Jan 25, 2008

Director graduates to big leagues

Simon's high school picture premieres at Sundance

By Bruce Newman / MediaNews

A few days before his first film was to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, Brett Simon was cautioning against reading too much into the picture's explosive title: "Assassination of a High School President." When Simon was a student at Gunn High School in Palo Alto, he didn't want to take the class officers down, he wanted to be them.
"I think I ran for vice president my junior year at Gunn," Simon said by phone from Utah, "and I lost."

They say Hollywood is just high school with money, but having his first feature as a director get into Sundance hasn't made Simon too cool for school. When the picture was shown to an audience for the first time in Park City on Wednesday night, Simon, now 34, felt like he was back in class again. No wonder. The theater was packed with industry insiders waiting to see if the new kid from the Peninsula has got it.

Acquisitions agents and studio executives are the kind of people who can make you feel like a freak and a geek, but the screening and the question and answer session both went smoothly.

"I think it went really well," he said later. "It was amazing to see it with 1,300 people. They were laughing in the right places, and they seemed gripped by it. We had a great high school theme party after the screening, with '80s music and full-on dirty dancing. Everybody was in a mood to celebrate."

Simon saw the movie as a chance to celebrate the highs and lows of high school, rather than a chance to settle scores.

"This definitely isn't a case of the tortured nerd who, in his first movie, wants to go back and remaster all the things he failed at in high school," Simon said before the screening.
"But I do remember the stakes of everything, how the little conflicts felt giant, the little romances felt life-or-death.

"And in a sense I'm trying to tap into that, because I think we all want our lives to have that kind of drama, at least on the positive side of it."

Of course, it isn't all positive for the high school paper's investigative reporter, Bobby Funke (Reece Thompson of last summer's "Rocket Science"), who's on the trail of some stolen SATs. Bobby incurs the wrath of the school's loony principal, played by Bruce Willis, and is tangled in a web of intrigue with a beautiful classmate (Mischa Barton of "The O.C."). Simon describes the film as "All the President's Men" meets "Ferris Bueller's Day Off."

"Assassination" didn't arrive at Sundance looking for a distributor. One of its producers is Bob Yari, whose Yari Film Group picked the movie up long before the festival, and is expected to release it in August. But for a black comedy set in high school, and made by a first-time director like Simon, Sundance can be an invaluable launching pad. In fact, it happened to him once before.

"The Sailor's Girl," a spooky short film Simon wrote and directed, caused a minor stir when it was shown at Sundance in 2005. Along with music videos he began directing after he moved from the Bay Area to Los Angeles five years ago, it helped him get the job directing "Assassination." He narrowly missed making "Juno" his first feature, which this week picked up four Oscar nominations, including one for the director who did get the job, Jason Reitman.

Simon's lack of experience as a director of films that ran longer than five minutes almost cost him the "Assassination" job.

"They weren't initially thinking of going with a first-time filmmaker," he recalled, "but I was able to get in the room, and it was one of those meetings where everything clicks, where everyone could almost taste the film we all wanted to make. It was no longer me hustling to get a job, it was, 'Let's make this movie.'"

At Gunn, Simon played on the water polo team, which put him in the jock group, but he also hung with the school's geek squad. He graduated in 1992.

"I was suspicious of those terms even in high school," he said. "A lot of what was exciting to me about this script was the messiness of it. Those terms weren't going to be enough."

The script - by Tim Calpin and Kevin Jakubowski, who have both written for "South Park" - has noirish elements, but Simon resisted any temptation to repeat the neo-noir feel of the hard-boiled high school detective story in "Brick," which was at Sundance the same year as "Sailor's Girl." Like Simon's previous work, "Assassination" has a look that is distinctively his own.

When he demonstrated a visual flair, no one was more surprised than his parents, Joan and Jack Simon. Brett had gone to Princeton University planning to become a writer, like F. Scott Fitzgerald. But he spent his first two years taking premed courses, leading everyone to believe he might follow in the footsteps of his father, a Los Altos psychiatrist.

Then without warning, he wrote and directed a play. And before graduating from Princeton summa cum laude and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, he became friends with Roeg Sutherland - one of Donald Sutherland's sons - who lent him his digital video camera.

As a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, Simon began making short films, and haunted the Pacific Film Archive. (When Simon left the school, the archive held a retrospective - or as his family refers to it, a "Brettrospective" - of his work, even though he was only 29.) One of his first short films was about a boy whose mother doesn't age as long as he doesn't stop breast-feeding. The film takes place when mother and son are both about 20.

"There was definitely an element of darkness running through it," Simon says of that early work, sounding a bit nostalgic. He's lightened up considerably now that he's making movies like "Assassination of a High School President."