Interview: How Alex Edelman Inadvertently Led Nick Blaemire and Guster's Ryan Miller to the Musical Safety Not Guaranteed

It began at a party for the closing night of Alex Edelman’s Just For Us at the Cherry Lane Theatre. There, actor/performer Nick Blaemire and his collaborator Van Hughes spotted a hero across the room: Ryan Miller, frontman of the alt-rock band Guster. They went up to him hoping for the best, and within two seconds, it was like they were old pals.

Blaemire didn’t know that Miller had scored the film Safety Not Guaranteed, a quirky little indie about a guy who places a classified ad seeking a time travelling companion, but he knew that after watching it again, he wanted Miller to write a musical of it with him. One problem: Miller had not only never written a musical before, but he had never even seen one. All he knew was that it took a long time. But Blaemire caught him at a good moment and they dove in. The result? Safety Not Guaranteed, the musical, is now running at the Harvey Theatre at Brooklyn Academy of Music.

And the two writers are as delightfully quirky as the show is.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Nick, tell me about your first meeting with Ryan.
Nick Blaemire: It was really Van who recognized Ryan’s paisley pants and was like “That’s the dude from Guster.” We went over and hung out and thank God, Ryan was immediately cool. I had grown up on Guster, and it’s always that thing of, if you meet somebody that you admire and they happen to be an asshole, the whole thing breaks. But the exact opposite happened. It was like “Are we already friends?”

And we were like “You should write a musical,” with no agenda. I didn’t have the idea for Safety Not Guaranteed yet. Then I randomly watched it for fun and saw Ryan’s name in the credits as the guy who scored the film, and then realized there were two Guster songs in the movie and he’d written an original song for Mark Duplass, and was like “Oh, this is a musical, and Ryan should write it.” So, I just DM’ed him.

Ryan Miller: Nick got me at a very imposter syndrome, “Yes and…” portion of my life. I was the lead singer of a band and that’s pretty much all I did until I scored this movie. Then I had this lightbulb moment where I was like “Oh, I could be a film composer.” From there, my whole film composition career started. So that was like “I can do something other than being in a band.” Like, “Fuck it, I can do whatever I want.”

Honestly, I learned a lot watching Duplass in a lot of ways. Mark and Jay are my mentors in terms of, “Don’t spend 10 years making one thing, spend one year making 10 things and one of those will work.” I really took that to heart.

A musical had always been in the back of my mind, but everyone I knew had spent seven to 14 years working on a musical. Anaïs Mitchell on Hadestown, Trey from Phish worked on Hands on a Hardbody, Barenaked Ladies worked for two years on Animal House and it never went anywhere, my buddy Nate from Fun worked on If I Ran the Circus. Just nightmare stories. But I also wanted to say yes because I liked Nick. He seemed smart and he knew what he was doing. My body said “Yes and…” and my mind was like, “This is never gonna work out, but fuck it, let’s see where this goes.”

There was this apocryphal moment where Nick was like “I’m gonna work on this a little bit,” and I’m like “Sure, kid” — Nick is 40, he’s not a kid — and then I walked into a room on Eighth Avenue. What’s the name of that building?

Nick: Ripley Grier. The most Broadway, the grime and grit. I didn’t want to give him the sterilized experience. I wanted the real thing.

Ryan: I walked in thinking we were gonna talk, and there were six Broadway actors and Nick. Jen Damiano was there. Van was playing the guitar, Gerard [Canonico] had a box to bang his hands on. The book was there, and they sang 15 Guster songs with six-part harmony, and it all worked. Two hours later, they’re like “What do you think?” And I go “What the fuck just happened?” It felt like I was in a Charlie Kaufman movie or something. I had no exposure to musicals or Broadway until this point. I had never seen one. So you have to appreciate how strange this was for me.

Nick: The huge key to this thing was Peter Saraf, the legendary film producer who used to run Big Beach Films that made Little Miss Sunshine. He produced Safety Not Guaranteed. I had done a movie with him like 10 years ago and he and I got along. I saw his name in the credits the same day that I saw Ryan’s and I was like “Oh, shit.” I had my agent reach out to Peter, Peter remembered me, and we got the rights within a week of these conversations, which never happens. The development on this show has been a year-and-a-half from first reading to production, which is fucking crazy. It had so much to do with Ryan and Peter and the fact that I found two of the better men that I’ve ever met in my life.

So it started as a jukebox musical?
Nick: That first reading was a jukebox musical. All of us and Colin Trevorrow, the director of the film, felt that we should be careful to not make it a jukebox musical, because we thought there was more to it than that. None of us wanted to cash in. That’s not the reason to do it. It’s not a giant Back to the Future-sized following of a movie. It’s got real indie cred and I wanted to translate that feeling. I wasn’t secretly trying to turn this into a show for tourists. It’s retaining the melancholy and offbeat humor, and the strange sounds that Ryan has been innovating for years.

But that meant Ryan had to write new songs. We had a song called “Doing It By Myself,” which is a Guster song and the introduction to Kenneth, the time-traveler character played expertly by Taylor Trensch in the show. The song worked, and Ryan was like “I think I can beat it and make it more specific to the moment without losing the weird indie pop aria moment we’re trying to hit.” And I was like, “That’s a tall order, man. No skin off my back if you can’t get there.” And then he just obliterated his own song and came up with something so original and kind of scary that brought these different angles on the moment. He was constantly pushing me to write more adventurously.

Ryan, take me through the lessons you got in musical theater songwriting.
Ryan: Oh, my God. So, since we started, I’ve seen five and-a-half musicals.

What was the half?
Ryan: I was in the pit for The Outsiders because our MD was subbing, so I sat underneath the stage. I don’t feel like that’s a full musical. Part of me, when we started, wanted to do my research. What’s the Led Zepplin of musicals? Who’s the Velvet Underground? Who’s the Talking Heads? First of all, there wasn’t enough time. Second of all, Nick had been pushing that my naivety and first-timerness was going to be in service. If I started to learn the tropes, than I was going to start building the tropes in.

We did a workshop at Skidmore for xa week, and there were 30 people in the room and I was the only one who didn’t know what they were doing, and I’m also the oldest guy in the room. I had no idea how rehearsals work, how the cookie gets made. On the other hand, I’ve been writing songs for 30 years, so I had total imposter syndrome and total confidence in my abilities as a songwriter, and that’s been such a strange thing.

I’m still really processing what musicals are. One of the five that Nick took me to see was Cabaret, because I feel like that’s the Beatles in a way. I was a little high and instead of following the plot, I just tripped out on musicals. Like, musicals are amazing. They’re acting and there’s a band. But I’m still learning how this artform works.