Tina Fey and Paul Rudd’s new comedy, “Admission,” hits theaters on Friday, March 22, 2013. (Courtesy of Focus Features)
We all remember the second semester of our senior year of high school, the time when our futures were decided when we received either a thick or thin envelope in the mail.
College admissions is something we all, perhaps painfully so, are familiar with.
In Tina Fey and Paul Rudd’s new comedy “Admission,” director Paul Weitz explores the murky waters of Ivy League acceptance while stringing together a charming love story in the process.
During the film’s New York press day, the three sat down along with co-star Nat Wolff to touch on the movie’s themes and talk about their own college admission experiences.
“I think I just showed up,” Rudd said when asked how he ended up at the University of Kansas, his alma mater. “I must have filled out a form somewhere along the way.”
Wolff, who was actually applying to colleges during the film’s production, used the coincidence to perfect his skill.
“I decided to make all the college fairs I had to go to character research,” Wolff said. “I went up to all of these school’s booths and pretended be this math and science genius and I actually got really close with the guy at MIT. They still call me twice a week.”
For Fey, “Admission” marks the comedian’s first completed project after wrapping the seventh, and final, season of her NBC comedy “30 Rock.”
“It was a very bittersweet ending,” Fey said. “The fact that we actually knew that it was ending, and not just being cancelled, was nice. That gave us all time to say the proper goodbyes. Actually, we are still moving our junk out of our own offices and the people at ‘Girls’ are moving in.”
“Admission” borrows the angelic setting of Princeton University for its collegiate comedy but transitions between the green hills of the campus to Rudd’s organic “learning compound” called the Quest School.
Rudd is the experiment’s leader as the school tries to educate its students through very unorthodox methods.
The school’s hippy way reaches a climax when Wolff, Fey and Rudd are forced to help a cow deliver its young, a scene that subsequently affected Wolff’s life after the cameras shut down.
“I actually gave up eating red meat after that scene,” Wolff said. “The production assistant came up to me asking if I wanted a burger after the take and I was like ‘you’ve got to be kidding me.'”
Even with the comedic chops of Fey and Rudd, “Admission” jumps between being a comedy and drama. Director Paul Weitz claims that the film acts as a commentary on the admission process as a structure.
“I really like that these characters are all in the structure, Tina’s is a major part of it while Paul is fighting his way out of it,” Weitz said. “I personally don’t think it matters where you go to college but instead who you come across when you’re there.”
“Admission” opens in theaters nationwide this Friday.
Come back on Friday to read the review.
