PODCAST – Swiss Army Man: The ‘Bad Screenplay’ Experiment

If you seen Swiss Army Man and the way the film develops from an off color joke to a deeply moving personal story, you can see that the structure of the film mirrors the process: the process by which the Daniels created it.

They start with a really unlikely premise, that certainly doesn't seem like it should sustain a scene, much less a movie. And by running towards it, end up with a meditation on the connection between shame and loneliness, a meditation on love, on friendship, on sex, on attraction, on the way that we hide in plain sight, on what's really important about life, about the strange and sometimes uncomfortable lines between love and friendship, and about the personal journey that we all have to go on in order to figure out who we really are.

In one of the most beautiful lines in the movie, Daniel Radcliffe’s character, Manny, asks Paul Dano’s character, Hank, “You want to go home so you can have love, but you ran away because nobody loves you.”

The structure of the film forces Hank to come to terms with that dilemma, and with the nature of that loneliness: not the loneliness forced upon us by other people, but the loneliness that is forced upon us by ourselves, when we hide the natural things that make us who we are from the people around us.

And the magical realism elements exist, not to be weird or unusual or show how original these writers are, but to dive into the metaphor that drives the movie: how the ways we feel “marooned” by the people around us are often a by-product of the way we maroon ourselves.

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