Jon Favreau Is Keeping It Real
Ben Stiller is not the only one who has an issue with making movies in a Canadian city. In today's LAT, Jon Favreau relates the hellish, family-scattering experience of being forced to shoot Elf in Vancouver:
"Nothing holds a candle to the health and happiness of my family," he said. "I won't direct anything that keeps me away from them. With 'Elf,' at the last minute they pulled it from L.A. and made me shoot the studio work in Vancouver. My family couldn't come because my wife has a career. It took a long time to get back to where we were before I left. [My daughter] was in my wife's belly. And I missed a big chunk of my son's life, and he had to get to know me again. So I won't let them show me a script that takes me out of town. Sometimes it's a deal breaker and sometimes it's not."[...]
"At the end of the day when my life is drawing to an end, I am going to look back at the one-sheets on my wall, and that is going to be all well and good," he said. "But it's going to be the family that's around me that is going to determine how content I am getting ready to move on to whatever is next."
It says something about a man's moral fiber when he can be surrounded by a career's worth of framed one-sheets from any number of beloved motion pictures PCU, Very Bad Things, Daredevil, what have you and feel nothing; but then look down on his desk at a 5x7 of the wife and kids at Disney's California Adventure and have it mean everything in the world.