Fred Savage

Adolescence is a tricky time; raging hormones, a deep distrust of the older generation, problem skin and struggling to fit in amongst your peer group whilst trying to develop a strong sense of individuality are just a few of the problems that plague teenagers. Thankfully those times cede into adulthood and its own set of trials, leaving the spotty, awkward years of growth and development a distant, oily memory glossed over with the fuzzy kindness of recalled triumphs and bff's. Some people are not so lucky however, especially the small select group of child stars whose puberty plays out on our TV screens in constant re-runs for decades after their own journey from youth into maturity is over.

Fred Savage is one such child star, the perpetually blemish-free Kevin Arnold, whose trials and tribulations centred around growing up in the 1960's with a speccy geek of a best friend and a love interest in the beautiful girl next door with impossibly lustrous locks.

When I am patched through to Fred Savage, the image of his teenage alter-ego quickly fades as we start talking about more current matters. Savage is in his car, on his way his kitchen job, which he likes to do in his spare time, not for the extra cash, but simply because it's a great environment and a fun place to work.

“I feel like the work in a kitchen parallels the work on a set,” he explains. “You've got a big group of people who are thrown together and you're trying to create something special but doing so in a really compressed amount of time with a huge amount of stress and you've all got to communicate well and I just love it.”

Savage's rapid-fire, enthusiastic delivery leaves no doubt in my mind that he means every word he says, and it's a vivacity that permeates our conversation about his life and work as he slowly makes his way through the traffic to his hospitality internship. Although it has been almost twenty years since The Wonder Years finished screening, for many people Fred Savage is still Kevin Arnold, despite the fact that at the age of 35 he is well past the days of awkward first kisses and trying to swerve the school-yard bullies. In fact, although he came to prominence with the role, and continues to appear in the occasional TV show or film, he tells me that he feels slightly embarrassed thinking back on his acting days. This is because for more than ten years Savage has been following his lifelong dream of being a director.

“It's been a long time goal of mine, ever since I was a kid,” he tells me. “Being on set and taking apart the cameras and checking out the lenses and going into the camera trucks and loading it and feeding the film through the gate and seeing how it all worked. Talking to the camera assistants and the DP's, I was just always so fascinated by the mechanics of it. Then when I got older I started to really appreciated the art of it and the technique of it. So I've been pursuing it since the first opportunity I got to do so. I've been directing now for the past ten years and it's really gotten to a point where I'm working all the time and I'm creating stuff and doing the work that I enjoy.”

Savage's first break came when he got to direct one of the last episodes of Working, a sitcom he was starring in, in 1999. The show was far from a hit but it was a break for the budding director, who soon after went on to direct his brother Ben Savage in his own series Boy Meets World. Acting may have still been getting him more work than directing at this time, notably appearing in smaller roles as the Mole in Austin Powers' Goldmember and a particularly inspired turn as A Junkie Named Marc in Brett Easton Ellis' The Rules of Attraction, but it was a way for him to learn more about the trade he was passionate about, even if there was no-one to actually mentor him.

“I found that working from when I was a kid I was exposed to a lot of the good and the bad and I found I learned as much from the directors I didn't like as I did from the ones I did,” he says of his directorial education. “Learning what not to do is just as important sometimes. I didn't get taken under anyone's wing but I did learn about the different approaches that people had on things and I learned what I liked, how different people communicated with the crew and how they best responded to it. So you start to pull together all this knowledge that you've gained over the years from observing and then once you actually start applying it, it's another whole learning curve.”

Savage's workload has steadily been increasing over the years, not just in quantity but also in quality. Working on his fair share of fairly lacklustre TV shows and TV movies, he has in more recent years been doing a lot better, scoring episodes of Ugly Betty, the Cuba Gooding Jr family film Daddy Day Care and hit comedies It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia and Party Down. With the latter two achieving some cult status amongst comedy fans, they have now opened up many more doors to the young director. Having been a fan of It's Always Sunny... since it started, Savage went to met the creators of the show at the end of their second season and ended up working on the third, fourth and fifth seasons, producing as well as directing. With Party Down, one of the funnier comedies to come out of America in the last five years, Savage was lucky enough to get in on the ground floor. “The guys who had created the show, they had shot a pilot where they each took a scene and had put it all together,” he says of how it all came together. “I don't know if they intended for it to be ready for air or if it was more of a sales tool but I think they initially pitched it to HBO and then Showtime and it had bounced everywhere. And then when Stars finally picked it up they were looking for someone to come in and re-shoot the pilot and give it a better treatment. It wasn't a very cohesive show as it was – I mean there was a great script but what they had shot was an amalgam of the different ideas of the four guys who had created it. But one of the things they had shot was this bit where Lizzy Caplan's character kind of walking around a party shooting parts of conversations with a video camera. And in their presentation they had that scene but the rest of the pilot they had shot was very formal. When I watched the pilot I told them that funniest part of it for me was the bits that Lizzy had shot with the video camera because it was all this fly on the wall stuff and you really felt like you were there. I thought that's what the whole show should be, made up from these shots, so you're touching on a conversation in the kitchen and then catching a moment in the bathroom and being able to see something crazy that's happening in the background. So that was my approach and they agreed with it so that's how we came up with the style of the show.”

After lending his style to the successful show for the two years it ran Savage has been in hot demand, but instead of committing to one project he's choosing to play the field and direct for a whole swag of different shows, enjoying the variety and the challenge that each shows style brings him. He likens the experience to that of playing different characters, using the pre-set visual vocabulary of each show to work his own style through. This will take a back seat though when Best Friends Forever, a new show he shot the pilot to, starts shortly for the American fall TV season. With all this comedy and television, I wonder though if Savage has aspirations to crack the world of film or dabble in drama.

“Film would be a world I'd like to explore,” he confirms, “but I really do lean towards comedy. I'm not a very dark person. I've lead a very happy life, I have a great family and I just don't really have those stories to tell. I wouldn't say I'm a cynical person but I would say that my approach to the world is a layered one, which works well in comedy. In drama I just don't feel like I have that in me, I don't know, maybe I just haven't tapped in to my dark side yet.”

The only hint of that dark side appeared in Roger Avary's adaptation of Brett Easton-Ellis's The Rules of Attraction, in which Savage played a spaced out junkie with a penchant for wind instruments. When I quiz him about where in his psyche the drug-addled wannabe muso came from he replies with a laugh: “Oh, my years as a junkie. That was actually my clarinet that I brought to the scene though. I play a little so I guess that was my connection to the character, my fondness for reed instruments. You know sometimes you catch it on cable or something and it cracks me up, because I don't know where that came from. People come up to me and ask me 'what drug was that? It wasn't coke, but it wasn't heroin. What was it?' And that right there uncovers my lack of expertise in the area, because there was no research, there was no sense memory, I honestly don't know where any of that came from.”

And as Fred regales me with the fun he had shooting the scene, he also arrives at his destination, pausing to talk to the car park attendant in his best school boy Spanish before telling me he'd best get to work in the kitchen. With his zeal shining through to the end as he heads off to do a job many in his profession would consider a waste of time or menial, it's a heartening to see that there are people out there who genuinely love what they do.