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Adapting to the market

THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU directed by George Nolfi, written by Nolfi from a story by Philip K. Dick, with Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, John Slattery and Anthony Mackie. A Universal Pictures release. 105 minutes. Opens Friday (March 4). For venues, trailers, and times, see Movies.


I can’t share some portions of my interview with George Nolfi, director of The Adjustment Bureau. It’s not that they’re particularly juicy or controversial – they’d just risk spoiling the odd delights of his movie.

“I have the same problem,” the di-rector says, laughing, from New York City.

Universal’s marketing strategy pitches The Adjustment Bureau as a clockwork thriller, but it’s a much nimbler film than that – an almost unprecedented mashup of romance, light comedy, political drama and conspiracy thriller, changing gears from scene to scene without ever slipping up.

“It was a way to tell a story that I thought could be really fun and satisfying in the way Hollywood movies have to be,” he says, “but [also] get into some of the deepest questions humanity has asked itself since the beginning. ‘Why am I here? How do I fit into the grand scheme? Do I choose my own course in life, or do grander, bigger things choose it for me?'”

And if someone else is guiding your destiny, what happens if you’d rather follow a different path?

“You can think of that in a big philosophical-theological sense,” says Nolfi, “but you can also just see it as an artistic metaphor for obstacles and problems and pain and stress, all the things that stand in the way of our goals. I thought that would be a really interesting thing to try to do in a mainstream movie.”

The Adjustment Bureau stars Matt Damon as a New York senatorial candidate whose world is rocked when he meets the girl of his dreams (Emily Blunt) on election night – and then rocked further when he learns that a strange team of mysterious, officious suits is bent on making sure he never sees her again.

Nolfi got to know Damon when they worked on Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Twelve.

“He’s kind of a national treasure,” Nolfi says. “I think he’s the best Everyman the industry has. He has this thing that makes you go, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s like that guy I grew up with, or the guy I’m going to go have a beer with at the bar,’ but at the same time, he can inhabit a character that’s full of self-deprecating humour, like in True Grit or The Informant! – he gains weight and has that pedophile haircut. He’ll go there.”

The Adjustment Bureau turns a typically paranoid Philip K. Dick conspiracy story into a proper romantic fantasy. How did Nolfi crack the adaptation?

“My producing partner brought me the short story,” he explains, “and said, ‘You know, this is a great premise – that fate is basically an agency of people who are operating behind the scenes all the time. What happens if somebody sees behind the curtain? How does he react?’ And he said, ‘What if you did it as a love story? A guy falls in love for the first time, and fate says, ‘Sorry, you were never supposed to meet her.’ And I just – it’s one of those few times in my whole career where I heard an idea and I was like, ‘I have to write that. I know what I want to do there.'”

The trick was figuring out how to do it.

“If you step outside a genre, you don’t have any mooring,” he says. “You don’t have any rules to follow – you don’t even have the ability to say, ‘Oh, let me just pop in a DVD and look at how this movie solved the problem.’ You just scratch your head and spend a lot of time sitting in coffee shops.”

Interview Clips

Nolfi on pitching The Adjustment Team to Matt Damon:

Download associated audio clip.

George Nolfi on Damon’s research process:

Download associated audio clip.

Nolfi on landing Emily Blunt and John Slattery:

Download associated audio clip.

normw@nowtoronto.com

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