Colin Firth Delivers The King’s Speech!
If you believe the pundits, Colin Firth will win the Academy Award for Best Actor this year.
The 50-year-old actor should have received his big break in 1989, when a then-unknown Firth landed the lead opposite Annette Bening in director Milos Forman’s (“Amadeus”) film “Valmont” – an adaptation of the French novel, “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.” Unfortunately, the film was beaten to the multiplex by Stephen Frears’ Oscar-winning film, “Dangerous Liaisons,” and played to little fanfare.
After starring as Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy in the 1995 BBC miniseries “Pride and Prejudice,” Firth became an instant heartthrob, and was subsequently typecast as characters bearing the repressed Darcy persona – including his spurned lover roles in “The English Patient” and “Shakespeare in Love,” a contempo version of Darcy in “Bridget Jones’ Diary,” and tortured-in-love painter Johannes Vermeer in “Girl with a Pearl Earring.”
Recently, something’s changed. Perhaps it was his leading role as a courageous warrior in the sword-and-sandals epic, “The Last Legion,” which bombed terribly at the box office, or appearing in the highest-grossing film in British history, “Mamma Mia!,” but of late, Firth has taken on more complex roles in character studies, including last year’s drama, “A Single Man.” The film marked the directorial debut of fashion icon Tom Ford, and featured Firth as George Falconer, a melancholic, gay professor mourning the death of his lover. The character was Firth at his most vulnerable, and garnered him an Oscar nod for Best Actor – his first.
While accepting the BAFTA – the British equivalent of Oscar – for “A Single Man,” Firth stammered through his acceptance speech. At first, it looked like just nerves, but little did the audience know that Firth was in the process of filming “The King’s Speech” – the tale of King George VI, who was plagued by a paralyzing stammer, and his unorthodox Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), who helps him. And if this writer is to be believed, Colin Firth will be hoisting a golden statue high in the air come February 27, 2011.
MMM sat down with Colin Firth to chat about his critically-hailed role in “The King’s Speech,” his own brush with royalty, the film’s rating troubles, and his personal thoughts on the British royals.
MANHATTAN MOVIE MAGAZINE: One of the central themes of the film is the issue of friendship and being isolated from people in general. It has to be relatable from a person in entertainment since you must have people who want to be your friend because it sheds the spotlight on them a bit, and I think Bertie’s main issue was that he’s never had a friend before.
COLIN FIRTH: You’re bang-on. It’s funny to say a story about the royal family, since none of us can say what that’s like. How can it possibly be universal? But I think what it’s done is taken issues that apply to absolutely everybody and taken this convention to heighten these things. Isolation is universal; it doesn’t matter how close you are to your family or how perfect your marriage is. There’s some level on which you can’t be reached, and this is taking that reality and making a very extreme case out of it. If communication’s imperfect, let’s show a case where it’s traumatic; if men protect themselves behind certain reserves against intimacy, then let’s take a man who not only does that, he’s protected by high walls, titles, protocols, and make the therapist work through all those things. You could almost look at them as metaphors for barriers we all put up.
MMM: Have you ever met royalty?
FIRTH: Not meaningfully. There are certain events in which you might find yourself shaking hands with a member of the royal family, but there’s nothing that gives you any clue of what it’s like to be that person—apart from watching people’s behavior around them. I was at an event where Prince Charles, who is very gracious with the people he meets, was being ushered around by his private secretary, and he would try his best to give as much of his focus and interest, and usually knew quite a lot about the people he was speaking to. But his private secretary would make sure he wouldn’t go too long with that person cause there was someone else in line. It was interesting to see people who were otherwise composed and would claim not to be impressed by royalty suddenly completely transforming, and becoming very, very nervous. You realize that if you are a member of the royal family, you encounter this very often, and that’s how you see the human race.
MMM: In the film, it showed how Bertie overcame his stammer. Was that based on facts?
FIRTH: I don’t think the film shows him overcoming it, I think it shows him coming to an arrangement with it where it won’t stop him from doing his job. That last speech, his therapist is right there and he has to fight for every word. He was never cured. I tried to follow the cadences of the real speech, and you hear it’s very measured and broken up, and you hear him going through three syllables and ending on up-phrases, and every now and then you’d hear him get blocked again. And that’s a fight. Everyone who’s sitting there listening to it – the Queen, Churchill, all the rest – are on the edge of their seat until the end. So, he overcomes the debilitating fear of it; he doesn’t overcome the fact that he will always have the obstacle.
MMM: What tricks did you use to get the stammer down, and were you able to shed it at the end of the day?
FIRTH: No, I got a bit confused in my own speech patterns. I’m a little worried when I tell people this, about how “deeply-immersed” you are in your role. It’s muscle memory. Your body will train itself to do that exercise. If you train yourself to interfere you’re your rhythm of speech, something in your brain remembers that, and follows it, and if you’re going around trying to promote “A Single Man” at the time, it sometimes comes around to haunt you. That’s not a real stammer; that’s my mind playing tricks on me. I spoke to the head of the British Stammering Association a few weeks ago, and he said research shows that there’s a strong neurological component; it’s not a psychological problem, there’s something happening in the brain. So I asked him if Logue is on the wrong track since he’s trying to work on the psychological process, and he said no, you learn not to be crushed by it; not to be disabled by it.
MMM: Could you talk more about your process and how you mastered the stammer?
FIRTH: I can’t! It was such an incremental process; in conversations with Tom, in conversations with David Seidler, our writer, who spent his childhood battling a stammer and still says that it’s not something that’s completely gone. But to listen to the way he talked about it, and to talk to Tom about the way it can work in the context of a film – we have a certain amount of time, we’ve got scenes that have to have a certain pace, and we also have to judge it so that people who are rooting for him can experience the agony of the stammer; how do you do that in a way that people share that, but in a way that it’s not so uncomfortable so that they film becomes unwatchable? Or that the pace grinds to a halt?
MMM: There were some major issues with this film getting an R-rating thanks mostly to the one therapy scene, as well as issues with the British ratings board.
FIRTH: Well, we won the battle with the British ratings board. Spectacularly. As far as I know, it was precedent. In Britain, we have a ’15,’ so it’s an in-between. We go 12A, 15, 18 – which is our R. It originally had a ’15,’ so it was already more lenient, and then it got dropped to a ‘12A.’ There’s a message on the poster that says, “It contains strong language in a speech-therapy context.” This can get really facile, this argument. I spoke about this a few weeks ago and got a ‘Firth blasts the MPAA’ headline. I’m not blasting the MPAA. They love the word ‘blasting.’ This isn’t a non-issue. I get that people don’t want their small children hearing these words. I don’t like them. One of the things the British board said was that it was not in a violent context, wasn’t directed at anyone, and wasn’t in a sexual context. As a parent, the context I would like to keep my kids away from is casual use. I love football – soccer. I love to take them to soccer, but I have to wrestle with myself because what they hear there would make a sailor blush, and certainly would make that scene sound like something from “The Sound of Music.” And they are screaming, those [soccer fans], and they are angry and serious, and I’m sitting there with a 6-year-old and I don’t want to deny him the joy of a football game, but you can’t get away from it. He’s heard worse, but it doesn’t make him go around saying it. It’s a dilemma. So, I don’t relish those words, so I’m not sitting hear judging people who don’t like the words. But, as far as the rest of public opinion is concerned, I’d be kicking in an open door if I stood here railing about it, because everyone seems to be in harmony on the subject; especially with the consistency issue.
MMM: Plus, this is a story that teenagers should see because of both the history element, and the quality of the film. So it must be frustrating that they can’t.
FIRTH: Yes, it is. I think this is why it’s being used as a bit of a flagship for the cause. I think every parent has a right to set down parameters for their own kids, and I don’t want my kids to think that language is okay. But that’s not the case in this movie. It’s not vicious, it’s not sexual, it’s not lazy; it’s anything but. These forbidden words have become momentary tools to get a guy to break out of extreme repression, and then he immediately gets rather sheepish and apologizes. There couldn’t be a more harmless context. And so, if there ever was an exception—I would hate to discourage kids in that age bracket, from 13-18, from seeing a film that has so much to say to people that age.
MMM: How do you feel the British monarchy has changed over the years?
FIRTH: I don’t watch them closely, so I don’t know. I find it very difficult to answer questions about the monarchy because I’m not a royal-watcher. Some people are. But an extraordinary moment happened in England with the death of Princess Diana. People became incredibly emotional all over the country, and the Queen was criticized for not lowering the flag. I don’t know what’s happening in their real lives, behind closed doors. They have the right not to exhibit it to the public the same way everyone does. I don’t want to be photographed hugging my kids either. It’s my business, not yours. But somebody made a comment around that time—a columnist said it’s about the nature of who the British think they are. This idea of British repression has always been a stereotype which is qualifiable anyway, but I think the English are just as accurately represented by the Rolling Stones as they are by John Major, or somebody. I mean the royal family aren’t even English, anyway. Philip’s Greek, the rest of them are German… they’re immigrants. [Laughs] No I’m being a bit arched there, but we are all a mixed nation. But this guy said, “We seem to have gone overnight from a country who can’t talk about their emotions to a country that cannot stop.” Everybody was holding each other and hugging each other and it suddenly became essential to hug each other. “Have you hugged your kids lately?” And the English have turned into that. It’s quite extraordinary how this touchy-feely thing came over.
MMM: Not to throw a jinx your way, but I know you were honored to being nominated for an Oscar for “A Single Man.” Would it be particularly gratifying to win an Oscar for this role?
FIRTH: Well, I mean it’s gratifying to get attention for a performance. I’m not going to wish any of it away! Talk as much as you like, but I welcome all of it! Well, we have to wait for it to come out. All I can say about it right now is if people are talking about it like that, I just think “wonderful start.” It’s code for “it’s a really good movie,” at the moment.
MMM: What’s coming up next?
FIRTH: I’m doing a movie called “Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy,” which is from a novel by John le Carré, and is a wonderful novel which was a brilliant television series in the 1970s. Tomas Alfredson (“Let the Right One In”), a very fine Swedish director, is directing it. I am playing a spy—flawed, melancholy, the loneliness of the human motivation inside espionage. It’s thinking man’s spy stuff.
THE KING’S SPEECH is now playing in select theaters.
Elizabeth Banks Talks The Next Three Days
On the surface, actress Elizabeth Banks may seem like just another likeable, easy-on-the-eyes ingénue who’s been on the receiving end of a number of lucky breaks, first making waves as J. Jonah Jameson’s eyelash-batting secretary, Betty Brant, in the “Spider-Man” films, before her breakthrough performance as a ditzy nympho in Judd Apatow’s comedy smash, “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.”
Think again.
After graduating magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania in 1996, Banks studied at the American Conservatory Theater, making her debut performance in the 1998 indie film, “Surrender Dorothy,” about a heroin addict. Banks was credited as “Elizabeth Casey” in the film, which won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Feature at the Slamdance Film Festival – Sundance’s edgier cousin. Then, she appeared briefly as Mekhi Phifer’s sympathetic friend in “Shaft,” and was credited as “Elizabeth Maresal Mitchell,” her birth name. She then changed her name to “Elizabeth Banks” to avoid confusion with “Lost” actress Elizabeth Mitchell, and co-starred alongside Paul Rudd in the hilarious cult comedy “Wet Hot American Summer,” about a wacky group of counselors at Jewish summer camp.
Banks’ role as Brant caught Hollywood’s eye, and landed Banks a pair of supporting roles, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Spielberg’s “Catch Me If You Can,” and in the horse racing drama “Seabiscuit.” However, her scene-stealing role as Beth, the shower head-romancing bimbo in the aforementioned flick, “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” made her a regular fixture in the comedy film scene. She soon demanded more screen time, starring as the female lead opposite Mark Wahlberg in the underdog football film “Invincible.”
In 2008, Banks cemented her status as one of Hollywood’s most in-demand actresses. She starred in a whopping six films, including as the initial object of Ryan Reynolds’ affection in the underrated ensemble dramedy “Definitely, Maybe,” the lead alongside Seth Rogen in Kevin Smith’s raunchy romantic comedy “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” former First Lady Laura Bush in Oliver Stone’s comedy-drama “W.,” and her fourth appearance alongside Paul Rudd in the breakout comedy hit, “Role Models.”
Her latest film is The Next Three Days. Directed by Paul Haggis (“Crash”), the film is a remake of the 2007 French film “Pour Elle” (Anything for Her) by Fred Cavayé, and stars Russell Crowe as a family man whose wife, played by Banks, is accused of a murder he believes she didn’t commit. Crowe will stop at nothing to make them a family again, and hatches a plot to break her out of prison.
MMM chatted with Elizabeth Banks about how she got into her prison role, if she’s ever committed a crime, and her upcoming directorial debut.
MANHATTAN MOVIE MAGAZINE: You shot this in an actual working prison, so did you bond with any of the inmates?
ELIZABETH BANKS: I wouldn’t say I bonded with any inmates, but my character is incarcerated at the Allegheny County Jail, where we shot the movie, which was helpful in terms of getting into character. I got to sit with the inmates, locked in the cell, and I lasted about two minutes before I was like, “Get me the hell out of here.” They don’t have bars on their doors; it’s heavy steel doors with a little window, so you feel incarcerated and institutionalized – like you’re going to get a lobotomy in five minutes. So it was very easy to imagine the isolation and the depression. I sat with about 50 women on this one cell block; some play cards, some watch movies, but they sound bad – and it’s really not a fun place to be. Most of the women I met were either drug offenders or parole violators – not a lot of super violent women but some were going to be there up to three years. Prisons are better than the Allegheny Jail because they have outdoor space and they don’t have it at the Allegheny County Jail – you never see the sun.
MMM: Did the inmates have any particular requests about the filmmaking process?
BANKS: They were interested in authenticity. For example, we went to the jail and asked them for their old stuff and we bought them new clothing. I had an issue with my costume; it was itchy and scratchy and gross. But the worst part was that it had an elastic waistband that cuts into you. And I’m tiny! You wouldn’t think, but it cuts into you. I asked the costumer for a drawstring, and she said it was not authentic. But the women said they rip it apart and take whatever they can to make it a drawstring. If they get caught you get an automatic 24 – spending 23 out of 24 hours in their cell alone. But sometimes the guards were cool about it because they know it’s uncomfortable. So I went back to the costumer and told her that the drawstring was authentic. But it’s interesting to see how they deal with all those little indignities everyday and how they fight little by little for some sense of freedom.
MMM: Did you find that some of the inmates had the issue that they were innocent and not guilty?
BANKS: I didn’t ask anyone about guilt or innocence. There were definitely some angry people in there. But the other authentic thing was that I met several women whose dyed hair was growing out, so it made me feel strongly that my character had to go back to brown in the clink. They all had children – I asked how many had kids on the outside and nearly every hand went up. There is a phone bank on the block, so as long as the guard ok’s it, you can be on the phone whenever you want. They also had a lot of ways to visit people and that for me – us in the movie having a little boy – makes the stakes so much higher. It’s not just a love story. It’s a story of a man who has a motherless child. And he’s trying to figure out how to get this child’s mother back. One of the goals of my character was to say to this man, “You need to find another mother for our son.” And could I say that out loud, knowing that I couldn’t mother him in here or do I need to fight to be mothering him so he knows I tried the whole time, when he was the one who put up his walls. That was emotionally tricky for me. She gets to that point that she’s resigned herself to this being her fate, but as soon as she’s willing to say that, he’s like, “I’m going to break you out, actually.”
MMM: Give us an idea of the behind the scenes for us – was anything scary for you?
BANKS: The scariest day for me was when we were driving through a curving tunnel and Russell hits 50 mph and says, “Take the wheel!” And I thought, “What!?!? We are not doing this because we’re all going to die.” That was the tensest day for me because I thought I was going to ram the car into the wall and kill all of us. That was for me, very harrowing. I was very scared in the driving sequences. And the one day, I was hanging out the door, and I was so far out of the car, he was hanging onto my foot! [Laughs]
MMM: What was your level of compassion for people who are incarcerated now that you’ve gone through this experience?
BANKS: I’m a total softie on that stuff. I absolutely believe there are people who should be separated from society and that there are bad people. I also believe there are a lot of people who have drug and alcohol abuse issues and domestic abuse issues we should be serving with social services and instead we throw them in jail, because we have no other place for them. A lot of the women I spoke to are not well educated and this system generally probably gets them in trouble.
MMM: Have you ever committed a crime?
BANKS: I’ve never been arrested. [Laughs] I tell people “just don’t get arrested.” No, sure, I’ve texted in the car, and I know it’s bad.
MMM: If you wore your character’s shoes, would you have done anything differently?
BANKS: Bad things happen to good people all the time and that was the situation she was in. But she didn’t have a choice to attempt to escape with him; he didn’t give her a choice. That’s the difference between men and women – women think about the consequences and put thoughts into actions, whereas he’s so masculine about it and is like, “I’m going to break you out, I’ve got it all figured out and I’ve got a gun – let’s go.” I didn’t have a choice at that moment.
MMM: You’re adding director to your resume as well, right?
BANKS: Yes, I did just direct a little comedy short for the Farrelly Brothers. They’re making this thing called “Movie 43” and Pete and Bobby asked if I would act in one of the [sketch comedies]. I said that yes, I will absolutely act in one, but I want to direct one too. I said I’ll pitch you some ideas, I know what you’re into and I brought in a female writer and I like this one, called “Middle School Date,” because the girl wins. I loved the prep, the actors, the editing process – because I’m totally anal about everything – and shaping the music and everything about it.
THE NEXT THREE DAYS is now playing in select theaters nationwide.
James Franco and Danny Boyle Talk 127 Hours
Chances are you’ve already heard about “Slumdog Millionaire” director Danny Boyle’s latest film, 127 HOURS—but for all the wrong reasons.
Yes, people reportedly fainted during the climactic amputation scene when the film made it’s world premiere during the Toronto Film Festival earlier this year, and yes, paramedics were called to the Los Angeles premiere when a young woman suffered a seizure about 45 minutes into the film, according to the Los Angeles Times. Far from a cheap marketing ploy, these incidents have detracted from what is undoubtedly one of the year’s finest films.
Adapted from the memoir of Aron Ralston, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place,” the film stars James Franco as Ralston, an adrenalin junkie and professional outdoorsman who, while hiking through Robbers Roost, Utah, had his arm trapped by a dislodged boulder and was trapped in a cave for nearly five days back in 2003. Armed with just a video camera, Ralston contemplates his life, eventually summoning the courage to amputate his arm and escape certain death.
The film was made by the entire team behind the Oscar-winning instant classic “Slumdog Millionaire,” including writer/director Danny Boyle, co-writer Simon Beaufoy, producer Christian Colson, and composer A.R. Rahman, and is one of the best-reviewed films of the year, with the Los Angeles Times saying, “In the end, 127 Hours is one man’s incredible, unforgettable journey; it took the extraordinary alchemy of Boyle and Franco to also make it ours.”
MMM attended the New York press conference for 127 HOURS, where writer/director Danny Boyle and star Jame Franco chatted about the notorious amputation scene, how they portrayed trapped hiker Aron Ralston, their own survival experiences, and their future plans (“28 Months Later?” The “Alien” prequel?)
MANHATTAN MOVIE MAGAZINE: How did you find out about this project?
DANNY BOYLE: So, I heard the story– I was in London, I live in London, I heard the story in 2003. And I had– it’s weird what happened to the Chilean miners recently because in the same way that stories snagged, you know, the way it just snags people. I mean, look, people in Britain were really fascinated. And obviously, we heard the story when Aron came out of the canyon. And I remember there was talk of a press conference. And I remember following the news, tryin’ to think oh, what, that’ll be interesting. So, it was a fascinating story, obviously. And then, I read his book in 2006. And there’s a guy who– Pathe, who are a kinda French company who operate in Britain and France, they’re like a mini-studio. The guy who runs that is a climber, he’s called Francois Ivernel. And he set up this meeting with Aron. And I went to meet Aron in Holland. Anyway, we couldn’t find common ground on [how to adapt the book into film], really.
MMM: Then what happened?
BOYLE: And then we got back together again. And my take on it was always that you’ll never be able to watch– if we depict it correctly, what happened to Aron, you’ll never be able to tolerate it unless you can empathize. And the way we all know that happens is through actors. You know, it’s not really through the slightly cooler tone of a documentary. And so, we got together and started writing a script of it as a first person immersive experience.
MMM: When did Franco get involved?
BOYLE: Part of the process, I think, is that we had to find the right actor. Before we did that, Simon, who is also a climber and has been up Eiger, which is European equivalent of Everest, came in and sorted out our script, and we all worked on it together. And then, we saw a few actors, and we met this guy [Franco]. I remember seeing Pineapple Express and thinking, whoa, great movie, but also thinking, wow, Franco, he’s got real range, hasn’t he? You know, there’s a bit in the film, it’s not like Pineapple Express, but it’s this extraordinary talk show host which is not based on Aron’s messages which we did use for a lot of the material, but it’s something that allowed James to explore the further reaches of what’s happening to his mind and his though-processing at the time. So, that’s the story really,
MMM: James, what was your first meeting with Aron like? Did he have casting approval?
JAMES FRANCO: Well, a lot of very important things happened that ultimately guided me through the performance. Aron did some of the early work of just walking us through and showing us some of the things that he did. But most importantly, we were at the Four Seasons in L.A., and it was the first time I met Aron, and he brought this ratty VHS tape that had the original reel videos on it, and we all sat there and watched it. And it was incredibly powerful for a lot of reasons. On the video, it’s Aron in the middle of the situation, not knowing that he’s gonna get out. And he made the messages up until, you know, within an hour of figuring out how to get out. And so, I was saying to myself while we were watching it, wow, there’s a guy that thinks he’s gonna die, and in some ways, he’s accepted it. And it was just a guy talking to his friends and family in a very, very simple and intimate way, but also not wallowing in self-pity, you know, doing it with dignity. And that simplicity combined with that knowledge of death behind it was incredibly strong for me, and showed me a way to do the part.
MMM: James, did you ever have to put your own survival skills to the test, and if so, could you tell us the story?
FRANCO: I mean, I’ve been lost—you know, I got lost in Paris, I had to find a taxi and [Laughs] there aren’t taxis at a certain hour, and it was really hard.
MMM: So has this experience changed your adventurous spirit in any way then?
FRANCO: If I hike, I’ll be sure to tell people where I go. But I mean it’s given me an appreciation for my life, for the people in my life, certainly. [In the first meeting] Aron asked me why I wanted to play this role, and I love the way that it strips down this character and this person, that everything that is familiar in our day to day lives with other people—just emotional dependence, everything that is familiar to us, and also just the daily activities that keep us from looking at ourselves, you know, in a very intimate way—all of that is taken away and it’s a man alone. And it’s a man facing death. And so, I imagined that what we had was a real way to just study what it is to be human, what’s important in our lives, what we hold onto from our outside life, what really gives us strength. And I said in the first meeting, “Oh, Aron, I love all that, and I also like you had the will inside you to get out. And Aron corrected me a little bit; that one of the main things that gave him the strength to get out was his connection to the outside world and his friends and family, and that those videos weren’t just a last message, that they were actually a way to connect to those people. And obviously Aron knew that they weren’t listening at that moment, but that he felt a real connection to those people, and that gave him the strength to survive. And so it’s given me an appreciation for people in my life.
MMM: What was it like having the entire “Slumdog Millionaire” team back collaborating on this?
BOYLE: I mean, we all do think of the film as being very different from “Slumdog,” because that was about millions of people, and this story is about one person, but we’ve discovered strange similarities, in a way, between the two films. I challenge the notion that “Slumdog” is somehow euphoric in a way that this isn’t. People remember “Slumdog” as being euphoric because there was a dance at the end, but we pass through some pretty dark material before we arrived at that point in the story and earned that euphoria. And, in that sense, I think the two stories share a certain similarity. They don’t pull their punches in the darker moments, but the up side of that is at the end of the movie, hopefully, audiences feel they’ve been through something powerful, meaningful and true. And there is a very little dance.
MMM: A lot has been made, obviously, of the climactic scene and how hard it can be to watch. I’m wondering, Danny, what is the challenge to know the line of what can be shown on screen and what can’t? Because obviously, you can’t not show this scene of the movie since it’s the most important thing.
BOYLE: Yeah, it’s the book really. I mean, I remember when I read it the first time, I felt breathless reading it. It’s the most extraordinary bit of writing. And we decided the only way to measure it was not to measure it in the sense of the sensibility of what would the… fashion in the audience be? We didn’t wanna make it for a horror audience, we didn’t wanna make it so that it was watchable by everybody. You know, it was obviously going to be something that had to truly reflect his experience, and the key things in it are that it took Aron over 40 minutes, and that it had a degree of pain in it. But also, that it was a doorway to something else, that it wasn’t an event in itself. And we decided that people would go through this as part of the experience of watching the film. And the euphoria or the exhilaration, the ecstasy you feel at the end of it is deeply earned because you, like him, have been through some kind of intense experience.
MMM: This question’s for Danny. You’re going to be pretty busy until 2012 with non-film related projects, right? You’ve got the Olympics and you’ve a play that you’re working on. Our readers want know how realistic is “28 Months Later.” Will you direct? And for James real quick, has anybody spoken to you about Ridley Scott’s “Alien” prequel?
FRANCO: Yeah, that’s weird news, huh? Maybe I’ll do Mapplethorpe in the “Alien” movie. [Laughs] I just heard about it on the Internet.
BOYLE: There’s a rumor going around that he was going to be in “28 Months Later.” That was the latest rumor I heard. I’d love to direct another one of it, actually, because I watched the second one. I wasn’t that involved in the second one, and I really enjoyed watching it as a punter, you know? ‘Cause when you make films, you never really see them as like punters see them. It’s weird. You’re entrusted with editing a film for an audience and preparing a film for an audience, and yet, you’re as far away from what they will see as you could ever get ’cause you’ve watched it hundreds of times, and you’ve minisculely produced it. But I watched it as a punter, and I thought, wow, I’d really love to direct the next one. And that’s where that began really. It’s just a question of time and stuff. If I’m still alive after the opening ceremony of the Olympic games, it’s open to question. I’d love to, yeah. Sure.
MMM: James, for you, I’m wondering, the film really could have been very static if it had been done wrong, and it could have been static on multiple levels. What impressed you about the way Danny made it feel like there was motion in the movie? And in terms of guiding your performance, how did you nail the beats properly?
FRANCO: I was attracted to just the setup. I mean, you know, the amazing story and Aron’s very incredible true story aside, just as a performer looking at a script like that was very exciting to me, and you know, frankly, I don’t mind a slow movie, so if this had turned out to be, like, an incredibly slow-moving movie, I probably would have been okay. But Danny definitely decidedly does not like those kinda movies. There are a lot of contrasts in this movie. There’s an incredibly intense situation, but there’s humor. The character is static, but the cameras and the technology they’re using is cutting edge. And this is really, I believe, the most kind of cutting edge mainstream movie that you can find just based on, you know, what they’re doing with the technology, how they’re using the cameras—but to serve the film and the experience. And so, in that way, you get, like, Beckett on speed. When the character does speak, it’s as if he’s speaking right to the audience, so you get incredibly close, like, third person delivery, and then, almost first person where he’s talking to his friends and family, you never break the fourth wall, but it’s as if Aron’s talking right out to the audience. And so, it’s an incredibly intimate kind of thing and that gives it that energy. So, I personally would have been fine if it had been Jeanne Dielman, but I’m happier with this version. [Laughs]
127 HOURS is now playing in select theaters nationwide.
Naomi Watts is Fair Game
Not to be confused with the 1995 action film of the same name that featured Cindy Crawford’s first (and only, thankfully) starring film role (and topless scene), Doug Liman’s action flick FAIR GAME stars Naomi Watts as Valerie Plame Wilson, the undercover CIA operative who was outed by former George W. Bush White House official Scooter Libby.
In case you’re not familiar with the background, here goes nothing. On July 14, 2003, Washington Post journalist Robert Novak wrote a column revealing Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA operative. He was given this information by senior ranking White House official Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who was eventually convicted of was of obstruction of justice, making false statements, and two counts of perjury. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison, but George W. Bush commuted his sentence. The incident has popped up in the news recently as Bush makes the press rounds for his new memoir, “Decision Points.” In the book, Bush recounts that a furious Dick Cheney told him, upon learning that Bush would only be commuting Libby’s sentence and not foregoing the $250,000 fine and two years of probation,” I can’t believe you’re going to leave a soldier on the battlefield.”
The film, based in part on Valerie Plame Wilson’s memoir “Fair Game,” is directed by Doug Liman (“The Bourne Identity”) from a screenplay by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth. Naomi Watts stars as Plame Wilson, while Sean Penn stars as her husband, Joe Wilson.
Watts immediately established herself as an elite actress following her stunning breakthrough role as a schizophrenic in David Lynch’s 2001 film, “Mulholland Drive.” Since then, she’s also appeared in a wide range of films, including the horror flick “The Ring,” earned a Best Actress Oscar nod for the intense drama “21 Grams” (also alongside Penn), and appeared in Peter Jackson’s Hollywood blockbuster, “King Kong.”
Like Plame Wilson, Watts strikes a balance between work and motherhood. Since 2005, Watts has been in a relationship with fellow actor Liev Schreiber, and the two had their first child – a son, Alexander “Sasha” Pete, in 2007, and their second son, Samuel “Sammy” Kai, in 2008.
MMM attended the press conference for the film Fair Game, where the talented Naomi Watts chatted about embodying Valerie Plame Wilson, her post-baby boot camp, and how she balances work and family.
MANHATTAN MOVIE MAGAZINE: Naomi, obviously you getting into the skin of someone that is alive, available, how much do you take advantage of that or not take advantage of that, and then how much do you concern yourself or worry in the process of them seeing it?
NAOMI WATTS: I think when you play someone who is a true, living person it definitely ups the ante and the pressure is tenfold. Everyone in America is familiar with this story, so I felt an extra amount of pressure that I wanted to tell it as truthfully as I could. And the fact that Valerie was not only alive but very involved closely, she was acting as one of our CIA consultants, she was on the set frequently as the BS barometer and saying, “This is how this scene would work,” or “We wouldn’t have those signs there,” or “You wouldn’t address someone like that.” She was very hands-on. It’s not every day as an actor that you get to meet a person like this. She’s someone who’s truly impressive to me so I was nervous. It felt like a big undertaking, and because of her injustice, because of that level of betrayal, it was deeply important for me to somehow serve her story in the best possible way. Our relationship was formed in a very quick and small amount of time. Basically, I had a baby on December 13, I read the script on December 28, and we were filming in February. We did like a little mini-shoot to catch the end of winter in February. So it was so little time, and so many facts. Obviously, we knew the story, but it was told through the media in a fragmented way. It was about piecemealing it together and then sort of letting go of the facts and concentrating on the character and really learning her story. Who was this woman and how did she deal with this betrayal? How did her marriage, her family function; how did her lifestyle change; who did she become? It would be so easy to assume that any of us would either avoid the fight altogether or come undone, and she did neither. And then with Sean, he actually went to Santa Fe and stayed with them for a couple of days. I couldn’t do that; I was nursing a child.
MMM: And I heard you were sent to boot camp?
WATTS: Yeah, Doug [Liman] sent me off. He was like, “No, you’re too soft and maternal. You’re going to boot camp.” I did some paramilitary training for three days.
MMM: You said one thing that Valerie certainly didn’t do is hide away or retreat or deny. I kind of think that’s exactly what she did. It’s almost like the instant the Novak story appears their whole world is transformed instantly into a battlefield. Her view seems to be, “I really don’t like these bullets and bombs. I’ve got my kids in the bunker, I’ve got my way of doing things, and I don’t want to do this.” And then she wakes up after she talks to Sam Shepard. That’s just the way it felt.
WATTS: Well I think the thing about Valerie is that if you meet her you learn very quickly that she’s not someone who wears her heart on her sleeve. She’s not an emotionally driven person. She was a brilliant covert agent and that is who she is to this day. She’s very controlled and reserved and quiet and warm, but you don’t get her all at once and she’s not easy to read. Yes, at times in playing this character it was difficult for me to wrap my head around that because I would handle it very differently than someone like her. But that’s who she is, that’s who she is through and through and she talks about it in the movie. Nothing ever broke her; she’s the one person in her training class that got through. She’s not a victim or a martyr. She absorbs things slowly and learns how to deal with them in her own way.
MMM: Naomi, could you talk about how you related personally to Valerie in terms of that you’re both mothers and you have to divide your time between a very intense career and also motherhood?
WATTS: Yeah. I had the utmost respect for her because of that and how she managed with twins and traveling all kinds of places all over the world and outrageous hours week in and week out. My job can be like that but then there are also incredible breaks. So I talked to her a lot about that, how she managed to be a professional and a mother and be really good at it. In fact, that was one of the things I learned about her just recently because I’d never really got to see her with her kids but obviously I heard her talk about them endlessly. But when she came into my hotel in Cannes and how she related to my children it was very clear in an instant that she is a natural mother, because my kids don’t really pay attention to people unless they’re holding some great, fantastic toy or something. So that balance was interesting to me, how she managed that, and definitely something that I can relate to.
MMM: Naomi, Liev told us he was also in research mode for “Salt” since he played a CIA supervisor. What was it like in your household during that period of time?
WATTS: It was very funny and very strange to have first of all, two of us shooting at the same time – that’s the first time it ever happened with us – and second of all, that we were both playing spies. But they couldn’t really have been more different; one was the classic spy story and one was based in truth and facts. So we were laughing about it; there were a lot of moments where we shared our research and watched documentaries on the CIA and compared notes, and I was talking about NOC. It was quite funny and unusual and good timing in a way, because he helped me and I helped him.
MMM: Naomi, how much did you actually know about Valerie’s story before you got called, and what were you thinking when you got to the end of the script?
WATTS: I was familiar with the story and was not following it as avidly as I wished I had at the time had I known this was going to be going on. But I was interested in it, and then it sort of just went away after the Libby trial. The next thing was getting that email from Jez Butterworth, who’s an old friend, and I said, “Listen, I just had a baby, I don’t think I’m going to read a script for a while,” and he went “Well, this is about Valerie Plame Wilson and Joe and their story. Just read the first 10 pages.” Of course he was very smart, as he always is, because you couldn’t just read 10 pages of the script. It all came back to me but there was obviously a lot more information that I discovered, and again, didn’t know quite the level of responsibility in her position. Then I read her book, which the script is based on, and went into more research, and then meeting her. So I learned a lot kind of on the job, basically. But I did know the story before I got closer.
MMM: Naomi, can you talk about meeting her for the first time and what surprised you about her? And also what was this boot camp, especially after just having a baby?
WATTS: Well meeting her it took a while, because as I said, I’d just had the baby. We worked out that Santa Fe and New York door-to-door travel was 12 hours and it wasn’t going to be an easy thing. I would have liked to be able to do what Sean did and just show up and hang out for a couple of days. Be inside their home and see how things functioned, but it just didn’t happen. But what was funny, and I realized I’m really talking to a spy when she said, “Well okay. How about we meet halfway? Let’s meet at Chicago airport.” I’m who meets at an airport? Oh, a spy does. But even that became hard to do, and eventually she came to New York and we had dinner. And again, like I said before, you don’t get her all at once, so it takes time, and I’m kind of like that too. I like to read a person before I give myself away or something; I don’t know. She’s obviously someone who that’s her training. So we just were careful and easy with each other and we slowly went into it, and then finally it was like crunch time and I just presented her with a list of very confronting and personal questions. All the facts were available but really what I wanted to get into was her mindset and her psyche and how she dealt with this. And yeah, how she was almost kind of just unbelievably consistent and strong. I wanted to learn about who that person was and how she managed to function in every part of her life. Oh yeah the training. That was intense
MMM: Did Valerie speak about how she felt about having to leave her agents out there and not being able to protect them and their families?
WATTS: Well, yeah. This is what the film is about. I think it’s very strange how her life evolved. She never expected to be in the position of exposing her life story and having it turn up into a film. She loved her job, she loved what she did, and would have that back in a second if she could. Obviously deeply involved with a number of different families, assets, whatever, that she was emotionally attached to. So it was really hard for her. This is why it felt like such a huge betrayal, and going into her job as a covert agent she expected, or there’s risk of being exposed by another government, but to have it done to you by your own is such an injustice.
MMM: As you know, Valerie lived a double life. As an actress you sort of have a double life as well – your home life and your public persona. What do your kids think of what Mom and Dad do for a living? Do they understand?
WATTS: Well her kids were very young at the time.
MMM: Oh no, your kids.
WATTS: Oh. They don’t really understand it yet. There have been times when they see a photo or a flash of us on tv or something and they’ll go “Oh! Mommy!” or “Daddy!” And then we try to explain Daddy’s got to go to work or Mommy’s got to go to work now. “But I want to come!” They can come to the set and they see you. They think our work is in a trailer; that’s our office. And then actually I’m shooting a film right now called “The Impossible,” which is another true story that we all know of based on the tsunami. This one was quite difficult then coming to work for the first time because they saw Mommy in quite a bad condition. So I had to explain that these owies were just pretend, and it took a little while. We prepped it days in advance and then showed them how you can put a little bit of blood on and then you can rub it off, and now they like it too.
FAIR GAME is now playing in select theaters nationwide.
Tags: 21 Grams, Doug Liman, Fair Game, Joe Wilson, King Kong, Liev Schrieber, Mulholland Drive, naomi watts, oscar, Sean Penn, The Ring, Valerie Plame Wilson
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James Gandolfini and Kristen Stewart Talk Welcome to the Rileys
James Gandolfini has always played the role of the tough guy.
While he attended Rutgers University, he worked as a bouncer at an off-campus bar. His first noteworthy acting gig was playing rebellious longshoreman Terry Malloy in a 1992 Broadway production of On the Waterfront—a role made famous by Marlon Brando, who of course has his own mob connections. Then, Gandolfini’s film career began with a series of brutish, enforcer-type roles—most notably that of Virgil, a mob hitman who delivers the mother of all beatdowns on Patricia Arquette’s Alabama Worley, in True Romance. Of course, he is best known for his iconic portrayal of Jersey Mafia boss-cum-family man Tony Soprano in the HBO series, The Sopranos.
Post-Sopranos, Gandolfini has been showing off his sensitive side—as the callow Mayor of New York City in The Taking of Pelham 123, and providing the voice of the impulsive, thin-skinned Wild Thing Carol in Where the Wild Things Are.
Kristen Stewart has become a Hollywood star thanks to the role of Bella Swan—a paragon of chastity and virtue, and the virgin love of vampire Edward Cullen in the film adaptations of author Stephenie Meyer’s abstinence-promoting Twilight series. Her other notable performances include a seizure-suffering diabetic in Panic Room, a captivating teenage musician in Into the Wild, and an alienated adolescent in Adventureland. And recently, she starred as venom-spitting guitarist Joan Jett in The Runaways.
Welcome to the Rileys is a departure for both Gandolfini and Stewart. The film concerns a downtrodden New Orleans couple, Doug (James Gandolfini) and Lois Riley (Melissa Leo), who take in a 16-year-old stripper, Mallory (Kristen Stewart), in an effort to alter the destructive path she’s on. The film is the sophomore feature of director Jake Scott, the son of Ridley Scott (Alien) and nephew of Tony Scott (True Romance).
MMM attended the New York City press conference for Welcome to the Rileys where Gandolfini and Stewart chatted about playing against type.
MANHATTAN MOVIE MAGAZINE: James, how did you figure out the back-story? Your Southern accent from Indianapolis was a little surprising.
JAMES GANDOLFINI: Yeah, to me too.
MMM: Is this guy going through a classic midlife crisis?
GANDOLFINI: Actually, I’ve reached an age where you look back and you question how did I get here and with me it’s mostly good, with him it’s not what I expected, it’s not what the man expected. He has to go back in his mind and go somewhere and try to figure out what to do now. I think a lot of people do that; they just can’t really go anywhere or just disappear and I think he just takes the opportunity to try to figure things out.
MMM: What surprised you the most about making this film?
GANDOLFINI: How kind and smart and special to the actors [Jake Scott] was. How different his set was from his uncle and his father. I never worked for his father. How smart [Kristen] was. I don’t mean that in a bad way, I mean for a young girl. Really, for a young woman how together and how smart and how she’s doing this all for the right reasons and how well we got along and how wonderful it was. I had a great time with her and I don’t necessarily think acting is fun, but I had a really good experience on this.
MMM: Kristen, those bruises were makeup, right?
KRISTEN STEWART: Yeah, they were. I got the bruises initially in rehearsal. I learned how to pole dance, you never really see it in the movie – you do for a second, it’s like in silhouette in the background – but it really hurts and you don’t realize that, of course, it’s going to show. There were so many that I wasn’t sure do you keep all of them or is that too much? I think what surprised me most was the fact that I was so unaware of the fact that I was walking down the street with my robe open and wearing fishnets and not caring at all. I had no inhibitions. I wasn’t scared and I’d known about this for a while before it got up and running and I’m really glad that it took a while to do so because I think that I was old enough to play the part as opposed to not ready. I think I would have shied away from too much. So it was shocking to find myself in situations like that and being completely fine with them.
MMM: How old were you?
STEWART: 18.
MMM: Kristin, how’d you prepare for the role?
STEWART: I went to my first strip club with Jake and upon entering the guy was like, “You’ll have to come back later if you want a job.” [Laughs] They must have thought that Jake was my pimp. Jake was also really on me about that as well, you’ve got to do some work before you’re going to be able to do this. He gave me a couple books that really helped. “Raised by Wolves” was the one that really got me like where you have really candid stories. This guy endeared himself to this group of runaway kids in Hollywood and they really just let it all out. Then just pole dancing and stuff like that, but basically we didn’t have that much time and it was really comforting to know that it validated me, it made me feel like I’ve done enough to do the part, but at the same time everything was in the script so once we started shooting luckily I felt like I didn’t have to add a thing. It was just doing it justice. It wasn’t like I had to add real elements; it was already there.
MMM: You all have very different ways of preparing for roles and didn’t do a lot of rehearsal, so how did you establish that you were a married couple?
GANDOLFINI: I like [Melissa Leo]. We just did it very professional and also she’s pretty good looking, which helps. It’s in the work. [Leo is from New York] Honestly that stuff helps; it just gives you shorthand. I enjoyed it. I just want to say something about the places [Jake] picked in New Orleans. It’s an incredible city for its lack of rules, it’s lack of regulation and lack of everything being on top of you and I think that’s why [Kristen] can walk down the street dressed as [she was] and it seemed easy. I remember the strip club that you picked and you’re walking up the steps of the strip club and there’s a circular step and there was hairs hanging off the bottom of the stairs.
STEWART: Like a lot!
GANDOLFINI: Like people’s hairs have fallen off and they stepped on it and you could see it these steps hadn’t been cleaned for hundreds of years and just the whole feel of it really, really helped. He didn’t pick places and dirty them up; we just went to the places so that helped a lot.
MMM: When you’re working on a film this small with just three of you, there’s a sense of being a surrogate family on the set. So what kind of family did develop during the making of this film?
GANDOLFINI: I think that’s any small film you do and we’re all trying to do the same thing. I think you’re not out hanging out every night, you’re working 14 hours, 15 hours. I guess there’s a sense of family; you’re doing all this stuff together and we had a few evenings together, which were fun.
MMM: Kristen, do you have a process for coming out of a role, especially going from playing Bella in “Twilight” to Mallory and back to shooting “New Moon?”
STEWART: No, the few things I’ve done in between the “Twilight” movies have just coincidently been very different, but I haven’t been like, “I’m going to shock everybody right now and just do this because it’s totally different.” It’s always been totally informed. Something speaks to you and you need to do it and that’s what it is. Also, I’m really lucky to have my cast on the series. You always think that it’s going to be hard to get back there, but it’s not because we’ve all wanted to tell the story for so long and it’s finally going to come to fruition and it always just sort of falls out luckily.
MMM: Kristen, how hard was it to really let go of Mallory? Do you still have her in you in a way?
STEWART: You probably have that with everything. It’s not just parts you play, it’s sort of every experience you have in life shapes you and makes you who you are and when some of the biggest, most monumental experiences have been working on films and playing parts, and this one more so than, I don’t want to compare them, but really more than normal, I think it’s had an effect on me.
MMM: Kristen, your character is in many ways a mystery. What did you imagine was her backstory and why is she such an angry person?
STEWART: Obviously this was something that was really important to us and Jake had a few ideas about what those details were and they weren’t so defined to be honest, but it was just enough. It’s weird to talk about. One of the first things that he told me when we met on the movie was that some of the stories, and I don’t know if this will sound bad, but a lot of these girls’ stories are really typical. A few things add up to being able to do something like that as a job and we sort of inserted those little bits, a few little details. I know where she’s from; I know that she’s not lying when she says to Doug where she’s from and I know that would never come across in the movie, but little things like that. But to go into it would be really weird.
MMM: How much does your character’s wardrobe effect how you portray her?
STEWART: It helps. I guess it seems like the most obvious thing, if I was wearing …
GANDOLFINI: If you were naked.
STEWART: [Laughs] Anyway, I think what was cool about the costume was that you think stripper – I don’t really think a whole lot when I think stripper, to be honest. A lot of people have certain ideas about how they must be and I really didn’t have any, but I always sort of imagined that they’d be kind of sexy at least or something because that’s sort of their job. On the contrary, you’re exposed so often that you’re entrenched the entire time. Literally, imagine never wanting to take off a trench coat, but living in New Orleans and it’s hot and so that was interesting. And also the stuff was really dirty and everything helps like makeup, sets obviously, anything to make you feel more like you’re there.
MMM: Can you talk a little about filming in New Orleans and what you missed the most about your respective hometowns?
STEWART: I’m not being deadly serious about this, but I tend to really offend people that are in my life when I go and especially on this one because it was the first time I’d ever been alone on a movie and I loved stomping around the city like it was mine and that’s totally what Mallory was supposed to do, so I didn’t really miss too much. I was having a great time.
GANDOLFINI: I missed my son and my wife as we say and New York food because I had heartburn for six weeks. It’s great food, but, man, you know?
WELCOME TO THE RILEYS is now playing in select theaters.
NYFF ’10: Clint Eastwood & Matt Damon Talk Hereafter
If it’s living – or not – he’ll shoot it.
Yes, octogenarian actor-cum-filmmaker Clint Eastwood can do it all. He’s been nominated for a whopping ten Academy Awards and won four – Best Picture/Director for Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby. He’s directed 32 feature films and tackled westerns, wars, romance, cops and robbers, and outer space. He won the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award Oscar – a lifetime achievement award – in 1994, and was nominated for seven of those Oscars after.
It’s his late-career creative renaissance that is particularly impressive, since it’s such an anomaly in Hollywood. Whereas other great directors seem to drop off as they get older (see: Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen, Jean-Luc Godard) Eastwood is in his prime.
In the 2000s, he’s directed the brilliant drama Mystic River; the heartbreaking character study Million Dollar Baby; a pair of impressive war films – Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima, covering WWII’s Battle of Iwo Jima from both the American and Japanese perspectives; the tale of a crabby old kook who comes to terms with his closed-mindedness in the race-relations drama Gran Torino; and, most recently, the Nelson Mandela/Apartheid-themed drama, Invictus. That film introduced Eastwood to Matt Damon, whose role as South African rugby star François Pienaar earned the actor his second Oscar nomination for acting, and first, surprisingly, since 1998’s Good Will Hunting.
One of the only genres Eastwood hasn’t tackled is the supernatural thriller—enter Hereafter, Eastwood’s latest film. In the vein of The Sixth Sense, the film is centered on three people – a factory worker who can communicate with the dead (Matt Damon), a French journalist who survives a tsunami (Cécile De France), and a London boy (twins Frankie and George McLaren) who loses his twin brother in an accident – and how the people are affected by death in different ways.
MMM attended the New York Film Festival press conference for Hereafter where director Clint Eastwood and star Matt Damon dished on aging in Hollywood, an Affleck/Damon reunion, their own brushes with the supernatural, and more.
MANHATTAN MOVIE MAGAZINE: Clint, how did this project come together?
CLINT EASTWOOD: Let’s see. Where were we? Steven Spielberg called me one day and said, “I have script I’d love to send over to you,” and I said, “Fine, send it over.” He and I have worked together on a few other projects, and I read it and I liked it. So I just called him back and I said, “I’ll do it.” I didn’t realize I was last on the list, however, I said,“Yeah, I’ll do it.” So he was going through a minor divorce there with Paramount Pictures or something, so it became a little confusing as to where this would have its life, but I have a relationship with Warners so I said, “Well let me take it to Warners.” Warners liked it and so there we were. I liked the script immediately. There were a few little ideas I had but I just put those in the back of my head. I thought it was good the way it was; it didn’t need rewrites. I haven’t shot a picture with any blue pages in it in a long time; you either like them or you don’t. But I liked this one. Most religions seem to ponder the afterlife but I thought this was interesting because it wasn’t really a religious project. It had a spirituality about it but it was not necessarily tied in with any particular, organized thought. I think everybody, whether you believe in the afterlife or the chance of a near-death experience and you come back and you see some semblance of it, whether that has happened or not I don’t know, but certainly I think everyone’s thought about it at some point or another in time. And it’s a fantasy that if there is anything out there like that it would be just terrific, but that remains to be seen.
MMM: Could I ask you to talk a little bit about the conception and creation of the tsunami sequence?
EASTWOOD: Let me just regress a little bit. I thought the unusual aspect of the script was taking actual events and placing them into a fictional story. And so the tsunami of four years ago out in the Pacific was one, and then the London bombings of course. I thought that was a unique thing to do. But the tsunami was very difficult to do. I kept having fantasies of huge hoses and thousands of gallons of water running down the streets and what have you, and I figured out how to do that. I figured that would be prohibitive; where would we do that? In the old days I suppose you would have done that on the set and you would have done little set pieces and turned a lot of water loose. But with the element now of computer generated elements you could go ahead and do it, even though water is probably the most difficult thing to do in a CGI basis. I have a fellow named Michel Owens who has worked with me on “Letters from Iwo Jima,” “Flags of Our Fathers,” and back as far as “Space Cowboys,” so he kept very much hip on the technology as it has been improving over the years. We went through it and figured out what shots we would need to do live and then we did it. But it took a lot of different places. Cécile was in a tank in London for nine hours without getting out too much, and she had to have a skin replacement afterwards. But then we went to Maui and shot in the ocean and on the streets of Lahaina. We had to preplan it in order to piece all the elements together with the connective shots and what have you. If you don’t preplan CGI it’s the most expensive thing in the world, so you have to plan every single shot and that’s normally not the way I shoot, but in this thing it worked out rather well. We hired a company named Scanline and they did a terrific job.
MMM: You’ve really focused on the challenge of remaining relevant as one gets older. Do you have any comments on the theme that defines your later period of films?
EASTWOOD: What was the old John Ford thing; ask him a long question and he went “Cut.”
MMM: There’s a really interesting theme in your films about remaining relevant as one gets older in any profession, in things like “True Crime,” and “Absolute Power,” and as far back as “Unforgiven” really is where it starts I think. It’s just a really interesting theme that runs through your films and I was just wondering if you have any comment.
EASTWOOD: I like to think there are different themes in every film. I don’t know if there’s an ongoing theme. Is that what you’re suggesting?
MMM: There seems to be. Even as far as “Letters from Iwo Jima” there’s a real sense of people struggling for control and respect as they get older, and it’s not always an easy battle.
EASTWOOD: You know, it’s very subjective. That’s a very difficult one for me to answer. I think it would be easier for someone else to evaluate than it would be for myself because I don’t think of it in that way. Everything to me is spontaneous. “Unforgiven” is probably an example of a script where I like it right away but I said, “This is great but I’d like to do this when I’m older.” So I stuck it in the drawer for 10 years and then took it out. Other projects just come to me. “Perfect World,” or whatever, they just sort of fall. And I have no real rhyme or reason; I wish I could give you some sort of pseudo-intellectual thing that would be great, and maybe if this was a French cinema class I’d have to fake something. But I’m not really the person to ask on that. If I start evaluating myself I would be afraid that I would not be able to think intelligently about every project and the various meaning thereof.
MATT DAMON: I actually asked a similar question of him on “Invictus,” but it was about directors as they got older why was it that they historically seem to fall off? I said what is that? I remember asking him because he’s obviously completely avoided that. And he thought about it for a good 10 seconds and then just said, “I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense to me.” Because it never did to me either because presumably the older we get, the wiser we get, the more knowledge you have about filmmaking, the more different types of films you’ve made. That whole CGI thing, he kind of just plowed into it with utter confidence and that sequence is incredible. And so it is kind of mystifying to me that historically the great directors, not all of them, but many of them, kind of fell off as they got older. And it never really made sense to me so I asked that question of him.
EASTWOOD: I was always sort of shocked. I knew Frank Capra a little bit and I spent some time with him at June Lakes, where he lived in the summertime. He was always so bright I always figured why isn’t this guy still working? And I also knew Billy Wilder somewhat and he had actually stopped working in his 60s, and I thought god, that’s amazing. Here’s a guy who is bright and lived well into his 90s and didn’t work. I never could figure that. I figured your best years should be at a point when you’ve absorbed all this knowledge. Now, maybe they just didn’t keep up with the times, or they picked material that didn’t work and they have a few pictures that don’t do so well. People are very fickle, Hollywood is very fickle, and they kind of move on. There’s a Portuguese director [Manoel de Oliveira] who is still making films at over a hundred years old, and I plan to do the same thing.
MMM: Could you please talk about the two young brothers, who I feel are kind of the heart of the film, and directing them through scenes of such sadness and getting such wonderful performances out of them?
DAMON: Well he cast them, and I remember talking to him during that process. I think we were pretty resigned to the reality that we’d have probably non-actors in those roles, because it’s an 11 or 12-year-old kid you’re looking for, so you’re not going to find a Julliard graduate. And Clint just loved their faces. I remember talking to him and he said, “I think these faces of these boys are really just terrific,” and they seemed to be from the same neighborhood that these kids are actually from. They went and shot the first two stories without me, so I would get reports about how the boys were doing. But obviously the movie comes down to that scene in the hotel room, and there’s a lot made of how few takes Clint does, but he does the number of takes that are required. We both went into that day going we’re really going to have to get this from these guys. And one really smart thing that Clint did was he interchanged the twins. Even if he was only going to use one of them he let them both do the scenes. So I think that took a lot of pressure off both the boys. And it also for that scene allowed us to play them off one another. I would take one of them aside and get all of this information, like did his brother have a girlfriend or whose farts were the stinkiest, things that they would think were funny. And then when the camera was on them Clint and I would start asking them and revealing these things so that we got really real reactions from them. Little tricks like that just to help them, because movie sets can get tense and people can get nervous pretty easily. Never on his sets, but that’s all by design. And so he kind of created an environment where they wouldn’t know that they really shot a movie. I think they had a really good time and they’ll probably be surprised when they see the movie.
EASTWOOD: The interesting thing with child actors is kids are natural actors. They’re wonderful actors and most kids are acting all the time. They’re out in the yard playing and they’re imagining things happening and they can get very vivid. But unfortunately, once they’ve been organized into acting and you get a stage mother sitting there saying, “No, do it this way.” And I’ve watched many times over the years in other films that I’ve done where a director will try to undo a lot of bad habits that had been instilled. And so when I looked at people for this picture, young kids, I picked the two that were the least experienced. In fact, they had no experience; they’d never been in film before. They said they’d been in some grammar school plays but I doubted that. But they had the faces and I’m one of those guys who believes if you cast a film correctly, and that’s with professionals or with amateurs, you’re probably 80 percent there. If you cast a film incorrectly then you’re going to be fighting an uphill battle. But I just figured I could pull things out of them without them knowing it better than trying to get somebody organized. And we auditioned about three or four sets of identical twins. They looked great but there was a lot of acting going on, and so I said these guys have the right face, they’re from the right neighborhood, they had certain elements that these kids needed to have built into their system, so they didn’t have to get in there and act like something else that they weren’t.
MMM: How did the film affect you? It had to raise questions in your mind or you had to feel something that you responded to because anyone in the audience has to react in one way or another.
EASTWOOD: Yeah, it raises a lot of questions, but that’s where it ends. The questions are here and you pose the questions and it’s up to the audience to meet you halfway and think about it in terms of their own lives and what their thoughts are or what experiences they might have had. There may be some near-death experiences out there and it would be interesting to see what the answers were, but they’re going to have to come up with those answers. As far as the technical thing, like doing the tsunami, I took all the imagery footage that had been shot on that particular tsunami when it was happening, we took that and used that as our influences to get going. But everything else has got to be in the imagination of the performer. Cécile talked to anchor people in French too, or what have you. Everybody has their way of preparing and I just allow everybody to do that on their own, and then if something isn’t working it’s another thing. But if you have people that do that inner research they bring that to the table. So I’m a firm believer in research, but I’m also a firm believer in utilizing the instincts that are within your soul or your body or in your stomach or wherever they reside.
DAMON: It was a terrific script, too. It was just a terrific script. It was really tight. When anybody asked me about it I said, “It’s just a really tight script.” It read like a play in a sense where sometimes when you do a play you don’t have to do anything, you explore the material and every answer you need is there. I’m somebody who does a lot of research normally on my own and I didn’t feel, for one, as Peter said, I didn’t really want to go down the rabbit hole. If somebody was recommended to me as like this guy really is fantastic, then I would have gone and spoken to him, but nobody like that came up and it was really all on the page in terms of getting ready. I had to do some forklift training; that was about it.
MMM: Have any of you experienced an otherworldly experience that you could talk about?
EASTWOOD: Everybody’s had 
some kind of a…I remember when I was very young my dad was taking me into the surf on his shoulders and I fell off. I can still remember today, even though I was probably four or five years old, I can still remember the color of the water and everything as I was being washed around in the surf before I popped to the surface again. But at that age you don’t think too much, I mean you’re just kind of going…well you hadn’t learned any obscenities yet but a lot of them were running through your mind. And then years later, when I was 21 years old I was in a plane – we ditched a plane off the coast of Northern California in the wintertime. And I must say that as I was going into shore I kept thinking about should I be thinking about my demise, but all I was thinking about was as I saw lights in the far distance I said, “Somebody’s in there having a beer and sitting next to a fireplace and I just want to be in there. So I’m going to make it.” And that was the determination, but there was no sense of fate out there or anything like that. I don’t think you get a chance to think that much. When you get that much of a chance to think you’re usually going to be okay.
MMM: Matt, I’ve heard it’s been reported that you’re going to reunite with Ben Affleck on a movie and that you’re going to be directing it. I wonder if there was a part for Clint Eastwood?
DAMON: What movie is this? That would be a project I’d love to do.
MMM: So it’s not true?
DAMON: No, I think he and Casey were going to write this movie and I guess he was quoted recently as saying he’d love to have me direct it, but there’s no script yet.
MMM: Clint, in terms of any films that you’ve directed what was the hardest during production and what was the easiest, and why?
EASTWOOD: I don’t know. I was thinking back on doing “A Perfect World” years ago, where I had a kid actor [T.J. Lowther] and he had some experience, but he was a kid that had great body English and everything, but kids are like animals; they’re good for one take and then their attention span, they kind of go off into another little journey in their head. But then I had professional actors working with them and they wanted to rehearse and they wanted to be organized or feel in a comfort zone, so that became a big dilemma of how to do that. So I had to cover the kid mostly by himself at the beginning or at least favored the kid, because I knew that eventually, when we got around to other coverage of the professional actor the kid was going to be bored with it all. So you have to make adjustments on every project. In this case it was no problem, and Cécile does speak English well so it was no problem. She knows French very well, too. And Matt?
DAMON: Some English.
EASTWOOD: It all just comes together. It’s amazing that any of it ever comes together; I guess that’s why I’m still doing it. I’m always amazed that this is actually kind of working. And then of course, as I’ve told Matt many times, let’s not think too much about this. Let’s just go and roar with it.
MMM: What’s the easiest film you’ve ever done that you’ve directed?
EASTWOOD: This one. Except some of the technical stuff, but it was easy because the people were all great. It was the best ensemble I’ve worked with.
MMM: When I saw the trailer I was a little disappointed that we saw the tsunami in the trailer. Did you fight the studio on that?
EASTWOOD: Well I don’t know if I want to go too far into the explanation of what it’s about and what they’ll see, but the trailer, you bring up an interesting point. Most of the time you’re fighting the studio a little bit because they want to tell the whole story in a matter of 30 seconds, and so they try to put a little bit of everything in there so you end up with a lot of nothing, really. They made some trailers that had accentuated the story and then some that accentuated the tsunami. The problem with accentuating the tsunami is all of a sudden it becomes an action movie and everybody goes there with the expectation that maybe they’re going to see two hours of flooding, and that may not be the case so much. But if you go into the stuff with the kids and you go into a lot of detail then they’ll think maybe this is a story that doesn’t have as much action-adventure.
DAMON: It’s a tricky story to sell.
EASTWOOD: Yeah, it’s a tricky story because this particular screenplay you have to flesh out all the characters and it’s tough to do. It’s tough to market a film like this.
MMM: Would you have preferred it without the wave in the trailer?
DAMON: Well any marketing department I think is always going to want to try and show the scope, right? And it’s an incredible sequence. I understand obviously you want people to be totally surprised by it, but at the end of the day they’re in that situation where they want people to come see the movie too. I remember with “The Informant!” I kind of jokingly went on David Letterman and intercut scenes from “Transformers” into the trailer to try and get people to go. Just to say, “Yeah, it’s about a whistle blower, but a lot of shit blows up too.”
EASTWOOD: Yeah I would have preferred to not show the tsunami and have it just sprung on everybody, but that’s just not the practicalities of life. You do want people to come in and see it, and hopefully they’ll enjoy it.
MMM: Have you ever gone into a project and been concerned how it would be received?
EASTWOOD: No, you try to put it on the way you perceived it when you first read it yourself, and so you get your own opinions and go with it.
DAMON: He said something interesting to me about being a director. He said, “I’m a tour guide, and I know why I’m giving the tour and you’re invited to get off the tour if you want. I’ll invite you on the next one but I’m making the tour for me.”
HEREAFTER is now playing in theaters nationwide.
Helen Mirren is RED
Helen Mirren – Dame Helen Mirren to you, punk – is having fun.
This year alone, she’s played the madam of a Nevada brothel who romances a hulking heavyweight boxer in her director husband Taylor Hackford’s (Ray) film Love Ranch, voiced a CGI owl in the animated film Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, and, in her latest film, the action-comedy RED, she plays a retired wetwork agent-cum-homemaker. If that’s not enough, you can also catch her later this year as sorceress Prospera in Julie Taymor’s film adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and as a retired Mossad agent in The Debt, reuniting Mirren with her Prime Suspect director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love). Oh, and lest we forget: nude magazine cover model.
That’s a hell of a lot of work for an actress who, at 65, seems to only be getting (and looking) better with age.
Born Ilyena Vasilievna Mironov, Mirren first made a name for herself in the British theatre, while also starring in an eclectic array of films like Caligula, The Long Good Friday, The Madness of King George, and, oddly enough, the MTV aud-targeting black comedy Teaching Mrs. Tingle, opposite Katie Holmes. British audiences, however, best know her as take-no-shit Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison in the celebrated UK TV drama Prime Suspect.
But it wasn’t until the 2000s that Mirren became a bona fide superstar. She was nominated for her second Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in Robert Altman’s parlor drama Gosford Park, and starred in the left-field comedy hit Calendar Girls. In 2006, Mirren won the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen, and was nominated for another Best Actress Oscar as the wife of Count Leo Tolstoy in 2009’s The Last Station.
RED – an acronym for “retired, extremely dangerous” – is Mirren’s latest. In the film, she plays a member of a group of retired government agents who suddenly find themselves marked for termination. Joining Mirren are Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, and John Malkovich.
MMM attended Mirren’s press conference in New York where she talked about shooting guns, her Martha Stewart inspiration, getting naked, and her massive crush on co-star Bruce Willis.
MANHATTAN MOVIE MAGAZINE: This movie is a lot of fun for people. How did you approach playing this woman? Was it with a sense of comedy behind her furs and her wonderful hairdo and her glamour?
HELEN MIRREN: No, I approached it very seriously, like I do everything really. It’s always great to find someone that you can pin your character on. Obviously in The Queen it was very easy to find the person to pin the character on; she’s called Queen Elizabeth. But here I was kind of looking for who this woman might be and then I had this flash of inspiration and Martha Stewart came into my mind, and I thought that’s who it is, Martha Stewart. So from that point on I based everything on Martha Stewart. The hair was Martha Stewart’s hair – the color even and the cut. The clothes were Martha Stewart. Because I thought Martha Stewart combines this perfect combination of sweetness and kindness and gentleness and unbelievable efficiency with this kind of laser like ability to concentrate and get the job done. And I thought that was the perfect thing for Victoria. So I had a picture of Martha up in my trailer in the makeup room, so everyday I could look at her and be inspired. That was just my secret story. That’s who I got inspiration from. Obviously, I didn’t try and imitate her or impersonate her, that wasn’t the point. It was getting inside of Martha.
MMM: I just recently saw The Tempest. Just before that I saw Savage Messiah, and then the ranch movie, and I think what a long, strange journey you’ve been through. What an amazingly varied number of characters. How do you make the decision to do a movie like this coming from having done The Tempest and Love Ranch?
MIRREN: I did this before I did The Tempest, I think. I can’t remember now; that’s terrible. No, maybe it was the other way around. The whole idea is to do something different from what you’ve just done. The Queen was an incredible experience for me in terms of the attention the film brought, but that sort of attention kind of sticks and I was getting a bit sick of people saying, “Oh you’re so evil. You play all these queens.” Actually, I don’t play queens; I play lots of different things. For a long time before that I was a police detective and then I transmogrified into the queen, and you just want to always try and push the last thing out of people’s minds so they can look at you with an open mind, basically.
MMM: How long ago was it since you saw Savage Messiah?
MIRREN: I don’t think I’ve ever seen Savage Messiah, actually. The day I had to do that nude scene – I have this nude scene and I have to walk completely bollock naked, as we say in England, down a flight of stairs. And it was early day and all that sort of thing and I was so mortified and embarrassed. I remember that morning looking out of my trailer, a little funky little caravan thing, and wondering if I threw myself off of the top step of the trailer if I could manage to break my leg and not have to shoot the scene. I was just so mortified and unhappy about it. So I don’t think I ever saw it, actually.
MMM: Are there similarities between the Teaching Mrs. Tingle character and your character in RED?
MIRREN: No, no, no. Mrs. Tingle was an unhappy person. Victoria’s not an unhappy person. I wanted her to be charming and nice and Martha Stewart-ish, but a charming character. Mrs. Tingle is absolutely not charming at all. It’s funny, there’s a segment of the population who usually seem to be working in the Gap, or for a while, they’ve moved on now, but who only knew me from “Mrs. Tingle.” They’d never seen any of my other work but they had seen “Mrs. Tingle,” and they were usually about 17 or 16 years old. And I’d go into the Gap and I’d be buying my t-shirt and they’d look up and they’d go “Oh my god! It’s Mrs. Tingle!” so horrified. Luckily, they’ve moved on and they’re much older now.
MMM: What were some of your favorite costumes in RED?
MIRREN: Oh I loved my white dress. My white dress was great. That was made for me and the costume designer made that and designed it and I thought she did a beautiful job. It was a brilliant dress because it was so comfortable and yet it looked so chic and lovely, and it worked for the scenes and everything. It was just like the perfect dress. I loved that dress. And I did actually rather like my snow camouflage thing as well; that was kind of cool. I didn’t realize such a thing existed in the world, snow camouflage, but apparently it does.
MMM: How was it doing action scenes?
MIRREN: Oh fun. It’s fun. It’s always great to do action scenes. They’re called action scenes because they do the acting for you. You don’t have to act in action scenes; the action does it all for you and it’s great. And I was very lucky; a lot of my action scenes were with John Malkovich, and he was just so good at that gun stuff. He was just brilliant. John, you wouldn’t believe it would you? But he was great. The difficult thing I found was not sticking my tongue out when I was shooting my gun.
MMM: Which gun was most fun?
MIRREN: I don’t like to ever say a gun is fun, but guns can be fun in the sense of target practice. Trying to hit a target carefully is interesting and I guess on that level I like the sniper gun the best. I hate to hear myself even saying that, but it’s true. The guns I found the most horrifying are these small machine guns. They’re not funny; they’re terrible, because you can cause such havoc. I could literally wipe out a whole room of people if I had one here. And I happen to have one here! [Laughs] That would be a headline, wouldn’t it? But anyway, awful, these little hand machine guns. As far as I understand, you can buy them here in gun shows; it’s dreadful. But anyway, the whole idea of targeting, careful target practice, that is interesting to me.
MMM: Is there a vision that you have of when you’re retired?
MIRREN: I don’t know. You don’t know that until it happens, I guess. I mean, as night follows day, inevitably it will happen, but I have no idea. I think we all have a dream of what it would be like not to work and grow heirloom tomatoes, and I do have that dream, it would be lovely. I do love gardening and all of that, but I do love my work. But mostly I love the people that I get to work with. In my job and all the jobs related to my job, including your jobs, you get to constantly meet and work with and be involved with clever, imaginative people who constantly surprise you and push you forward and inspire you. So I think I would miss that a lot if I didn’t work anymore. I’d miss the people that I get to meet and work with, including the press. All the elements of it really.
MMM: I read in “Bust” magazine that you said that men like to play with guns because firing one off is akin to ejaculation. What is the sexiness for women or for you?
MIRREN: Probably the same thing. Probably penis envy.
MMM: You seem to be one of these people who are fearless. What scares you today? Would it scare you to walk naked down the stairs?
MIRREN: Oh yes, I wouldn’t like to do that today. I think it’s worse when you’re young, funnily enough, because you’re more of a sex object, and then you become an object of horror or something. No, it’s never comfortable. The best thing would be if all the crew took their clothes of too and then you’d feel fine. But it’s never comfortable to be the only one without clothes on for men or women. I’ll tell you what scares me is plastic; plastic bags and plastic bottles. Why does my water have to come in a bloody plastic bottle? The landfill and the ocean; I don’t know, I’m just terrified with the proliferation of plastic.
MMM: Your background is Russian.
MIRREN: Yes, well half Russian. My dad’s Russian, my mother’s English. I always say my bottom half is Russian.
MMM: Often in films you see Russians depicted as villains.
MIRREN: Yes. And Brits. Usually Brits more than Russians, actually. The Brits are the baddies 
in American movies mostly. It’s very nice that I’m not playing a baddie in this one. It’s very interesting the way film culture doesn’t lead the way the world thinks, it tends to follow the way the world thinks. I did a film called 2010 in which I played a Russian. Actually, I wasn’t a baddie; I was a goodie. I remember having an argument with the costume designer because she was an American woman and she said, “She’s Russian, she would have horrible, big, ugly clothes.” No she wouldn’t. She’s a Russian astronaut; Russian astronauts have an incredibly high level. “Ah, but we can’t show that.” Russians had to be shown to be sort of funky and behind the times, and in particular, usually fat and ugly. That was the other thing: all Russians were fat and ugly. There were no beautiful Russians in the times of Communism as far as the Americans were concerned. And of course suddenly all of these unbelievably gorgeous Russian models are coming out of Russia. Where were they? It’s interesting how without really realizing it we’re constantly being fed imagery. I think the Brits are a nice, convenient target to make for baddies because you can’t be accused of racism or religious bigotry by making the Brits the baddies. America has a strange love-hate relationship with the Brits in general.
MMM: Is there an action franchise or an action film star or an action director that you would like to be a part of or work with in the future?
MIRREN: Good question. I’m too ignorant to really answer it properly. I guess John Woo. Tarantino is an incredible action director. It’s so sad that he lost his editor just very recently because his films are so brilliantly edited, and of course a director is the person who edits as well as the editor. But obviously that was an incredible marriage of minds, those two people. Very, very, very sad that he’s lost her and the movie world has lost her. But anyway, I would say John Woo or Quentin Tarantino.
MMM: Where does your passion for acting come from?
MIRREN: I wonder. I don’t know. It started early in my life. Very early. I was about 13 or 14. Originally it came through Shakespeare and I kind of discovered Shakespeare when I was about 13 or 14. Shakespeare was a channel but the thing I still love about my job is to be able to find yourself in a different world, whether it’s in the theater or on film. In each thing it comes at you in a different way. In film it’s more visceral, you can literally be in Camelot, I can literally be a sniper outside of a house in the snow, I can literally be that person. And it’s just so exciting to find yourself in these wonderful, fantastical, sometimes funny, sometimes serious, but amazing worlds, and I love that side of my job. I loved it in The Last Station I was suddenly in Russia, in the Russia of my grandparents’ photographs. I literally was suddenly in that world and that’s fantastic. When it was Shakespeare and I discovered the world of “Hamlet,” so different form my little post-war life in a dormant town in England, to go into these wonderful imaginary worlds was just so fantastic, and that’s what I love the most still.
MMM: I read that one of the reasons you wanted to do RED was that you had a chance to work with Bruce Willis and you actually had a bit of a crush on him. Could you elaborate on that?
MIRREN: Well it doesn’t really need elaborating on it, it’s all true. I do have a crush on Bruce. Don’t tell him, for god’s sake. Don’t let my husband know—oh my husband knows. I do have a crush on him. And I have two kinds of crushes on him: I have the classic fan-type crush and then I have a more aesthetic crush on him as an actress looking at an actor who I think is really a wonderful, wonderful actor. There are two Bruce’s: he’s brilliant in the action movies but he’s also this fantastic character actor, and I’m hoping we’ll see more and more of that side of him. I think he’s really, really good. So I have two kinds of admiration for him – the venal kind and then the sort of respectful kind.
RED is now playing in theaters nationwide.
Tags: Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren, John Malkovich, Legend of teh Guardians, Love Ranch, marlow stern, Morgan Freeman, RED, The Debt, The Tempest
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NYFF ’10: Julie Taymor Talks The Tempest
At the tender age of 7, a young girl from Newton, Massachusetts, took an interest in the theater. In an effort to impress her parents, she drew her sister into stagings of children’s stories. Then, at age 9, she became involved with the Boston Children’s Theatre. She became the youngest member of Julie Portman’s Theatre Workshop of Boston at age 15, and then, in the first of many travel explorations, went to Paris to study with L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq—all before graduating from Oberlin College with a major in mythology and folklore.
Taymor made her proper theater directorial debut with the 1986 adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” for the Classical Stage Company in New York, and, in 1991, she was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship – a.ka. the “genius grant” – for her contributions to theater. After winning a pair of Tony Awards for designing the costumes and directing the 1997 Broadway smash hit musical “The Lion King,” Taymor shifted her focus to film, directing “Titus” in 1999 (an adaptation of the Shakespeare play “Titus Andronicus”), and the biopic “Frida” in 2002, based on the life of eccentric artist Frida Kahlo. The film was nominated for six Academy Awards. In 2007, she helmed the critically acclaimed film musical “Across the Universe,” which refashioned the songs of The Beatles set against the turbulent backdrop of ‘60s America.
With her latest film, The Tempest, Taymor’s career has come full-circle. When Prospera’s (Helen Mirren) throne is usurped by her brother, she is sent off on a ship to with her four-year-old daughter. Prospera, a sorceress, ends up on a remote island with Miranda and soon butts heads with Caliban (Djimon Hounsou) over her efforts to raise Miranda. The film boasts an all-star cast, including David Strathairn (Alonzo), Russell Brand (Trinculo), Alfred Molina (Stephano), Ben Whishaw (Ariel), Chris Cooper (Antonio), and more.
MMM attended the post-screening Q&A with theater legend Julie Taymor – whose upcoming musical “Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark” is scheduled to begin previews on November 14 – as she chatted about the decision behind Prospero’s gender change, her love of Shakespeare, and being a female director in Hollywood.
MANHATTAN MOVIE MAGAZINE: Why The Tempest, after Titus? Why did you choose this as your next Shakespeare adaptation?
JULIE TAYMOR: Actually, The Tempest was the first Shakespeare play in 1986 with Theater for a New Audience, and I fell in love with the play then, and I directed it three times. And after Titus, in 2000, I decided if I were to do another Shakespeare it would be The Tempest. It’s one of his greats. I had loved it. I fell in love with it in the theater. I don’t think I’d have liked to do a Shakespeare film without trying it in a theater first because the paired down minimalism—what you have to do in a theater—you would have to really do it with the actors first. It lends itself to the cinema. It’s extremely visual, and in fact his most visual play.
MMM: Having worked on the play several times, what has subsequent readings revealed to you?
TAYMOR: One of my favorite scenes is the one where Prospera, in this version, and Ariel talk about compassion and forgiveness. She say, “What do you think spirit? Shall I forgive him?” And he says, “I would if I were human.” And I just find that compelling, both emotionally, and what Shakespeare is saying that all the joy and run of revenge is ultimately about forgiveness and making your way through that. It’s very different, and in many ways this [film] is saying some of the same things about the play, but my version in the play was a black sand ground with a white site, so the image of the clowns—the fools—was in the original production, in the silhouette. There are many things that haven’t changed, but once Helen Mirren went into the play, without changing the lines, things changed immensely. Not just because she’s a great actress but also because the dynamics were so different. In my stage version, it was a male Prospero, and a female Ariel, although it was just a floating head. Caliban was with a New Guinea mud man mask, and in the film, I didn’t want to hide Ben Whitshaw’s face or Djimon Hounsou’s face, so that brought a different sensibility to those characters as well.
MMM: What was your rehearsal process like for the film, in comparison to the stage?
TAYMOR: In the theater, you get all your actors on day one, and you get them for five or six weeks before you go into tech. Helen worked on it for four weeks. We did a reading a year in advance because it was extremely critical to both Helen and myself that this wasn’t a gimmick, that it had validity as a Shakespeare play, and it wasn’t about putting a woman in, because obviously you had to change many of the words, the he’s to she’s, the lords to what, the master to what. It’s very interesting because we kept the word master because the word mistress doesn’t mean the same thing. It’s incredible in the English language about what words change and which don’t. We used the word Mum as opposed to mother, and this process of the reading informed us about where we needed to go. We rehearsed in London with Russell Brand, Felicity Jones, Reeve Carney, and Helen, those actors for about two weeks on and off. And then in Hawaii, where we shot most of the film, I had what we called the court—David Strathairn, Tom Conti, Alan Cumming, and Chris Cooper parts—for not very long, because these actors are very busy. But I did have Djimon, Russell, and Alfred Molina in LA for a hilarious four or five days as well. And we did rehearsals in a bare room where you can really engage with the language and the physicality of it all, before we go to shooting.
MMM: In recent years, the character that gets the most scrutiny is Caliban, for obvious reasons. Talk about your conception of that part.
TAYMOR: It was very interesting, in my other three productions, I had African Americans or Africans play that role. It is a non-white role. If you want to be technical, his father is black and his mother is a blue-eyed hag. He’s just not European in the sense of the world. This play is written in a time in which there were many explorations, many journeys to the New World. He may have been called a monster because he was a Native American, and whatever he was, he was the other. Now, in this version with Djimon, I take Shakespeare at his words, I take him literally. So when he writes, “Thou earth thou speak” or “moon calf,” all these wonderful words to describe, “thou fish thou” I incorporated. He is made of the earth. He is representative of the island because the main theme in this play is nature vs. nurture. And nature, the actual island itself, is Caliban. Is he wrong to have been attracted to Miranda when she comes of age? You watch this conflict in Prospera; she’s a monster at that point for putting Miranda on this island in close proximity with other human beings and its only natural. It’s about civilization in that sense. So it’s very touchy to put a black man into a slave role, but it felt more honest. It’s not politically correct, whatever that means, but he also has webbed fingers, he’s got a blue eye. He’s got the moon, the two-tone skin that he’s half black, and half white. He’s got this circle—even though that’s not what a moon calf means, I love the idea he looks like a calf, a cow, with these spots. So unlike the theater piece—which I put him in clay as well—he is slightly monstrous in his physical appearance.
MMM: How did you conceive of the timing and rhythm for this play for cinema?
TAYMOR: Titus was long. It was two hours and forty minutes. And The Tempest is four hours in its full, unedited, unexpurgated version. Now Shakespeare’s plays were never meant to be shown in full, and I had already cut it when I did it years ago to an hour and a half version, and this is probably a little less dialogue and a little longer because I wanted to have certain moments of breathers from the language, but there isn’t a lot. Maybe my feeling is that it is Shakespeare and knowing audience attention spans, I didn’t just allow us to go into these visual massive panoramas—although there are a few—because there is a momentum in the play. It takes place literally between 2pm and 6pm. It’s interesting because the play is very confusing because she says “Three days hence, I’ll free thee” and at other times she says in three hours. So we played with the idea in time. It was a revelation when I went back to that speech in which she says “I have bedimmed the noon-time sun” and I realized that it was a solar eclipse. So I realized that if I have an eclipse when she starts to do the dark magic on the court, we will be able to go into a theatrical, highly stylized world. It’s very hard to shoot in broad daylight all the time; you can’t control it. And we’re in landscapes where you can’t bring in lighting – we were in cliffs with winds and rain. That’s real stuff. But it was wonderful to pull this sense from the script itself and then bring it to the landscape, and then shoot in green screen or blue screen later on for the highly stylized moments.
MMM: I always thought that it was problematic that Prospero destroyed his magic and gave away his book and I know the speech says “What strength I have is now my own” and that’s the usual interpretation, but clearly the evil is still abound. Sebastian isn’t any better than what he was and neither is the brother. I wonder about your thoughts on this?
TAYMOR: I love it because Shakespeare was a realist, and he did these silly things where the bad guys are fully punished and the evil is truly gone. He is so cynical about the world and the most beautiful thing about Shakespeare is that he can be passionate, romantic, and cynical at the same time, and one doesn’t give weight to the other. He can have the most beautiful story about first love, first sight. And think about Ferdinand and Miranda—we talked a lot about the chess game, where she says to him, “You should cheat” and it’s like she already knows what’s in store for her. So what is he saying there? He’s already saying that this youth, this innocence, is already on its way to corruption.
The character of Prospero and Prospera has done everything in service of the daughter. “I do this for thee my daughter thee my loved one.” I think in this version what we feel really strong about is when Prospero gets his robes back, he just becomes the duke again. But in ours, because it’s a corset, and you go from these androgynous free clothes that you wear on an island and be comfortable, back into that severe female corset, she’s not just giving up her magic, she’s giving up her freedom.
MMM: Could you talk about the film’s aesthetics?
TAYMOR: The island of Lana’i, I don’t know if any of you have been there, but I was there ten years ago, right before I did “Frida,” and I had been thinking about The Tempest. But I went there and there’s this place called The Garden of the Gods and its where you see Caliban carrying the sticks and there were these giant red boulders, it looks like Mars, and then I saw these giant cliffs and then I saw these giant forests that look like labyrinths and its almost unpopulated. There’s two Four Seasons Hotels, which was very nice for us, and there’s a little town, but it’s so beautiful and so small that I knew it was the island of The Tempest. There’s not one palm tree in the film. When you think of Hawaii you think of Blue Lagoon or LOST, but you don’t think of what I think is the most gorgeous part of Hawaii which is the volcanic landscape. The idea of the volcano is so profoundly part of the design, not just part of the landscapes but in the costumes that Sandy Powell so magically did. That robe she wears is volcanic shards. It’s shaped like a volcano. She is a volcano. That fire in the cell is the fire of the volcano. It’s this bubbling anger, this fire inside of her that is in the landscape and the person. I always try and find an ideograph when I do theater, and film. If you just shoot in landscapes, you really have to feature the actors in the foreground because the landscape is a character.
MMM: Could you talk about your conception of Ariel?
TAYMOR: I cast Ben Whishaw. I love him, and I thought he and Helen would have this chemistry, not necessarily sexual, but there’s the tendency of the old woman with the young man and having a relationship and it seemed to me it could be very cool. The thing that happened was that Ben wasn’t available for the shoot in Hawaii, so instead of casting another actor, I took it as one of those restrictions that could be a plus, and it was an enormous plus. And had he been there, he would have been on the ground, and he would have been 5’9’’ and on the ground, and all of his shots would have been like me up here. What would we do? So the fact that he wasn’t there made me come up with a concept, and I always wanted him to be able to be transparent. So by not having Ben on location, it freed us up for allowing him to transform. He was air, he was water, he was fire, he was lava dogs, he was frogs, he was harpies. The harpies is not a visual effect either. He is with giant wings, on a glass table, in blue screen. I wanted it to be as real as possible. I didn’t want it to be a CGI character because the power comes through the actor and we, even in some of those two shots in the cell itself, we could make it transparent in post and we were able to control the corporeality of his presence. And the one scene where he’s not effected is where he says, “I would if I were human,” because he has to be there, and that’s just the real Ben, almost in the Bhutto white make-up, which helps to create this non-human androgynous figure, and we did want him to be androgynous, hence, he is. But we did want this duality there of a male-female spirit.
MMM: There are not many female directors in cinema, and did you see this adaptation as a political mission at all?
TAYMOR: Not for me. That wasn’t the intention at all. There was no mission, period. The idea of having a female wasn’t really the idea of having a female, it was wanting Helen Mirren to play Prospera. And I was going to do it with a male but I didn’t have a male in mind that excited more than the idea of working with Helen Mirren. And there are only a few Shakespeare plays, which we both agree. We had met each other, and we were talking about Titus and how few roles there are for women of her age in Shakespeare, and she said, “I can play Prospero as a woman,” and I said, “Do you want to?” because I had already been thinking about it and working on it and I wasn’t ready to offer it but at that moment I said let’s do it and she asked if it would be in the theater and I told her film. And then we had to raise money, and we casted, and we did the reading to make sure it would work. When I did the research on this, three times, the speech of Prospera where she makes the ring of fire, when she renounces the magic, that speech is a direct lift from Medea [the speech is actually by Medea in Ovid’s Metamorphosis]. Shakespeare just lifted it. And I was surprised that it was a female speech; that it comes from a sorceress originally. So when we started to look at this play we realized that it does work with a female in that role. The mother-daughter relationship is very different than the father daughter relationship. When she has the young prince Ferdinand it’s not about her competition with him, it’s because she knows her daughter can get hurt. I think that a lot of the elements come from Helen’s performance. It wasn’t because of any mission on this, it’s just one of those revelations that this works, a great Shakespeare play that works. In this day and age it shouldn’t be such a big deal.
THE TEMPEST opens on December 10, 2010.
NYFF ’10: Charles Ferguson Uncovers an Inside Job
In a field that included films from Oliver Stone, Woody Allen, Olivier Assayas, Mike Leigh and others, a documentary filmed on a $2 million budget was heralded as the best film at Cannes in a poll of 19 top film critics conducted by IndieWire. That film is Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job – a sprawling documentary chronicling the causes and impact of the global economic crisis.
Ferguson, a former political scientist and software entrepreneur, is no stranger to exposing corruption. His debut, the 2007 Oscar-nominated documentary No End in Sight, focuses on the two year period following the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003, and the Bush administration’s failings in the initial Iraqi occupation. Time magazine called the film “without question the most important movie you are likely to see this year.”
Three years later, Ferguson has chosen to document the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Narrated by Matt Damon, Inside Job provides a comprehensive, easy-to-follow analysis of the events surrounding the global financial crisis of 2008, which came at a cost of over $20 trillion. Meticulously researched and containing loads of interviews with key financial insiders, politicians, journalists, academics, and even a Wall Street psychologist and Wall Street madam, Ferguson’s film vividly captures an out of control industry that’s corrupted everything from politics to academia.
The film is also beautifully shot – no small feat for a film about finance – with IMAX-like helicopter shots that transport you from the luscious hills of Iceland to the picturesque Manhattan skyline. “It might well be the most important film you see this year, and the most important documentary of this young century,” said Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir.
MMM attended a post-screening discussion of Inside Job with filmmaker Charles Ferguson at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater as part of the 2010 New York Film Festival.
MANHATTAN MOVIE MAGAZINE: One of the things that struck me about the film is what you describe is really a through-line that goes from the 70s/80s to the present and covers both Republicans and Democrats. Considering how polarized our government is, it seems this is one area where there’s a lot of agreement.
CHARLES FERGUSON: Unfortunately, yes. It makes the problem much more disturbing, and much more difficult to deal with. The fact that the problem is completely bi-partisan also makes it more difficult for the American people to understand what to do.
MMM: What happened to the whistleblowers? How do people look at them now?
FERGUSON: There was a guy who’s actually in the film, Dr. Rajan, who’s now at the University of Chicago. At the 2005 Federal Reserve Conference, there was a fete for Alan Greenspan, and he gave a paper that said, “You guys are heading for the biggest crash that there ever was,” and he laid out how, why, and when it would happen. People like Larry Summers stood up and called him names, and he was almost booed off the platform. Even now, I don’t think he gets a lot of credit for it.
MMM: Clearly, when you’re interviewing all these people, word must have gotten around that there was this guy Charles Ferguson who made a well-regarded film about Iraq and is asking a lot of questions. Was there some technique you used to nail down these interviews?
FERGUSON: I was terrified that that would in fact be a problem, and in some cases, it was. Some of the people who declined to be interviewed knew what I was doing and clearly didn’t like it. In the case of Glenn Hubbard and Frederic Mishkin, we interviewed them three days apart – Hubbard first. I crossed my fingers for 72 hours that they weren’t going to talk during that period. One thing – this is funny and it’s also not funny – that helped me in this regard, in the case of Hubbard and a number of others, they were so embarrassed, ashamed, and fearful at the end of their interviews, that the last thing they wanted to do was tell anybody what had occurred.
MMM: With the downfall of Lehman, why didn’t you look at the antagonistic relationship between Henry Paulson and Dick Fuld? Many people point to that as the reason why the government didn’t decide to save Lehman Brohters.
FERGUSON: The question of why Lehman was forced into bankruptcy is one of those questions like why the Bush administration started the Iraq War. There are 20 different possible explanations; each of them probably has some degree of truth. I would love to be Henry Paulson’s psychiatrist. Unfortunately, I am not. Let me give you the list. One is that Richard Fuld has apparently antagonized just about everybody on the entire planet just with his personality – arrogant, abrasive, etc. Second, most of the other Wall Street firms, the top management of Lehman Brothers was primarily – with just one exception, a cousin of President Bush – composed of Democrats who were substantial contributors to the Democratic Party. Third, Paulson really did care about the moral hazard argument and wanted to make an example of this company. Fourth, he didn’t have the faintest idea of how much damage Lehman’s bankruptcy would actually cause. Fifth is that Lehman had been emerging in the previous decade as an increased competitor to Goldman Sachs. Finally, there’s also the possibility that there was an ego issue; that there was no easy way for Paulson to back down, personally, when the British said that they wouldn’t [bail out Lehman] unless there was a federal guarantee. So, that’s the list. Choose what you like.
MMM: Were there things in the film that you wish you put in but weren’t able to?
FERGUSON: There are many things I would have liked to put in the film. I would’ve liked to put more in the film about the specific cases where congressional action was the result of lobbying or influence of the financial services industry. There just wasn’t time.
MMM: Did you ever think of including the Tea Party movement – who want to deregulate the economy – and Stephen Shwarzman, who has become the bête noire figure of Wall Street?
FERGUSON: Again, there are many people who weren’t in the film for time or priority reasons, basically. Scharzman would be one. Pete Peterson, the founder of Blackstone, would be another. Jimmy Cayne, the chairman of Bear Stearns, would certainly be another. We actually had him in an earlier cut for kind of black humor purposes. How many people know this? When Bear Stearns was going down the drain, Jimmy Cayne was too busy to pay attention to his company because he was playing bridge at a bridge tournament in Chicago with two Italian professional bridge players who he pays half a million dollars a year to play bridge with him. There are many stories about Jimmy Cayne – marijuana, which he consumed in quite large quantities even though he was a conservative Republican, etc. We just couldn’t include it and I do have regrets about that. With regard to the Tea Party, one reason we couldn’t include it was time since we had to finish the film at a certain point. And the other was it’s not clear to me how important that phenomenon is. It could turn out to be important and lasting in American politics, it could turn out not to be. I would say I’m agnostic about that question.
MMM: How did Matt Damon get involved?
FERGUSON: Two ways: we asked him, and he said yes. He was the only person we asked. We thought he would be better than any person we could imagine. So, why did we like him? He’s somebody whose voice and character is very well known, is known to have political concerns in an intelligent way. And why did he say yes? It turned out he made a thriller set in Iraq called “Green Zone,” and while he was preparing for the film he saw my documentary about the occupation of Iraq, and apparently liked it. He turned out to be absolutely great – not just for the narration, but he had clearly read the transcript of the entire film quite carefully, and he had very intelligent suggestions about the precise places where we ourselves regarded as problematic. We had this very clunky, convoluted ending, and the ending we have now in the film owes quite a lot to his suggestions and our discussions with him about what to do. And, needless to say, given that the total budget of this film was $2 million, he worked for substantially less than his normal rate. [Laughs]
MMM: Do you think this is essentially a film about addiction – to money, power, sex – and the refusal of recovery?
FERGUSON: That’s actually a very interesting question, and a very perceptive one. The material in the film about that is there for two reasons: I do think there’s something to what you just suggested, and the other is that that environment led these guys to be remarkably disconnected from the things that would discipline you or me if we tried to behave in a similarly egregious fashion. They had so much money and insulated themselves in this bubble. I personally find it strange that somebody who already has $400 million would be willing to risk this in order to get more.
MMM: In terms of looking forward, do you see for consumers, the appointment of Elizabeth Waren [the new head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau], as another case like Brooksley Born [who attempted to regulate derivatives and was stopped], and do you see Larry Summers going back to Harvard [as a professor] where we’re instilling the same type of education that’s going back up the chain?
FERGUSON: Elizabeth Warren’s appointment is probably not going to do much good. Her appointment is temporary. She has a dual appointment in reporting to President Obama and the treasury secretary [Timothy Geithner], whom she is not friends. It’s pretty clear, given the overall pattern we see in the administration, we’re not going to expect much or get much from this agency in this administration. With regard to Summers going back to Harvard, yes it is quite ironic that he’s going to do as much damage there as he did in the previous administration.
MMM: One thing I like very much is how you bring in international perspectives, the IMF, the interviews with Singapore, China. I’m wondering how your idea of bringing that aspect in, and were there more international agencies?
FERGUSON: There were many more, and that’s one of the regrets I have about length limitations on the film. There were a large amount of extremely interesting people, several of whom are about to be indicted. The former prime minister of Iceland, who I was told last night, is soon going to be arrested and tried. He was trained as an economist in the United States. [Laughs] We interviewed him, and one thing I very much regret is that I asked him if there ever been a time in economic history when an entire nation’s banking system in a five year period has borrowed 10 times its GOP. And the pained laughter of his response was just priceless. But somehow it didn’t make the cut.
MMM: One of the things that’s startling about this film and “No End in Sight” is these very public problems that are presented that have never been shown in such a way before. I wonder if you could talk about the media, which is absent from both movies, and their complicity in both Iraq and this story. Do you think they were lied to, or their interests are complicit with their subjects, and how do you see non-fiction filmmaking as a remedy for that complicity?
FERGUSON: It’s a complicated situation. On the one hand, it is certainly the case that the business and financial media did not do as good of a job as they could have done, and the nature of these problems has not been explained as widely as discussed, not as deeply investigated while they were building. It is not the case that you couldn’t read about this anywhere. There have been, actually, quite a number of good articles and books about different aspects of this subject. But, it is unquestionably true that the majority of the specialized press, the relevant specialized press—and this was also true of Iraq with our foreign policy military press—did not go as deep, did not push as far as they should have. Part of the problem I believe is the nature of access journalism, as significant measures come to be, what makes you good as a journalist is that you get an exclusive interview with this powerful guy, he gives you some fact, and you publish it tomorrow morning since you’ve got the scoop. It’s hard to practice that on a long-term basis if you are tough and critical. And perhaps because of the financial pressures on the media, or other reasons, investigative journalism is not in bountiful supply in the traditional media. And I hope and believe that the web and documentary film are taking up some of that slack.
MMM: As Elizabeth Warren certainly has Obama’s ear, are you doing anything specific to get her to see the film and make her comment in any way? And is Frederic Mishkin really back teaching at Columbia?
FERGUSON: Yes, Mr. Mishkin is certainly at the Columbia Business School, and this might stun you, but if you were to see the full interview that we did, he would look much worse. [Laughs] Actually what happened was that we had an earlier cut, and a couple people, including Michael Barker of Sony, came back and said you can’t do this, because people are going to have sympathy for him because you have destroyed him so completely. You’ve got to ease up. So we actually did. I won’t go into details. Mr. Mishkin does not come off well in the film. He and everyone else in the film have been invited to see it. He declined to come but sent a public relations executive to come report back. In regard to Elizabeth Warren, I’m sorry this might pain a number of you, and it’s somewhat politically incorrect, but Elizabeth Warren is not the solution to all of our problems. I admire her; I admire her work, but the only way she’s been able to get to where she is, is by being extremely careful not to criticize the Obama administration outside of the extremely specific issue that she is now, kind of sort of half in charge of dealing with. I spoke with her privately at great lengths, and she declined to be interviewed on camera for exactly this reason.
MMM: Were you pressured in any way to not put any of these interviews in, or was there anyone trying to influence the film?
FERGUSON: The simple answer is no—no one tried to pressure us. Several people tried to retract the permission for their interviews but we already had their signed released forms and that was that. In regard to pressure, I have to say something about the Sony guys—Michael Barker and Tom Bernard. They have been, and excuse me I’m going to be a bit vulgar to make my point, they’ve been totally fucking amazing. I was really scared when I started making this film I would get calls like this guy is my neighbor, this guy is a major shareholder, etc. Never once. Never once. And they are now supporting this film extremely strongly. I have my quibbles with the movie distribution business but they have been incredible.
MMM: When did the five-act structure of the film come to you? You obviously had a very high ratio of stuff you shot to what you actually used.
FERGUSON: I would say it’s about half and half. By the time we started editing, I had done an enormous amount of research and I knew what was in the interviews because I had conducted them. At the same time, there was an extraordinary amount of material. We filmed about 70 or 75 interviews, and most were about an hour and a half long, and some were even two or three hours long. In addition, we had an incredible mass of documentation of every kind—books, articles, lawsuits, government documents, and academic articles—huge quantity of stuff. So the editors were critical. The two editors, Chad Beck and Adam Bolt, are much more than what you think of normal editors. The structure of the film really emerged. I had about half when we started editing, and the rest emerged while working with them. And they worked really hard. The last four months, they were working 6 days a week, typically ‘til 1 or 2 in the morning. And I was typically in there with them for about 6-8 hours a day.
MMM: Where do you see the economy in five years, and do you think there will ever be any convictions?
FERGUSON: I think we have a rough five years ahead of us, and possibly a rough generation. The American economy and American society are troubled, and there’s all of this, which is a big thing, and then there are all of the other important things that aren’t being attended to because the people responsible just don’t care about attending to them. The high school graduation rate in South Korea is 96% and in the US its 78%, that’s a problem. With regarding convictions, I think there will only be convictions if the American people get angry enough.
INSIDE JOB is now playing in select theaters nationwide.
Tags: Charles Ferguson, Frederic Mishkin, Glenn Hubbard, Global Financial Crisis, Inside Job, Matt Damon, No End in Sight, Recession
Posted in Festivals, Interviews | 1 Comment »
NYFF ‘10: The Makers and Stars of The Social Network
“You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies” reads the film’s tagline. Based on what we’ll call a fact-based novel, “The Accidental Billionaires” by Ben Mezrich – which used recreated scenes and dialogue to tell the story of the founding of social networking website Facebook by a handful of Harvard students – THE SOCIAL NETWORK was initially mocked by Internet pundits when the screenplay leaked July of last year. They’re not laughing now. Using his trademark dim, yellow/green/black-tinted color palette, director David Fincher (“Fight Club,” “Zodiac”) has brought screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s (“The West Wing”) robust, 162-page script to the big screen in a brisk two hours.
The Social Network stars Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg, the young man who founded Facebook at the age of 19 when he was a sophomore at Harvard with the help of some seed money from classmate Eduardo Saverin, played by Andrew Garfield. The company soon eyes expansion, and enlists the aid of Napster co-founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake). This new partnership threatens Saverin’s stake in the company. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg is being sued for intellectual property theft from the inventors of HarvardConnection (later ConnectU) – blue blood rowing twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer), and Divya Narenda (Max Minghella).
Today, Facebook has been valued at $23 billion, and Zuckerberg, with an estimated fortune of $6.9 billion, is the king of Silicon Valley whose fortune is vaster than even that of Apple’s Steve Jobs.
Many questions have been raised about the film’s accuracy, and the movie’s makers and stars addressed those and other questions at the film’s premiere during the 2010 New York Film Festival at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center. What people haven’t questioned, however, is how good the film is. See what the people behind The Social Network had to say about the best-reviewed film of the year.
MANHATTAN MOVIE MAGAZINE: Aaron, I think you’ve expressed your distaste for the electronic communication world. What is it that made you overcome that and made you want to write this script?
AARON SORKIN: My feelings about the internet are actually irrelevant to anybody’s enjoyment of the movie. But what made me overcome it was that I didn’t think it was as movie about Facebook, really. I thought it was a movie that has themes as old as storytelling itself – of friendship and loyalty and class, jealously, power, these things that Aeschylus would write about or Shakespeare would write about. Luckily for me none of those people were available so I got to write about it. And David really agreed, and you should talk about it.
DAVID FINCHER: Obviously, there was a lot of internet chatter when it was announced that we were going to make this movie. I think people thought we were making a sequel to “The Net,” or we were trying to do some kind of fad hopping. But I really didn’t know anything about the origins of Facebook; I just had a dry-read of a script that had a bunch of people in it that I felt I knew and knew intimately and could relate to and empathize with. I thought it was a lovely, wonderful, two hours.
MMM: Aaron, how long did it take you to figure out where to begin the film?
SORKIN: Once I had Mark’s blog, which you see in the movie and which is pretty much verbatim, I made it a little bit shorter but it was clear that he’d just gotten his heart broken by a girl and that this was going to be a night of drinking and blogging and this revenge stunt Facemash. I knew that I wanted to see him get his heart broken by a girl, that I wanted to see that scene, but since he brought up that it was nine pages, that it’s two people sitting in a bar. David, what he’s most known for is being peerless as a visual director. So intuitively this is an unusual marriage of director and material because I write people talking in rooms. And you would think that the director would come along and say “Listen, I just don’t know what I’m going to point the camera at. I can’t begin a movie like this with a nine page scene and two people talking at a table.”
FINCHER: It’s a good scene. There’s no problem in sublimating your desire to show off if what you’re presenting is something that you think is what it’s going to take to kind of steep the audience. Originally when the script began it was in black and you hear the voices over black, and I kind of wondered why don’t we just see the Columbia logo and start hearing them then and hear the jukebox and hear all the people talking, and let people know pin your ears back man, you’ve got to pay attention. I just felt that the scene teed up exactly who this guy was, exactly what the stakes were, exactly what the world was, and it taught you how to watch the movie. And also, when Aaron read it, it was four and half minutes. It was nine pages in four and a half minutes, so the whole thing was let’s get everybody used to the idea of nine pages in four and a half minutes.
MMM: I’d like to ask Jessie, Andrew, and Justin if your approach to the role involved much actual research into the people you were playing, or whether you took more of your inspiration just from what was in the script.
JESSE EISENBERG: I did a lot of research during the rehearsal process but if I didn’t and only had Aaron’s script that would have been perfectly sufficient. I auditioned for the movie prior to looking up Mark Zuckerberg online. I didn’t know what he looked like, I had never heard him speak, and all I had was Aaron’s incredible characterization and felt that was more that sufficient to make the audition tape. Then we had about a month and a half of rehearsal and in order to feel more prepared and to understand who this guy was I found every interview and watched every interview that was online and got every picture that I could find of him. But really, as Aaron said, it was not really a movie about Facebook as much as it is about these more substantive themes. And in the same way it was not traditional biography picture, we were trying to do kind of an imitation of the character of Mark Zuckerberg, and so I was really just focusing on playing Aaron’s characterization.
ANDREW GARFIELD: I think Jesse put it very well, I don’t know how much I have to add to that outside my own personal experience, which is that I had a photo to go from. But that was great in its own way because I could just invent something from inspiration, and I immediately saw that he, maybe this is my own projection, but he seemed very warm but kind of reserved. I kind of had minimal to go from which was actually quite liberating, even though I did try to find him in a very obtuse and uncommitted way. But it would have been really interesting because of course when you’re playing someone who exists and is living and breathing somewhere you kind of feel a massive sense of responsibility to not ruin them on screen because we’re all human and when you have empathy for other humans then it’s difficult to do that.
JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE: I also have empathy for human beings, thank you. I think there was kind of a collective movement with Jesse and Andrew and myself that we all felt like so much of the information we needed was there on the paper, and then moving into the wonderful mind of David to find out exactly where this film was going to go. But I think just for playing my character I actually stayed as far away from anything on the internet that I could. You meet my character when he meets Facebook pretty much, so I wanted to be excited by that.
FINCHER: We had conversations about how it’s a biopic. A biopic is essentially there to tell you why somebody did what they did, and I wasn’t interested in that at all. I was interested in what they did, and because we saw it from the multiple points of view and all of those points of view of course were polarized by intense litigation I don’t know whether Eduardo was Mark’s best friend. I know the lawyer stated that he was his best friend and I know that Mark stated the exact opposite. So we had to find kind of a happy medium in there where both of them could walk away from the scenes that we see them in and one could righteously say “I was your best friend,” and the other one could look and be aghast by that. I wanted to stay away from mimicry. We cast the actors that we cast because of what they brought to it and we wanted to unleash them with as much freedom to make each of the parts of the movie, the story that they were supporting as human as possible, and give them the leeway to be human and not to trap them with “Well he normally starts with his left foot.”
MMM: What were the challenges of playing characters people may think are big assholes?
EISENBERG: It’s impossible to play a role and to look at it, not only in the way that you described it, but look at it objectively at all. I had the unique position in that my main responsibility was to not only understand where my character was coming from but to be able to defend all of his positions, his behavior, and ultimately sympathize with him. And over the course of the movie and really over the course of this publicity experience I’ve developed an even greater affection for my character. You have no choice; it’s impossible to disagree with the character that you’re portraying. We shot the movie for about five and a half months, they were very long days, and you’re spending a lot of time working hard to defend your character’s behavior. So even if the character is acting in a way that hurts other characters you still have to understand and ultimately sympathize with all of that behavior; it’s just impossible to play it any other way.
FINCHER: The character is an asshole is such a reductive, overly simplistic way. I have no problem saying that I think Eduardo Saverin had a fairly good imagination, and I think at some point there is going to be a fork in the road for those two guys and I don’t think that Sean Parker was overly Machiavellian. I think that what he’s saying, how he presents himself, is perfectly reasonable. As somebody who’s been through it, who has had a Napster and lost a Napster, here’s a guy who’s saying, “This is the big leagues. And it’s great that you have friends from your dorm, and it’s great that you have college buddies, and it’s great that you have somebody you can turn to and borrow $19,000. But this is the fucking bigs, and you have to now realize that if you want to protect what it is that you invested so long and so much of your energy; if you want to protect that you’ve got to have the support of people who know what they’re doing who can navigate these waters.” I think what Mark Zuckerberg said was probably: “I am up to my eyeballs trying to figure out how to make this thing work and how to get it on 60 million laptops. How do I do that?” And a bunch of guys came to him and said, “Hey, your buddy who put up $19,000, he can own 30% of something that’s worth a million dollars, or he can own .03% of something that’s worth $10 billion. Do him a favor.”
MMM: I was just wondering if any of you maintain personal Facebook pages and if so how addicted to them are you?
SORKIN: I put up a Facebook page the day that I signed up for the movie. I didn’t have one before; honestly I didn’t know much about Facebook. I’d heard of Facebook the way I’ve heard of a carburetor, but I can’t pop the hood of my car, point to it, and tell you what it does. So the first thing I did was start a Facebook account. I kept it up all during research, during writing, during photography, and then took it down.
EISENBERG: I had a similar experience. I signed up for Facebook the first day of rehearsal so I could understand what my character was talking about, and when we started shooting and I had to learn all those lines I stopped using it.
FINCHER: I’ve seen it over someone’s shoulder. No, I don’t have Facebook.
GARFIELD: I was your usual, general kind of Facebook user, I’m sad to admit, and I’ve been three months clean. I’m proud of myself too. But now I don’t use it because it was just negative for me, like it is for most people.
TIMBERLAKE: I don’t have a personal Facebook page, but it is nice to know that you through the world of philanthropy, for instance, that you can send out a message and, for instance, raise money for free health care for kids. But no, I don’t have a personal Facebook page. It’s hard enough to do voice work in animated films, so I took a double-duty of it all and I just didn’t have time to look at pictures of my friends. [Laughs]
MMM: I have a question for Mr. Eisenberg. A lot of people in the tech community comment on Zuckerberg’s personality as being somewhat of an Asperger’s personality, where he’s very not touching, very emotionally muted. Was that a part of your thought process in your portrayal of Mark?
EISENBERG: I certainly don’t want to diagnose him but in Aaron’s script and then also in watching these interviews there’s a certain kind of disengagement that you see. It’s frankly not dissimilar to some disengagement that I probably express when I’m doing interviews because they can be incredibly uncomfortable, so to kind of attribute it to some extreme diagnosis doesn’t feel right to me. But there was a really interesting quality that I wanted to bring out, which is this difficulty connecting to others. It makes the character far more interesting to play, that he has trouble connecting with others and yet feels particularly comfortable connecting everybody else, and perfectly comfortable in the social environment of Facebook. And it was also something to make me feel the character was really a full person, so even though he maybe appears enigmatically or reserved or detached, there’s still something happening beneath that. At the end of the movie he’s a billionaire and he’s created something really out of nothing almost by himself and he feels still alone.
MMM: Did you guys encounter any problems from Facebook the company and Zuckerberg?
FINCHER: I know that Scott Rudin had conversations with Facebook, I know that Aaron, you were privy to…
SORKIN: Yeah we, we being [producer] Scott Rudin and me, aggressively courted Facebook’s and Mark’s cooperation in the film. Mark would end up doing exactly what I would have done, which was decline, but we also told them at the time that whether they participated or not we would show them the script when the script was done and we would welcome any notes that they had. So we did give them the script, and their notes largely had to do with hacking. There was a little bit of hacking terminology that I’d gotten wrong, unsurprisingly. I know that there was a rumor a day or two ago that Mark had been spotted at a screening; I doubt it. I don’t think there are any of us who would want a movie made out of the things we did when we were 19 years old. If Mark is going through an uncomfortable moment, that doesn’t give me any joy at all. So, I understand. I doubt he’s going to be first in line next Friday to buy a ticket.
MMM: A lot’s been made of the embellishment and sexualization of certain scenes in this film. Can you talk about what scenes in particular were very embellished?
SORKIN: None, and I don’t know where this is coming from. I’m not going to sell any tickets by making this statement, but I have to tell you that there is less sex in this movie than there is in any two minutes of “Gossip Girl.” Nothing in the movie was invented for the sake of Hollywoodizing it or sensationalizing it. As I explained, because of the three different versions of the story that were given not just in the deposition rooms, but there was a lot of first-person research that I did with people who are characters in the movie and people who were close to the event, most of whom were speaking to me on the condition of anonymity. And there were a lot of conflicting takes so there are going to be a lot of people saying that’s not true, that didn’t happen, just as they’ve been saying since 2003. The work that I did is exactly the same as the work that any screenwriter does on any nonfiction film. When Peter Morgan writes “The Queen” he’s going from fact to fact to fact, but Peter Morgan wasn’t in Queen Elizabeth’s bedroom when she was talking to her husband about their daughter-in-law. Moreover, and more important, people don’t speak in dialog and life doesn’t play out in scenes. There’s work that the dramatist does, but nothing was invented, certainly nothing was sexualized in order to amp up the temperature on the movie.
MMM: Even the early Harvard final club party scenes that depict girls making out with each other and dancing on tables half-naked?
SORKIN: Even the Harvard Club scenes. That is based on descriptions of parties given to me by members who have been at these parties. Those beginning of the year parties, the bus that brings girls to the parties, what goes on at those parties, but that particular scene again is an example of is that scene really happening or is that the party that Mark’s imagining in his head that he can’t be at? That kind of thing. But really, this is a nonfiction story.
FINCHER: You have to keep in mind that there is a point of view; there is a perspective. Certainly we did a lot of research and we had stories told to us that were far worse, far more salacious, far more demeaning to the participants than the stuff that we chose to actually show, and we had to temper it. We were trying to tell a story about somebody who is sitting at home doing something and going “Everybody else is having far more fun than I am,” and that’s the narrative purpose of it.
MMM: Mr. Fincher, a lot of the early word about this is saying that this is a departure for you and I’m curious what you think about that.
FINCHER: Because it doesn’t involve somebody aging backwards or because it doesn’t involve serial killers? [Laughs] You read scripts that you want to see the movie of and then you beg to be involved, and this was one of those. I know now and I felt it when I was shooting it that I was going to be able to make something that I could look back on 10 or 12 years from now and say, “I got to work with all these guys right as it happened. Right as they kind of coalesced.” It was a great opportunity to work with a lot of people who came to play, and it was an ensemble movie that was going to live and die by quality of whether or not you believed the behaviors of the people who were gifted this man’s words. And every day of the 72 days that I was lucky enough to be able to shoot this movie I got to walk away from it saying, “He’s good. That’s going to work. That looks like a marriage coming apart.” So I feel about it like would I have loved to have made “American Graffiti?” Now in its own weird way I’ve been able to. I got to do something where I got to look at nine people across the screen and there was a moment in time when they were all in the same movie.
THE SOCIAL NETWORK is in theaters nationwide.
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