"I always refer to a piece of advice my father gave me the night before I started shooting Thank You for Smoking. He said, 'Always remember: it's not your job to be funny. Your barometer for comedy is nowhere as good as your barometer for truth.'"
Jason Reitman (born October 19, 1977 in Montreal, Canada) is a Canadian director and screenwriter of French-Canadian and Slovakian Jewish descent.
He is the son of well-known action/comedy director Ivan Reitman, but his career has so far tended more towards introspective comedies about outcasts negotiating their positions in life. He frequently collaborates with screenwriter Diablo Cody.
He is also the brother of actress Catherine Reitman.
Works he was involved in:
- Ghostbusters II (1989, bit part) as Brownstone Boy #2
- In God We Trust (2000 short film
, as director and screenwriter) - Thank You for Smoking (2005, as director/screenwriter)
- Juno (2007, as director)
- Up in the Air (2009, as director and screenwriter)
- Young Adult (2011, as director)
- Labor Day (2013, as director and screenwriter)
- Men, Women & Children (2014, as director and co-screenwriter)
- Casual (2015-2018, as executive producer, and director on some episodes)
- Tully (2018, as director)
- The Front Runner (2018, as director, co-screenwriter and producer)
- Home Movie: The Princess Bride (2020, as director)
- Ghostbusters:
- Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021, as director and co-screenwriter)
- Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024, co-screenwriter and producer)
Tropes associated with his work include:
- Deadpan Snarker: His lead characters almost invariably have a very dry sense of humor.
- Humans Are Flawed: Most of his movies explore the flaws and humanity of questionable human beings.
- Manchild: Quite a few of his characters aren't exactly what you'd call very mature.
- Narrator: His first three films all involve narration from the lead characters.
- The Film of the Book: Many of his films are adaptations of books.
- Promoted Fanboy: Due to being the son of Ivan Reitman he would visit his father during the filming of Ghostbusters and would later say he was the first fan (and also had a cameo in Ghostbusters II). 35 years later he would later take over production responsibilities for the franchise, starting with directing Ghostbusters: Afterlife.
- Production Posse:
- He has served as a director to three of Diablo Cody's scripts, working on Juno, Young Adult, and Tully.
- All of his feature films aside from Tully have had J. K. Simmons in a supporting role.
- Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: Somewhere in the middle. While Thank You For Smoking, Young Adult, and even Up In The Air are all fairly bitter, all of his films otherwise depict their characters with humanity and compassion.
