Q: As the director of “Meet the Parents” and other hit comedies, you adopt a surprisingly sober tone in your coming film, “Recount,” which takes us back to the 36 days in the autumn of 2000 when the results of the presidential election remained disputed in Florida. Have you shown the film to Al Gore? He has not seen the film as far as I know.
It stars Kevin Spacey as Ron Klain, the lawyer for the Democrats. Has Klain seen the film? He likes it. It’s kind of painful for the real people to relive it. It’s painful for everybody to relive. Particularly the Democrats who are involved in it. They always say, “Can’t you change the ending?” That’s always the joke.
I thought the film was very fair, except, perhaps, that the actors who play the Democratic operatives are more physically appealing than the Republican operatives. That’s interesting. I think Tom Wilkinson, who plays James Baker, is a very handsome man.
He’s kind of beefy, though. Laura Dern, who plays another key Republican, Katherine Harris, is smothered in pancake makeup. People get nervous when they’re thrust into the public eye. There was a rumor that someone told Harris that when you’re on TV, your makeup washes out so don’t be shy with those eyelashes and with that lip color.
You give dimpled chads great prominence in this film, as opposed to hanging chads. The hanging chads get a few close-ups too. Hopefully we’ve put punch-card machines into permanent obsolescence, because they really are just unacceptably primitive.
As the director of all three Austin Powers films, you resisted turning “Recount” into a comedy. It’s not a comedy at all.
No, no one in “Recount” says, “Yeah, baby, yeah.” There are no zinger catch phrases.
You and Mike Myers are rumored to be working on a fourth Austin Powers film, but nothing has emerged since “Goldmember” in 2002. Whenever I talk with Mike, we talk about it. The pressure is always there. But the script should earn its existence. It has to be really funny.
It sounds as if you have standards. I try. The standard in comedy is so much easier because, like, Is that going to be funny or not? You can usually tell.
What do you make of the fact that Austin Powers and Borat — you produced “Borat” — are both regressive male personalities in pursuit of bimbos? I don’t disagree.
Are you like that, too? Are you trying to live in the mojo zone? I think men are obsolete to some extent. I was going to do a film called “Used Guys” about a future where women run the world because they finally figured out that men are poisoned with testosterone and shouldn’t be allowed near anything sharp or explosive.
What did your father do for a living during your childhood in Albuquerque ? My dad is a retired engineer. He used to work for Sandia National Laboratories.
Was he helping to develop nuclear power? He worked on aspects of that. But he worked in energy research and other things as well. He couldn’t talk about the work he did.
So he was an Austin Powers-style international man of mystery. An Albuquerque man of mystery.
When did you leave New Mexico ? I went to Stanford to be a lawyer, and I really thought I might go into politics.
You do sort of look like a governor. I get confused with City Councilman Bobby Shriver sometimes. People literally come up to me in Santa Monica, and he’s told me the same thing. Maybe you have a future in politics. I’m not equipped. I have terrible stage fright.
Da The New York Times, 11 Maggio 2008
