In David Carr’s profile of Jason Reitman that ran in the NYT on Sunday, pegged to the release of Reitman’s new movie Up In the Air, Carr writes:
By the time the script was finished and shooting was being set, Mr. Reitman realized that job loss, merely a motif in the script, was something he had to come at more directly. He decided to hold an open casting call for the recently fired in St. Louis and Detroit. Kevin Pilla, a father of four from St. Louis, was cast after he received an untenable relocation offer from his employer, an electronics distribution company.
“It gave me a chance to relive the moment and say all of the things that I wanted to say at the time,” Mr. Pilla said… “The second they heard the language of firing, you could just see it,” Mr. Reitman said. “Their eyes would turn, their posture would change, their face would go sallow. One girl broke into hives. It just happened, and they would be in the moment.”
Thing is, Carr makes it sound—and Reitman probably implied it—that Reitman made it clear that he was shooting a feature film when he held those open casting calls. But when I went to a screening of Up In the Air a few weeks ago, Reitman said in a Q&A afterwards that he had placed ads in the local papers saying that he was shooting a documentary about people who had been laid off, and when the people showed up for their “audition,” he never told them that their wrenching confessions of what it felt like to be laid off were going to be not in a documentary about the economy, but a $25 million feature film half-backed by his father Ivan (Ghostbusters!). Who knows, maybe he told them later (though he didn’t mention this in the Q&A), and clearly this guy Kevin Pilla is now aware how his “performance” was used.
In the Q&A Reitman seemed really thrilled at the authenticity of the performances he had gotten out of these “real” people. But knowing how he got them made me feel icky.
