Chuck, Buck, and Miguel

By some cosmic coincidence I don't want to think about, my best college friend e-mailed me out of the blue the day before I was to interview Chuck & Buck director Miguel Arteta. It's at least 10 years since Andrew and I had spoken, and emotions were still raw, on my part at least. According to the algebra of Arteta's film, I'm more the Buck, the friend nursing memories and wounds. Andrew is definitely a Chuck, a man seemingly at the top of his game. By this logic, I should have called out to him. Yet word came in the other direction.

"Hope you get this message. Hope you're well," he wrote. "I'll be in Boston this weekend. I hope we can get together."

A lot of hoping, underlining the tentative, hamfisted way old friends reach out to each other. Nothing, of course, compared to how the infantile Buck obtrudes upon his childhood friend in Arteta's disquieting film. I'd never think of doing that with Andrew. I couldn't imagine he would either. Then again, I never expected to hear from him. And, to be honest, I wasn't really sure I wanted to meet up.

I put the question to Arteta, who was groggy-sounding on the other end of the line in LA. Should this Buck make time for his Chuck?

"Absolutely," Arteta said. "Life's too short not to see what surprises come your way."

Although Arteta didn't write the screenplay for Chuck & Buck, he understands its single-minded hero -- you don't make two movies in four years, see them both premiere at Sundance, and get them nationally distributed without a healthy dose of obsessiveness. Following the left-field success of Star Maps, in 1997, Arteta flirted with a Hollywood studio assignment. Screenwriter Mike White, who had a small part in Star Maps, showed him the Chuck & Buck screenplay, but his advisers called it "career suicide." Yet when bigger projects fell through and Arteta was laid up in bed after two knee operations, Buck haunted him and wouldn't let go.

"The movie celebrates the twisted little child inside of us," the director explains. "That hits a chord with our generation." It used to be that people would check into therapy to grow up and achieve wholeness, he says. Not so with him and his friends. They see shrinks to get in touch with their spontaneous sides, to act on their impulses, to indulge childish whims. In one relationship that started up soon after Star Maps, Arteta and his girlfriend traded the role. "I was a Buck for a while, she was a Buck for a while." The romance is over: "Making Chuck & Buck taught me how to get out of an obsession."

Yet a film director can never fully shake the dynamic. "Most actors are like nine-year-olds. They know that 90 per cent of their job is to focus on their performance and they're 100 percent unwilling to do that." This cast was full of exceptions, perhaps because so few of the leading players are trained actors. White, the star, is better known as a producer of the television series Freaks and Geeks. And Chris and Paul Weitz are Hollywood heroes of the moment thanks to American Pie, which they wrote and directed. They're all old friends, connected by Wesleyan University.

Arteta ended up there after dropping in and out of Harvard, and after a year watching old movies at the Brattle Theatre. He played in his share of local bands, too, including a combo called You and Your Big Ideas. Their trademark? Performing in Abe Lincoln hats and beards. "If anybody out there saw us," Arteta says, "I just want to apologize."
-- S.H.

---

Back to 'Chuck and Buck'

---