![]() ![]() ![]() I didn’t think a ton about my own age and relationships to these characters until really I was on set and that’s when it was clear that I was somewhere in between, maybe closer in age to the teenagers than I was to the adults. Was it interesting for you to write this from a perspective of being in between the two generations that you’ve got in the film? It’s hard now to picture having written anything else as our first screenplay together rather than this time in our lives when we first got to know each other. We had tried a few other things, but we could both really relate to this and we had so many shared experiences from growing up that it made a lot of sense for us to write it together. I knew Ben from high school, he was a few years older than me and he primarily was writing historical nonfiction at the time, but we had always talked about wanting to write something together. Since you went to high school with Ben Tarnoff, was he already a writing partner or did you want to work on this with him for that reason? One of the first people to come on board was the casting director Doug Aibel, who has cast Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach movies, so that gave us some credibility from a casting standpoint and since the movie is so character-driven that it was really important to find the right people to put in the movie. The timing was fairly good to build that out as some of my shorts had been going to some festivals, I had this feature and the work to show and it actually started to come together fairly quickly. ![]() I had been making some shorts in film school and started showing those around when I was developing “Quitters.” It actually started as a short film and as I kept writing it, it felt like there was something there, especially with the main character Clark. Shortly before the film hits theaters and VOD this week after a successful festival run following its premiere at SXSW last year, Pritzker spoke about the personal inspiration for the film as well as literary influences he had, as well as the benefits of inexperience, crashing a car on federal property, and going back home to make the film. Relief can be found in Pritzker and Tarnoff’s rapier wit and their refreshing ability to convey the thoughts that usually aren’t dared to be spoken, all held together by a simple, melancholic score from legendary composer David Shire (“All the President’s Men,” “The Conversation”). While Pritzker and co-writer Ben Tarnoff aren’t afraid to show any of their characters acting on their darkest impulses, they also refuse to villainize any of them, making the expectations of age and status the real enemy as the discomfort of suppressing personal pain to keep up appearances in the upper-middle class milieu weighs on everyone on screen, with the teens eager to act like adults and the adults trying their best not to act like teens. With a distracted father (Greg Germann), he sees a way out in the form of a new girlfriend (Morgan Turner) whose urbane and largely permissive parents are arguably more attractive to him than she is personally, a situation that is bound to implode. Set in the Presidio of San Francisco, you never can be entirely sure whether it’s a fog rolling off the bay or the thick sense of entitlement that clouds the judgment of its lead character Clark (Ben Koenigsberg), cut from the same finely-tailored cloth as restless young screen protagonists like Richard Dreyfuss’ Duddy Kravitz and Bud Cort’s Harold before him, as he wrestles with how to handle the sudden departure of his mother (Mira Sorvino) to a rehab clinic and the rejection of his romantic overtures to a classmate (“Moonrise Kingdom” star Kara Hayward). He shouldn’t worry since in spite of making a film about overanalytical teens and their parents with their own overworked neuroses that may have trouble engaging with each other, “Quitters” is far easier for an audience to embrace. “ was always the intention was to create these kind of prickly characters and to see if you could stick with them,” says Noah Pritzker of his feature debut “Quitters,” sheepishly admitting shortly after, “I don’t know if I’m doing the best job of promoting the movie by saying that.” ![]()
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