Four Actor Aces on “King Jack”

Playing in Theaters

Four Actor Aces on King Jack

(from Sag Harbor Express June 16, 1916)

Jack and Ben hide under a car in “King Jack.”

King Jack fits my category Movies That Should Play in Sag Harbor. A year after it received the Tribeca Film Festival’s Audience Award as the most popular narrative film in 2015, Tisch-graduate Felix Thompson’s tough-but-affectionate ode to boyhood opened at the Cinema Village in New York City last week to critical acclaim. I hope it comes our way. Thompson’s first feature takes place in a small, past-its-prime town in upstate New York, where troubled, fifteen-year-old Jack (a winning performance by Charlie Plummer) tries to get through a summer weekend despite having no friends or good role models. He has a critical older brother Tom (Christian Madsen) and a loving but oblivious mother who is busy working and tells him to look after his younger cousin Ben (Cory Nichols is instantly likable). He also is being hounded by bully Shane (Danny Flaherty, now a regular on TV’s The Americans) and his thuggish friends, while chasing after an elite girl who doesn’t like him–and not noticing that the much cooler Holly (Chloe Levine) is interested in him. There will be trouble. That’s essentially the synopsis I included in my introduction to an interview I did with Thompson a week before he received the TFF’s $25,000 prize in April ’15. (http://sagharboronline.com/felix-thompsons-king-jack-is-crowned-tffs-favorite-film/) Minutes later I did the following one-on-four with the young male leads of King Jack: Charlie Plummer, Cory Nichols, Danny Flaherty and Christian Madsen. I liked these guys!

Danny Peary: Charlie, you already had other credits, but it must have been exciting being cast as the title character of a feature film.

Charlie Plummer: I was kind of surprised they cast someone my age, 15, instead of going with someone who’s 18, but I think it really added to the film to have people that age who are going through the experience of learning to deal with problems on their own and not necessarily relying on their parents or someone who’s an actual adult.

DP: Your writer-director Felix Thompson and I talked about how he could have made Ben and Jack the same age in the movie. Would that have made sense?

Cory Nichols: I think it adds to the story for Ben to be a younger cousin. I think it works better if Jack begins to realize that he has to care for other people.

DP: I agree it works better, too, because Jack understands that his older brother, Tom, hasn’t been taking care of him.

CP: I think that in the relationship between Jack and Ben, a lot of the time Ben’s much more mature, which makes it more effective, but Jack thinks of himself as being much more mature. I think he really learns in the process of the entire film that it’s not so much about your age but who you are as a person.

DP: In the 1970s, I was an extra in a film and there was a scene on a riverboat. During our breaks, all the extras who played the elegant, first-class passengers went off by themselves and stayed apart from us who played the riffraff. What about you between scenes with the mean guys and the good guys?

Christian Madsen (tongue-in-cheek): It’s the same thing, we went our separate ways. I think we lucked out because when you make an indie film there are situations where you can’t escape, you have to be in close quarters with each other. On those days when I was on set, our hangout spot was in a small room on the second floor of the house that was the family’s house in the movie. So if you wanted to go anywhere, you’d have to go through mom’s kitchen, so it was like you were really living in the world of this family. So in that confined space, we all became friends.

(Left to Right) Christian Madsen, Danny Flaherty, Charlie Plummer and Cory Nichols. Danny Peary photo.

Danny Flaherty: We became very close. There was no way to escape. Every time I turned a corner I ran into Charlie and Ben!

CM: We were all staying at the same little hotel, so we had some good hangout nights.

CN: Every single night on that rundown ping-pong table.

DF: Yeah, we played ping-pong almost every night.

DP: It really was fortunate that you guys got along.

All: Yeah, very fortunate.

DP: Do you think it was just that Felix did such a good job with casting?

CP: It was that, but I think we also had very good chemistry from the start and bonded really well. We all really like sports and that was a topic. But I think we just all got along really easily. It was really wonderful.

CN: We didn’t know each other before but Felix did such a good job of bringing us all together and every time somebody new came on the set, we would all get together at the hotel, so that everyone was familiar with each other, and he’d make strangers feel like good friends.

DF: Whenever somebody came to the town, he’d take us to the diner and kind of force us to meet with him, which is really interesting, and that really helped us form relationships right away. He was really trying to get that chemistry to be real, and the tactics that he used to do that worked out very well.

DP: Did Felix use tricks to make sure your bully Shane was properly mad at Jack?

DF: No, but he would tell me little things, like, “This is the scene where you just kick the crap out of Jack.” He was pretty straight forward.

CP: Danny is just a really good actor.

CN: He’s the nicest guy and looks friggin’ scary.

DP: Charlie, Jack does some petty crimes–I am thinking of the graffiti–but his mom says to him: “You can be a good kid if you wanted to.” Did that ring true to you? Was that a major line in your thinking?

CP: I think Jack doesn’t really know what a good kid is, but part of him doesn’t really want to be what people think of as a good kid. I think he’s really trying to find himself and find out who he wants to be. Does he want to be friends with the bullies? Does he want to date this girl who’s really mean to him? Or does he want to find people like Ben, who might not be as cool as other people but is a really good friend? I think Jack is trying to figure all that out about himself by himself, and that’s a big part of the film.

DP: Danny, Shane is pretty bad the whole way through the movie? Did you want to like him and look for something good in him?

DF: My character is very troubled, and one of the reasons he picks on Jack so much is because he was picked on when he was Jack’s age by Tom. I think there is some good in him but it’s very hard to find. Everything that’s happening in that character’s life, with his single-parent situation, and his memories of his mom beating the crap out of him, he can’t be good in that way because he’s letting all his anger hold him back from being a good person.

DP: Is there hope for him?

DF: You know what–I don’t believe there is.

DP: Danny, have you known bullies and is there something about them that you latched on to?

CP: I’ve known a few bullies in my past. I think they have a lot of issues that they’re dealing with themselves and the only way they can express it is to take it out on other people around them, people that are non-threatening. Because Jack is not very threatening to Shane, who is lot bigger than him. But Shane takes it out on him because of the way he feel about his older brother Tom and what Tom did to him in the past. So he’s kind of dealing with his problems by making his problems other people’s problems. I feel that’s what bullies do a lot–they have no one to open to and talk to, so they end up taking it out on people who are weaker than them.

DP: Christian, your character has some shading to him, in that he doesn’t treat Jack well but still isn’t a totally bad guy. Do you think the relationship between him and Jack changes during the film?

CM: I don’t think that Tom has the fortune that I do in my real life of being grounded. Tom doesn’t really have a foundation there. Being from a broken family and having no father there, he comes to terms with his having to forcefully try to become the father figure of the family, which doesn’t work out because he’s just a shadow of that. He has a very small window of an opportunity to do something important in that moment of his life, helping out his brother. I don’t know if he gets it across to Jacke the way that he wants to, because the only way he knows how to explain anything is in a physical way. I think in some weird way he would just want to show Jack, “I care about you, but I don’t know how to explain it you verbally, I just know how to show you in a physical way.”

DP: Does Jack want to be friends with Tom more by the end of the movie?

CP: Oh, yeah, I think Jack really looks up to him–it’s his older brother. I think no matter what happens, he’s always going to be his older brother. However bad he treats him, he’s always going to look to him as a hero, one way or another.

CM: All brothers have a quiet understanding of each other, how to pick at each other, how to tell each other things. I have four younger brothers and I can say one thing to tick them off or say one other thing to make them smile. You just know them. I can do something in a way for my brother to know how I feel about a situation. I think there doesn’t have to be a lot of explaining between Tom and Jack. They know each other so well that if Tom does one little thing it’s going to get across to him somehow, in some way.

DP: In the movie, Tom and his mom talk about $5 being such a large amount of money. Did that resonate with you guys?

All: Absolutely.

CP: It’s definitely a family that’s really struggling financially, but also sticking together as a family. They’re kind of in separate corners, all the time, not really wanting to take about their issues and problems. They’re not necessarily really supportive of each other in that sense. But I think they are a family, and at the end of the film, they do all come together. I’m including Ben in that sense, I think they really open up to each other and that’s really beautiful.

DP: Cory, when Ben goes home, will he report back to his mother that it was a good weekend he spent with Jack?

CN: I think to his mom he will say that was a good weekend. But in the movie they don’t show the dialogue I had when Ben’s on the phone calling his dad. He was saying to his dad, “I really want to come home, I’m homesick.” He never said, “I got beat up,” because he’s just not the kind of kid who would rat anyone out, but he definitely wouldn’t hide the fact that he didn’t enjoy it. However, in front of his mom he would say he had a good time because of the bad state she is in.

DP: But when the worst is over, Ben seem to be enjoying himself.

CN: Yeah. I do think it’s hard for him to push past what he went through. But, you know, he ends up making the best out of it.

DP: Charlie, what about Jack? Felix calls this a rite-of-passage movie so can we say that what your character goes through can be seen a good thing?

CP: I definitely think it’s a hopeful story. Some is very hard to watch, but it has a really hopeful ending. I think the great thing about these two characters is that–and this is a reason the ending is happy–they become genuine friends. It’s not that, “Oh, we have to be together and we had an OK time,” but they really bond with one another during the experience they go through, and that’s unlike anything else. They go through a lot but the end product is definitely happy.

DP: Do you think you’d be friends with Jack?

CP: I don’t know. Jack is definitely a kid that is troubled and is the kind of kid a lot of us don’t really want to look at, because he’s got a lot of problems and he doesn’t really want anybody’s help. So it’s hard to go up to a kid like that and try to become friends with him, try to understand him, but I know that for me playing him, it was a really interesting process trying to get into his head. And now, after doing the project, I think I have a lot more compassion for that type of person. And a lot more understanding of what they’re going through in their daily life. So at the start of the project, no, I wouldn’t have wanted to have to deal with someone struggling so much, but now I’d absolutely want to help them.

DP: If you go with your family to see this movie, is there a moment when you’d say, “I really want you to watch me?

CM (laughing): All the moments I’m not in! For me the whole scene where Tom goes to the bully’s house and to rescue Ben for Jack was fun to shoot. We had a lot of physicality in it, we a lot of little steps we had to go over, but when we would get ready and shoot all in one, it was really a good experience to go through. It would start to rain, we’d have to tarp everything, then it would stop, we’d run back out. But it kept you on your game, because you knew you had to perform at that moment. There was a stunt guy on set who was really great, and he helped us all be more believable in that aspect and be very safe.

DF: I’m very opposite of my character in real life, so I think I’d be like, “Mom, don’t watch this, I’m very, very mean.”

CN: For me, I’d probably want my mother to watch the scene were I come in with the bat. I just love it.

DP: I like when you smile on the pitcher’s mound when you’re throwing balls for Jack to hit and he’s hopeless.

CN: You know, I was just going to say I love that, too.

CP: I’m in a lot of the film so it’s hard to pick out one moment. But I do love the “Truth or Dare” scene with two girls and Ben. I think it’s really beautiful. It’s a really all-around great film, so I can’t really pick out one thing and say “This is the best scene.” It has such a beautiful flow to it.

DP: What is it like to premiere your movie in New York at the Tribeca Film Festival?

CM: Tribeca has a good feel for this film, Just to keep it short, Felix put it the best. He called me and said, “We’re bringing the film home.” We shot it upstate, but it’s great to bring it back to our home here. All these guys are from here so they can bring their friends and family. It’s great. We’re all honored to be here.

Rebecca Miller Reveals “Maggie’s Plan” Maggie's Plan - Greta Gerwig Maggie (Greta Gerwig) and John (Ethan Hawke). By Danny Peary Maggie’s Plan fits my category Movies That Should Play in Sag Harbor. After premiering in May, Rebecca Miller’s new film starring indie favorite Greta Gerwig goes nationwide this Friday, including at the UA East Hampton 6. Miller, the daughter of playwright Arthur Miler, continues to carve out a name for herself. In addition to two acclaimed novels and a collection of short stories, she has now written and directed five feature films, including The Ballad of Jack and Rose, starring her husband Daniel Day-Lewis, and, adapted from her book, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, starring Robin Wright. Her fifth, adapted from an unpublished novel by Karen Rinaldi, Maggie’s Plan is her first comedy. The New York Times called it “a serious screwball comedy.” The synopsis from the press notes: “Greta Gerwig portrays Maggie Hardin, a vibrant and practical thirty-something New Yorker working at the New School who, without success in finding love, decides now is the time to have a child on her own [accepting a sperm donation from a college acquaintance, Guy, a kind but somewhat spacey pickle salesman played by Travis Fimmel]. Maggie's Plan - Greta Gerwig Maggie (Greta Gerwig) and Georgette (Julianne Moore). But when she meets John Harding (Ethan Hawke), a ‘ficto-critical anthropologist’ and struggling novelist, Maggie falls in love for the first time, and adjusts her plans for motherhood. Complicating matters, John is in a strained marriage with Georgette Nørgaard (Julianne Moore) a brilliant Danish academic. With a Greek chorus of Maggie’s eccentric…best friends Tony and Felicia (Bill Hader and Maya Rudolph) observing wryly from the sidelines, Maggie sets into motion a new plan that catapults her into a nervy love triangle with John and Georgette; intertwining their lives and connecting them in surprising and humorous new ways. Maggie learns that sometimes destiny should be left to its own devices.” Prior to its New York release I spoke to the amiable Rebecca Miller about her new movie. Danny Peary: While watching Maggie’s Plan, I thought of it as a farce. Then I read a piece written during the Toronto Film Festival that labeled your film “a screwball comedy.” Would you consider your film that? Rebecca Miller: I looked at a number of forms that are all connected. I read French farces from the 18th century. I looked at A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I definitely looked at screwball comedies from the 1940s. And many more films than that. So I had a lot of influences. Screwball comedy and farce are both appropriate. Rebecca Miller Rebecca Miller. Danny Peary photo DP: There’s actually a division of screwball comedies called “remarriage films.” RM: Yes, I’m familiar with those, but to be honest I didn’t know that there was a genre of them. I definitely looked at Philadelphia Story quite carefully, The Awful Truth, His Girl Friday. DP: In the press notes, you talk about how happy you were to do a comedy. Is there pain in this one too? RM: You can sort of see it, I guess. But I saw it from a different lens. You could have made this story as a dramatic story. DP: I agree that the exact script could have been made into a film without laughs. RM: Right, but with a different rhythm and timing and outlook. The key to good comedic acting is that it’s emotionally real. If it’s going to be emotionally real and bad things happen, people are going to react with real emotions. DP: The tone of your film is different. It’s kind of a risk, I think, that you don’t go extreme screwball or to heavy drama, but keep it somewhere in between. RM: Exactly. It has an unusual tone. It is risky but Risk is my middle name. DP: I watched an interview in which you said that with Pippa Lee,we can slowly peel away a little more about her as the film progresses until we get a clear picture of who she is. Is Maggie a quick study? Do we know her right away? RM: I think she’s complex. But I think you know one thing about her right away. The first thing you see is that she helps a blind man cross the street. Since she’s about to do so many naughty things, I figured it would be smart to show that she’s a good person before she starts messing up everybody. She’s not a narcissistic person. She’s definitely a person who tries to look on the bright side but she also has a great wound in her, too. One of my favorite moments is when she describes her relationship with her mother and her mother’s death. She recovers from it so quickly. She lets herself go there and is surprised that she is revealing that much of herself–sometimes you have a real connection with someone and are much more vulnerable and open than you thought you’d be–but then she bounces back and she asks about the other person. That makes me love her. She is motivated to control her own destiny–it has to do with destiny having dealt a blow to her. DP: I love your quote “Destiny works better in retrospect.” Why do you feel that in regard to Maggie. RM (laughing): In general, what I meant was when we look back on our lives, especially when we’ve lived longer, things start to fall into a novelistic pattern and look like destiny. You start to say, “Oh, yeah, this is the man I was meant to meet because I had a baby with him.” Then you start to see the sense in what looked like chaos from the beginning. When you start out living your life, it seems like that it is made up of one random thing after another. Then you look back on it and there seems to be some kind of logic and pattern. DP: Did Maggie have a plan since she was a little kid, and her having a baby is just the latest of her plans? RM: Yeah. She planned out her education. How to find a career that suited her character. I think she’s living a very thoughtful life. She subletting in a nice neighborhood in Manhattan for probably much less money than you would normally have to pay. She wears vintage clothing partly so she can look good but also doesn’t have money to have a whole wardrobe. She lives within her means. You can feel that this is a girl that knows what it is to support herself and how to take care of herself. She’s had to do that for a long time. I found it touching that she was sorting the bills when she was twelve years old. That’s somebody who’s a special kind of character. DP: Greta Gerwig is great at playing earnest characters, well-meaning characters, and, like what you just said, resilient characters. You cast her a year ahead of filming. Was this your conversation with her in trying to get to who Maggie is? RM: There was a sense that Greta understood the character in an instinctive way, just from talking to her from the start. I guess we didn’t start so big. It wasn’t really a conceptual conversation that we had, but more about all the details that make up a person and all the contradictions that make up a person. In regard so Maggie’s many characteristics, Greta really built that character. We did talk about her great romance. She’s sort of bowled over by John and all her plans go out the window. Because it’s a big sexual awakening for her and she feels this excitement that she hasn’t felt for a person. We wanted to get across that she’s a modest person and isn’t most experienced person, although she has had relationships. DP: Were all her relationships disappointing? RM: The way I see it is: She had a relationship with Tony [Bill Hader], which was two years long and the longest relationship she ever had. I think they were lovers who became like brother and sister, which happens when you just know someone too well and gradually you become related. After that it’s been one brief relationship after the other for Maggie and she really hasn’t latched on to anyone. No one has taken root in her heart. So she starts thinking, “Well, I really feel ready to be a mother.” She’s one of those people. My best friend had that feeling when she was 30 years old. She said, “I want to have a baby, I want to be a mother. One of the reasons that the chapters that Karen Rinaldi sent me were so resonate was that I knew people in similar situations. It was in the air. DP: I read where you said you couldn’t imagine doing it yourself. RM: Having a baby by myself? I would not have had kids, personally. But everybody has a different connection. I know people who want to have a baby just no matter what–and that’s the department that Maggie’s in. DP: At the age of thirty, she is ready to have a baby, but at this time she meets John and has, basically, her high school crush. And he proves to be a disappointment—like Warren Beatty is to Natalie Wood when she visits him years after high school in Splendor in the Grass. Do you see John as a type? RM: You can say all the characters are types. For instance, you could write off Georgette as a type, but she’s certainly more on an individual than that. What’s interesting to me is what is beyond type. I don’t know if John is a type. I don’t see him like that but maybe because I feel like I know him so well. . DP: Did Ethan Hawke ever say that John is a great guy? RM: No, and the thing that made his performance so special is that he played him without any vanity. He didn’t try and save him from the confusion, the narcissism or his childlike quality. He played all of that and in a way, the generosity in which he played the character somehow for me saves the character and makes him more likeable and more acceptable as I watch the film. John’s not a bad guy. DP: You talked about Maggie doing naughty things and messing up people’s lives and even breaking up a marriage. But is Maggie really a flawed character? She seems almost perfect, and is nurturing to everybody, which is why everybody likes her. RM: It’s funny because you can look at her as totally perfect or you can look at her as very flawed. It depends on your perspective. She’s definitely somebody who tries to bring out the best in other people’s lives and other people. In doing so, she can seem like a bossypants. DP: Everyone lets her do things because she does them so efficiently. RM: She’s extremely capable and so she tends to take up a lot of slack in other people’s lives as well. DP: I know you got this story from someone else, but when watching this movie I kept thinking that when you were writing the script you became curious about what would happen if you took these three stand-alone characters, Maggie, John, and Georgette, and mixed their stories together into a certain situation. RM: What Karen Rinaldi bestowed on me by sending those chapters was sort of this beautiful geometry that became the skeleton that I was able to lay the flesh of the story on. Some of the characters already were in existence in relation to each other, but there was no Tony and Felicia [Maya Rudolph]. There was no Pickle Man [Travis Fimmel]. In some ways the plot was very condensed because there were only a few chapters of a much larger book–which will be published in a year. I always try to write people so they are interesting enough to have their own movie, and I definitely ended up becoming really fascinated by them as individuals. And because the plot needed to be built out so much, a lot of the work became, “What would that person do?” I try not to use characters in a manipulative way, and it’s a particularly difficult thing when there’s form that has certain requirements. This form has some demands on it. It’s sort of an “all’s-well that-ends-well” situation and how do you get to that place? You could end this movie in so many ways but if you know that you have to get to a place of pleasure, which I really wanted to do from the start, how do you get there in an honest way? DP: That’s what I thought when watching your film–you were curious how it would work out. RM: Exactly. That meant going down blind alleys. A crazy thing happened. At what point in the writing, Maggie and Georgette had an affair. I decided that was way too much! All sorts of things happened, but then I’d pull back and say, “That’s not this movie. Maggie wouldn’t go there.” You go really far in one direction and you pull back but you’re left with residue of that moment. Like when Georgette says, “It’s easy to get my number.” There’s almost a seductiveness to Georgette, because she can’t help seducing everybody who happens to walk by. That’s what she does, and even Maggie falls under her spell. She has a little crush on her when she sees her in the bookstore, thinking, “Oh, my god, she’s so great!” She’s a young woman seeing an older woman and thinking, “She’s so cool.” DP: You also were in tune with why a male would be attracted to Greta Gerwig. She has that unconventional appeal that makes everyone like her, especially when you have Maggie dancing around the apartment unaware John is gazing at her. RM: Right! She’s very disarming and attractive. DP: Why did you make the film about a younger woman rather than make a film about Georgette, who’s your age? RM: The chapters that were sent to me did have Maggie as more of a protagonist than Georgette. So I took that. One of the nice things about being a writer is that it’s very fluid. You can change sex, you can change age. You can write young or old. You can hide yourself anywhere and no one needs to know. You can be in the male or female character. Not that these characters are me but for me to really write a character, I usually use some part of myself. For Maggie, I definitely was able to lend her some parts of me but having said that, the creation of her came from a deep collaboration with Greta. Not so much the dialogue–I wrote the dialogue score, if you will–but who she is in a very deep way. Like she’s a Quaker–that is something we came up with together. We were able to let each other come inside our circles. A circle is very often is discrete and you can’t let anyone in. Being in there together was a very rare and special thing. It gets to a point when you’re collaborating with somebody in a deep way that the lines begin to blur in terms of who came up with what. That’s a wonderful moment because it’s like you’re gifting each other stuff. DP: Could you hang out with these characters? RM: Oh, yeah. I’d love to be really close friends with Maggie. And I think Tony and I would be quite close. He’s based on one of my best friends. He’s cranky but so loving. He loves Maggie so much. To me, he’s the kind of person that would give his life for someone else but he’s a grump. Sometimes the people that seem thorny are actually the best hearted people. DP: Your film deals with second families, fertility clinics, single women wanting to raise kids. Is this a film about today? RM: Yes. For me it’s very much a message in a bottle. We’ll put it in the river and 20 years from now people will say, “Oh, they put butter in their coffee and they had fertility apps.” So yes, I think of it as our very contemporary confusion. I also recommend King Jack, which opens in NYC this Friday. Here’s the link to my April 2015 interview for Sag Harbor Express Online with its director Felix Thompson a few days before his film won the Audience Award at the Tribeca Film Festival: http://sagharboronline.com/felix-thompsons-king-jack-is-crowned-tffs-favorite-film/

Playing in Theaters

Rebecca Miller Reveals Maggie’s Plan

(from Sag Harbor Express June 9, 2016)

Maggie (Greta Gerwig) and John (Ethan Hawke).

Maggie’s Plan fits my category Movies That Should Play in Sag Harbor. After premiering in May, Rebecca Miller’s new film starring indie favorite Greta Gerwig goes nationwide this Friday, including at the UA East Hampton 6. Miller, the daughter of playwright Arthur Miler, continues to carve out a name for herself. In addition to two acclaimed novels and a collection of short stories, she has now written and directed five feature films, including The Ballad of Jack and Rose, starring her husband Daniel Day-Lewis, and, adapted from her book, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, starring Robin Wright. Her fifth, adapted from an unpublished novel by Karen Rinaldi, Maggie’s Plan is her first comedy. The New York Times called it “a serious screwball comedy.” The synopsis from the press notes: “Greta Gerwig portrays Maggie Hardin, a vibrant and practical thirty-something New Yorker working at the New School who, without success in finding love, decides now is the time to have a child on her own [accepting a sperm donation from a college acquaintance, Guy, a kind but somewhat spacey pickle salesman played by Travis Fimmel].

Maggie (Greta Gerwig) and Georgette (Julianne Moore).

But when she meets John Harding (Ethan Hawke), a ‘ficto-critical anthropologist’ and struggling novelist, Maggie falls in love for the first time, and adjusts her plans for motherhood. Complicating matters, John is in a strained marriage with Georgette Nørgaard (Julianne Moore) a brilliant Danish academic. With a Greek chorus of Maggie’s eccentric…best friends Tony and Felicia (Bill Hader and Maya Rudolph) observing wryly from the sidelines, Maggie sets into motion a new plan that catapults her into a nervy love triangle with John and Georgette; intertwining their lives and connecting them in surprising and humorous new ways. Maggie learns that sometimes destiny should be left to its own devices.” Prior to its New York release I spoke to the amiable Rebecca Miller about her new movie.

Danny Peary: While watching Maggie’s Plan, I thought of it as a farce. Then I read a piece written during the Toronto Film Festival that labeled your film “a screwball comedy.” Would you consider your film that?
Rebecca Miller: I looked at a number of forms that are all connected. I read French farces from the 18th century. I looked at A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I definitely looked at screwball comedies from the 1940s. And many more films than that. So I had a lot of influences. Screwball comedy and farce are both appropriate.

Rebecca Miller. Danny Peary photo

DP: There’s actually a division of screwball comedies called “remarriage films.”
RM: Yes, I’m familiar with those, but to be honest I didn’t know that there was a genre of them. I definitely looked at Philadelphia Story quite carefully, The Awful Truth, His Girl Friday.
DP: In the press notes, you talk about how happy you were to do a comedy. Is there pain in this one too?
RM: You can sort of see it, I guess. But I saw it from a different lens. You could have made this story as a dramatic story.
DP: I agree that the exact script could have been made into a film without laughs.
RM: Right, but with a different rhythm and timing and outlook. The key to good comedic acting is that it’s emotionally real. If it’s going to be emotionally real and bad things happen, people are going to react with real emotions.
DP: The tone of your film is different. It’s kind of a risk, I think, that you don’t go extreme screwball or to heavy drama, but keep it somewhere in between.
RM: Exactly. It has an unusual tone. It is risky but Risk is my middle name.
DP: I watched an interview in which you said that with Pippa Lee,we can slowly peel away a little more about her as the film progresses until we get a clear picture of who she is. Is Maggie a quick study? Do we know her right away?
RM: I think she’s complex. But I think you know one thing about her right away. The first thing you see is that she helps a blind man cross the street. Since she’s about to do so many naughty things, I figured it would be smart to show that she’s a good person before she starts messing up everybody. She’s not a narcissistic person. She’s definitely a person who tries to look on the bright side but she also has a great wound in her, too. One of my favorite moments is when she describes her relationship with her mother and her mother’s death. She recovers from it so quickly. She lets herself go there and is surprised that she is revealing that much of herself–sometimes you have a real connection with someone and are much more vulnerable and open than you thought you’d be–but then she bounces back and she asks about the other person. That makes me love her. She is motivated to control her own destiny–it has to do with destiny having dealt a blow to her.
DP: I love your quote “Destiny works better in retrospect.” Why do you feel that in regard to Maggie.
RM (laughing): In general, what I meant was when we look back on our lives, especially when we’ve lived longer, things start to fall into a novelistic pattern and look like destiny. You start to say, “Oh, yeah, this is the man I was meant to meet because I had a baby with him.” Then you start to see the sense in what looked like chaos from the beginning. When you start out living your life, it seems like that it is made up of one random thing after another. Then you look back on it and there seems to be some kind of logic and pattern.
DP: Did Maggie have a plan since she was a little kid, and her having a baby is just the latest of her plans?
RM: Yeah. She planned out her education. How to find a career that suited her character. I think she’s living a very thoughtful life. She subletting in a nice neighborhood in Manhattan for probably much less money than you would normally have to pay. She wears vintage clothing partly so she can look good but also doesn’t have money to have a whole wardrobe. She lives within her means. You can feel that this is a girl that knows what it is to support herself and how to take care of herself. She’s had to do that for a long time. I found it touching that she was sorting the bills when she was twelve years old. That’s somebody who’s a special kind of character.
DP: Greta Gerwig is great at playing earnest characters, well-meaning characters, and, like what you just said, resilient characters. You cast her a year ahead of filming. Was this your conversation with her in trying to get to who Maggie is?
RM: There was a sense that Greta understood the character in an instinctive way, just from talking to her from the start. I guess we didn’t start so big. It wasn’t really a conceptual conversation that we had, but more about all the details that make up a person and all the contradictions that make up a person. In regard so Maggie’s many characteristics, Greta really built that character. We did talk about her great romance. She’s sort of bowled over by John and all her plans go out the window. Because it’s a big sexual awakening for her and she feels this excitement that she hasn’t felt for a person. We wanted to get across that she’s a modest person and isn’t most experienced person, although she has had relationships.
DP: Were all her relationships disappointing?
RM: The way I see it is: She had a relationship with Tony [Bill Hader], which was two years long and the longest relationship she ever had. I think they were lovers who became like brother and sister, which happens when you just know someone too well and gradually you become related. After that it’s been one brief relationship after the other for Maggie and she really hasn’t latched on to anyone. No one has taken root in her heart. So she starts thinking, “Well, I really feel ready to be a mother.” She’s one of those people. My best friend had that feeling when she was 30 years old. She said, “I want to have a baby, I want to be a mother. One of the reasons that the chapters that Karen Rinaldi sent me were so resonate was that I knew people in similar situations. It was in the air.
DP: I read where you said you couldn’t imagine doing it yourself.
RM: Having a baby by myself? I would not have had kids, personally. But everybody has a different connection. I know people who want to have a baby just no matter what–and that’s the department that Maggie’s in.
DP: At the age of thirty, she is ready to have a baby, but at this time she meets John and has, basically, her high school crush. And he proves to be a disappointment—like Warren Beatty is to Natalie Wood when she visits him years after high school in Splendor in the Grass. Do you see John as a type?
RM: You can say all the characters are types. For instance, you could write off Georgette as a type, but she’s certainly more on an individual than that. What’s interesting to me is what is beyond type. I don’t know if John is a type. I don’t see him like that but maybe because I feel like I know him so well. .
DP: Did Ethan Hawke ever say that John is a great guy?
RM: No, and the thing that made his performance so special is that he played him without any vanity. He didn’t try and save him from the confusion, the narcissism or his childlike quality. He played all of that and in a way, the generosity in which he played the character somehow for me saves the character and makes him more likeable and more acceptable as I watch the film. John’s not a bad guy.
DP: You talked about Maggie doing naughty things and messing up people’s lives and even breaking up a marriage. But is Maggie really a flawed character? She seems almost perfect, and is nurturing to everybody, which is why everybody likes her.
RM: It’s funny because you can look at her as totally perfect or you can look at her as very flawed. It depends on your perspective. She’s definitely somebody who tries to bring out the best in other people’s lives and other people. In doing so, she can seem like a bossypants.
DP: Everyone lets her do things because she does them so efficiently.
RM: She’s extremely capable and so she tends to take up a lot of slack in other people’s lives as well.
DP: I know you got this story from someone else, but when watching this movie I kept thinking that when you were writing the script you became curious about what would happen if you took these three stand-alone characters, Maggie, John, and Georgette, and mixed their stories together into a certain situation.
RM: What Karen Rinaldi bestowed on me by sending those chapters was sort of this beautiful geometry that became the skeleton that I was able to lay the flesh of the story on. Some of the characters already were in existence in relation to each other, but there was no Tony and Felicia [Maya Rudolph]. There was no Pickle Man [Travis Fimmel]. In some ways the plot was very condensed because there were only a few chapters of a much larger book–which will be published in a year. I always try to write people so they are interesting enough to have their own movie, and I definitely ended up becoming really fascinated by them as individuals. And because the plot needed to be built out so much, a lot of the work became, “What would that person do?” I try not to use characters in a manipulative way, and it’s a particularly difficult thing when there’s form that has certain requirements. This form has some demands on it. It’s sort of an “all’s-well that-ends-well” situation and how do you get to that place? You could end this movie in so many ways but if you know that you have to get to a place of pleasure, which I really wanted to do from the start, how do you get there in an honest way?
DP: That’s what I thought when watching your film–you were curious how it would work out.
RM: Exactly. That meant going down blind alleys. A crazy thing happened. At what point in the writing, Maggie and Georgette had an affair. I decided that was way too much! All sorts of things happened, but then I’d pull back and say, “That’s not this movie. Maggie wouldn’t go there.” You go really far in one direction and you pull back but you’re left with residue of that moment. Like when Georgette says, “It’s easy to get my number.” There’s almost a seductiveness to Georgette, because she can’t help seducing everybody who happens to walk by. That’s what she does, and even Maggie falls under her spell. She has a little crush on her when she sees her in the bookstore, thinking, “Oh, my god, she’s so great!” She’s a young woman seeing an older woman and thinking, “She’s so cool.”
DP: You also were in tune with why a male would be attracted to Greta Gerwig. She has that unconventional appeal that makes everyone like her, especially when you have Maggie dancing around the apartment unaware John is gazing at her.
RM: Right! She’s very disarming and attractive.
DP: Why did you make the film about a younger woman rather than make a film about Georgette, who’s your age?
RM: The chapters that were sent to me did have Maggie as more of a protagonist than Georgette. So I took that. One of the nice things about being a writer is that it’s very fluid. You can change sex, you can change age. You can write young or old. You can hide yourself anywhere and no one needs to know. You can be in the male or female character. Not that these characters are me but for me to really write a character, I usually use some part of myself. For Maggie, I definitely was able to lend her some parts of me but having said that, the creation of her came from a deep collaboration with Greta. Not so much the dialogue–I wrote the dialogue score, if you will–but who she is in a very deep way. Like she’s a Quaker–that is something we came up with together. We were able to let each other come inside our circles. A circle is very often is discrete and you can’t let anyone in. Being in there together was a very rare and special thing. It gets to a point when you’re collaborating with somebody in a deep way that the lines begin to blur in terms of who came up with what. That’s a wonderful moment because it’s like you’re gifting each other stuff.
DP: Could you hang out with these characters?
RM: Oh, yeah. I’d love to be really close friends with Maggie. And I think Tony and I would be quite close. He’s based on one of my best friends. He’s cranky but so loving. He loves Maggie so much. To me, he’s the kind of person that would give his life for someone else but he’s a grump. Sometimes the people that seem thorny are actually the best hearted people.
DP: Your film deals with second families, fertility clinics, single women wanting to raise kids. Is this a film about today?
RM: Yes. For me it’s very much a message in a bottle. We’ll put it in the river and 20 years from now people will say, “Oh, they put butter in their coffee and they had fertility apps.” So yes, I think of it as our very contemporary confusion.
I also recommend King Jack, which opens in NYC this Friday. Here’s the link to my April 2015 interview for Sag Harbor Express Online with its director Felix Thompson a few days before his film won the Audience Award at the Tribeca Film Festival: http://sagharboronline.com/felix-thompsons-king-jack-is-crowned-tffs-favorite-film/

Power’s Lucy Walters Shows Strength in Award-Winning “Here Alone”

Film Festival

Power’s Lucy Walters Shows Strength in Award-Winning Here Alone

(from Sag Harbor Express 5/27/16)

Lucy Walters.

“Here Alone,” perhaps the first art film with zombies, fits my category Movies That Should Play in Sag Harbor. When Rod Blackhurst’s feature debut played in April at the Tribeca Film Festival, I didn’t recognize the name of the lead, Lucy Walters–I didn’t know she was the young woman in the subway in “Shame”–and hadn’t watched “Power,” her series on Starz. And, truth be told, I went to a critics’ screening for “Here Alone” only because it was the one film that fit my schedule that morning. It turned out to be my surprise find of the festival, an exciting, well-acted, cleverly-directed post-apocalyptic thriller that balances action with thought-provoking subtlety. I thought I alone had made the great discovery of the festival’s sleeper. But it turned out that “Here Alone” would win the Audience Award! “The Walking Dead” can make room for this worthy movie with a different take.

The synopsis from the press notes: “Deep in New York’s upstate wilderness, Ann (Walters), a young woman in her late 20’s, struggles to survive after a mysterious epidemic decimates society. On the constant brink of starvation, Ann leads an isolated and regimented life. Haunted by memories of her past [her husband Jason (Shane West) was killed by those infected with the rage virus and she had killed their baby when it was infected], she also battles the current blood thirsty threat that lurks just outside of the forest’s borders, those that the epidemic infected….[A] chance encounter brings Olivia (Gina Piersanti), a teenage girl, and her injured stepfather, Chris (Adam David Thompson), into Ann’s life and regimen of survival….While Ann and Chris grow close, Olivia becomes bitter…”

Impressed by “Here Alone” and curious about its captivating and brave lead actress (what a grueling role!), I met Lucy Walters for lunch in Manhattan earlier this month to talk about her career, “Power,” and her new movie that still hadn’t found a distributor.

Lucy Walters as Ann and Shane West as Jason in “Here Alone.”

Danny Peary: Before talking about “Here Alone,” I’d like to go back to the beginning. Were you born in Texas?
Lucy Walters: I was actually born in Pittsburgh but we left for Texas when I was about two months old.
DP: Why did your family move to Texas?
LW: My dad had a job at the University of Texas Medical Center, in Houston. It was supposed to be for ten years at the outset but it’s been many decades and they’re still there and happy.
DP: I don’t understand how your father was a marine biologist in Texas.
LW (laughing): He does his research on Cape Cod, so I get to see my parents in the summers because I’m in New York City and they’re in Massachusetts. His field is really zoology so he is not restricted to just marine animals. For the longest time he was working with mollusks, which don’t have backbones, but now he has a grant to research spinal cord injuries and is working with rats.
DP: I read that your parents were strict and didn’t let you watch TV when you were growing up, other than PBS.
LW: My parents look at the world through the lens of biology. There was nothing sentimental about anything.
DP: Were you a happy kid?

Ann sees Olivia (Gina Piersanti) and injured Chris (Adam David Thompson) for the first time

LW: I was a pretty happy kid. I was quite a silly little ham. I know I was considered the flighty one in the family. I remember my older sister, who was the rebellious one, giving me a hard time for playing that role in the family. So I wanted to correct that and prove to everyone that I was very serious minded.
DP: Do you relate to your sister being rebellious?
LW: It’s funny because she’s very square now but at the time, she had to go through it. I think I have a real respect for that. She had a backbone. I think it takes some real chutzpah to rebel in the way she did. . I admire that my sister and my mom fought it out. I learned don’t ask don’t tell, a cautious approach that has gotten me far–although I think the characters that I play are bridge burners. The people I respond to have that energy and I’m a little too careful. I guess it’s just a fearful approach. I respond to that person who thinks consequences be damned.
DP: You went to the University of Texas and you studied economics.
LW: Economics is what I ended up doing my undergraduate thesis in. That was my concentration and it’s easier to say that than what I actually majored in. I was in this small school within this university called Plan Two. It was their honors college. Very small classes, reading and writing intensive. I loved it. It had the perks of a huge university with the intimacy of a small liberal arts college. Within that you had to chose your concentration and so that’s where economics came in. That came later in my journey. It almost felt like a rebellion.
DP: When people that time find out you’re an actress are they surprised or does it make sense?

Lucy Walters in “Shame.”

LW: Well, I did a double degree in theater. I guess it does make sense but I think it also makes sense that I had to first do this crazy journey. I wanted to act just to prove everyone wrong. I needed a lot of that external validation because I had a complicated relationship with the craft in general and certainly a life pursuing that craft. I wanted to do something more serious minded. I was a violinist growing up, I did that very intensely. There wasn’t enough room for play and the violin. And now I feel like I want to get away from something script and play again.
DP: Your choosing not to do musical theater even before college, but to do straight theater surprises me because you’re such an effervescent person. It seems like musical theater is perfect for you.
LW: I think it felt like a good fit because I was a musician and I liked theater. I was encouraged at an early age to go that route because I had have a very foundation. I could read music and harmonize but I don’t have a musical theater voice, I just don’t. I’m not sure I had the voice but I just had the musical know-how for it. We sometimes define ourselves in opposition to other people and I felt that I didn’t get along well with musical theater types. I stopped doing musical theater in the middle of high school.
DP: Did you do theater often?
LW: I was first and foremost a violinist and the theater was like the counterpoint. It was fun but I didn’t take it seriously.
DP: How good were you at violin at your peak?
LW: I was pretty serious about it. I was taking college level master classes at Rice University at the Shepherd School of Music.
DP: Were you thinking of playing the violin for your career?
LW: Yeah. Until I realized that I didn’t want to play in an orchestra.. I played with my quartet in college and played weddings and stuff like that, but I didn’t see a career in it. Now I see people doing very interesting music with violin but at the time, For a career, I didn’t know anything besides playing with the symphony, which didn’t seem that appealing to me. I think probably if I had been more serious about acting, I would have come to the same conclusion. I just kept at it long enough because I almost didn’t take it seriously.
DP: Since your parents were so serious, were they upset you stopped being serious about violin?
LW: No. I have much younger brothers. There was all of this attention focused on my sister and I and then my parents had a second set of kids and they became very laissez faire in regard to my sister and me. They were not there when I transitioned away from violin and didn’t know what to do with my life, they were very focused on the boys who were very young. It’s probably good to be a little lost but I didn’t have things set up.. The day that I went to college, my mother said “Oh, today’s the day?” They were just very hands off.
DP: When did you get serious about acting?
LW: I guess I must have been somewhat serious in it because I majored in it but I guess I would have put more into the resources that were there. It wasn’t a great program but you get what you put in and I wish I had gotten more out of it.
DP: Did you do serious plays in college?
LW: Yeah, I did do serious plays but I wish I had done more. We did a lot of new work in college but I did Shakespeare. I did some outside of the university as well. I remember doing Stonewater Rapture and I did a Pinter play.
DP: Did you read a lot of plays?
LW: For sure. First, it’s for the family. The bonds run so deep that you’re almost looking to build your own family. I think that’s why a lot of us get into theater. I think also it’s the English department. I love dissecting literature and I love dissecting plays. I miss that in TV. In theater you sometimes get a week of table work. No acting but just a week of character work and building on the script. That’s what I was drawn to more than anything. I miss that but I have the discipline to do that on my own.
DP: Did you keep playing violin?
LW: Yes, but I wish I played more.
DP: Did you have aspirations to leave Texas?
LW: Absolutely. I didn’t know what I wanted to do but I knew I wanted to be in New York. My mom’s a New Yorker and it just always felt right.
DP: When you moved to New York was it a plan or did you do it on the spur of the moment?
LW: It was pretty planned. I had a girlfriend from college who was living here. My dad does his research on the Cape, so I spent my last summer being a kid there. Then they drove the Texas minivan from the Cape home and dropped me off in Bushwick, in Brooklyn. I had younger brothers and they were horrified. I was living in the type of first apartment you might expect when you find it on Craigslist. There was a trapeze in the living room, I lived with a bunch of sideshow performers with tattoos on their faces and a transvestite. It was very exciting. Then I started my life. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I did have a fair amount of community here, including my girlfriend. We had studied with the same economics professor, Kenneth Goldsmith, at Rice, and he was now doing finance in New York and opened the door for a lot of opportunity for me. I was really close to going that economics route, which is funny because it’s so different than who I am. They just wanted people who were good at math. It’s just so funny that’s the route I flirted with because it’s so far from the route I chose. I like the idea of stability but right when I was about to start a training program at the Bank of America, I got a job doing pizza commercial.
DP: How did that happen?
LW: When you don’t come from a fancy school, it’s hard to get an agent. But when I first came here, I freelanced for a commercial agent. The pizza commercial. wasn’t glamorous but it made me think, “Let’s give this a shot for a year.” The problem with this acting career is that it’s just seductive enough to keep you in it for another year.
DP: The commercial was this first thing you booked?
LW: Yes, because those are the only people who will take a real gamble on you. I didn’t have a fancy pedigree.
DP: In addition to commercials, you made a number of short films. How did people find you?
LW: I had a roommate who was a filmmaker going to NYU Tisch. It was through doing those shorts that I realized how much I loved filmmaking. Sometimes the machine is so big that you’re missing all the interesting parts as an actor; you’re just shuttled from your trailer to a set. But on these NYU shorts–as it would be with Here Alone, when we were making a movie in the middle of nowhere–there’s a skeleton crew and you’re up close with them and the director when hard choices are made– How do we scrape things together and make this work? That to me is the fun part. When it’s too slick, sometimes I miss the grit.
DP: You had a breakthrough of sorts in 2011, playing the young married woman who at two different times on the New York subway, maybe a year apart, exchanges glances with Michael Fassbender’s sex-addicted stranger in Steve McQueen’s Shame. How did that come about?
LW: Good luck. I had a relationship with Avy Kaufman, the casting director. She had seen me for another role in that film and I think it was her support that got me an interview for the woman on the subway while they were actually already filming. I took a meeting at 11pm on a Tuesday night with Steve as he walked to Michael’s trailer. And a few days later I got a call saying, “Can you be on the set?” I had never seen a script. I had no idea of the context of those scenes. I don’t think they had been really written. I don’t know. It was not a normal audition because there weren’t lines. I’m kind of glad that I didn’t know what I was doing because sometimes you feel it’s your job to craft a story. By not knowing, I was able to just react to an incredible scene partner.
DP: You say you didn’t have to craft a story on the spot, but I read that you came up with a whole back story for your character.
LW: You have to do something but it was a good lesson in not over planning or over thinking because we can do that too much as actors–I can do that. In a sense, we were lucky that we didn’t have enough time. We did only two takes of that first scene. We actually illegally shot the second scene after the film had wrapped. We kind of did it guerilla style with the director, the DP and a very skeleton crew and shot it on the G train in the middle of the night, which was hilarious. But that first scene, there was technical stuff because we had to walk through a sea of extras when we leave the subway car, with him following her.
DP: We don’t see them in the same shot. We see him looking at someone. We see you looking at someone. It’s the editing that makes it appear that they are gazing at each other. The editor includes a shot of you crossing your legs. It’s an erotic moment–were you told that there should be eroticism in this scene?
LW: Yeah. We talked about how there should be a variety of feelings. Steve certainly wanted a range. There certainly had to be something there between us..
DP: Do you think your character will think about him after she sees him on the subway?
LW: Oh, I’m sure. You start to see some of the same people on the same commutes. I like to think we’ve seen each other before. There’s been something. Steve allows the audience project what they want onto these characters and this moment. Which I think is always more interesting and powerful then to have it spelled out.
DP: Which is why it’s a scene without any dialogue.
LW: I would love to have scripts written so I could understand exactly where we are trying to go and I would be so much happier just to film them without words.
DP: Does she want to see him again on the subway? What if they meet a third time?
LW: I think the power of that scene is everyone feels something differently about it. I’ve only seen that movie once. I’d like to see it again now because I loved that movie. I remember thinking that she was excited by their encounter and there is possibility, but she shut it down because she was newly married. There has to be something there or there would be nothing to shut down. Maybe after a year has gone by and she sees him again, she’s more open to what things may have been. I’d like think she’d wouldn’t be afraid to see him again and would be open to that. It is Michael Fassbender!
DP: Does anyone ever recognize you on the subway from that scene?
LW: Once or twice on the subway! It’s funny, Steve wanted very New York-looking people. He didn’t want actors that looked like actors or models. Part of that was some of the costume pieces were things from my own wardrobe, including the thrift store purple hat. I rarely wear that hat because it’s in the film, but I was running out the door once and needed a warm hat so I put it on and was caught. I remember feeling doubly embarrassed as though I was asking for the attention. What’s nice is that we didn’t know what it was going to end up being. It ended up being a great thing for my career and I’m so grateful for that. It was a testament to filmmaking that when you give something a score and some real time, it can became a nice poem of a scene. That’s a credit to the director and editor and composer. All of these components made it something powerful, way beyond anything I did.
DP: You were in a few movies after Shame–including The Brass Teapot and Lies I told My Little Sister, in which you had the lead–and made many appearances in popular TV shows like The Good Wife, Blue Bloods, and Rizzoli & Isles–but you are best known for playing Holly in the Starz series, Power, which is going into its third season.
LW: Power has been a great platform for me. Just working regularly on the same show for a good length of time is such an education. People took a minute to find the show, but they are finding it. Holly’s such a fun part to play because she’s just trouble. It has been liberating to play because fans hate this character. Hate her! That the fans really hate her has been liberating because I am no longer trying to please anybody. I don’t have to be pretty, I don’t have to be likable. I can just be raw and trashy and mean and ugly and all the things that you’re usually not allowed to play. It’s been fun. It’s really, really liberating to get to play the worst and best parts of yourself.
DP: For the lead in “Here Alone” did you audition?
LW: I did not audition.
DP: I read that Rod Blackhurst tweeted you.
LW: That’s right. I have no idea why he thought of me. He might have seen what I’d done, but there are a lot of actors as well. My guess is that the producer Noah Lang had a hand in it. That’s a very good question and I’m not sure I want to know the answer. These things are so serendipitous. My reps were not excited about it at first. But I knew some of Rod’s friends so he was vetted to some degree and then I Skyped with him and was really taken with him. Then I thought, “Why not? Let’s just do it.”
DP: Had you seen Rod’s short, Alone Time, about a young woman from the city who camps alone out in the wilderness?
LW: I just watched it recently. He talked about it as being the genesis of Here Alone. It was also filmed upstate.
DP: I know he also met Gina Piersanti by tweeting her. But were you the first cast?
LW: I think so. I’m not sure when they first spoke to Gina but I know they didn’t think the shooting dates would work for her. Eventually they did work out.
DP: I saw this movie by default–nothing else was playing at the time–at the Tribeca Film Festival, and was really surprised by how good this movie is.
LW: I think we were all surprised by it. Even when you read the script, you don’t know what it’s going to be. I’ve read great scripts that were executed poorly and mediocre scripts that were turned into good movies. You just don’t know because a movie is a huge machine with so many parts. Even with a great director and great editor, you just don’t know.
DP: You probably took this film partly because it was a lead role for you, but if you were already a big star and this script came to you, do you think you would have wanted to do it?
LW: So much of it is the people. Who do you want to go into a foxhole with? If you trust the people you will work with, the other stuff is irrelevant. I was hungry to take a part like Ann after being immersed for the past three years in Power. And I love playing Holly. I had normally been cast as the sweet girl and Holly is certainly not that. She’s trouble. She is so different from Ann. You’d think that an extreme, midnight zombie movie shouldn’t be realistic, but Ann felt way more aligned with who I actually am than Holly. She is not a woman who leads her sexuality, she is not a woman who engages in quippy banter. She just is just s survivor. She just does what it takes to survive. You know, I live my life with a furrowed brow just trying to get through it. So I related to that and her. There’s nothing cute or sexy or anything. She is just taking life very seriously. It’s different circumstances but I take life way too seriously and just getting food some days feels like enough. It’s New York City, and if you get food and do the laundry in a day it’s like whew! It’s Ann’s grit that I responded to.
DP: What did you and Rod talk about in terms of this character? Did he want you to understand her more than he did?
LW: Because this was a small film, Rod was doing everything. So there wasn’t a lot of time for us to get into who these people are. We did a little bit. We Skyped and had some conversations. He gave me a lot of information on what the disease was like that created the zombies. He really wanted this to seem real. But where Anne is emotionally, he let me figure a lot out for myself. I was in a weird place, I was coming straight from another film. That was all-night shoots, and you start to lose your mind when you don’t sleep for two weeks. So I was deeply depleted when we started this film. Also I was in the middle of my own breakup. So I still was not sleeping during the time we made Here Alone. Which was crazy because filming it was so exhausting. Needless to say, I had done work to figure out where she was but at the end of the day it didn’t matter because I was in my own weird state and that informed her. I had mapped it out, but it was enough to be wrestling with what I was wrestling with because it showed through. That’s why I like this type of storytelling. It doesn’t have to be so demonstrative.
DP: Are you glad it was done with flashbacks, showing Ann, her husband and baby flee the city because of the epidemic and try to survive in the wilderness. rather than chronologically?
LW: Maybe it did help. We shot in the dead of winter in the hopes that there would be snow. I wonder if it was hard for the audience members to tell what were flashbacks but for me the actor, it was nice because the flashbacks didn’t contaminate each other. I think it would have been fine no matter what we did.
DP: Did Rod see himself as any of the characters, including Ann? He did grow up in the Adirondacks.
LW: He never talked about that. Then again, he didn’t write he screenplay, David Ebeltoft did. None of them talked about it. But Rod is an outdoors guy.
DP: Gina Piersanti’s and Adam David Thompson’s characters don’t show up until midway through the movie, but were they on the set the whole time?
LW: When I first came, it was just me. I had a long road trip with the director to where we filmed in Corning, New York.. While he and the crew were in pre-production, I learned how to shoot a gun. Gina and Adam came probably four or five days after I had been there by myself. Which was probably good because it was Ann’s world that they were entering. Gina’s great and I loved working with her. Adam, too. is such a great guy. I’d known him previously and we were already friends.
DP: Between the time Ann’s husband is killed by zombies and she kills her baby and the arrival of Chris and his stepdaughter Olivia, does Ann talk to herself?
LW: Not much. A little bit. She does some counting and a little bit of muttering.
DP: Does she worry about her sanity?
LW: Probably but like I said, she’s not worried about her own health. She is in a pragmatic way, trying to get through the day, but she certainly isn’t trying to make this cushier for herself. She thinks she has to pay penance.
DP: We talked about Alone Time, which Rod Blackhurst and David Ebeltoft cowrote. They also have another unfilmed project with Elgin James called North. It’s about a parolee who rides a bike up the California coast to figure out what it means to be free. He has a goal and kind of least an abstract destination. But Ann doesn’t really have anything in her life.
LW: She’s just made a prison for herself and I think a lot of that her self-flagellating because she is not getting over her guilt from killing her sick baby.
DP: Does she fear dying?
LW: No. I think in some ways the easy thing to do would be to just kill herself or just let it end. In some ways, her living through this is a form of punishment.
DP: She had been a nurse. Where does that fit in?
LW: There’s a toughness to being a nurse and there’s a toughness to Ann. I remember reading the script and thinking, “Wouldn’t it be more interesting if she came from a cushier life?” We chose things like Ann’s underwear. She would have frilly, lacy bras. That made sense to me. This is a woman who isn’t her world but Jason’s, this isn’t fun for her. She’s a person who likes sweet, fun things. She’d choose the frilly bra not the practical bra. That’s a key for me that this woman trying to survive in the wilderness isn’t who Ann is, although she proves to be tough enough to survive. There’s a toughness to someone who can be a nurse and that I’m so impressed by. She can’t be squeamish, she has to get things done.
DP: She also proves to be nurturing to the injured Chris and tries be almost motherly with Olivia.
LW: Ann clearly is nurturing and she’s a caregiver but not in a gooey way.
DP: Ann and Chris are drawn to each other, but they don’t seem to see what we see, that Olivia is attracted to her step-father and is jealous.
LW: Yeah, I guess they do drop the ball by not picking up on that. But I guess Ann might be taking on a more motherly role with her….actually I don’t know what’s going to happen between Ann and Olivia moving forward.
DP: The synopsis in the press notes concludes: “As an uneasy tension grows, their lives are threatened when the protective forest is breached by the infected. Under attack, Ann is forced to confront her past.” That’s not right is it?
LW: Hmm. No. She’s always confronting her past, it’s 24-hour guilt.
DP: In the flashbacks, she seems to love her husband Jason, but not a lot. I think he annoys her. Is that true?
LW: They wanted the script to show that their relationship was not great. Jason’s proposal was not great. This was not a great love to begin with and now they’ve become roommates. They’re trying to do the right thing by being with each other. They have a baby..
DP: I wonder if her guilt is only in regard to the baby and not about her husband, who got killed by zombies. when she insisted he go out at night in search of food.
LW: I’m sure she has guilt about both of them. As much as she resented him, it sure was nice to have a teammate.
DP: All of a sudden she gets a new family when Chris and Olivia arrive. Is that how you see it?
LW: Certainly not at first. It takes a little while for her to judge their intentions.
DP: Not long. I think she is pretty welcoming.
LW: I guess you’re right. That first scene when she saves him, she does not have to do that but that’s her nature.
DP: Was it ever mentioned on the set that you were making something different from “The Walking Dead?”
LW: They tried to never talk about it because they were trying to do their own thing. I actually haven’t seen that show!
DP: Ann flees a deserted house with some food she took and some fast-moving zombies give chase. Did you realize how it was being filmed, how the zombies behind you would be blurry and sort of shadowy?
LW: No. I remember wondering and hoping for the best. I didn’t want it to be a B-horror film but without the budget to do special effects, I just wondered about the quality.. I remember trusting them and choosing to believe that it was going to work.
DP: It’s not a zombie movie really. It’s a survival movie.
LW: I agree. Going back to “Shame,” I think the most powerful things were those that were not spelled out for us. So our imaginations are what make it interesting, our imaginations projecting onto what is happening with no dialogue in our scene at the beginning of Shame or what these zombies actually look like if we could see them clearly. Somehow when you actually see them toward the end of the movie, the fear dissipates a little.
DP: Was the nudity hard to do?
LW: Here’s the deal, I was scared of nudity for a very long time. Film is permanent. It is out there and there are just so many icky sites. So much of having to be a shape shifter because once it’s out there, there’s no reason for putting on your push up bra anymore. There it is. In a weird way, nudity is kind of liberating. It took me a long time to get there. After Power, this was a piece of cake. That has a lot of nudity and it’s all sexualized and was very scary to do. In Here Alone, the nudity isn’t sexualized. It’s realism. It’s not trying to be a hot body. That’s a scary thing to do, to never feel like you’re enough. And this one was just realism. The nudity is just in service of the role. There were moments that I was clear that I didn’t want the nudity to be all gratuitous and if it wasn’t necessary, I really didn’t want it to be in there. I didn’t want to throw a big stink, but I had to trust that if Rod told me it wasn’t gratuitous then it wasn’t. It’s a tricky thing but I’m trying to become more European about saying “fuck it.” Besides being very cold, I’m getting way more comfortable with it.
DP: I thought when Ann washes off the mud from her nude body that it was a brave scene for you. There’s a metaphor. She can never clean off the guilt. And what this woman has to go through when she is caked in mud. Was that part of what you were thinking?
LW: Yeah, and I sort of like the idea of going all the way. There’s nothing more vulnerable than that. There’s no skimping. You’ve got to get raw and filthy. You had to go all the way for this film and I like that.
DP: Well, all other actors can complain about what they’ve gone through in movies, but you can always say, “I did this!”
LW: Right!
DP: If “Here Alone” was done by a lousy director, it could have been a lousy movie.
LW: It’s about trust. And sometimes I have to take a leap of trust because I didn’t really know him but there’s something to Rod that I did respond to.
DP: Where does this movie fit into your career?
LW: I’ve always wanted to do independent films and I want to do bigger and more substantial roles. I’d like to think that this will open the door to make that more possible.
DP: So you have a lot of pride in this movie?
LW: For sure.
DP: What was it like to be at the Tribeca Film Festival?
LW: It’s such an honor. No one took it seriously, it was the Midnight part of the festival. For these boys to get this break. I’m just so thrilled for them. Tribeca is a lovely festival and it’s nice to be on your home turf because there is that support. I was really proud to get to be a part of it. It’s nice to get to be living here and experiencing it. I was glad the film did as well as it did and won the Audience Award because I don’t think it would have been on everybody’s radar.
DP: Before our lunch today and later today you are auditioning. Having seen you be an engaging guest on Afterbuzz for Power, my guess is that you do well at auditions.
LW: I actually don’t. I think I could, but this comes back to something that I’m working on in myself. It’s like my wishing I had been a fiddler rather than a classic violinist. I think there’s something deep in me and it’s not helpful that it’s still looking for the right answer. When it works, I go in there and I understand the character and what it is I’m bringing and I’m just so confident with that that I don’t need anything else. I can to present what I want to do with the role and they either respond to it or they don’t. That’s when it goes well. This is not something I want to admit, this is like a fault, but I think that sometimes at auditions, I’d like to ask, “Can we talk about the scene?” Because if I have time to prepare, I can kill it. The way auditions often work is that it’s next morning and you have a lot of material to learn. For me it’s a slow process– I need to sit with a script, think about it, daydream on it and get those juices going. It’s not a five-minute microwavable. It’s a stew that needs to simmer to get those flavors in. I’m not a good memorizer. There’s work involved to make it effortless. When I’m not super prepared, I lose my confidence because I know what it should be. It’s like how test taking has very little to do with wisdom or knowledge. They are different skills.
DP: But you seem completely comfortable in the work I’ve seen from you.
LW: I’m getting there. I think I spent the early part of my career trying to be what people wanted me to be. But you have to get to the point where it’s not about getting validation from others, getting that A, but about pleasing yourself. This is not a revelatory thought but spending so much time trying to cover up the things that I didn’t want people to see is exhausting. When things have started to finally work, it’s when I’m no longer trying to be something. I’m just embracing or loving those flaws I have. I can’t tell you how many times I wore push up bras or do something else to be what I thought others wanted.. But if they want that there are plenty of real models. What I’m bringing is those imperfections. Those flaws are actually character. Those flaws are actually interesting and something to embrace rather than cover up.. This is not a fresh thought but for me it has felt very fresh. It has felt like, I finally understand what my job is.

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Ryan Gosling & Russell Crowe Talk About Being “The Nice Guys”

Playing in Theaters

Ryan Gosling & Russell Crowe Talk About Being The Nice Guys

(from Sag Harbor Express 5/25/16)

Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling in “The Nice Guys.”

Healy and March “meet cute.”

The Nice Guys, which opened at the UA East Hampton 6 on Friday, is a buddy detective-comedy pairing Ryan Gosling as inept private eye Holland March and Russell Crowe as hired enforcer Jackson Healy, two men who don’t like each other but join forces to solve a murder (of porn star Misty Mountains) and a seemingly unrelated disappearance.   As IMDB states: “During their investigation, they uncover a shocking criminal conspiracy which reaches up to the highest circles of power.” Written and directed by Shane Black (who scripted Lethal Weapon; and wrote and directed Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Iron Man 3), The Nice Guys is set in 1977 Los Angeles, but because of financial reasons, was filmed in Atlanta. That’s where I did a set visit, on the 33rd day of a 49-day shoot, for the Australian magazine FilmInk back in 2014. Along with seven other international journalists, I spent many hours on a freezing night both inside and outside a large Atlanta hotel, speaking to cast and crew whenever they became available and watching the nattily-dressed Gosling and Crowe film action sequences involving a grenade exploding, their jumping over cars, and some hand-to-hand combat. In fact, Gosling and Crowe were so busy that we got to talk to them only briefly–at about 2 am. They both seemed exhausted as they plopped down on some wooden chairs and immediately polluted the room with thick cigarette smoke, while using one paper cup for their ashtray. I note my questions.

The nice guys with March’s daughter Holly (Angourie Rice).

Danny Peary: Are you guys through for the night?

Russell Crowe: No, we’re just taking a break. Ryan doesn’t actually smoke, he’s just in character.

DP: Did you know each other before you were cast?

RC: We had an assignation, once. A quiet dinner, just me and Ryan and twenty other people.

DP: Did you have a table reading before shooting began to get a rhythm for the two of you?

Ryan Gosling: Yeah, we did have a table reading.

RC: But we didn’t have what you’d call an ideal preparation for this, it was very fast.

DP: But did it work right away, in your opinion?

RC: Yeah, yeah. It just means that we talk constantly and we plan on the run.

Q: Are you improvising, then?

RC: Yes.

Q: Prior to The Nice Guys, we’ve had mismatched-partners incarnations in past movies, whether in the detective genre or whatever, and the two men need to fuse together to get to the end result.

RC: People like to see that friendship blossom, in lots of different ways. It’s like in L.A. Confidentialwhere the two characters come together at the end. They’re individuals but they come together and are locked in.

RG: This what Joel Silver [the film’s producer] and Shane do best. If Lethal Weapon and 48 Hrs. had a kid and he lost his virginity while Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was on TV, then you might end up with Healy and March.

Q: They’re flawed characters–is that what makes it interesting?

RC (laughing): Well, we’re just characters, we’re definitely not flawed.

Q: But you’re character is a little bit of an alcoholic.

RC: Hey, he’s a man who works hard. He likes a drink at the end of the day. And first thing in the morning. You’d have thought that the guy is a debt collector who sits alone in a small apartment above a comedy club, hearing the laughter. That’s the soundtrack of his life. He doesn’t have much communication – he can’t hear the jokes, but he can hear the result.

Q: Chemistry can’t be created, it’s just inherent, and having watched you tonight, for the two for you, it’s just there.

RC: Chemistry is a funny thing. You never know if it’s going to be there or not. Ryan just makes me laugh, and that keeps me engaged in a certain sort of way. The characterization that he’s doing is so special.

DP: Did one of you say, “I’m going to be the straight man and you’re going to be the comic in this scene?”

RG: That dynamic was there in the script. With Shane Black, there is always a great mixture of humor and drama. It’s the kind of mix that only he can do in this particular way.

Q: Shane Black says Chinatown influenced the story. That had to do with corruption in L.A. regarding water rights; your film is about the auto industry in the late 1970s. Can you talk about that part of the movie through your characters’ eyes?

RC: It is, really, similar from my point of view. There was that aspect, social commentary aspect in the script, which elevated the material, in my mind. You look at the state of Detroit now, and you look at what happened in the 1970s that prevented Detroit from ending up being another, better place right now. It’s decayed through the specific decision to hold onto things rather than look to the future. That’s what was really interesting to me.

Q: Ryan, when you read the script for the first time, what were you attracted to?

RG: How Shane always finds a way to subvert things. What’s so great about this film is that it’s aware of what it is, but at the same time it’s still very much its own thing. There’s a great scene with Russell’s character is surprised in his apartment by these two goons and a gun goes off, and it hits the lady in the next apartment, you just hear her wailing the entire scene. We did a scene the other day where I toss a gun to Russell across the room and he’s supposed to start shooting. It was a very cool moment. When we were about to shoot that scene, Shane’s like, “Wouldn’t it be funny if you threw the gun but you threw it a little bit too high and it went out the window? Then you have to do the scene without a gun.”

Q: In the scene we saw being filmed tonight, you guys were running and shooting. It had to be a little boy’s fantasy to do a scene like that.

RC: As an old man, I’m sick of doing shit like that! They gotta pull me out of there on a wheelchair! “What? I got to run over there? Just great…”

RG: I’ve never really done an action film, so for me this is all new. I’m a babe in the woods. [Laughing] I’m learning so much from Russell.

Q: Is it advantageous to shoot with several cameras on actions scenes like that when there is choreography involved?

RC: Shane doesn’t really shoot with multiple cameras a lot. He’s actually most of the time shooting with just one camera, which I haven’t done for years and years.

RG: That’s all I’ve ever done. Working on smaller films, I’ve never done the multiple-camera thing. Some cases they’ll cross-shoot if they can, and hope it works–because you can improvise.

DP: Ryan, you have said, “I’ve always wanted to entertain.” I don’t know if you were kidding around when you said that.

RG: No, I was being serious.

DP: Yet since none of your past characters are the type that wants to act or entertain, you couldn’t play them in a way that shows that part of you. Instead you played them with a lot of introspection. What about March? Is he more flamboyant and outgoing than your usual screen characters?

RG: Yes, he is. He isn’t introspective, but very different from that. This movie is much broader than anything I’ve ever done. The physical comedy sequences are really fun to do.

Q: You both are coming off your first directing experiences. Do you have more of a director’s eye now?

RC: I’m always very interested in what the camera is doing, I have information that I want to feed to this inanimate object so I want to know where it is. In a situation like this, though, when you go onto a movie, there’s a lieutenant – the director you’re working for–so it doesn’t cross over. You’re working for somebody else’s vision and the way he wants it.

RG: I’ve become much more sensitive to what directors go through, so it’s been really helpful for me, actually. Still it’s nice to come to the set and have all the cameras already set up, and just do my part.

RC: Whereas you see me–I just love being in charge. I’m totally comfortable if every single creative decision is mine! I don’t think that surprises any of you.

DP: Do your characters evolve at all, changing from the beginning to end of the movie, or could they be moved to the next movie, the sequel, as exactly the same characters they are when we first meet them?

RC: Well, there’s movement in terms of how they start out as opposing forces, and then join together when working the case. There’s movement, and also I think, a sort of maturity aspect with Ryan’s character. They don’t change their thoughts but they certainly get something out of the experience.

DP: Ryan, March’s daughter is trying to change him, so he’ll be more responsible–does it happen?

RG: She is trying to do that and she does it.

RC: There’s a moment where his daughter gets upset with him and calls him out. I think there’s definitely a building empathy.

RG: March is disenfranchised and disillusioned with how little change you can actually make in the world, so he’s really going for low-hanging fruit in the beginning of the movie–cheating scandals, things that aren’t right with retirement homes, that sort of thing. But he meets Healy and becomes much more optimistic.

RC (laughing): Whereas the opposite happens with Healy. He starts with a certain wounded nobility and ends up an alcoholic!

SPOILER ALERT

Q: March and Healy don’t start out on a really nice note, but do they become friends?

RC: They’re still not buddies at the end of the story. They’ve connected, they’ve done something together, but they’re still not close.

END SPOILER ALERT