of white snow and how lonely it would look.’ It was a beautiful image of loneliness in this great environment and in this great city, how people live in New York City and how the city affects them.”
Costume designer Mimi O’Donnell found her inspiration in the city. “The information I needed was all around me,” she says. “I just had to go out and look for it. I was literally riding the subway, taking pictures on my cell-phone of what New Yorkers look like.”
O’Donnell is a LAByrinth company member and designed costumes for the play as well. “It was an enormous help,” she says. “Coming into the film, a lot of my work was well underway, because I had already had the opportunity to sort things out with the actors in the play. Phil as a director was a joy because he knew the characters so well. He gave me so much specific information and it was all so rich. For me, it was as if in the movie the characters were all two years older and Lucy had a different haircut.”
As a company member, O’Donnell takes special pride in the final outcome of what was a lengthy process. “It has been a unique experience going from working on the play to working on this as a film,” she says. “Having the theater company be involved on so many different levels has been wonderful. The actors from our company playing the smaller parts show up with as much enthusiasm as if they were starring in the movie. They’ve come with costumes, they’ve come with ideas, they’ve come with just wanting to support everyone, and that’s always refreshing and thrilling.”
Thérèse DePrez says audiences should expect the unexpected from Jack Goes Boating. “It’s an unusual script with a great combination of drama and comedy. It has a very unusual pacing and there are some very beautiful romantic moments mixed with some very, very funny moments.
Producer Beth O’Neil sums up the creation of the film by saying, “From day one, Jack Goes Boating has been an unusually easy and wonderful collaboration among artists. I think it’s extraordinary to have such a great group of people working together for the same goal and we were really lucky to all have each other. I hope audiences find the end result equally gratifying.”
 Production notes provided by Overture Films. |
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Jack Goes Boating