A Stage for Up and Coming Stand-Ups

Joseph Vecsey Hosting All-Star Comedy Showcase at Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, NY

A Stage for Up and Coming Stand-Ups

(from Sag Harbor Express 6/13/13)

Surely Charles Dickens was correct when he famously wrote, "There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as hilarity," which explains why we are experiencing an epidemic of laughter at the Bay Street Theatre this summer.  All three plays being presented this summer are comedies.  The theatre's Comedy Club is featuring such stand-up superstars as Paul Reiser, Amy Schumer, David Brenner, and Paula Poundstone. And at 8 p.m. this Monday, June 17, four stellar comics whose faces you'll more likely recognize than their names will seize the stage in the 3rd Annual All-Star Comedy Showcase.  
            This highly-anticipated humor fest is the brainchild of its 24-year-old host Joseph Vecsey, a former streetballer--his father is Hall of Fame basketball writer/analyst Peter Vecsey--who gave up his NBA dreams to do stand-up, write funny scripts, interview his peers and idols on his acclaimed The Call Back Podcast, and put together comedy revues.  

Joseph Vecsey 

Joseph Vescey, a stand-up streetballer

 

 

Q: Joseph, you live in New York City, so what is your connection to the area and Bay Street Theatre?JV: My parents have a house on Shelter Island, so my sister Taylor, who writes for the East Hampton Patch, and I have been coming out here since we were kids.  I saw comics like Jeff Ross perform at Bay Street and realized that the only up-and-coming comedians who appeared there were opening acts for big headliners.  So in 2010 I came up with the idea to give them a showcase.  I sent a proposal to its managing director, Gary Hygom, and he liked the idea, particularly because he could hire my acts to open for headliners that summer.  That first year we put on our show in May and it was called The Underground Comedy Showcase.

Q: Why did you come up with that concept rather than saying, "I'm a comic and I'd like to open for one of your headliners?"

JV: I'd been doing standup for only six or seven months and wasn't ready to open for someone big.  My name was an absolute zero and I needed more experience.  However, I already knew a lot of standup comics that I could bring to Sag Harbor. At first Gary thought I wanted to rent out the theater, but I said, "I don't have any money.  Can we do a split at the door?"  Bay Street Theatre took in more than we did but it was a success and we came back last year with a new name, stronger show, and better date.  June 17 for this year is our best date yet.

Q: Have you performed and hosted elsewhere since 2010?

JV: I did bar shows, clubs, theaters, colleges, restaurants, rough urban rooms in Brooklyn and Staten Island, even a hostel on 103^rd and Amsterdam.  I got so much better and even opened for Jim Breuer and Susie Essman at Bay Street last year.  Bay Street in 2010 was my first big gig, but since then I've hosted shows all around New York and popular clubs like the Laff House in Philadelphia and Jokers Wild in New Haven.  

Joseph Vecsey performing

 

Q: What is your role as the host?

JV: Hosts are comedians so they both introduce the acts and perform. Sometimes confused people come up to me afterward and say I should be doing comedy myself.  They think I was just naturally funny when talking to the audience and don't realize that I was trying to be funny.   I'll do two or three bits rather than full routines, and a lot of crowd work, making sure people are ready to laugh when the first act comes on.  I'll ask where they're from and even pick on a couple of them, but not in a malicious or embarrassing way. Last year everyone was very receptive.

 

Q: Is Bay Street a good venue for comics?

JV: Comics really like performing here because it's a good size theater yet as intimate as a comedy club.  You see the audience and the nice backdrop is close so the laughs bounce of it.  Also Bay Street's location makes it very appealing.

 

Q: I see that you have assembled a diverse lineup of comics this year. 

JV: I agree. We have four acts who will be doing fifteen-to-twenty-minute routines. Kenny Garcia is a very laid-back comic who tells well-written jokes and lets the audience come to him.  And then he takes it to unexpected places. Chris Clarke and I shoot sketches together in which I play a hardcore overly violent white skinny rapper and he's my stocky and stronger black manager whom I verbally abuse and order around.  He is naturally hilarious.  I love the substance of his comedy, his delivery, and his expressions--he has a great look.

Kenny Garcia

Chris Clarke

 

 Mark Riccadonna is a friend who helped me find work when I was a beginner.  He is probably the most universal and versatile comic in my lineup.  People respond to him because of his great stories and clever jokes--and also because his humor is super clean.  Our fourth comic is Mirina Franklin, who is coming in from Chicago, where she is working with Wanda Sykes.  She's a rising star who is basically herself on stage, friendly and smiling. but will suddenly start mimicking, verbally and physically, aggressive and sassy people she's come across.  She'll bring to the show hilarious humor told from a unique perspective.

Mark Riccadonna

Marina Franklin

 

Q: So what kind of show can we expect?

JV: An amazing show that is geared not only for the slightly older audience that Bay Street typically draws, but also high school and college age comedy fans.  Last year we were happy to attract 225 people, but the theater seats 300 and I hope young fans will help fill it this Monday.  They will see four comedic talents with a ton of professional experience who aren't doing comedy as a stepping stone to the movies. These individuals instead want to continue to perfect their craft--their art--and are content to be among the best stand-up comics on the planet.

The Director of The East

Playing in Theaters

The Director of The East

6/10/13

Last week I posted two roundtables I participated in with the cast of  Zal Batmanglij's political thriller, The East, his second film written with rising star Brit Marling.  Here's my follow-up, a roundtable with Batmanglij. Again the plot: Marling plays Sarah, the prize recruit for a security firm that protects major, often disreputable corporations.  The first big assignment she's given by her dynamic boss, Sharon (Patricia Clarkson), is to infiltrate an underground anarchist group called the East.  This extremist freegan collective has been targeting companies that are callously putting people's lives at risk with their products or polluting the environment.  While gathering Intel, she finds herself attracted to the charismatic Benji (Alexander Skarsgard), inspired by the dedicated Izzy (Ellen Page), and seduced by the communal living, and she wins them over by participating in the group's dangerous, subversive "jams."  She comes to question the East's eye-for-an-eye tactics that endanger individuals--as well as her own values.  Will she side with Sharon or Benji or take her own path?  I note my questions.

Zal Batmanglij  Photo: DP

Q: I read the essay by your mother about her successful sons in the New Yorker. You bought a camera when you were younger and made family movies.  They called you Woody Allen, right?

Zal Batmanglij: My mom thought I was really funny.  I am really funny, just my movies are not funny at all. My mom wrote that profile about her two sons and it was sort of advice from a non-tiger mom.  My parents always encouraged us when we felt creative, but never demanded any results. So my brother played music but he was never asked to perform for anybody.  And I made films I never had to show anyone.  I wanted to be a filmmaker so my parents helped me buy a video camera simply by encouraging me to save my allowance. I bought my first video camera and there were no expectations, but I would come home from school every day and make movies that I never finished.  My brother was the star of my first movies but he would laugh all the time, so I had to find another leading man.  But my friends didn’t really want to act in movies either so it wasn’t until that I went to Georgetown that I actually finished a movie. That’s where I met Mike Cahill and Brit.  Years later, Mike and I made our first movies together.  [Cahill directed Brit in Another Earth and they wrote the screenplay. Zac was given a “Special Thanks” in the credits. Zac directed Brit in his sci-fi short, The Recordist and in his first feature, Sound of My Voice, for which she and he wrote the screenplay.  Brit acted in both films simultaneously and they were both accepted at Sundance in 2011.]

Q: How do you and Brit write?

ZB: We set aside time. We have a six-day writing week. We spend three or four days working on the housekeeping --how are you feeling, how am I feeling? If you can trust each other and clean up even the most random issues that percolate around any partnership, then you can spend 2 or 3 days doing the actual work of passing the information back and forth without being mired in all the ego-driven stuff that normally exists. We’re getting better and better at doing that. We email each other YouTube videos and stuff but never the writing itself. Because we had day jobs when we were first started writing, we would write early in the morning or late at night after we got back from our day jobs.  That’s how we wrote Sound of My Voice.

Q: How did Fox become involved with The East?

ZB: We made Sound of My Voice in a vacuum and didn't expect anyone important to see it.  We’d shown it to only about five people before we submitted it to Sundance, and after it was accepted, we didn’t show it to anyone else until it premiered. The next day I was at some party I’d been invited to because now I was a filmmaker, and this guy came up and started talking to me about moviemaking.  He said he liked Sound of My Voice and asked if we'd written anything else, and I said The East. I just thought he was a nice guy giving me a compliment, but it was Michael Costigan, who ran Ridley and Tony Scott's production company for many years.  Two days later he had a copy of the script for The East.  I don’t know how he got it but he said, “I read The East and we’d like to make it into a movie.” I asked, "Who’s we?" He said, “Ridley and Tony Scott.  I was like hahaha. And he said, “No, really.”

Q: Did that open doors for you guys that you didn’t have before?

ZB: No, but it gave us support and guidance. It gave us a road to walk on and people took it more seriously.   Still we made it on a $6.5 million dollar budget, which is one-third the budget of Silver Linings Playbook.  I don’t know what fraction of a Ridley Scott-directed movie budget that would be.  But strangely, because I’m very inspired by Tony and Ridley’s work, it has a lot of elements from Enemy of the State and Spy Game, any of their films that I grew up loving.

Danny Peary: In the production notes, you’re quoted as saying “Michael Costigan, he got it in ways that we didn’t even get. He helped us articulate what we were trying to say.” Anything specific?

ZB:  Yeah, all the time, people are telling me things about the movie that I didn’t put together. For example. the other day someone said, my favorite line in the movie is when Sarah says to Benji, “You don’t think I’m hard enough,” and he says, “No, I don’t you’re soft enough.” Later, Sharon grabs her and says, “Don’t get soft.” I never made that connection.  I’m sure Brit did because she’s much smarter than I am. I never realized that the movie is about being poisoned, over and over again. Whether it’s poisoned water, or a poisonous antibiotic, or water laced with arsenic. Mike Costigan helped us see that and a lot of thematic things in the movie. I didn’t put those things together before.

Q: Did writing about this lifestyle put you back into the whole mindset of when you and Brit did something similar over one summer?

ZB: Yeah, it did.  We had this experience and couldn’t shake it, and had to make the movie in order to digest the experience. We had to find a way to make sense of it. We wanted to write a spy thriller anyway, so we decided to combine that with her experience and that’s how the movie was born.

DP: Did Sullivan’s Travels influence your dropping out, traveling around without money, and hoping to write about it when you returned?

ZB: We didn’t do it consciously necessarily, but I think so. The idea of the haves and the have-nots was really big in movies of the ‘30s and ‘40s and the ‘70s.  There is a sisterhood between these times, and I think that we definitely felt that. You can see Sullivan’s Travels finding its way into The East. Brit looks a little bit like Veronica Lake, thought she’s a little bigger.  Also, A Place in the Sun is a film I think about a lot in regard to the idea of privilege, I think of the scene where Montgomery Cliff’s character comes to his uncle’s house and they treat him so poorly and won’t even invite him in for a drink.  Maybe that’s in our next film.

Q: What was scarier, getting into the freeganism movement or coming back out of it?

ZB: I’m not sure. When we went into it, we stopped watching films, we stopped listening to recorded music, we didn’t know what was going on in the news or in the gossip world because we didn't read magazines or have any access to television or other people who knew any of those things. We entered into a sort of a capitalist-free zone. What replaced it was kissing each other in spin-the-bottle, taking food out of the trash, and learning how you could feed not only yourself but also a hundred other people at a time.  One of the groups we were with would take abandoned bicycles and fix them up, so we learned how to do that and would ride them around the city. We learned all sorts of very different things. So when we came back we were shocked by the world that we had taken for granted before. It was overwhelming. There’s so much stimulus coming at you all the time.  Seeing movies was now weird. If you go see a movie not only do you have to navigate the intensity of film, and its lack of authenticity, twenty minutes of ads before a movie. You’re a captive audience, they’ve got you.

Q: So you underwent a big change?

ZB: It’s funny how quickly human beings adapt.  Part of that is always with me, I’m always very wary and very aware. I remember us going into a Whole Foods to use the bathroom, about a month and half into our summer, and everyone just kept looking at us. We were like, What are they looking at? We thought they all smelled funny because they had used so many chemicals in their hair and deodorants and stuff. When we got to the bathroom we looked into the mirror and we saw that we looked totally different than they did.  It was evident from our hair that we hadn’t showered in a while. I had a beard. We had these underground eyes. When I’d seen underground eyes in people I’d always thought those eyes that were saying, “I hate you,” but I realized they’re the eyes of someone who is not afraid anymore and is feeling fearless. 

Q: How did your experiences with this lifestyle affect you as a director?

ZB: Anarchist collectives are all about egalitarianism and having no leadership. The collective says that every vote is equal. And a film set is all about hierarchy. I always like to think about the circus. In the circus there’s this real sense of tribalism; people work together. I think the ring-leader is not more important than the clown, the acrobat, or the elephant trainer. They all work together. I felt that on The East, and I think the crew and the actors felt too that everyone was working together to create a common film.  We would shoot nights and it was so cold that the actors were freaked out. They were shaking, their lips were blue. So the costumers put heating pads in Ellen and Brit’s dresses and their shoes. There was such thoughtfulness there, and I could see that job was not any less important than my job.

Q: Did the actors follow the script or did you make changes while you filmed?

ZB: I remember one Sunday where Brit and Alexander and I were together trying to figure out a week’s work, and we work-shopped scenes to try to make them feel more real. We were always doing that, and inspired by the idea of Woody Allen, I always told the actors to just make it sound good. We are not precious about the dialogue, so if you want to make anything feel more real, then by all means do it.

DP: I would guess that the scene you and Brit might have discussed most was the first jam at the party. In the second jam two people are nearly killed, but they were responsible for other people’s deaths.  But in the party scene, the East puts a lot of innocent people ar risk as well by allowing them to drink champagne containing a drug that may have lethal side effects.  Did you two worry that this might alienate a mainstream movie audience?

ZB: That’s an interesting question. I don’t know.  We debated that scene in terms of the characters. The antibiotic is the most commonly prescribed antibiotic in the world, and it’s actually based on a real antibiotic. If it’s not dangerous to put that drug on the market then everybody should be able to take it.  But if people have adverse side effects, then the pharmaceutical company has to wake up and realize what’s going on.  Because of what happened to Doc’s sister from taking the drug, the group thinks that it’s acceptable to have collateral damage to make its point. But Sarah doesn’t think its right to allow innocent people to drink the champagne with the drug and collects some of their glasses before they drink anything. At that exact moment, Sarah realizes she’s on her own.  The film asks: What do we personally think about it?  I don’t think Brit and I ever talked about whether we were alienating the audience.  Are you saying you felt alienated at that moment?

DP: I was thinking in terms of you as filmmakers risking us losing all our sympathy for the East, despite its idealism.  If we happened to go to that part, the East would be willing to kill us too; we’d become guinea pigs.

ZB: It’s not as if they put arsenic in the water. All they give everybody is a drug already on the market.  We weren’t trying to get people to identify with the East necessarily; we were always just trying to tell a story. And that story just gets murkier; the gray area gets murkier. It gets trickier and trickier.

Q: In films about extremist political groups or cults, often the people who are the most fanatical or committed are estranged from their families. Is that a tendency you see?

ZB: Yeah, the Earth First review of the movie recently came out. Earth First is a group that I think is kind of cool but it’s definitely an extremist group.  There were a lot of things they liked about the movie but they had a problem with the idea of Daddy issues.  The mainstream media always paints these groups as having Daddy issues.  I think we all do our jobs, or life’s work, because of the experiences we’ve had growing up with our parents and friends.  So yeah, of course, I think if you were abused as a kid you’re much more sensitive to abuse in the world. I think the same thing is true of the people who are the abusers.  CEOs have often been compared to sociopaths in their brain makeup. I think they've also experienced certain things in their lives that allow them to close down certain parts of their empathy.  How do CEOs of the pharmaceutical companies think?

Q: What do you hope the viewers will take from the film? Do you think it’s going to inspire people to maybe try this lifestyle?

ZB: I don’t know if films have the power to change so much as they have the power to reflect the world back to us in a way that makes more sense than our own interpretations of the world. We were just making a movie, we didn’t poison anybody, but those people are actually allowing people to be poisoned. And that’s the collateral damage for a drug that saves millions of lives. I think doctors would not want us to start a movement where everyone’s googling the side effects of their drugs, but I think we should. I think we’re all responsible enough to be able to make that choice of what goes into our body. I think we need to take more accountability for ourselves, for our actions, I hope this movie inspires us to start that dialogue. I think Brit and I have a lot of questions, but we don’t have any answers. We’re not able to preach in the film, because we have nothing to preach. We just have a lot of questions that we’re asking.

DP: Accountability is the big issue you raise. Basically, you point out in your movie that pharmaceutical companies may know something is wrong and not tell anybody.

ZB: Yeah, because the only tests for drugs are tests that are paid for by the pharmaceutical companies. That’s as if the movie studios wrote their own reviews. They would insist that they’re not biased, and they probably wouldn’t be fully biased, but… can you really trust those reviews?  If the studio is funding all the reviews, that would be weird. Maybe that’s what will happen in the future.

Q: It kind of happens now.

ZB: But the drug companies totally have that.  They take the doctors on junkets. In effect, they fund the lives of reviewers.

Q: Did the Occupy Wall Street movement influence the film?

ZB: Well, it influenced my desire to make it faster and faster. Occupy happened three weeks into pre-production, so we were in Shreveport at an old, alternative life style night club and trying to make it look like the middle of the woods.  And Occupy just sprung up, and it was so exciting. We were seeing images that we had experienced on the road now in the mainstream. Our parents had heard our stories from that summer,
but they’d never seen what it looked like really, it was a total abstraction for them, so they were the most excited. We felt, we’ve got to shoot this movie, we’ve got to edit it fast, we've got to get it out there!

DP: Do you consider The East a political film?

ZB: I consider every film a political film. I mean I literally. I’m very attuned to feeling the politics of a movie, so I’m always thinking, what is this movie trying to say and what’s it about? Do I think it’s more political films than most things, I don’t know. What’s a recent film I saw recently? I was trying to watch The Guilt Trip on the plane and I thought to myself that there is something so wrong in the politics of this movie. They keep talking about corporations. Every 5 minutes, she’s like, “I’m going to the Gap!” They’re talking about the Gap a lot and they’re talking about J. Crew a lot.  In our script, we wrote in all these specific brands as a joke. For instance I wanted to show a Coke bottle but we couldn’t get Coke’s permission.

DP: What about The Company You Keep, in which Brit plays the daughter of a former political activist?

ZB: The Company You Keep is for me a story of generations. I guess I’m so leftist that I didn’t feel it was that political.

DP: But it’s the only Hollywood film that doesn’t come down hard on the Weather Underground.  It’s very sympathetic to radicals, when mainstream films always portray them as 100% wrongheaded.  Maybe they’re connected to the East.

ZB: I remember we were watching a great documentary on the Weather Underground and Brit and I were very moved and inspired by it. And then Robert Redford sent Brit the script for The Company You Keep a couple of weeks later. Then Brit shot that movie until the day we started shooting our movie. So Brit literally left Vancouver and came to Shreveport to starting making The East.

DP: Since you and Brit have been making movies, do you see each new film you do as something entirely new?  You did a film about a cult before, this is a film where the guy is almost a cult leader, so I can’t tell if there is progression.

ZB: Well, they were written sort of back-to-back and come from the same period in our lives, born during our period of looking for our tribe.  So in both films you get that sense of tribalism. Whatever movie comes next will be born out of the fountain of what we’re experiencing now. Hopefully Brit and I will get to make many more movies together.

 

Doing Somersaults for Run & Jump

TriBeCa Film Festival

Doing Somersaults for Run & Jump

6/3/13

I was quite taken with The Rocket, which won the Audience Award (as well as being voted the Best Narrative Feature) at the recent TriBeCa Film Festival, but I was rooting for the splendid Run & Jump.  American Steph Green's witty, perceptive German-Irish co-production is about the Caseys, a happy family living in Ireland's Kerry County, which tries to put itself together after a stroke leaves the 38-year-old father, Conor (Edward MacLiam), physically fit but brain-damaged.  They get needed financial help when a stick-in-the-mud American doctor, Ted Fielding (SNL alum Will Forte in his first dramatic role), pays to stay in their house for two months and study and film Conor.  At first he doesn't connect with Conor's optimistic but struggling wife, Vanetia (a marvelous Maxine Peake), or their closeted-gay teenage son Lenny (Brandan Morris) and always cheerful young daughter Noni (Ciara Gallagher), but over time he loosens up and becomes close to them all, often taking on the father role and sometimes the mother role, too.  The escalating romantic feelings between Vanetia and Ted results in a lot of soul-searching. "This is not a story about a man adjusting to life after a stroke," says Green in the film's press notes. "This is a story about a woman adjusting to a new man.  This side of the story isn't often told...[Alibhe Keogan's] script navigated a classic love triangle trip in a new way, in a distinctive world, presenting two people whose relationship developed in shy, realistic stages, and was never self-serving...Ailbe told me she wanted to make a movie about how things didn't always turn out perfectly, but this rugged was the nature of life, and therefore, should be celebrated."  The following is an all-too-brief interview I did with Steph Green, Maxine Peake, and Edward MacLiam at the festival.

 Edward MacLiam, Steph Green (center) and Maxine Peake  Photo: DP

 

DP: Steph, I really like New Boy, which I first saw when it won Best Narrative Short at the 2008 TriBeCa Film Festival. And I was thinking of that film in regard to your first feaure.  They're both about people finding it difficult to into a group, rather than being  a fish-out-of water.

Steph Green: I don't think Run & Jump is really a fish-out-of-water story.  Ted is American who comes to live with a family in the countryside of Ireland's County Kerry, but he didn't have to be American to be a guest at the house.  He's a doctor who happens to be a American.  I see it as a story about relationships and the dynamics between these five family...I mean four family members and a fifth.

DP: They all embrace him by the end.

SG; Yeah, he's awkward at first but they open him up and he becomes part of the family.  Nobody has talked about that a theme before, so there you go.  I'm interested in how people reject and then accept each other, in stages.

DP: Maxine and Edward, did you talk about what the family was like before Conor's stroke?

Edward MacLiam: We had five days of rehearsal and improvisation to build the family.  Maxine and I did some improvisation as Vanetia and Conor and then the kids Lenny and Noni, played by Brendan and Ciara, came in, and then the parents Paddy and Nora, played by Michael Harding and Ruth McCabe, got involved, and then Sharon Horgan's's character Tara, was brought in. So it was the whole family unit and friend.  That helped immensely because we had a reference to draw from.

DP: Steph, were you present for this?

SG: Yes, I was always there.  There is a line in the script, "When we looked at something, we saw the same thing," so I knew I had to give them a back story or they wouldn't have believed that line to be true.  One thing I did was make Maxine and Edward slow dance. I got a tip from an acting coach, who said that if actors are going to play a married couple, make sure you have them do some slow dancing during the rehearsal process. I remember watching them slow dance and seeing them melting.  They were slowly turning down any of their nerves and connecting.  I stopped the music and they kept dancing because they were so into it.

DP: Since Vanetia and Conor used to think the same, was it sad when you were doing the back story? 

Maxine Peake: You come up with the back story and you have those memories when you're doing the scenes, and I think initially I was feeling sorry for Vanetia when she wasn't feeling sorry for herself. I'd say things and start reacting emotionally and so I told myself I had to stop.  It's interesting how we had to push that emotion down to our boots.

DP: Does she ever feel sorry for herself?  For instance, when she goes drinking, does it have nothing to do with her feeling sorry for herself?

MP: I think it does.

SG: Vanetia does feel sorry for herself then.  It's the only time she allows that. 

 

Ted (Will Forte) holds Noni (Ciera Gallagher), as Vanetia (Maxine Peake) and Lenny (Brandon Morris) look on and her father Conor pays no attention to the fact another man is taking over his role in the family.

 

DP: Steph, you mentioned you used music in rehearsal.

SG: We used music a lot during rehearsal, some that went into the movie and some that wasn't in the movie but was inspired by it.  Mood music.  Maxine has eclectic taste in music so we made mixes that would illicit moods of scenes she's in.  For instance, when Maxine danced with Ciara in the kitchen during rehearsal, we had some Bowie blasting.  Of course, for the movie itself I couldn't afford Bowie.

DP: Edward, I think playing a brain-damaged character is so hard, ironically, because you had no limitations and could do whatever you wanted.  I think that can give you too much leeway and too many choices for how to play the character scene by scene. So I imagine you had to constantly come up with the logic and limitations for how he behaves.

EM: Yeah. I did some research and read case studies and loaded it all in and saw what came out through Steph's direction.  I really, really trusted her. She gave me some specific notes early on and that kind of changed how I saw the trajectory of things.  Like what Maxine was talking about--oh, you feel your character is feeling a certain kind of grief because of the situation. I think I may have latched on to that a little too much early on, and as a result my character was a little too pronounced.  Steph brought me back a little.  I trusted letting go and letting things happen naturally and never blocked myself by saying "Oh, I don't think Conor wouldn't say that or do that."

SG: I kept looking for frameworks from various psychologists saying, he wouldn't do this or he wouldn't do that. In fact, what you said is exactly right.  Any symptoms or any behavior is possible.  I think we just got it down to the behaviors that were most interesting.  We also had the input of the original writer, Ailbhe Keogan, whose father suffered a brain injury and that changed her household.  I feel that if there's any truth to this movie it comes from her story.

Ted documents Conor

 

DP: Like Maxine, we as an audience can get totally frustrated with Conor because while the film is sympathetic toward him, he is not totally likable.  He even has mean moments.  Edward could have played him totally sweet and that would have been wrong and less interesting.

EM: As much as it is physical, there's is a subconscious transformation going on with Conor. It gets very specific in how this relates to his son Brendan--how he now has a different smell, a bad odor, and how he states in front of his gay son that he doesn't like gays.

DP: A major, major moment in the film is when Ted realizes that instead of filming Conor, he's instead filming Vanetia.  This confirms he loves her, and watching her, I think we are supposed to love her, too, in order to understand Ted's feelings. So, Maxine, how was it playing a character everyone falls in love with?

SG (laughing): No pressure!

MP: I wasn't conscious of that.  I had just to play her, and not worry if she was likeable or not. Steph would just tell me that Vanetia is the life of the family.

 

Ted and Maxine get closer

DP: Step, you wouldn't tell Maxine that audiences must fall in love with Vanetia, but isn't that really what you wanted?

SG: Oh, yeah, that was hugely important in the edit, where you couldn't help but fall for this women.  Some of the best compliments we're received are from people who say, "Who can blame Ted?"

MP (laughing): It was a good idea that she didn't tell me because of the pressure from thinking it wasn't possible for people to feel that way about me. But it's about Vanetia, I suppose.

SG: Yes, it is. Vaneyia is bereft of fun now, she is missing having fun.  She is feeling the need to have fun again, and Ted is her only adult option in the house. Ted needs to have fun, too.  That is maybe the fodder for their relationship developing, even more than thinking about romance. 

Ted and Maxine have fun

 

DP: I think the other thing needed for this film to work is for us viewers to ask ourselves at the end, "Should Ted leave?"

SG: Absolutely.  I really wanted to create something where you are torn like the characters are torn.  I hope the ending is satisfying.  An hour after the premiere, people told me that they were still debating whether Ted should stay with the family or leave.  That's the best feedback, for them not to know what they want.  It's true to life.

DP: Well, Ted is valuable to the family.  The whole film we think how he's replacing Conor, but at times he replaces Vanetia, too, and is a double parent.

SG: That's right, because she starts to fall apart and he steps in.

EM: Conor even asks Ted to stay, for his son.

DP: This film is about characters changing and adapting.  How does Vanetia change?

MP: I'm not sure. I think she taps into a coping mechanism and then accepts what has happened.

A great performance by Maxine Peake as Vanetia

DP: I won't reveal the ending, but because of Ted filling in at crucial times, the entire family becomes stronger, including Vanetia, its life.

MP: That's true.

SG: The family does become stronger.  And I think Vanetia recommits herself to the family. Early on, she has too much optimism for the reality.  By the end, she has the right amount of optimism. She accepts the reality and commits herself to that.

MP: She sees she can survive the reality, as well.  She decides to survive the reality.

Forte got to do a little comedy when Ted reacts to Noni entering the bathroom without knocking

Moving to the Left when Traveling to The East

Playing in Theaters

Moving to the Left when Traveling to The East

5/31/13

In Zal Batmanglij's political thriller, The East, the second feature film he's written with rising star Brit Marling, the young actress plays Sarah, the prize recruit for a security firm that protects major, often disreputable corporations.  The first big assignment she's given by her dynamic boss, Sharon (Patricia Clarkson), is to infiltrate an anarchist  eco-terrorist group called the East.  This extremist freegan, underground collective has been targeting companies that are callously putting people's lives at risk with their products or polluting the environment.  While gathering Intel, she finds herself attracted to the charismatic Benji (Alexander Skarsgard), inspired by the dedicated Izzy (Ellen Page), and seduced by the communal living, and she wins them over by participating in the group's dangerous, subversive "jams."  She comes to question the East's eye-for-an-eye tactics that endanger individuals--as well as her own values.  Will she side with Sharon or Benji or take her own path?  In anticipation of the film's release this weekend, I took part in the following critics roundtables with, first, Marling and Clarkson, and, second, Skarsgard and Page.  I note my questions.

Roundtable with Brit Marling and Patricia Clarkson

Q: Brit, in the press notes it says that before you and Zal Batmanglij wrote the screenplay for The East, you two actually spent time experiencing the freegan lifestyle, including dumpster diving.  So how much in your movie is fabricated and what real-life experiences made it into the screenplay?

Brit Marling: The East collective was totally made up, we never met anybody like those people.  Although certainly we were inspired by our experiences in regard to their philosophy and how they live--squatting, harvesting food from dumpsters, train-hopping. For a summer, Zal and I did and saw all those things.  It is a very hard lifestyle, you can’t romanticize it, but also there's so much meaning and feeling in it. There's something beautiful about living as a tribe and sharing everything. I think that's conveyed in the film [in how we portray the East]. But the culture jams they think up were all made up.
            What isn’t made up, oddly, is all the corporate crimes that happen in the movie. There really is a company that dumps coal slurry and arsenic that was ending up in bathtubs and kids were getting tumors. That’s real. That stuff about pharmaceutical companies was pulled from a PBS special about how people were taking certain prescription drugs and having adverse reactions. One woman took pills to prevent a sinus infection ended up in a wheelchair.  And the BP spill happened when we were making the movie, so we put that into the movie. You have to feel frustrated when watch the BP oil spill happen, and see that they get slapped on the wrist with a fine that they could pay in a week.

Sharon (Patricia Clarkson) wants the confused Sarah (Brit Marling) to put her head on straight

 

Patricia Clarkson: I'm from Louisiana and my dream is for the really big guys to go down. Because somebody has to. Texas just filed their big lawsuit, Louisiana has so many lawsuits against that damn company. Nobody’s backing down. But you look at what just happened at that factory in Bangladesh, and what we're wearing may have been made there. So we all have blood on our hands at every moment of our lives, and how do we stop that?  And the pharmaceutical companies...

BM: It’s complicated; it’s not like we can be against all pharmaceuticals because of course a lot of drugs save people’s lives. But there are some companies that are driven strictly by profit.  

PC: We’re all part of it and it’s hard to give it up.

Q: Do you think you could keep up that freegan lifestyle like Brit?

PC: Could I do the dumpster diving? Could I live like that?  No, I’m way too spoiled. I’m 53 years old so probably the only thing I could do is go camping.

BM (laughing): It’s hard to be a vegan in New Orleans.

Q: Brit, did that experience you had as a freegan stay with you while you were playing Sarah?

BM: I still think about it all the time. When you have an experience like that, it changes you and I don’t think Zal and I will ever quite go back to being the people that we were. It really widens your perspective and you can never really close it again.  It is hard for any of us to figure out how to lives our lives and be accountable so that we don't help oppress people in other parts of the world that we've never met or thought about. It’s hard to break away. Modern life can be really alienating and I'm frustrated by things and I think a lot of what we wrote in the movie is a reflection of that. 

Q: The East is a group of anarchists, yet we see throughout the movie that it can be very oppressive in some ways. There's a certain amount of conformity that shows, yet they’ve got these ideals in regard to freedom and individualism. Talk about creating these characters within this collective.

BM: I guess it’s true that whenever people come together in a group, a kind of groupthink takes over. Even if you’re on the fringe or the outside and promoting freedom of behavior [and individual thought], you still tend to assimilate with the people around you. So in the group, there’s a similar way they dress and talk about things. I think that stems from their politics. What I find interesting about some of these anarchists is that their activism manifests itself not through direct action but in the way they live their lives. They get off the grid, don't use standard energy sources, harvest their food from what our culture sees as waste. None of it– the make-up or clothing or things--are the trappings of this culture. But you’re right that this can become, in and of itself, its own rule book. I think some of that comes from the strong focus and persistence of their mission, which is to wake up people. And part of that includes trying to live in a way that keeps them awake themselves.

Q: It’s interesting that the characters in the film on both sides came from privileged backgrounds.

PC: Yes.  At a certain point everyone assimilates; you all kind of reach the same high or low water mark, eventually. We do all kind of merge with our surroundings, and our surroundings will ultimately dictate our actions.

Danny Peary: Do you think that when Sharon was Sarah's age she was much like Sarah, but made a conscious decision to go to the right instead of the left?

PC: Possibly, but I think she’s always kind of been who she is, which is a woman on a journey to reach the top. I think she made a conscious decision and was willing to do whatever she had to do to get there.

Q: Brit, when you were writing Sarah, did you devise her moral compass first and then work from the inside out?

BM: Yeah, I think what’s interesting about what Patricia just said about Sharon, is that there’s a desire for Sarah to follow her to the top. Sarah looks up to Sharon for having the tunnel vision and persistence to get to the corner office and be the head of the company.  I believe that’s where Sarah's mind is set on reaching, but her moral compass is set in a different direction. She doesn't realize it until the moment she calls her boss and says, I think a bunch of innocent people are about to hurt, and Sharon says to not interfere because they aren't their clients.  

PC: I think our moral compasses can be reset at any moment. We all think we have a very set moral compass. I like to believe I do. But then, tomorrow I could wake up and be on the front page of the New York Post!

DP: There’s a quote in the press notes in which the filmmakers say that The East "isn’t an 'issues' movie or a 'political' movie." I disagree–it is an issues movie, in terms of what you just said about accountability. Brit, can you expand on that?

BM: We didn’t think we could make something didactic, because we didn't know any of the answers. Often when you’re making an issues movie, it’s because you have an idea for a solution. We didn’t, although we may indicated some mechanism for the cure.  However, we believed it was interesting to make something that provokes the dialogue that we’re all having, just talking about these things. I think that’s all we were hoping to do. That’s why they’re saying the film is a thriller rather than an issues movie.  We didn’t want it to be a polemic, we wanted it to be about emotion.  For instance I think there’s a real mother-daughter relationship between Sharon and Sarah, and in the rooftop scene in which Sharon rushes off in a helicopter, we want you to see, more than anything, the daughter looking up at her mother, and feeling unsure.

DP: Talk about how Sharon, her surrogate mother, and Benji, her lover, pull Sarah in opposite directions.

BM: We’d always thought that the movie relied on Sharon being as charismatic and sexy and alluring as Benji. These two forces in her life had to have equal power or the movie would feel weighted one way or the other. She has to be as drawn in by both.

DP: After a break, do you think Sarah would go back to the East if she weren’t attracted to Benji?

BM: I think she goes back because she wants to figure things out. Is this person that I’m in love with  willing to compromise or change? Is he open to changing from the way he sees the world and meeting me halfway? Sarah is very interested in a lot of his and the East’s perspective, but she feels differently about the means to the end. Benji believes in an eye for an eye, that’s just the person he is. Sarah doesn’t think that harming even one person is okay while in pursuit of some kind of awakening. I think she goes back to the house to find that out and realizes very quickly that he’s not going to change.

DP: If she didn’t love him, would she have gone back to the house anyway? Would it be the same if only the others were there?

BM: I think she would leave her job and go her own way, but I am not sure if she would go back to the collective.

DP: She does show that she will take her own way.

Sarah (Brit Marling) and Benji (Alexander Skarsgard) are drawn to each other

 

Q: What was that mansion location like?

BM: That house was crazy.  It was in the middle of downtown Shreveport, with cars going by all the time. It looks like a mystical mansion in the woods, It was a former alternative lifestyle nightclub, all black and gold paint, but the production designers who designed Beasts of the Southern Wild, Zal and the DP transformed that place.

PC: I was hoping when I was approached to do the movie that it would shot in New Orleans.  But I was told it would be close, in Shreveport. I love Shreveport but people don’t understand that if you’re in Shreveport, you might as well be in New York, because the distance between New Orleans and Shreveport is just vast.

BM: It is vast, but we chased Patricia. I don’t know how Zal got to her agent, but it was just like, please will she do this movie? I’d been the biggest admirer of her work from High Art days. When Patricia said she would do it, Zal and I jumped up and down and ran around and screamed. We were so excited. We had a really good time together.

Q: Brit, You get to develop projects that you are in, which not a lot of actors do. If you don’t like the scripts that you get you can just sit down and write one tailored to you.  

BM: It’s so competitive out there.  There are so many fiercely talented female actresses.

PC: I was having that exact thought two days ago. There are so many talented women in our business. Young, middle-aged, older. The span is astonishing.

BM: I write out of necessity.  I've got to write not only to get yourself a job, but also because of all the woman whose work I love. Julia Ormond has a small but pivotal role in The East and she really makes you believe that her character has been poisoned. There are not enough women writing for all the great actresses like Julia, who should be doing really challenging, cool stuff.

PC: Sadly, if you  look at the movies that are playing, eighty percent of the cast is men, and there are only roles for one actress, maybe two. Certainly the independent world is different, but it's hard find roles that suit us. But, Brit, you know you are a shining star, and that most women who look like you aren’t writing their own scripts.

Roundtable with Alexander Skarsgard and Ellen Page

Standing: Ellen Page and Alexander Skarsgard

Q: Had either of you seen or heard of Brit’s work before hearing about this project?

Ellen Page: We were both huge fans of the previous movies she made with Zal, Sound of My Voice and Another Earth, and her performances were just astounding. And then to know the story of how she and Zal entered this industry was incredibly inspiring. I love their work, and the moment you meet them, their passion and their creative intent and their purpose for telling stories is palpable and infectious. I wanted to be part of their body of work.

Alexander Skarsgard: I was already a fan when I read the script. I was going to go to New York right after we wrapped a season of True Blood, but I would have three months off so I was reading scripts for that time. I got this and it was such an amazing, intelligent script. It wasn’t clear who the good guys and bad guys were, it was very murky, and I felt it raised some interesting moral questions. Where do you stand and how far are you willing to go for a cause? I always want to take on projects that are fun and feel new.  It’s a discovery, you know, rather than feeling repetitive. That gets me creatively excited. I read it on the fourth of July, when I was in San Diego, and was blown away by it. I called my agent that day and said I wanted to meet Zal and Brit. They work in LA, so I jumped in my car and drove up to Los Angeles that day and met with them. I didn’t know them personally, but after meeting them and feeling their energy and enthusiasm, and hearing their story about their backgrounds and how they got started, I just felt, Please let me work with you guys!

Q: Brit and Zal lived the freegan lifestyle for a while. How much did that spill over onto the set?

AS: A couple of the members of the East were played by real anarchists from New Orleans.  They came up to Shreveport and lived with us and were part of the group, basically. They were in the film, playing themselves in a way. Those are people in the group who don’t look like they’re from Hollywood.

EP: They have real tattoos.

AS: Three of them were up there with us for two months, living with us, and it was fantastic.  When we did that sequence, when Sarah returns and we’re all dancing, it was such an amazing night.  The ones living with us brought their friends up that night.  Freegans, anarchists, who would sing and play. They were great musicians.  They had this recorded song they wanted to use in the film, and they would stop, pause, play. It didn’t quite work. Then between two set-ups they just started playing and we started dancing and Zal saw this, and he was like, "Fuck the take, let’s do it for real."

Q: What is your character Benji's perspective on the fact that you have this anarchist organization that espouses ideas of freedom and individuality, and yet there’s a groupthink, a conformity that they have?

AS: Benji's a leader although he’s very adamant about there being no leader in the group. He hates cult leaders, because that means you follow someone blindly; whatever they say you believe and you follow.  So he tries to avoid becoming that. That’s why when Sarah, talks about him and his followers, he’s says, "Well, I don’t have any followers. It’s a true democracy. We vote on everything." I think to him it’s all about figuring out the best structure and how to be efficient and to do the most damage--and by doing that, the most good.

Q: Ellen, your character Izzy's attitude is: conform to the group or be cast out. Where is she coming from and how does she justify what she does?

EP: I think a lot of the time in groups that I’ve been around, the lifestyle itself is just what people really, truly believe in. They really believe in living as they do and creating no waste and taking accountability for their actions. So of course it creates this sort of conformist aesthetic.  Obviously Izzy went through a huge, huge shift, as I think a lot of people do who wind up in these environments and have this kind of philosophy. I think she has profound guilt and anger, and that's what becomes externalized. But I don’t think that ever takes away the validity of witnessing atrocities and then wanting to do something about it. I think there’s a validity in what these people are angry at. Yes, a lot of it is personal and internal, and obviously there’s an emotional connection to it [including Izzy with her rich father] but I think as a human being you can’t separate yourself from what you know is wrong.

AS: When it is personal, that sort of opens your eyes.  That's true in Izzy’s case and Benji’s as well. Money changed not only his relatives but also corrupted him, and that scared him.

DP: Why do your characters--especially Izzy who is very suspicious at first--come to accept Sarah?

AS: I think Benji is intrigued pretty early on. There’s something about her.  As I said, with his personality, he could easily become a cult leader, and that's why he's so adamant that they vote on everything.  And he’ll ask everyone in the room for their opinions.  She shows up and is tough and asks difficult questions that he can't answer. He likes and respects that.

EP: Izzy is at first obviously extremely confused and reluctant to accept her.  Who the hell is this girl and why are we letting her in here?  But then when it comes to the moment that they need someone to help them in an extremely intense operation that could have terrible consequences if they are caught, and she not only volunteers to do it but does it with great success.  When Sarah helps them pull off the jam against the pharmaceutical company Izzy is won over.

DP: That’s the practical reason she accepts Sarah, but doesn't she also develop an emotional attachment to her?

EP: I don’t know how emotional it is. I think it’s emotional only in the sense that others have said they’d step up to the plate and then let them all down. People act like they’re committed but when it comes to breaking the law they won’t follow through with it. And to have her be so committed and follow through with it for the cause – obviously she has an incredibly emotional attachment to the cause–that wins Izzy over because that's what she cares about the most.

AS: For Benji, I think there’s a deeper and more meaningful reason for him why he wants Sarah there. That’s revealed at the end of the movie.

DP: How would you summarize your characters?

AS: Benji does things in the way he believes will have the most impact--the most effective way.  I think just being passive and being sedated is what scares him most. For him, any kind of awakening is good.

EP: Izzy is pretty militant. The more civil disobedience the better. She's pretty angry and thinks and thinks the group should take it to the next level. She believes in eye-for-an-eye justice.

director Zal Batmanglij Photo:DP