Interview: Jason Schwartzman on The Overnight, intimacy, and the kind of roles he'd really like to play

With starring roles in last year's terrifically acerbic Listen Up Philip, as well as The Overnight and the upcoming 7 Chinese Brothers, Jason Schwartzman has spent the past year at the heart of several of the best indie comedies in recent memory. But in person, he modestly dismisses his recent spate of terrific lead performances as a mix of timing and luck. "Sometimes you're like, 'Oh, man, that movie would be so fun to do,'" he says. "But you know, someone else is probably gonna get to do it."

The Overnight, which arrives in limited release today (and V.O.D. next week), follows Alex and Emily (Adam Scott and Taylor Schilling) a young married couple who have just relocated to California with their young son. On a trip to a local park, they meet Kurt, a disarmingly friendly stranger (Schwartzman) out playing with his own son. When it becomes clear that their kids have hit it off, Kurt invites all three of them over for a pizza playdate — but when their kids fall asleep, Kurt and his wife Charlotte (Judith Godrèche) convince Adam and Emily to stay, leading to a long and increasingly strange night.

You may be tempted to Google around and learn a little more about The Overnight. Don't. Just see it.

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In a tight ensemble of four central actors, the role of Kurt is arguably the most difficult — and the most important. For The Overnight to work at all, you need to believe that Alex and Emily would be charmed, and not repulsed, by Kurt's various eccentricities. Fortunately, Kurt is also a role that could hardly be more tailored to Schwartzman's strengths. Though he has played both comic-book villains and sneering narcissists, Schwartzman's best performances tend to tap into his natural warmth, thoughtfulness, and candor.

Those are, not coincidentally, the exact qualities that keep Alex and Emily from bolting when the evening starts to get a little weird in The Overnight — so I was surprised to learn that Schwartzman was the last actor to join the cast, officially signing on just days before the movie started shooting. When the offer arrived, Schwartzman says, The Overnight was "not only happening for sure, but happening very soon."

"I got the script [in the morning], and I think I had to give them an answer by 1 p.m.," he says. "It was like an ultimatum! And I'm a painfully slow reader." Schwartzman has no idea what the backup plan was if he hadn't taken the role. "Movies are such an odd thing — how they get made. It's so hard to make a movie," he says. "I can't tell you how many times I've been a part of things and they fall through, and other times I go, 'Oh, I wanna be in that so bad!' and they want this other person."

In both style and subject, The Overnight is about as intimate as a movie can get — shot in just 12 days, almost entirely in a single location, with an unusually tiny cast and crew. "There are more people in this room than there were on the crew," says Schwartzman, gesturing around the mostly empty hotel lobby in which we're talking.

But these conditions also suited The Overnight, which feels both sprawling (in the gorgeous, luxurious mansion where the film takes place) and claustrophobic (in the laser-focus on the four main characters). "Shooting it at night, I think it focused us in a weird way," Schwartzman says. "You know how it is with phones. Even if you're trying to be focused with your phone near you, you will look at a text, you will look at an email. Your mind can just sort of…not be there. And I feel that, because we shot at night, everybody we knew was asleep. And there's just a kind of… I don't know, an insulated feeling that we had going on."

While Schwartzman has little in common with his freewheeling character in The Overnight, he can relate to the central conflict: the sheer difficulty of being just settled enough that your primary relationships are with your spouse and child, but you don't have the time or energy to seek out new and fulfilling independent relationships. "My wife and I had some really good friends of ours in Los Angeles. They moved to Austin," he says. "I remember thinking, 'God, they moved to Austin with a kid. Now what do they do?' How do they make friends? Do you start dating other couples? That was very much on my mind, and weeks later, [The Overnight] came into my life."

It's those thematic underpinnings that make The Overnight one of the first truly standout comedies of 2015 — and that Schwartzman found so engaging as he tackled the role of Kurt. "In this modern age, it seems like the only way to get stuff out there is by having the brightest fireworks out there," he says. "But I do feel this movie really has something special about it. It is a very unique film, and it's a combination of a small movie and a big movie, in a way. It has these moments that are designed to get a lot of people to laugh at one time, and then these kind of quieter things."