Actress Zoe Kazan "Explodes" with "A Behanding" - Zoe Kazan, p.3

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Wednesday, 02 June 2010 12:13

Written by Brad Balfour

Q: You mention that gap between childhood and adulthood and since this was a two character story and that's interesting. I don't know if this was a conscious effort by the director or not.

ZK: I think it was.

Q: One reason it works is because Ivy is so complex. She's not a child but not quite an adult; she has that wide-eyed, childhood, idealistic expression that you do so well. Mark Rendell plays his character the same way, but is a male version, also between childhood and adulthood, idealistic with everything still new, yet he seems to have a much easier time.

ZK: Well he's a boy.

Q: Was that in the script or in the characterizations that you were drawing on?

ZK: It has something to do with the script. It has more to do with their characters than anything. First of all, Ivy's more grown up than Al is; she's just had to take care of herself at a younger age. Epilepsy, like diabetes, is something that you have to take care of; you have to mind what you eat, you have to mind how much sleep you get, what kind of stress you're under.

And to be a young person and to be minding those kinds of things, most teenagers aren't capable of that, let alone someone who has a mother who's not 100% present. So I think that there's a way that she guards herself, takes care of herself, that's much more akin to an adult than anything that Al's had to go through. She does his laundry for him; she takes care of him in an unconscious way, not in a manipulative way.

She's not trying to prove anything by taking care of him; she just takes care of him. And I think that he brings to her, like what the trade off is, is that he brings a lot of childish joy, and I think it's one of the reasons that they make a really great pair, really great friends. The other half of it is that Mark is like Al.

For one thing, Mark's a lot younger than I am. I'm 26, and when we shot the movie I was 24, and Mark was 18. So that's a big age different; we would never have been in high school together. I think when you watch the movie you don't see it because I look young and Mark has an ageless kind of look to him. We could be almost any age within a certain range.

Q: That's a testament to your acting too, because it's not easy to pull that off.

ZK: Yeah, totally. It's funny because Brad said something, and I don't want to age myself too much, but Brad said something to me recently and he was like, "We wouldn't have been able to make the movie now because I've grown up two years since we made the movie. I'm not in a very different place in my life, but I feel older in a way." And when I talk to Mark now, he's older too. When we met he'd never had a girlfriend, he was living with his parents still, and there's something very endearing about that to me, and I think that informs what you see on screen a little bit too.

Brad has a real sense of decorum as a filmmaker. He thinks about the characters as being people, and I think that one thing he was very concerned about was giving Ivy her privacy. So the breakup scene, the scene where she cries, the seizure, those are all things that he shot from further away and with objects between them. And he did that very purposefully. Of course, as an actor, I'm like, "Put the camera on my face when I'm crying, dude. Don't back-light me and make sure nobody can see my face, you asshole."

But he knew what he was doing and I think that there is more emotional impact because you're given a little bit of distance. Sometimes when you're forced to look at something in close-up all the time it kind of becomes about the acting and not about the character, and I really respect what he did with that. It's just a very different style of telling stories. If you look at "It's Complicated," you couldn't have two more different movies.

On It's Complicated, every scene we shot with a wide-shot, a two-shot, close-up, close-up, medium-shot, medium-shot, over the shoulder; I mean she got coverage on every kind of coverage you could possibly want.

So the way that movie cuts together, it cuts together in a much more conventional way. You get into the scene on the wide-shot and then you go in, and you go in, and you go in. We didn't have the money to do that, so part of what is happening is that there are solutions having to do with economy. We just didn't have the time; we shot this in 17 days, so if he could get it in one shot that was a wide-shot he would get it in the wide-shot. But because of that he had to make specific decisions before he edited about what he wanted it to look like.

In some ways it made my job much easier because I only had to do it a couple of times. Especially with the seizure; only having to do that a couple of times was a godsend because it's really exhausting. And other times I was begging him for another take.

Q: When you're in between being a kid -- dependent on your family -- and being an adult, on your own, there's a bohemian ideal where you don't have to be doing things for a job. Do you think the film is communicating to the audience about that period of life?

ZK: Ivy has to work; she helps out at her mom's studio during her break. She's not going to have a lot time where she just gets to sit at home and figure her life out; she doesn't come from that socioeconomic background. But I do think that when you're in college, especially when you're on break and you don't have any homework, it is a feeling of being a kid again. Like summer break or spring break, suddenly you're not a grownup living at school, having your own life.

I remember this so clearly, being at school and taking care of myself; I feed myself all my own meals, put myself to bed whatever time I want. Then I come home and my parents are like, "Where are you going? What time are you going to be home?" and being 19 years old and being like, "I don't have a curfew at school." And I do think there's some of that liminal space.

Q: Does being a New Yorker now…

ZK: I've been here five years.

Q: For living in such a crowded city, feelings of loneliness can pervade because everybody's doing their own thing. Did that informed the role for you.

ZK: In New York, there's a sense of being alone in a crowd of people all the time. I grew up in Los Angeles and I think LA is a much lonelier city than New York is. You're alone in your car or your house, people don't really go out in the same way that they go out in New York, so if you don't know anybody in LA I think you're much lonelier.

In New York it's much easier to be alone than it is in Los Angeles because you can always go to a bar or a coffee shop or go to Film Forum and there are people around you and you feel like you're in a community. But I think that when you have that much availability to people and there's still no connection, that's the kind of space that Ivy's in. Her mother isn't really taking care of her and her boyfriend isn't really available to her.

She's self-sufficient, but I think she's lonely, and I can definitely understand that. There are times when being on the subway, like when you're depressed, it's physically painful because there's no privacy, there's no space. Like after her breakup when she's taking the subway home, there's no space for her to be alone and cry, and I think that there is a kind of prison of public-ness that is happening in the movie. Even when Greg calls her when she's at that party, or having the seizure at that party, the door is open, there are people walking by. There's a sense of there's no place for her to be alone.

Q: What did you hope this film conveys to an audience?

ZK: I hope people can see past Ivy and Al's youth to the [see the] universality of the story. It's about loneliness and learning how to connect with other people. It's about the thing of not being willing to know your own heart or not knowing your own heart. I do think it's specifically about young people and about a very young stage of life; I hope that it has more to offer than that.

Q: Was it weird working with your boyfriend Paul Dano in the upcoming Reichardt film, Meek's Cutoff?



ZK: It was really normal actually. There was another actor that was supposed to play the part Paul played and the actor had a visa issued but couldn't come at the very last minute. Like literally two days before we were going to shoot Paul came in to do it and I think he was more nervous about it than I was.

We met doing a play together, so we had worked together before, so I knew how he was as an actor. But it was actually an incredible thing because it was a very grueling shoot. 

We were in the middle of nowhere, like in the desert of Oregon six hours from civilization.

We had no cell service, very little internet, and we were in these incredible salt flats with all this alkaline dust. It was like two hours from our motel to the set everyday over literally no road, just over dirt, with dehydration and sunstroke, then hypothermia. We had such grueling conditions, so to have someone there with me who I loved, who at the end of the day would just be content to help me get some food and help me get to sleep was great.

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