CraveOnline: I can imagine that you had a big white board or a whole bunch of index cards full of ideas for what he could have done, different characters he could have become that would have taken the story in other directions. Were there a lot of other ideas you’d still like to explore in, as you’ve set it up, a sequel?
Thomas McCarthy: Yeah, of course. There always are with every script, right? Whether it’s historical or whatever, you always have these places [you’d like to go] and you’ve got to make choices and say, “I want to tell this story.” Really, I just used Max, like I would with any other story. Kind of in some weird way putting one foot in front of the other in terms of events and how they might play out, and how you see someone kind of dig themselves deeper and deeper and deeper into a hole, and maybe understand that and see where he comes out on the other side. And then maybe have a sense of his journey.
You know, Paul and I both talked about, you got to see a superhero movie and you know at the beginning that the guy’s either going to becoming a superhero or [already] is. In this, you discover it without having any idea, if you see the movie fresh, without reading about it. We didn’t even set out to do that, it was in the writing and creating of it that we kind of arrived there. Wow, this makes sense for who this guy is, someone who’s a tradesman who is searching for a higher purpose, and now he has a very distinct opportunity to find that.
Looking at it as a superhero story for a moment, it’s interesting to see a superhero who is definitively Jewish. There are only a few of those in the comics.
[Laughs.]
There’s not many! There’s like Sabra, and The Thing, it’s relatively few. Did you pursue that because you thought it would be kind of funny? Like, “Pickles? Pickles are a magical cure-all?”
No, we did it because we were researching history. He was a fourth or fifth generation Russian Jew, his family came over a time that would have put him there when those Lower East Side tenement buildings were mostly Jewish. It was Irish, Italian, Jews, depending on where you were. So historically that felt right, and then Paul [said] that was his family’s journey. He’s Russian-Jewish, they kind of came there then moved out to Queens and Brooklyn. He lived in the Lower East Side at the time. We spent time researching it at the Tenement Museum, what these guys were like, these tradesmen who came over and set up shops and how they created these mini-unions. So all that was just based on what it was.
I didn’t get much sense of him being Jewish in terms of a funny thing, I just thought it was who he was. I didn’t realize it until you just said it, that there aren’t too many other Jewish superheroes. [Laughs.] I didn’t know that, although Sandler joked about it a lot. So it really just felt real to us. It’s just who that guy was.
And then the pickle thing came out of the fact that the pickle store where we shoot, that’s there, which would have been right around the corner from his store, and going back 50-100 years that whole block was like pickle stores. Now, with development and shrinkage, there’s only two or three there but there used to be probably 30 or 40. It was literally two blocks there of just pickle stores. I just thought that’s really cool, and it makes sense of what these guys would have fed into their culture or history. It made sense to us.
There’s a thing, I’m not sure if it’s a plot hole or if it’s a rule about cobblers that I don’t understand. I’d like to ask you about it. It ties into the ending.
Mm-hmm?
We see earlier on in the movie that if our hero puts on the shoes of a dead man, he looks like a corpse. But then we find out that there’s a whole room full of shoes that have been collected over many, many, many decades. So he’s got all these celebrity corpses that he can be? How does that work? Or are those just collectibles?
No, we talked about that. I always live in fear when someone like you starts a sentence like that, because Paul went, “You know someone’s going to come up with a rule that we haven’t discussed, and we’re going to be like, ‘Oh, that’s a great point.’” It’s hard to cover every base. You sound like you’re a fan of this genre so I’m sure you get that. Being from Crave, you get that.
So no, our feeling on that was… his father sort of eludes to it in the last scene, that there’s a lot to learn from the stitcher. Our feeling is that as you get better and better you learn how to do that. You learn how to stitch for different things. [Laughs.] We actually had a scene where he explained all these different things written. We ended up not shooting it because that feels like post-exposition just to explain rules.
But if you don’t know how to do it you’re just going to come up as the corpse. I don’t think we see any other dead men represented, [except] Method Man, briefly, when he was in a state. That was sort of a thing we talked about and Dustin [Hoffman] eludes to, yeah, there’s a lot to learn about the stitcher, and how you use it. Once you do, you gotta figure a guy like him at that point is way more versed in it. Which sort of seems to fit. It makes sense to us.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
