Marc Maron & Rob Burnett Talk Existential Tribeca Dramedy ‘In Memoriam,’ Maron’s Process In Navigating Loss Of Partner…

In Memoriam, a new existential dramedy that premieres at the Tribeca Festival on Sunday, proves an ideal vehicle for Marc Maron to flex his acting chops.

Mining the insecurities, anxieties and contradictions that have long animated his comedy, Maron here plays Langston, a veteran television actor who, after receiving a terminal diagnosis, becomes fixated with making the Oscars’ In Memoriam montage, reconnecting along the way with a teenage daughter (Talia Ryder) he never knew, who helps him reconsider the things he’s prioritizing.

Anchored in that father-daughter relationship, In Memoriam features an all-star cast including Lily Gladstone, Judy Greer, Michael McKean, Justin Long, Alan Ruck, and Sharon Stone. The film is directed by Rob Burnett, David Letterman’s right-hand man for nearly 30 years, between two late-night franchises and his production company Worldwide Pants, marking his follow-up to The Fundamentals of Caring, starring Paul Rudd, Craig Roberts, and Selena Gomez, which Netflix snapped up out of Sundance back in 2016.

For Burnett, the seed of the idea came from a poignant moment in his personal life, when his son accidentally shattered one of his Emmys, leading to a moment of reflection on legacy and what’s really important in his life.

Ahead of their Tribeca premiere, Burnett and Maron spoke with Deadline about the process of crafting their new film, with Maron opening up about tapping into his feelings surrounding the passing of his partner Lynn Shelton as he inhabited an experience of existential “terror.”

Burnett shares a comment Letterman once made to him about fame, reflecting on the show-biz tendency to fill an internal void “through the adoration of many,” as Maron gets candid about his emotional journey in moving on after loss, and navigating the “void” he’s been confronted with following the conclusion of his 16-year run with podcast WTF.

DEADLINE: Rob, what was the initial spark that gave rise to this project?

ROB BURNETT: Legacy is always something that I find really interesting. There were sort of a few things that led me to this. One was, when I was at The Late Show, we won some Emmy Awards, and all of my Emmys would immediately go straight down to Florida, to my parents, which is where all show business trophies should go. Because they could display them proudly. But there was one that somehow ended up in my son’s room, literally just up on his shelf with his little hockey trophies and whatnot. One Sunday morning, I’m in the kitchen making pancakes for my girls and my wife, and he comes in. He’s like eight years old at the time, and he’s holding the Emmy, and he’s dropped it and it’s completely shattered. He’s got this white face to him of just sheer panic that something very important has happened here, and I just remember that moment, I looked at his face and looked at that Emmy and said to myself, “That face is all I will remember. This Emmy means nothing compared to everything that’s going on in this room.” So eventually my writer brain started wondering, “Well, what if that wasn’t my take on that? What if all I cared about was that Emmy? And then more extreme, what if I didn’t have that Emmy, but always wanted one?” That somehow morphed into the ultimate legacy play, which I guess is the In Memoriam montage at the Oscars.

DEADLINE: This is your first film since The Fundamentals of Caring a decade ago. Do you tend to develop a range of ideas at one time?

BURNETT: Yeah, I’ve been working fairly steadily throughout [on] various projects that haven’t gone. So I’m kind of always just planting crops like a farmer and you just never know what’s going to come up. This one, I actually wrote kind of a while ago, and then it was in my computer. Nothing was really happening with it, and then I pulled it out and looked at it and said, “I think this is something.” And then really, it became real when Marc said yes.

DEADLINE: Did you two know one another from your time in late-night?

BURNETT: Well, here’s the funny thing: “Not really” is the answer to that. But when I went from being the head writer to the executive producer of The Late Show in 1996, the first comic I booked was Marc Maron. I don’t want to overstate that like I found him. Really, what happened was, we had this woman Zoe Friedman, whose father was the great Budd Friedman. She was in charge of booking our comics, and I said to Zoe the first day I took over, “Okay, what comics have you tried to get on the show that you haven’t been able to?” She brought me a big stack of tapes, and I looked at them and just said, “Oh, let’s book that guy.” It was Marc. And I said, “Then, 30 years later, we’ll do a movie together.” [Laughs]

MARC MARON: Yeah, I remember him saying that. It was weird.

BURNETT: He came out, and I remember you killed, actually. You made me look good.

MARON: Oh yeah. It was a good set, the first Letterman. I wore a shiny suit for some reason that I bought at Calvin Klein here in New York City the day of the show, and it was a little big.

DEADLINE: Marc, in certain respects, the lead role here feels tailor-made to you. What about the script resonated for you?

MARON: Well, I mean, I understood the feeling. I understood the guy. It’s weird when people say tailor-made for me, because I feel like I’m much more neurotic than this guy, to be honest with you. I find that there’s an element to my personality that is self-centered, but I don’t think this guy really, until the third act or halfway through, really reflects on his actions, or who he is, or any of that — which I’m doing as we speak right now. But this self-centeredness, I definitely I thought was funny, and I thought that I understood it.

DEADLINE: When I say tailor-made, I’m referring to the interest you’ve demonstrated on past projects in honestly examining things like petty insecurities and vanities for comedic purposes.

MARON: Sure. I guess this guy is somebody that I do understand on that level. But I thought what was interesting about it, and what I related to in a way of growing up with it, is that real lack of fundamental self-awareness that involves how you impact other people. The idea that the entire balance of this movie hinged on that dynamic with Talia as my daughter, that was compelling because that really had to work, or else the whole bottom would fall out of this thing. So out of all the people that I acted with in that movie, working with her, in terms of me trying to do different things as an actor, was a real breakthrough, and I thought very satisfying.

DEADLINE: You and Talia show great chemistry. Talk more about working with her to find this father-daughter relationship.

MARON: I think that she just showed up for it and I met her there. I don’t have kids, and I think that probably helped the character, that I had really no understanding of how to function with a child of my own. Because that was really what was going on there. But I think we just locked in. If there’s anything I can do as an actor that I feel confident in, [it’s] be open and listen and engage with the emotions that are on the page, if they come out of the person that I’m talking to. And it’s so well written that a lot of those things are there. So I think that our emotional availability just led to the thing working into the chemistry, and that did happen pretty quickly.

BURNETT: When we cast it, I was so happy and thrilled to have Marc, but exactly what Marc is saying is correct. I knew that the only way this movie was going to work was going to be the chemistry between him and the daughter. And Talia, I didn’t think we were going to be able to get. I wanted her very badly, and we ended up getting her. But still, you don’t know: No matter how good the actors are individually, they have to find this thing.

But what was funny from my perspective was that we had a very informal table read at our producer’s house. It was the first time I saw them together, and the first time I heard the script out loud, and I started to feel like, “I think we’ve got a shot here. They’re just walking through it.” But then what I really remember is we went out and had a small dinner. There wasn’t a lot of cast. I think Michael McKean was there, Marc, Talia, me and a couple of the producers.

MARON: Oh yeah, at Crossroads.

BURNETT: Right. I arranged for Marc and Talia to sit next to each other because that was important. But at one point, I’m talking to Michael McKean on the other end of the table, and I looked down and saw the two of them. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but just watching the two of them, I said to myself, “We are going to have a movie.” Because my thought was, they are so different as people. I was watching Marc, and I’m just looking at his body language and going, “He can’t fully be himself around this girl. He’s got to kind of manage himself around this girl.” And that is what the whole movie is, is that this girl is turning him inside to outside, which is not an easy thing to play. And he has to understand the nuance of that, which he did beyond anything that I wrote. So exactly what Mark’s saying is true, that the movie hinges on their chemistry, and [I] credit all of it to those two.

DEADLINE: There’s a tension at the heart of the film with regard to Langston’s values — he’s someone who has prioritized being admired by the many over being loved by the few, to his own detriment. How prevalent do you think this mindset is in show business?

BURNETT: I think there’s an element of this in everybody that’s in show business. I think it’s intensified if you’re in front of the camera, but show business at its core for anybody — for me, for anyone that I know that does this — there is a piece of that that is, “Hey, look at me, look what I can do. Like me and like what I’m doing.” Then, it depends on your personality, and I think that’s intensified if you’re in front of the camera, for sure. Because that’s really you out there; I can hide more. But yes. It’s cliche, I suppose, but cliches are there for a reason. I do think there’s a lot of people trying to fill some holes through the adoration of many.

David Letterman said something to me once that I will never forget about fame. I remember him saying to me, “It’s never about you, it’s about them.” I’ve seen a lot of fame up close through Dave and through my travels at The Late Show. Selena Gomez, in my last movie, was famous beyond anything I’ve ever seen, honestly. And it’s interesting. Marc can speak to this as an actual famous person better than I can, obviously. I think it’s how much you decide to make of it. But I think there’s a limitation to how much this can really fill you up.

MARON: I’m fortunate that my fame is still fairly specific and pretty mid-level. My fans know me better than most, in terms of parasocial relationships, because of the way that I have been a public person, and they’re all pretty polite. But I am realizing lately, just in terms of how social media works and what we really need, that the need for that kind of approval or just those hits of “Good job,” I probably rely on it more than I should, and I’ve got to figure out how to get out from under it.

DEADLINE: What did the process of getting the film financed look like?

BURNETT: I think when Marc said, yes, we had a movie, but I’m in a strange position. My last movie, The Fundamentals of Caring, amazingly made money. Netflix bought it as an original before Sundance, and I know for indie films, you’re just hoping to get out with your life, but we actually made money. So I had an investor group, and they’ve been after me. They wanted to go: “Let’s go again. We loved it.” But I won’t put their money at risk — and my own money, some of it, too — until I feel like we’ve got a real swing. I remember I got the call when Marc said he was in. I said, “We’re going.” And I raised the money pretty quickly, honestly.

Here’s a funny thing in terms of it being tailor-made to Marc: He’s so good in this and it’s so much him that I can lie and say that I wrote it for him. But the truth is, I didn’t. But I will say, the minute his name came up…I don’t know why I hadn’t thought about him because I loved him as an actor and comedian; I just didn’t think of it for some reason. But the minute my producer, Nicky Weinstock, said Marc, I said yes before the second syllable of Maron. I’m like, “Yes, that’s the guy, that’s who we want.” And I told Marc’s manager, “Hey, now that we’ve got Marc in the movie, I’m going to go and do a Marc pass of the script.” And he just said, “How?” And I went to rewrite it and I’m like, “Yeah…” I mean, I changed like three words. Like, “I don’t think he would say that.” That was it. It was really meant to be, I think.

MARON: Well, I didn’t know that. That’s pretty funny.

DEADLINE: You had a pretty stacked cast here — great roles for Alan Ruck, Justin Long, Lily Gladstone, Sharon Stone, and more. What went into bringing the project together, in that respect?

BURNETT: [It’s] a cast better than I deserve, and the two biggest names, I have to credit to Marc as a producer. He had a relationship with Sharon and Lily, and without that relationship, I don’t think they do the movie. In fact, the day before her scene with Marc, we had set up a Zoom for me and Sharon. I was working; it was during the lunch of a shooting day, and I have the Zoom, and Sharon says to me, “I just want to tell you something.” This is the scariest thing a writer/director could ever hear an actress say, let alone an actress of Sharon Stone’s stature. The first thing she says is, “I’ve just got to tell you something. I said yes to this because of Marc. I didn’t read it.” And literally, my bowel released. I’m just like, “Okay, this is a disaster.” [But] she said, “And then I read it,” and then she went on to praise how much she loved it. I’m just like, “Oh, this was not how I thought this was going to go.”

So yeah, Sharon and Lily came from Marc. Justin, I have a long relationship with. I kind of discovered Justin when he was a kid and put him in my TV show, Ed, when he was 19 years old. He had one line in the pilot, and was so good that he became a regular, and off he went. Judy [Greer], I know a lot of people that know her, so I had sort of a de facto relationship with her, and Ruck…

I think they responded to the script. I think also, Marc is beloved and actually an attraction. On top of the people that he has a specific relationship to, I think when you get Marc, it adds a coolness and credibility to it.

MARON: It’s weird because over the course of my podcast and interviewing, I think other than Justin, all those people had been on my show [WTF] before. I feel like I develop a fairly deep connection with people on my podcast, and sometimes, with something like this, it makes me believe that’s true. I mean, I have very long, in-depth conversations with these people. I don’t know what my impact is or what they think of me, but I always feel like I’m very close to these people, even though I only talked to them for an hour or so.

Sharon really took a liking to me. We did the podcast, but she was also very supportive…We didn’t have a relationship, but after Lynn Shelton, my partner, passed away, Sharon was very supportive and present in reaching out to me.

Lily, I was up in Vancouver shooting Stick for Apple TV, and again, I’d interviewed Lily. She was in Vancouver and we had dinner, and she was just talking about how she really wanted to do a comedy. And then, months later, however long it was when Rob told me about this thing, I’m like, “I know Lily wants to do a comedy.” And I just texted her. I said, “I think I have a comedy for you to do.” And that was it.

DEADLINE: Tell us about tapping into the existential reality your character is facing. I’d have to imagine your experience losing Lynn factored into your performance somehow.

MARON: The idea of getting cancer, obviously I’ve played that through in my brain over and over again, being a hypochondriac, and the feeling of actually having something horrible, that element, I hope I played that all right because there is a terror to that. I think when I really tapped into the Lynn thing was the scene with Sharon, and I’ve talked about it before because I wasn’t confident as an actor. Going into this, I’m an insecure person when it comes to acting, and the idea of me playing an actor, I was like, “Oh boy, all right. Well, I’m going to try.” But when I got to the scene with Sharon, I didn’t know if I could cry. You know, it called for crying, and I told her that. I said, “I just don’t know.”

This was after I freaked out before the scene. We had done two shots, two masters or whatever, and then had lunch, and I just didn’t think I was showing up. I thought she was eating me for lunch, and I kind of lost my mind in my trailer like, “What am I doing? It’s Sharon Stone, how am I going to do this?” And then I’d just interviewed Al Pacino, so I’d written some things down that he was talking about, and it kind of regrounded me. Then, after lunch, we did it, and I told her I didn’t know if I could cry. She said, “Don’t worry about it. You’ll get there or you won’t. [Maybe] we have to use the mentholated stuff or whatever.” Then, she says, “I think you can cry, though. What makes you cry?” And I said, “I’m an old man now. A lot of things make me cry.” I knew she was talking about Lynn, and I was trying to use that, but my craft as an actor is not so precise or reliable. I didn’t really know how to use it, but I was trying to get into that space to have those kind of feelings.

I said to her, “Are you talking about Lynn?” And she goes, “Well, yeah.” And I go, “I’m kind of thinking about that.” She goes, “Well, look, play the scene to Lynn and I’ll make sure she’s here.” That’s what she said. And I was like, “Heavy, man.”  I think what ultimately happened for me to get in that place is I felt that Lynn was watching. Lynn was always a big supporter of my acting and really championed me; I don’t know that I would’ve pursued it as much if it weren’t for Lynn. She had directed me in a film and a couple specials, so the idea of her experiencing me doing it, that got me there.

DEADLINE: You participated in a great documentary, Are We Good?, chronicling your experience with Lynn’s passing. Could you talk about how you, in your life, have approached the challenge at the heart of your character’s journey — finding some hope and joy, even with the inevitability of loss staring us in the face?

MARON: In my personal life, I don’t know. I’m still having some problems, you know? But I think in the film, and probably in life, opening yourself up to love of any kind, whether it’s an estranged daughter or a partner or something, that seems to be the meat of it, of really what you want to get to. You want to be open and available for love. [Lynn and I] didn’t have that much time together, and I don’t know where it really leaves me, but it’s not in a great place emotionally. But I’m trying to sort it out.

DEADLINE: Last fall, you ended your podcast WTF after a 16-year run spanning nearly 1,700 episodes, going out on your own terms. Has it been weird coming out of that? It seemed like the conversations you had on the show were helpful for you in processing life’s highs and lows.

MARON: It’s weird. The job of it is not missed, and over the course of 16 years, I talked to almost everybody I wanted to talk to, or who was willing to talk to me. My producer [Brendan McDonald] and I, it was just the two of us, and it was a lot of work — two new shows a week that we never missed for 16 years. So we were a little fried. I don’t know that I noticed it as much as he did, but oddly, I do feel a void. It’s not an unusual void for me because I spent half of my life as a comic, so you’re just kind of used to wandering around and thinking. But I do think the emotional connection was very nourishing to me in a spiritual and psychological way. Not having the show is having a bit of an impact on me that’s not great, but I don’t know that I should rely on that show for that stuff. I have to figure out how to do it in my life, as opposed to just have strangers over a few times a week. So I think it is challenging and I think it is messing with me a little bit, but I don’t regret not doing the show anymore.