Adam Scott and Josh Hartnett play brothers and business partners in the dramatic film August directed by August Chick. Scott stars as the brains behind an innovative dot.com start-up company while Hartnett plays the smooth-talking, hotshot salesman who attempts to keep their fledgling company afloat in August 2001 as the dot.com bubble bursts.

Interview with Adam Scott

What's the appeal of a film like this for you?
“Well, I thought it was really interesting, just from a sociological standpoint, and it's kind of a time in really recent history that's a little bit forgotten.

I mean, obviously after September 11th everybody's priorities really shifted and the focus of the country went to another place. But right before that we were in this really unique economic situation with this huge ecommerce and kind of an economic run that has never been seen before, and an economic crash that is very unlike the economic crash that's happening now. You know, it's very unique and kind of puts American idealism with being funneled into a place that we just weren't ready to go yet, and we kind of got ahead of ourselves as a country.

It was a uniquely American problem in that a lot of people got a little bit too optimistic and idealistic about something that we just weren't...like they say in the movie, like Hartnett's character says in the movie, that the technology is not there yet. And so a lot of people just weren't ready. But for a few years there it was insane, the amount of money that was being funneled into these companies that were just kind of making it up as they went along.

All that was erased after 9/11 because priorities shifted, of course. But it's just a really interesting little slice of history and it was only like seven years ago.”

You sound very knowledgeable of that period of time. Did you do extra research into dot.com startups?
“A bit. I mean my brother is in computers and my wife was at the time of the big dot.com burst. But, yeah, there's a lot of really great documentaries, especially Startup.com which kind of had a really personal relationship in the middle of all of that, which was really handy because that's kind of this movie as well, is the two brothers that started the company.”

We never really find out what it is your company, Landshark, does. Did you like the choice of not really telling the audience what exactly Landshark’s all about?
“Yeah, that was always there, that was always one of my favorite things about the screenplay is that they never did because you know a lot of these places you never really...like what the hell did pets.com plan to do? And that was a real thing. It's like what are they going to do, clean your pets? You know, what are you doing there? Order treats? So who knows? I think that what we were thinking was it was something in the myspace vein, but it was five or six years before myspace was even ready. It was like a concept that just both users and the technology just wasn't ready for.”

When you're working on something like this where it is ambiguous about what you're actually doing and what your character is doing, do you come up with your own detailed back story?
“It really depends on the part. It depends on how far it is from my personal experience, how far the character is away from me. I think that whatever you can relate to you should try and use. I usually just try and do the least amount of effort is the best because - not as far as hard work goes or anything - as an audience member I don't like watching people work. I don't care about the actor and how much work they had to do to get to where they are. I just want to see the characters moving through the story. So I just try and do whatever is required to make it seem like there is no work going on. You've got to do that. But then, you know, it just depends. It really depends on the character. For this, the characters had a very specific backstory that's only alluded to, and so Josh and Austin and I just had to sit down and work all of that out before we shot.”

With a short shooting schedule, how did you develop that brotherly chemistry with Josh Hartnett?
“You know, it's interesting. I had this audition with him and we seemed to work well together. And then we had like two days to rehearse, which is actually a lot for a movie - especially if it's just the two of us and Austin just sitting around reading through scenes. But mostly we just sat around and kind of bs’ed all day, which I think is more constructive than actually working on scenes sometimes, just to kind of get to know each other a bit more and become more comfortable. That kind of helps with the scenes. You can really overwork scenes and squeeze all the juice out of the lemon, you know? So it's better just to get comfortable with each other.”

Does a quick shooting schedule help in not squeezing out all the juice?
“It depends, you know? For this, I think it was like five weeks which is really short. You know sometimes you wish you had a little more time and sometimes when you do 19 takes you wish could have stopped at three because it just gets terrible. But with this it was just perfect. It was like we had just enough time to get it right.”

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