Jeff Garlin is a seriously funny guy, both as Larry David's agent and friend Jeff Greene on HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and as a veteran stand-up comic in the storytelling tradition of Woody Allen and Shelley Berman.
But the 45-year-old Garlin is also pretty serious about his latest role as a filmmaker. "In terms of the movies I want to make, I'm only interested that they have pathos and humanity in them," he says.
"There are plenty of people making cynical movies. There are tons of them. All everybody ever sees is something that is not designed to make you feel good -- or feel, for that matter," he says. "I aspire to Charlie Chaplin, Frank Capra and Preston Sturges. If I had my way, I would be directing movies that are modern-day Frank Capra movies."
His first feature, "I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With," which opens Friday, has more than its share of laughs, but it also doesn't shy away from pathos.
Garlin, who stars in the film, as well as wrote and directed it, pays homage not only to Jackie Gleason's character, the Poor Soul, but also to Paddy Chayefsky's romantic drama "Marty," which was first a live TV show in 1953, starring Rod Steiger as an overweight Italian butcher still living with his mother, then an Oscar-winning 1955 film with Ernest Borgnine.
In fact, "Cheese" is really a Jewish version of "Marty." Garlin plays James Aaron, a portly Chicago bachelor who lives at home with his equally heavy mother (Mina Kolb, who plays his mom on "Curb Your Enthusiasm"). James works at the Second City improv company and also on a reality TV show that captures people in embarrassing situations.
When he learns that his favorite film, "Marty," is to be remade, James tries desperately to get an audition. To soothe this and other disappointments, James goes on food binges, eating candy in the middle of night on the hood of his car.
Sarah Silverman plays an ice cream parlor employee who romances James; Bonnie Hunt is a schoolteacher who may or may not be the "one."
Garlin earlier had done a one-man show called "I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With," but he says only the movie's tone and title are the same. He started writing this screenplay in his early 30s and then kept revising it over the years.
"Initially, I wasn't even going to star in it, and then my name became more well known through 'Curb Your Enthusiasm,' " he says. "It was Jack Black I gave the script to. I said, 'I want you to do this.' He read it and said, 'Why aren't you doing it? It's your voice.' And he was totally right. I was, like, 'I guess I could do this,' especially if it was going to be an independent."
