JOSÉ LOURENÇO LONGFORM INTERVIEW: 'Young Werther', and "Why Not Toronto?"
Learn A Little More About the Torontonian Filmmaker
I didn’t know what to expect going into Young Werther (2024), a Canadian adaptation of an 18th century German romance novel, but at every turn I was pleasantly surprised. The actors successful manage a balancing act between old stage style performance and new, and Toronto as the updated setting gets the good treatment for once.
Director José Laurenço was kind enough to sit down for an interview with me about the film. The interview was meant to only be 15 minutes, but it ended up around 45. What can I say? We got along!
Below is the transcript, edited and condensed for readability.
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Alex Southey: I guess, honestly, the first question that I have written down, is, why this [Young Werther]? Why?
José Lourenço: Yeah — I mean… What’s the right answer…
AS: I can break it down — like, why did it even come to your attention?
JL: I first read the book in university and then I read it again years later when I was trying to be a working screenwriter. I worked at newspapers — the Star — and magazines sort of like throughout my 20s and then in 2008 I had this idea, like, “Oh I’m gonna try and become a TV writer.” And so I wrote some samples, and—
AS: Some spec scripts?
JL: Yep, spec scripts, exactly.
AS: What did you write? I’m curious.
JL: [Groans] Oh, god — one of them I have no problem saying, because one of them was decent — it was The Office, the American Office.
AS: Okay, sure.
[Both laugh in anticipation.]
JL: The other one is so cringey — uhh — ohhhhhhh, god, it’s really hurtful to say that it was, uh… Entourage?
AS: Amazing. [Imitating an Entourage character] “Vin! What are we gonna do, Vin!?”
JL: [Laughing] Awful. I thought I was so clever. I wrote a Lloyd bottle episode.
AS: Oh that’s hilarious! [Laughs].
JL: My writing manager at the time, who read it, was like, “I think this is funny… as an idea? I don’t know if you had to write it — and definitely don’t show this to anybody.”
[Both laugh.]
AS: So, hearing that — we can get to the “Why this?” in a second — but, selfishly, I am a little bit curious to hear how you — I think you maybe skipped over what might be the most valuable part for anybody interested in getting into screenwriting, which is, you created the spec scripts (which is fine, anyone can do that on their own, on a personal laptop), but, once you’re done them, what did you do to get your foot in the door? Did you literally just cold email?
JL: Well I did cold email a lot of people. I probably sent those specs to, like, 20 people; To anyone I knew that had any sort of connection. And I’d worked at MuchMusic for a few years as well, and my friend who was a VJ at the time and is now a podcaster, Hannah (Hannah Sung), said to me she was headed down to LA for some meetings, and I was like “Oh… maybe I should go down for some meetings…”
[Both laugh.]
JL: So we stayed for like a month, aaaand I didn’t have any meetings with anyone — but then when I got back to Toronto after having a very nice time and meeting other friends, I had a note back from the person who would go on to become my manager. And that’s how it started.
AS: So the only thing that I wanted to do was provide a little more context going even further back. So you are throwing out what I consider prestigious jobs, even in your 20s, like at one point it was the Star, and at another point MuchMusic. How did you get those jobs? Did you just study the right stuff in university, and send cold emails?
JL: Well, I went to McGill and loved it so much. I would’ve stayed there, but, my French is, just, woeful. So I moved to Toronto with a friend of mine who’d gone to school in Ontario, and we were like “Why don’t we start a band?”
AS: I gotta say — that’s what other people not from Montreal think everyone from Montreal is like. Always starting bands, just whatever, doing some creative project.
[Both laugh.]
JL: So anyway, we’re in Toronto then, and I don’t think I’m doing film reviews — I applied for an unpaid internship at a magazine that doesn’t exist anymore called Shift. I don’t think it exists anymore. But I was there five nights a week, and working as a bartender four nights a week, and, uh — you know I was like 21, I had all the energy in the world. But I do remember, maybe three weeks into the internship, I was getting, like, no sleep, and so I ended up sleeping in… two hours late.
AS: Oh no.
JL: And when I showed up to work, the coordinator was like [angry monster voice], “This is unacceptable!” And I was like, [makes horrified face] — and I started crying!
AS: NO!
JL: Just… in the office, like, tears going down my cheeks. And I was, like [scared, sad voice], “Please, I’m so sorry. I’m so tired. I’m working at a bar at night,” and she was like “What?” — and she was very nice about it.
AS: Aw, that’s so sweet. Okay, so, I’m putting together the stepping stones of how you got to where you are, but, eventually, where does it — what’s the best way to ask this… How do you find yourself directing?
JL: After I got that job at the magazine, it went out of business two months later, and the money that I did get — I’d already spent it on a guitar.
[Both laugh.]
JL: So I was immediately in the hole and had to crawl back to the bar, and be like, “Will you hire me?” [Laughs.]
AS: Amazing.
JL: And, months later, I was just walking somewhere and saw the former art director of the magazine on a date just… drinking in the park.
[Both laugh.]
JL: And we chatted about work, and she said, “Oh, you should call The Star! My friend just quit a column there and maybe they’re looking!” So I cold-called the manager of the Star the next day, and was like, “Hey, I heard you guys are missing a columnist. Could I send you some of my samples?” And she was like, “No! That is not how this works at all! That’s not how any of this works.” She was like, “Who? What?” — But she did say they were looking for part time copy editors, and I eventually got one of those jobs. After a few years, a columnist position opened up, I applied for it, and they were trying to hire, like “Young… people… for the… young… person… section.” I did that for a few years.
I’d always wanted to work at MuchMusic. So, I turned the newspaper Star job into a researcher job at Much — low level, working in the news unit. Eventually I moved higher up. I ran Rap City — and drove Rap City into the ground! [Laughs.] But I was creating, like, mini docs, essentially. And it was my first taste of working with scripts, and editing —
AS: Okay—
JL: And directing came out of… having some less than inspiring meetings with directors to direct scripts I’d written. There was, like, one guy who was gonna direct Werther back in the day, and I was like, “Oh, this could be cool!” He put together a cool cast, and then that version of the movie fell apart, but, this all led to me thinking more and more, “Maybe I can direct”. So, I just started… making shorts with friends, and music videos, and ads for a little bit. Just kept sloggin’ along until we could put together the version of this movie that was eventually made… I had an animated series at FOX, which was greenlit, but then Disney came in, bought FOX, and cancelled the entire slate.
AS: [Groans] I feel like there are a million stories like that.
JL: Oh, in that Disney-buying-FOX thing — thousands of people had just regular day-to-day jobs lost, too, in that “merger”.
AS: Totally, yes. Haha. “Merger”, right. Can we really call that a merger?
[Both laugh.]
AS: Merger… Acquisition. Merger. So what piqued your interest about Werther rather than something else? Why adapt that?
JL: I mean it’s just the character at the centre of it, really. It’s just the “Werther” character was funny to me. I know it’s a tragedy — it’s not lost on me! People will ask, like, they’ll be like, “How dare you!” And it’s just like… it’s not a “how dare you” — it’s one interpretation of the book.
AS: No, of course. You’re not claiming to do a line-by-line adaptation.
JL: One day someone will make the definitive adaptation, but this is not it. This is much more just “inspired by”, and — but yeah, the character is so funny, and so true, and human. They’re this person so caught up in their emotions.
AS: So caught up — and in a way that really lended itself to a cool performance from Douglas Booth, who, prior to this — If I’m correct — the last time I saw him act was in the movie about Mary Shelley. He was in Mary Shelley (2017) — and he was good in that but it was a smaller role, whereas this is, like, meaty for him, and he gets to… This is something I wrote not in my questions but in my review: There’s a tone to the whole movie that’s most evident in the way they act — the way your actors act — and it’s this, like — a lot of the script is modern; modern words, and sentence structure, and situations — but, the style of acting is reminscent of stage-style… the era that you’d expect this to be from. And I thought that was so interesting because way more often adaptations do the opposite. They go “We’re gonna make it, like, a Scorsese New York thing, even though it’s meant to be Shakespeare” — how did you land on that? What a fine line to walk. How do you even get to that?
JL: I wanna give, like, all the credit to the performers. It’s just them, like, finding that. Alison (Pill) and Doug — it was in the rehearsals. I think it’s them sort of reacting to the script, and reacting to the references (I provided to them). They found something together.
AS: And what were the references?
JL: One major one is Withnail and I (1987).
AS: So the actors did their homework, then?
JL: Oh, man, Doug is one of those guys that, like, is so charismatic, and so kind, and welcoming, and makes people feel good about themselves, and is just, like, you know, a very handsome, dashing fellow—
AS: He’s a “leading man” guy.
JL: He’s a leading man guy, and I think he could very easily… coast through life, but he is such a hard worker. When I first saw his script it was like twice as thick as it had been before because of all of his post-it notes and annotations. His prep was outstanding. Every day he just wanted to know everything. He was so present. I can’t say enough good things about Doug.
AS: Any other references?
JL: Uh, Rushmore (1998) was one.
AS: I swear to god, that was on the tip of my tongue. I was like “Rushmore is so that tone”, but specifically it comes through in the score from Owen Pallett — it’s a very Rushmore, baroque, classical take on that score style, you know?
JL: Oh I wish I had the ability to speak about the intricacies of Owen’s score.
[Both laugh.]
AS: I think it’s fantastic. When I saw their (Owen Pallett) name, I was like, “Oh, wow! Good for you guys!”
JL: Very, very exciting. A lot of the people I spoke to when we were first putting it together would tell us they didn’t know about it, but when I brought it up to Owen, they were like, “Yes, I love this book! It’s funny… I had this operetta where Camus was interviewing—”
[Both laugh.]
JL: And even that, I was like — I’m probably butchering that. But they’re so fluent in literature, and music, and… I remember I got this text from them. And it was this long text. And they were like “Your score opens with…” and then they described a musical joke they were making in the instrumentation and the theory. They said, “It’s not something a lot of people will get, but the people who do get it will be very tickled by it.”
[Both laugh.]
JL: And I was like, “I fuckin love the detail you’re putting in.”
AS: That’s the kind of person you want to further the tapestry you’re creating.
JL: Yes, it was so fun going in to watch them record the score.
AS: Yes how did that happen, actually? There are a few different ways you can go about creating the score so I’m curious.
JL: We definitely had temp music in the edit. But a lot of that stuff — I was already going to Owen. I’d say most of the temp music was an Owen Pallett reference.
AS: I heard the same thing happened with, uh — I don’t know if you like Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies—
JL: Course!
AS: I figured! We’re both Millennial men. We probably like Paul Thomas Anderson.
[Both laugh.]
AS: And I heard before Radiohead’s guitarist Jonny Greenwood was approached by him to score his movies, he was already using work Greenwood had released previously.
JL: Oh I love that.
AS: So it’s cool it came together!
JL: Owen has such a catalogue of work — not just their own music but their contributions on other people’s records.
AS: Yes, sure.
JL: So there was lots to pull from. There were moments where I said, “Feel free to… plagiarize yourself?” And they were like “No, no.” All original. With Owen it was — I was not prescriptive at all. I was just like, “Please work your genius! React to it.”
AS: You hired them because you wanted them, right?
JL: Exactly, what am I gonna do, micro-manage a huge composer?
AS: Exactly.
JL: I think I maybe asked for, like, one change because a note was landing on a visual beat, and they were like “Absolutely!” That was it. For the most part they’d just send me stuff and I’d be like, “You fucking beautiful genius.”
AS: How did, um — did they start by making demos?
JL: They were pretty sophisticated demos. They were midi, but it sounded like full instrumentation. And then Owen hired an orchestra to do all that stuff, and they were based in Eastern Europe, and Owen conducted remotely!
AS: The future is now.
JL: The future is now! And then they did a lot of recording here in Toronto, in a studio in the East end.
AS: Was it Union Sound? They’re in the East end.
JL: You know, I think it was! Yeah!
AS: Great studio.
JL: It was really beautiful. There was a beautiful guitar piece recorded there, and this choral piece. It was crazy watching a choir work. I had this idea — which was a straight lift from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)—
[Both laugh.]
JL: I spoke to the head of the choir, just like, “Can you get them to just do, like, an orchestral version of Charlotte’s name?” And they worked for five minutes, and — perfect!
AS: Wow. I feel like happy accidents — or not “accidents”, but happy stuff on the day — end up being the most talked about things, or these little gem that are littered throughout the project.
JL: Definitely.
AS: Okay, the main second question I wanted to ask — if the first was about balancing that performance tone — was: How the hell did you pull off having a movie where Toronto is Toronto.
JL: There’ve been so many different versions of the film that could’ve been made. Depending on where the financing was coming from, or the production company I was working with, the location would change. And I was fine with that. Like, whatever! They’d be like, “Hey, could we set this in… New York? Can we set this in Chicago?”
AS: Exactly. Boston, or somewhere Connecticut, etc.
JL: We had been parked with this one streamer for like two years, and we’d been going through some casting difficulties where they weren’t saying “yes” to actors. So we took the movie back because we felt like it was gonna go on forever. And — yeah! We found Wildling Pictures, here in Toronto, and they were just so supportive. They were like “Yes! Why not Toronto?”
AS: Thanks so much for chatting to me, man.
JL: Thank you! We’ll hangout in Toronto I’m sure.
AS: Absolutely.
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