Max Landis on Kristen and Jesse casting for "American Ultra"

CBM: What do you think of the casting of Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart for American Ultra?

Max Landis: SO [frick]ING EXCITING. They're perfect; both of them essentially play "a character and a half" in the movie in an interesting way, and they were actually both my first choices. I think both of them are associated with iconic roles, and that excites me for the same reason Heath Ledger's casting in Dark Knight excited me. Not to compare my movie or my actors to that one, but it's the same sort of "VERY different characters than you're used to seeing these people in" situation.

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ICYMI
Update:
jordanzakarin At the moment, at least, Landis is riding high, buzzing about the Stewart-Eisenberg project, the idea for which he first had at a house party; he wrote “American Ultra” on his hand, and after about a month and a half’s worth of work in between studio projects, the script — about a sad stoner couple in their twenties — was completed.

“I was imagining one of those intense, action movie phone calls, you know the ones,” he explains, “where the villain and the hero trade one-liners and the audience knows badass shit is going down and everyone is all dialogue-y and smirking or stone-faced and grim. And I thought, wouldn’t it be funny to do a twist on that side where one of the people just has absolutely no idea what the stakes of the situation are, and the villain, also a bit of an idiot themselves, gradually becomes too frustrated to explain it to them and things just get really awkward?”

Via @Vonch