John Krasinski, A.K.A. Jim from NBC’s The Office seems to have the whole package: actor, director, and writer. Krasinski, whose career exploded with NBC’s 2005 launch of The Office, has made his directorial debut with Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, a film adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s provocative and awesomely bizarre collection of short stories. The Travesty got a chance to speak with John about his experience on the film set, and, of course, his most favored flirtatious moments with Pam Beesley.

Texas Travesty: This is your directorial debut. Was it fun having that kind of creative control over a project or would you rather just go back to acting?

John Krasinski: I think acting is sort of it for me. But this one was sort of a perfect experience, in a way. I never wanted to be a director, so doing this was something I did because I felt really inspired by the material. I had read it in college and done a stage reading of it and was so moved and blown away that I just wanted to do something with it ever since I left college. I finally got the rights, wrote the script and ended up directing it. Really, after we were searching for a director, just one day, believe it or not, Rainn Wilson and said “Why don’t you just direct it?” I was like I can’t do that! Wait a minute… So I jumped up to the plate and did it, and it was just phenomenal. I don’t even know if I would direct again, not because I didn’t have a great time but because this one was pretty perfect. To be surrounded by a crew and a cast like that is a very rare occasion. I had a really good time directing this, but I think I would be hard pressed to find material that would inspire me in the same way to do all that work for a movie like that again.

TT: I’ve read this about a year ago and I was really excited when I heard you were making a movie about it. Being both writer and director, you had control of the adaptation by one of the greatest authors in the last decade. Was it stressful to make decisions about how you were going to portray this work in film, or was it pretty easy to just kind of adapt it?

JK: It was actually really terrifying from the adaptation side of it. First and foremost, I’m a huge David Foster Wallace fan, so to be doing the adaptation of a book that I think a lot of people love, written by an author that a lot of people love, it’s a really scary prospect. You’re taking something that is beloved on so many big, deep levels. The hardest part for me in adapting it was editing the book. To just cut out huge chunks of text was sort of terrifying, because I kept thinking to myself, what right do I have to think these three pages aren’t good enough to make it into my movie? So that was the hardest part: editing down the monologue to a place where actors could actually get their hands around them and really work through them, because some of the dialogue is a bit overly literary and, in that way, really, really great for the book, but for actors to speak it, you need to cut it down and pare it down a little bit. That was the toughest part.

TT: Along those lines, did you do very many alterations to the story? Or did you pretty much just copy the book into the script?

JK: The interviews were definitely taken right from the book and put into the script. As far as through line and things like that, I just basically had to invent the world that all these guys lived in, and create the character of Sarah, who is the woman that is interviewing them the whole time. That was really fun. I think for me, for some reason, it was always really vivid in my head that this was a woman that was interviewing these guys. Then, when the guys answer her questions in the book, their responses to her always seemed like they had been challenged in some way, that this isn’t just a clinical series of questions, but that this is actually sort of delving into something that these guys are finding very difficult to talk about. I thought that was really interesting and that’s where I got the idea that she’s on some sort of personal quest as well as this academic pursuit. That was the big thing there, creating that character was actually extremely fun.

TT: The interviewer doesn’t have a voice in the book, so you said your mind went directly to this character that you created? Or did you have some other ideas for how you were going to link these stories together?

JK: At first I was going to set it in space and it was going to be an action thriller...no. [Laughter] It’s a difficult thing, because when you direct a movie and it’s definitely your first one, the fact that you come out of the gates and you say, “I want it to be nonlinear and I want it to be sort of a crazy experience, similar to the one you had when you were reading the book,” it’s sort of a wild concept. I was super psyched about it, because, like I said, I wasn’t planning on having this be some huge epic film in the directing world, so I wanted to solely do the book justice. So throughout the whole process, I really tried maintaining that sort of feeling of the experience. I had written a couple of different versions of the arch Sarah and in one I sort of made the breakup a little more problematic and made the whole thing sort of linear and cinematic, but the truth is the material itself won’t hold onto that sort of a fabricated structure, because it basically wants to be a series of interviews with guys, and have you basically experiencing one sort of guy after another and putting them all together at the end. It was kind of amazing at the end of it that the more I tried to put a linear structure to the movie, the more it didn’t work. It felt like it was falling flat.

TT: So, this movie is billed as a comedy, and while David Foster Wallace’s writing is hilarious, there’s a lot of weight to it. When you went in to it did you have a strictly comedic mindset?

JK: No, I don’t know why it’s been billed as a comedy. I mean I think I appreciate it because there’s something ironic about that whole thing and there are many funny moments in it, but at the end of the day, I think that it’s an experience. I’m sure I sound incredibly pretentious saying it’s a “film experience.” One of the two main reasons that I ever wanted to do this were to have more people experience what I experienced the first time I read the book in college, and sort of this mind-altering thing I thought, the way these guys were speaking so honestly with a very unique perspective n the world. I just wanted more people to know about David Foster Wallace. If I could bring one of this books to a bigger medium and get more people interested, maybe he would have more readers, which would be exciting. Then the other thing is, literally, the only thing I want from this movie, with people walking out, is that they have a conversation. Usually the biggest thing to me is that even if you didn’t like a movie, which is totally acceptable and fine to me, I would hope that you would take the material in and you would actually let it sit with you for a second and then not be sure what you thought of the movie for a few minutes. That’s kind of an amazing compliment, and that’s definitely the way I felt when I read the book. So if you say, “I don’t know, I thought maybe this was a little uncomfortable, and that part I thought was funny and this part was offensive,” and this and that. Hopefully, you would find somebody willing to talk it out with you. Hopefully it’s one of those things that at the end of it you kind of have to stop and think about your life for a second.

TT: There were a lot of really great actors in this film. As a director, when you’re setting up a scene, do you let them develop the characters themselves or do you give them a lot of guidance for what you envision the characters to be?

JK: Well, you know, it’s funny. I was really interested to see what their take was on it just in the beginning. The truth is that the material is kind of an actor’s dream, that you have a three-part arch all in a few pages. All the actors completely identified that immediately, and so they had an idea of who these people were and they were really excited to give it a shot. Then I basically set them on the path and said, “These are my thoughts on the guy,” and just basic things like, “This is where I think this guy goes after work,” and they would take that scene and sort of do their own thing with it, which I really loved. If people kind of got off the path I would bring them back, but the big conversations happened right off the bat before we started filming. I would go to lunch with all the actors and talk about where they were coming from, and it was pretty right on. Most of the guys knew exactly what they wanted to do. There were a couple of times when I wanted to push the envelope a little bit and make it a little bit funnier than it seemed on the page, because I think that’s very interesting when people are talking about very serious stuff in a comedic way. Then with people like Dominic Cooper, we pushed it all the way. We tried to get him as fired up as he could possibly be. That was an incredible scene to shoot.

TT: So I told a couple of friends of mine that I was going to do this interview and they immediately emailed me with questions about The Office, so if you don’t mind I’m going to add a couple of questions. In general, what’s the difference between working on television and working for film, in your experience?

JK: It’s really interesting. I have a very meek vision, but when we’re on the show it’s kind of shot similarly to a movie. You have to set up the shot and you’ve got the sort of single camera vibe to the whole show, so therefore the hours are similar and the amount of work is similar. I’d say our show is so unique that I think I’d be hard pressed to compare it as a representative of television. It’s almost like we’re doing a play every week and there happen to be a couple of cameras around, which is really, really exciting. But for me, I’d say the biggest difference is probably waiting around. On film sets there are huge major setups of lighting kits that cost more than most people own. You’re waiting for these giant lights to be set up, where on our show the lighting is sort of the lighting that’s in the office so we’re shooting constantly. That’s the biggest difference: we pretty much have no downtime at all on the show while we’re shooting. Then on a film set you have a lot of downtime when you’re waiting around. That’s a difficult thing, when you get really excited for a scene and they’re like, “Awesome, we’re going to shoot it in two and a half hours,” and you’re like, “What!?”

TT: What have been some of your favorite scenes to be a part of in The Office?

JK: Oh my God, there are countless. Right off the top of my head, the moment that Mindy (Kelly Kapoor) slapped Steve (Michael Scott) on the Diversity Day episode. He was making fun of her being Indian and she slapped him in the face. That was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen, ever on television or film or whatever, and to be there live was even greater. Then there are a lot of sentimental moments that I have on the show. One of the favorite scenes I’ve ever shot was the river cruise scene—to go up on that boat and be sort of let loose to do whatever we wanted. Jenna and I literally did pause that long thinking there’s no way they would tape the whole thing, but they did, so things like that have been incredibly cool to be a part of. I think that this is one of those shows that’s really special, hopefully for the audience, but definitely for us. The writing we have is astounding, so to be a part of moments that I think are really beautiful moments, whether they’re a part of TV or film, is just insane.

TT: Are you working on anything new right now?

JK: I have no plans to direct necessarily right now, but I have a movie coming out at Christmas with Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin, the real up and comers, keep your eye out for these. [Laughter]. That will come out at Christmas and that’s been really fun doing that. But for now, Austin is the last city I’ll be visiting for this, so I’m really excited to be coming down there.