Peter Sollett came to the Toronto International Film Festival in 2002 with a lovely, under-the-radar debut feature called Raising Victor Vargas. Six years later, the 32-year-old director returned to TIFF with a higher-profile project, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, starring Michael Cera and Kat Dennings as budding New York City scenesters with tragically hip iPod playlists. Sollett spoke to EYE WEEKLY about how to make a move towards the mainstream while retaining a “smuggler’s” mentality.

You took a long time before making a follow-up to Raising Victor Vargas and, in some ways, this is a very different kind of film. For one thing, it was made with a studio.
The whole situation has changed. I couldn’t make a movie like [Vargas] now. I don’t know who makes them, or who finances them, or who releases them — unfortunately. Making movies that way has gotten a lot harder. 

But you’re not suggesting that the only solution is a kind of capitulation?    
No. With Raising Victor Vargas, I felt like I had made a pretty good movie that most people really liked, and it was extremely frustrating to me that it wasn’t marketed and distributed properly. I didn’t want to have that experience again. I wanted to make a movie that could get put in front of people who would enjoy it.

I’ve read that Nick and Norah had a long development process, and that Michael Cera was cast before he became so closely identified with a certain character type.
We cast him before Superbad and Juno came out. The only thing he’d done at that point was the first season of Arrested Development. While we were making the movie those other two movies came out and people loved them. But I think in our movie, he’s doing something different — he’s creating a character who’s more romantic and maybe a little bit deeper.

It helps that he gets to play off of Kat Dennings, who is so understated compared to, say, Ellen Page in Juno. She’s very funny. One of the nicest things about the film is that all the girls in it get to be funny.
It’s a rare thing. In teen movies, girls usually only get to be the objects of desire — and they only get to be that because they’re hot. Actresses need to be smugglers, I think, because they’re usually given so little to work with. If they’re going to introduce depth or subtext, they have to sneak it in there.

Speaking of smuggling, there’s one scene in the film that I imagine you had to sort of sneak in — to your credit.
Yes, I’m very proud [of that scene]. We smuggled it through. Please don’t give it away, but to have a scene like that is really rare. We had to fight and fight to keep it, more than anything else in the film. The MPAA would not give us the rating we needed with that in the film. If you look at the precedent, male characters get to have these moments all the time, in weird, goofy ways. For women, it’s a big no-no.

The other key thing about this scene is the way it explicitly links pleasure to music in a film that’s about these music-savvy teenagers. The plot turns on the idea of a secret show being played by an underground band — does this sort of thing happen in Brooklyn all the time?
We were green-lit last August, and a few months before that Arcade Fire had come out with Neon Bible. They were going around doing secret shows. I think they played at Win Butler’s junior high school’s cafeteria. Bruce Springsteen always does that and Nirvana did it a few times in New York, too. But I don’t think that it’s ever happened in a movie before.

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