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The Gronvall Files: A ROYAL AFFAIR To Remember With Filmmaker Nikolaj Arcel

Wednesday, November 7th, 2012

Once a staple of the Golden Age of Hollywood, costume dramas are an iffy bet these days. Minus the vast resources of the old studio system, with its contract players, armies of technicians, numerous sound stages and back lot sets—not to mention extensive wardrobe collections—the cost of mounting period dramas is daunting. Plus the lack of interest many American moviegoers show in any history that pre-dates their childhood years has made the genre a harder sell. For instance, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette under-performed at the box office (although you certainly could argue that middling reviews didn’t help).

I haven’t yet seen Keira Knightley in Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina or Daniel Day-Lewis in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, so I can’t weigh in on the merits or potential of those two films. But I have seen an outstanding historical drama that I hope will beat the odds: Denmark’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, A Royal Affair. The Magnolia Pictures release is directed by Nicolaj Arcel, who wrote the screenplay with Rasmus Heisterberg, his co-scribe on the Swedish-language film adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. A tale of romance and court intrigue based on actual events that occurred in late 18th-century Europe, A Royal Affair stars Mads Mikkelsen and dazzling newcomer Alicia Vikander (who, coincidentally, also appears in Anna Karenina).  

Vikander portrays Caroline, an educated, vibrant young English aristocrat who is married off to the eccentric, spoiled, and volatile Danish king, Christian VII, strikingly played by first-time screen actor Mikkel Boe Folsgaard (who won the Best Actor prize earlier this year at the Berlin International Film Festival). Although the new queen quickly produces an heir to the throne, her marriage founders due to her husband’s neglect and the malice of his ambitious stepmother, who connives with the court to use the monarch as their puppet. On a tour of Europe the lonely king acquires a new personal physician who becomes his friend and confidante, a German named Struensee (Mikkelsen). The doctor is steeped in the latest scientific discoveries, as well as the anti-feudal philosophies of the Enlightenment—including revolutionary concepts like the rights of man. Christian returns to Denmark with Struensee, and gradually a high-stakes triangle forms, as king, queen, and physician implement major reforms in the beleaguered nation. But their efforts are deeply resented in the corridors of power.

 A Royal Affair was featured in the recently concluded 48th Chicago International Film Festival, and director Arcel was an honored guest. 

Andrea Gronvall:  Since Movie City News often focuses on the business of movies, I’d like to ask about the role of your executive producer, Lars von Trier. In America it’s not unusual for someone to get a producing credit for doing only one thing—say, bringing a star on board. What were his contributions to A Royal Affair?

Nikolaj Arcel:  Lars’s name can help you get financing, whereas mine cannot. It took three years to finance the film; the money for the $6.5 million budget came from four different countries–although Denmark funds 50% of 20 Danish films each year. But more than his influence there I wanted his help on the screenplay and in the editing.

AG:  And what advice did he give you?

NA:  Originally I was trying to focus on one character, but Lars said I had to split the focus between Mads’ and Alicia’s characters. He also said I needed to make the film an epic, and not worry that people will have to wait a while for the story to get going. And in Denmark, we have a group of directors who meet to critique each other’s footage: Lars is one, and Thomas Vinterberg [The Celebration, The Hunt], Ole Christian Madsen [Flame and Citron, Prague], Susanne Bier [After the Wedding, A Better World]. Lars came to the edit eight to ten times, and guided us through.

AG:  What was the most technically-challenging scene to shoot, and how did you pull it off?

NA:  I had three different ballroom scenes, but only one night in which to shoot them in our location. We used three cameras and kept jumping about. I wanted to create as much of a comfort zone as possible for the actors, but as it got closer to sunrise, we had to avoid daylight seeping in. So we had to keep moving the set back, away from the windows!

AG:  I was impressed by how graceful a dancer Mads Mikkelsen is in those scenes.

NA:  He was trained as a ballet dancer. So was Alicia.

AG:  I read an interview that he gave some time ago to The New York Times, in which he said there was so much that he wanted to do that he couldn’t see the point of sleeping more than four hours a night. Later I read that during the filming of A Royal Affair he would wake you in the middle of the night with ideas of what to do on the set the next morning.

NA:  Mads takes his work seriously, and he loves his job.

AG:  My editor David Poland says that Alicia Vikander is going to be The Next Big Thing.

NA:  Not only is she in Anna Karenina [coming out at the same time as A Royal Affair], but she also recently signed to appear opposite Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore in Seventh Son.

Nikolaj Arcel.

AG:  I still can’t get over the performance by Mikkel Boe Folsgaard: his king is chilling and monumentally self-absorbed, but also needy, and funny, and ultimately sympathetic. What a discovery!

NA:  Our movie was his first. He has an enormous amount of talent, a very raw talent. He was totally open, completely not intimidated, which led to my casting him.

AG:  Watching your movie about the history of Denmark made me think about the history of the United States. My country was born during the Enlightenment, the same period your film covers. Our founding fathers fought a revolution to free us from the tyranny of kings. Yet today so many Americans are obsessed with royalty, even though we have none—by design! On the other hand, in Europe, which still has quite a few royal families, most people are not all that impressed by monarchs. What’s that about?

NA:  In Denmark we still have a Queen. She is nice, we’re used to her, but she is not an object of fascination. For us, our obsession is with movie people; we are fascinated by your film culture.

AG:  A Royal Affair is 180 degrees apart from one of your famous earlier projects. After the success of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, were you afraid of being typecast?

NA:  I wasn’t afraid of being typecast; I was being typecast! [Laughs] But I’m working on a crime thriller again, the screenplay for The Keeper of Lost Causes, a novel by Jussi Adler-Olsen that made The New York Times bestseller list. It’s the first film of a trilogy.

AG:  What would be the one thing you’d most like audiences to take home from A Royal Affair?

NA:  Obviously, for Danish audiences it has a lot more resonance because it’s about Danish history. But then there’s the idea that someone who comes from nothing can become like a king, and work with good intentions. Why do we always punish these visionaries, instead of supporting them? The movie is also about freedom: do you accept your position in life? A Royal Affair is about the freedom to love, the freedom of self-expression.

AG:  And what those are worth.

 

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The Gronvall Files: Director Alison Klayman On Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

Friday, August 10th, 2012

There are headlines China’s leaders like to see, such as coverage of Chinese athletes racking up gold medals at the XXX Olympiad, or Beijing’s Dalian Wanda Group snapping up American movie screens with its purchase of the AMC Entertainment theater chain. Then there are the newsmakers that make China’s ruling technocrats nervous, such as legal activist Chen Guangcheng, who sought refuge in the American Embassy in Beijing before getting his government’s permission to leave to study the in U.S., and the artist Ai Weiwei, the subject of a new documentary from IFC Films, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry.

Acclaimed internationally for sculptures and installations that have been exhibited in western cities from Munich to London to New York, to name a few, Weiwei is also a culture hero to millions of Chinese, not only for his trenchant and yet often playful art works, but also for his populism and activism, which he has advanced through blogging and social media like Twitter. His protests against injustice, corruption, and propaganda (he publicly criticized the 2008 Beijing Olympics) occasionally landed him in hot water with authorities (he was beaten up and seriously injured in Chengdu), and in 2011 led to an 81-day-long government detention.

In 2008, Alison Klayman, then 24, an American freelancing as a journalist in Beijing, met Weiwei and began filming a 20-minute video to accompany one of his art shows. Before long, the project developed into a feature documentary, and she followed him on his travels within and beyond China for the next two years. The affinity that developed between them might be attributed to a shared sensibility, openness, and curiosity, but perhaps also to a social activism born of their individual family stories. Weiwei and his father, the modernist poet Ai Qing, survived the disgrace, exile, and punishment intellectuals suffered during the Cultural Revolution. Klayman is the first journalist in a family of lawyers with a pronounced labor rights history, and her mother, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, broke barriers by becoming the first woman to graduate from Columbia University. It is impossible to watch Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry and not be impressed by the heart, attitude, confidence, resourcefulness, and bravery of its charismatic subject—characteristics shared by his enterprising young director. On a swing through Chicago Klayman spoke with me about her journey to documenting the larger-than- life figure who ranks high among the greatest living artists.     

Andrea Gronvall:  When you were first going to China, you were planning just a five-month trip with friends. Were your parents supportive when you decided to learn Mandarin and work as a journalist in Beijing?

Alison Klayman:  Going to China was certainly an adventure, especially since I had to no background in China. They came to visit me maybe four months in, and that was when I said to them, “You know, I think I’m going to stay.” But Beijing is an incredibly cosmopolitan city compared to their old images of China, and they were impressed with how I could already speak enough Mandarin to get us in cabs, and order food, and stuff like that. They’ve always been incredibly supportive, although there were times they wondered, “Are you sure you’re going to be able to find a job?” I just thought that in China, at the worst you could always teach English, which I never had to do. For journalism, it’s one of the few places where you could make a living freelancing, if there was going to be any interest.

AG:  Before you did that, you worked at a number of odd jobs. What was your oddest job in Beijing before you got accredited as a journalist working in radio?

AK:  I think the funniest job was working for a German artist named Wolfgang Stiller, making C-class dummies for a movie called John Rabe, which was about Nanjing in World War II; Steve Buscemi was in it. We built about 50 dead bodies—men, women, and children. C-class dummies means they’re not for close-ups; they’re for wider shots, and shown strewn about, crushed by tanks, whatever. We weren’t an official props company, but he was an artist who did a lot of sculpture, and so we’d make heads, hands, feet, and then add them to foam bodies. And after so much counting, making sure we had enough pairs of hands and enough pairs of feet, I was like, I’m going to have dreams about body parts!

But I think the job I turned down to do that was even funnier, which was arranging an event in Harbin, that was going to be an ice ballet of luxury cars; it was a weekend event designed to encourage rich people to buy these SUVs. But I thought, I don’t really believe in that very much, so I guess I’d rather do the dummies job.

AG:  So, once you signed on to make a film about Weiwei, you followed him around for two years; you shot over 200 hours of video; you traveled to seven countries, eleven cities. And you brought it in for, what, about $500,000?

AK:  Yeah–under a million, yeah.

AG:  And you got funding in part from Agnes Gund from New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Given the travel budget alone, where else did you get funding from, and how did you arrange it?

AK:  First of all, I was living in Beijing, and because I shot most of the film, that side of it was very low-cost. So travel was really almost the only expense that we had, but he traveled a lot and I felt that footage was really important. And I had a fiscal sponsor in New York, The Hazen Polsky Foundation. They support films about art and artists; their last film before mine was Herb and Dorothy, about two regular folks who collected art in their little New York apartment. But I was pretty much off the radar before I came back to New York, and started meeting people. And then all of a sudden Weiwei was detained, and it became a very large story, and I was on The Colbert Report and doing a lot of press—more about Weiwei’s story, less about the film, because the film wasn’t even finished.

AG:  While you were doing that, did you ever feel the lines between journalism and activism were getting blurred? Or to put it another way:  because of the close working relationship you had developed with Weiwei, was it ever hard to keep your objectivity?

AK:  I think that was sort of a game changer when that happened. I was incredibly uncomfortable talking about his situation, coming on as Alison Klayman, who has this background. I feel that one of the most important things about doing the film the way I did was being off the radar. Even though I was an accredited journalist, I was not accredited with the BBC or New York Times; I wasn’t high profile. I felt that this was really important, to not be important. But I also felt that it was important to speak out against something that was incredibly and very clearly unjust. I didn’t know that it was going to be an 81-day detention.

AG:  At what time during post-production did you realize you would have to hold off completing the film until the aftermath of Weiwei’s detention?

AK:  In the first probably week or two, the problem was we were sort of full steam ahead:  Weiwei was supposed to come to New York at the beginning of May for the installation of his Zodiac Heads at Grand Army Plaza and we wanted to show that. So as you can imagine, we sort of put the breaks on everything. After he was detained it was really hard to work on the film; then finally my editor and I started watching the footage again, and I was just crying over the happy scenes, wondering what is Weiwei eating now, what is he sleeping on. At some point—because we didn’t know if the detention was going to be years and years—we realized that we had to go forward, because quite frankly this film could do good for raising awareness, and also, when you are so powerless it feels like the only thing you can do is to share his story.

AG:  There are a lot of tense moments in your film, like the sequence in the Chengdu police station, where the cops want your footage. How did you pull off that tape switch, without them being suspicious? And were there other close calls?

AK:  In Beijing, there was never any of that kind of conflict. All of the close calls were in Chengdu; it was a couple of different trips, and it was because we were in seats of authority. In that one I was able to film about 30 minutes, 40 minutes, and then the special cops who speak English came, and said, we want to see your I.D. I said that I left it in the car—which was true–and they told me to go get it. So I brought the camera with me, and I switched the tape. And there were other instances where they wanted to confiscate a tape, and I managed to switch it right before they came to take it. You learned to switch tapes frequently.

I think the film adds punctuation to a period in Weiwei’s life:  the preceding few years of a rapid rise in his career; his activism; his clashes with the government. I also think it provides a valuable lesson in showing a little bit about modern China:  this is how it is.

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The Gronvall Files: Red Lights

Thursday, July 26th, 2012

CILLIAN MURPHY AND RODRIGO CORTES ON THEIR PSYCHIC THRILLER RED LIGHTS

Although he doesn’t think of these as primarily genre films, Cillian Murphy has starred in a few:  the dark sci-fi vision Sunshine and the modern horror classic 28 Days Later (both for director Danny Boyle); Wes Craven’s terror-in-the-skies thriller Red Eye; and possibly the best comic book hero screen adaptations to date, Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and the epic finale The Dark Knight Rises. Now the Irish actor tackles the paranormal in the craftily plotted Red Lights, Millennium Entertainment’s new thriller by Spanish writer/director Rodrigo Cortes, who two years ago made a big splash with his English-language debut, Buried. Murphy plays Tom Buckley, a scientific investigator who assists the eminent Dr. Margaret Matheson (Sigourney Weaver) in her life’s work of exposing self-proclaimed psychics as the con artists they really are.

 Key to the scientists’ method is their focus on “red lights,” those telltale signs in the purported psychic’s surroundings that indicate something’s not kosher. But after a string of successes, the pair come up against Matheson’s old nemesis, the wealthy blind mentalist and media darling Simon Silver (Robert De Niro), who has re-emerged from a long retirement for one last public tour. What follows is a showdown between the forces of good and evil, where mysterious, frightening, and potentially dangerous events occur. Are these manifestations of Silver’s extrasensory abilities, or are they stunts engineered by the best that money can hire?

 As the battle wages, the film develops a distinctly paranoid atmosphere, redolent of such 1970s conspiracy thrillers as Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men and The Parallax View, two Cortes cites as influences. On a recent stopover in Chicago he and Murphy shared their thoughts on what makes Red Lights glow.

 Andrea Gronvall:  Red Lights is a movie of and for these times, because so much of the story is about lies, and the debunking of lies. Channel surf the television news programs, read the newspapers: over and over again—not just in America, but around the globe—the “man on the street” being interviewed is so angry because we’ve been lied to so often by politicians, by bankers and industrialists, by sports heroes, and so on. Even Oprah Winfrey got incensed after she showcased the author of what turned out to be a fictionalized memoir. So, Cillian, Tom is very interesting, because he combines the zeal of a scientific investigator with the outrage of the fed-up average citizen. Did you have any particular people or sources in mind as you fleshed out this character?

Cillian Murphy:  Well, first of all, I’m really glad that you had that interpretation of the movie because it’s dead right. And I think that the De Niro character is obviously a sort of magician/psychic/faith healer/televangelist, but there’s also the aspect of the politician, isn’t it, that we’ve been talking about?

Rodrigo Cortes: Yeah.

CM:  But, no, the character didn’t really need fleshing out from what was on the page because it was so strong; it was all there on the page when I read it. You bring to it whatever you can in terms of, I don’t know, your take on life and your energy as a human being. What jumped out at me about Tom were the themes of self-acceptance and obsession, because those I think are sort of the twin engines for him, and everybody can identify with that. When you take away the setting of this sort of paranormal world, or this sort of genre, and just talk about the characters—that, to me, is what I’m always interested in:  character. I’ve been in a few science fiction or genre movies, but I never thought I was, I always just thought about the characters.

 

AG:  Well, the characters are indeed what pull us into the movie’s world of paranormal activity and investigation; the actors do all the work of creating the chills that, in other films, CGI would provide.

Sigourney Weaver has a few scenes that are very striking, where her character has to come clean about her own beliefs, or lack of religious beliefs, and why she has kept her comatose son on life support for so many years. That struggle with religion lends the story more gravitas than that found in most movies about the paranormal. If this is not too personal a question, Rodrigo, are you religious? Because there’s definitely a religious subtext to your film.

 

RC:  I wouldn’t describe myself as religious because I find religions to be useful in living a very emotional way. Which doesn’t mean that I’m a rationalist. I’m not interested in believing as a concept, but in understanding. Let me try to explain it this way: if you ask me, for instance, do you believe in the supernatural, I would tell you no, because I don’t feel that nature can be transcended, and I don’t feel nature can transcend itself. Even the unexplainable has to live in those margins, the margins of nature. If you ask me about the paranormal, if you describe paranormal as a group of phenomena is search of an explanation, I would tell you, well, there are things out there that cannot be explained—yet. Hopefully, one day we will have the tools to explain them.

 

But it’s not about being against, or for, religion. If you believe in God, that’s a belief. If you’re an atheist, that’s another belief, because you cannot prove that God doesn’t exist. And people are used to dealing with beliefs, and I’m not that interested in believing. For instance, even if you have a very solid presence of God, you should try to understand him, not to believe in him. That’s what I mean. It is a way of thinking, and a way of trying to digest reality, a way of trying to question everything, seeing everything as if it were completely new, so you have your own personal approach to things.

 

AG:  Red Lights is a cross between a supernatural thriller and a crime mystery about a suspected con man. When you’re writing such a complex story, what kind of safeguards do you rely on so that all the details stay in synch, and you’re not left with gaping plot holes or loose ends?

 

RC:  I never use treatments, because I know where I’m going, but still I want to find an organic way to get there. Listening to my characters and listening to the way they would react logically, sometimes you find a better way to get there than the one you planned. But once you finish your final draft, in a way you understand for the very first time what you really want to do with the film. And in the rewrites, you can do all these technical things, because now you have all the elements, you have the ending, you know exactly what you are going to do, so you can plan certain things, or see certain things, or close loose ends, or whatever. So, the second part is more technical, but it comes out of a process that involves a lot of reflection, but also a lot of organic life.

 

AG:  I know when your film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival that there was some controversy over the ending. Without venturing anywhere near spoilers, I just want to say I don’t agree with the naysayers. There are clues throughout Red Lights that lead the viewer to the logic of the narrative’s conclusion. It’s all there if you’re paying attention.

 

RC:  I like to say that movie making is a kind of magic; it works by misdirection. You keep the audience looking at your left hand, so they don’t see what the right hand is up to.

 

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The Gronvall Files: Actress Elizabeth Banks on People Like Us

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2012

Looking at the roster of titles this year that star Elizabeth Banks, one of Hollywood’s hardest working actresses, it’s a mystery where she ever finds time to sleep. As Effie Trinket, she made an indelible entrance in the spring blockbuster The Hunger Games, setting the movie’s tone of dystopia, then pulled off the neat hat trick of making her initially odious character almost sympathetic by the end. Banks also portrayed a smart, tough cop in the thriller Man on a Ledge, and a pregnant author in the comedy What to Expect While You’re Expecting. Now she’s on screen as the female lead in the drama People Like Us, a DreamWorks Pictures release. It’s one of the meatiest roles of her career. She plays Frankie, a single mother and recovering alcoholic in L.A., whose numerous defenses are challenged when she’s befriended by a stranger named Sam (Chris Pine), who’s in town for the funeral of his father, a famous record producer. What Frankie doesn’t know is what Sam has only just learned: she is Sam’s half-sister, part of a secret family dad had on the side for years, before leaving abruptly and without explaining to Frankie. The aftermath of his undisclosed bigamy has left Frankie emotionally scarred.

Banks, a Massachusetts native and Democrat, stopped in Chicago recently for an event on behalf of the campaign to re-elect President Barack Obama. “They reached out because I blogged about some things that they care about,” she explains. Ever the pro, she managed to carve out some time beforehand to talk about her new film, which is directed by Alex Kurtzman, from a screenplay he wrote with long-time partner Roberto Orci (Star Trek, Transformers Prime) and their friend Jody Lambert.

Andrea Gronvall:  People Like Us has a few surface similarities to another film that’s out now, Your Sister’s Sister, about two half-sisters whose philandering father wreaked domestic havoc through his multiple marriages. But the movie that your film resembles most is the 2003 documentary My Architect, about the eminent architect Louis I. Kahn, who died in 1974. It’s a memoir by his son, Nathaniel Kahn, who only found out much later that his dad had–

Elizabeth Banks:  A secret family?

AG:  Two  secret families! And as I watched People Like Us, I was reminded how there are more and more movies about broken families, the damage done, and the impulse to create new bonds where old ones have collapsed. The tag line on your movie’s poster is “Find Your Family.” And the way you play a character with these abandonment issues, you hit all the documented steps of anger, distrust, risky behavior, and—

EB:  Self-medicating.

AG:  Yet at the same time Frankie has formidable survival skills.

EB:  Yes, she does. She is a survivor; I mean, that’s what I really hooked into: that despite everything, she is a put-one-foot-in-front-of-the-other, pragmatic person. That’s humanity, in my opinion. We’re not that kind to each other, and a lot of people have walls up. It’s very hard to ask for help; it’s very hard to face your demons. Frankie is a type-A personality, who sometimes feels the weight of the world, like Jesus, but keeps soldiering on, and I think a lot of people can relate to that.

Ultimately for me this story is about mourning. At the beginning of the movie they lose their father, and they spend the entire movie mourning that loss. It’s not so much the loss of him as the lost opportunities to have closure, to see him again. I think that Frankie always imagined she would run into him, and scream at him until she was blue in the face, and just feel, “Alright, relief! I get to tell this fucker what he did to me.” And she won’t have that chance. But at the end of the day we also want to believe that our daddy loved us.

I feel very grateful that in my life I have great parents. I love my parents. But they weren’t perfect, and there was definitely some damage—there’s damage in every family. Because kids want their parents to be perfect, and we blame them for everything, whether they deserve it or not.

AG:  It’s surprising how entertaining People Like Us is overall. Sure, it has its humorous moments, balance for the more gut-wrenching scenes. But its undercurrents are quite dark throughout, and the viewer gets really pulled in. A big part of that is of course due to your chemistry with Chris Pine, but there’s also the look of the film.

EB:  Yeah, it looks like a beautiful, “old school” Hollywood adult movie. [To prepare] we talked a lot about Kramer vs. Kramer, the vibe of old Robert Benton movies in general, and old James L. Brooks movies. There’s a real sophistication about it.

AG:  Tell me a little bit about Alex Kurtzman’s working method with his actors. This is his debut directorial effort. How extensive were rehearsals? Does he like multiple takes?

EB:  Yes, this is his first time directing, but he has spent a lot of time on movie sets. He is an old pro in this business. It’s always a concern when you work with a writer-director–and I’ve worked with a lot of them–that the writer in them is going to be very precious about the words. And I was very grateful that Alex was not. I have great respect for great writing; this was a beautiful script, beautiful characters, a very personal story, well told. So it wasn’t that I didn’t want the words, but you always also want to feel free everyday, and that you can trust in everybody, and that he can trust me—enough that even if I say something he didn’t write, it’s still Frankie. And he had a really great vision, and actresses want to believe in where a movie is going. Because when we’re done on set, like we give it up, it’s out of our hands. So trust is the most important thing; I had ultimate trust in him.

AG: You and your husband Max Handelman have established your own company, Brownstone Productions. How many years has it been a going concern?

EB:  About five, I think. Our first movie was Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis, and that The Walt Disney Company made; we were sort of the junior producers on that one. And our first feature that is truly our baby has come out terrific; it’s called Pitch Perfect, and it’s a comedy set in the world of competitive collegiate a cappella singing, with a great young cast led by Oscar nominee Anna Kendrick. We’re very excited, and we’re working hard to get that movie ready for the world to see on October 5. It’s very funny, about a group of misfits who want to win a championship, and just sing and dance their way to glory.

AG:  Can you sing?

EB:  Yes, I can.

AG:  Have you done musicals?

EB:  I have done musicals in my theater past, yes.

AG:  You say “your theater past,” but what about theater in your future?

EB:  I would want to do a movie musical because you record everything in a studio, and it’s very safe. An actual musical theater production? I think it’s probably out there for me somewhere, but maybe not in my near future. It’s such a huge commitment, frankly. You know: sleep all the time, drink tea with lemon, rest your voice. It’s a real lifestyle commitment, and I have a young son now, so I cannot be doing eight shows a week anytime soon.

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The Gronvall Files: Lorene Scafaria on Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

Sunday, July 1st, 2012

Romance and the Apocalypse: Writer-Director Lorene Scafaria on Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

In writer and first-time director Lorene Scafaria’s new Focus Features release Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, a giant asteroid is on a collision track with Earth, and all global high-tech efforts to divert the oncoming disaster have failed. With everyone facing only weeks left to live, an insurance salesman named Dodge (Steve Carell) is deserted by his wife (Nancy Carell) and most of his co-workers—although not his maid, who diligently reminds him to buy more window cleaner. As society rapidly unravels, he meets his resourceful, nonconformist neighbor Penny (Keira Knightley), and they agree to a road trip together, sort of one last pilgrimage before dying: she’ll help Dodge reconnect with a long-lost love, if he’ll help Penny get back to her family.

A hybrid of science fiction, romantic comedy, and road movie, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is notably high-concept. It’s also as upbeat a reflection on the apocalypse that you’ll likely ever see. And as a date night movie (which it is, in its own odd way) it’s fresh and seductive, like the 2008 charmer Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, whose screenplay Scafaria also penned.

Throughout the movie Dodge and Penny try to remain focused, despite the numerous distractions supporting characters present. A bickering married couple (Robb Corddry and Connie Britton) throws a hedonistic dinner party where the guests range from the debauched (Patton Oswalt) to the sweet but dim (Melanie Lynskey). Rioters plague the streets, so a noisy chain restaurant called Friendsy’s seems like a haven, although its party-hearty, buff staff is unusually welcoming. I asked Scafaria during her own recent promotional road trip why she chose to layer this bittersweet love story within vignettes of people going haywire.

“I thought a lot about what anybody would do, if we’re all facing our mortality at the exact same time—which obviously is a different circumstance than just one man dying,” she replied. “I thought about who would be the best characters for that scenario–like an Everyman who’s been sleepwalking through life, sort of half-dead. And who’d be the best person to pull him out, and take him along on the ride of a lifetime. I’ve been trying to write these kinds of characters for a long time, and using the backdrop of the end of the world was a chance also to explore all these other people they meet along the way.”

   Scafaria, a trim, long-haired brunette with China doll bangs, a sharp sense of humor, and an intent gaze, started laughing:  “And I thought, if this were happening to me, I would go over to my friend’s house for a dinner party that would get weird really fast. We’d have a great time, and everybody would be cracking up. Some people would be doing heroin, and other people would want to be wasted the whole time—just sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, why not? Nothing wrong with it, in a way.”

Then she turned serious again:  “But I know what I would be like. I would go for love, I would go for a relationship, and I’d look for friends. Death is inevitable, and it is the great equalizer, so the idea that [when that moment comes] you could just be looking into the eyes of the person you love, that is a happy ending to me. In college I used to study poetry, and a lot of elegies. So I was always thinking of this movie as an elegy, something that starts in such a dark place, takes us on a journey, and then, hopefully, ends in a sort of uplifting moment,” She laughed, conceding, “Even though, obviously, it’s still dark.”

One of the funniest–and loveliest–scenes in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is when Dodge and Penny stop at that diner called Friendsy’s. The scene has a tender undercurrent because it’s where we first see that the two are falling in love. But I thought Scafaria called the restaurant “Friendsy’s” because it sounds like “frenzies,” which exactly describes what’s on offer, since the servers have impulsively added group sex to the menu. So I asked Scafaria how she came up with the name, and she shot back, laughing,  “I don’t know! When Friday’s said no, and then shockingly, Appleby’s, and all the rest who were not interested? ‘Our restaurant: where you come to feast and dine before you die.’ Really? When do I get to go?”

Our talk turned to casting. Keira Knightley has been in so many weighty movies of late that it’s refreshing to see her in this film as such an exuberant, playful character. I wondered if Scafaria set out to upend audience expectations by casting Knightley in a role that’s zanier than Steve Carell’s.

The director admitted that was the case. “I was excited by movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where Jim Carrey–who’d never been seen like that before, who becomes almost invisible in that movie, he’s so good–takes a back seat to Kate Winslet, who’d been known for playing different [more serious] parts, yet suddenly has the loopy role. I remember wanting to take a page from that, and have a comedic actor who could play a more guarded character. I used to love watching Steve Carell go from zero to 60 in the course of an episode of The Office, but I also love him as a much more still character–because that to me is when he shines the most, in things like Dan in Real Life and Little Miss Sunshine. The idea behind pairing him with Keira was to convey that she is this sort of old soul, and he’s sort of a young man, and so the notion that she would light a fire under him fit. I also think that when you’re that great an actress, you already have good comic timing built in.”

   Scafaria is now two for two with romances that resonate. Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist is a favorite of mine; it exquisitely captures what it’s like to fall in love for the first time. As its title suggests, it’s about a couple with time and time ahead of them {assuming their love stays true). With Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, we watch two older people who, after several false starts, finally find true love, but they’ll have much less time together.

“Just so you know,” Scafaria interjected, “that was a completely conscious decision after writing Nick & Norah’s. I loved that story; I loved that it could go on forever. But what I wanted to write next was something that had an end to it; like, what if you took “forever” off the table, how that would affect the dynamic. I was desperate to write something with a loud ticking clock, and I couldn’t think of a louder one than this.”

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The Gronvall Files: Lynn Shelton

Wednesday, June 20th, 2012

Built for Speed: An Interview with Lynn Shelton, Director of Your Sister’s Sister

Seattle-born filmmaker Lynn Shelton earned acclaim for her first two features—We Go Way Back (2006) won the Slamdance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize, and My Effortless Brilliance (2008) received an Independent Spirit Award—but her breakout film was Humpday (2009), which netted her another Independent Spirit Award, as well as the Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Prize. Writer, editor, producer, director, and occasionally actress—she was beguiling as a bisexual free spirit in Humpday, and has a cameo in Colin Trevorrow’s Safety Not Guaranteed—she employs a highly collaborative approach to filmmaking, encouraging her actors to build recognizable and relatable characters through extensive improvisation. In her latest work, the IFC Films release Your Sister’s Sister, she re-teams with Humpday star Mark Duplass, who plays Jack, a man still grieving the loss of his brother a year ago. Best friend Iris (Emily Blunt), his brother’s former girlfriend, takes pity and sends him alone on a retreat to her family’s cabin on an island in the Pacific Northwest. What she doesn’t know is that her lesbian half-sister Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt) has already moved in, trying to get over a romantic breakup. After a night of slamming back tequila shots, things quickly get complicated for the new roomies. Shelton stopped in Chicago recently to talk about her working method, and the ways in which she’s branching out as a director.

Andrea Gronvall:  How did you come up with the title of the film?

Lynn Shelton:  It was really hard! I had lists and lists of names, so I just asked friends for help. But I like it, because ita bit of a puzzle; you have to think about it for a second. It indicates three people: there’s a person saying “your sister’s sister,” and then there are the two sisters, and either sister could be the subject.

AG:  There aren’t that many filmmakers who excel at improvisation; movie production is so expensive that doing things on the fly is not for the faint of heart. Of course there have been great directors, like John Cassavetes and Mike Leigh, whose films are heavily improvised, but in a lot of movies improvised stretches often wind up looking like mistakes, like the actors are winging it because the script wasn’t ready. What attracts you to improv?

LS:  First of all, I think everybody works with improv in their own fashion, and what I don’t like to do is just to show up on set and say, “Hey, what are we going to do today?” I have a very clear goal in mind for each scene, so by the time we get to set we really know what the scene is about, and, even more importantly, we know who these people are, what their back stories are—everything that’s happened before that scene takes place. With Your Sister’s Sister I had a script, I had dialogue written out, but I asked the actors not to memorize it. Sometimes they would just slightly alter a line, or sometimes they would change a whole line. Maybe 25 per cent of the movie is from lines that I wrote, so the vast majority of it is not. But there’s a very specific trajectory that needs to be followed, and so even though the dialogue itself may be improvised, the movie is not, if that makes sense. We’re not coming up with the [entire] movie on set; we’re just coming up with the specific.

And the other thing, for me, is that I’m an editor by trade. So I try to create a really emotionally safe environment and a relationship of trust with my actors, so that they know I’m not going to let them look bad on screen. And they can go ahead and take risks and put themselves out there to find their way, with the assurance I’m going to cut stuff out, and just put the gems on screen.

And the last thing I have to say, is that—and I don’t know if you were referring to this or not—I’ve seen what you’re talking about in comedies, and I don’t want my actors to know they’re in a comedy. In fact, I didn’t know how funny Your Sister’s Sister would be. The same thing is true of Humpday, believe it or not. I knew there would be some funniness, but I didn’t know for sure how much, because we’re playing it dead straight on set. I don’t want people reaching for jokes, or feeling like they have to be entertaining. I want them to be playing to the truth of the scene and of the moment.

AG:  Given your method, do you prefer to shoot in chronological order as much as possible?

LS:  I do, and Humpday was shot totally in order, Later we re-shot a couple of things, including the very first scene, and that was actually for a camera issue. And the plan was to shoot Your Sister’s Sister in order, but we lost our original Hannah a few days before the shoot. Rachel Weisz had to bow out due to scheduling issues, and so when we got Rosemarie DeWitt, it was a total blessing and she saved our butts, but she was in production on a TV show, The United States of Tara. Her dear producers very kindly amended her schedule enough that we could do it. But we still lost two days, plus we only had her for a certain time, so we had to shoot things out of order.

And you know it was good for me, because I learned two things: (1) that you can replace actors, even when you’ve worked so hard with a particular set of people that it feels like developing the movie both with and for them; and (2) that shooting out of order doesn’t necessarily screw it all up, and sometimes works better because you discover something about what you’re aiming for.

Ideally, I would still love to be able to shoot in order; there’s something so organic about it. I just shot a new movie called Touchy Feely and it was my longest shoot–it was 20 whole days—and with multiple story lines, a lot of characters, and many locations. I felt like it was time to do that because I had made three movies in a row with three characters and one location. But we still didn’t have a lot of time, and so we had to shoot really out of order; we’d be in one location, so we’d have to shoot all of the scenes that took place there. It really made me long for shooting chronologically.

AG:  Tell me about Touchy Feely.

LS:  The core is a dysfunctional family unit, sibling-based. Rosemarie DeWitt and Josh Pais play brother and sister who are at odds, but what bonds them together is his daughter, her niece, played by Ellen Page, who’s in a very co-dependent relationship with her father, and her aunt is kind of trying to set her free. Allison Janney, Ron Livingston, and Scoot McNairy are also in it. Structurally, it’s very different than the last few films I’ve made; it feels more dramatic to me. But I’m always that way. With every film I don’t know how much humor there’s going to be.

AG: Your Sister’s Sister and Humpday both are sort of chamber pieces. Does scale for you dictate the intimate nature of a subject, or does the subject dictate the scale of the movie?

LS: They go hand in hand. I do really love that microcosmic approach to filmmaking; my fascination is the self and how we perceive others, and how our perceptions of our selves and others are challenged when we find that our limits are different than what we had thought. I’m so drawn to how people want to connect, but can’t, for whatever reason. It’s a lot easier to focus on that in a chamber piece, when you have something that’s just really bare bones. The vast majority of your time can be spent on finding the scene, as opposed to lighting, or moving to a new location, or spending an entire day setting up the perfect crane shot, [which] is not where my passion lies when I’m on set.

AG: There’s a big difference between directing film and directing TV, as you know, because you’ve directed an episode of Mad Men. The difference in pace between TV and film production is astonishing.

LS: That’s actually not true for me. I work so fast, and Mad Men was insanely fast! In fact, having just worked on Mad Men gave me the confidence that I could do Your Sister’s Sister after losing two days of shooting. I was already terrified that we weren’t going to get what we needed in 14 days, and then it was down to 12, and I was like, I am not going to be able to get the footage, I’m not going to be able to do it. But I’d just been on Mad Men, a job I’d been lobbying to get. They gave it to me and I thought, oh my God, I hope I can do this. I’d only been up in the hinterlands making little micro-budget films in my own weird way; I had no idea if my skills set was going to transfer. But directing is directing, and the crew told me, “You were one of the fastest directors we’ve ever worked with.” And then I did New Girl last year, and it was again the same thing. I’m sort of built for that kind of speed, as it turns out. I think it’s also my editing background, because I really know what I need, and when I have it, and when to move on. Because I know that somewhere in the takes—maybe not in all one perfect single take, which is what I think some directors try to look for–is the take I need. I don’t sweat the master to death, I just get a couple of those [shots] to use at the beginning and the end. As an editor—I’m editing my new movie, too—I don’t want to slog through 30 takes; I just want four good ones. That’s all I need.

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The Gronvall Files: Safety Not Guaranteed’s Colin Trevorrow

Tuesday, June 19th, 2012

Director Colin Trevorrow Takes Some Risks with Safety Not Guaranteed

 

Safety Not Guaranteed is one of this summer’s delightful surprises, an offbeat science fiction comedy that’s not the least bit dystopian. Challenged by his editor at a Seattle magazine to come up with a compelling story idea, manipulative reporter Jeff (Jake Johnson) pitches investigating an anonymous classified ad that was placed by someone who wants a companion for traveling back in time. With two interns—the cynical Darius (Aubrey Plaza) and the buttoned-up Indian Arnau (Karan Soni)—in tow as backup, Jeff tracks down the mystery man, a small-town supermarket clerk named Kenneth (Mark Duplass). Loner Kenneth is clearly paranoid about his secret project, but lets down his guard when Darius goes undercover and auditions to be his time travel partner. As the journalists chase their story, they find more than what they expected.

Vermont-based Colin Trevorrow makes his feature directorial debut, working from a screenplay by his long-time writing partner Derek Connolly, whom he first met in a comedy writing class at New York University, and interned with on Saturday Night Live. In Chicago to preview Safety Not Guaranteed for students at DePaul University, the director took time out to talk about this new Film District release.

Andrea Gronvall:  I remember as a kid watching an old syndicated after-school TV serial called Journey to the Beginning of Time, in which four boys on a boat discover that as they travel further along the water, they’re also going back to a prehistoric era. Like many children, I was keen on dinosaurs, so that show really fired my imagination. Did the fantasy of time travel grab you as a youngster?

Colin Trevorrow:  Yes. I think the first time travel story that I can remember has to be Voyagers. I don’t remember that much, but it was about a little boy and either his father or guardian of some kind, and they had a compass that would take them through time. It was sort of like Quantum Leap. Seeing a little kid go on that particular adventure fascinated me. Then when Back to the Future came out, that was the be-all, end-all cult movie experience; I fell so deeply in love with it. That movie, and another called Flight of the Navigator, had beautiful emotional beats and cores as to why the main characters were traveling back through time. In the first you’re dealing with someone who wants to make sure his parents fall in love, and in the second a kid wants to return home so he can live the childhood that he missed.

I remember seeing Time Bandits, sitting on the floor in a packed theater. I would say those movies, and the tone of those movies, grabbed me. I’ve written several time travel scripts for various studios, partially because I was interested in the stories, partially because they saw I wrote the first one and figured, “Oh, this guy likes time travel.” I’m so glad I got to make this one of my ideas, because you can’t keep doing this. This is likely going to be my [one produced] time travel story, and I’m proud of it, because I feel it really is about the emotional needs that a time travel narrative satisfies, as opposed to, you know, running around shooting dinosaurs with shotguns and stuff.

AG:  I’m glad you brought up tone, because mastery of tone is tricky, something that can elude even veteran filmmakers. But in your debut feature you’ve created this supple comic tone that ripples from caustic to tender, from wondrous to skeptical. The film has a hipster flavor, and yet at the same time it’s moving in a humanistic way, one that harks back to works from earlier decades. How did you pull it off? That’s not something you can storyboard.

CT:  No, it’s not. And I think we’ll probably start seeing a lot of this with filmmakers, or anyone my age, reacting to so many great people that came before. There’s this great tap dancer, Savion Glover—his tap dancing style is a combination of Gregory Hines and other amazing dancers, and he’s put their steps into this new thing that feels totally fresh. And I think that’s like this movie, and the tone of this movie.

You can tell that I grew up in the Eighties, that Steven Spielberg–Robert Zemeckis–Richard Donner school. I love Richard Donner very much, and yet I love Francois Truffaut, and Billy Wilder, and Woody Allen. And I actually love Mark Duplass’s movies and their naturalism, and wanted to bring that into Safety Not Guaranteed as well. And I felt Aubrey Plaza represents a very modern kind of disaffected young female character, who feels there’s nothing for her in the world, so that’s an element I also added. Combining all of these things into one could have been an awful mess, but I don’t think it is.

AG:  No, it’s not a mash-up.

CT:  It doesn’t feel like a mash-up at all; it feels both modern and anachronistic in its own way, like a throwback to the way films were in the Eighties–but only because we take time to let the movie breathe. I write studio films, and you’re not allowed to do that anymore, you’ve got to keep the plot going. And we took like a 15-minute break from the plot in this movie, and just let these characters hang out and fall in love and discover things. I guess that’s where maybe the hipster side comes in: “hipster quirky,” or whatever the label. I don’t even know what hipster means anymore. But I can’t apologize for wanting to spend time with these characters and learn what’s really going on with them, outside of this cool time travel story.

AG:  That turns out to be seductive, in that you’re leading the viewer to become more transfixed by what’s unfolding.

CT:  It’s not 15 minutes away from the story, but it is 15 minutes away from the plot. I had to have a certain amount of confidence that it was going to work, and yet, at the end, hopefully we deliver in a way that we earned, and also in a way that allows people to be glad that we spend much of the movie with people that we care about, and want to see win. I think the “want-to-win” factor is massive in this. If you don’t want them to succeed, this movie dies.

AG: Your casting certainly helps us root for the characters, what with the skills of Aubrey Plaza, Mark Duplass, Jake Johnson, and your discovery of—

CT:  Karan Soni.

AG:  –who is so cute and so sweet. In old movies there’s this tradition involving the egghead girl with glasses, where she has to lose the glasses so the hero can realize, “Oh, there’s a woman there.” And that moment in Safety Not Guaranteed when Arnau’s glasses come off, we get to see his profile and his long eyelashes—

CT: This guy is amazing looking. It was a tough part. We knew that we were starting that character as a caricature, to a certain extent, and wanted to break that down—not necessarily break down the stereotype, but break out a character that wasn’t real, and turn him into someone very real. And that’s something that you have to beg a lot of forgiveness from the audience for, in that I think for some people that may be very off-putting:  “Oh, it’s the nerdy Indian guy again.” But when you look back on your own life and you think about how much of a momentous occasion your first kiss was, that instant that occurs in this movie might seem small, but for this character is a turning point that could change the direction of his whole life. It’s a Back to the Future moment.

AG:  Did you always see this as a widescreen movie?

CT:  That was something that was very important to me all along. And we shot widescreen with Panavision lenses from the late Seventies, early Eighties, even though we used a video camera, the Sony F3, which had come out about a week before we started. It’s a great camera, even with the flaws that ended up existing—like, there’s grain in the movie.

AG:  The grain is good. It feels like a 16mm film.

CT:  I was hoping it felt like a Super 16mm movie. That was always the goal in using widescreen, even though we weren’t shooting anamorphic—we didn’t have that luxury as we were covering 32 locations in 24 days. I think it makes the close-ups that much more effective, too, in that we’re not always up in everyone’s face, so whenever we are, you know that something’s happening and you should be listening. We made a conscious effort, from the start to finish, to change the weight of the camera. It’s very handheld for the first half of the movie, and then it gets more graceful, and then when we get to the end, we’re pretty much ball on track, very fluid.

AG:  You took Safety Not Guaranteed to the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, and then to the inaugural Sundance London Film and Music Festival, How did the two experiences compare?

CT: Very, very different. The audiences in Sundance London were a little quieter, because they’re British, and yet more effusive in their praise one-on-one, and very articulate. That was nice. I took my father, and together we saw Prince Charles introduce his film [Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World, a documentary inspired by the Prince of Wales’s work in combating climate change]. We were deeply moved after we heard him speak; he’s brilliant. And Robert Redford said that when he mentioned Safety Not Guaranteed to him, Prince Charles said that it sounds like an interesting title. Sundance London was a wonderful experience.

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The Gronvall Files: Interview with Tanya Wexler, Director of Hysteria

Monday, May 21st, 2012

Unlike most of the starched, corseted, and repressed female characters that populate her new comedy Hysteria, filmmaker Tanya Wexler is comfortable in her own skin. The ebullient director, 41, who resides in New York with her wife and kids, is frank and funny, and radiated more health and positive energy during a return visit to her Chicago hometown than one would think possible in the middle of a multi-city promotional tour. The Sony Pictures Classics release is a period piece unlike anything you’ve seen before: Hugh Dancy stars as Dr. Mortimer Granville, an idealistic young doctor whose unusually forward thinking costs him job after job in Victorian-era London–until he lands a gig at the clinic of Dr. Robert Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce), who has built quite a practice curing respectable but frustrated women of the maladies that were then conveniently lumped under the catch-all term “hysteria.” His method? Manual manipulation of the client’s private parts—all in the name of science, of course, with everyone fully clothed. Before long the handsome new physician has become so popular with the ladies that he develops a bad case of carpal-tunnel syndrome. There are also the distractions—pleasant and not so—that are posed by Dr. Dalrymple’s daughters, the demure Emily (Felicity Jones), and the feisty suffragette Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal). But it’s Mortimer’s unconventional long-time friend and benefactor (Rupert Everett) who comes up with a handy solution:  the invention of the electric vibrator.

Andrea Gronvall:  Comedy is really tough to do well, but you seem to have a strategy. Hysteria starts as farce, when we meet down-on-his-luck Dr. Granville (Hugh Dancy) in the process of losing yet another job. Then, with the introduction of his best friend, the eccentric, aristocratic inventor Edmund St. John-Smythe (Rupert Everett), the movie shifts into a comedy of manners, and later forays into slapstick, showing the effects Edmund’s ingenious new invention has on Mortimer’s satisfied customers. And the laughs build throughout, right up to the tongue-in-cheek punchline at the end.

Tanya Wexler:  We drew a lot of inspiration from the great old screwball comedies of the thirties and forties. They layer in all kinds of comedic beats—the more broad, physical ones, the more witty repartee. If you think of most of the comedies Katharine Hepburn or Cary Grant made, there’s certainly banter, but [Howard Hawks’] Bringing Up Baby goes all over the map. And Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, one of my all-time favorite movies! Think of the physical comedy, and the wordplay, and then it has one of the best exit lines ever: “Nobody’s perfect.” It made me laugh–and want to make a movie that’s fun and entertaining, but with something to sink my teeth into.

AG:  But Hysteria is also warm and oddly endearing, maybe because almost all the characters, with their assorted flaws, are likable. A lot of that has to do with casting; you picked the right actors for each role. Take Maggie Gyllenhaal, for instance; she can project passion, steel, and vulnerability at the same time. Her headstrong character, Charlotte, is labeled “hysterical,” but Charlotte emerges as the most pragmatic and the clearest thinker of the lot.

TW:  She’s the truth-teller.

AG:  And Rupert Everett, Jonathan Pryce—what was your thinking in casting them”

TW:  I had an amazing casting director [Gaby Kester], but Rupert, Jonathan, Maggie, Hugh—they were all on my wish list. Jonathan was the first actor to come aboard, and when you have somebody like him attached, everyone knows what kind of movie it is, because he’s a class act, and he can do anything, really—dramas, comedies, musicals. He was our anchor: he stuck with us for years while we were trying to get this made.

AG:  I caught Hugh Dancy last November on Broadway in Venus in Fur—

TW:  I saw it—it’s such a good show!

AG:  —playing a character who’s attractive and highly intelligent, but who is also a bit clueless, and winds up swept away by a woman who’s stronger than he is. That’s kind of what happens to Dancy’s character in Hysteria, minus the darkness and the kink.

TW:  I saw Hugh in a production of Journey’s End several years ago; I’d seen him do comedy and romantic comedy in films, but it was that stage production more than anything else that sold me on him as an actor.

AG:  Speaking of the stage, I was lucky to view one of the best productions in the history of Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater, Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room or the vibrator play. It’s interesting that your film and her play came about at roughly the same time. Same subject, but the tone is very different. Your approach is more antic–more upbeat, certainly–more irreverent. Do you think that audiences are going to be surprised to learn that the vibrator was originally developed as a laborsaving device for male doctors?

TW:  That’s my joke! Yeah, the vibrator’s meant for a guy! That’s why guys shouldn’t be threatened now—like, “Dude, you’re tired, but that’s okay, take a break, it’s a member of your team.” I like power tools. I purposely didn’t see In the Next Room when we found out it was being developed in parallel, like [in the case of] the two movies about Truman Capote. My wife saw it, and said it’s really good, but not to worry, because it’s different. I didn’t want to unconsciously crib anything, but I’m dying to see it now, because there needs to be diversity, and the world can handle two works about the vibrator!

The joke is can you believe they really did this:  they really thought it wasn’t sex, both the women and the men. We delude ourselves; we’re in denial all the time. Once you make that your core, you engineer the rest of the movie out of that. The truth is the funniest thing of all.

AG:  Although show business is not the Wexler family’s only claim to fame, several of your relatives are in the movie industry. Your uncle Haskell Wexler is one of America’s most esteemed cinematographers. I met your filmmaker cousin Mark Wexler when his first documentary feature opened, and I also met your half-sister Daryl Hannah years ago at the Telluride Film Festival. Your family has a home around there?

TW:  We did. After my dad [Jerrold Wexler] passed away, my mom sold it. My mom [Susan Wexler] is here; she’s in the other room.

AG:  Ah! So, was it a given when you were growing up that you’d wind up in this business, or did you come to filmmaking via a circuitous route?

TW:  There was never any pressure. My dad and mom, like most parents, said, “We want you to do your best”–you know, to reach for things. My dad was successful in real estate here in Chicago. If I felt any pressure, it was just that of having a successful parent, and feeling what it means “to do your best” as a very high bar. It’s very hard not to internalize that, what “your best” means. Being the most successful in your community, or whatever? It’s intense, and I don’t think I ever really understood how much pressure [I created] for myself, in a way that can make you really driven. That can actually work against you, because really I think success is just getting on with it–like persistence, putting one foot in front of another.

I went for an undergraduate degree in psychology. I think my dad thought I was just as likely to go into business, or become a psychologist, as anything else. Growing up, my sisters and I were acting semi-professionally, in local Chicago stuff–something we all were passionate about, but that could have easily been almost a hobby. My mom was a huge theatre lover; she was on the board of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and we were always at the Goodman Theatre. And I was like a crazy groupie at Second City; I would go over and over again to classes. And I think that actually had as big an effect as anything. Because when you see work that moves you—some people just want that as the experience, but I always wanted to be a part of that. I remember a production of—was that the Organic [Theater Company]?—a production of Hamlet—

AG:  Wisdom Bridge Theatre. Aidan Quinn starred. Robert Falls directed.

TW:  —that Bob Falls directed, absolutely! [Costarring] Del Close, Byrne Piven. I was 13, 14, and, look:  I’ve got the chills, still! That production changed how I saw everything—to spray-paint “To be, or not to be” on the wall, to upend everything and still get the core of it right–that, as much as anything that my family did. It was probably my mom bringing me to the theatre that had the biggest impact. It’s also because she’s in the next room that I’m saying this.

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The Gronvall Files: BETWEEN TERENCE DAVIES AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA

Tuesday, April 10th, 2012

For a world-class filmmaker, Terence Davies keeps a fairly low profile; you’re not likely, for instance, to catch him chatting up Jay Leno on late-night TV (in part because the director/screenwriter dislikes travel and hardly ever watches television). He has channeled his energies into his work, from ruminative autobiographical features like Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, about Britain in the 1940s and 1950s, to his masterly adaptation of the Edith Wharton classic The House of Mirth (starring Gillian Anderson in one of her best movie roles), followed by the acclaimed documentary Of Time and the City, about his native Liverpool. His latest film is an adaptation of the Terence Rattigan stage drama The Deep Blue Sea, set in postwar London and starring Rachel Weisz as a married aristocrat who attempts suicide after forsaking all for love with a former RAF fighter pilot. Last autumn at the Toronto International Film Festival, Chicago-based distributor Music Box Films snapped up the U.S. rights; it’s the indie powerhouse’s first English-language title, following its successful releases of the French thriller Tell No One and the Swedish adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its two sequels. The Deep Blue Sea recently previewed at the Gene Siskel Film Center’s annual European Union Film Festival, prior to theatrical release, and Davies, 66, made a rare appearance, regaling the packed house for close to an hour with his memories, insights, and movie lore. He was also generous enough to sit down with me beforehand, where we talked about the craft of adapting a stage play for the screen.

Andrea Gronvall:  The differences between Terence Rattigan’s play and your film of The Deep Blue Sea are striking. You’re faithful to the essence of the play, but you’ve given a back-story to the marriage of the Collyers–Hester (Rachel Weisz) and Sir William (Simon Russell Beale). There’s no hint of Judge Collyer’s mom at all in the play, but there she is in your film, played with icy malignancy by Barbara Jefford, and in a flash we can intuit so much more about the problems this couple faced.

Terence Davies:  I wanted to see Hester in a social position where she’s clearly considered not good enough for this woman’s son. And how a 50-year-old can still call his mother “Mummy”—that’s peculiar to the upper classes in England. We always said “Mum,” or “Marm,” or “Ma’am;” we never said “Mummy,” after we stopped being like, eight or nine. I wanted to open the play a little, so that it wasn’t all a question of people [characters] telling you things. When you can show things, as you can in proper cinema, you don’t really need much of the first act [of the play]; the first act has been collapsed into nine minutes. I said as soon as we set it from Hester’s point of view, all that goes; anything she’s not privy to, we can’t have.

AG:  There are other characters–some of whom you’ve reduced to essentially walk-ons in the movie—that in the play exist primarily to indicate different strata of society, and how oppressive England was in the postwar years. But in the play some of those characters appear annoyingly offhand in their dealings with Hester.

TD:  They’re not convincing, for one simple reason: he [Rattigan] never lived in a bed-sit in Ladbroke Grove after the war. So these people are caricatures; [in the play] Mrs. Elton is a caricature of a landlady. They weren’t like that at all, those women who had houses that they let out into flats. In the play, for instance, Mrs. Elton tells Hester, you’re behind in the rent, but it doesn’t really matter. That would never have happened. You didn’t pay your rent, you were out, because there were no tenant rights; those people relied on that income. So, that had to be changed; that had to be made truer, because I can remember when my sisters got married and moved into these awful rooms. I know what the Fifties were like because I grew up then.

AG:  In the play, the domestic setting is described as dingy; in your film, we indeed get the point that because she has chosen to be with her jobless lover Freddie (Tom Hiddleston), Hester has come down in the world. But as the movie progresses, I didn’t experience their apartment as drab; it took on a sort of dusky glow, and a certain richness, maybe because under your direction the production designer (James Merifield) and cinematographer (Florian Hoffmeister) convey a sense of lives that are fully lived. Is that effect deliberate, or was it my imagining?

TD:  No, the color palette was deliberately narrow, because at the end of the war, Britain was literally bankrupt. In homes you saw all that the people had, and they’d had it many years, and tried to keep it as well as they could. I was from a working-class background, and we had a front room which was called a parlor, and that was kept absolutely pristine. Coming home from school in September when it was dark, I’d go into the parlor, and the fire was lit, and a little plate of potato cakes had been toasted, with butter on them, and a cup of tea. But all of the fire was reflected in the surfaces—on wood, leatherette—so it made it look sumptuous to my eyes. It didn’t matter that we had nothing, and that the house was literally a slum—that [parlor] seemed so rich!

I remember being taken to see Young at Heart–I love Doris Day with all my heart—and those interiors were gorgeous. Which I know is absurd: these three girls, who never do any work, live in this fabulous place, and look fabulous all the time, and you think, how is that done? But I’d come home, and sit in the firelight, and think, oh, it’s just like Young at Heart. I’ve always been very aware of surfaces, ever since I was a child. It was just recreating that, with a limited palette.

AG:  I watched, thinking, okay, maybe I’m just bourgie, but I could live in that.

TD:  [Laughs] Well, even Rachel Weisz said, “This is a very sexy apartment.” I said, “I grew up then; believe me, it’s not sexy.”

AG:  We can sense the ghosts of England’s wartime past within the parts of the movie that are set in Hester’s apartment, but naturally we can sense them even more deeply in the flashbacks. The subway scene in The Deep Blue Sea is so eloquent, when Hester, on the train platform in the film’s present, peers into the blackness of the tunnel. And then dirt and debris suddenly seep onto the tracks from overhead; the camera pulls back, the background goes dark, the foreground lights up, and we see Londoners taking refuge in the Aldwych tube station during the Blitz, as Nazi bombs rain on the city. A man sings, and the tracking shot continues along the platform, where all sorts of people are holding themselves together. Why did you decide to do that then, at that point in the film, when Hester is again contemplating suicide?

TD:  Because what I do find extraordinary about life is that a very simple thing can alter a decision. After the phone call [to Freddie], Hester decides, he doesn’t love me, I’m going to kill myself. And while she’s waiting for the train to come, she remembers what it was like during the war, when London was bombed 72 nights in a row during the Blitz. And it’s that memory, and of someone singing—because they did sing down in the tube; people danced as well, would you believe?–that stops her from doing something dreadful.

Also, the influence is Brief Encounter, when she [the heroine, Celia Johnson] runs to the edge of the platform and says, “I couldn’t do it, Fred. I wish I could have said it was for you and the children, but I couldn’t. I didn’t have the courage, Fred.” What is extraordinary about human beings is that we have memory. Those people who suffer traumas where they can’t remember the past, it must be devastating, because we are the accumulation of our pasts. And if you can’t remember that, how can you possibly know what you are now? None of us really know who we are, but the past for me is not a foreign country. It’s alive, and with all the clues; if only we were intelligent or sensitive enough to unravel them, we might find happiness.

AG:  Hester is obviously a tragic heroine, yet she is also incredibly self-aware. But unlike protagonists nowadays who undergo psychotherapy in order to understand themselves and thereby change for the better, she understands herself, but doesn’t try to fix herself.

TD:  Yes, but in those days you wouldn’t have—especially in Britain, no one would have thought to go to a psychoanalyst, even if you could afford it. Hester’s very much like my mother; she’s a stoic. Not in the old Greek sense, but in the sense of, these are the cards I’ve been dealt with, let’s get on with it. I came from that era where you got on with things, where you didn’t give up. I was beaten up every day for four years at secondary school. I didn’t tell a soul; my mother found out by accident. You just didn’t tell anybody. Not like now, where not only do people want to go on [reality] television and cry, they get a franchise out of it! I mean, that would have been unthinkable in the Fifties. [Laughs]

And also [the very idea of] telling us everything—cinema doesn’t work like that. At the beginning of The Deep Blue Sea there’s a woman and two men. And what we ask is, what’s the relationship between them? And then the film says what the relationship is. It’s like dead simple! But simple things are always more powerful.

AG:  You’ve also improved on the play in terms of the character of Freddie. In the play he comes across as callow and self-absorbed and—

TD:  And stupid.

AG:  In the play, we learn one of the keys to Freddie’s troubles is an accident he had in Canada, In your film, we don’t really know why he’s fallen on such hard times. But that allows Tom Hiddleston more mystery to plumb; there’s more darkness to his character, who comes across as more unstable than in the play. In the play Freddie’s mostly a boor.

TD:  During the Battle of Britain, the average age of these young men was 22, and they were fighting eight soldiers a day. And when they saw a German aircraft, do you know how much response time they had? Eight seconds, or they were dead. And so part of the story is that Freddie’s horrified that he’s been through that, and Hester is going to throw her life away over the fact that he hasn’t remembered her birthday; he hasn’t done it deliberately, he’s just thoughtless. But when you’re in the thrall of love, to that depth, every single thing is important. Why are they late? They said they would come at four o’clock; they’ve come at six—why? You become obsessed with that, and that’s what’s destructive, the destructive side of love.

AG:  At the close of the film, when the camera pulls away from Hester looking out the window, moves up and out and along the street, and we see the devastation of bombed buildings at its end, did you mean to suggest in that shot that Hester will find a way to repair herself, just like London found a way to rebuild itself?

TD:  Not really, no. My intention was to say at the beginning of the film, we see this house: during this story, we’re going to concentrate on Hester, a tenant. And then at the end we come away and say, we’ve seen her story, but there are stories that we’ll never know. It’s for aesthetic symmetry; I love that. We see Hester’s story, and then we go back, and they get on with their lives.

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The Gronvall Files: JENNIFER WESTFELDT ON FRIENDS WITH KIDS

Saturday, March 10th, 2012

What’s a gifted actress to do when Hollywood continues to bypass projects featuring strong roles for women, in favor of cookie-cutter productions kowtowing to that coveted 18-35 male demographic? In the case of Jennifer Westfeldt, you fight back, writing and producing indie vehicles to star in. The darling of critics and art-house fans for her 2001 film Kissing Jessica Stein and her 2006 follow-up, Ira & Abby, Westfeldt now becomes a quadruple-hyphenate with her directorial debut, the new Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions release, Friends With Kids. The bicoastal filmmaker, who splits her time between New York and L.A. with significant other Jon Hamm, has delivered a beguiling romantic comedy about two long-time single best friends, Jason (Adam Scott of the NBC-TV hit Parks and Recreation) and Julie (Westfeldt), who quite happily don’t feel any physical attraction for each other. But their biological clocks are ticking and, seeing how having children has stressed the marriages of their close friends Ben (Hamm) and Missy (Kristen Wiig), and Leslie (Maya Rudolph) and Alex (Chris O’Dowd), Jason and Julie hit upon an idea. They’ll have sex to produce a child, but remain unwed until they each find the “right” person, meanwhile bringing up baby without any acrimony. Ah, but what’s that saying about “the best laid plans?” Westfeldt stopped over in Chicago recently to bask in the unseasonably warm temperatures and reflect on the hurdles to getting her boundary-pushing romcom made.

Andrea Gronvall: It cost less than $10 million to make Friends With Kids, but it doesn’t look or feel like a low-budget movie. How long did you have to shoot it?

Jennifer Westfeldt: We shot it in 24 and a half days, which is crazy, in the dead of winter, and then we had a couple of pick-up days in the summer. When you’re trying to get an indie film off the ground, there’s usually that one magic moment where the actors’ schedules align, and unfortunately, that happened to be in the worst winter in 40 years—not my plan!

AG:  How did Mike Nichols become involved as executive producer of the picture?

JW:  We had the great fortune to do a workshop of the screenplay the summer before we shot it, through a company called New York Stage and Film, which is sort of my creative home, this wonderful summer program held on the Vassar campus. Most of the New York playwrights work out all their material before it comes to New York; John Patrick Shanley has developed every single thing he’s ever done there. In the four-day-long weekend that we worked on it, we started with a cold table read with some screenwriting mentors. Mike was one of those, along with Tina Fey and various other people. And then we had a round-table discussion about the screenplay, and Mike was really taken with the script–so much so that he loaned his name to the project and became sort of a godfather.

AG:  As good as your first two films are, with Friends With Kids you’re kicking it up a notch, into more racy territory. Some writers have made comparisons to last year’s Bridesmaids, if only because your movie reunites four of that film’s cast members, and is also a comedy told from a woman’s point of view–with occasional raunchy language, Judd Apatow-style. But in your film, the explicit, blunt dialogue is not gratuitous. Particularly in the last scene, where it underscores the movie’s theme: which is that in order for a relationship to survive, desire has to be there.

JW:  Timing is everything, and my character, Julie, and Jason (Adam Scott), the two best friends in this film, have a very different trajectory. At the outset they’re on equal footing: they almost have a brother-sister relationship, where they can be honest to the point of crass with each other. In the final scene the language had to be that visceral to come back from the earlier scene of my [character’s] devastating birthday, [where she challenges] the way she and Jason have always thought about each other. A traditional ending with some declaration of love just wouldn’t work with this story. The film is trying to look at–from all the different characters’ perspectives–the evolving nature of love, of family, of passion, of attraction, and how these things shift and change as we get older and our priorities shift and change.

AG:  We certainly see that in the ebb and flow of Maya Rudolph and Chris O’Dowd’s marriage, and the high point and later the nadir of Kristen Wiig and Jon Hamm’s marriage. You’ve written some strong roles for your costars, not just for yourself. Let’s talk a little bit about that dinner scene in the Vermont lodge; it distinguishes your movie from the usual Hollywood romantic comedy. The fact that here there’s actual pain, and—

JW:  Consequences, yeah! I didn’t know that I’d get away with it—it’s 10% of the movie, that scene. I knew I was breaking a lot of traditional story-telling rules to suddenly have this 10-minute, real-time scene–which almost never happens in a movie. That really is the domain of theatre. But here these selfish singles have this idea about how to beat the system, and have it all. And, you know, you can’t have it all. There always are consequences. Anything worth having in life, there are going to be messy parts, high highs, and low lows—particularly if the rules change a little on one side, for one person.

And Jon’s character—as dark as he is in that scene, where he’s obviously in a lot of pain—is also the voice of the audience. He’s really the truth-teller, even though he doesn’t say it nicely. He’s saying what everyone’s been wondering, which is, did you think this through? How is this going to affect this child? That sentiment had to come out, in a way that involved a sort of emotional climax for all eight characters. I wanted to show how this choice Julie and Jason make ripples through their group of friends, how the dynamic starts shifting when everyone feels judged, and I felt like it all had to come to a head in that spot.

AG:  The two actors in smaller roles, Megan Fox and Edward Burns, give good support. What led you to cast them?

JW:  Megan I met through the casting process; her agent was very keen on this script and this part for her. I met with her and another producer, Jake Kasdan, and was so taken with how smart, and how funny, and how irreverent she was. Her character represents the free spirit, that person who can get on a plane to Europe—tomorrow, without even thinking about it—and stay there for two years. She knows she doesn’t want to have kids, and is fine with that choice.

Eddie Burns’s character, by contrast, is the one character in the film who is not struggling in any way with his identity as a parent. He is 100% okay with the compromises, the sacrifices involved with having kids, and he identifies as a father and as a parent, first and foremost.

AG: He’s mature.

JW: He’s a grownup, yes. Eddie is a tremendously appealing presence, obviously; he’s also a great dad himself. When I met him and [his wife] Christy [Turlington] and their family, I thought that’s exactly what I need in this role: someone who is that great at parenting, and that easy and charming with it.

AG: When you write for yourself, do you have notions of a persona in mind, or are you consciously trying to create a different character each time out?

JW:  Because I’m really an actor first, I think about each role I write as though I were the actor playing it; so, whether it’s a man or a woman, or old or young, I think about what would make sense, what would feel truthful to me in the part. I don’t how else to write. But I do want to say one last thing: it’s a really exciting time for women right now with the success that Kristen and Annie [Mumolo] have had with Bridesmaids, and Tina Fey with 30 Rock–but also Miranda July, Julie Delpy, Lena Dunham, and Rashida Jones. We just saw at Sundance there were five movies where women were writing for themselves. I hope to support other women doing that, and to continue to be in the company of all those gals; it’s really exciting to be a part of that wave.

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The Gronvall Files: PAUL WEITZ ON BEING FLYNN

Thursday, March 8th, 2012

Although the new Focus Features release Being Flynn is based on a true story—Nick Flynn’s acclaimed memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City—director/screenwriter Paul Weitz says he sees it as “a fable about whether we’re fated to become our parents.” The story centers on a booze- and drug-addicted aspiring young writer, Nick Flynn (Paul Dano), whose path to sobriety is challenged when his long-absent father Jonathan Flynn (Robert De Niro), an alcoholic with profound delusions of grandeur about his own status as a writer, takes up residency in the homeless shelter where Nick works. Haunting both men is the memory of Jonathan’s wife and Nick’s mother, Jodi (Julianne Moore). The real-life Nick’s real-life wife Lili Taylor and Olivia Thirlby (Juno) costar. Paul Weitz (who with his brother Chris Weitz codirected American Pie and About A Boy, before going solo to helm indies like In Good Company and mainstream Hollywood fare such as Little Fockers, where he first worked with De Niro), touched down in Chicago recently to talk about his film, his stars, and his star-crossed characters.

Andrea Gronvall:  To experience the full emotional impact of the end of Being Flynn, the audience first has to go through all the dark stuff early on. You had to have been thinking, how do we do structure this adaptation without losing viewers?

Paul Weitz:  Something that I sometimes worry is a flaw in myself is that I can’t really extricate some sense of humor from a sense of tragedy. Anton Chekhov would write at the front of his plays “a comedy in four acts,” and then [Constantin] Stanislavski would direct them as flat-out tragedies, and Chekhov would be furious that he’s not getting laughs. In this case I know Nick Flynn feels that there’s humor in his book, even though to some degree the events are dire. I persuaded him to put his life on hold to be on the set all the time, and one great benefit of it was–aside from having somebody to tell me if something was fake or not—that he has such a distance and irony about his own experience that it was very liberating.

Nick’s a poet, and his memoir is structured in poetic fashion, weaving back and forth in time, and in styles. I took each story line—Robert De Niro’s, Paul Dano’s, and Julianne Moore’s—and chose to show the point at which they were in the most danger, then intercut between them, and had the transitions be all sound and visual. And so there’s sort of a fugue state in the movie.

AG:  No way that everything in Nick’s book could fit into the movie, but why did you decide not to include Nick’s brother in the film? And why did you decide not to show the enabling aspects of Jodi’s character? I’m thinking of this passage in Nick’s memoir:  “I drink to get drunk…. By the time I’m seventeen, my mother and I drink together sometimes, and sometimes she shows me the quote she keeps in her wallet–‘Never trust anyone who doesn’t drink.’”

PW:  His brother, Nick told me, was somewhat uncomfortable even being included in the book, and didn’t really want to be part of what was depicted on the screen. That [decision] also made Nick’s character and situation in the movie more extreme, in that the only person who could possibly untangle this web that’s allowing him to get through his life is his father, who he has such a problematic relationship with.

In terms of the quote that you mention, I wrote versions of the script that had that in it, but I had a relatively compact amount of time to express something about the character Julianne Moore was playing. The most you see of Julianne is in flashbacks to when Nick was 10 or 11 years old. There’s only one scene where you actually see Paul Dano with her; it’s always Liam Broggy who’s playing Nick as a young boy. I thought that it would give the wrong impression to take that dialogue and transplant it to where she’s talking to an 11-year-old kid; it would make her too culpable. Because the real contradiction is that she was somebody who brought light into Nick’s life, and then succumbed to her own depressions.

AG:  Let’s talk about technique. After seven years of preparation and 30 screenplay drafts you shot the picture in only 36 days. Maybe it was because of the rhythms you fell into during a fast-paced shoot, but your movie has no flab. I love how we meet the characters at the homeless shelter, where each looks into the camera and we get a quick synopsis of who they are, who they were, and who they’re going to be.

PW:  You’re introduced to the people who work in the shelter in an entertaining fashion. I was trying to recreate the feeling that Nick has in going in there: that far from being a grim place to work, it’s actually exciting. It’s loaded, and dangerous, and in a certain way fun, and his heart races as he gets in there.

AG:  And it gives him material.

PW:  It does give him material, and during the course of this scene he’s getting the material for writing his memoir, essentially. One has a tendency to think of the people working there as being largely saintly. Some people are religious; there’s a character who says, “I want to live my life the way Christ does–and I hate my rich parents.”

AG:  That got a big laugh at the screening I attended.

PW:  That’s good! And then you have people who might have lived there, and who’ve gotten themselves out of it and ended up working there. The character played by Wes Studi, the wonderful Native American actor, was based on a guy who was running the van program that would go out on the streets at night–a Native American guy who moved to Boston, and at the age of 15 or 16 was an alcoholic who was living in the shelter.

AG:  I also loved that quick montage showing the succession of Jodi’s boyfriends. How did you come up with that?

PW:  That was an early idea I had; I like doing things without CG. Basically, the scene’s a game of catch that the preteen Nick is playing with a bunch of different boyfriends that his mother had; that was how I was going to express the idea that she dated a lot of guys. I did it all in single takes, with actors who’d claimed they could play baseball. About half of them were lying. I would pan left with the camera to the little kid and he would pitch, and these guys would be lined up, hidden on the right side of the camera, and then run on and catch the ball and throw it back. And whenever one would drop the ball, the whole crew would groan. It was a really fun, sort of 1920s-style way of shooting.

AG:  Tell me about the powerful scene where Jonathan has his meltdown in the shelter’s changing room.

PW:  That’s when he’s staring into the mirror, yeah? It was one of those parts of the screenplay where it just says, “Jonathan rants.” Of course you can’t hand that to an actor, so I worked with Nick Flynn on the kind of repetitive things that Jonathan Flynn would say in real life. Here he is succumbing to his demons and his delusions; in particular, he is somehow being brought face-to-face with the love of his life, Nick’s mother. And so we handed De Niro a four-page stack of essentially non sequiturs–impossible, really, to memorize. I said to him before shooting, do you want me to tell you what small portion of it I believe will end up in the movie? He said, “No, just let me shoot it as written, and then use what you want. But I’ve really been working on this.” And then I shot it from both sides, because normally you’re quite keen not to. The first couple or three films I directed I was terrified of this idea of the line, which is–

AG:  It’s crossing the axis.

PW:  Yeah, you scramble the viewer’s head if you jump back and forth. In this case I was consciously crossing the line in shooting it from two directions. He’s staring at himself in this funhouse mirror–which is something that existed in the actual [Boston] shelter, Pine Street, that the movie is based on.

AG:  The Flynns are fascinating, but you have quite an interesting family yourself.

PW:  It’s eccentric, sort of minor Hollywood royalty. My mom [Susan Kohner] was an actress, whose I guess best known performance was in the film Imitation of Life, a really marvelous melodrama. And then my grandmother [Lupita Tovar] was a Mexican film star who came to Hollywood during the silent film era, and ended up doing the Spanish-language version of Dracula (1931), which was shot by Latino actors on the same stage sets as the American versions. The Americans would do their version, and then the Latin actors would come in the middle of the night to shoot theirs. My grandfather [Paul Kohner] was working at Universal and produced, and the story I was told was that it was kind of a scheme of his to keep my grandmother in the country, because she was going back to Mexico for lack of work here.

AG:  I don’t want to belabor that numerous writers have commented on your tendency to pick films about father-son relationships, but have you ever thought of doing a documentary about your dad, John Weitz?

PW:  It’s really interesting, because he was formed in the crucible of World War II: being a German Jew, a refugee, and then joining the American army and the OSS. He was an extremely macho fellow who was a fairly successful racecar driver, and a fashion designer, which is not usually regarded as a particularly macho profession. But it is similar to Being Flynn in that when you’re a fashion designer, you can’t help but be in the terrain of appearances: how you’re presenting yourself, and how important that is. In Being Flynn, Robert De Niro to all intents and purposes is really hitting the skids, but through the belief and image that he has of himself as a great writer, he’s able to survive and persevere and, weirdly in some ways, come out on top. I have, in retrospect, wondered what kept me attached to this story over the seven years that I was writing drafts of it. And I think that the relationship between what we seem to be, what we’re trying to project, and what we are, is like an animal chasing its tail, [that] I feel in my life and in this film.

AF:  It’s a weird balancing act, because Jonathan is definitely headed toward self-obliteration, and yet he also has a peculiar form of narcissism.

PW:  No question, and the truly bizarre thing is that there’s an in-built level of irony, in that the real Jonathan Flynn never saw his masterpiece–that he was writing over the course of decades on napkins and envelope–published. But now he’s played by Robert De Niro in a movie; so, on some level, Jonathan’s delusions of greatness have been shown to be accurate.

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The Gronvall Files: Asghar Farhadi, writer/director of A Separation

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

The Gronvall Files
Family Ties: An Interview with double-Oscar nominee Asghar Farhadi

A Separation, the gripping fifth feature by Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi, has been on a roll since last year’s film festival circuit, when it won Berlin’s top prize, the Golden Bear. Earlier this month it picked up a Best Foreign Language Film Golden Globe, and now it has been nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Original Screenplay and Best Foreign Language Film.

A few years ago I reviewed one of the director’s previous films, Fireworks Wednesday, but as much as I admired that movie, it didn’t prepare me for the wallop A Separation packs. The movie begins in a Tehran divorce court, where Simin (the luminous Leila Hatami), yearning to pursue a new life abroad with her young daughter (Sarina Farhadi, a heart-tugging performer), seeks release from her dour husband Nader (the superb Peyman Moadi), who will not abandon his Alzheimer’s-afflicted father. Simin moves in with her parents, and Nader, in order to function in his job as a banker, is forced to hire an outsider to look after dad. The new, unskilled caretaker Hodjat ( Shahab Hosseini) harbors many fears, the biggest being what would happen if her hot-tempered, unemployed husband finds out that she took this job.

Before long, the desperate caretaker makes a horrific miscalculation when she leaves her charge tied to a bedpost; the furious Nader then compounds the tragedy. Immediately two families are embroiled in a struggle that cuts to the heart of social strife, while the viewer tries to discover which character is telling the truth, and which is lying. Recently the director, a film school graduate who also labored in theatre, radio, and television, stopped briefly in Chicago, where we conversed with the aid of his quick-witted Italian-Iranian translator.

Andrea Gronvall:  A Separation is a domestic drama, at least at first. Then it evolves into tragedy. As in many tragedies, the main characters are essentially good, well-intentioned people. But as in ancient Greek tragedies, here they each have a flaw that leads to downfall. In your work in the theatre, was tragedy one of your preferred modes?

Asghar Farhadi:  When I was working in theatre I was reading a lot of tragedies. But this kind of tragedy—if you want to compare it to the classic tragedies of the past—has one historic difference. In a classic tragedy, there is a war between good and evil, but in modern tragedies, the war is between good and good. In classic tragedies, you hope the bad guy dies, so you feel better. But in this modern tragedy, you don’t know which character you want to win, which one you want to lose, and you’re probably not going to feel good about either.

There’s also another difference between the classic tragedy and the modern tragedy. The weakness–the Achilles heel–of the classic tragic hero comes from within himself. For example, Hamlet doubts too much. King Lear is not very with it. Macbeth is too hungry for power. But for the characters of the modern tragedy, their weaknesses don’t come from within themselves; they come from the environment, the pressure that the environment puts on them.

AG:  You work very fast: it was ten months between when you started writing this screenplay, until the end of—or was it the start of–post-production?

AF:  Towards the middle of post-production. This time it was fast. But you started counting from the very moment I put my pen on the paper; this was brewing within me for a long time before. Not specifically this story, but just a combination of images, and feelings, and thoughts.

AG: So you start with the images. Then, when you sit down to write, do you have in mind the beats–you know, those points in the characters’ arcs that are going to get you from A to Z?  Or does it all begin with one particular character, and then branches out to incorporate other characters?

AF: When I have an image in mind, this image makes me keep returning to my past. I go into my memories, and I start selecting here and there, putting them together. Simultaneously with this process of assembling memories, the characters are being born. And at the same time, the story also starts developing. It’s very difficult for me to describe my process. I’m not really aware of what’s going on, really, as I’m thinking. Many things happen in an unconscious way.

AG:  You’re in the flow of it.

AF:  Yes, like a river.

AG:  Memories: that brings me to my next point. Alzheimer’s disease is key to narrative developments in A Separation, but I didn’t know that going in to screen your film. Generally, I try to read as little as possible about a film before I see it, in order that my perceptions of the movie aren’t filtered through someone else’s take.

AF:  This is the best way to watch a film.

AG:  So, as I was watching your film, I was profoundly struck by its accuracy and emotional honesty, by how well you captured what it’s like to have a parent who has Alzheimer’s, what the pressures are on a professional with a demanding job who’s also trying to do the right thing by his father, and what are often the differences in class between the professional and the caretaker he hires to look after the parent. After I saw the film, I read that your grandfather had Alzheimer’s. If it’s not too personal, could you please tell me how your parents coped? How did you cope? How old were you when you witnessed your grandfather in decline?

AF:  I have to go back a little [in time] for my description. When I was little, I didn’t love anybody like I loved my grandfather. He was my hero. He was very loved and revered, by everybody. He was always telling me a lot of stories. And I believe that the reason why I became a writer and a filmmaker is thanks to all those stories.

Then I had to move from the city where he was living to attend university in another city; for years I lived in this new city, and of course I saw him much less. I think that I was around 30 when I realized that he had become ill. When I would go visit him, of course he had the same frame, and yet he didn’t remember anything anymore, and he turned from that big hero he was to me into a much smaller person.

From the person who had had this incredible memory, who could tell me stories of all kinds and always surprise me with the endings, I now had a man in front of me who couldn’t even remember my name. This is a very painful disease. Before, I always thought that when people miss or lose their future, that’s very painful. But I also realize now that when people lose their past, that’s even more painful.

My grandfather had a few relatives who never allowed him to be taken to a home; they decided that they would take care of him. Every day one of his children was there. And then one day it happened that none of the kids could take care of him, so they hired a nurse, and this nurse tied him to the bed. A few days after this occurred he actually died. I had not thought about this for a while, but this came back to me.

AG: Your daughter Sarina Farhadi is lovely, and a very affecting actress. Is this her first film?

AF:  No, you saw her in Fireworks Wednesday [playing] the child, the daughter.

AG:  How old was she then?

AF:  Then, she was four.

AG:  She’s grown up!

AF:  This is the fourth film she’s in, but it’s also the biggest role she’s ever played.

AG:  Does she stand in for you, in a way, in A Separation? Does she portray aspects of your childhood?

AF:  No, my childhood was very different from the characterization in this film. When I was a child I was very noisy; I was not calm. [Laughing.]

AG:  Well, I can understand the attraction to the theatre, then. Fireworks Wednesday is also about deception and class conflicts. What keeps attracting you to these themes?

AF:  This fight between two different classes is not just at the level of economics. This is the conflict between a middle class that has more knowledge and is more directed towards modernity, and a lower class that is tied to the past and to traditions. It’s almost a conflict between new and old. In Fireworks Wednesday, that’s not the main theme, but here in A Separation, it is.

AG:  Well, you’re in very good hands with Sony Pictures Classics. When did your paths first cross?

AF:  It was in Berlin. Yes, and they actually love film. I think that Michael Barker loves the movie even more than I do.

AG:  Do you have any feelings at all about the possibility of winning an Oscar?

AF:   I try not to think about it.

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MOVIE LIFE IN THE POST-THEATRICAL AGE? AN INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR/WRITER/ACTOR EDWARD BURNS

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

The Gronvall Files

There’s a lot about Edward Burns that’s just so likeable—he’s sharp, talented, and industrious, but also easygoing, and a generous ensemble player. Since breaking out with his acclaimed 1995 writing/directing/acting debut, the low-budget indie The Brothers McMullen (shot over weekends so as not to interfere with his then day job as an Entertainment Tonight gofer), he has worked as an actor for other directors, including Steven Spielberg (Saving Private Ryan), James Foley (Confidence), and Nancy Meyers (The Holiday), while enhancing his own profile as a filmmaker with art-house features like She’s the One and Sidewalks of New York. These days, however, he’s aiming for more eyeballs than can fit in the local cineplex. His latest film is Newlyweds, an edgy romantic comedy about a recently married Manhattan couple (Burns and Caitlin Fitzgerald) whose relationship is tested by some highly strung relatives. The film bowed on VOD at the end of December; on January 13th Tribeca Film begins a theatrical release with a limited run at Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center. I spoke with Burns over the phone about his movie, his enthusiasm for the new technologies that are reshaping the business, and his upcoming stint in front of the camera, opposite Tyler Perry in I, Alex Cross.

Andrea Gronvall:  You shot your 2010 feature, Nice Guy Johnny, with the digital Red One; for Newlyweds you chose the smaller, lower-priced Canon 5D. What did you like about each camera?

Edward Burns:  When the Red came out, my DP [cinematographer William Rexer] and I both wanted to buy one. We thought we could afford it, and wanted to play with it to see what it could do. We first shot a web series [The Lynch Pin (2009)] with it, then made Nice Guy Johnny, a $25,000 small, run-and-gun movie. It’s amazing how it looks in a theater; Nice Guy Johnny played on huge screens at film festivals around the country, and really held up. Flash forward to Newlyweds. We’d heard a lot about the Canon 5D. So we went up to B& H Photo and bought one at 11 AM, headed over to this guy’s gym to do a camera test, and then dumped the footage into Final Cut Pro on my computer. We liked it so much, that shot ended up in the movie.

When I talk to aspiring filmmakers, I tell them that with these new technologies, the playing field has been completely leveled, depending on the scale of your project. If you’re making small comedies or small dramas, then get to it. We shot Newlyweds in just 12 days over the course of four months, and for only $9,000. After post-production, the total came to $120,000.

AG:  A lot of documentary filmmakers like the smaller cameras because of their relative unobtrusiveness. You adopted a pseudo-documentary style for Newlyweds. Sometimes viewers feel like they’re eavesdropping on your ensemble; at other times the characters directly address the camera, allowing for some neat solo riffs. How did you know that these actors—Caitlin Fitzgerald, Kerry Bishe¢, Max Baker, Marsha Dietlein Bennett, Dara Coleman, and Johnny Solo—would mesh so well?

EB:  With the exception of Caitlin, I had worked with everyone before. I wanted this to be a companion piece to Sidewalks of New York, but I thought, let’s go even further with that concept, and use a documentary-size crew, just three people. The actors would wear their own clothes and do their own makeup. We would film in real locations—apartments and public spaces like the gym, the recording studio, coffee shops, etc., which would remain open for business while we’re shooting. To do this, you have to know beforehand that the actors will be game. I brought all of them in after I’d written my second draft; I hadn’t even changed the characters’ names in the script to fictional ones—they were still “Marsha,” “Dara,” and so on. I sat the actors down, and walked them through their scenes. Like, this scene starts from A and gets to B, these are the beats, and then I’d encourage them to improvise. I gave direction when I needed something to change. Because all of them were allowed to have their own voices, it doesn’t feel like a scripted screenplay.

AG:  Six of your films have played the Tribeca Film Festival. Did your relationship with the festival influence your decision to have Tribeca Film distribute Newlyweds?

EB:  In 2010 we were at the festival again with Nice Guy Johnny and my lawyer John Sloss was beginning to field offers from buyers. Most of the deals being offered were of the “no advance partnership” variety, where the distributor only guarantees two screens, one in New York and one in L.A. I already knew from the past what it costs to roll out a film in a platform release, and how that kind of theatrical release can be a loss leader. So John tells me to imagine that tonight I’m going on Jimmy Fallon, where I tell everyone who lives in New York and L.A. to go out and see the movie, and everyone else watching the show in the rest of the country to try and remember to look for it. Then compare the size of audiences in New York and L.A. theaters with the number of viewers in 45 million homes across America who for $6 can see it on demand on TV. So we launched Nice Guy Johnny on VOD, and more people saw it then than would have if the movie had had a typical indie theatrical release.

AG:  And you also put Newlyweds on VOD. So why is Tribeca Film handling a theatrical release of the movie? Why put it in theaters at all?

EB:  My producer Aaron Lubin is from Chicago; he grew up on the city’s South Side. Then there’s another Chicago connection: I was in town to speak at the Tribeca Flashpoint Media Arts Academy, and met Adam Kempenaar [host of Filmspotting on WBEZ Radio], who has become a friend. And Adam was going on about how movies always open first in theaters in New York or L.A., and that when we opened our next film, we should open it in Chicago. So, here we are; we’re experimenting with Chicago. Our second theatrical experiment, a couple of weeks later, will be on Long Island, where I’m originally from. If we make money, or break even—if we don’t lose money–then we’ll decide what a third city might be. If we don’t do well in these first two runs, then we’ll know a theatrical release is dead.

AG: You’re still keeping busy as an actor for hire; I just watched you in Man on a Ledge. And you can be seen later this year in a high-profile movie, I, Alex Cross, alongside Tyler Perry, who plays James Patterson’s famous fictional detective. I’m looking forward to it, in part because it stars two independent filmmakers whose approaches to acting are probably very different. Without giving any spoilers, can you tell us something of what we can expect to see?

EB: First of all, it was great making it; the first scene we shot together is actually the last scene in the film. It’s where we reminisce about our childhood; our characters have been friends since they were young, and in that scene we had to summon up 35 years of history together. We hit it off right away. Tyler has become a really good friend of mine, and given me some incredible advice about my career. One day he told me that he had watched The Brothers McMullen again over the weekend, and wanted to know why I didn’t ever make a sequel. And what about She’s the One, my first commercial success? No sequel, either. He pointed out that in 15 years I hadn’t made another film about Irish-Americans, and told me, “You have to super-size your niche.” So, I’m doing it. After I finish my next film, Fitzgerald Family Christmas, I’ll make a sequel to The Brothers McMullen.

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The Gronvall Files: One Day, One Singular Director: An interview with Lone Scherfig

Friday, September 2nd, 2011

Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig enjoyed her international breakthrough in 2000 with Italian for Beginners, a Dogme 95 film that was both a critical and box office success. Her first English-language film, Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself (2002), was a quirky meditation on life, love, illness, and death, set in Edinburgh; audiences who were able to appreciate its nuance were rewarded by the director’s next film set in the U.K., An Education (2009), which garnered three Oscar nominations: Best Picture, Best Actress for leading lady Carey Mulligan, and Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay for novelist Nick Hornby. For her latest movie, One Day, she has teamed with another British novelist and screenwriter, David Nicholls, who had adapted his bestselling novel about two university graduates, the well-to-do but aimless Dexter (Jim Sturgess), and the poor but driven Emma (Anne Hathaway), whose long relationship unfolds in vignettes that begin on July 15th of each year. It’s a funny-sad romance, and the kind of intricate work we expect from Scherfig, but it’s also her most mainstream movie to date. I caught up with the director recently when she was in town to talk about this Focus Features release.

Andrea Gronvall:  The narratives of your films vary quite a bit, but the amount of attention you pay to tone in each movie sets you apart from a lot of other directors. Although well plotted, your movies are about a lot more than the mechanics of getting from A to B. The sensibility is a little melancholy, but with rich comic veins, which can also be dark. Are you consciously attracted to material with these facets?

Lone Scherfig:  Yes. When it’s not in the material, I can sometimes add this sort of bittersweet-ness. I’ve done a lot of craft-oriented work—for instance, directing TV series, where you don’t have very much influence on the script, or the cast. Affection for the characters makes me sometimes move things in a slightly different direction than [what’s] written. I think it’s about how you view other people, and what it is that you like about other people, and what fascinates you, that gives you your voice as a director, maybe. But I keep saying that I want to do something that’s much more genre-oriented and stylized, and eventually I think I will.

AG: Well, you certainly already understand genre. An Education is a coming-of-age film, part of a distinct genre. One Day is a love story, although Wilbur Wants To Kill Himself is a little harder to categorize.

LS: [Laughing] Yes!

AG: What you would call Italian for Beginners?

LS: That’s a Dogme film. Dogme became a genre in itself. One Day is a love story, and none of the other films have love as a major theme, how love plays out over a long time. Dexter (Jim Sturgess), who is technically the main character, has to learn what love is, and to find it, and to suffer for it. I think because of its structure, it also becomes about time, and how you spend your time, and the unnecessary detours you go through. In terms of directing, it’s the time issue that makes it the most challenging, to make all those time jumps work, and be interesting and pleasurable to watch–yet not overpower the emotion, or make the film monotonous, but add to the flow, and add to, when you get to the last chapter, the feeling of “Oh, wow! All those years passed and I didn’t notice.”

AG: I liked where the story traveled in less than a minute from July 15th in a given year to July 15th in the following, as though you were indicating, “Okay, here’s what happened this year—nothing big. Let’s go on to the next year.” It’s an unexpected shift.

LS: And it makes it still more unpredictable that you don’t know [going in] that the rhythm is syncopated. It’s really important to keep an element of surprise and unpredictability. We tried out different versions, and I still don’t know if we ended up with the best one. I need some time away from the film, then go back and see it, and learn from it.

AG: How does working with David Nicholls, who adapted his own novel, compare to working with Nick Hornby, who was adapting another writer’s work? I don’t know anything first-hand about their personalities, but I imagine they are quite different.

LS: They are. They are sometimes compared, because they both have this combination of something that’s humorous and moving. But they are totally different! David has an acting background and that makes him good at writing dialogue that tastes good for the actors, but Nick is very musical, so he can achieve the same thing in a different way. They both make it easy for the actors to make things ring true, but they just access it from different angles.

AG: Let’s get back to the concept of time in One Day. In An Education, your teenaged heroine had nothing but time ahead of her. But in One Day, when we see Emma (Anne Hathaway) on her bike early in the film, we don’t yet know how this scene is going to connect us to the various stages of her life, and her relationships with Dexter, and others. And the coda at the end throws new light on their first night out together as university graduates.

LS: Because David has decided to go for that one date every year–which turns out to be a much more important date than you realize [initially]–that makes him tell the stories about all the other moments in their lives. He says, I’m not showing the day the child is born, I’m showing the first night of babysitting; because of that, he’s forced to cover the other turning points, because you don’t see the highlights of their lives. It’s more than a gimmick; it’s an opportunity to zoom in on moments that are at first sight unimportant, but then become meaningful in a bigger context–especially since the characters don’t know about this mechanism. It’s not like Same Time, Next Year. It’s not an annual reunion; it is just a construct to select moments of their lives. So, that was almost the best part of directing this film: that I needed to take out the big toolbox in order to make this work. Sometimes it’s the sound, sometimes it’s the tracking, or a dissolve, or music, or whatever makes each little sequence in the film connect the best to the next one, without being too loud.

AG: A word or two about your supporting cast: it’s lovely to see Patricia Clarkson as Dexter’s mom. She’s one of America’s most versatile actresses. And Rafe Spall [son of actor Timothy Spall] is spot-on as Emma’s smitten coworker. Why did you choose him for the role of Ian, the standup comedian?

LS: We saw a lot of people, and I just thought he was the right combination: someone who is not a comedian, so he gets that Ian is layered, and not just gets all the jokes. But there are a lot of good jokes in One Day, and if you read the book, there are more.

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THE KIDS AREN’T ALL RIGHT: An Interview With Submarine Director Richard Ayoade

Sunday, June 12th, 2011

The Gronvall Files

British actor, writer, and director Richard Ayoade turns 34 this month, around the time that his feature directorial debut Submarine—a big hit in the U.K.–arrives on this side of the Atlantic. Based on the acclaimed novel by Joe Dunthorne, the movie is a whip-smart coming-of-age comedy set in Wales, about a very bright but morose 15-year-old student, Oliver Tate, whose determination to lose his virginity is matched only by his fixation on saving what he sees as his parents’ crumbling marriage.

Newcomer Craig Roberts glowers, stumbles, and wisecracks his way through elaborate ploys to seduce his misanthropic schoolmate, a pretty firebug named Jordana (Yasmin Paige), while barely disguising his contempt for and anxiety over his depressed dad (Noah Taylor), who seems oblivious to how much Oliver’s mom (Sally Hawkins) has perked up since her old flame (Paddy Considine) moved in next door. Misfit Oliver imagines himself the star and narrator of the movie of his life, and film fan Ayoade tosses in plenty of clever references to world cinema.

The writer-director cut his comedic chops performing in the Edinburgh Fringe (where he first met pal Hawkins years ago), graduated to TV stardom playing a computer geek on the very funny British series The IT Crowd, then segued to directing music videos. He recently helmed an episode of the NBC sitcom Community. The Weinstein Company launches Submarine on June 3; a promo tour brought the soft-spoken, modest Ayoade to Chicago on a recent grey, rainy morning. Over tea we talked about his movie, and quite a few others that he loves.

Andrea Gronvall: You’ve pulled off a neat balancing act. Submarine is funny and sad, angry and touching, and you’ve captured the voice of Oliver Tate, the hero of Joe Dunthorne’s novel. I know there’s no way you could fit most of the book in a film your length, but how faithful were you to the dialogue?

Richard Ayoade: It’s difficult to say. You get to a point where you’re not quite sure whether things are in the book or the film. You sort of digest the book, and, hopefully, know it very well; then you start to not worry too much about it because you might do a disservice to it. A lot of dialogue from a book does not directly translate, for some reason. Eric Rohmer is a very interesting example. You know, his [six] Moral Tales are all adapted from short stories that he’d written.

AG: I love Rohmer.

RA: Yeah, I think he’s amazing. And what he said was that very often the prose dialogue that he wrote wouldn’t translate to film; it just had a different register. But when he wrote something like, “They came in and said hello, and then talked a bit about the weather,” that could translate as dialogue. {As for adapting Submarine], there’s no description of Oliver in the book, and you don’t exactly know what his room’s like. And how people respond to him is entirely implied in the novel—you know, disparity between his testimony and what you imagine was the case.

Whereas in the film if he’s speaking to someone, you know what they think, and you know it before he does. You see their reactions.
There’s a juxtaposition between his sort of hubristic statements and what you’re seeing. But that’s happening straight away; there’s no way to pull your punches. I remember The Swimmer, which is quite an interesting adaptation, because you never quite have the same obliqueness that’s possible in prose. It’s very hard to not show too much in a film.

AG: The Swimmer, wasn’t that Burt Lancaster?

RA: Yeah, from a John Cheever short story. With prose, you can just describe a couple of things in a room to give you the impression of what it’s like. In the film, you see the whole room, and every bit of information in that room will be part of the narrative. You can’t get away from that, and it exists throughout the scene. You can throw it out of focus, or not emphasize it as much, but the surroundings exist.

AG: You accurately convey that sense of being at a breaking point that so many people reach at Oliver’s age. His obsession with his parents’ separating strikes me as a form of psychological projection, in a way.

RA: Right.

AG: He is at that age where it won’t be long before he’s the one separating from his parents. But this absolute obsession that he has is conveyed in the start of one of those almost throwaway comedic lines, “During one of my routine inspections of my parents’ bedroom….” He’s practically stalking them, even before we see any real signs of their breaking up.

RA: I think he’s trying to mount a preemptive strike against being from a broken home, so that if [eventually] he is from a broken home, he won’t be upset about it. That’s often what people do: they try to rehearse the worst-case scenario mentally. You sometimes wonder what exactly are his intentions. I think that for all of his ideas of wanting to be an adult and being taken seriously, he’s very much missed the privileges of being younger, of being a child, in a sense. One of the ironies of adolescence is that you want to grow up, but the adult world isn’t that attractive, either.

AG: Right. Holden Caulfield didn’t want to grow up to be one of the phonies. And in The 400 Blows, the Antoine Doinel character is so full of rage at his parents and society. This similar rage that Oliver feels in your film could easily tip him into becoming a monster, but that doesn’t happen.

RA: He’s so clearly out of his depth. He’s sort of pretending he knows pretty much about how things are because he’s seen films like The 400 Blows, or [has read] The Catcher in the Rye. He knows that he’s going to go through a period that is going to be troublesome–his first relationship with Jordana (Yasmin Paige)–that will be a transition.

AG: Do you feel he’s meaner in the book?

RA: In some respects, yes–if only because Craig Roberts is very sympathetic: his personal charisma alone is such that you can forgive him quite a lot. I was watching Tippi Hedren talking about Marnie recently, and she was saying, you know, “It would be very hard for an audience to believe that I would be resistant to Sean Connery.” Who was the writer who started that screenplay? Evan Hunter, and then another [Jay Presson Allen] finished it; she thought the audience would excuse Connery’s character of rape [Hunter objected]. That’s such a strange idea in films, that if you like the actor enough you’ll excuse all sorts of behavior. You don’t excuse his character, but he certainly holds your sympathy far longer than he ought to, ordinarily.

AG: Well, the character of Jordana helps deflect some of the disapproval we might feel about Oliver’s more extreme behaviors, because in some ways she’s a more flinty character than he is.

RA: They both have these very protective shells around them. Everyone has a persona; what they project to the world is not necessarily the same as what’s beneath the persona. That is very tricky to latch onto at that age, to know who you are. You have to let things occur to find out.

AG: Did you ever see George Roy Hill’s The World of Henry Orient, with Peter Sellers and Angela Lansbury?

RA: Yeah, it’s great.

AG: People are comparing Submarine to Wes Anderson, and of course your references in the movie to Salinger and Truffaut are overt. But there’s a certain tonal delicacy in The World of Henry Orient that’s also present in your film: this wonderful sense of adventure these two kids feel as they discover each other, that’s followed by betrayal.

RA: I do really like that film, and I suppose you never know what you may unconsciously take along. J.D. Salinger takes people at that age seriously, and realizes that they take themselves very seriously as well. The Graduate also does that so brilliantly, I think. For me, Flirting was an influence, perhaps because of Noah Taylor being in it. But genuinely, Taxi Driver was more so, because it’s so subjective, where someone has a kind of mythological view of himself—and it felt funny to have that aspect in a 15-year-old.

AG: You’ve stated elsewhere that there aren’t many coming-of-age films made in the U.K.

RA: Adolescence feels like quite an American construction. From Mark Twain on there’s this idea of American adolescence, in a way unlike English notions, which are more Victorian, in that there’s more of a direct split between childhood and being an adult. There’s no real equivalent to My So-Called Life–that sort of romantic, American, suburban adolescence—or The Outsiders, or Dawson’s Creek. I love Dawson’s Creek.

AG: Interesting! Why?

RA: Because I really like Kevin Williamson. I think certainly the first two Scream films are really well written, and The Faculty is brilliant. He’s just an incredibly exciting writer. I haven’t seen Scream 4, but I thought that the series Dawson’s Creek was epic. There was an awareness of the nature of films, and the making of them, that films are things that people look at a lot. People sort of view themselves in terms of films. You wouldn’t have a film like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in England. That sort of idea seems so, I don’t know, indulgent.

AG: If you were to act in a film by an American director, whom would you most like to work with? Who would you like to be directed by?

RA: Well, I don’t necessarily wish myself on him. Paul Thomas Anderson, but he would have to have fallen on real hard times to hire me.

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The Gronvall Files: Tops in His Division: An Interview with Win Win Director Tom McCarthy

Friday, April 1st, 2011

By Andrea Gronvall

Who says you can’t go home again? Actor/writer/director Tom McCarthy, inspired by his memories as a high school wrestler in his hometown of New Providence, New Jersey, collaborated with his close friend and former wrestling teammate Joe Tiboni, a lawyer and first-time screenwriter, to create the funny and heartwarming new indie feature Win Win.

Paul Giamatti stars as Mike Flaherty, a financially strapped New Providence eldercare lawyer who, needing extra cash, becomes the court-appointed guardian of one of his addled clients. When shortly afterwards the client’s teenage runaway grandson Kyle (amateur athlete Alex Shaffer in his movie debut) resurfaces, Mike and his wife Jackie (Amy Ryan) invite the kid to stay with them and their two young girls, not imagining that Kyle will turn out to be the star the high school wrestling team that Mike coaches so desperately needs. Under distributor Fox Searchlight’s expert guidance, the film tripled its gross in just its second weekend of release.
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The Gronvall Files: Richard Press and Philip Gefter: Partners Behind Documentary Bill Cunningham New York

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

By Andrea Gronvall

As a breed, film critics are generally sartorially challenged, but I’ll freely admit to enjoying Vogue, Vanity Fair, and the style coverage in The New York Times–particularly the “On the Street” column that’s photographed, written, and composed by the paper’s long-time fashion chronicler Bill Cunningham.

A colorful collage revealing trends Cunningham spots while bicycling around the city, the page nearly throbs as the reader’s eye is drawn by one well-placed shot to the next. Now the man who charts the tastes of Manhattan’s best–or most daringly–dressed is the subject of a new documentary from indie distributor Zeitgeist Films (another arbiter of taste), called—what else?–Bill Cunningham New York.
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The Gronvall Files: Good Company: A Conversation with The Company Men Director John Wells

Wednesday, January 19th, 2011

As this year’s Sundance Film Festival unfolds, one of the films that made a splash there a year ago, The Company Men, John Wells’s feature directorial debut, is gathering steam in its commercial rollout. The acclaimed writer-producer behind TV hits like ER and The West Wing, as well as Southland (which found a new home on TNT after NBC jettisoned it for Jay Leno’s short-lived prime time experiment), was in Chicago recently to scout locations for Shameless, a new Showtime series starring William H. Macy, and to promote The Weinstein Company’s expansion of The Company Men on January 21st.

The film showcases a terrific ensemble, with Tommy Lee Jones, Ben Affleck, and Chris Cooper playing executives who lose their jobs at a shipping firm when boss Craig T. Nelson decides to streamline operations. Kevin Costner, in his best role in years, costars as a salt-of-the-earth carpenter who lends a hand to brother-in-law Affleck when the downsized exec most needs it. Wells and company have made a film that eloquently sums up much of what American workers have experienced in alarming numbers over the past few years. Relaxed and affable despite a grueling schedule, Wells proved equally eloquent in an early morning interview on a day when Chicago was as cold and grey as Park City.

Andrea Gronvall: It’s great that you launched The Company Men at Sundance last year, because it’s an excellent forum for serious films with something to say.

John Wells: Festivals have become even more important, what with the major studios basically out of the business with these kinds of films now—that’s a generalization, as occasionally a wonderful film like The Social Network will come through the studio system. But not often, and most studios can only point to maybe one every couple of years, not one every couple of months, which is what it used to be. So you really need the festivals if you’re going to get any kind of airing or distribution. But that has turned festivals more into marketplaces, where most were originally there just to show films that often nobody would see otherwise.

AG: There’s a current of social consciousness, and frequently, social activism, throughout your work—obviously in The West Wing, ER, and now The Company Men. Did growing up the son of a minister affect your worldview? Were your parents social activists?

JW: My mother’s a schoolteacher and a union activist and my father’s a minister in the Episcopal Church and very much a peace and justice advocate. So I grew up in an atmosphere [where] part of your responsibility as a citizen was to try to participate in the democracy in some way and work toward changes that you believed in. I come from a long line of Democrat activists and FDR supporters. I was born in Virginia, and grew up in Colorado–again, in a very progressive environment: in Denver those were the Pat Schroeder years.

AG: When you first began your research on The Company Men, you talked to about 300 downsized workers one-on-one. Did they consent to interviews on video, or on audiotape?

JW: It started [when] my brother-in-law lost his job, as many people have. He’s very accomplished academically; he had an MBA and a graduate level electrical engineering degree. His company was bought out by a foreign company and 5,000 people lost their jobs on the same day. He started telling me about his experiences, something I didn’t know that much about. So I went online to a bunch of the downsizing and unemployment chat rooms, saying I might be interested in writing about this if you have anecdotes. And I had a couple of thousand responses.

My researcher and I started culling the people who might be more compelling when you actually spoke to them, and then followed that up with phone calls. A lot of them I did, a lot of them my researcher did, and then there were a certain number of people that I interviewed in person because they lived locally, or lived someplace where I was going to work.

AG: One of the many things I like about The Company Men is how you convey the sense of shame Chris Cooper’s character feels; he’s harder hit by the loss of his job than the others. And then his sorrow, disbelief, rage—for him, losing his job is not so very far removed from losing a loved one.

JW: I found among all the people that I interviewed, that no matter how many other people were losing their jobs at the same time, and no matter how you process it intellectually — that it really was no personal responsibility of yours that led to your losing your job — that people always felt like they’d done something wrong, were trying to figure it out, and felt ashamed that they had lost their jobs. I think it’s a cultural thing, the way we so much connect our jobs to who we think we are.

AG: You’ve put your money where your mouth is by taking on the presidency of the WGA West, for a second time. Clearly you believe in labor rights. Where do you see the future of unions in this country? And where do you find the time to do everything you do: two TV series, directing a movie and promoting it, plus heading the Writers Guild of America?

JW: I work with and depend upon a lot of really wonderful, talented collaborators; many I’ve worked with for 20 years and more. So, that’s how I do all those things. I absolutely do believe in unionism and this notion that through collective action people can take care of each other, like in the Writers Guild. We’re basically all freelancers, and people don’t work for individual companies for long periods of time.

The health and pension benefits that are going to be provided when you’re moving from job to job through a multi-guild employer plan, the kind of protections for our work, and the credits and some things like that, are essential for writers to string together a real career. Otherwise, without those protections I think it’d be very difficult for people to raise families.

AG: Are you a news junkie?

JW: I don’t know if I’m a “junkie,” but I spend a tremendous amount of time actually reading the news. I get the New York Times and L.A. Times every day. I regularly read the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. I have lots of friends who send me various articles from all over the country, one of the advantages now of the Internet. I got into the [news] habit as a child—I was raised in a home in which Time Magazine was revered–but as a writer it’s been furthered by the kinds of television shows and things that I’ve written.

When we were doing The West Wing we got the exact same newspapers on our doorstep every day that come into the White House. A large part of the responsibility of the writers on each one of the shows — ER, and The West Wing, and now for what we do on Southland — is to be constantly reading different periodicals, and have researchers pull things.

One of the difficulties in The Company Men was that the economic situation was literally changing as we were shooting, so on a daily basis I was making changes to the script to try to keep it up to date because events were unfolding so quickly during the depths of the credit crisis.

AG: I like that you end the film on a note of hope, and I’m wondering if in all your research you came across a lot of real-life instances of downsized folks who were able to reinvent themselves.

JW: I never want to minimize the economic and emotional difficulty of going through these experiences, but I was really struck by the resiliency of the people that I talked to. It’s one of the great things, I think, of the American character; it is why the country has been successful over time, is that there’s a quality of picking yourself back up and figuring out what to do next. And everybody found other things to do.

My brother-in-law is a perfect example. He had a rough period; there was a huge contraction in his industry so there were lots of people with his exact resume who were out looking for jobs at the same time. And he ended up eventually, after some rough years, going back to school, and getting a law degree, and now is [using] his electrical engineering and business background as a patent attorney up in Silicon Valley. You find a way to get to the other side, and often discover who will actually come to your aid. Americans are a very individualistic and proud people, but we’ve moved away from a time not that long ago in which you were required to depend upon your community to simply survive.

We’ve moved away in the sense [that it’s expected] that everybody should be able to take care of themselves, no matter what the circumstances. And the reality is that in these situations, the first thing that you need to do is to gather your resources, your family and friends, and people who can support you, to pull through the more difficult times.

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A Conversation with Tamara Drewe Director Stephen Frears

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

By Andrea Gronvall

This fall when so many films are about heavy subjects like dirty politics, wrongful imprisonment, death and near-death experiences, one independent comedy stands out as a welcome oasis. Tamara Drewe is the latest work by gifted British director Stephen Frears, whose notable movies include, but are by no means limited to, The Grifters, Dangerous Liaisons, High Fidelity, and The Queen.

Based on the graphic novel by Posy Simmonds (who was inspired by Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd), this entertaining movie is a satirical look at a picturesque English country village, where a pompous mystery writer (Roger Allam) holds court at the writers’ retreats he hosts on his estate, in between churning out bestsellers and cheating on his long suffering wife (Tamsin Greig).

The return of former neighbor Tamara Drewe (Gemma Arterton)—once a Plain Jane, but now a stunning London sophisticate–turns everyone upside down. Things get even more complicated when she hooks up with a rebounding rock star (Dominic Cooper), an event that turns a bored, rebellious, lovelorn teen (Jessica Barden) into a stalker. Fresh off the film festival circuit, Frears recently stopped in Chicago to chat up his movie, which Sony Pictures Classics is now rolling out across the country in a platform release.

Andrea Gronvall: Tamara Drewe is so much fun, as well as moving. You’ve struck an interesting tone.

Stephen Frears: Well, those are the things I thought when I read the script [by Moira Buffini].

AG: How long did it take you to shoot, and how long to edit?

SF: It took me nine weeks to shoot. [The edit took from] December to about March. We just got on with it.

AG: What was the budget?

SF: I don’t know the budget. I’d happily talk about it, but I don’t know it. I choose not to know about it.

AG: One less thing you have to worry about.

SF: No, it’s that I find the numbers so frightening. I just finally said, can’t we make this cheaper?

AG: Well, your movie doesn’t look cheap. It’s beautiful to gaze at.

SF: We shot it late in the year–in September, not in mid-summer. By September the sun was starting to get low in the sky, so that’s when it looks especially beautiful. And this [the story] had to cover all of the seasons, so you wanted a time of the year that gave you the most possibilities. We were incredibly lucky. We shot in the west of Dorset. I have a house in Dorset; I go out for about three days, then I have to get back to London. It is stunningly beautiful, but then you just start to get restless.

AG: So the “weekenders” angle in the movie is true to life?

SF: Yes, it’s about rich people who bought houses in the country, thereby pricing out the local people.

AG: Well, gentrification is happening in a lot of places. I used to attend the Telluride Film Festival, when the town had loads of charm. But since it became a vacation-home magnet for celebrities, it’s been very built up.

SF: I was in Telluride this summer. It’s lovely, but it has become gentrified.

AG: In a lot of movies these days women characters are one-dimensional; one is either a femme fatale, or a gun-toting action heroine, or merely a decorative sex object, or impossibly good.

SF: I understand your complaint.

AG: The women in Tamara Drewe share some of these aspects, but what I loved about the movie is that they’re all so flawed.

SF: So, that’s what women want—to be shown as flawed?

AG: It makes them more interesting. Here you give them space, to be good and to be bad. That’s a neat trick to pull off. How did you decide on that tone?

SF: It was always in the story, the tone. The truth is if I didn’t show women like that, the women around me would crucify me. I don’t really have a choice!

AG: Who are those women who would beat you up?

SF: My wife, my daughter, the casting director—I mean, they’re all women around me. They would trample me into the ground.

AG: I found the tone of your film to be slightly different than the book’s. It’s a bit more larky.

SF: It has high spirits.

AG: Yes! It reminded me of Cold Comfort Farm. It’s delightful that there are so many layers to this tranquil country village that one might not suspect at first. If this were a Hollywood film, the actress playing the title character would be in every scene, and we wouldn’t get as much layering.

SF: They don’t do ensemble films in Hollywood?

AG: Not often enough. With buddy pictures, the two male stars may split the screen time, but more and more often, there’s one main star supported by actors in minor roles who don’t have many lines.

SF: Oh, I knew this was an ensemble film. In fact, when they asked me if I would make it I said, “I can’t make it with famous people.”

AG: It meshes as an ensemble piece; it’s more than just a springboard for all these talented performers to come on and do their clever bits, and then exit. I’m guessing it was the screenwriter who decided to introduce the two mischief-making local teenage girls, Jody [Jessica Barden] and Casey [Charlotte Christie] earlier in the movie than they are in the book.

SF: We all said, can’t we have more of the young girls–they’re so wonderful—so we brought them forward.

AG: The movie really becomes a triangle about three women, three generations—Tamara, Jody, and Beth, the mystery writer’s wife, played by Tamsin Greig. Shifting the focus back and forth between them not only propels the narrative forward in a really engaging manner; it also leads to a deeper understanding of the characters because we see how they view each other.

SF: That’s interesting, but it wasn’t that self-conscious.

AG: But even if it wasn’t self-conscious, this switching focus creates sympathy for characters who might be a little too hard-edged, or self-serving. Did you see Tamara as a kind of anti-heroine?

SF: No, because I don’t think like that; I just saw her as a gorgeous girl appearing in the middle of a village, causing chaos.

AG: Gemma Arterton is definitely gorgeous. And your other casting decisions: you picked solid actors like Dominic Cooper—I didn’t even recognize him in the film. It was a surprise to see his name in the end credits.

SF: Where did you know him from?

AG: An Education, and a few smaller roles.

SF: Again, perhaps because I don’t see all these films—no, I had seen An Education. He’s jolly good. But I’ve never seen Mamma Mia!

AG: He could start a whole new trend here. If more guys realized what a little eyeliner could do for smoldering looks—

SF: He’s great. My cousin said, “You want Dominic Cooper,” and I said, “Oh, okay.”

AG: Why did she say that?

SF: I never asked her.

AG: You obviously enjoy long-standing relationships based on trust and faith. Okay, then, why Tamsin Greig?

SF: Because she’s brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Various friends started working with her and I was rather jealous. She’s a very, very witty, striking woman. She never stops working in England. And only when I met her did I agree to make the film.

AG: In this role she seems like she has the kind of heft of an Emma Thompson—someone of that caliber. And what about Roger Allam?

SF: Well, he’s the best actor in England.

AG: He deserves to be discovered here in the U.S., too.

SF: Well, that’s not my problem—don’t blame me! They’re very good actors. You make these [casting] decisions instinctively. You try to think about it, but then you work a lot out afterwards: “Oh, that’s why I did that.” A lot of it is just instinct.

AG: Tell me a little about your new project.

SF: I’m supposed to make a film in Las Vegas, about sports book gamblers.

AG: What is the allure of that for you?

SF: Lay the Favorite, Take the Dog is a rather good book [by Beth Raymer], and a good script by a friend of mine, a chap called D.V. DeVincentis, who wrote the screenplay for High Fidelity. I like Chicago; I made High Fidelity here.

AG: You captured a lot of what’s appealing about our city. You also recently were in Toronto with Tamara Drewe; how did you find the festival this year?

SF: It’s become just business. It wasn’t the fun it used to be.

AG: Is there any film festival you like?

SF: Telluride! Telluride was heaven: very familial—friendship and intellectual curiosity. It’s absolutely terrific.

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The Gronvall Files:Going the Distance from Fact to Fiction with Director Nanette Burstein

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

Change is good, although it’s not always easy to reinvent oneself. But New York filmmaker Nanette Burstein, a Best Documentary Feature Oscar nominee for On the Ropes (which she co-directed with Brett Morgen), doesn’t miss a step in her transition from nonfiction film to narrative features.
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