Jason Schwartzman: ‘I love the work — in my daily life I can be quite lethargic, but something happens on a movie set’

If “Wes Anderson boy” was an official title, Jason Schwartzman (Los Angeles, 44 years old) would top the list of those who carry the designation — with Bill Murray’s permission, of course. The Californian actor, who made his debut on the big screen in 1998 with Anderson’s Rushmore, has now made eight movies with the Texan filmmaker: Darjeeling Express, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, Hotel Budapest, Isle of Dogs, The French Dispatch, and Asteroid City.

Nonetheless, during a rendezvous with EL PAÍS in a Berlin hotel, Schwartzman is not promoting another filmographic notch in his belt with the cult auteur. Sitting in a downtown lounge of the German capital, the actor instead explores his role in Between the Temples (2024), a rather peculiar screwball comedy directed by Nathan Silver, which made its debut at last year’s Sundance Film Festival.

In it, Schwartzman plays Ben Gottlieb, a Jewish cantor depressed by the recent loss of both his wife and voice, and who is headed toward a profound loss of faith. As his inner circle pressures him to marry a rabbi’s daughter, his high school music teacher reenters his life. Gottlieb is to tutor her for her bat mitzvah, a ceremony that is usually undertaken when a girl is 12, but that his pupil is taking on post-retirement.

“I was excited to read the script from the first page. It was completely unusual and different. I had never read anything like it, in terms of style and what it was talking about. It seemed like a great adventure,” says Schwartzman, clad in a zipped-up windbreaker and multi-colored scarf wrapped cozily around his neck (yes, it’s winter, but we’re also indoors — what will this man do when he steps foot on the icy streets of Berlin?)

In one sense, the film can be understood as a homage to his father, Jack Schwartzman, a Jewish-Polish Hollywood producer who died when his son was just shy of 14. “In a somewhat selfish way, I was excited to shoot this film because I wanted to learn more about Judaism,” says the actor, who also worked as executive producer on the project. “I felt very close to this character, whose job is to help children prepare for one of the most important events in their lives, whether that’s a bar or bat mitzvah. But he’s in a situation where he’s lost that ability. I was thinking about how confused he must feel, because losing faith is a problem that can happen to any believer.”

Though this might not sound like a comedy, it is. Even if, the film’s protagonist says, shooting it was hardly fun. “It was hard, actually, because one of the main things that the director emphasized to me was that my character speaks really slowly. It’s very odd to have a director say ‘slower.’ You don’t hear that very much, it’s a downer. You know, I didn’t think we were making a comedy. I always asked Nathan Silver, ‘Does my character think he’s funny? Is he a funny person or not? If he was in the room, would he make you laugh?’”

Even beyond his father, Schwartzman is part of one of those extensive Hollywood lineages whose beginnings are hard to parse, not to speak of where it ends. He is the son of actress Talia Shire (née Coppola, who played Sylvester Stallone’s partner in the Rocky saga), the nephew of Francis Ford Coppola and cousin of actor Nicolas Cage and director Sofia Coppola. In 2009, he married art director and designer Brady Cunningham, with whom he has three children. “I’m so happy to go to work. On a deep level, there’s no place I’d rather be. In my daily life, I can be quite lethargic. But something happens on a movie set… I feel so excited to be there. I think it’s just working in general, it doesn’t have to be a movie set. But I love the work.”

Recently, he’s been working non-stop. In addition to the premiere of Between the Temples, he was in the cast of Megalopolis, his uncle’s controversial epic. Then there was Queer (Luca Guadagnino’s latest film, an adaptation of William Burroughs’ celebrated novel), Pavements (an experimental musical biopic about the alternative rock group Pavement) and The Last Showgirl (directed by his cousin Gia Coppola). “It was definitely the most work I’d ever done in a year,” he laughs. He’s always aware of the fact that any actor’s career has its lean times. “The only thing I can try to do is never give up. It’s a tough profession, because there are a lot of down times between shoots. So when I work, I try to pretend that it’s my first role.”

None of this is too bad for a guy who never wanted a career in Hollywood. “I didn’t know I could want to be an actor,” he says. “It’s part of my upbringing, et cetera, but I never like, saw movies and thought like I could be there. Especially in the ‘80s, you know, like I didn’t see Lethal Weapon and think, this movie is missing one thing: me. Who would think that?” He recalls that at the time, he was more focused on music. “I had this little boombox. You could just take it into a room with you, it just felt like you could do it yourself. I think that that was what appealed to me about music, that you didn’t need anybody to start making noise. Movies were like, professional sports or something. But I loved comedies and those big movies.”

In 1997, he got his hands on the script for Rushmore, which would eventually be his debut vehicle. “I had never read a script before. But I got sick, I got the flu. My mom went to the video store and rented me three movies. She was like, ‘You should watch these for your [audition]. And they were Dog Day Afternoon, Harold and Maude and The Graduate. And I was watching The Graduate, and there’s this moment when Dustin Hoffman is in his bedroom and Mrs. Robinson comes in and he knocks on the table, and I remember seeing that movement and it clicked. I was like, ‘You can’t do that with a song.’”

Even so, Schwartzman still alternates between making movies and music. He was the drummer and songwriter for Los Angeles band Phantom Planet until 2003, and has released three albums through his personal project, Coconut Records, for which he plays most of the instruments. On the first, Nighttiming (2007), Kirsten Dunst and Zooey Deschanel contributed vocals. A fourth album is already on the way. “I’ve been sitting on a bunch of songs for a long time, I’m just kind of in a rut. I was like, ‘I don’t know if I should ever make these again.’ And then I reconnected with this friend named Ben Kweller, a musician I’ve known since I was 18. He was in LA recently and it was just like this movie. He’s going to make a record with me. It’s an example of like a person coming into your life — I don’t think I would have made another album if I hadn’t connected with Ben.” Perhaps, or maybe this is what it’s like to be a guy who can’t stay still..

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