LOS ANGELES — The filmmaking brothers Paul and Chris Weitz, who have had their movie hits and misses since breaking through with the blockbuster 1999 teen sex comedy “American Pie,” had childhoods that resemble something out of a movie made by their friend Wes Anderson.
The writer Tom Wolfe was a guest at the family dinner table. The Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman once took them to the circus. And they spent many boyhood hours orchestrating elaborate skits with their collection of stuffed animals (which included twin alligators and a duck made of socks), who sipped cocktails and had turf wars at a make-believe club fashioned after the El Morocco, a once glamorous nightspot near the Weitz family’s Park Avenue apartment.
The brothers described their unusual provenance during an interview at the office they share in the Venice section of Los Angeles, not far from where they live with their wives and children.
“I was four years older, and Chris was certainly his own person,” said Paul, 49, who has tousled gray hair. “But we were close.”
Chris, 45, has a scholarly Clark Kent demeanor. “We were a resistance unit,” he said, laughing.
“Essentially, we had a provincial upbringing in the middle of a huge city,” Paul said.
Their father, the clothing designer John Weitz, who left Nazi Germany as a teenager, made a grand living in fashion and went on to write novels and biographies of men in Hitler’s inner circle.
“Wes told me once he used to have a John Weitz blazer that somehow made its way onto Jason Schwartzman’s character in ‘Rushmore,’ ” said Paul, referring to the oddball protagonist of Mr. Anderson’s 1998 film.
The mother of the Weitz brothers, Susan Kohner, was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Douglas Sirk’s 1959 film “Imitation of Life.” She retired from show business when she settled down with Mr. Weitz, and often traveled with her sons to their grandparents’ house in Los Angeles, where Chris and Paul roasted marshmallows by the patio fireplace in the company of “actors with European accents,” as Chris put it, like Yul Brynner and Liv Ullmann.
Their maternal grandfather, Paul Kohner, a Czech émigré, was a talent agent who represented Greta Garbo and Billy Wilder; their maternal grandmother is the screen actress Lupita Tovar, who left Mexico in the days of the early talkies and remained close to old friends like the painter Diego Rivera.
As children, Paul and Chris sometimes annoyed their old-school father with their constant performances. “Once I remember being in London,” Paul said, “and Chris and me were little kids doing some shtick. We were interviewing pigeons on the street and we wouldn’t stop. I remember Dad saying, ‘It’s so booor-ring!’ It was an early piece of dramatic criticism.”
Their high jinks had a choreographed flair. They pilfered sugar packets from restaurants while pretending to be spies carrying out a secret mission called Operation White Gold, and a brief period of light shoplifting hinted at their literary leanings.
“We did go through a book-swiping phase,” Chris said. “To be fair, they were paperbacks. Anything larger wouldn’t fit into our 8-year-old trouser pockets.”
“I took Bruce Tegner’s ‘Complete Book of Self-Defense,’ which taught me how to flip people over,” Paul said.
“I remember stealing a William Steig book,” Chris said.
“I don’t remember that,” Paul said, looking at his brother, puzzled. “We lived near this bookstore called the Madison Avenue Bookshop, and a lovely man ran it.”
Chris said he didn’t recall stealing anything from that store.
“I might have once or twice,” Paul said. “For all I know, he actually knew and billed our parents.”
As a teenager, Paul used to doctor the grades on his report cards, turning minuses into pluses. Sometimes he wandered through the Metropolitan Museum of Art high on “stimulants” that he procured in Central Park, he said.
Chris pursued more patrician activities. As a youth he joined Manhattan’s Knickerbocker Greys, an after-school marching corps founded in 1881 “for boys of the scions of New York upper crust families,” as he described it. He went to a London boarding school when he was 14, but remained popular among New York’s cotillion set.
When it came time for the brothers to embark on a career, their Manhattan upbringing and childhood habit of creating imaginary worlds together came in handy: They were the co-writers (along with Todd Alcott) the screenplay for the 1998 animated film “Antz,” which was set in a place they knew well, Central Park, with a hero voiced by Woody Allen.
After they directed “American Pie” (with Chris as an uncredited director), they wrote and directed “About a Boy.” The screenplay was nominated for an Oscar. Then they went their separate ways as writers and directors for more than a decade.
In that time, the older brother, Paul, wrote plays and directed movies, among them “In Good Company,” “American Dreamz” and “Little Fockers.” His latest is “Grandma,” which comes out this month.
Anatomy of a Scene | ‘Grandma’
Paul Weitz narrates a sequence from his film “Grandma,” featuring Lily Tomlin and Sam Elliott.
By MEKADO MURPHY on Publish Date August 19, 2015. Photo by Glen Wilson/Sony Pictures Classics. Watch in Times Video »Chris, in the meantime, wrote and directed “The Golden Compass”; directed “The Twilight Saga: New Moon”; and wrote two young-adult novels (including the newly published “The New Order”), as well as the script for a “Star Wars” spinoff movie, “Star Wars Anthology: Rogue One,” which is now in production.
“For me,” Paul said, “there is some element of joy in the erasure of self when you are working.”
Chris added similar sentiments: “There is nothing better than directing a movie that is going well.”
The brothers left their Venice office in separate cars and navigated heavy traffic on the way to the Bel Air home of their grandmother, now 105. She was resting when they went inside, but their mother, who has two Golden Globe awards and an Oscar nomination, was there to greet them.
“I like your haircut,” she told Chris, sweeping a lock of hair from his forehead.
He stared blankly ahead.
Ms. Kohner, who was visiting from New York, went on to recall how her boys used to make fun of her performance in “Imitation of Life.” “They used to do the thing from ‘Imitation,’ the dance,” she said. “They did it just to annoy me.”
The brothers laughed knowingly. “Mom had this striptease in ‘Imitation’ where her character sings, ‘The loneliest word I’ve ever heard is empty,’ ” Paul said.
The song from the movie was “Empty Arms,” and Paul began to sing it while Chris retreated to the kitchen.
If the brothers’ films have a common thread, it may be in their exploration of relationships between men, which Chris chalked up to “daddy issues we had to deal with.”
Their father was an unusually accomplished man who, during World War II (before his success as a designer and author) served in the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the C.I.A. He was an affectionate presence, but he set a high bar.
“He took the level of a perceived insult — walking around with torn jeans — to a new level,” Paul said.
Mr. Weitz also bluntly doled out fatherly wisdom. When Chris fretted over a girl who wasn’t returning his calls, he said his father told him, “If somebody doesn’t call you, it’s because they don’t want to talk to you.”
But he supported the artistic choices of his sons, even among friends who disapproved of the notorious scene in “American Pie” where a lusty teenager makes novel use of an apple pastry. “Dad was out in Sag Harbor,” Chris recalled, “and some other older gentleman came up to him and disparagingly said, ‘I bet you are very proud of your sons.’ And our dad said, ‘Haven’t you ever masturbated before?’ ”
Chris and Paul looked at each other and laughed.
“I don’t know where the conversation went from there,” Paul said.
“There is nowhere to go,” Chris replied, chuckling.
These days, even when they’re not working together, the brothers give each other advice and encouragement. “We do look at each other’s films and give each other notes,” Paul said. “I can remember when I was slightly on the ropes about something professionally, feeling bad about myself, and Chris wrote me a postcard. On the back it read, ‘You are going to win.’ It was subconsciously childish, but I really took it to heart. I kept it in my sock drawer.”
Chris said, “When you are in the middle of these movies, they tend to eat your life.”
He understands this better than most, given his experience making “The Golden Compass,” a $180 million epic starring Nicole Kidman, based on the first novel in Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy. The movie was controversial from the start; skittish executives demanded modifications to its skeptical view of organized religion and asked for a more upbeat ending.
“Those books came to me at a tremendously important time in my life,” said Chris, whose father, an atheist of Jewish lineage, had died not long before he got to work on the script. “To be, sort of, not delivering a good enough version was really difficult for me.”
“The Golden Compass” faltered at the domestic box office, and no sequels followed. “In terms of career stuff, it was tough,” Chris said, “because everything had been coming up roses up until that point for me, for us.”
Now the brothers are collaborating again, this time with Steven Spielberg, who hired them to write an adaptation of the Japanese film “Like Father, Like Son,” which took the Jury Prize at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.
“We grew up being drilled into politeness,” Paul said. “It is a great tool in Hollywood and a great tool in collaboration, because ‘You are an idiot’ is a lot worse to hear than ‘You are really wonderful, and you’ve done something idiotic.’ ”
Chris gave his brother a skeptical look. “We don’t really talk to each other that way,” he said.
“Yeah,” Paul said, with a laugh. “That was all metaphorical speech.”