Aziz Ansari’s sharply funny directorial debut, Good Fortune, wasn’t supposed to be his debut.
He had planned to adapt Dr. Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, about coping with death, but the film was suspended when one of its stars, Bill Murray, was accused of misconduct. (Murray has said he kissed a female staff member, as a joke, while both wore Covid masks.)
On what was supposed to be a shoot day for Being Mortal, Ansari sent another script he’d been working on to one of his Being Mortal stars, Seth Rogen, who loved it — and signed up for what became Good Fortune.
The film, which is now available on video on demand, stars Keanu Reeves as Gabriel, a lowly guardian angel tasked with keeping people from texting and driving. He ends up causing Ansari’s character, Arj, a struggling delivery driver sleeping in his car, to switch lives with Rogen’s character, Jeff, a spoiled tech bro. Keke Palmer, who was also to have starred in Good Fortune, plays Elena, who is trying to unionize the hardware chain where she works.
Besides writing and directing, Ansari is famed for his standup comedy, key part on NBC’s Parks and Recreation, and starring role on Netflix’s Master of None, which he co-created. For our latest edition of Things I’ve Learned as a Moviemaker, he told us about always being ready to pivot. Here is his moviemaking advice, as told to MovieMaker.—M.M.
Aziz Ansari: Things I’ve Learned as a Moviemaker
1. You’ve just got to be writing all the time, and have so many things going at the same time, because movies are so hard to put together. Every movie is a miracle. I remember reading about Steven Spielberg when he made 1941, and it didn’t go well. And he said if you have something that doesn’t go well, just immediately dive into the next thing.
2. The most important thing is to just start directing. Directing is such a tough job to define. You have a script, and whether you’ve written it or not, you basically see it in your head, and you’re trying to share with a team of people what you see and how it should be executed. And the more you know that, the more you can articulate it. Ideally, you have a great team, and they collaborate with you and push it even further.
3. I cannot recommend enough to read Elia Kazan’s A Life. I read it while making Good Fortune, and it was almost magical. Every time I was dealing with a problem, he was somehow talking about it. Like we were editing, and I’d be reading his views on editing.
4. For Being Mortal, I read the book, I became friends with Atul, I interviewed nurses and healthcare workers, people that worked at hospices, doctors, everyone. For this movie, I went and did DoorDash and interviewed people who slept in their cars. I talked to a guy who tried to unionize his Home Depot. That stuff is your best friend, because you don’t need to live the experience if you do the research.
5. Watch as many movies as you can. When I decided I was going to start directing, I thought: OK, who are the best directors alive? And it’s, you know, Scorsese, Tarantino, PTA, whoever you want to say. What do those people have in common? They have an encyclopedic knowledge of film. And I realized that cannot be a coincidence. I immediately started trying to watch as many films as I could. There was a time when I really hadn’t seen everything, but it doesn’t take that long to start racking them up. If you’re like, “I’m gonna watch one movie a day,” even if you don’t hit every day, you can still watch 300 movies in a year. You should really try to devour film.
Good Fortune, written by, directing and starring Aziz Ansari, is now available on VOD from Lionsgate.
Main image: Keanu Reeves and Aziz Ansari in Good Fortune. Lionsgate.