Jonathan Mostow '83 (Writer, Director, & Producer, SURROGATES, TERMINATOR 3)
By Anthony Cistaro A.R.T. '97
You’ve seen the provocative billboards everywhere. Beautiful, youthful people lifting their shirts to reveal metal machinery where their midsections should be – “Human perfection. What could go wrong?” The posters announce the arrival of the heavily anticipated Bruce Willis/Ving Rhames action thrill ride, Surrogates, directed by Harvard’s own Jonathan Mostow '83.
Originally from Woodbridge, Connecticut, Jonathan Mostow began his professional paying career in entertainment on the day he turned 16 (he ran down to the local movie theater and got a job as an usher). Later in college, while browsing Harvard’s course catalogue, Mostow found a single filmmaking class – available only to “Visual and Environmental Studies” majors. Mostow declared the VES major so he could take the filmmaking class.
Upon graduation, Mostow left the relatively small Boston commercial/industrial film scene and moved to Los Angeles. There, Jonathan embarked on a “very long, impoverished and setback-filled journey that finally led to me making my first film.”
It took Mostow seven years. During that time, he made a living coaching students preparing for the SAT. He also wrote business plans. “Somebody saw ‘Harvard’ on my resume and mistakenly thought I was an MBA or something,” said Mostow. “By the time I had finished, I had written up a plan for a billion-dollar company, which I had no business doing whatsoever. I don’t even know if they’re still financially solvent…”
Mostow got a lot of notice in 1991 for the Showtime movie Flight of Black Angel, which he developed with his recurring collaborators, writers Michael Ferris '83 and John Brancato '80. (Incidentally, Ferris was Mostow’s college roommate. Both Ferris and Brancato edited the Harvard Lampoon, and Surrogates marks the most recent team effort for Mostow and Ferris/Brancato).
Based on the strength of Black Angel, Mostow then caught the brass ring of a studio feature that was a definite “greenlight.” The script, however, just wasn’t material that Jonathan connected with. He passed on the project. “I thought at the time maybe I was making a mistake, but I also knew that it wasn’t a movie I could be passionate about. And I decided that if I can’t work as a director on the terms I want to have, then I should go and do something else.”
Ever self-effacing, Mostow continues, “It may sound silly coming from a guy whose pictures are all genre-based entertainment. It’s not like I’m making emotional movies about my grandmother or something. I’m making big, fast, hopefully mass-appeal studio movies. But for me personally in each of these films I’ve made, there’s always been something that I found compelling and interesting – so that every morning when I get up, I’m interested when I go to work.”
Mostow has found much that compels and interests him in Surrogates. Surrogates first found form as a popular graphic novel that painted a world in the not-too-distant future where people avoid the dangers of daily life by sending “surrogate” robots out to the world as stand-ins for them, while they experience life from the comfort of their own homes.
Surrogates struck Mostow as a metaphor for life in the digital age: “We’re in this transformative period in human history where you don’t actually leave your house for things – you can get all your information online, you can do all your shopping, you can communicate with people whether it’s by Twitter or Facebook or email. And so we’re more connected to the world and to people than we’ve ever been. Yet on a human level we’re far more disconnected because we’re not really interfacing with people in person any more.”
Mostow is also known as an actor’s director. Actors love to work with him. When asked why, Mostow said, “When I had all that free time early on in my career, I took acting classes. Not so much because I wanted to be an actor, but because if I was going to work with actors I wanted to be more tuned to the acting process. And I have to credit one of my acting teachers, Stella Adler, for teaching me how to get in touch with and develop that indicator inside that can cause you to recognize when a scene isn’t working – and just say ‘Stop’ and work to fix it.”
Mostow finds that the responsibility of oversight is sometimes the loneliest part about being a director, “Everybody in the process is most concerned about their own personal piece in it – the actors are worried about the lines, the cinematographer’s worried about the shots – but ultimately the director’s the guy who will be held accountable for whether or not the movie works.”
When asked for a few parting words of advice, Mostow shared the following: “Friendships and relationships will far outlast any business venture you’re in – and so I’ve always put my friendships and personal relationships as a priority. Always tell the truth. Don’t behave any differently in a professional Hollywood situation than in any other circumstance. Basically my experience of Hollywood has been that most of the people I’ve dealt with are really decent, really honest, hardworking people. I haven’t experienced what the cliché of Hollywood is – I think the outside perception is far less charitable and more negative than what it really is.”
Aspiring filmmakers take note – for Jonathan Mostow, it’s all about integrity. Check out Mostow’s latest at your local Cineplex and learn something about how to make an action picture with heart.