TORONTO—In a private interview with the Georgia Straight during the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival, director Jason Reitman was in the midst of describing his newest effort, Labor Day, when his phone rang.

“Oh, it was just my dad calling. I’ll call him back,” he said, nonchalantly, ignoring it. Now, excuse us for getting all excited, but it’s not every day that a question or two from the Straight take precedence over a buzz from the likes of legendary producer-director Ivan Reitman.

For all of Reitman’s talents as a filmmaker, having a father who was responsible for films like Animal House and Ghostbusters didn’t hurt when he was making his way into the movie business. “I certainly wanted to be a filmmaker for as long as I can remember,” the younger Reitman admitted. “And there were moments where I got scared of the idea of being a filmmaker, and then my father actually gave me the confidence to do it.”

One of those moments undoubtedly came at the same festival in 2005. That’s when Reitman first showed his debut feature-length film, Thank You for Smoking, at Ryerson University. “There was a ton of pressure, because it felt like my career was either going to start now or end now, and I’d been wanting to make it for a long time,” the Montreal native recalled. “It was either literally going to be the moment where my career took off or the moment where I’d have to go back to the drawing board, maybe direct commercials, maybe be a writer. So that moment—when the movie ended, people clapped, and Searchlight bought my film—it’s the moment I became a director. It’s the moment I realized, ‘I get to do this for a living.’ It was extraordinary.”

Since then, Reitman has gone on to make comedies with decidedly serious undertones, a trend that gave us films like Juno, Up in the Air, and Young Adult. With Labor Day (opening Friday [January 31]), he moves away from the comedy genre, fully embracing the drama of Joyce Maynard’s novel about a prison escapee named Frank (Josh Brolin) who forcefully takes refuge in the home of a reclusive woman and her son (Kate Winslet and Gattlin Griffith).

The film continues Reitman’s focus on fascinating female characters, something he rationalizes with ease. “I like to tell original stories, and the most simplistic argument would be [that] if you want to tell original stories, tell stories about women, because those stories are never told,” he said.

But the film’s seriousness required a change in mood from Reitman, who—in doing his first period piece as well as his first serious drama—had to revamp the way he usually conducts business. “In my other films, the tone was really a mixture of the camera and the music,” he said. “And this is a film that’s slowed down, slowed down so that you can feel the heat, and hear the staccatos, and watch people sweat. That’s what the book felt like. I knew I had to re-create that in the film, and that was a huge challenge because I had never done anything like it.”

In the end, Reitman said, his work on this film was guided by advice from the same figure whose call he ignored earlier. “It all comes back to something my father told me. He said that ‘Your job is not to make things funny; it’s not to make things tense. Your job is to find truth on a daily basis.’ That was true with this one perhaps more than ever, because I was in a world and a genre that I never really play around with.”