Radcliffe, Temple, and Hill Toot Their "Horns"

Playing in Theaters

Radcliffe, Temple, and Hill Toot Their Horns

(from Sag Harbor Express Online 10/30/14)

By Danny Peary

Horns, Alexandre Aja’s genre-bending adaptation of Joe Hill’s cult novel, opens theatrically Friday in New York City and elsewhere.  You can also see it on VOD. Just as Ben Affleck’s character is wrongly accused of murdering his cold-hearted wife in Gone Girl, a young man, Ig Perrish (Daniel Radcliffe gives still another excellent post-Harry Potter performance), is blamed for the rape and murder of his virtuous long-time girlfriend, Merrin (an appealing Juno Temple).  Unlike Affleck’s ineffectual character, Ig grows a pair of horns that have the power of making everyone he comes into contact with reveal their most despicable thoughts and desires.  Ig sets out to find the real killer, and as he gets closer, he increasingly transforms into the Devil.  He is even accompanied by snakes during his pursuit.  He may be the Devil and is capable of brutality, but he isn’t such a bad guy.  That’s one of the many quirks in this daring, well-cast and acted, zany hybrid that is at once a love story, a parable, a murder mystery, a satire, and a horror film with images that are not for the squeamish.  It’s a wild ride that I hope you take to the end.  On Tuesday, I was part of this lively roundtable with Radliffe, Temple, and Hill (Stephen King’s son) at the Trump Soho in Manhattan.  I note my questions.

Joe Hill, Juno Temple and Daniel Radcliffe.

Q: Joe, before this project got off the ground, what did you perceive would be the biggest challenge a filmmaker would face when adapting your book to the screen?

Joe Hill: I never thought it would be a film. I thought it was such a weird, unlikely story to be adapted.  My leaping off point was Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.  You have Gregor Samsa, a man with a meaningless job, waking up one day as a giant insect.  He was an insect even before he turned into an insect and even his family didn’t respect or care about him.  When he becomes a bug, the internal truth becomes external.  Horns is pretty much the same way.  In my other stories, even fantasies, there’s usually an explanation of a conventional sort.  But this is more surreal, magical realism, and very Kafkaesque.  It has a black sense of humor and a tragic love story and a lot elements and I thought that was so strange that I couldn’t imagine anyone really making it into a film.

Q: Daniel, what was your first impression of Joe’s book, which is quite different from his father Stephen King’s books.

Daniel Radcliffe: I wasn’t looking at Joe’s work through the frame of his father’s work.  I just viewed it as an incredibly original, daring, witty, and emotional piece of writing.  I was pleased how that transferred into a script. Obviously things change when a novel is adapted into a screenplay but the one thing you don’t want people to be upset about is the absence of the book’s tone.  What makes Joe’s book unique is that it rampages through different styles, and we have remained very faithful to that and hopefully fans of the book will respond to that in the film.

Q: How did you feel about a movie that mixes so many genres–romance, satire, crime, horror, mystery…everything?

DR: Joe has said how he likes old movies that did many different things, and one of my favorite films is A Matter of Life and Death [1946], which has some amazing flights of fantasy, including a court case in heaven.  It is very funny and imaginative, and also has real drama and dramatic tension throughout. It does everything successfully.  That’s what excited me about the script for Horns.  We live in a world of people who obsessively categorize everything and I like that this film is very hard to pin down.  If you can describe a movie in one sentence and do it justice, it’s probably not a very good movie.  I think Horns will take many sentences to define.

JH: I wouldn’t call Horns a horror movie exactly.  In bad horror you get the jock and the cheerleader and the geek and the virgin and other one-note characters, and the character who has the most dimensions turns out to be the serial killer.  I find that morally odious because I don’t want to root for the bad guy, I want to root for the good guy.  I don’t think horror should be about disgusting people, about shock, or about sadism, but about characters you can really love so that when you see them suffer you will root for them to pull through.  It should about empathy rather than nastiness, and a sense of humor and a sense of romance brings more to the story.  What we see more and more, especially in the last decade, are horror movies that do only one thing.  They’re only scary, or sadistic, or funny, or romantic.  Because that’s so much easier to market.  They know how to sell a movie like Ouija because all it does is try to be scary for an hour and a half.  But that’s not necessarily better storytelling.  I love ambitious storytelling.

DR: Also, if you were to look at your life as a film, you’d be very hard pressed to pin it down to being only one genre.  A script like this without a sense of humor wouldn’t be something I’d be interested in doing. Because even the darkest times in life often result in the use of humor even as a coping mechanism or something else.  It’s a lot more complicated and real this way.

Q: The movie is many things, but, Joe, what do you think of the original religious aspect in the book being toned down in the film?

JH: I don’t know if I agree that the movie toned down the religious aspect, I just think it has a lighter touch.  It doesn’t hammer you over the head with religious subtext and it’s good that it’s not a theology lecture because I doubt if people would buy a ticket to that. Ig is a giving, loving person who thinks about others.  And Merrin is also a giving, loving person who thinks about others. In that way, it has a kind of quiet, Christian idealism, I guess.  But it’s not a religious film like a Mel Gibson movie. [Laughter]

DR: It’s interesting that you can watch this film as a very religious person and enjoy it.  There’s a lot of Old Testament-style justice. And you can see Ig as sort of a Job figure.  But I think we’re using religious symbolism and imagery to tell the story of humans, rather than the other way around.

Danny Peary: What I find most interesting is that when you expect Divine Intervention and God to save the day and goodness to prevail as in many good vs. evil films, Ig must go back to being the Devil to get the job done.  At one point it’s stated that “God turns a blind eye,” so is God present at all in this story and is the Devil an antihero rather than a villain?

JH: There is one viewpoint that God and the Devil aren’t adversaries, they’re actually on the same side.  In some ways that makes sense if you think that God hates sinners and the Devil punishes them.  The first time we ever see him, he frees two people from a jungle prison where they are being held by a megalomaniac and awakens them to their sexuality at the same time–which is kind of awesome and progressive.

Juno Temple: Weirdly when you look at Ig when he become a devilish, demonic creature, you see that he’s in that guise for good to solve a horrible crime.  So it’s the idea of playing with good and bad and how good can be bad and bad can be good.

JH: I’ve always thought that the Devil is kind of a superhero and he’d fit right in with The Avengers.  He has superpowers and has a really cool look with the horns and red costume.

Q: Daniel, how much of your look was makeup and how much was done on computer?

DR: It was all really there.  from I wore the horns and extensions and everything else. If there was some touching up in special effects, it was minimal. And there is only one snake in the film that is visual effects–it was actually a real snake but it looked like it was made out of rubber. [Laughter]

Q: Daniel, I saw you this year in the play The Cripple of Inishmaan and you were amazing.  You were the cripple in the play and now in this movie, you wear horns almost the entire time.  Can you talk about altering your body to play Billy and using props with Ig?

JH: I really enjoy being physical and being challenged with different roles.  With The Cripple of Inishmaan, I had to do something myself to change my body.  On Horns, the acting and attitude was obviously in my jurisdiction but the transformation itself was the work of other people and I was the beneficiary of it.  Any time you can look in the mirror, and you’ve gained distance between what’s looking back at you and the person you normally see in the mirror that’s a good thing.

DP: Joe, did you name Merrin after the priest who tries to rid of the girl of the demon in The Exorcist?

JH: I did.

DP: Juno, your character is portrayed as totally good, even angelic, keeping demons out of Ig while she’s alive.  Yet despite her being established like that she has premarital sex, which is progressive in that it breaks movie rules.

JT: First and foremost, Merrin is good, but she’s human good.  Being human is being naughty and nice, you’re going to be a bit of both.  I think that enjoying lovemaking can be seen as a sin, especially within her character.  But it’s complicated because she’s also truly in love with somebody and I think sex is a big part of being in love.   She is obviously this presence.  I truly feel you need people like Merrin in the world who just have this light around them.  You feel so happy and lucky to know them.  Do I feel she’s really good in a religious, angelic sense? No.  I think she’s human but, my God, I think she’s a good human.

JH: The Devil is okay with sex before marriage! That’s another reason he’s so awesome!

DP: Ig is a nice, caring, decent young man.  But if Merrin hadn’t existed, would he have gone down the wrong road with all of the other kids he grew up with?

DR: It’s really hard to say but it’s undeniable that if someone like Merrin walks into your life and adapts to who you are you and your lives become intertwined, then the relationship is going to be special.   It is special because Ig and Merrin meet each other in their formative years and they become for each other what the other one lacks. Seeing Ig as an adult and knowing about his past relationship with Merrin, I find it hard to even imagine what life would have been like for him if they had never met.  Probably it wouldn’t end like it does or as early as it does!   You know, better to have loved and lost.

JT: Yeah.

DP: Talk about that and the film’s tag line, “Love Hurts Like Hell,” which makes it clear we’re watching a love story.

JT: I think it’s a good tag line because ultimately when you look at this relationship it hurts like hell because his love has been taken away.  Not only has the love of his life been ripped away but also he’s suspected of murdering this young woman.  He did love her and everybody around her loved her. This is an honest love story in which Merrin and Ig are both wholeheartedly in love and I think have an incredible balance.

DR: Going back to what Juno said, Ig and Merrin are such a loving, committed relationship.  My mom and dad have been married for over thirty years and the institution of marriage is not something I have any personal problems with. But getting married doesn’t prove that you love someone.

JH: My favorite scene in the movie is when Merrin and Ig break up.  You have these two people who love each other so deeply and they say such agonizing and painful things to each other.  They obviously care for each other but stick their knives into each other over and over again.  It’s easy in films and novels to make it seem like bad things happen because of evil but actually a lot of bad things happen because of people trying to do the right thing. You almost always suffer because of love, not only because of hate.  People are much more likely to kill because of love than hate.

Q: Daniel, after shooting such emotional scene, when the director said “Cut,” did you go right back to being yourself?

DR: No. Particularly if you’re not done yet it’s not helpful to snap back to yourself.  By the time Juno and I filmed that diner breakup scene, we were getting along, but when you do intense scenes like that it kind of solidifies your relationship with the other actor. We shot it for two days and it was very emotional.  We were there for each other but because of the nature of the scene we needed to be in our own spaces as well.  It wasn’t possible to flip back and forth in and out of character.

Q: That was my favorite scene, too.  I was interested in whether they are looking at love in a child-like way, talking about their love lasting forever, or an adult way, realizing they might not know each other after all.

JT: I’m a hopeless romantic.  I believe in true love and that at any age you can fall madly in love with someone and it can last forever.   That also applies to friendships because I think love shows itself in many different ways.  I think it’s interesting that we can never totally know each other because that’s a joy of being human.  I think every human should have a bit of mystery because if you fully know someone you might not be in love with them entirely.  It’s the idea of having things that are only yours.

JH: That’s actually one of the things the story is about.  What does it do to you when you know everything about someone else, including their worst thoughts?  Would seeing their darkest places destroy your feelings for them?  I know that before I wrote the book my idea was to take this decent, sort of perfect young man and destroy him and turn him into Satan.  While writing the book, I discovered that destroying someone who is decent is harder than I expected.  Even when they are faced with the worst in the people they love, they can still find the power to forgive them and still care about them.  And for a pretty dark story, that’s kind of hopeful.

DP: Juno, at the film’s premiere, you spoke about Merrin being “a memory” because she’s dead when the picture begins.

JT: That’s something that drew me to the character.  Because memories are so precious.  Even as an actress, you draw on so many memories–memories of being sad or happy, or maybe being bored while taking a train from one city to another.  You wrack your brain for some of your favorite memories.  You can sit by yourself and laugh at your memories or be taken into another universe.  Memories are the most brilliant thing the human mind is capable of storing, I think.  Getting to play a memory was such an honor, especially to play the memory of someone who truly loves her.

JH: There’s also the Rashomon thing where we keep seeing her through other people’s eyes.

SPOILER ALERT

JH (cont’d): For instance, it’s great going into Lee’s head and seeing that he doesn’t get it.  He’s reading things in Merrin that simply aren’t there.

Q: The Devil’s not the villain in this movie.  It’s Lee, Ig’s long-time friend and lawyer.

JH: You have this character of tremendous malice in Lee Tourneau. He obviously yearns for Merrin, but what he really yearns for is to be complete. Ig is complete because he and Merrin together finish each other.  Lee has never had that and can’t imagine what that feels like. Max Minghella poured so much emotion into that role and it’s wonderful.  I really think that he’s one of the film’s secret weapons.  If there is one thing in the film that I think is so much better than what’s in the book it’s the depiction of Lee Tourneau.  In the book, he’s kind of the boogeyman.  He seems perfect but we know he’s an empty box, a hollow sociopath.  But in the movie he comes across as basically sort of a good guy with some nasty impulses.  You see a man, one of the bros, one of the friends, who could be guilty of sexual assault.  I’ve talked to people who feel that’s so real.  Usually the men who commit sexual assault and murder are not Ted Bundy figures.  It’s usually a friend, someone you trusted who took advantage.

END SPOILER ALERT

Q: Daniel, did you ever have a betrayal from a friend that you could draw on for the friendship between Ig and the real killer?

DR: No, no! I’ve never had a friend like that to draw on, which I’m very grateful for. [Laughter]  I’m sure I’ve had something but nothing that is comparable.  Obviously you draw from whatever you have experienced and with some friends we reached a point where we couldn’t be friends anymore but that’s not really the same thing.

Q: Joe, in regard to the issue of violence against women, I’m curious what it was like for you to write the scene where Merrin is raped and killed.

JH: I’m not sure how I can respond to that. [Note: Hill donates to the Pixel Project.] Indie rockers will sometimes say, “I don’t know how you can dance to that song because I was in such pain when I wrote it.”  And you kind of want to swat them because they seem so full of themselves and pretentious.  But Horns was a really unhappy and paranoid book that was written by an unhappy and paranoid man.  The whole thing is just kind of this muddle of being depressed and not feeling like I could write a novel.  The end came out really well and I’m proud of it, and for me it’s a lot easier to connect with and enjoy the movie because I have a little distance from it and I could just sit back and enjoy it while all these other people [like the director Alexandre Aja and screenwriter Keith Bunin] did the heavy lifting.  I don’t know how the actors had the courage to do what they did in the film. I want to know how you, Juno, could do that?

JT: Shooting something like a rape and murder scene is never going to be easy and shouldn’t ever be easy. When you sign on to play a character who is going to go through that, you have to be ready to do it. We shot in the middle of the night in the forest in freezing cold Canada.  It was important to respect Merrin and not wear a warm coat and not drink a hot chocolate, because if I was really her in that situation I would be so frightened.  As you said, Joe, someone you have grown up with and trust can turn on you just like that–it’s such a chilling thought.  Alexander Aja created such an intense environment that night.  It took a long time, it was cold, it was miserable in the right way.  I was so lost in it.  It was a horrible scene but I wasn’t going to be a starlet and say, “Oh, sorry I’m not going to shoot that.”  You have to go for it and let go and allow yourself to be frightened.  And to be honest, it does take time to shake it off.  You should respect a scene like that and for any woman who has gone through something like that I didn’t want to be fucking pampered when doing it.

DR: And you weren’t.  That was like your first or second day of shooting. I got there a week later and Juno had set such a high bar.  The crew was saying, “That girl stayed under those rain machines four hours without complaining.”  That was not representative of how most actors would be.

SPOILER ALERT

JT: Max is actually a very good friend of mine.  I see him on a regular basis because we’re neighbors in Los Angeles.  I know him so well but when Lee does that sudden shift in personality, it really was frightening.

END SPOILER ALERT

JT (cont’d): What was amazing about working with all these young actors was that we all just went for it.  All we could do was react to each other, so it was so great that we could trust each other.  That’s all thanks to Alex creating this universe.  You do it, and the next day you want to have cocktails together.  Everybody around you respected the position you’re in.  That was something I was blown away by when making this film.  Not only was that rape and murder scene brutal, there were a lot of brutal scenes.  Every single actor was challenged.  Even the kids who played us when we were young had challenges, physical challenges, real fear, hard situations.  I can say everybody respected that.

Q: Daniel, what was the most poignant thing for you in the film? Was it listening to Ig’s parents say awful things to him and reveal how they truly feel about him?

DR: That was horrible but the thing that brought me up short every time, whether reading it or doing it, was the scene in the treehouse in which Ig reads Merrin’s letter and finds out what was really going on with her.  That is what makes this story stay with me.  That love story Juno talked about is so key to the film.  We created this perfect, universal dream relationship between young lovers–which Joe then destroyed! [Laughter]  There is something so blissful and golden about it and I think everyone has had some version of that relationship, so what befalls them is hard to see.  But I believe the end of that storyline, with Ig reading the letter, makes the movie really special.

Keanu Reeves Talks About Playing "John Wick"

Playing in Theaters

Keanu Reeves Talks About Playing John Wick

(from Sag Harbor Express Online 10/23/14)

By Danny Peary

An action-revenge thriller with a high body count, John Wick opens theatrically this Friday, and the advance word is good.  For the Australian magazine FilmInk, I went on a set-visit in Brooklyn last winter with five other international journalists.  Filming took place outside, in a large parking lot next to an abandoned bank. It was freezing, causing all of us to huddle around a space heaters between takes.  When we could brave the cold, we stood to the side and watched a shoot-out amidst several parked cars, a meticulously choreographed scene that took two days to film.  There was a lot of gunfire and well-dressed thugs fell dying into the mud, ruining their suits, and clearly the victor was the title character played by Keanu Reeves.  Afterward Reeves, in a dark suit and tie and with slick hair that was parted down the middle, sat in a tent getting his makeup reapplied. He wasn’t made up to look handsome.  He emerged with his face covered with scratches, cuts, and blood.  That’s how he looked when we did the following, very informal roundtable at a square table in the unheated building.  I note my questions as I represented FilmInk.

Keanu Reeves in a scene from “John Wick.”

Q: What are you shooting today?

Keanu Reeves: My character is trying to get to a Russian crime lord, Viggo, played by Michael Nyqvist.  To find out where he is, he first goes after Viggo’s son Iosef [Alfie Allen] and he has to kill his henchmen.

Q: Talk about your character.

KR: John Wick is a former assassin who worked for Viggo but fell in love and got married and kind of put his past behind him. He literally buried his past, his guns, in his basement. His wife [Bridget Monahan] passes away from an illness and she gives him her dog.  She tells him, you need someone or something to love. John Wick has been robbed of his ability to grieve and to have this kind of hope, but he got this gift from his wife. The son has two henchmen with him and they steal John’s car and kill the dog.  So he seeks revenge. The film plays with worlds. There’s the normal world he has lived in and the underground world from his past that he goes back into.

Q: You’re the protagonist in this, and you’re a cold-blooded killer.

KR: Yeah, it’s pretty Old-Testament. It’s not a New Testament story until, maybe,  the final scenes. The journey starts off, he wants revenge–maybe not revenge, but reclaiming.  Someone’s taken something from him, and instead of saying, Q: You’re the protagonist in this, and you’re a cold-blooded killer.

KR: Okay, I’ll deal with that loss and move on, he’s the kind of person who’ll say, No, you can’t take that from me.John Wick is a little extreme. Viggo describes John as someone you would send after the bogeyman.

Danny Peary: The most dangerous revenge characters are those who have nothing to lose. Does your character at this point have anything to lose?

KR: I guess the deepest and easiest answer is yes, his soul. It’s the good part of him. When this switch goes on with John, I don’t think he reflects a lot about the dark side that he goes into, but I guess if he doesn’t do what he does in the film and he doesn’t reclaim his good side, he’ll be lost in the dark side of death.

DP: With your character, there’s resurrection, but how can he allow his dark nature to take over in order to defeat all these people and still get redemption?

KR: I think it’s because when we first see John, we see the good side of him. He’s with his wife and he’s loved.  He restores old books. He’s a nice guy. I think of him as an orphan who went into the military and kind of got pulled out of the military. That backstory is not spoken about, but hopefully I can transmit that he’s not a monster. Because I feel like he’s relatable. When things that we love are taken away, I think we all strive to protect and reclaim them, so I think in terms of relating to this character and what he does, there’s some wish fulfillment.  If they did that to me, that would be my way of dealing with it! [Laughter] An impulse, a basic impulse.

DP: It’s like peaceful Viggo Mortensen being forced to resort to his old ways in The History of Violence.

KR: Yes. I don’t know, I sympathize with the guy.

Q: What was your weapons training for this?

KR: It’s been fun.  I’ve had some movie gun training in the past, so some of the techniques I was familiar with, but each character I play requires something different so I worked for a while with a gentleman from LAPD SWAT.  I also worked with a guy from the army, because I would be doing different kinds of weapon and tactical techniques.  So it was basically reacquainting myself with weapons and techniques while training new things on the job and trying to get it right under the circumstances. One thing I needed to get right was a tricky holster!

Q: What about training for hand-to-hand combat?

KR: I worked with some very accomplished jujitsu and judo practitioners. I’m very much a beginner, but when I can focus on certain techniques, I can hopefully get pretty good at them.  I hasn’t been easy, and my knees aren’t as fresh as they were ten years ago, but with experience comes efficiency–and I’m a lot more efficient.

Q: When you do something like this, is there an adrenaline rush or something that elevates your excitement levels?

KR: Yeah, this film gives me a lot of opportunities to do action.  They wanted me to not do everything.  The way that they’re filming, they’re doing some inserts but they’re very long takes, and you’re seeing it happen. They want me to do a couple of throws, jujitsu and some judo. Some neat things that I haven’t really haven’t had the chance to do much of before.  So I was excited by that. There are fight sequences when it’s Action!, and you have to go for it.  And there is an adrenaline rush.  But even the scene you saw today, it’s movie fighting.

Q: After months of training and the end of the shoot now, are you exhausted?

KR: I really love this project.  You know, you go into a project with lots of hopes.  We’ve been filming for a couple of months now and the directors, David Leitch and Chad Stahelski, have really realized all that I could hope for. We have a wonderful cinematographer, Jonathan Sela, a great cast, and the right tone for the film, so it’s going to be a unique genre picture.

DP: What do you mean by right tone?

KR: It has a real tone but it’s a hyper-reality.  It’s really hard-boiled. And I like that. It depends on your sense of fun, but for me it’s fun.

Q: Has directing given you a different perspective on the set, as an actor?

KR: Absolutely, and not only on the set.  While it’s definitely everything on the floor in terms of the camera and shooting, I also see things differently in regard to pre-production and post-production, and try to support the directors with everything involved with the picture.

Q: What is your relationship with the directors?

KR: I first worked with Chad when he was a stunt double on The Matrix.  That’s where I met him. We did theMatrix trilogy together. After that, I also worked on pictures with David. They went on to create a company called 8711, which is action design. They did a lot of second unit filming for some really big Hollywood movies. I’d seen their work so on the action side of it, I was really confident and excited about what they could do with the opportunity to direct. Working with them on the script and my character, I felt that they were so creative and understood the material really well.  They’re really collaborative, they pay attention to detail, they know what they want, they accept my help.  For me, it’s everything that I could look for in an actor-director relationship.

Q: What about a sequel for this?

KR: I don’t know, it depends on how they end this version, if I die or not. There’s a question about whether or not John Wick survives. We’ve shot different versions of the ending. John Wick, the Beginning! Yeah, I mean if they wanted to do something like that, I’d be game, hopefully with the same directors. I really enjoyed playing the character.  I still love acting, because every role has variety. Each role, including John Wick, has its puzzle and its journey. I really enjoy figuring it out and going on that journey.

Tom O'Brien's "Manhattan Romance" in The Big Apple

Playing at Film Festival

Tom O'Brien's Manhattan Romance in The Big Apple

(from Sag Harbor Express Online 11/6/14)

Tom O’Brien.

By Danny Peary

Modern Romance fits my category Movies That Should Play in Sag Harbor.  It hasn’t had its theatrical release yet but it can be seen Sunday night at the Big Apple Festival at the Tribeca Cinema in New York City. This is writer-director-leading man Tom O’Brien’s smart, witty, terrifically-acted follow-up to his critically-acclaimed Fairhaven, which was about three male high school buddies who have a tumultuous reunion in their Massachusetts town.  It is about one lonely outcast who finds himself adrift. Danny works at a New York ad agency but on the side tries to finish a documentary he’s been shooting forever about relationships.  He hasn’t been able to have a successful relationship himself, other than his strong friendship with Carla (rising star Katherine Waterston), and now finds himself with Theresa (a super Caitlin Fitzgerald of Masters of Sex), who won’t have sex with him and believes in open relationships.  Carla tells him he could do better but the only other woman he has strong feelings for is Carla, and she is involved with Emmy (Gaby Hoffmann).  He senses she is bisexual but she won’t admit it.   He is frustrated in every way.  Last Friday I spoke to the amiable actor-filmmaker over breakfast about his second feature.

Danny Peary: Congratulations on being the Opening Night film at the Big Apple Film Festival.

Katherine Waterston and Tom O’Brien in “Manhattan Romance.”

Ton O’Brien: We’re thrilled.  It took a while to finish it because of funding, and then we started hoping for a New York premiere. Big Apple is perfect.

DP: You are one of the few athletes who made a successful transition to filmmaking. Are people surprised now to find out that you were once a serious hockey player?

TO: Probably those who just know me from New York as an artist and writer.  But people who just look at my height and weight aren’t that surprised.

DP: You were a goalie at Elmira College.  How good were you?

TO: I was one of the top Division II players.  There was one guy on our team who made it to the Boston Bruins and most of the others guys went to the minor leagues or Europe.  I was scouted and could have played in Europe if I wanted, but I thought there was no point in doing that and delaying my life. As soon as my college hockey career ended I needed to find another outlet.

DP: When did you start writing?

TO: I did some writing in high school but nothing really serious.  In college I was an English lit major and did a little creative writing.  I came to New York when I was about twenty-two to be an actor and started a theater company with Chris Messina and Rosemarie DeWitt.  It was called All Seasons Theatre Group and I started writing plays for it.  They were all one-acts but for one full-length play called The Group that we put on at the Ensemble Studio Theatre [in summer 1999, with Chris Messina directing].  I wasn’t in the full-length play but I was in some of the one-acts.  Most often we’d write for each other and the other people in the company.

DP: What about writing for yourself?

TO: That developed out of the practicality of wanting to get better roles. I wanted to write myself good roles because nobody else was doing that.   So Chris and I talked about writing a movie for ourselves.  So I wrote the script forFairhaven, which would feature us, and for years, he helped me develop it.  [O'Brien would play Jon, an ex-quarterback who is stuck in town, and Messina would play bad-boy Dave, who returns to town for his dad's funeral.] During that whole process of writing a good part for me, I fell in love with writing itself.

DP: Did you prefer from the start to write personal material?

TO: I think so because that’s what I have always been drawn to most when I see films and plays.  Relationships, how characters behave.  I was interested in writing about characters exposing themselves and being vulnerable and open.

DP: Fairhaven got really good reviews to help it out of the gate.

TO: It did. Stephen Holden gave us an amazing review in the New York Times and that got us into a lot of doors. The roll-out for Manhattan Romance has been more low key and we’ve done the smaller festivals and flown under the radar. It’s nice how it is being done.

DP: Talk about casting this film.

TO: The first person I went after was Katherine Waterston.  This was two years ago before she was cast in the lead in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice.  I knew her from theater and I’d met her socially a couple of times. I thought she was interesting and beautiful in a nontraditional way.  Her mom is a supermodel [Lynn Louisa Woodruff] and her dad is Sam Waterston. She’s kind of a combination of the two of them. I talked to Chris about who could play Carla and we concluded we wanted a New York theater actress who felt she needed to be a lead in a movie. I asked Chris, “What about Katherine Waterston?”  I think she’d done only one movie, The Babysitters, with John Leguizamo.  He went, “She’s perfect!” So he emailed her and I met her and thought she was quirky and funny and reminded me of Diane Keaton in Annie Hall.  She was dying to star in a movie and had loved the script so we decided right then to do it together.  I didn’t audition her.

DP: Was there one thing in the script that she wanted you to explain to her?

TO: She was really concerned with the believability of Carla leaving her lesbian relationship and going straight.  I didn’t have to rewrite anything because it was there in the script but she just wanted me to keep an eye on that as the director.

DP: How did you cast Caitlin Fitzgerald as Theresa?

TO: Ed Burns had seen Fairhaven and asked me to lunch.  I told him that I needed a producer to get my second movie made and he said, “I think I know the guy for you, Michael Harrop. I’m meeting him later”  At that moment, somebody walked by the restaurant and Ed goes, “That’s Mike!”  So he grabbed him and brought him in.  Mike had worked with Ed for years and he ended up being my producer.  I mentioned to Ed that I was looking for someone to play Theresa.  He recommended Caitlin, who starred with him in his film The Newlyweds. He put me in touch with her.  So his influence is all over the movie.

DP: Carla and Theresa don’t have any scenes together, so did Katherine and Caitlin ever meet?

TO: They knew each other.  Katherine had to leave in the middle of the shoot to do Night Moves with Kelly Reichardt and when she left Caitlin came in to shoot her scenes.  Then Katherine came back and we finished. She suggested Gaby Hoffmann to play Emmy. I didn’t know her.  It was amazing for Gaby to come in and do a supporting role.  She said, “I always wanted to play Katherine Waterston’s girlfriend.”  We had her for only four days, but she’s such a pro that I didn’t have to give her a word of direction. I didn’t have to give any of them much direction. It’s the Woody Allen thing–it’s all casting.

DP: Don’t take this the wrong way, but if I didn’t know differently I would have thought you had made Manhattan Romance before Fairhaven.

TO: That’s interesting because that’s sort of the opposite of what we’ve been hearing. Most people who sawFairhaven first think this is a leap forward in terms of the filmmaking.  But I can see what you’re saying becauseFairhaven definitely had a bigger budget and the aesthetic was intended to be glossier, with less hand-held shots.

DP: Also I would think you would have wanted to get all the autobiographical material out of your system in your first film before making a movie about three male characters.

TO: Yes, Manhattan Romance is more autobiographical.  There’s a lot more of my life in it than in Fairhaven. InFairhaven there was more cover, on this one I feel more exposed. It think of it as a reflection of the solitary, single New York life that I’d lived for so many years.

DP: I know there is much of Jon, the former high school football star who wants to be a writer, and Danny, a striving filmmaker, that is you.  So could Jon and Danny be friends?

TO: That’s a good question.  I think so.  I feel that if Jon got out of Fairhaven and went to New York and became a writer he might be Danny down the road.

DP: Or you.  In Fairhaven, Jon tells his therapist that it’s hard being who he is.  That seems to be a prevailing theme for you because if Danny went to a therapist I’m sure he’d say the same thing.

TO: You’re right.  It’s like what Scorsese says about directors exploring the same themes their whole career.  So that’s definitely one theme of mine.  Hopefully by the end of the movies Jon and Danny will be closer to stepping into their own selves.  Those are the most interesting characters for me.  We see Hollywood movies about guys who win the game and win the championship and become everything they dreamed of being.  But what about the people who don’t have it that easy?  Therein lies the drama.  I think it’s a nice juxtaposition when you see someone who should be a heroic character and realize he’s not.  Like a one-time star quarterback who once saw him himself as the next Tom Brady.  When you really get into his head and his life, you see he’s not heroic after all.

DP: Does Danny miss his father because he has no role model or male figure to talk to?

TO: It’s interesting that you’d ask that because my actor father [who has a small bit as Danny's uncle] has pointed out that in both of my scripts there is an absence of a father for my characters.  I think it’s a character thing–how do you become a man without having your father be an example?

DP: Directors have common themes in their movies through their whole careers, but I believe you had to make Manhattan Romance when you are at this age, not ten years down the road.

TO: Absolutely. When I look back at the plays I wrote ten or fifteen years ago, I ask, “Who was that who wrote that?”  There are certain things you have to do at certain ages and then move on. I think it’s a film for right now.  When I was making Fairhaven it was like me ten years ago, but Manhattan Romance feels like me when I was making it.  What’s interesting is that the whole crew was single.  My producer, my DP, everyone in the camera departments.  I thought, why not make a documentary about this crew? Since I made the film I have a girlfriend. It is life imitating art.  Being in a relationship, it would be hard to make this movie today.

DP: I expected Manhattan Romance to be a broader comedy because it won the Audience Award at the New Hampshire Film Festival and I wouldn’t have guessed the audience in Portsmouth would so much appreciate a subtle comedy.

TO: The audience at that festival is very savvy and discriminating. My tone is usually very realistic and I love the bridge between documentary and narrative.  I want to feel like I’m watching real lives.

DP: You also have a lot of dead-pan humor.

TO: That’s the kind of humor I grew up with.  Bill Murray, the early Chevy Chase, and those kinds of comic actors.  I also like awkward comedy

DP: I know Woody Allen is your biggest influence. His movie was Manhattan and your movie is Manhattan Romance, and I think you tried to capture the city as much as he did.

TO: That was the idea. This movie was always meant to be an homage to him.  I’ve been in Manhattan for fifteen years now and I’ve always had this experience of it in my head that I wanted to visualize.  For instance, there’s a montage scene where my DP Scott Miller just stole some shots of people in the city.  I wanted to show cinematically what it’s like to walk down the street in Manhattan.  I include early morning scenes when the city wakes up and night scenes when there’s chaos and it’s too stimulating at times.  I try to show the whole spectrum.   We did a lot of walking through the city and you’ll see many familiar places.  Scott and I traded a lot of our New York experiences.  He is kind of the quintessential New York DP,  so we were lucky to get him.  I feel he really captured my internal vision of the city and we were on the same length right from the start.

DP: You could say the “Romance” in the title refers to a romance with the city.

TO: Yeah, it’s the romance between two people, Danny and Carla, but on a bigger scale it’s a romance with the city itself.  We wanted the city to be a character.

DP: Also New York is a giant city of more than eight million people, yet you can be lonely in it, as Danny is.  That’s the difference in New York of having one person in your life and not having someone in your life.

TO: Exactly, it makes a huge difference  We wanted to capture that loneliness and isolation he feels as all these people pass by, crossing into each other’s world’s because it’s so crowded.

DP: Talk about the scene when Danny gets frustrated and starts running through the city, running with no place to go, and the camera impossibly stays on you.

To: It was crazy.  They were in a van and my producer was driving and the DP had the door open and was shooting.  It was Friday night on Prince Street in SoHo so it was packed and I don’t know how they kept up with me.  I was jogging at first and when I realized they were still with me, I ran a little faster and they stayed with me the whole time.  For awhile we considered playing that in one shot.

DP: A line you have quoted in interviews is “Truth is best served through fiction.”

TO: I quoted Hemingway. It’s true.  I wanted this film to be fiction but have the feel of a documentary.  I like the layers of reality there–it’s a film about a filmmaker making a film.

DP: Those are interesting shots when Danny has his interview subjects framed on his camera and meanwhile Scott Miller is shooting him.

TO: It was important to me to shoot like that.  A lot of TV shows, like The Office, do those documentary shots of the subjects but I wanted it to be more about this guy making a documentary. So I told Scott at the beginning to always shoot me while Danny is shooting.

DP: Danny seems to understand the couples he shoots but is he capable of understanding himself?

TO: As is often the case, it’s easier to see things in other people than in yourself.  I think he’s doing that when making his documentary on relationships.  He’s looking at all these other relationships and during the course of making his film he starts to learn more about himself and who he really wants to be with.

DP: So this is a progression for him?

TO: He has been working on his documentary for so long that he needs to finish it before he can move on with the rest of his life.  For him to get together with someone in a real way, he needs to figure out something about himself through making the movie.

DP: Is there a revelation moment in regard to his feelings toward Carla while making the movie?  I know he looks at the footage of Carla sitting with Emmy on their couch, so does he realize that they don’t fit as well as he and Carla do?  Is there something he sees?

TO: I think so.  But maybe there’s not one specific moment.  That’s the conclusion he’s coming to through watching his footage.  Danny is a watcher.  He makes this movie that requires him to watch other people in the city.  Eventually he says he wants to start dealing, he wants to stop observing and be a participant in his own life.  That is the moment when he decides not to sit on the sidelines anymore but be in the game.

DP: Does he think of himself as a supporting character in his own life?

TO: I’d say so.  There’s a line in the film about how he realizes he’s watching other people have their lives rather living his own life.  He concludes he wants to start living, which he can do after putting the movie away.  His relationship with Carla becomes his new project.  I’ve constantly had that experience of having unfinished projects get in the way of my life.  Fairhaven especially because I worked on it for so long. I could identify with this filmmaker who never makes his film or a writer who never writes his novel.  I was someone who couldn’t finish or follow through. Danny couldn’t finish his film in the past, but now he does and realizes that maybe he can be with Carla and live this life that he wants to live.

DP: Does Danny undervalue himself?

TO: Yes. He’s better than he sees himself.  Carla tells him that he’s better than to be in his situation with Theresa. Sometimes it takes someone else to show you yourself.  That’s what Carla and Danny do for each other.  They boost each other.  It flips during the movie and he’s telling her that she’s better than to be in her relationship with Emmy.  They give that honesty to each other and that’s part of their connection.

DP: When he talks to Carla about his preferring to be alone rather than having a relationship, he talks about the need to make sacrifices in order to have a relationship.  I thought that was an odd approach for a person to take.  Compromising is part of relationships, but it sounds negative for him to enter a relationship with the attitude that he’s losing something rather than gaining something.

TO: That’s been his experience.  He’s been alone so much that he’s kind of fallen in love with his solitude and he wants to stay independent and not sacrifice his alone time.  I think there are sacrifices in relationships but there are definitely great things too.   It become a trade-off.  What do you value more–the freedom to do whatever you want to do or a connection to another person?  He tells Carla that he hasn’t met anyone he’d sacrifice his time alone for.  But she calls him on that, saying it doesn’t have to be that way.

DP: Does Danny have any male friends?

TO: Well, he has his buddy who he works with at the editing studio.  But I think he’s a loner.  Carla is his best friend.

DP: Manhattan Romance begins with Danny already involved with a New Agey young woman, Theresa, who believes in open relationships. Jon, your character in Fairhaven, also has a New Age girlfriend who believes in open relationships.  Are New Age types part of your world?

TO: Yes. In my other life, I teach yoga so I’ve been around the New Age community a lot.  In Fairhaven, Angela, the New Age girlfriend played by Alexie Gilmore, becomes a positive person for Jon, but I didn’t feel she was fully realized on screen as much as I wanted to. I really wanted to explore that more with Theresa.  I based Theresa on a real person and Caitlin pretty much is her. Katherine’s character, Carla, is more of an amalgam of different people but Caitlin’s was specific to one person and she nailed her to a T.

DP: Some of the lines Theresa and Danny say to each other as they hug–”innocently” for her but not him–are so funny.  Like when he tells her it’s great that they can hug without his feeling sexual.  He thinks it’s a good thing when he can tell her, “I feel nothing.”

TO: Yeah, and they are real. Put your life in art, Woody Allen-style.

DP: Is he genuinely interested in open relationships?

TO: He’s interested in some progressive ideas about relationships because he hasn’t had luck in standard relationships. So he’s open to the idea that there is something else.  When he’s lying in bed with Carla, she tells him that relationships don’t have to be about one thing.  She breaks it down for him, but he thinks it’s all or nothing and if it doesn’t work he’s willing to try something crazy.  But I think he’s more in love and seduced by Theresa then he is into open relationships.

DP: There’s a lot of self-deception with all your characters, so does Danny wrongly think he could handle Theresa seeing other guys, too?

TO: Totally. I wanted the audience to understand what he’s going through.  She’s a beautiful woman and he is drawn in when she gives him attention, but we know it’s just never going to work. You see that early in the film when Theresa gets up from their table and goes to sit with another guy.  That was an example of what it would be like with her.  And he’s thrown by it.  The idea was interesting but the actuality of it would be hard to do.

DP: We are sure that Danny needs to get away from Theresa.  But we can feel a little sympathy for her because there’s some self-deception going on with her and she’s covering up some pain.

TO: I wasn’t looking to make her the total bad guy.  I wanted to walk the line.  I have seen in the New Age community that there are people who have total self-deception and are a bit crazy, but there are more authentic people who are living the life they want.  I wanted her to be in the middle.  She might be full of shit but she’s trying to figure her life out and really believes in these ideas.

DP: I’m not sure she really believes in these ideas, I think she wants to believe in them.

TO: Yeah, she’s not 100% there.  But there are people who do live those lives.

DP: Like Jarrod, the guy who takes off his shirt and sits on her couch.  He comes across as a completely obnoxious, pretentious guy but when challenged he tells Danny, “You don’t know me.”  That is his one line that hints there may be something there.

TO: You and my mom are the only two people who have picked up on that line so far.  She loved that line because she thought it made him a more well-rounded character.

DP: That one line gives him infinite possibilities.  I still wouldn’t want to spend any time with him.

TO: Neither would I. Except the actor is a sweetheart of a guy who happens to be Katherine’s brother-in-law, Louis Candelmi. He’s a really good actor who’s doing a play at the Public Theater right now.

DP: Just as you didn’t want to make Theresa a villain, you don’t set up Emmy as an awful person.  She’s very close to being perfect for Carla.

TO: Yeah! I’m glad that came across. In the Hollywood version of this story, Emmy would be a terrible person and there would be no doubt Carla should leave her to be with Danny.  But I wanted there to be subtlety and to show that it’s a pretty good relationship between Emmy and Carla. I didn’t want it to be black and white that Carla should need to leave. She’s just not quite what Carla needs.

DP: A theme of yours is that people gravitate toward relationships that they know will have unsatisfying resolutions.

TO: They don’t know that at the time. I don’t think they’d go into it if they knew the outcome.  I always tricked myself into thinking that I can fix it or make it work.  At some point you have the realization that it’s not going to get better.

DP: Were you trying to resolve such things in your own head by exploring these characters in your film?

TO: Yes. It is interesting that I got a girlfriend after finishing my movie.  Like Danny, I finished my movie and was able to be with someone too.

DP: You don’t have to answer this but how close is your girlfriend to Carla?

TO: It’s interesting that she has a lot of the same qualities.  She is also grounded and down-to-earth. Maybe in some way I was writing the perfect woman for me and of an idealized version of a relationship.

DP: Do you think Danny and Carla’s odd relationship is in any way specific to Manhattan?

TO: It’s definitely specific to my experience of New York. When I arrived I felt for the first time, “Oh, I’m home, this is where I should be.”  It’s the land of misfit toys in a way, where all these people from different places come and find their family and home here.  Danny and Carla are misfits at home in New York.  So for me their experience rang true.

DP: Among the millions of people, you would think that there would be 100,000 people who would be good matches for Danny or Carla, but they gravitate toward each other.  In fact, Danny is attracted to Theresa, and Carla lives with Emmy. But could it be that they are the only match for each other?

TO: I don’t know. I guess that’s a philosophical question having to do with whether there is only one person for each person.

DP: Well, do you, not necessarily personally, but as the director-writer of Manhattan Romance, want to make us believe that Danny and Carla are the only match for each other?

TO: The idea is that these two people have an intense connection.  They are friends first but feel something more underneath the friendship.  But they don’t know how to define or articulate those feelings, especially with Carla being in a lesbian relationship with Emmy.  It is even more confusing for her because of the whole sexuality thing, but neither is consciously aware of what their feelings are.

DP: Your film is interesting in regard to being a viewer.  Because when Danny and Carla are both seeming vulnerable and you put the camera close to them, as when she sleeps overnight in his bed, we don’t know if we’re supposed to feel sexual tension between them.  We feel guilty for not accepting that they can just be friends and for thinking he can win her over although she’s a lesbian.

TO: It was intentional.  I wanted you to feel that you were in bed with them.  I love that Scott Miller was invisible and they forgot that he was in the room.  At the screening in LA, somebody said, “I was uncomfortable for a lot of the movie.”  I took that as a great compliment.  I wanted people to feel uncomfortable because it’s all so raw and open and vulnerable.  That’s how the characters are. I think the whole movie is based on there being an underlying sexual tension between them.  So right from the start, we want you to feel that connection. You’re going on a ride with Danny and feeling his intimacy with Carla.

DP: In the script, you include a reference to a guy in Carla’s past.  Danny tells her that he doesn’t want to cross a line with her, but does that guy from her past tell us viewers that she might be bisexual and be worth pursuing?

TO: It is purposeful.  If she had never been with men before and had only been in lesbian relationships, for her to suddenly flip and go 180 degrees the other way would a little hard to buy.

DP: Do you want us to root for Danny to win Carla?

TO: Yeah, ultimately that’s what you want.  She shows up at the end and it’s a version of the classic movie.  He’s just said how he doesn’t like classic movie endings and then he finds himself in one with her.

DP: We like Carla from the start, particularly in comparison to Theresa, and we like Danny but until she has her near breakdown after her breakup with Emmy we don’t really see how good he is for her.  Is that when we’re supposed to see he’s good for her too, or earlier?

TO: Different people see it at different times.  Many people connect with Danny right from the start and go on his whole ride, and others connect to Carla and then come to appreciate Danny more at the time you mention.  Women seem to really like the love story between the two and want them to get together at the end.

DP: Among these characters, do you think sex gets in the way?

TO: For sure.  He obviously wants to be with Theresa sexually and she’s giving him the push-pull.  He has a genuine connection with Carla but when they are together the sexual tension kind of screws up their relationship.  Sex makes them distant from the other rather than enhancing the connection.  They are best friends and both think that if they have sex they might jeopardize what they have.

DP: For the intimate scenes between Danny and Carla, Danny and Theresa, and Carla and Emmy, did you rehearse?

TO: We kind of just talked them through.  You don’t really want to rehearse those scenes.  You don’t want to lose the spontaneity but you also want make sure the actors feel safe and secure enough to do those scenes.  You sometimes get actors who hold back to protect themselves.  As an actor, you want to feel free to do those scenes.  It was more me who was concerned for them.  They said, let’s do it, whatever.

SPOILER ALERT

DP: Your movie is called Manhattan Romance but the romance actually blossoms outside the city.

TO: We shot in Cold Spring [in Putnam County].   I wanted to give the film a little time jump and some distance geographically.  That space was needed for Danny and Carla to come together. It would have felt forced to do it linearly, with them getting together at the end in Manhattan immediately after the previous scene.  The two of them needed what had happened between them at Emmy’s Election night party at the bar to sink in.

DP: He tells the audience at his movie’s Q&A that he doesn’t believe movies should have endings where everything is tied up in a bow.  And your ending is kind of open-ended.

TO: It’s funny that some people expect the screen to go to black after the Q&A.  Even having the final scene with Danny and Carla walking together, it’s not tied up.  That was in the script.  I love ambiguity in films.  Some people may think it has been resolved and they are going to go off and get married and live happily ever after.  Some people may think they will spend the weekend together and realize it’s not going to work.  So it’s a mix of ambiguity and the classic movie ending.

DP: It’s Bogart and Claude Rains.

TO: I steal from Casablanca a lot.

END SPOILE ALERT

DP: How can people see Manhattan Romance?

TO:  For people who miss the Wednesday night opening there will be another screening at 8 pm on Sunday, at the Tribeca Cinema. Then hopefully we’ll get a distributor.  We’re talking to distributors and sales agents.  Rather than do festivals for a long time, we’d rather just get it out there quickly and capitalize on Katherine also being in Inherent Vice.  That comes out December 12 and we’re hoping to ride its coattails. Just since we shot the movie, the careers of Katherine, Caitlin, and Gaby are exploding.  Caitlin’s got Masters of Sex, Gaby’s been on Girls and has got  Transparent, an Amazon show that’s getting really popular.  So the cast and Ed Burns connection will hopefully draw a lot of people to the movie.  I hope people see it.