In a suite at the Waldorf Astoria, three men roam the halls who have been Flynn at one time or another. One, author Nick Flynn, skinny and frail with a long face and big eyes, will always be Flynn. After all, he is the man from which the book Another Bullshit Night in Suck City comes from and, in keeping, the film Being Flynn. The man who’s father both fictionally and, in a strange way, literally became Robert De Niro, who plays another Flynn, Nick’s father Jonathan, on screen (sadly Mr. De Niro was not present at the Waldorf). Nick describes watching his real-life father do his De Niro impersonation: “[my dad] had seen the trailer for [Being Flynn]…and he does this impersonation of De Niro doing him. It was this weird meta-moment. De Niro’s doing him then he’s doing De Niro doing him.”
Then there’s the slightly more well-fed Paul Weitz, the ever-accomplished filmmaker who was Flynn on the scripted page on and off for seven long years, the same amount of time it took Flynn to write the novel. Weitz spoke on the long path to production: “It’s definitely the longest it’s taken me [to get a film made]. It took that long because initially it was at a more mainstream studio with a bigger budget and as much as they might have wanted to see the movie, they didn’t want to make the movie.”
And, finally, the final Flynn. The one most will recognize and remember as Flynn. The actor Paul Dano, who plays Nick Flynn on the silver screen. “The film ended up being a lot harder than I anticipated and a lot more important than I anticipated, just in terms of what I took away from it.” Dano said of the project. His smile turns to a bit of a grimace as he recalls the weight of the film as a whole.
This same sentiment seems to be a through line for all three Flynns. Whether it be the past, bigger budget productions stopping after they’d started (“I was headed up to Boston to be on set and then they weren’t shooting anymore,” recalls Nick Flynn) or the arduous process of tailoring your script for a studio determined to soften a hard work of art. Weitz admitted to his own struggles in adapting the script without compromising the narrative. “Of the 30 drafts I wrote, I think there’s a good 15 that kind of cheapen the material, where I just really wanted to make it. So I might give a false, cuddly note to [Robert De Niro]’s character at the end of the movie.”
De Niro remained attached even as the funds dwindled and the timeline grew and grew. “Really, the bar that we had to limbo under kept getting lower, which, as it turned out, led to a version of the film that was as true as I could make it to what I wanted it to be.” As for that pesky title change, Nick Flynn is refreshingly honest about it: “You just can’t call a movie [Another Bullshit Night In Suck City]. There’s a reality out there. Called Missouri I guess.”
Thankfully, even the good people of Missouri will recognize the city Being Flynn set in. While the novel is set in Boston, Mass. the film takes a more universal approach, creating a New York-like metropolis that’s easily relatable. “I like the idea of a parable of a city. I mean the book is so specifically Boston but then there would have been the problem of everybody talking like they’re from Boston. Being from Boston that’s painful for me. There are many movies that probably would have been good had they not talked like a strange version of the Kennedys.”
Being Flynn opens to limited theaters on Friday, March 2nd.