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Jason Reitman, son of Hollywood hitmaker Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters), joins Sofia Coppola, Roman Coppola and Jake Kasdan in a curious new wave of second generation filmmakers making their names with offbeat, individualistic films produced outside the studio system. Like his contemporaries, the Canadian-born but Los Angeles-raised Reitman was steeped in film from an early age. His childhood was spent, in his own words, "half inside movie theaters and half on my dad's set." Yet he came to filmmaking on his own terms, sidestepping film school for a degree in English from USC and making his award-winning short films on the side.

After a career in commercials, he chose a challenging project for his feature debut: Christopher Buckley's cult novel Thank You For Smoking, a decidedly non-PC slash-and-burn satire of social politics, media exploitation and the culture of spin. The hero is a tobacco industry lobbyist, Nick Naylor, a manipulative, glib, proudly obfuscating "yuppie Mephistopheles" (according to his detractors) who zealously defends the right of "defenseless" corporate giants' to market products that, when used as directed, will likely kill their clientele. The novel was already optioned and had been in limbo for years when he pitched his take, and through perseverance he revived it and attracted an impressive cast centered by Aaron Eckhart, who plays Naylor's medicine show patter and con man guile with gusto and charm, and filled out with Maria Bello, William H. Macy, Robert Duvall, Katie Holmes, Sam Elliott, Rob Lowe and others.

The resulting film is sly, smart and hilarious, a witty adaptation that keeps the satirical jabs coming fast and furious and is, if anything, even more pointed and barbed than the novel. No surprise that he had to step outside the studio system to get it made.

The following interview was conducted in February, during the Seattle stop of Reitman's press tour.

You studied English at USC. Did you study any filmmaking?

I took a couple film classes, but they weren't production classes. They were more cinema series where I got to watch a lot of movies, and that was primarily why I took them. Particularly the Kubrick class where they showed 35mm prints of all his films. I was an English major. T.C. Boyle headed up the English program there. I was writing stories. I was a creative writing major, and I went to work with him and it was fantastic. And at the same time, I started making short films. Just on my own.

Is it true that you financed your first film by creating a calendar company?

Yeah, I made these desk calendars with a buddy of mine and we sold advertising space on the desk calendars to all the places in the USC community, basically selling this idea that this calendar would be the welcome mat to students as they showed up. And it worked. Dominoes is one our advertisers and they got a thousand coupons in the first few weeks off our desk calendars. So, it worked, and the advertising money went to pay for Operation, my first short film.

So, you didn't study filmmaking. Did you spend much time on your father's sets?

Oh, yeah. I grew up basically living on my father's sets. My childhood was spent half inside movie theaters and half on my dad's set.

Would you say that was your film school?

That was my film school. When I went to make my first short film, I actually read a couple of books. I read some book on cinematography and some book on lighting, just so I could get a bit of the technical lingo. But, really, the idea of directing came from watching movies and being on set and reading books.

You've said that the novel's author, Christopher Buckley, read the drafts of your screenplay. What kind of input did he give you?

He had great notes. The day I was hired, I called him and told him that I wanted this to be a collaboration. He was really not ready for that; the previous writers never spoke to him once. It was really important to me because I was such a fan of the book and I wanted to be true to it. I wanted to feel like he had input and he sent me fantastic notes. And he came to the set and he's obviously been very involved. He's come to all the premiers at Sundance and Toronto. I think he feels ownership in the movie and that makes me really happy.

What kind of suggestions would he bring?

There was a point where I wrote that Polly, the liquor lobbyist, was able to get an early copy of that Heather Holloway article by using the fact that there were so many liquor advertisers in the Washington Post. I remember he said, "That would never happen. Don't use that." And he told me to cut that out. He gave me the line, "The yuppie Nuremburg defense." I had originally not put that in the screenplay and he said that was one of the strongest lines in the book and people always reacted to that when he would go on book tours, so I put that in.

Just little things, little things about how politics work beyond my experience from growing up my father's son. It's nothing compared to Chris's experience. He's William F. Buckley's son, he grew up in DC. He invited Donald Rumsfeld to the DC premier. I mean, this is a guy who's very into the political world and just really understands the ins and the outs. He guided me along a lot of the details and how they should go. I remember my favorite note of his was, "If the seal clubber [scene] makes the movie, I'm buying drinks after the premier." So he owes me drinks.

How does a first time director get the reins of a film like this, which had been in development for years and had to be a semi-hot if not hot property?

I found the book in the late 90s. A friend gave it to me and I just fell in love with it. Now, before that, in the early 90s, Mel Gibson had bought it while his deal was at Warner Bros., and he started to develop it into a big, broad, $50 million Mel Gibson comedy. That was the original concept and they spent a lot of money on it. And the project basically died there at his company, Icon, because they were being untrue to the film. By making it so big and expensive they had turned it soft.

By the time I got an agent, after I made a few short films, won a few awards in Seattle, my agent asked me what I wanted to do and I said I wanted to make Thank You For Smoking. And he got me into the room with Icon. The project was dead so I was basically trying to revive it at the time. I said, "Look, you have this amazing book and you've totally taken it in the wrong direction. You should be trying to make Citizen Ruth, you should try to make Election. You don't have to pay me, just let me do this."

Over the weekend I wrote the first act on spec, 25 pages, and I just gave it to them. I said, "Look, this is what I'm thinking." And they really liked the tone of what I gave them and they went for it. They hired me for scale and I turned in a draft three or four months later and they really liked it. In fact, they had no notes. Mel Gibson called me on the phone to tell me how much he liked the screenplay and I thought, at the time, "Wow, I've got it made," you know. "I'm going be able to make this movie that's so dear to my heart and represents exactly who I am as a filmmaker." But it wasn't as easy as that.

No studio would make it. No one would touch it. They all had an issue with the fact that there was a lot of money against it from the previous writers. And they also didn't like that the movie didn't apologize for itself, that Nick never had a huge change of heart in the third act and went to work for the Red Cross. And that's what made it tough. The film sat around for three years, just basically dead again, when this guy named David Sacks, who was this internet millionaire, one of the creators of Paypal, decided he wanted to go into the movie business, found my screenplay, and made it happen. So that's how I got the gig. The long story.

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