Austinist Interviews SXSW: A Lawyer Walks Into a Bar… Director Eric Chaikin

You do have plenty of people out there defending the little guy, working as public defenders and things like that. Those kinds of stereotypes aren’t quite as true for those types of lawyers. But among corporate lawyers, they work, like, a hundred hours a week—and though they get well paid to do it, there isn’t a lot of underlying fulfillment and satisfaction a lot of the time.

It’s definitely true that lawyers tend to get lumped together as, “the lawyers”. It’s almost as if they’re treated as a separate class of people sometimes. And it’s strange because it seems like that’s one of the only professions where that happens.

It’s strange—we pay them to be the responsible adults in all of our transactions, which we completely resent. But we wouldn’t be able to do anything… everything would be on a wink and a handshake if somebody wasn’t formalizing the interactions. [We saw] this all the time just making the movie.

[For legal reasons, this section of the interview has been removed. And though I wish this was some kind of hilarious ironic gag I’d made up, I can’t take credit-MS]

But that’s what we pay them for. To say, “no, it has to be exactly as it is in the contract”. So we recognize that as a society, there is more productivity because we do formalize our transactions, but it’s just an annoying part of life, and [lawyers] are the ones who have to annoy us with it.

Do you think that the lawyers you had working on the film recognized that irony?

Yeah. I think every lawyer has got a pretty healthy understanding of the profession and of what they’re doing. And we’ve had plenty of cool lawyers involved in the process.

The press materials for the film give the impression that you were trying to make a fairly neutral film. So that a lawyer could enjoy it and not feel like they were being insulted, and a person who doesn’t like lawyers could also enjoy it.

We didn’t want to make a slam on lawyers—that wasn’t the goal. The goal was definitely to show the public debate. And it’s not an issue-heavy movie. We definitely bring up some issues, and there are a lot of people who you’ll recognize commenting on these issues. But at the end of the day, it’s a piece of entertainment. We didn’t go in trying to make an expose. But we did want to really show this public debate about lawyers. And suing each other—lawsuits are a thread in the movie. We all complain about how America is the most litigious society in [the world], but why is that? What are some of the rot causes of that? We touch on that stuff in the film to try and provoke some thought, and to frame the picture that you see these [future lawyers] in. Because that’s the world that they’re going to enter.

Is it hard to keep your personal—I mean, I’m sure that during the filming process there was something that you wanted to include, but for the sake of fairness couldn’t.

Well, we didn’t want to make a “red state” or a “blue state” documentary. We wanted to keep it kind of “common sense”. Something that everybody can relate to. But it can quickly get into a political debate, because you’ve got the—well, the stereotype is that you’ve got the trial lawyers on the left and the republicans on the right kind of demonizing the trial lawyers. We didn’t want to get into that. And in fact, out of the hundreds of hours that we shot, we could seriously make a five-part documentary on the legal system. And there is some fascinating stuff in there, but that was going to kind of weight down the viewing experience. We wanted this to feel like a movie, where you’re watching characters go though something that everybody can relate to—a struggle to achieve what they want to achieve.

In popular entertainment right now, law shows and legal show are very popular. How much of a divide is there between what happens in those shows and what happens in real life?

I don’t know… they seem pretty real to me. Obviously they get caricatured. But one thing that I think hasn’t been dramatized so well is the whole first-year, associate experience. I mean, [the associates] are getting paid, but they’re coming out of law school at 24 or 25 and they’re getting paid like a hundred-seventy thousand dollars a year (if you’re talking New York salaries) to basically do document review. You know—stuff you didn’t really need to go to law school to do. So a lot of it is just kind of hanging in there, and I don’t know if many TV shows dramatize that.

Would you want your own kids to be lawyers? Would you let them go down that path after having been though the experience of making this film?

I look at this and, you know—it took a lot more energy to make this film about taking the bar [than it does to pass the bar], and it takes a lot of energy to pass the bar. I thought at some point it might have been easier to just study for the darn bar and to make what these guys are making. I think it’s more about values. If you take your values into a situation and can keep them at the end of the day, then yeah, sure I’d let my kids be lawyers. When I have them.

But I have had heated debates, before this movie, with friends of mine who are Harvard Law graduates, about whether it’s ethically right to work on cases where you’re facilitating behavior that you don’t morally agree with. I took the position that the moral route is to bow out and say, “I don’t want to work on that case”. And their position is that that’s not how the legal profession works. You don’t get to pick and choose. But that was more in the context of corporate scandals.

I actually went on a date with somebody who—this was like the worlds shortest blind date—I went on a date with a girl who was corporate lawyer, and she was working on one of those late 90s corporate scandals where she was actually defending the guy who had drained the company of all its money. Now, she was just working at a law firm and they just handed her the case. And I said, “how do you rationalize working on this case?” And she said, “that’s my job”. And I said, “exactly. How do you rationalize that that’s your job?” And so, yeah—that was a short blind date.

So there are some bands that have music in the film who are going to be appearing at SXSW?

There is a TON of music in the film. We really wanted people to think of this as a “movie”. Documentaries can go in a lot of different directions, and God bless the people who are making issue-oriented docs and trying to really change things, but we really wanted this to be a movie. To feel like a movie. And part of that is that it’s gotta have the type of music that you’d typically hear in an indie film. A lot of these bands we found on Myspace and GarageBand—and we do have Texas connection so some of them are Texas bands. So we wound up with a lot of great independent bands, and some of them are kind of poised to pop, so you’ll hear them first in A Lawyer Walks Into a Bar…

Is there any part of the festival experience that you’re most looking forward to?

I gotta tell you—just getting out of the editing room and back into the real world. We’ve been working solid on this for over a year, and I think we’ve got something that people are going to enjoy. So just getting back and connecting with real people. Watching people watch the movie, talking to moviegoers. Going around the country and seeing the local film communities is really rewarding, and not in a cliché kind of way. It’s really nice to just see people respond to something you’ve been working on for a year.

[Add A Lawyer Walks Into a Bar... to Your Calendar on our (Unofficial) SXSW Film Other Side Guide]
[Add A Lawyer Walks Into a Bar... as a friend on Myspace]