Beautiful People: Max Winkler

Like father, not exactly like son. "I've never worn a leather jacket, and I never could," Max Winkler says. "It would be bad for my ego." Yes, he may be the son of Henry "The Fonz" Winkler, but he's the first to admit he's no actor ("horrific" is how he describes his acting skills). His ego, though, has a few projects it can be proud of: directing a popular Internet show (Michael Cera's Clark and Michael), a festival- circuit short, and now a feature film he wrote, starring Uma Thurman.

"I'd been really antsy to make a movie," he explains from his editing room (also, as it happens, his childhood bedroom) in L.A. "My writing partner and I had written a bunch of scripts, but all of them were too expensive or not practical to make right out of film school. Out of frustration, I thought, 'I'm just going to write something incredibly sort of personal and concentrated.' I sat down in a room and locked myself in for two weeks."

The result was Ceremony, a "comedy with a lot of sadness" about a young man (Michael Angarano) who shows up at the wedding of an older woman (Thurman) with whom he's infatuated to try to halt the proceedings. Winkler cites The Graduate and Harold and Maude among its influences, but emphasized that for all its debts, it's a personal (if not autobiographical) film first and foremost. "It was a very cathartic experience. I feel like I was on rumspringa or something." (That, for the uninitiated, is the testing journey into the secular world that Amish teenagers undertake.) He laughs: "My therapist may have been out of town those couple of months."
MATTHEW SCHNEIER

Max wears a cardigan by Lacoste, shirt by Guess, pants by Band of Outsiders, and tie by Stussy Deluxe

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