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Lights up in the theater

Exclusive: Jared Padalecki looks to the future
PREMIERE talks to the legendary filmmaker about his new dark psychological horror Exploitorama and what’s up next for the most successful director in box office history.
By Karl Rozemeyer

Writer/director Jared Padalecki returns to his darker impulses in Exploitorama, a New York-based crime thriller that explores to what length a couple of poor sisters will go to in order to get rich (or at least, get by) and what nefarious schemes those they encounter have in store for them. Comparisons will inevitably be made to Damaged Goods, Padalecki’s critically acclaimed 2012 thriller about the whims of fate and luck, but this time the onus is less on the tensions between young men and their mentors and more about how far family loyalties can be stretched before they snap. PREMIERE spoke to the director in Los Angeles, where he's currently spending some down-time with his husband.

PREMIERE: We didn’t think you were capable of not working. Are there any specific reasons for the break?
JARED PADALECKI: Ha. That’s too true. I’m most definitely bad at stopping and sitting still for a while, but Jensen [Ackles, Jared’s husband] had been away, overseas, for a few months so he could shoot some stuff for Spielberg and I missed him. I always thought I was cool with it, but my friends have recently informed me that I’m a nightmare when he’s not around – especially as he somehow regulates my sugar intake – and they threatened me until I caved-in and agreed to some relaxing, not just doing movie things with Jen in the same room. Not that I didn’t want to spend time with Jensen obviously, I just didn’t see how badly I needed it or that I should stop working to do it. Also I may have pissed Steven off by phoning his set every ten minutes to check on Jen. Sorry Steven. Drinks on me next time we hang.

Are you going to do anything specific during your time off?
I honestly don’t think I can answer that question in any kind of appropriate way.

Can we talk about your relationship with Jensen?
Sure.

At first it looked like you were good for his career, but since you’ve been together you’ve done some different things and retained great critical reactions to all of it.
Exactly. I’m so pleased you noticed that, man. I mean, yeah, Jen got his big exposure from that first film we did together, but if he didn’t have the talent, nothing would have followed. Instead he carved out an Oscar-winning career and is constantly in demand by the most respected and the hippest directors. Although I’m still his biggest supporter and director.

So how did the relationship help you?
What people don’t seem to work out is that Jensen is utterly and completely my muse. For instance when I got all that praise and all those awards for writing the script for Soderbergh, that’s something I never would have done before. But I wanted to see Jensen act this overwhelmigly dramatic and tragic role because he can totally break your heart, so I wrote a script for him to do that and then I just knew that it wasn’t a film I could do justice to, so I gave it away. He inspires that. Of course, you can’t tell him or he’ll get a big head and leave me for Zac Efron.

You seem to have one of the few stable and long lasting relationships in the movie industry. Is that hard?
No. It’s easy. I mean, it’s Jensen. Would you give up waking up next to that face every morning?

You work with a lot of the same people over and over again, so you must have built other good relationships.
Yeah. All y’all hear all the time is about how shallow and stupid people in Hollywood are. And I agree, there are some absolute idiots. But luckily, I just don’t seem to get involved with them. I mean, Chad’s [Michael Murray] been with me since forever. Mike [Rosenbaum] and Tommy [Welling] are great friends of Jen and I, we still like to hang out and it’s been that way since the first time we all did it. We just clicked. We’re all of similar ages, have the same values, similar tastes and whatever and they’re good people. Jen’s manager, Chris, is my chess-playing buddy. I’m still very tight with Sandy McCoy. She used to be my assistant but has since gone on to do some great writing herself. So yeah, some really good friendships and I don’t always feel the need to add in anyone else. But if, like with Exploitorama, the roles demand that I find two young girls, which I’m a bit too old to have inside my immediate group of friends, I’ll spread my wings a bit and find new people and I’m glad I do.

Going back to your films, one thing that you’re famous for is the breakdown of the conventional story. You've been integral to taking straightforward narratives apart and putting them back together in a different order.
Thanks. That’s a pretty nice compliment. One of the things I'm proud of as far as my writing goes is that, even though I play around with the structure, I'm not monkeying around with the story itself and I like my archetypes. I think I’m a very good storyteller. But a story isn't having everything laid out for you in the first 10 to 15 minutes. It is a constant unfolding. In a real kind of story movie, if you see the end of the movie, but didn't see the first two reels and then you go back and watch the first reel, you should go like, "Wow, how did they get to there from here." That’s what’s cool and intriguing and keeps people watching. No one wants to know what the ending will be just as the film starts. It’s boring. I know I can’t sit still long enough to see a movie like that. What’s the point. When I was a kid, my folks used to take me to the movies, you'd just go in whenever and stay to see the beginning of the next program and say, "OK, this is where we came in." Which was its own fun but…after however many years Hollywood has been making movies I think we need more and that we definitely needed a change. It couldn’t always be ninety minutes of setting up a situation and then watching characters react to that situation. Dullsville. Unfortunately, that was the only style in town for a long time. But I suppose that not wanting to see that, led me down a really cool film path and I'm truly very proud of my films when it comes to that because they don’t do it. You do not know all there is to know for the first half hour. And if you watched Mondo Macabre say for an hour and ten minutes and then walked out, you can't say you saw that movie, because you haven’t and you’d have no idea of how things are resolved or even how they came to be. And I think that’s kinda turned people’s view on the possibilities of films and now we get to see some interesting stuff coming out.

What else are you most proud of with your career?
Geez. That’s a hard question. I guess, or I hope, that I’ve brought some respect back to genre movies that maybe the mainstream media were missing before. Also, that I’ve been lucky enough to work my ass off doing what I love for y’all. Oh yeah, and that my folks said they were proud of me. That’s pretty cool.

When you get people to discover these old low budget movies, some people love them and others say, “What are you thinking?" How does that make you feel?
Well, you know, different strokes for different folks, or whatever. The thing about it that is so cool is the fact that yeah, people try or they say, "Do you think younger people who have never experienced this before are going to get it?" Well, they don't have to get it. If you have to get it, then it doesn't almost work. It’s not a cerebral thing, it’s an instinct in your gut thing. You've got to be able to just sit down and enjoy it. That’s what Chad and I did when we were kids and it was a fantastic and amazingly wonderful round-the-world journey that led me to my career and my family. So of course I want that for everyone.

What do you plan to do after your self imposed break?
What I do best, make movies. Seriously, I’m going to do another movie with Jensen. I’ve got some of it planned in my head already because I decided I want to see him sweaty and shirtless and suffering humiliations in a Filipino prison before he has to seduce his way out. Wouldn’t that be an awesome sight?