Borderline Creep

In 2010, Josh Radnor went back to Kenyon College, the small liberal arts college in Ohio that he, himself, had attended years before. It was a celebrated homecoming – the star of TV's neverending How I Met Your Mother screening his first movie, HappyThankYouMorePlease, to the students. Back on the hallowed, historical grounds of his nearly-200-year-old alma mater, Radnor could feel the years peel away; in his heart, he felt like he'd never left. And yet, he was 35.

“I couldn't help but realise how much older I was than all the students,” Radnor says, in recollection. “I was twice their age, and I couldn't figure out how that happened, because it felt like I'd just been there yesterday, and all of a sudden kids are calling me 'Mr Radnor'. After that, I was talking to my producer and I said that I realised that if I dated a student that'd be really inappropriate, and he said, 'That's a great movie, write that movie'.”

And, thus, Radnor wrote Liberal Arts, a film about going back to the ol' alma mater shot at his ol' alma mater. It features him in the central role as the 35-year-old ex-student returning to visit a retiring professor (Richard Jenkins, who is really great herein, as always), and ended up in the middle of a sustained flirtation with Elizabeth Olsen. The two set about swapping handwritten letters (Radnor also did this, for a stint, in his 20s, with a girl) and falling into, well, something.

“There's a creep factor line that you have to stay south of,” Radnor says, of the whole set-up of writing a film in which he gets to make out with a hot young starlet. “You see a 35-year-old guy and a 19-year-old girl, it can make you uncomfortable, but the way I got around that was to make my character himself uncomfortable with it. People always say to me, 'You wrote this movie just so you could be with Elizabeth Olsen', and there is a real history of books and films where the author is really making a case that it's really a positive thing for these much older men and much younger women to be together, to the point where it can feel like a fantasy. And that's very much not the case with my movie.”

Instead, the film is a study of dissatisfaction, academia and the passage of time, with Jenkins and Allison Janney (herself a Kenyon alumnus) playing teachers turned bitter over the years. “Part of the movie is a celebration of a liberal arts education: the life of the reader, a life of the mind, all that,” Radnor says. “Part of it is a recognition of its limits – if you just live an interior life you can get trapped in there.”

And, early in 2012, Radnor took the film back to Kenyon, where this time it was shown for the whole town, who were just as eager to see themselves and their streets on screen as this returning son. Going back again, 37 this time, felt just as familiar. “I remember being in college so exactly – what it was like to walk down that street, have that conversation, drink that beer – yet here I am going to my 15-year [college] reunion,” Radnor says. “Time is just funny in that way – it goes and goes and goes, even if you don't.”

WHAT: Liberal Arts
WHEN & WHERE: In cinemas Thursday 13 December