Despite appearances to the contrary, John Krasinski, the rangy costar of NBC’s “The Office,” does not fit into the category of actors who really want to direct.
Even if the movie passion project he wrote and directed, “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men,” was set to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Monday night.
“I never wanted to be a writer, never wanted to direct anything,” Krasinski, 29, said in West Hollywood, Calif., last week.
“People talk about being a triple threat. I’m still working on being a single threat! Acting’s what I love the most.”
For Krasinski, it was the source material that prompted him to make the move behind the camera.
During his senior year at Brown University, the Boston-area native took part in a staged reading of acclaimed literary fiction writer David Foster Wallace’s bestselling “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men,” a mordant, sometimes disturbing collection of 23 short stories, some presented as interview transcripts with guys of various ages who try to justify their outrageous and often repugnant male behavior.
It was a eureka moment for the future “Office” boy; without encountering Wallace’s book, Krasinski said, he never would have made the push to infiltrate the entertainment industry, let alone wind up as Jim Halpert, America’s favorite shaggy sitcom Everyman.
“That reading was a real wake-up call to me to look at the world in a different way,” he said.
“Until then, it was just me performing with friends… Without being overly sentimental, it was the defining moment I decided I wanted to act.”
Krasinski wasn’t even on the pop culture radar as an actor when he began seeking the rights to Wallace’s 1999 book.
In 2001, Krasinski, a theater student in New York waiting tables, began lobbying Wallace’s longtime literary agent, Bonnie Nadell, for the right to option “Brief Interviews” but was rebuffed several times.
Then, “he explained how much the book meant to him and was really heartfelt and sweet,” Nadell said.
“I went purely on intuition that he was going to do a good job.”
Krasinski adapted it for the screen by taking only one major liberty with the original content: He concocted a female character, an interviewer played by Julianne Nicholson (“Law &Order: Criminal Intent”) with a personal motive for trying to understand the darkness that lurks in the hearts of men.
In 2005, with a shooting draft finished and the casting process under way, Wallace, the literary phenom who also penned the groundbreaking novel “Infinite Jest,” called Krasinski to give him his blessing on the project.
“He said, ‘What’s it scripted around?”’ Krasinski said.
“I said, ‘A woman doing her dissertation around feminism looking into the role of the modern man in the post-feminist era.’ There was a silence. And he said, ‘I never figured out how to do that, how to make them all relate together. That sounds awesome.’
“It was probably one of the greatest days of my life!”
From there, Krasinski started putting together financing, landing money for the project from one of his college friends.
What came next stunned the literary world. After a protracted battle with depression, Wallace took his own life in September.
“It’s such a tragedy on every level,” Krasinski said of Wallace’s death. “That’s a loss I don’t think anyone can fully fathom. No one will write the way he did.”
“Brief Interviews” arrives at Sundance — one of 16 films screening in the dramatic competition — as the only one of the author’s books successfully adapted for the screen.
For his part, the actor said he is not committed to taking his career as a writer-director any further.
“In my wildest dreams, Sundance would be where it ends up,” he said. “This is, without a doubt, a fairy tale.”
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