Danny Rubin, writer of Groundhog Day
interviewed by Lindsay Ahl and Louis Leray
Louis: So talk about post-Groundhog Day. Pre Charlie Kaufman … Repetition … Groundhog Day became a landmark film … people watch it over and over.
Lindsay: Just like the film happens over and over, people watch that film over and over …
Louis: … and then the dark side of that, once you get something right, whether it’s a pop song or a movie, people want you to do that over and over again … keep making that same kind of movie … do the Groundhog thing….
Danny: You’re reciting the story of my life for the last ten years (laughter). It’s true. I mean it opens doors too, so I’m not complaining, but people will say, this new script doesn’t compare favorably to Dodge Ball, or Groundhog Day, and I’m like, how do you know? You haven’t made it yet! That’s what you said about the script [for Groundhog Day] at the beginning too. Well, you know when it first came out, the reviews were kind of like, an okay comedy with Bill Murray. That was really it. But people were responding, and it was pretty clear that everybody was loving it. It took a while, but it worked its way into the culture. My friends and relatives would send me clippings that mentioned Groundhog Day, or the clip would mention, Hey, it’s just like Groundhog Day. So it crept into everyday language, sports, (I don’t really watch sports but I was told by sports fans it’s a recurring theme that comes up) and of course in politics. One of my souvenirs of the phenomenon was that my dad had heard during the peace talks at Wye River during the Clinton Administration, with Arafat and Madeline Albright, and everybody, they were getting nowhere, they were deadlocked, and someone in the department made up these t-shirts that said, “It’s Groundhog Day at Wye River” and they all wore these t-shirts, which I thought was great. So I got one of the t-shirts from the state department as a present.
Louis: Louise was saying that it was hard for Columbia to say yes, because it wasn’t a formula film.
Danny: Yes. I had written another screenplay, and it was in development, it was moving forward in the process, and my agent said, you need to write something else, and I was writing something else, but it was going slowly, and he said, you have to write something quickly and get it out there, and Groundhog Day is the one that I wrote. It got me about 50 meetings, all over town. People would say, I love this script, what else have you got? Or, this is really fantastic, let me show you a list of some of our projects and see if you want to work on them. So it got me work, and I don’t know, it was six months later, or a year later, when my agent had left the business and I submitted a writing sample to an agent at CAA who said I think I might know who will be interested in this. So they sent it to Harold Ramis. And Harold and his partner Trevor Albert were very excited and talked Columbia into buying it.
Louis: I saw on the credits you wrote the screenplay with Harold Ramis … what happened with him working with you on the screenplay?
Danny: Well, it became more savvy; it became something the studio would actually make. I mean I did some wacked out stuff from a studio point of view. I started the story in the middle.
Louis: You told me that. When you did it, you did it so there was no context for the shift from reality into the altered reality.
Danny: There didn’t seem to be any need for one. I mean we all know what the real world is like. We already live here.
Louis: That’s what Myra Dyren did with Meshes in the Afternoon, or maybe Memento, is maybe the closest recent film where we’re not quite sure. Basically, reality never constructs itself in Memento, you keep going back and back and finally the other guy plants the seed that his wife never died. Base reality doesn’t exist in that film, but he keeps going through the motions trying to get there. But in Groundhog Day, there is a moment in which he enters the twilight zone, where the music changes, but it’s never explained.
Danny: Well, that was an argument with the studio. I didn’t want an explanation, because to me, that would trivialize it. Whatever the explanation was, it would trivialize the idea of the experience we’re all having. At one point Harold called me up and said, they need a scene, they need something, they need an explanation. And I said, “Please, please don’t make me write a “gypsy curse” scene.” And he goes, “Gypsy curse, great, write that!” I said, please no. And so he says, write, it, we’ll shoot it, then we’ll cut it out, they’ll never remember. Cause he got it, you know. But ultimately, they never even shot it, so that was good. They didn’t notice.
Louis: In Big, with Tom Hanks, they show how he goes into that alternate reality. It seems like people want that.
Danny: Maybe they want it, maybe they don’t. Maybe they’re always given it and not given a choice. You know, maybe some of the audience members get lost, and they say, wait a minute, what happened, and they’re looking for an explanation, but that actually says more about them than about the movie.
Louis: I think that’s why Groundhog Day is so powerful and has that existential feel, because you don’t provide that easy answer.
Lindsay: It’s interesting that you’re operating off the assumption that we all do know what reality is, because so much of philosophy is assuming that no one knows what another person’s reality is, so now the question is how do we establish that base. You’re beginning with the idea that we all know this is a chair, so let’s alter that without really talking about it.
Danny: Well, it’s the lead-to and the discovery that’s fun, and Harold wanted the discovery to be along with the audience. And chronologically. And honestly, that’s something that came to me later. Harold promised me he wasn’t going to mess with the structure, cause he liked it, but I guess he changed his mind.
Louis: Does that mean that you guys wrote those scenes at the beginning where he is actually being a weatherman, or did you shoot those later …?
Danny: The process was like this. I was the original writer. Then Columbia hired me to do a couple of rewrites. I did one of them, and I backtracked into Pittsburgh a little bit. But I don’t think there was a weather station thing. That exposition wasn’t there. But somehow, it backed up into the journey a little more. And then they gave it to Harold Ramis to polish it, because he has a certain personality and humor that the studio depends upon for their money, which is a kind of adolescent well-understood Ivan Riteman/Harold Ramis kind of movie. He did a draft, and they liked it, and I don’t think that one had a weather station scene either. It backed up into Phil Connor’s life as a sort of jerk. And then they cast Bill Murray. Harold and Bill were working on it, and they weren’t coming to an agreement of how it should be. There was some tension, and they hired me back to work with Bill to fix it. Then it was sort of a compromise. Basically, some things were not completely decided. Largely, I was still looking at it from my point of view and he was still looking at it from his point of view, and we were just trying to make it work. We worked together on it for a couple of weeks and finished it. The production itself brings in a lot of improv work. And of course, in editing, they find things that they don’t need. So, it’s really a group process. So I take credit for how amazing it is, but I also share credit for how amazing it is with everyone who worked on it.
Louis: Run Lola Run is one film that repeats … but it’s about cause and effect … what happens if you change this one thing in your day?
Danny: Well, my background was in the sciences, undergraduate, not professionally, but I was thinking about it like an experiment. And it was … let’s keep everything the same except for one thing. If you repeated the day over and over again Phil Connors is the only one who can remember what happened before, and because he has that memory, he can change his behavior with respect to the day. But he’s the only difference in the day. For everyone else the day is identical – except for the changes brought about by Phil. So, it is an experiment, a kind of human experiment.
Louis: Where did that idea come from?
Danny: Well, you had talked about beginnings, and this is perfect because there are at least two beginnings. The one that I used to tell, quite honestly, is that I was thinking about if a person — how some people can live their entire life, and never change from who they are. They bump up against something and they can’t get past it. So I was thinking, is one lifetime enough? Maybe two, for some people, or maybe three? If a person could actually live forever, through infinity, would they ever change, would they ever get past this thing that’s blocking them? And so I was thinking about it like that, and I was thinking that’s kind of interesting, but how difficult to create a movie like that because of having to deal with the French Revolution, or whatever. So I thought, well, that’s kind of complicated, what if it all happened on the same day? So then, I had a movie. Every idea after that came very quickly. It had resonance, both comedically and dramatically, and character development wise, and spiritually. It seemed like it was all there. So the idea came from eternity being turned back on its tail into a circle. And I think the movie ultimately has resonance with people because the idea wasn’t the high-concept comedy idea of repeating the same day; from the beginning it was a story of a young man’s journey though life. An epic that had happened all on the same day. And the other part of the story is, that was what got me working on it, but I had run across some old notes, from at least two years before that, where I was getting interested in writing movies, and one of the ideas was, a guy stuck in a time machine who repeats the same day over and over. And I immediately thought of that scene that wound up in the movie, where he’s picking up Rita. And my note, Great way to pick up women. This rich spiritual movie comes from those ideas. Basically, I had remembered this idea about a guy repeating a day while trying to solve my problem with eternity. So, those are my two beginnings.
Lindsay: What that’s oriented around is this idea of change. Is it possible to change? Do people change? What’s the nature of the change?
Danny: I think you can change your behavior, and I think all of the things that we experienced as we were growing up involve change. Changing the way you thought about things as a child more selfishly. Perhaps one idea of growing up is getting outside of yourself and realizing that other people are involved. And feeling that relational aspect of dealing with other people. So, yeah, I think that kind of change is change. The way I was thinking about it, is like, finding my way around Los Angeles. I lived in LA for about two years, and over that period of time, I went from being totally confused about how to get from here to there through all the traffic, to having a pretty good idea at which time of day, on which day of the week, it would be a good idea to take which path to which place. This is an amazing rarefication of information. The only way it can be done is through repetition of mistakes. Oh God, I’m backed up in traffic, quick take a left on this and see where it leads so you can get around it. And you end up in a worse situation. And then another time you find yourself with the same thing, near that road that opened up, you take it, you’re half-way down, through the turn, and you say, Oh no, I did this before; it’s a really bad idea. So you go through it, and convince yourself, yeah that was a bad idea. And maybe the third time, you start to go through the opening and then you remember, Oh, yeah, that was a bad idea. And eventually you find your way, and you know the traffic patterns. What happens in Groundhog Day, is that he is faced, day after day, with the consequences of his behavior, and everybody else’s behavior and everything that happens, and the things that aren’t working start to add up, and he’s able to see it. It’s almost like you see something once, it’s a ghost, you see it twice, it’s a bit more solid, maybe it was there, but if you see something a third time you really do see an outline of the thing, you see it a forth time, it’s there, there’s no denying it, it’s there. You see it for the hundredth time, you’re so used to seeing it there, finally, the reality that’s there will make you say, Oh, I can change my behavior based on fact that I know that is true. That thing is really there. There’s no getting around it. There’s no alternative. This is the thing, right? So, it’s accepting things for what they really are, and based on that, I’d say Oh, well, I don’t want it to be that way so I’m going to change that thing.
Louis: This is a talent or a skill that’s really waning in our society and I think about it in terms of semiotics. Like with Columbine, the signs were there, but no one could read them. The ability to see signs and to read them, you know, American Beauty comes out, “Look Closer” our whole society is about looking at seeing and learning to see but in reality people don’t see things.
Danny: Which is actually the subject of the film I’m working on now. It’s about how everything you need is right there, you’re just not seeing it. It’s all about what we’re paying attention to and what we see and choose not to see. What passes by without us noticing it. And I think Groundhog Day highlights that as well. Because there’s things that he knows at the end that he didn’t know at the beginning. But they were all there. There’s nothing different. We all have this blindness. Tools can help you see through a different prism than what you’re seeing right now. If all of a sudden you realized you were on the other side of a microscope, if you were the size of everything you were looking at, everything would be different. Your values would be different. And sometimes that can be helpful. I don’t know if the point is to find out what’s really true or what’s really going on. But given what’s in front of us, what we know, what we have, there are things you can do to change your way of looking at things, to get unstuck. That’s the whole point of being an artist or screenwriter. If everyone else is looking at it from over there, I’ll stand over here.
Louis: Well, if time is a kind of common ground that we agree upon so that we can function, then where are we and what are we doing? You wrote about that, the metaphysics of that.
Danny: Well, I should start by saying that clearly what I believe is sort of what I believe, and what I believe now, at this point in time that you’re asking. What people get out of the movie is what people get out of the movie. This shouldn’t change that.
Louis: Of course, thank god the movie is a constant. That’s what we like about movies. They’re always the same and yet every time you watch them you’re different, so you get something new out of them. So you must have had some lofty ideas about time when you were thinking about Groundhog Day.
Danny: Not so much. For me it was mostly just a device. I got into a great philosophical argument with this guy at a conference about whether or not the movie was actually about time or not. And he contended that it wasn’t. And I contended that it was. But I think I was just being contentious. I don’t know. The Santa Fe idea that consciousness is sort of compressed and everything that happened before and everything that’s going to happen is all one thing and it’s already right there, I think that’s as legitimate a way of looking at things as linearly, and it’s only a question of what you need. Or what your experience in life is. I mean if you’re sitting here in this room with me, remembering something, or sort of planning something that you’re thinking about doing, and you’re also in the present moment with me, how relevant is it to think about time linearly? And if it’s not relevant, who cares. Coming up with hard and fast rules about the metaphysics is not as important to me as what makes sense in whatever context you’re looking at it. I mean, is light a wave or a particle? Well, what do you need it to be? Why to look at it this way or that way. You find what’s utilitarian, and you continue to ponder, how can this be, if it has these properties, and yet we’re here, we’re born and we die, whatever that means, we all agree on what we agree on. I don’t think that the answer is the answer.
Lindsay: I love how you’re implying that one has control over our perception of things, and further, that we could decide, okay, today I’m going to look at this in this way.
Danny: Sure.
Lindsay: We’re taught in school, in society, in Hollywood, to temper our investigative or innovative use of things because we’re so focused on the practical – stories work this way. Especially in writing, with all the infinite possibilities for story structure, for poetics, for narrative structure, we’re taught, well, stories will sell if you write them this or that way.
Danny: I think my favorite workman fixes the toilet with a paperclip. Because at that moment, at that time, in that place, that’s the most elegant solution to what the problem is. Was the paperclip designed for that purpose? Does the toilet manual say … paper clip? (laughter) You know, invention for what we need seems to be what we do. And so as a writer I always try to find the uses of a paper clip.
Lindsay: Allowing your thoughts to be as real as anything else …
Danny: Sure. Especially because I live in this business where ideas can be realized. I mean you take something that defies physics and defies all laws of science, like Groundhog Day did, by breaking a rule, seems to be the only way to reveal to us something. This guy showed me something really cool once. It works in the same way. He was a physicist. He took the Galileo drawing of the ball, the ball dropping … here’s the ball … here’s the ball … here’s the ball hitting the ground … and it’s going to bounce up like this, with the angle drawn, you know, very Galileo looking. And this guy got an animator to animate this. And so you’d see it fall, and it’d go up like that, right, so you could see it happen. Then he got an animator from Disney to do the same thing. And what the ball does, is right before it hits the ground, it kinda looks like it’s reaching out a little bit, like a cat, then it kinda crouches up and pushes off. And what he did was, he broke the laws of physics, of how the ball would behave. And in doing so, he created character for that ball. There’s something fascinating to me about that. By breaking the rule, he created a character that we could identify with. Cause it showed that it has some kind of will, or animas, a desire to do something.
Louis: This is interesting because so often we like to explain all behavior in terms of physical and chemical laws, highly evolved over time, explanations for love, desire, social levels of connection, disconnection, etc. On a science level, it’s about cause and effect. On a human level, it’s not how we perceive ourselves. I love how you say that by breaking the law of physics you create a character. Spirit is the breaking of physical laws. And it’s something that’s hard to deny. If someone says the word spirit, what does that mean to you?
Danny: It usually means whatever they’re saying it means. I find whenever you’re talking about spirit or God it’s a very confusing argument, because everyone’s bringing a lot to it. I mean, it’s like being in development for a movie. Your idea about the movie is very different than what the other guy’s idea of the movie is. And you’re all saying, I love it, this is great, blah blah. Go ahead and write it, we’re all in agreement on these 12 points, and you come back after you write it and you find out we weren’t even close to agreement. There’s not even anything remotely agreeable about this idea because everyone did not articulate everything they were assuming when they brought it to the table, right? So with that professional experience to bear, I would say, first of all, I think I feel the same way about this and what we were talking about before. I have kind of a utilitarian view about it. Which is, people take it all too seriously, what the real answer is. Is it a particle or is it a wave? Choose sides! Draw a line! Start a fight about it! The spirit I encounter in specific instances and specific places in a moment where I realize that I have feelings different from just this feeling of physical or mental being, there’s this other feeling I have, and I assume this is what other people are feeling when they are talking about spirit. Where does this happen for me? Most often in nature, more than anywhere else. And I’ve always found that I can divide religion and spirit in a way that religion has to do with the political entity and spirit is a personal point that strikes in different ways. In music, I feel it. Just as moments with people, for whatever reason. And what’s spirit and what is its nature? Is it a big thing that blows through everybody? Is it an intelligent thing which decides things for people? I doubt these things have anything to do with reality, and they just have to do with how people relate to it. The way it works for them. And whether we’re dictated by scientific physics and chemistry? Clearly, more than we’d like to believe. If you put certain chemicals into a person they can all of a sudden be happy, or suddenly be upset, or disoriented. And all the neroupharmolocogy stuff that’s happened in the past 30 years, (when I gave up studying about such things, so I don’t really know what’s going on), clearly shows that there’s a relationship between what we eat and who we are, so it’s sort of an illusion that we are anybody. It’s what we tell ourselves to get by, which is fine, because everybody does it. What’s the real answer? Well, keep digging, keep asking – it seems to be part of our nature.