Maybe in a past life director and writer Martin Hynes took on the world like a restless explorer. But it’s with “The Go-Getter,” the summer’s sweetest indie road film, that Hynes creates a tender and twinkling Mercer, a 19-year-old schoolboy who sets out on his own journey and who’s “a bit cooler than I ever was at that age,” fesses up the filmmaker.
“The Go-Getter” begins in Eugene, Ore. where Mercer, played by Lou Taylor Pucci (“Thumbsucker”), steals a random car for his cross-country bout, one sparked from the spontaneous decision of finding his long lost older half-brother after their mom’s untimely death.
Beautifully complex and mesmerizing with Hynes’s natural good talent of cinematography and rhythm, Mercer’s story is paced with an amazing soundtrack provided by indie-folker superstar M. Ward, and a much more weird and wonderful stream of phone conversations with a lovely and caring Kate, played by Zooey Deschanel. Mercer filled encounters myriad adventures with swirls of despair, passion, freedom, solitude, sex, drugs and confusion; but most of all: self-discovery.
The impressive picture made its debut at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. This weekend it’s finally finding its way onto the big screen as the Los Angeles-based director’s third feature release.
The Daily Forty-Niner spoke to the director over the weekend while he was in Oregon casting for his upcoming flick, “4AM Automatic”. Curious of how the Oregon-born, Columbia-educated, USC-graduate, actor-turned-director felt about his movie’s leading man, we asked him about the secret meanings behind the artistic storytelling and his inspirations for a road movie.
Daily Forty-Niner: Is Mercer an autobiographical character?
Martin Hynes: Mercer is some version of me, the younger version of me, but in a version that I think comes off a bit cooler than I ever was at that age. I took a lot of things from my life to come up with a character like that and the trip that he has—which is like ten days or something—there’s a lot of things all sort of pushed together into that time period, but they were drawn from my life. So, yeah, I think he is a reflection of me.
DFN: You directed the film, but also wrote it. What literary inspirations helped you write the screenplay?
MH: There are a lot of books and movies that inspired me and that specifically inspired this film. I think that there is a classic literary archetype that’s called a picaresque story, or a “travel” or “road” story—I think Huckleberry Finn, which is mentioned in the film, is one of those stories; there’s a beautiful book by Walker Percy called The Moviegoer, another kind of story like that. So in terms of literary references, those are things that I think this movie belongs to—a certain tradition—but with other American storytelling certainly.
DFN: The phone conversations were one of the film’s most magical parts. Where did the inspiration to weave these into Mercer’s story come from?
MH: I myself was on the road for a long time, for about a year at one point in my life. I put all of my stuff in storage and just was driving around and writing and I think the experience of having—well, you know, when you’re so cut loose and you’re so distanced from everything that’s so familiar to you, when you have a voice at the end of a phone line that sounds familiar and carries with it some kind of comfort or affection or connection of any kind, somebody whose sense of humor you share or sense of anything you share, becomes really, really precious. And I think that there’s a kind of specific romantic quality to that that even weirdly the distance that’s there, physically, makes it even more romantic somehow, like the things that you say to each other on the phone become almost more intimate. You say things that you might not even say to each other if you were in the same room. I think the quality of those conversations that I had in my life on that long trip were the inspiration for the connection that Mercer and Kate have.
DFN: The music also played a major role in creating texture and especially rhythm. It’s like a symbolic language, and like the soundtrack to Mercer’s life. How did you plan this? Why did you make a movie with all that music?
MH: I grew up playing music. I grew up playing a different instrument and singing. It’s always been a huge part of my life that I think what I imagined this kid Mercer going off by himself on the road… I felt that it would be important that music in a way sort of follows him.
I wrote in the script, at the beginning of the movie, that he borrows something from a friend who’s in a band, and that he’d have this sensation of being on the outside. Whatever band that was—and I didn’t know who it would be at the time—that their music would become the soundtrack and would follow him down the road and be this reminder—maybe an unconscious reminder for the audience—for Mercer where he came from and that this was something he had become apart of.
I was lucky enough to hear M. Ward’s music and felt that it would be perfect for this film, and I was really lucky that Matt Ward responded to this script when we sent it to him and allowed us to use all of his music. Rather than a lot of films you see where there’s just a huge sort of jukebox of a whole bunch of different kinds of music, it was important to have one unified set of music entirely from one artist (in this case it was from M. Ward), and that it would feel like it’s the soundtrack to this kid’s life in the way that it all holds together and it’s just kind of one voice, Mercer’s voice.
DFN: If Mercer were in LA where would he hang out?
MH: LA is extremely cruel to Mercer, so I would imagine he would get as far away as he could from LA. But I think that if he was stuck in LA—hmm, now where would Mercer find himself? I think some place just friendly and open all night, like Fred 62 in Los Feliz, where even if you’re pretty broke and you don’t know anybody you can wander in there at 3 or 4 in the morning and sit down and have a cheeseburger, until there’d be some people around there so that you wouldn’t feel so lonely.
DFN: Why did you name this film “The Go-Getter”? What does that term mean in this movie?
MH: I think of that term as being somebody who’s ambitious or who is willing to do anything to get something, and it feels like a semi-ironic thing because it still feels lost in a way. But I also think of the term as meaning somebody who’s kind of a straight-shooter or a good kid, like a go-getter, like a kid who’s never going to get into trouble, a do-goodie kind of guy. In that way, it is who Mercer has been his whole life: a good kid, a straight-shooter, an honest guy. And this is the first thing he’s ever done that isn’t honest—just steals somebody’s car and take off from where you live. I think in that way the term “go-getter” is kind of an ironic play on what he has been in his life before, but also that he’s finally getting the ambition that’s worth pursuing—going to find his brother and exorcise the death of his mom, to get it off his chest. It’s probably the first important ambition that’s he’s gone after.
DFN: Another interesting layer of this movie, which was so much more complex, is when Mercer meets a cowboy in the desert. At that point, it seems like there is another theme going on—cowboys (or, on a deeper level: Westerns) and protection. Mercer spends a lot of time running around in a cowboy hat, too. I think that these two subjects had an important meaning in the film. Can you talk about what they mean?
MH: For me, there’s another archetype of American storytelling, and that’s the Western. I think that it represents, especially for young men growing up, the image of a cowboy is something that is strong and cool and something that you probably wish you could be at a certain point, especially if you grew up
where I grew up in Oregon. There’s something kind of cool about cowboys—being an independent guy out on the range. And clearly Mercer is nothing like that. When he starts the movie he’s, by all appearances, a meek kid, a very quiet kid. When he sees that cowboy hat he puts that on in a way to put on a character that’ll give him a little bit more courage or a little bit more a sense of being able to be out there by himself, almost like putting on armor, something to shield him.
I wanted to run this cowboy theme through the movie—that book on tape that’s left in the car that he hears the middle section of, that there’s a cowboy story and the narration of that story runs counter to what we’re seeing on the screen. You can hear narration from a story, it’s a different story, but it’s a cowboy story. He meets that cowboy Bill Duke, the great actor out in the desert. And Bill told him the truth about it—really, all that cow poach that’s sprinkled in Christmas, he says, “My blood turns into gasoline.” He punctures that myth for Mercer that somehow there’s a noble or good quality in being out by yourself in the Great West. Well, this guy’s here to tell him that that isn’t good. I’ve forgotten the people I was close to. There’s a certain point where Mercer loses that hat in that fight. He doesn’t go back to pick it up, he just leaves it. I think that in that way the Western myth or cowboy myth that I was trying to set up during the film, he just perceives it as just that you can’t take on another personality to help yourself. You just have to be yourself, be yourself in that moment. Confront your brother as yourself, not some sort of other character that you imagine has more strength than you do.
