The initial spark for A Man for the Job came when I was driving to a women’s medical clinic for my annual mammogram, and I noticed that all the parking valets were good-looking young men. I later mentioned this observation to a friend, and she mused, “I wonder if it’s on purpose?” The possibility that it could actually be on purpose intrigued me. Why would someone decide to hire only attractive young men to park the cars of middle-aged women hospital patients? And would that really be a good idea? Hospitals are emotionally intense places—would these young guys be able to handle it? Is it even fair to think that they could?
I began writing to imagine possible answers to these questions, and the world of A Man for the Job started taking shape. An early image, which endured through all my screenplay drafts to the finished film, was that of three young, handsome valets seated in front of an office wall plastered with medical diagrams of the female reproductive system. To me, it was both poignant and wry--male sexual bravado overwhelmed by the clinical reality of women’s bodies.
I thought about who put up those medical diagrams in an effort to educate the young valets, and I came up with Wayne the parking supervisor, who both needs his young employees and can barely stand their immaturity. Writing Andy, the film’s emotionally immature protagonist, involved drawing on my own memories of being a teenager and unable to deal with adults telling me about their sadness and grief. With the final image of the film, I wanted to convey that after his experience with Stephanie, Andy has moved outside of himself a little bit, away from an unreflective narcissism toward a new awareness of the interior lives of other people. I hope that there’s some humor coming through in that final image as well…for the whole film, Andy has been in over his head, and he realizes it by finally seeing something that has been there the entire time.
We shot the film over five days in Kansas City, with a fantastic local crew and cast. I worked with more collaborators on this film than I have on my past films, and the experience of making it was all the better for it. I feel like I finally understand what it means to “trust the process,” and bring in talented people to make their own creative contributions to the core idea of a film.