the traveler's resource guide to festivals & films
a FestivalTravelNetwork.com site
part of Insider Media llc.
Film Festivals
The Cast of "Boyhood" & Their Cinematic Journey of Growth
- Details
- Parent Category: Film Festivals
- Category: Interviews
- Published on Sunday, 01 March 2015 21:40
- Written by Brad Balfour
Cast of Boyhood. All photos by B. Balfour except Patricia Arquette at Golden Globes
Far too much of the buzz and ballyhoo about this season's indie awards darling Boyhood has focused on the fact that the film was made in real time -- sort of. Director Richard Linklater took his core ensemble — Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette, Ellar Coltrane and Lorelai Linklater — and reconvened them once a year for a few days over a 12-year span to shoot this family drama of a divorced couple and their two kids going through life’s ups and downs. Shot intermittently from 2002 to 2013, it depicts a young boy in Texas growing up with divorced parents, ending with adolescence and the advent of adulthood.
This native of Houston, Texas, told a common story about an ordinary family in a relatively conventional place, which might not have merited all the attention had not media and tastemakers seized on its unique process of construction. The reaction has been so arch that it’s overshadowing other, more subtle but equally important, qualities of the film.
Yes, if this 2-1/2 hour story had simply documented a family's disarray and aftermath with its eye-opening dissection, it might have earned as much praise. But the film did something far more essential when it changed focus from the family dynamic to Mason’s (Coltrane) personal evolution: he takes up photography, which helps define himself beyond the family’s trials. That move distinguished the movie from being just another domestic drama.
Creating Boyhood seems perfectly in character for a such a unique creator as this distinctly Texan director. His second film, Slacker, established his approach to filmmaking. Linklater worried less about plot and action than taking his audiences along a voyage into his consciousness, whatever it was into at the time.
As Linklater has moved along, his storytelling skills evolved while his films have retained a certain signature tone and attitude. Often working with the same actors such as Hawke (who has done the Before series with him), Linklater has put his faith in his actors and they in him.
The 44-year-old Hawke — one of his most veteran collaborators — helped anchor this project as he took risks with the two younger actors who played the kids. Both he and the 46-year-old Arquette have done the breadth of work in acting from television series to a range of indies and major studio movies.
Of course all have been rewarded for this unique venture. The film was then nominated for five Golden Globe Awards, winning Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress for Arquette. It has also received six Oscar noms, including Best Picture, Best Director, and acting nominations for Arquette and Hawke, which Arquette took home.
After Boyhood’s 2014 Sundance Film Festival premiere, it competed in the 64th Berlin International Film Festival’s main section where Linklater won the Best Director Silver Bear. Once it was released in July, 2014, it was declared a landmark film by many notable critics, who praised its direction, acting and scope.
This Q&A is culled from a press conference held at The Crosby Hotel in 2014 just before the film’s initial release.
Q: Has Boyhood changed the way you think about cinema, what cinema could and should be?
Linklater: Embarking on this, I had never seen this type of film before. I kind of figured that by this point, people would be pointing out to me how this type of film had in fact been made before in some country, but it’s never has happened. No one came forward with the film that felt original to me that I had never seen before. It felt like a huge idea — very simple — but an idea I had, based on years thinking about it.
Cinema in general, narrative storytelling, the possibilities of it in, relation to time and structure — I had spent my for my adult life thinking about that kind of stuff. With this film, I was solving a particular problem, so I liken to — it sounds arrogant — a scientist who goes to sleep at night and then dreams of the formula for his whatever that solves his problem.
If you’re a scientist and you’re thinking of a problem, o you get the answer that’s obvious. I’m kind of in that same boat, but I’m a storyteller who was trying to figure out how to tell the story, given the limitations I was confronted with. I think about this all the time in cinema: boundaries of narrative and filmmaking. I was excited about it.
When I first got involved with film, it had all these really unique storytelling possibilities. I loved the medium so much. I think film is still a wide-open frontier for storytelling.
Arquette: As far as cinema goes, I feel like I’ve watched a really strange shift over the course of my career. I’ve seen it become the business of bankers and spreadsheets. I feel like with the restraint in which Rick directed this movie — the structure couple with the collaborative openness and the balance of those two things — he didn’t tell the obvious dramatic story. Most people would say, “You’re not following the formula of storytelling. You’re not catering to this demographic.”
There’s a philosophical element to the human connection and communication and space for the human relationship. If this movie does well, first of all, financers will have to re-examine and be a little more supportive of exploring. I also think young film audiences actually enjoy this. I think the more we move towards technology in our human communications, the more of a need as human beings to see movies that are about humans.
Coltrane: I think there’s this tendency or need to gravitate towards hyper-dramas as the only thing that makes a story worth telling — these big, fantastical moments that don’t happen to most of us. I think it’s powerful to dwell on the little things.
Hawke: It’s interesting that the movie actually does get a lot of power off our pre-conditioned experiences at the cinema of thinking something big is going to happen. There’s unbelievable attention to the minutia of the movie because we’re so conditioned to think, “Something horrible must happen. We wouldn’t just be watching some people drive to this university if there isn’t going to be a car wreck, right?”
But what I love about that is that’s actually how I feel about my life. A lot of my life is wasted worrying. The movie actually captures the feeling of, “Well, he’s spending the night camping and it’s so scary.” But how do any of us survive those nights? But there’s something about how the movie works, in its relationship not just to its own storytelling but the storytelling doesn’t live in its own vacuum. It’s in response to other things.
Q: Despite its 12-year spread, there’s a really consistency to the arcs of the four main characters in the film. What did you see as the subtle and big changes to these characters?
Hawke: It depends on how you define big or small. They’re certainly small, by any normal standards of storytelling. My character goes through some pretty significant changes of who he is and the end, versus who he is at the beginning. Certainly we all do, but they’re very humanist changes.
Coltrane: There are a lot of small things after 12 years. Like, you age 12 years, but day-to-day, you’re just one day older.
Hawke: If he wanted to do a movie about transsexuals, he did a bad job [laughs]. I was trying to be funny, but that really wasn’t. Now it’s going to be all over the Internet. Please forgive me. Delete that comment.
Linklater: The whole movie is this little collection of intimate moments that probably don’t fit into most narratives. They’re not advancing the character or story enough or the plot that it would all add up to some things that are much bigger. That was the feel to the whole movie — but that mirrors our lives. Everything has a life corollary in that way.
Q: What was the experience of meeting over the 12 years to film Boyhood? Did any of you ever have any doubts about making this movie? Apparently, Lorelai Linklater reportedly had her doubts…
Linklater: That was kind of a fleeting thing. Had she not been my daughter… She approached the director and asked if her character could die. I explained to her it was a little dramatic for what we were trying to do. But that was a fleeting thing. She really enjoyed the movie.
It was special for us to work on it. It was special to get together every year. The crew felt it and the cast. We all committed. It was a life project. It never felt like anyone wavered, ever.
Hawke: I think I can say that we collectively grew to love it more and more and more. At first, seemed a little bit like a fun experiment, and then it turned into something I love so much. I remember years ago being in a rehearsal room with the great Tom Stoppard, and he was talking about how plot is this unfortunate device that the audience just needs. And what’s funny about plot is that over time, you don’t even remember it.
He talked about the obvious example of Lawrence of Arabia. You can watch that movie and 25 years later you still remember him [Peter O'Toole] standing on top of that train, expressing this feeling of power and what happens as he was becoming fully actualized of who he wanted to be in this kind of close-up.
I couldn’t even tell you where in that story that is, or what’s going on. I just remember that I was moved by it. He cited Gena Rowlands in a certain movie. He couldn’t remember the plot.
Rick was kind of daring with this movie to forego what [Tom] Stoppard thought was necessary, a bogus plot. Our lives don’t have plot, but he felt the narrative does. And this movie skirts around that.
Linklater: I replaced the plot with structure. I think it’s much more innate to how I think. We’re more adept to think, “Structure is plot.” Humans put structure in everything, [such as] time.
Hawke: Structure often doesn’t have line to it, whereas plot often does.
Linklater: It’s not so much a construct. It’s innately human.
Q: Do you see Boyhood as an intimate character study or something more sweeping than that?
Linklater: Both. It’s very specific and intimate to this family and to Mason and all that. It is intimate and but it’s very common, and I always thought it is very universal, within that specific world. This could have been made in any country, at any time. There’s such a commonality there. I’ve always thought of as a very universal, big story about life and time and all that.
Arquette: But also, Boyhood was not the [original] title.
Linklater: No, we didn’t call this “Boyhood” for 12 years. It was a name on our call sheet.
Arquette: Sometimes it was “The 12-Year Project.”
Linklater: Or “Growing Up.” We thought that was a little too vague. It was from a boy’s perspective, but it could be everything.
Hawke: This question even illuminates the answer, which is: it’s an epic about minutia. That’s what it is. It’s difficult to title because of that. But it’s a family seen through one boy’s eyes, so that title makes as much as sense as any other.
Linklater: Titles are difficult.
Q: While the title of the movie is Boyhood, there could also be secondary titles, like Motherhood and Fatherhood. What was going inside the heads of Mason Sr. and Olivia? Was that something you set out to do?
Linklater: It was always going to be a portrait of growing up and parenting and aging. You never stop growing up, especially when you’re a young parent. Their characters are still growing up still. I saw it as bumbling through parenting and also growing up. As adults, we have our own childhood experiences to draw on, we had our relations to our own parents, and we had ourselves as parents.
While filming, we had five children born between us, and that was an ongoing part of life. As kids, you have that perspective in that moment and thinking about your parents, but you’re not a parent yourself. It was this multi-generational collaboration always.
Life was all around. I really wanted to see the parents’ perspective. That scene at the end when [Mason Jr.] is leaving his mom — we all did that at some point. I remember the inability as a teenager to totally comprehend my mother’s point of view at that age. You’re so self-absorbed.
You can be the most empathetic person, but you don’t have the life experience at that age to fully understand what they’re going through. You can acknowledge, but you can’t fully feel it. We see that contrast in that scene so well, I think. We spent a lot of time talking about, all of us.
Q: You mentioned before that Boyhood is an epic of minutia. Does the vastness of this movie allow for those powerful moments of silence more than other films because it intertwines realism?
Linklater: I hope so. The playing field here was real in that way. I didn’t want anything to feel like it wasn’t earned or tethered to some kind of reality. I don’t think there was anything in the movie that didn’t come out of my life or their lives or something real-world-based.
So within that, once you get people accepting it as real, it really opens you up to an incredible realm of possibilities of your experience of the movie, because it just relates to your own life and looking at that emotional spectrum. Once you’re hitting some people’s own lives, that’s an incredible area. It was designed to do that.
You can’t specifically say what anyone can experience at any given moment, but once you get to thinking about life in general and your own life and your lives of loved ones and your own experiences, it’s triggering all kinds of wonderful things, I hope — painful and wonderful, maybe. Who knows?
Q: Was it difficult to get back into character every time you met up for Boyhoodover the years? Did you watch any dailies?
Coltrane: I wasn’t acting in other movies. I get asked that a lot. It was a very long buildup every year. We always had a couple of months to think about what we were doing, and then a solid week of workshopping and building the character and figuring out where the characters were that year. By the time we got to filming, we were just already there.
Hawke: We had a very good director. My father is a mathematician. Usually, mathematicians have their breakthrough ideas really young.
[He says to Linklater] It’s interesting that you were in his 40s when he started this, but I don’t think your style of filmmaking has changed that much, but you’re a lot more experienced. If you had done this movie when you were 26, working with Ellar was different than the way you worked with Lorelai which was different than the way you worked with me and different from the way you worked with Patricia.
I’ve worked with [Richard Linklater] eight times now. I’ve watched Rick learn how to speak to people the way they need to be spoken to. And that’s what helps you be ready to play. We were always prepared to play.
You brought up something that I’m surprised that people don’t write about more, which is how awesome it is to see Patricia’s character in this movie, and to see a woman who is a mother and a lover and more than one thing in a movie. I’m so proud to be a part of a movie that respects her character in the way this movie does. It’s so real and it’s so true.
It’s true in life — we see it all the time — but I don’t see that woman in movies. [A woman in movies] she’s in the background or an ancillary element to give some encouragement in some way to some studly guy. But this [Olivia] character is a real, three-dimensional human being, which is so exciting. The women in my life who have seen the movie so appreciate it. But she’s also not just good. She does stupid things and smart things.
Linklater: There’s a complexity to Olivia.
Hawke: I just love her… We’re used to people in movies being one thing all the time.
Linklater: She’s a great woman at the end. She’s worked toward that. There’s so much complexity to her. We’re all human. There are flaws. To work with someone like Patricia, who’s so ferociously real, it was super-inspiring.
Q: Mason Jr.’s interest in photography changes his life. Was that a conscious decision to have him pick up photography? Did that parallel any of your ownexperiences when you decided to become an artist? Frankly I feel the is the crux of the film far more than the time-span concept or a simple study of marriage, divorce, and its effect on families. Without this development the film would have been far more pedestrian.
Linklater: I always thought that we’d see Mason get into some kind of art, some form of expression by junior high/high school. Somewhere in there, he would start to express himself. I didn’t know exactly what form that would be.
I thought maybe it would be writing or maybe music. If I had to bet, I thought Ellar would be in a band. But he actually did become a visual artist. He was very interested in photography. I personally liked that. I thought, “That’s great!” I was taking pictures at that age, and I thought that was a perfect segue and a perfect thing for his character to get into.
Coltrane: Absolutely. I think being lost in the artistic process is a very therapeutic thing and an outlet that’s incredibly valuable, no matter what it is, to throw yourself into creating something.
Hawke: The most beautiful experience for me about making this movie is watching Ellar become this creative entity unto itself. If the movie didn’t work, it would’ve been a stunt or gimmick around time. It’s Ellar’s performance and his creativity and passion in the movie that elevate it. It makes it more than structure.
The structure is working, but it requires a certain level of inspiration.
Watching [Ellar] survive adolescence and let the movie not just be Rick’s expression, but also [Ellar’s]. That was happening in the movie, and it was happening on the set in different. Ellar is not Mason; they’re different people, but there’s a similar development.
[Patricia] and I discovered the arts young. Much has been said about how transformative and healing that can be. But there are other ways to be creative. You can be creative in athletics. You can be creative in a lot of different ways, if you find a passion for it. You can express yourself with baseball. You can manifest your personality with your team and with your coach in the same way that you can in the arts. I could wish for two things for my kids: decent friends and a passion that’s so exciting.
Arquette: The beautiful thing about art, whether you’re getting paid for it or not, it is a little spark of a life force, whatever that it. It’s miraculous, some of the great biblical art in churches. Some of our greatest musicians may have been flawed humans, but were somehow connected to something beautiful.
In acting, you have to get past your own head and your own ego and all of these f*cking barriers and walls, and get to a place where you can hopefully be present enough to be in a scene in someone to get out of your own way, to listen to a director who has a beautiful vision and just be there.
Chilling out with these people every year, meeting each other, building on each other… It was collaborative and built upon itself. I felt safe with everyone, and I trusted their process. And it was jumping into the void from the get-go. When you’re in the right hands and you jump into the void together, really great things can come of it.
Q: Boyhood is a movie about growing up -- one way or the other. Ethan and Patricia, what do you remember about your first kiss?
Hawke: Our first kiss? My first kiss was with a girl named Cindy at the Hamilton Roller Rink, during the slow skate. And she said to me afterward, “Do you like Jack Daniels?” And I said, “Yeah, too bad he died.” I didn’t really know what Jack Daniels was then. I think I thought it Jimi Hendrix.
Arquette: I do not remember my first kiss. That doesn’t mean I’ve had a lot of kisses. I think I was pretty young. I’m sure it was a peck.
But I do remember one kiss. I don’t know why, but I really didn’t like the way this guy kissed me. He was a friend of a friend. He was a pro skater, and he was the only guy I ever gave a fake phone number to. And years later, he murdered his girlfriend.
Boyhood is currently available on DVD and Blu-ray
Nick Nolte Goes For "A Walk in the Woods"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film Festivals
- Category: Interviews
- Published on Thursday, 29 January 2015 01:01
- Written by Matt Oakes
Of all the issues I had with A Walk in the Woods (our review) - the telling of Bill Bryson's failure to complete the Appalachian Trail - Nick Nolte was not amongst them. In fact, he was the solitary beacon of hope shining through a film that otherwise stank of mediocrity. After the screening, the infamously crazed actor looked older than ever, shambling to a chair with the help of friends and family. You see, following the filming of Woods, Nolte had a full hip replacement. His spirits, medium-high, he sat to ironic applause and answered a few ambling questions with surprising tact and clarity. For such a wild man, Nolte has an astute, somewhat rambling outlook on nature, film and the great American trail. And nothing can beat out that gruffalo growl of his.
Disney's Animated "Big Hero 6" Turns Actor Ryan Potter into A Super Hiro
- Details
- Parent Category: Film Festivals
- Category: Interviews
- Published on Monday, 10 November 2014 12:55
- Written by Brad Balfour
Premiering at the 27th annual Tokyo International Film Festival this October, Disney’s latest animation spectacular Big Hero 6 posits a near-future city of San Fransokyo where technological possibilities can transform kids into superheroes, especially when the enabler is teen tech prodigy Hiro Hamada.
Hamada’s older brother Tadashi (Daniel Henney) has convinced his slacker brother to forgo robo-fights and street betting for a coveted slot at the exclusive university he already attends; Hiro is psyched. To meet the admission requirement, he develops a remarkable nano-tech device. His presentation demo is witnessed by both the school’s dean, professor Robert Callahan (James Cromwell), and an unscrupulous billionaire Alistair Krei (Allan Tudyk), who wants to whisk Hiro and his invention away from the school. As the Hamada bros leave to enjoy his victory, an explosion in the building ensues.
When this death-dealing disaster catapults Hiro into the middle of a mysterious danger, he springs into action creating the super-powered team, Big Hero 6, out of his pals: adrenaline junkie Go Go Tomago (Jamie Chung), neatnik Wasabi (Damon Wayans Jr.), chemistry whiz Honey Lemon (Genesis Rodriguez) and fanboy Fred (T.J. Miller). In turn, prodigy Hamada establishes a special bond with his late brother’s creation, the plus-sized inflatable med-bot Baymax (Scott Adsit), and transforms it into his crime-fighting partner.
As the first non-live-action project based on a Marvel Comics property, the director and producers — part of the Disney animation team behind mega-hits Frozen and Wreck-It Ralph — turned to 19-year-old actor Ryan Potter to voice Hamada. Born in Oregon, he spent part of his childhood in Tokyo; then the seven-year-old’s family returned to the States. Something of a prodigy himself, fluent in both Japanese and English, Potter began studying White Tiger kung fu, a discipline pursued since age eight, while also handling drums, baseball and skateboarding.
In 2010, the 15-year-old began acting after he got a leaflet in kung fu class announcing that Nickelodeon was looking for teens to star in Supah Ninjas, a new martial-arts series. After auditioning, Potter landed the role of Mike Fukanaga, an American teen who discovers he comes from a long line of ninjas. Following its 2011 debut, Potter became one of Nickelodeon’s popular young stars, accruing features in teen mags and making appearances in the network’s Worldwide Day of Play special and its reboot of the ‘90s game show Figure It Out, among others. Though Nickelodeon renewed Supah Ninjas for a second season in March 2012, Potter also began a recurring role on Fred: The Show, playing the best friend.
Besides acting, the precocious Potter founded a charity In 2011 — Toy Box of Hope — which holds an annual holiday collection drive for children in Los Angeles area homeless shelters and transitional living facilities. During its 2012 event, Potter said of the organization’s efforts by explaining, “[W]hat we want to do is provide bedsheets, jackets and toys to [homeless shelters], so these kids are like, ‘Wow, someone cares, there’s hope.’” Potter reportedly planned to expand Toy Box of Hope to include a “Birthday Party Box” program.
In June 2012, he also became one of the youngest celebrities to lend support to California’s No H8 Campaign in defense of same-sex marriage. To explain his involvement, the then-16-year-old officially stated: “I know what it feels like to be bullied and I will not tolerate the thought of anyone, for any reason, being bullied. It starts with young people, and can end with young people. As we learn to embrace our diversity, we become stronger, more tolerant. The differences are beautiful. The differences matter. It’s what makes life an adventure.”
Winning the audience sweepstakes, Big Hero 6 made nearly $50 millon in its first week -- and provided a fascinating take on near-future versions of modern maker technology and bionic adaptations for the human body.
But Potter is blowing up well beyond both television and film appearances and plans to transform his acting successes into much more. As he engaged in this breathless one-on-one phoner during this film’s junket day, I wondered what next I will be discussing with this skilled-beyond-his-years talent.
Q: You’ve got this great starring role in a big feature film — but it’s animated! Girls aren’t going to see you in the flesh!
Ryan Potter: I know, and I actually love that; I get to fly under the radar.
Q: Were you recorded digitally with motion capture?
RP: We didn’t use any motion capture for this. I went in and did a bunch of recording sessions and I did get very physical in the booth. I would run around and jump around, throw myself around, to create that physicality, that energy. But they animated everything afterwards, so they animated to the voice and the physicality that I created in the booth.
Q: With the little twists at the end, how did you feel when you read the script?
RP: There were rewrites constantly, and there were definitely some scenes, like one of the ending scenes. It was very emotional, and you could feel that in the room. They’re like, “Oh, here we go, this is a very emotional day. Are you ready?” And I’m like, “Yeah, I’m ready to go,” and we’d be in the booth for a couple hours at a time. We almost had to leave the booth, trying to crack jokes or tell funny stories as much as possible, because the mood of the room definitely did go down for some of those scenes.
When I was in the booth and was going on with the lines and had to keep doing them over and over, it was tough for some of the engineers who came in to sit there recording all day long. I’d see them on the other side of the glass tearing up and some of them crying, and it was just as emotionally draining for them as it was for me.
Q: Did you meet your fellow voice cast members in the course of doing the recordings?
RP: I met the cast for the first time last week during the cast dinner. It’s so bizarre because you work on this film for a year and a half with your cast mates, but you don’t get to see them. And the way the film comes together, it really doesn’t sound that way. It sounds like we were all in the booth at the same time.
I met Maya Rudolph [voicing Aunt Cass] very briefly, and she was a blast to work with. She is a phenomenal, phenomenal lady, and she is so funny.
Q: She’s so funny in person.
RP: She was just killing me. We recorded for maybe 20 minutes, but that was it. [Other than] that, I was by myself in the booth the entire time, and I met the rest of the cast last week. But we clicked immediately.
We had been working on this project together for a year and a half, and when I met Scott [Adsit] — who plays the voice of Baymax — I was like, “Hey, Scott!” and he was like, “Hey, Hiro!” and I was like, “Oh, hey, Baymax!” and it didn’t feel like we missed a beat.
I was trying to introduce myself, but he already knew, and I already knew. Scott and I picked up immediately, and it didn’t feel at all like we had to tell each other about ourselves because we already knew so much.
Q: You did the live action television series Supah Ninjas for Nickelodeon where you used your martial arts training. How did you apply your martial arts knowledge to this character?
RP: It’s interesting because early on in the process there were a lot of lines like “Strike” or “Kick” [in the script] and they didn’t quite know the actual terms. So I was able to go in and say, “That’s actually this; that strike is that; that kick is this.”
So early on they took my word for it, but they brought in the martial arts consultant for the rest of the film. I’ve done stunts before, so I’ve done rigging, and I’ve sparred, and I’ve done grappling, so I know the physicality that Hiro [Hamada] goes through in this film. He is very active; he’s being thrown around, he gets lifted up. So I know what all those sounds really sound like in real life, and it came very easily to me.
Q: You can do the most amazing stunts and not get injured doing animation. Were you ever injured in the process of doing stunts or martial arts?
RP: At my martial arts school, I got my bumps and my bruises, but [for] stunts, I worked with a phenomenal fight coordinator, Hiro Koda. It was awesome to work with him because he really did want me to do more and more. So when I trained with him and he got me into the harness and onto the wires, he taught me everything I know now. He kept me safe throughout that entire process, and he was phenomenal to work with.
Q: So you’re Nisei — second-generation Japanese in America, right? I should have said, “Kon’nichiwa [hello]” earlier, and I’ll say, “Hajime mashite [nice to meet you],” now.
RP: I am. I’m half-Japanese, half-Caucasian.
Q: Do you go to Japan and visit relatives? What have you learned from your grandparents and their experiences?
RP: I actually grew up in Tokyo. The city they created is very familiar to me; I’m very familiar with Japanese culture and Japanese pop culture. That was my childhood. I moved here when I was seven years old.
I go up to San Francisco on holidays and spend time with my family there, but whenever I go to Japan I enjoy every moment. I try to go back there every year or so. It’s a phenomenal place, and I absolutely love it. It’s not my second home; it is my home. Whenever I go back I feel very connected with Japan.
Q: Have you seen a lot of anime and read a lot of manga [Japanese comics]?
RP: Oh, yeah. I grew up with [Hayao] Miyazaki films [such as the Oscar-nominated Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, and The Wind Rises] and I grew up with Weekly Shōnen Jump [comic magazine]; I grew up with [the anime series] Dragon Ball Z, [and director] Satoshi Kon films like Paprika.
Q: Really, the late anime innovator Satoshi Kon?
RP: Satoshi Kon is without a doubt one of the top three animators of all time. His work is so under-appreciated. His work has inspired so many films here in the US that have gone on to do so well, and there was really no credit given. In Inception [Christopher Nolan's 2010 sci-fi thriller], there’s a lot of scenes from Paprika in it. It was kind of a nod — “Hey, that was a great thing you did” — but they didn’t quite give the acknowledgment. And Satoshi Kon is on par with Walt Disney and on par with Miyazaki [among others].
Q: And there’s the great manga artist Katsuhiro Otomo, creator of the sci fi series, Akira — which became an incredible anime.
RP: Otomo — oh, absolutely. These guys have shaped my childhood.
Q: Once the idea of acting and doing Supah Ninjas was introduced to you, did you always want to do both? Were you ever torn with doing more martial arts and not pursuing the acting?
RP: This isn’t to play down people who pursue acting… For me, I do acting just as a fun job. It is a phenomenal job, and I have fun doing it, but I relate more to my martial arts, to my baseball, to my film study. There are more facets to my life that I relate to.
I love acting — I love doing it. It’s a lot of fun, but for the longest time, I wanted to become a firefighter. I still do want to become a firefighter. You never know; I may go to film school and not like film school, and then go learn to firefight.
Q: You should talk to Steve Buscemi. He was a firefighter before he became an actor.
RP: Yeah, and Steve Buscemi, without a doubt, is one of my top three favorite actors of all time. I love his work and he is an inspiration to me.
Q: If you were a director, what would you do?
RP: I would want to do music videos, actually, because I have a love of music, and I feel like I’d be too much of a critic of my own music if I were to produce or create or whatever it is. I’ve always been a very visual and very creative person; I’ve always had to be hands-on. Combining my love of music with my need to create, music videos are the perfect combination of the two.
Q: What’s your favorite music… or artist?
RP: My favorite musician has to be Prince, without a doubt. Prince is, I think, one of the greatest artists of all time. A lot of this younger generation doesn’t know about Prince, and it kind of blows my mind. This man mastered so many instruments by the age of 13. He’s very under-appreciated, but there is a generation that idolizes him.
Q: So what are you doing next?
RP: I’ll continue to promote Big Hero 6 and do the other things that come from Big Hero 6, but I’m working on putting together a portfolio and going to film school.
Actress Reese Witherspoon Highlights the Truth of "The Good Lie"
- Details
- Parent Category: Film Festivals
- Category: Interviews
- Published on Friday, 03 October 2014 20:38
- Written by Brad Balfour
Reese, Margaret Nagle, Sarah Baker, & Corey Stoll
Nashville, Tennessee, might seem as remote a place from the African nation of Sudan as one could imagine. Yet given the fantastic journey of thousands of Lost Boys (and girls) who came to the United States in the 1990s — after an arduous walk from their homeland across 1,000 miles to Kenyan refugee camps fleeing a bloody civil war — it doesn’t seem so strange. And since many of them were settled in places like Missouri, experiencing drastic cultural contrasts became the norm for them.
As a story initiated by this civil war, the upcoming film The Good Lie encompasses the stark contrasts that came out of that conflict. It tells of the tragedies, but also of the determination and hope that drove these young people to survive as well. Filmed in Atlanta, Georgia, this feature draws on the collective experiences of the survivors of that war as they came to this country through various Christian charities. Having stirred audiences when it screened at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival, The Good Lie recently premiered in Nashville — hometown of one of its stars, Reese Witherspoon.
To best aid in telling of these four survivors’ remarkable experiences, established actors such as Oscar winner Witherspoon, Corey Stoll and Sarah Baker joined with actors of Sudanese descent — Ger Duany (Jeremiah), Arnold Oceng (Mamere), Kuoth Wiel (Abital) and Emmanuel Jal (Paul) — to present a composite tale of four who not only walked those miles but grappled with the traumatic cultural conflicts adjusting to a new life in the cold American midwest.
Based on real-life events (compressed by screenwriter Margaret Nagle), Oscar nominee Philippe Falardeau directed Witherspoon to play Carrie Davis, a brash American woman assigned to find jobs for her young Sudanese charges who have won a lottery for relocation here.
Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the 38-year-old actress spent her childhood in Nashville, where she went from a high school cheerleader to attending Stanford University as an English literature major. After a year, she left to pursue acting.
Proud of her "definitive Southern upbringing," Witherspoon gave her character "a sense of family and tradition" and taught her about "being conscientious about people's feelings, being polite, being responsible and never taking for granted what you have in your life."
Witherspoon landed her first feature role as the female lead in The Man in the Moon in 1991. She went on to star in such films as Freeway, Cruel Intentions, Pleasantville and Alexander Payne’s 1999 hit Election, for which she earned a Golden Globe nomination.
In 2001, her career ratcheted up with the breakout role of Elle Woods in the box-office hit Legally Blonde, and then in 2002 when she starred in Sweet Home Alabama, which became her biggest commercial film to date. The following year saw her return as lead and executive producer of Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde.
By 2005, Witherspoon had received worldwide attention and praise for her portrayal of June Carter Cash in Walk the Line, which earned her an Academy Award, Golden Globe, BAFTA, Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role and the Critics Choice Movie Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role.
Now married to agent Jim Toth, Witherspoon has three children, two from her previous marriage to actor Ryan Philippe. After something of a hiatus, she now has several films being released this year, including this one and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice.
This Q&A is culled from a recent press conference and Reese’s introduction at the film’s Nashville premiere.
Q: This film has some great Tennessee connections such as Producer Molly Smith, who has quite a bit of credits to her name, Alcon Entertainment’s Fred Smith, who started a transportation company in Memphis that's changed the world (FedEx). And, obviously, a local girl who's done really well.
RW: I’m so glad to be here and represent Tennessee. Thank you for being here to support us. It's so good to see you all in Nashville. It's so exciting. I'm so used to seeing you in Los Angeles or New York.
Q: What was it like to show your film here in Nashville where you grew up?
RW: This theater [The Belcourt], where the premiere was, brings back so many memories for me that I was getting emotional when I got here. I've seen so many films here with my family. It's such a great thing to have a premier in Nashville, and to have any of my movies, ever, in Nashville.
Q: This is a spectacular season for you with this movie, producing, all the awards talk, and even popping up with Joaquin Phoenix in Inherent Vice. Have you had a goal to do something like this?
RW: It wasn't planned. I think for a few years I was a little bit lost as an artist, not being able to find what I wanted to do — not making choices I was ultimately very happy with. What kind of started this whole string of things was just getting back to wanting to play interesting, dynamic female characters.
I made these movies, and they all seem to be coming out within three months of each other. I'm in a little bit of a traffic jam right now. Hopefully, we’ll be able to see all of them, and see them for their different qualities.
Q: How do you feel to be back in the Oscar buzz spotlight?
RW: It’s so nice; it’s so sweet to be getting [attention] for it. I’m excited that everybody’s liking the films I’ve been in lately.
Q: The Good Lie is a surprising film with an amazing story, told with such humor and compassion.
RW: I read Margaret Nagle's script, and was so moved. I just knew I couldn't not do it. Margaret did such an incredible job. You could tell that there was so much research involved, because when I started watching documentaries, it was completely accurate. Every story you've heard [about] the Sudanese refugees is somehow in the movie or in the script.
I remember when I met Philippe Falardeau, the director, the first thing he said to me was, "This movie isn't about you. And I just want to be really clear about that."
I've never had a director say that to me before but it made me happy, because I didn't want to make a movie where it was just a white American girl coming to save African people.
My character [Carrie Davis] is without family, just as emotionally distraught as they are. I thought it was such a beautiful opportunity to talk about [how] family is where you find it. The film is incredible.
Q: How did you arrive at Carrie's look? Was it written on the page, or did you have any input on that?
RW: Molly called me and told me she wanted me to be a brunette, and I was like, "All right." I've done that before. We worked with the hair and make-up people. It's always nice to sort of depart from yourself. I was covering all my post-baby weight, too.
I'd just had a baby, and I was still nursing and taking care of him. That’s the reason why I didn't know if I wanted to make the movie. You know how your brain gets confused, right after you have a baby? I was really confused.
Q: What was in the message of the movie that spoke to you and made you want to do it?
RW: I felt that there are so many times when you don't appreciate your life until you see someone else's perspective on our privileges and the opportunities that we have, whether that's education, or health care, or just food and running water.
One of my favorite scenes is when [Ger’s character] is running his hands [in the water], turning the water on and off, after they'd walked through the desert without water or food.
I thought it was a great message also for families. I think it's really great to take your kids to this movie. It brings up a lot of integral conversations that we should all be having. I'll take my kids!
Q: It must have been an incredible challenge for you to play a character where you don't know the backstory to the other characters. You have to discover it along the way. What did you learn about south Sudan in general?
RW: I came from a place of not knowing, so other than a random newspaper article or something, I knew very little about the story.
A lot of the things that I learned were from talking to Emmanuel and Ger. Sometimes we'd be doing scenes and I'd say, "Well, did that really happen?"
Ger would tell us about being a young boy and walking all that way, and what it was like. It's hard to even conceive.
And then at the very end of the film, we got to go to the Kakuma Refugee Camp.
Even though I didn't shoot any scenes there, I didn't want to just do the part in Atlanta and be done and go home to my life. I really wanted to see what the experience was like, so I took my teenage daughter and we went.
Q: Your daughter hasn't experienced that sort of poverty before, so what was her experience like? How did it help her perspective on the world?
RW: Well, she's a wonderful, socially conscious girl. Even if you read a million books on a situation, you don't understand it until you see it yourself. I was very lucky that they organized for her to be there, because she is a little young to be off on these trips.
Q: Was she 13 at the time?
RW: She had just turned 14. She didn't say a word the whole day. And then she really didn't talk about it until a couple of days later. I think it's definitely going to affect her for a long time, as it did me. It was amazing.
Q: What do you think she gained from the experience?
RW: Consciousness, awareness — hopefully, a feeling of wanting to give back.
Q: Why was it important for you to take her there?
RW: I think that travel is the antidote to any kind of selfish behavior -- service, really. It's not their fault, kids nowadays, we give them all these technologies, and access to things that disconnect them, so as much as you can show them of the world, it's great.
Q: Describe the experience; take us back there as it happened to you.
RW: It was really very emotional, seeing over 250,000 people displaced — sleeping on concrete slabs, and the sprawl of that many people living together. There were 12 different languages being spoken; seven different kinds of religions. There was very little health care, very little food.
We saw women giving birth on metal tables, with their infant sitting there with no clothes on. Kids that were sick, and babies like her brother's age, sitting on concrete slabs and sleeping with seven other brothers and sisters. But I think the conditions were worse.
Seeing that is one thing, but the other remarkable thing [we saw] was the joy and determination of these people to rise above [it] and have a better life for their children. They greet you with smiles and laughter and dancing. Their spirit was just incredible.
It was incredible to be there with Ger and his family — so many of his family members are there — at that very camp.
It really brought it all home to me. This is an opportunity to raise awareness, but it's also an opportunity to create change.
As I was talking to the religious leader Rick Warren, he said, "Sometimes we assume because people are poor that they're not intelligent, that they don't have anything to offer to society. But these are people who are on top of their field. They're doctors, educators, community leaders, and they've essentially been displaced."
So it's been really educational for me to learn about refugees, and their contribution to society, and how we hopefully lift more of them up out of those situations.
Q: Why do you think it's hard for us, as Americans, to grasp what's going on —the persecutions going on in Sudan? How can this movie change that?
RW: I think there's not been a lot of media coverage. A lot of people are making comparisons [of this film] to Hotel Rwanda, but it wasn't a situation that a lot of people knew a lot about. Once [you] saw the film, it makes you want to go home and look it up and get more involved.
I really like the part when Corey's character says in the movie [that] he’s so reticent to get involved. He's like, "Let's not get involved. We're probably going to get sued."
One of the things I think is so great about this story is that you don't have to be a perfect person to do something great for somebody else. The imperfections in your life actually might be helped in the process of meeting and helping and creating community for people who are displaced.
It's not just for the saints of the world. We can all make a difference.
