Revisiting Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, director John Krasinski’s first pancake of a film

It’s a common misconception that A Quiet Place was John Krasinski’s directorial debut. The critically acclaimed post-apocalyptic thriller was actually his third film as a director (besides a handful of episodes of The Office), following two previous outings in the indie world—the ensemble family drama The Hollars, and his actual debut, an adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s short story collection Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. If you’ve never seen it, or even heard of it, that’s no surprise. Even Krasinski himself would probably like to forget it. But with his fifth outing behind the camera, the family fantasy IF, about to open in theaters, it’s as good a time as any to unpack this ambitious yet fundamentally flawed passion project.

For someone else, a film as pretentious, experimental, and incomprehensible as Brief Interviews might have been a career ender. For the famously likable Krasinski, however, it was just his first pancake—a sincere early effort that didn’t turn out as planned. Some annoyingly talented artists manage to get just about everything right on their first try, but that’s not the norm. For the rest of us, it may take a few bad pancakes before we get into a rhythm and really start cooking. The point of this slightly belabored metaphor is that talent can take time to emerge, and the key to growth is to learn from your mistakes. Or, to put it in the wise words of Yoda, “The greatest teacher, failure is.”

There’s something to be said for trying something once, failing spectacularly, and then getting right back up and trying again. Well, maybe not right back. Brief Interviews With Hideous Men premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009, played in limited release for a few weeks, and then became a footnote in cinematic history (probably for the best). It would be seven years before Krasinski directed another feature. The Hollars was a star-studded yet mostly forgettable dramedy with a script by James C. Strouse (Grace Is Gone, Love Again). Krasinski initially came on board the film as an actor and connected so much to the material, and to Strouse (who based it on his real-life family), that he wound up directing as well. As a sophomore effort it was serviceable enough to make Hollywood forget about the fiasco that was Brief Interviews, making space for him to eventually co-write and direct A Quiet Place, then its sequel, and now, IF.

In interviews before and after the Sundance opening of Brief Interviews, Krasinski talked at length about discovering David Foster Wallace’s work through a stage reading of the collection in college. Undeterred by the conventional wisdom that Wallace is one of those writers whose books simply can’t be faithfully translated to the screen, Krasinski said to himself: “Challenge accepted.” As soon as he had enough clout in Hollywood, thanks to four seasons as Jim Halpert on The Office and a series of mid-budget films opposite A-listers, he acquired the rights to Brief Interviews With Hideous Men and set out to adapt the unadaptable. “This is, bar none, one of the greatest authors that has ever lived. Period,” Krasinski told an audience at a screening of the film in 2009. “[This movie] will never be more than a fraction of the imagination inspired by his writing. That is a given. I’m telling you that right now. But at the same time, I hope I did him a little bit of justice.”

There’s no question Krasinski had high ambitions and noble intentions when he took on the project, but he bit off more than he could chew. Wallace writes in dense prose, full of cerebral language, footnotes, and asides. Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is exactly what you’d expect from the title. The only thing that really connects the stories is an exploration of male depravity, and how it manifests in their views on women and sex. That, in itself, is not much to hang a film on.

To fill in the gaps and provide some connective tissue, Krasinski invented the character of Sara Quinn (played by Julianne Nicholson). Her last name is undoubtedly a reference to the “Q” that stands in for the unprinted questions posed by the unidentified interviewer in the book. The mystique of those missing questions is diminished slightly by introducing us to the interviewer, but it’s not like Sara gets much characterization anyway. She’s more of a narrative device than a complete person. She’s working on a research project about men, but also trying to work through a recent break-up after discovering her boyfriend cheated on her. She gets more screen time than any other character, yet by the end of the film we know less about her than any of her subjects.

Krasinski cuts back and forth in nonlinear fashion between the interviews and Sara’s academic life of campus events and advisor meetings. It’s all very gimmicky, and not as clever as he thinks it is. Some characters break the fourth wall, others wander in and out of memories, theirs and others, to deliver metatextual commentary on a scene. Characters who aren’t even in scenes together talk over one another. Time loses all meaning as we experience sudden flashbacks, then forward into the future, before snapping back to the present, and then to who knows when. Krasinski pulls out every trick in the indie auteur book, but it feels like he’s trying so hard to be artsy he forgot the most basic rule of filmmaking—don’t lose your audience. If you manage to stick around past the first 15 minutes or so, you find yourself spending a good chunk of the film’s mercifully short 80-minute running time waiting to see if all these blurry portraits resolve into a single, coherent whole by the end. (Spoiler alert: they do not.)

Speaking of waste, the bench of talented actors in this thing is ridiculous. In Hollywood, star power attracts star power, and Krasinski used his to put together an impressive cast, including (in alphabetical order, as they’re listed in the credits) Will Arnett, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Cerveris, Josh Charles, Dominic Cooper, Frankie Faison, Will Forte, Ben Gibbard, Timothy Hutton, Christopher Meloni, Chris Messina, Max Minghella, Corey Stoll, and more. Charles has a good bit in which he delivers a single breakup speech intercut between a handful of different women. Cooper gets a few choice words as an annoyingly persistent grad student who believes his messed up ideas about trauma and victimhood are uniquely profound. Frankie Faison describes his father’s life of humiliation as a men’s washroom attendant in painful and colorful detail. But the stories aren’t tonally consistent, and the characters seem like they belong to different films. The structure doesn’t allow them much screen time beyond their own little vignettes.

Krasinski saves the juiciest role for himself, naturally. As Sara’s ex-boyfriend he gets to deliver the film’s final blow—one of the most memorable, and controversial, sections from the book (“Interview #20" for those in the know). In a 10-minute monologue he explains the circumstances of his cheating through the second-hand retelling of a traumatic event experienced by the woman he slept with. And here’s another example of the challenges in dramatizing Wallace. He writes long, stylized passages of layered exposition that were never intended to sound natural coming out of an actual person’s mouth. Krasinski proves to be too enamored of Wallace’s prose to change in ways that might make it flow better when spoken aloud. So he lifts entire, stilted lines out of the text like, “I’ll just bite the political bullet and confess that I classified her as a strictly one-night objective,” but rearranges the words in ways that take the power out of them. It turns out, when you try to strike a balance between Wallace and realism, you wind up in a murky middle ground that doesn’t work on either level.

Misguided though it may have been, Krasinski had a vision for Brief Interviews With Hideous Men; it just didn’t work out like he planned. If he thought of himself as a post-modern filmmaker in the spirit of his favorite author, the experience seems to have disabused him of that notion. In recent years he seems to have settled into a more populist mode that suits him much better. Now that he’s on pancake number five, it will be interesting to see if he’s finally got the technique down to a science.