"Hey. You made it!"
"Yeah!"
"Dave..."
"Yeah..."
"Dave Wallace..."
"David Lipsky... hi, it's a pleasure... so..."
[David Lipsky voiceover] One of the things that I said to Jesse Eisenberg, who's playing me,
I said that one of the ways the audience will know if you've gotten something –
if you think that Jason, or that David Wallace, has had something good, is –
he will instantly look at his tape machine
and he will look to make sure that the battery light is on and also that the counter is going...
because when you get something great like that, you want to make sure you have it.
"You don't drink?"
One of the nice things for me, as a journalist, is seeing journalists just seen as people who
can lead you into lives that you don't have access to otherwise.
They're the repositories of secrets.
I could be reading David Wallace's work...
I could be reading it at home and thinking, "God, this guy's doing the best fiction right now in America" —
and then 18 hours later, I could be unpacking my bag on the futon in his guest room,
and hearing him talk to his dogs while he's trying to go to sleep.
After we'd been together for so long, we both kind of forgot what I was there for
and it was just — these are two people who have similar interests
who happen to be travelling and having a great conversation,
and I think sometimes if that situation is going really well,
people kind of forget what you're there
for...
"Oh, hi! Okay, David and David. That's easy."
"We only just met, he's writing a piece on the tour.
Should we get going?"
"Yes! Come on!"
One of the things about this intense journalistic experience that I had with David Wallace
is that you had that kind of very long relationship compressed into just five days.
The end of that movie really does feel
like the last day that I was at David's house.
That will never happen again because now people have digital recorders on their phones
so they would just record it...
but the only way to get that data was to move from room to room,
and just repeat what I was seeing.
"Looks like a frat... but a kind of bookish frat."
I did that, A) so I could write about his house —
but the other reason I did that is
that I loved being there talking to him,
and it was an excuse that I wouldn't
have to leave for another 20 minutes.
If I had to record the house I could be in
David's company and be talking to him
and thinking about him for 20 minutes
longer.
That kind of very strong connection, which then ends,
is one of the great sad things, but also a great thing
about the way people work together to create a nonfiction story.
One of the things I love about THE END OF THE TOUR is that we just see
David's office — we see his desk and that's it.
And he had painted his office room black which is true,
and we just see Jesse looking at that room and really having
no clear idea how he makes the transition from
seeing that stuff and being able to
express it so well in conversation –
to how many drafts one has to do to get it
right.
To make something good, particularly with prose, takes a great deal of work —
that's part of what the movie is about
and I think that when you just see people talking and recording,
you have no way of knowing how they're
going to go home and then say
"Okay, here's what the story is and here's the way to tell the story so that people
will care about what's been happening to
these people."
That real immersion in people's lives is a thrilling thing. It makes for great storytelling.
"Listen, before we start putting stuff on tape, I need to ask you something."
" I need to know that anything that I say five minutes later not to put in,
that you're not going to put in."
you
