Ryan has long been content with his pampered, elite lifestyle lived out across America in airports, hotels and rental cars, and yet he has nothing real to hold onto. Then, he falls for fellow traveler Alex (Vera Farmiga) and begins to contemplate what it might actually meant to have a home.

At the press day for the film, the writer/director/producer talked about making Up in the Air.

Q: Is this the first time you've worked with your dad professionally, where he's produced something of yours?

Jason: Officially, yes. Obviously, I've been showing my work to my father my entire life, starting with my math homework, all the way down to my short films, and everything else I've done. I've always relied on his advice on these things. He's the greatest storyteller I know, and he's read all my screenplays. He's given me advice on everything, including those first five horrible original screenplays that I wrote, that taught me how to be a writer, and then the actual stuff that I made into movies. By the time we were doing Up in the Air, we knew how to do the job together. It's not as though it was like, "Okay, how do we figure out how to work together?" In your producer, you want someone you trust in, and I don't trust anyone more than my father.

Q: Were those people who did the short scenes about losing their jobs real people who really lost their jobs?

Jason: Yes, they were real people. I started writing this movie seven years ago. When I started writing it, we were in an economic boom and, by the time I finished writing it, we were in one of the worst recessions on record. The biggest change I made, in approaching actually directing the movie, was that I realized the scenes I'd written were not adequate. They weren't authentic. In location scouting in St. Louis and Detroit, I walked into empty building after empty building. I realized that I was surrounded by the realities of this recession, and that it was important to reach out and see if we could actually find some people who had lost their jobs to talk about their stories on camera.

Q: Did you draw on your own personal experience in the airport security line, when you wrote that line of dialogue about getting in line behind Asians, or was that from the book?

Jason: No, that's very much me. I'm an obsessive flyer. I choreographed every second of every frame of how George packed, how he went through security and how he chose a line. The idea that it's good to get behind Asians in the security line isn't altogether true because Asian men tend to wear belts and belts are just time killers, when you're going through security. In general, I would avoid anyone wearing a belt, when you're going through security. But, Asians are an efficient race.

Q: Were you worried about the film coming out at this time because of the economy now, and with so many people losing their jobs or scared of losing them?

Jason: No, it doesn't, for a couple of reasons. This is not a movie about job loss. It never has been. The reason why this was just as an appropriate movie in 2002, when I started writing it, as it is now is that it's a movie about human connections. It's about a guy trying to figure out who and what he wants in his life, and who has a philosophy about living alone that is challenged by his family, by a woman, romantically, and by a young upstart girl, who is biting away at his ankles, the entire film. That's what this movie is about.

The location is in the world of corporate termination, which happens to be very relevant right now, and that adds weight to the movie, but it's just not what it's about. If you watch the trailer, that's not what the trailer is about either. I would say less than 10% of the film takes place in the world of corporate termination. The people who are in the film, who lost their jobs and who have now seen the movie, they love it, are proud of it and found the experience of being on camera to be cathartic. Almost every single one of the people who came in to be on camera for us would say, "You know, I haven't really had a chance to talk about this to anyone. This is not the kind of thing that we talk about here in the Midwest, and you can feel so alone because you've lost your community." You're not going into an office where you see the same 50 people that you see all the time. You're at home alone a lot, looking on the internet, trying to find an opportunity. So, to come to a place where there were other people who had experienced something similar, realizing you're not alone, it seemed to help, and hopefully the film will do the same thing. They act as a metaphor. You have a guy who's searching for purpose in his life, and for a living he is cutting people off from what matters most -- their livelihood -- and pushing them into a world in which they are searching for a purpose themselves.

Q: Could you talk about casting Anna Kendrick, since she brings something really spicy and spunky to this film?

Jason: Spicy and spunky? I look forward to telling her that. She's like tortilla soup. I saw Anna in Rocket Science and I was just knocked out by her, and the role of Natalie grew from there. It was seeing her and hearing the rapidity with which she spoke, and her sense of wit and timing. She reminds me of Veronica Lake in Sullivan's Travels. She's just from another era, and she's different from every girl of her generation. People always like to tell me, "Oh, you couldn't have cast this with any other actor. George Clooney had to be Ryan Bingham." But, the truth is that I could have never done this movie without Anna Kendrick and Vera Farmiga. They were almost harder to replace than George Clooney.

Q: How did you strike up a bond with George Clooney? What it was like directing him?

Jason: The first way we struck up a bond was him kicking my ass in basketball, after which he said to me, "I just read your script. It's great. I'm in." Those were the words he said. That's how he came into the project. What's wonderful about George is that, unlike a lot of actors who create barriers between you and them, to make sure there's never intimacy, George breaks those barriers down. The second that you are in a working relationship with him and he trusts you, there are no barriers and he's very trusting. I can't think of a single thing that I asked him to do that he said no to. He creates a very lovely set environment.

Q: Do you think it's true that you could not have made a movie with anybody else in that role except George?

Jason: It's hard to imagine the film having that kind of weight and poignancy without him. There's something about his opening up in this film. There's something about his show of vulnerability that I, at least, have been waiting for, watching him his entire career, that makes this film really work. When he becomes vulnerable to Vera Farmiga, it really means something.

Q: Did you create the Natalie and Alex characters?

Jason: Yes. There was this series of women in the original book, and there was a woman named Alex, and I liked the name. That's about the only resemblance, and Walter Kirn would tell you the same. He has sex with a lot of women in the book. So does Nick Naylor in the book Thank You for Smoking. I'm apparently attracted to authors who send their characters on national sex tours. But no, Alex is very much my creation, and so is Natalie.

They're the same character. Alex and Natalie are the same woman, 15 years apart, and they come from a series of women that I have always loved, including my wife, who are an interesting response to the feminist movement. They are women who are always the smartest person in the room, who are almost frustrated by their own brilliance and who have been told they can have everything, that they can do anything they want with their lives, they can achieve anything and they can have it all, except no one can have it all. That's the truth. Everyone has to sacrifice in life. I find it's these sacrifices that lead to mid-life crisis, both in men and in women. I've seen it explored, a fair amount, on screen with men, but I really haven't in women, and that's why I created those two characters. It was to explore something that I actually really see my wife going through, as she became my wife and a mother and, simultaneously, a career woman. She feels conflicted by her identity.

Q: Vera is incredible in this movie, in such a complicated part. Did you see her in something that helped you to know she was the right person for this role?

Jason: I saw her in Down to the Bone and thought she was fearless in that, and I saw her in The Departed and knew that she could really go toe-to-toe with some charismatic men. But, it was really in meeting her that I knew. I went, "Wow, this girl is really something." It's funny, she was pregnant through prep. She had a baby right before we started making the movie, and I remember going to her and saying "You can't do this. I don't see how this is humanly possible." And, she came back so confident and was like, "No, no, no, don't worry about it." It wasn't a conversation. It was just like, "No, it's fine. Don't worry about it. You're not even going to know." I was like, "Really, I don't think you can do this. I just had a baby. I'm not trying to be sexist. I'm just aware of what goes on." And, she refused to even entertain the conversation. It was one of those moments where I realized, "Wow, this woman really is Alex." She's so cocksure and so fearless, and such a gamer. It was just perfect.

Q: Being such a prankster, did George Clooney pull any pranks during production?

Jason: There were no pranks. We had a prankless set. I feel like I give the worst Q&A's because everyone wants to know about these pranks, and I have nothing. All I can say about the pranks is that he seems to prank the people who deserve it, and I guess no one on our set deserved it.

Q: Having refused to get married again or settle down, is some of the real George Clooney in his character? Do you think you changed his point of view on his life at all?
Jason: Do I think I helped change his own point of view on his own life? Absolutely not! The first thing he said to me was, "I'm in." The second thing he said was, "I know people are going to draw comparisons between this character and my persona, and I'm ready to stare them straight in the eyes." I loved that. I just thought, "What a brave, self-aware thing to say and then to do." It didn't require further conversation. We both understood, and that was it. We went and made the movie.

Q: The ending is not nicely tied in, which was refreshing. Was that your original ending?

Jason: Yes, that was always my ending. I did not want to make a movie that explored the importance of companionship through romance. There's plenty of those films. I wanted a movie that explored the importance of companionship through loss. It's not when you see them dancing together at the wedding that you realize that this man is in love. It's right after he finds out the truth and he's sitting alone in his hotel room. You go, "Oh, this guy wants something more, and maybe so do I." Hopefully, the actual physical impact of feeling that makes the audience think perhaps they want something more. The movie is not about a man making a decision. It's a man coming to an epiphany, and we leave him before his moment of decision, in the purpose of pushing the audience to think about it for themselves, rather than think about what the character's decision is.

Q: Do you see parallels between the people who have lost their job and him losing his chance with that connection? Did the studios try to change that?

Jason: Never. Not for a second. I attribute that to the success of Juno giving me a fair amount of power and to George Clooney. People don't fuck with you, when you've got George Clooney on your side.

Q: Do you know what your next projects are going to be?

Jason: I'm adapting Joyce Maynard's new book, Labor Day, and I'm working with Jenny Lumet, who wrote Rachel Getting Married, on a screenplay.

UP IN THE AIR opens on December 4th

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