The film that cured Patton Oswalt of his movie addiction: “A tainted shot of PCP”
All of us love films, who couldn’t? They’re engrossing, surprising, emotional, visually astounding, sometimes mind-blowing pieces of creation that often take thousands of skilful people coming together to produce something magical. Of course, we love them. But it’s a fair statement to say we don’t love them as much as Patton Oswalt.
That’s because writer, actor and comic Oswalt was a properly dedicated, and self-diagnosed movie addict for many years, taking in half a dozen films a day like some kind of celluloid crack fiend, shoving as many different movies into his eyes as physically possible.
In one year, he watched 250 movies in the cinema alone. He would make up arbitrary rules, including that if he missed the first few minutes of a film, then watching it didn’t count, and he would have to start again. He would drag his partner to all-night horror marathons, refusing to leave even at 3am. And if you’re thinking to yourself that it isn’t really something you can get addicted to, like Alan Partridge and Toblerone, Patton himself says that it would genuinely control his life, jobs and relationships.
So, as with all addicts, there needed to be a turning point, and for Oswalt it came in 1999 when one of the most hyped and long-awaited sequels (or in this case prequels) arrived in the form of Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, George Lucas’ return to the world he began 22 years earlier and that made him a billionaire.
Oswalt explained: “It’s not that it killed the addiction; it made me look at the addiction from such a different angle that it didn’t hold any power over me anymore. I’ll put it this way – I was the worst kind of movie fan. I’m the kind of guy who saw 6 movies a day, didn’t write any movies, didn’t make any movies, but then could be armchair quarterbacking on a movie that I had no hand in making.”
It seems that Lucas’ perceived failure at giving a ravenous movie public the film that they’d so hoped for, the kind of film that didn’t feature Jar Jar Binks, for example, gave Oswalt a newfound perspective on the fact that movies are, while important, just entertainment. And a form of entertainment that he had never managed to make himself.
He added, “Yes, I thought (Phantom Menace) was a failure, but the dude took a shot at it. It hit me that I was spending days and days and nights and nights with my friends, arguing back and forth about this film but this guy made a movie. Good or bad, he made a movie. He’s on a different realm than you.”
“That was the tainted shot of PCP… I woke up in the emergency room thinking ‘I got to rethink my life’”.
Ironically, Oswalt’s revelation about critics realising it is easy to tear down but not so easy to create would form the backdrop story to his voicing the lead role in one of the greatest animations of all time, Pixar’s Ratatouille, pitting his wannabe chef vermin against the fearsome, Peter O’Toole-voiced Anton Ego in the cutthroat world of French cuisine.
He also went on to be a leading stand-up in the US, picking up six Emmy nominations and winning two for his comedy specials, and collecting two Grammys out of seven nominations for Best Comedy Album over a thirteen year span.
Coming up, he’ll be seen in a new Ben Stiller-produced comedy called The Dink about competitive pickleball, which will also feature cameos for tennis pros Andy Roddick and John McEnroe.
