Reel life: R rating liberating for 'Vacation filmmakers

Jonathan Goldstein and actor John Francis Daley have written the screenplays to the comedies “Horrible Bosses,” “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone” and “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2.”

Daley is freshly 30 (as of July 20) and hails from Wheeling. Goldstein is 46 and comes from New York City. The two made their directorial debuts this week by writing and directing the sequel “Vacation.” I grabbed them on Tuesday for a quick telephone interview:

Q: How did directing your first movie together affect your relationship as writing partners?

Goldstein: It's more intense than writing. It's more hours. You're under more pressure every day to deliver. Unfortunately, we're still talking!

Daley: Even though we share the same mindset a lot of the time, sometimes we don't, and we have to agree on how things should be done. Fortunately, in this day and age of film, you can do various takes without incurring huge expenses. That allowed us the freedom to shoot different versions of how we wanted things portrayed.

Q: It must have been liberating to go full R-rating without having to worry about conforming to the constraints of a PG-13 rating.

Goldstein: It was very liberating. This allowed us to be more honest in some places. I've always thought parents in most movies are whitewashed, so they come off not so real, you know? What we were able to do was put in some rough edges and make them into real people.

Daley: It also allows us to explore some of the darker material that's raunchier and arguably more offensive, but also is really funny. I like the idea that there are so many different ways to make an audience laugh. You can do that with the sharper dialogue humor we used, as well as the simpler sight-based jokes that we have a lot of as well.

Q: How did you two meet?

Goldstein: I was a writer and John was an actor on a sitcom called “The Geena Davis Show.” We found we had a similar sensibility. We found the same things funny.

Daley: I was showing people in my dressing room a short film that I had done. Jonathan was walking by and I said, “Hey, check this out.” He watched it and he told me it reminded him of the short films he had made when he was my age. He brought his in. There was a startling resemblance to them. We decided we should write together.

Q: What's next up for you two?

Goldstein: We have a little thing called “Spider-Man” we're going to write. We're very excited about it. It's a departure from the straightforward comedies we've been doing so far. Marvel wants to bring a certain element of comedy into the Spider-Man franchise. Excitement and spectacle alone can't always a carry a film.

Daley: And it's fun in the fact that we can both totally relate to Peter Parker in being a geeky outcast, someone who's misunderstood and too smart for his own good. Spider-Man is different from most superheroes. They're all gods. They're indestructible. To give super powers to a young man who's vulnerable and trying to figure his life out is a total departure.

Q: What's the best part about working with each other?

Goldstein: John gets me outside my own head. When you write, you're in a bubble. John is the perfect sounding board for me.

Daley: Jonathan allows me to bounce ideas around to validate that they're good. That's important, especially in comedy. Plus, the fact that we were born in different times allows us to cover a broader spectrum of pop culture references.

Goldstein: Notice how he says “born in different times.”

Daley: I'm trying to be a nicer person.

Critics notebook:

• The 5th Annual Chicago French Film Festival opens Friday, July 31, at the Music Box Theatre. It runs through Aug. 6 and is copresented by Institute Francais and the French Embassy in The United States. Go to MusicBoxTheatre.com.

• If you want a glimpse of a black-and-white independent thriller that looks like the love child of Antonioni's “Blow-Up” with Quentin Tarantino, watch the trailer to “Full Frame” at http://bit.ly/1D9l7ab.

“Full Frame” will have its world premiere (yes, world premiere) at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 4, at the Midwest Independent Film Festival with a screening at the Century Centre, 2828 N. Clark St., Chicago. What's it about? “A spineless, busybody photographer finds himself trapped in a web of blackmail, bad guys, beautiful women, and murder!”

The entire crew of filmmakers hails from Quincy, Illinois. Director Christopher Kelley will be there Tuesday. Go to midwestfilm.com for info.

• Dann Gire's column runs Fridays in Time out!