John le Carré (David Cornwell) in “The Pigeon Tunnel,” premiering October 20, 2023 on Apple TV+. Courtesy of Apple+
If it is true that to be a great writer, you need an unusual childhood, then the great spy novelist John LeCarre may be Exhibit A. Or so it seems in this fascinating documentary by Errol Morris, THE PIGEON TUNNEL.
Errol Morris, one of the most creative, compelling documentarians ever, turns his camera on perhaps the greatest spy novelist ever, John LeCarre, in the documentary THE PIGEON TUNNEL. The British writer and former spy who uses the pen name John LeCarre, but whose real name was David Cornwell, has turned out a remarkable string of spy novels, nearly all of which became bestsellers. From The Spy Who Came Into The Cold onward, John LeCarre has thrilled readers with spy novels that have the intriguing ring of real spy craft to them, unlike the James Bond adventurer type, transforming the genre of espionage novels.
“The Pigeon Tunnel” is the name of John LeCarre’s (aka David Cornwell’s) 2016 autobiography but it is also the place-holder name he used for his spy novels before they had their final titles. Near the beginning of the Errol Morris’ excellent documentary THE PIGEON TUNNEL, LeCarre related a rather chilling story about the origin of that phrase, a tale in which privileged guests at a grand Monaco hotel use a seaside-facing balcony to shoot at pigeons as they emerged from a tunnel, an entertainment arranged by the hotel, something young Cornwell says he witnessed while staying at the hotel with his free-spending gambler father Ronald “Ronnie” Cornwell, and one that illustrates a certain sense of cold entitlement and his lack of feeling.
Documentarian Errol Morris spoke with John LeCarre in an interview that ranged over four days in 2019. LeCarre is charming, cordial, erudite and often smiling, as he talks about his books and his work in secret intelligence, and most especially about his father Ronnie Cornwell, a charming swindler and gambler who was always in debt and sometimes in trouble with the law. LeCarre’s mother abandoned the family when he was five, leaving him and his older brother with his unreliable, philandering father. Growing up with such a father, truth was a stranger in their lives and his father involved his sons in his cons. When not in trouble with the law, Ronnie rubbed elbows with the upper crust and spent freely. There was little affection. It was a childhood that could not have been more unusual.
While LeCarre recounts his tales, Errol Morris works his signature magic, with actors re-enacting some parts of LeCarre’s life, particularly his youth and young adulthood, sequences so good you are drawn into them like drama and a bit surprised when you come back to the white-haired man in the room. We also get archival stills and shots of newspaper clippings, often headlines about Ronnie’s arrests or financial scandals. There are extended clips from films based on LeCarre’s books, primarily THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD and the British TV adaptation of the Smiley series of novels, starting with TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY.
While Errol Morris weaves his magic with archival materials, John LeCarre is filmed in ways that suit the spy tales or stories of growing up as the son of a conman. The shot is often cocked, a Dutch angle, and shooting into a room through a doorway or with eerie green light adds a sense of mystery. LeCarre never loses his temper, never raises his voice and only rarely looks even uncomfortable. With a few exceptions, like when he talks about his own father’s attempt to con him out of money, LeCarre is calm and collected, personable and polite – a charmer to the last.
But LeCarre begins the interview with a touch of wariness, quizzing director/interviewer Errol Morris about his “intentions” for the interview and asking how he should regard him – friend, adversary? When Morris replies that he honestly doesn’t know, and repeats it, LeCarre seems to relax as it satisfied with the vague answer. It sets a strange tone for all that follows, with us always wondering what is going on in his head,. behind the congenial smile. About recruiting spies, LeCarre describes how the British secret intelligence service looked for “boys who were a little bit bad but who were loyal,” those who had separated from family early by going to boarding school and has an early Independence – all of which he acknowledged described him perfectly.
As the two talk, the background sometimes shifts, from a library to a room with a large table and vertical windows. We see only LeCarre, although we sometimes hear Morris, as LeCarre talks about his books, his work in secret intelligence and especially about his childhood and his relationship with this unreliable father.
The one thing he seems to have done right, was seeing that his sons had good educations at public schools and went on to Oxford. The plan was for young David to be a lawyer but instead he studied modern languages, with the support of his tutor Vivian Green. Then MI5 came calling and espionage entered the picture.
John LeCarre’s spy novels were strikingly different from the James Bond adventure tales, with the feel of real spy craft and cerebral, coolly calculating cat-and-mouse games between adversaries on opposite sides of the Cold War. It was a revelation that transformed espionage novels. and led to a string of bestsellers and movies based on them.
All this adds up to a fascinating tour of the world of John LeCarre, his strange childhood, his days at Oxford where he studied modern languages and was recruited to spy for MI5, and his time with MI5 (British domestic security) and MI6 (international) during the Cold War that he wrote about so well. Blended with the excellent recreations and the archival footage and stills, and we feel completely immersed in John LeCarre’s world, fictional and not, always with the little hint of secrets still kept.
It is a world that LeCarre fans, like this writer, won’t want to leave. But leave we must, as the film comes to an end and we are left with the knowledge that is was LeCarre’s last interview before his death in 2020. But is was fascinating while it lasted, much like LeCarre’s always smart and nuanced spy novels.
PIGEON TUNNEL is available streaming only on Apple+ starting Friday, Oct. 20.
Director Karyn Kusama and actor Nicole Kidman on the set of DESTROYER, an Annapurna Pictures release.
The crime drama DESTROYER stars Nicole Kidman as a hardened L.A. policewoman bent on vengeance, in a gritty role unlike anything she has ever played. The film is directed by Karyn Kusama from a script by Phil Hay, who is also Kusama’s husband, and his writing partner Matt Manfredi. Kusama’s breakout film was 2000’s GIRLFIGHT.
Karyn Kusuma, who grew up in St. Louis, and husband Phil Hay were in town last November for the 2018 St. Louis International Film Festival, where DESTROYER made its local debut. The film-making couple spoke to a group of St. Louis-area film critics at a round-table interview.
Below is a portion of that interview. Questions from all film critic participants are combined, and the interview is edited for length and clarity. DESTROYER opens Friday, January 18.
Interview with DESTROYER director Karyn Kusama and co-writer Phil Hay
Question:
“I watched this film on Wednesday and I’m still thinking about it.”
Karyn Kusama:
“Oh, cool. That’s great. Happy to hear it.”
Q:
“Something particularly striking about the film was the way you shot L.A. It reminded me of Michael Mann and COLATERAL. Was he maybe some of the inspiration for your visual approach in shooting the movie? Because the way it looked really added to the whole quality of the film.”
KK: “Obviously, because Michael Mann has made some classic crime films in Los Angeles, it is hard not to acknowledged the influence of those films. But I think for me, I looked more at films from the ’70s, particularly I’d say TAXI DRIVER, THE FRENCH CONNECTION, [and] CHINATOWN to a degree. Movies like THE PARALAX VIEW, KLUTE, where there was a gritty, dark photographic style, that also could meet up against harsh sunlight, unrelenting brightness.
Q: “I’m curious – as a writing and directing team, what is your process for starting a new project? Do you come up with an idea? Do you automatically just say I’m going to direct what you write? Or do you both discuss the idea first? How does that work?”
Phil Hay: “We have to earn it (laughs). So Matt (Manfredi), my partner, and I, you know, we’ve been writing together for more than 20 years. Usually what happens is…it takes us a really long time to figure out if it is a movie for us or not. In the case of both this movie DESTROYER and THE INVITATION, our previous movie, [it was] like ten years [from when] we came up with the idea, basically, until we said, ‘OK, now we’re going to write this script.’ ”
“[W]hat we do, Matt and I, we have these little questions [about the script idea]. It could be a theme, could be a character, it could be a specific story item, but something that kind of interests us. We keep talking about it, talking about it, talking about it. And when it gets to that point – and it may take years – where we think there is something there, then we bring it tentatively to Karyn and say ‘What about this?’… and she might have some thoughts and might, you know, have a perspective on it.”
“In the case of DESTROYER, we went back and, really, specifically sort of outlined the story. Normally, Karyn says ‘you guys write it and give it to me’ and then we start the conversation. In this case, we said ‘let’s show you, we want to walk you though the story, so you can start thinking [about it].’ Now that we have this team, this family – we try to do things in a kind of simultaneous manner, so while we’re writing script, Karyn is already starting to think about the visual conception, already starting to put together her “look” book, [and to] think about collaborators we might want to work with. Our composer, who is one of our oldest friends, is already writing music based off the script, even before the movie is shooting. So there is a lot of simultaneity that goes on, which is really great for us.”
Q: “Did you always want to tell this story through a female perspective? Or did that change throughout the process?”
PH: “I think, from the writing side, we knew we had a story [but] it was kind of nebulous who the story was going to be about. We had some things that were almost around the center [but] there was this hole in the center, in a way. And it was when – and that was sort of Matt, and I and Karyn starting to talk about this story – we all had this realization that not only that this story needed to be about a woman, but [that it needed to be] about this specific woman and her specific problems. That was “the reason for being” of the whole thing. So I can’t imagine a version of this [without that]. For us, it wouldn’t be worth telling, because it wouldn’t be that character, if it was not this particular woman. And I think that did invigorate us from the beginning. That’s what made it special to us, that’s what made it feel right.”
KK: “Yeah. And it’s distinctive. For me, reading those early scripts, I knew, kind of, in my gut that we really hadn’t seen this woman [on screen before], and I don’t even think we’ve seen such as interesting version of this [character as a] man before. Personally I felt really … I just felt excited by the idea that she was so, kind of, difficult and cantankerous and problematic. You know, I have a very… I don’t want to say love-hate but a “tough love” relationship with that character, because she demands pretty tough love. I don’t know, I felt there was just something about her that felt incredibly distinctive.”
Q: “I was drawn to this character played by Nicole Kidman. You see a lot of movies where the plot drives it – what is going to happen, what is going on – but then it can have a certain emptiness about the actual character. That was not the case here. I saw the movie last night, and was thinking about it this morning. Like that scene with Shelby, her daughter. The character’s whole story could be sort of reverse engineered from that moment.”
KK: ‘When [Kidman’s character] has that final conversation with her daughter?’
Q: “Yeah. She’s talking to her, and she gives her a kiss at the end, and we know that [Kidman’s character] doesn’t really know what is going to happen but she’s very self-aware about her limitations as far as how she’s able to be a mom and how she’s able to love her daughter. But the thing is, it would be easy as an audience member to kind of judge that but what I was thinking was that we all have that, we all have certain limitations as far as what we are able to do.”
KK: “I think that was what we were striving for, to depict a character who as extremely limited… Nicole [Kidman] herself actually made a comment that I hadn’t really thought about in terms of playing the character. She said that, first and foremost, the character is so emotionally shut down. And I hadn’t really thought about it that way, that it is so hard for the character to even know when she is feeling something. You know, she acts more out of these base emotions, [feelings] about rage and about shame, and about deprivation. She’s sort of this person who’s always trying to protect her territory and her, kind of, very limited kingdom. So I think it was important to us that we see the character like that, because we’ve all been there, or I felt I have. We’ve all had our moments of feeling petty and small and grabby, and I think she’s just a bigger, slightly bolder version of those qualities. But I hope what we do is humanize that.”
PH: “I think it’s good you brought that up in the way you did because, always for us, that scene in the diner is the center, in a way, of the whole thing. It is the meaning of the thing, because of what the cost is [for the character]. The difficulty for her to be honest, finally, and to offer her daughter something extremely valuable in her life, and to change the context of their relationship, which I think is true of many parent-child relationships, the idea of who’s right and who’s wrong.”
Hugh Jackman and director Jason Reitman on the set of Columbia Pictures’ THE FRONT RUNNER. Photo courtesy of Columbia Pictures
Director Jason Reitman, whose new film, THE FRONT RUNNER, about Gary Hart’s 1987 presidential run, was recently released, was honored at the 2018 St. Louis International Film Festival. Reitman attended SLIFF to receive the Contemporary Cinema Award. He spoke to a round table of film journalists the day after receiving the award. All questions have been combined and the interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Questioner: “How was last night for you (when Reitman received the award and his new film THE FRONT RUNNER was previewed)?”
Jason Reitman: “It was great! I love flying into St. Louis. It brings back this kind of flood of memories from shooting UP IN THE AIR. Literally from the moment I step off the plane, I always wind up, you know, walking out of a gate that we literally just filmed right by. While they’ve renovated (the airport), I still recognize the architecture, the lamps, and I pass this security where we did the whole big security scene, and then the moment I’m driving out, I’m seeing a Hilton we shot at, and the parking spot that used to be the Hertz. And then I start driving through town, and I say, ‘You know, that’s the apartment building where George (Clooney) lived, and it’s just …(laughter)”
Q: “That was one of the best scenes, where he (Clooney) goes on a rant with Anna Kendrick, defending Lambert airport.”
JR: “Oh, thank you. And then of course, we’re here. We shot a really lovely scene here at the Cheshire, and so, it brings back a lot of memories. And I really love the Tivoli here, it’s a gorgeous theater and where we had the screening last night.”
Q: “Congratulations on the award!”
JR: “Yeah, that was really cool.”
Q: “We’re ready for you to write another one, to come to St. Louis to shoot.”
JR: “I’d love to come back here and shoot a movie! Although I’m not sure how it could be the experience I had on UP IN THE AIR. That was just kinda dreamy, and you could also just feel it from the locals who were working on the film, which is not always the case. I’ve shot – this is my eighth movie I just made, and you kind of get a different sense of the city you’re in by the people who are working on it. And particularly even the background extras in UP IN THE AIR, cared so much about the movie we were making. Obviously, they became very integral in the firing scenes, you know, they would. St. Louis had just gone through a ton of lay-offs, particularly at Anheuser-Busch. In those sequences where George was firing people, we ended up using real people from St. Louis and Detroit, where we also shot, who had lost their job and shared their stories, and that became a real part of the film.
Here at the Cheshire, I remember we were shooting the rehearsal dinner and we had this kind of wedding sequence and we had these young gals who were playing the bridesmaids roles who were local. I remember they really fell in love with the whole process of making the movie here, and they loved the film and liked what were making. And I remember they got the sides (lines) for the next day’s shoot, and the next day we were shoot the scene where George arrives at Vera’s, and finds out she’s married, and I just sort of remember that these young girls in their bridesmaid dresses looking at the sides, heartbroken, and coming up to me and saying ‘What? They’re not going to be together?’ They were heartbroken. It was really lovely.”
Q: “About THE FRONT RUNNER, it interesting how you didn’t necessarily paint him, Gary Hart, as a villain but you didn’t, you know… you really left it up to the audience. I wanted to know what the thought process was, you know, you told the story, put the information out there, but you didn’t really spin it, at least in my opinion, either way, as either bad guy or good guy.”
JR: “Certainly. I mean I don’t believe in heroes or villains in real life. I do enjoy movies that have heroes and villains, I like STAR WARS, but for this kind of movie, a movie about real life, I don’t think you can have heroes and villains, I think people are more complicated than that. Certainly Gary Hart is more complicated than that , I mean, he is this really interesting litmus test on how we view flaws in our leaders, because he was such a compelling candidate for the presidency. Kennedy-esque, handsome, charming, well-spoken, brilliant and prescient – kind of beyond all imagination. At the same time, he’s a human being who made human mistakes. And they were private ones, so it really kind of begs the question of our curiosity, and where a private life really kind of meets a public life.”
Q: “Hugh Jackman was this incredible choice for this role. Was he your first choice, did you have to have him in this role?”
JR: “Yeah, I mean, beyond the kind of cosmetic similarities between Hugh and Gary, he’s an actor I’ve been wanting to work with for a long time. Particularly in these last five years or so, with this run of Les Miz and LOGAN and THE GREATEST SHOWMAN, he’s just kind of taken it up a notch. I thought LOGAN was kind of exceptional performance, to take a character over the course of nine movies and stick the landing with such an emotional closing film, [it] blew me away.
I was familiar with the stories of his decency, stories of his work ethic, and those all came true. It’s not an easy role [Gary Hart]. Acting is kind of built upon…the first thing you learn as an actor is you kind of need to identify your character’s goals and their choices, and here was a character where you were never going to understand that. It became his job to protect those ideas and let the audience peek in but never actually walk in the door. It’s a very tricky thing to do. And never judge your character, which is particularly tricky in this movie as well.”
Q: “He can do so much. A performance I liked, that doesn’t get a lot of credit, is PRISONERS.”
JR: “Oh, yeah, he’s great.”
Q: “He takes that role to a new level, while making you draw your own conclusions about being a parent.”
JR: “Yeah, yeah, and knows how to keep it at a slow boil. It’s really hard.”
Q: “I think that’s what I liked about this performance too, you don’t necessarily love him by the end of the movie but you don’t hate him either…. I also wonder, did Gary and Lee [Hart] watch it?”
JR: “Yeah, you know, they did. I had spoken to everyone before we started making the movie, just out of decency, you know, ‘hey, I’m Jason, I’m the one making the movie, here’s my phone number,’ but yeah, when we finished the film, the first one we showed the movie to was Donna [Rice], then Gary and Lee Hart, their kids, the campaign, Tom Fielder from the [Miami] Herald. They all saw the movie, I just kind of flew around showing it to them. As you can imagine, it’s terrifying to turn the movie, walk out of the theater and let them sit there. It was really scary for me, You know, if I told you I was going to make a movie about your life, [and] let me pick the worst week. (everyone laughs)
So, however, what kind of happened with each of the screenings is we’ve approached this story that has historically kind of been thought of as a joke – you know, a short joke with a punchline of the name of a boat – and everyone who worked on the movie approached it with empathy. I feel like the real people can feel the sensitivity of the actors, and Gary and Lee Hart particularly felt that for Hugh Jackman and Vera Farmiga, as did Donna Rice from Sarah Paxton. And I think they felt my empathy, in opening up a really harrowing time they have not been able to live down for decades, and treat it with the seriousness that we did.”
Q: “In the beginning, you did not use that photo – I was in the news room and that photo came over – but you did not use that photo.”
JR: “Yeah, and I can tell you why – the photo came out later. This is one of the interesting things about Gary Hart’s story. The Gary Hart story plays with how we remember things, and if you ask people who know the story, they will tell you a couple of things. They will tell you ‘well, he told the press to follow him around,’ which was not the case. And then they’ll say ‘he left the presidency [race] because of a photograph, and that’s all.’ That’s not the case. He left politics and weeks later, the National Enquirer bought this photo and published it. At that point, he was back in Denver, out of the race and has already made this speech we show at the end of the film. But we don;t remember that.
What I find interesting about that is way our curiosity works, and the way we sum up stories in our head. And there is something complicated about that, there’s something to the fact that we take this moment, which is kind of a groundbreaking moment as far as the relationship between “celebrity-facation” and politics, and instead of thinking about what changed in that moment and how that put us on a road to today, we think of it as a name of a boat and a photograph., because we enjoy the humor of it, and we enjoy the curiosity of it. Look, I wake up every morning and check out my phone app, the news app, and often there is a story about the midterms and right next to it, there is a story about Ariana Grande and Pete Davidson breaking up. And they’re from the same source, they’re both from the Post, and they are given equal weight. I don’t blame them, it’s not their fault,we’re the ones clicking it. And so I’m kind of asking the audience, what is it that our curiosity allows us to gloss over something important because we enjoy the sordid details.”
On Friday, March 13, Disney will release the live action version of CINDERELLA from director Kenneth Branagh.
The original animated movie opened on February 15, 1950 to universal acclaim and 65 years later, CINDERELLA has become one of studio’s most treasured titles.
Branagh has once again turned to the Scottish composer Patrick Doyle for the score. The album features original music by Doyle marking the eleventh time he has teamed with Branagh.
In 1989, the director commissioned Doyle to compose the score for HENRY V and they have subsequently collaborated on numerous pictures, including DEAD AGAIN, MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN, MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, HAMLET, AS YOU LIKE IT and THOR, and most recently JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT.
Doyle scored RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES for 20th Century Fox and BRAVE for Disney Pixar, which was awarded Best Original Composition for Film at the International Music and Sound Awards.
From the worlds of Asgard to the Highlands of Scotland, Doyle’s various scores have whisked audiences off to distant lands, past, present and future. With an enchanting score full of magic and musical color, as well as creating a new Disney song, this time the Oscar-nominated composer takes us to the fairy-tale kingdom of CINDERELLA.
WAMG: CINDERELLA is such a beautiful film and your score is just wonderful. It sounds like a fairytale.
Patrick Doyle: Thank you very much. I think it’s a gorgeous, sumptuous film. It’s a classic movie – a timeless movie. It’s enchanting and it’s funny. It’s magical and very emotional. It’s a wonderful opportunity for a composer.
WAMG: The story is very familiar as well as the music. What was your first thought when you found out Kenneth Branagh was doing a new version of CINDERELLA?
PD: It’s a classic story. Number one, knowing Ken, I knew it would be a completely different approach to the iconic animated version. I think he’s done a wonderful job transferring from animation to live action. There’s always a thought that people will compare the two. I have been through this in the past with HENRY V and I knew Ken would have new approach to the film. I think he did a tremendous job.
WAMG: Your score is very romantic and while reminding the audience of the original, it takes you into this new adaptation.
PD: I’m glad you agree. I tried to write a classical score and hopefully it will have a classic feel to it. The reaction to the film, and the score, has been fantastic and it’s a tremendous opportunity to write for a symphony orchestra. Any reason to employ a symphony orchestra in a movie is always welcomed, especially when it’s the calibre of the London Symphony Orchestra.
The movie is from the original Charles Perrault’s French interpretation of the tale entitled “Cendrillon, or the History of the Little Glass Slipper” which introduced the fairy godmother, the pumpkin carriage and the glass slippers. We also come from a culture where we have what’s called Pantomime in Scotland, England and Wales. It’s an annual event – they’ll show Puss and Boots one year and Cinderella the other. Cinderella is a wonderful story and goes back to Greek times. It deals with diversity and it’s universal to every culture – it resonates to every culture the world.
It has a wonderful happy ending that everyone knows, but it’s the journey along the way is what’s so traumatizing. It’s cathartic in the end to watch her dream come true where she finds someone who’s a good person. It’s the best possible circumstances where people fall in love for themselves and not what they are.
WAMG: I loved Cate Blanchett’s theme – she makes quite the entrance as Lady Tremaine with the cat Lucifer in tow. Did you go with theme cues first or melody cues first for the character?
PD: (Sings the cue) I worked very hard to have a sort of chromatic theme – to roll around in the lower register of the instruments in the orchestra. I wanted to have a very distinctive theme for her.
The CINDERELLA waltz music at the ball, “La Valse de L’Amour,” was heavily plundered and mined by me throughout the score. (Sings the cue) I like to weave all these themes throughout the score. There’s waltzes and polkas, along with a plethora of dances, so there was a wonderful opportunity for me to write real classical music.
WAMG: You can hear it all through the film. With that classical theme in mind, what instruments, whether it was percussion, strings, brass, were you keen on using?
PD: It was an absolute mixture of everything. That’s the joy for a score like that – you can choose and strategize so that the sound can influence the viewer to see specific things. You can use the oboe for the mystery with the lower register, the bassoon for the entrance of the step-mother, the harp for the magical qualities. The whole symphonic voice comes into play and every instrument is utilized. The palette was wide open. I used the percussive sounds to give off wonderful colors.
My objective was to capture the magical enchantment and emotion in order to give it a timeless quality because the Disney canon is timeless. It survives generation after generation and that was in the back of my mind. I wanted to honor that great musical tradition of Disney.
The first film I saw on my own was FANTASIA. I went on my own at age 14 to Glasgow to see that film. That turned me onto music and animation – I was amazed by the marriage of the two.
In addition to the score, the soundtrack also includes end credit tracks by Lily James (“Cinderella”) and Helena Bonham Carter (“Fairy Godmother”), plus the end credit original theme song “Strong” (written by Patrick Doyle, Kenneth Branagh and Tommy Danvers) performed by Compound/Motown recording artist Sonna Rele and produced by TommyD (Kylie, Kanye West, Corinne Bailey Rae, FUN). Sonna was chosen by Kenneth Branagh to record “Strong.”
WAMG: Along with the score, fans have always liked that Disney made it a point of adding songs to his animated & live action films. In this CINDERELLA, there is the song that your wrote, “Strong.” How did that develop for the movie?
PD: The tune is totally based on all the themes in the film. You’ll hear the melodies and motifs, which I’m very proud of because all the score was first and then the song came in based on all the material in the score.
TommyD Is a great producer and writer and Ken worked on the lyrics and we worked very hard on it. I’m very proud to be part of that tradition to have written a Disney song. It’s really lovely.
I’ve also been the only one to write a Gaelic song for Disney with the movie BRAVE. I loved being involved in “Strong.”
WAMG: If I may ask you about BRAVE for a moment. When you first found out the movie was being made, being from Scotland, did you get choked up?
PD: Talk about being choked up! When the Pixar people invited me to San Francisco, after my initial meeting, to talk about the movie, I walked into a conference room and they had rocks, heather and little twiglets and branches and pictures beautifully displayed for me. Pictures of Scotland and the glorious Highlands – my wee eyes got choked up.
“I can’t believe you’ve done this to me,” I said. My life flashed in front of me! I was very proud to be asked to do that score.
WAMG: Your music for RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES goes so well with the Jerry Goldsmith’s original 1968 score. The movie was such a success, especially for fans of the APES franchise. In APES and CINDERELLA, there are a ton of sound effects to accompany the visual effects. Did you work closely with the Sound Department on both movies?
PD: It was a fantastic opportunity to work on such an iconic franchise. I remember on RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, I asked the sound department to let me hear the early recordings they took of the real apes and I used one of their cries and turned it into a noisy musical cue for the percussion parts. It also became the running string motif in the film driving all the action sequences.
When thematic sounds come from an organic source, I think it has far more resonance so hopefully it connects people to the film.
I worked very closely with the sound department on CINDERELLA. I did a facsimile of the score, as I was going along, to give them so they were able to shape their sounds around the music and to tune the effects to the key of the orchestra. I had to work very closely with them to get an inter-organic marriage.
WAMG: You wrote the score for the silent movie IT starring Clara Bow, commissioned by the Syracuse Film Festival, which received its world premiere at the Syracuse historic Landmark Theatre in October 2013. How was it to score a film after the fact?
PD: I’ve always been a great fan of the early days of cinema. When I was a kid we had only two television stations in Scotland. There was the BBC and an independent station, and that was it. They would show lots and lots of movies from the 1920’s and 1930’s through the 1940’s and 1950’s. When I look back on it, I watched silent movies that were only about thirty years old.
I’m very lucky to be in that transition period to have written in the 20th and 21st century. When I was approached to commission the score I leapt at the opportunity. I loved the film and I’m very aware of Clara Bow. I took great care to write a contemporary score.
I’m quite excited because there’s going to be a Scottish premiere in June and I’m working with young children from my old Shire. I’m tremendously pleased and other movie industry people are doing workshops with these kids, so I’m very proud to be working on that.
All young kids from North Lanarkshire and South Lanarkshire where I was educated will be there. I remember as a very young kid going on weekends where I played in the youth orchestra and to be able to go back after working on this for a number of years, is a nice feather in the Royal Scottish Academy of Music, so we’re very excited about it.
Walt Disney Records will release the original motion picture soundtrack for CINDERELLA on March 10, 2015.
The score was recorded at Air Lyndhurst Studio in London, and was performed by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by James Shearman and produced by Maggie Rodford. The film arrives in theaters on March 13, 2015.
CINDERELLA track list:
1. A Golden Childhood 2. The Great Secret 3. A New Family 4. Life and Laughter 5. The First Branch 6. Nice and Airy 7. Orphaned 8. The Stag 9. Rich Beyond Reason 10. Fairy Godmother 11. Pumpkins and Mice 12. You Shall Go 13. Valse Royale 14. Who Is She 15. La Valse de L’Amour 16. La Valse Champagne 17. La Polka Militaire 18. La Polka de Paris 19. A Secret Garden 20. La Polka de Minuit 21. Choose That One 22. Pumpkin Pursuit 23. The Slipper 24. Shattered Dreams 25. Searching the Kingdom 26. Ella and Kit 27. Courage and Kindness 28. Strong Performed by Sonna Rele 29. A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes Performed by Lily James 30. Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo (The Magic Song) Performed by Helena Bonham Carter
Film makers Charlie Siskel (left) and John Maloof (right)
2014 turned out to be an exceptional year for feature-length documentaries about artists. A film from 2013, TIM’S VERMEER, opened wide that January and was soon followed by JODOROWSKY’S DUNE, FOR NO GOOD REASON, LIFE, ITSELF, and GLEN CAMPBELL: I’LL BE ME. However, the only art doc to be included in the five nominees for BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE FILM at the 87th Academy Awards is the acclaimed FINDING VIVIAN MAIER. You can read my review here. Recently WAMG was able to speak to the two men behind the film, producer/writer/directors John Maloof (who also narrates the film) and Charlie Siskel.
WAMG: I suppose we should start with you John, since this journey began back in 2007 with your purchase of a box of Maier’s negatives at an auction. You mention in the film that you’d hoped to find some research materials for a historical project. Had you done historical projects for film or multimedia (DVD) before?
John Maloof: Not for video type projects. I had recently purchased a 100 year-old house in the Portage Park neighborhood of Chicago and was collecting materials for a history book about the area surrounding the property.
WAMG: You said in the film that you were familiar with going to auctions and estate sales and such in your youth. Did your family introduce you to that?
JM: Well, I did partner with my family in attending such sales when I was growing, even hitting a occassional flea market a few years ago and setting up a table.
WAMG: So, the building you bought, is that on the North side, the West side (of Chicago)?
JM: Portage Park is a neighborhood on the Northwest side.
WAMG: Oh yes, I’ve got some friends that attend that theatre quite a bit. I had confused it with Rogers Park which factors late in the film. When you started accumulating the work of Vivian Maier you mentioned about submitting or trying to get some museums or cultural facilities interested, including MOMA (the Museum of Modern Art). I’m wondering, with the release of the documentary, if they have been in contact with you after several of the special gallery set-ups and such?
JM: Well, the main reason I contacted them originally was just to get some help in organizing and cataloging the amount of materials. The hundreds of negatives became too time consuming to scan on my own. Mainly I needed help in the scanning process.
Charlie Siskel: I should mention that we did having a screening of the film at MOMA and they helped in digitizing and listening to the Maier audio recordings and their cataloging.
WAMG: Well, It’s certainly a compliment to them that they realized the worth of this artist. I was wondering, John, about how you went about accumulating these pieces that had already been sold off to other parties. Must’ve been like having Christmas several times a year, discovering these new treasures, and even expanding the feature with audio cassettes and film footage. Must have been a startling discovery.
JM: Happily, I was able to acquire the other Maier artifacts without much difficulty at reasonable expensive which helped me in putting some of the pieces on display via the internet and working toward the goal of a public display.
WAMG: I guess then we can jump ahead to the big show at the Cultural Center, It sounded like you had an incredible turn-out for that, I think that this is where you, Charlie, became aware of the work and got involved, is that true?
CS: I had seen the story about these incredible photos in a story I caught one day watching PBS. Of course, I spent a good part of my youth in Chicago. Since much of my family was still there, this report sparked an ongoing interest I’ve had about people with double lives, specifically as it applies to undiscovered artists. It seemed that John’s story could be the basis for a documentary that explored these themes.
WAMG: Yes, It’s a pretty incredible seven-year journey, although I guess it could be eight years now, wouldn’t it John? You said in the documentary you found the first photos in 2007, so it’s quite a trip from there to the red carpet.
JM: We were filming this right through 2009.
WAMG: That would be right after Vivian’s passing, I believe. I had seen (actor/comedian) Jeff Garlin’s name in the credits (as executive producer). Charlie, was he instrumental in inspiring you with the documentary process? Did he help open some doors for you?
CS: Yes, he too was fascinated by her photos. We were stunned by the wonderful images that appeared in our email inboxes, which soon became hundreds of photos. Once we became aware of all the material, the receipts, notes, audio cassettes, and especially the 16mm and 8mm footage we realized that these incredible images told a very compelling story of this woman.
WAMG: I had dabbled in 8mm films in high school and was impressed with the color quality you were able to get, there wasn’t a noticeable amount of damage, I guess they were stored at the correct temperature? Was there any footage that didn’t make the transition, there was nothing that become too brittle to use?
JM: It was all Kodachrome film, so the color saturation was very bright and vivid.
WAMG: I’m assuming the 16mm was black and white?
JM: What we used in the feature was primarily the 8mm then Super 8mm home movie footage of the families.
WAMG: Speaking of the families, it was quite an unexpected treat to see one of the icons of daytime TV involved in this. I guess that cues into tracking down the families. Would you say that about 80 or 90% of the folks you contacted at least agreed to talk to you or be in the film?
CS: Pretty much all the families came on board. Several of the children that were cared for by Vivian are in their 50’s now, but still had strong recollections of their time with her and shared their memories. A couple of her charges paid her expenses for the last years of her life. They didn’t wish to be interviewed or identified, so we respected their wishes. They all recall that camera hanging from her neck.
WAMG: One of the things I came away with from the film was it was startling to them that a person that was sort of in the service industry would have such a rich, creative spirit, and that’s one of the great joys of the film is to see this work and realize this person was able to get out and do this and share with us specifically a Chicago that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s agreat exploration of that and a mystery film, so it works on that level also.
CS: We really wanted to show that artists can come from every walk of life. That everyone could have a secret passion. Vivian, as you said, was in the service industry. Kafka was an accountant. I mean, where are the artists in society? Is it only those in the upper classes, who can attend colleges and training centers? Maybe that person sitting next to you on the bus or train has that artistic spirit.
JM: Vivian didn’t want to be cooped up in an office or a factory. She decided to make her living as a nanny or caregiver in order to be out and about in the world. She enjoyed the freedom of it. Her passion wasn’t limited by her humble beginnings, Vivian was really a romantic.
WAMG: One of the more amusing segments, I enjoyed the two linguistics experts who believed that she was doing a fake French accent, I wondered if they were surprised by the film to learn of her family’s roots in France?
JM: Vivian was born in New York City, though. On her first visit to France in the 1930’s, she didn’t speak the language at all. But when she returned in the 1940’s, she spoke French fluently.
WAMG: I’d imagine she heard a lot of French growing up, in the household?
CS: It’s interesting that we did have a screening at the Portage theatre for many of those people featured. When I went out to the lobby after the film’s ending I spotted those two experts still arguing about Vivian’s accent.
WAMG: I was looking over your resume, Charlie, I saw that you were mostly on the production side of TV and films, has this film inspired you to direct more feature film projects?
CS: Directing on this project blurred the line between the writing and producing work I’ve done on different projects. I had the luxury of learning from the guerrilla style film making working with Michael Moore. The storytelling really came together by having someone to bounce ideas off of. The interviews might alter the story of Vivian, so luckily I had John, the detective of the story, making sure that we were on the right track.
JM: We were able to sift through the different stories and test each other a bit.
WAMG: It occurred to me that some documentaries become the basis for dramatic films like GREY GARDENS, have there been any inquiries or have you explored the idea of turning this into a stage play or a dramatic feature film?
CS: There’s been some talk with Killer Films, but nothing’s has been set.
WAMG: I’ll wrap things up by asking about your Oscar nomination morning story. Were you waiting up to hear the news live? Were you awakened by a phone call?
JM: Charlie called me! (laughs)
CS: (laughs) Yeah, I had the liveblast set, but I woke up beforehand. I threw on my bathrobe, grabbed a cup, and logged in to the live streaming broadcast just in time to hear the announcement.
WAMG: What a great way to start the day! Will you be showing the film out there? I know there’s a documentary day at the Oscars.
CS: It’s going to be a whirlwind couple of days out there. We will be showing the film on “Doc Day”.
JM: The nomination and ceremony is wonderful, but the best thing to come out of this is the attention focused open Vivian Maier’s remarkable work. So many people will be aware of her because of the Oscars.
WAMG: It’s a terrific film. As the young folks say, “It’s got all the feels.”, it’s funny at times, it’s tragic. it’s involving, as I said, a great detective story, and I’d don’t know what the proper things is to say. With the theatre you’re supposed to say, “Break a leg”, I don’t know if I should wish you good luck, but I hope all goes well at the big show.
CS & JM: Thank you
WAMG: And thanks you for a great film. It’s always wonderful to tell folks about a film that’s well worth their time.
FINDING VIVIAN MAIER is available on home video, streaming services, and via premium cable TV channels
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY opened today, and has already broken the record for box office midnight sales this year! To celebrate such a momentous occasion, check out my interview with Mr. Michael Rooker, who plays Yondu in the film, as we talk about GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY’s social media praise, Merle Dixon, and why James Gunn continues to cover his beautiful face.
From Marvel, the studio that brought you the global blockbuster franchises of Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and The Avengers, comes a new team—the Guardians of the Galaxy. An action-packed, epic space adventure, Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” expands the Marvel Cinematic Universe into the cosmos, where brash adventurer Peter Quill finds himself the object of an unrelenting bounty hunt after stealing a mysterious orb coveted by Ronan, a powerful villain with ambitions that threaten the entire universe. To evade the ever-persistent Ronan, Quill is forced into an uneasy truce with a quartet of disparate misfits—Rocket, a gun-toting raccoon, Groot, a tree-like humanoid, the deadly and enigmatic Gamora and the revenge-driven Drax the Destroyer. But when Quill discovers the true power of the orb and the menace it poses to the cosmos, he must do his best to rally his ragtag rivals for a last, desperate stand—with the galaxy’s fate in the balance.
Last night, (after the press screening) Twitter and Facebook blew up with positive reactions to the film. Did you ever expect such a big reaction?
MICHAEL ROOKER : Yeah! [Laughs] I kinda did. I saw it last week, and wow… I went crazy over it. I thought it was really fucking cool! It’s really nice, and it’s all there. The guy’s a genius! [Referring to James Gunn] What the hell is that all about? He put all of this together. The puzzling of putting all of these characters together, and molding them, and making them all make sense… Boy, oh boy! What are you gonna do, man? He did a really wonderful job with it.
James Gunn wrote this part for you. Is there an added pressure that comes with having a part written for you, as opposed to a role that you are simply cast for?
MICHAEL ROOKER : Less pressure. I just gotta be me. Just be me and do my stupid thing, you know? [Laughs] Duh! I just have to do what I do. It’s me, so however it comes out, it’s right. It’s correct. I didn’t have to… We mesh really well. He wanted me to do it because there’s some weird thing that goes on where I can be really bad and people still like me… in some weird way. I do it in a lot of things, like ‘The Walking Dead’. People come up to me and they want to weep. They feel so sorry that they killed me off. They’re mad, and they feel sorry for me, and all this stuff, but Merle’s a dick. [Laughs] Come on! He doesn’t like many people. He likes his brother! That’s all he likes! He doesn’t care about anybody else, yet the audience, the fans, the people who watch this – they connect to that. I think they really, truly… No matter how anti-social you can be, or whoever you are… I think it’s natural that people will latch on to any cool thing, and they won’t give up. They have faith in you – that you are going to get better… and Merle did. In their eyes Merle got better. Merle redeemed himself by going and trying to take out the Governor, and giving his life for his brother, and hence, the group. People are invested in this group – in this ‘The Walking Dead’ group. This character of Merle Dixon is more popular now that he’s dead and off the show than he was when he was on the show.
Yondu is very similar. He’s a real tough love guy. Yondu is the surrogate dad / father figure for this young man who grew up to be Star-Lord. Whenever he steals from me, and cheats me, and does all this stuff I give him some tough love, beat his little ass and then I’m proud. It’s like, ‘God. He did that to me? That’s my boy!’ you know? ‘Wow. I can’t believe he did that!’ and I love him for it. I love him because of it. Even the last moment, when I don’t have the real thing – that last moment is so cool. It’s like ‘That’s my boy! He did it again! Oh, am I gonna get him!’ and I love it for it. I love him even more for it. It’s that kind of stuff. It’s good, and it’s fun. People like it, and I love it. I love doing that. You know what I like? I like the whole concept of being this bad, bad-ass, but the only person amongst hundreds who would run out and save the puppy when the semi-truck is baring down. Not a lot of people will do that. That’s, sort of, part of me. It’s also part of a lot of things that I do. It’s that kind of real gritty, tough… but with soft spots deep inside somewhere.
You were a monster in SLITHER…
MICHAEL ROOKER : I was!
James covered in blood during ‘Scream Queens’, and you get attacked by the ladies. Now you’re painted blue with some incredible choppers. Why do you think James keeps trying to hide your beauty?
MICHAEL ROOKER : You know what? He’s just jealous. He’s just plain and simple jealous. [Laughs] He’s jealous of my good looks. He looks in the mirror, probably every day, and goes ‘Dammit! I wish I was as good-looking as Rooker! That damn Rooker! How does he look so good? And having been out until 5am! How is that possible?’ [Laughs] You know, his brother gets worse! ‘Humanzee!’… Come on! His brother gets worse. His brother’s been getting it all his life! I’ve only been getting it for about eight years. His brother’s been getting abused his entire life. ‘Hey, why don’t you do this… Climb up that tree and fall off. I’m gonna film it here… I’m the director!’ [Laughs] That’s what James does. That’s what he’s been doing all of his life… abusing the people he likes and cares about!
Where would you like to see Yondu in a sequel? What would you like to see?
MICHAEL ROOKER : Ooh! More! [Laughs] Just more! More! More Yondu! More Yondu, dammit!
MALEFICENT explores the untold story of Disney’s most iconic villain from the classic “SLEEPING BEAUTY” and the elements of her betrayal that ultimately turn her pure heart to stone. Recently, I sat down with actor Sam Riley, who plays Diaval, Maleficent’s raven sidekick in the film. Check it out below!
Driven by revenge and a fierce desire to protect the moors over which she presides, Maleficent cruelly places an irrevocable curse upon the human king’s newborn infant Aurora. As the child grows, Aurora is caught in the middle of the seething conflict between the forest kingdom she has grown to love and the human kingdom that holds her legacy. Maleficentrealizes that Aurora may hold the key to peace in the land and is forced to take drastic actions that will change both worlds forever. The film stars Angelina Jolie as Maleficent, Sharlto Copley, Elle Fanning, Sam Riley, Imelda Staunton, Juno Temple and Lesley Manville. “Maleficent” is produced by Joe Roth and directed by Robert Stromberg, with Angelina Jolie, Michael Vieira, Don Hahn, Palak Patel, Matt Smith and Sarah Bradshaw serving as executive producers. Linda Woolverton wrote the screenplay.
How did you first become involved with MALEFICENT? Is it true that you were told that you weren’t “Disney” enough?
SAM RILEY : My agent did. Well, I don’t know if they heard that from them, but he said ‘The feeling is that you’re not quite Disney material’ which I completely understand. And then, I didn’t hear anything for a long time after doing the casting. And then, like three weeks later, my American agent rang up, which is always in the evening in Europe. I was very excited!
You live in Germany, right?
SAM RILEY : Yeah. In Berlin. I was in a pub and they said ‘Buy yourself another drink because…’
That’s a good place to be when you get a call like that!
SAM RILEY : Yeah! Although it can be expensive if you buy everyone one. [Laughs]
There is a lot of material from past tales on Maleficent and Sleeping Beauty, but this is a whole new look on the raven. How did you develop your character? Were you given a lot to go off of?
SAM RILEY : Well, yeah! I watched the original. I mean, I remember the raven, but watching it again – he’s, sort of, half asleep the whole time. It was difficult, because I like to do homework and anything I can because that’s part of the bit of doing this job. So, I watched a lot of videos on YouTube about ravens, and worked some on that, and then, when I came to London, the arranged for me to spend time with ravens.
How was that?
SAM RILEY : Intense, because I was completely ignorant of them. This one was [showing about three feet with his hands]…
Really?
SAM RILEY : For real! I though they were like crows! It was this big [again, displaying the size with his hands]. The guy let it out of the cage and it stretched its wings, which were probably not much longer than the width of the table [round 6′ or 7′ table]. I was like ‘Fuck man!’ They’re enormous. Then, it started bouncing around on the table. It could do tricks. They taught the bird tricks which it could do very well, but it had an attitude. [Laughs] Kind of vain. Dismissive. He could tell that he was more intimidating. It was really amazing. I studied him so I could use bits of his movements and things in my character when I’m the man.
Good thing you don’t have a phobia of birds!
SAM RILEY : Or their feathers! [Laughs] It was intimidating. They’re really big. It wasn’t what I was expecting at all.
Was he fast?
SAM RILEY : He didn’t really want to do anything unless you were feeding him. It’s kind of like a dog. He’ll only sit if you have a treat. I wouldn’t want him to chase me around the room or something. When they fly…
This film is a bit darker than I anticipated, but your character finds a balance between the good while working for evil. It would be easy to portray a more ‘enslaved’ type of relationship with Maleficent because you were indebted to her. How did you find the balance in your character?
SAM RILEY : It’s kind of the way she [Angelina Jolie]… When we first met she was talking about the fact that it has to start like that, and he has to be afraid of her. Then, if you think about it, we spend every single day with each other for sixteen years… watching her [Sleeping Beauty] grow up. I’m the only person who really talks to her. We thought that it would be more adjusting – developing them like they’re married or something. He realizes over time that she’s not as cold, or wicked as she likes to think of herself, and he gradually grows in confidence, and love, I think. I think he worships her.
When you have a fairytale, or a famous film such as SLEEPING BEAUTY with such a moments, cult-like following is there an added pressure to please the fans?
SAM RILEY : Not for me, no. On Angelina, maybe, but a lot of it’s on her shoulders. I don’t think they could have cast anyone more perfect. I’m kind of used to that. It sounds really strange, but there’s this film that I did – I played a character that had a massive, nice little cult following – Ian Curtis from Joy Division [CONTROL]
You also were in Jack Kerouac’s ON THE ROAD, which has a huge following.
SAM RILEY : I played another literary character too, so I’ve kind of been unfortunate. [Laughs] Fortunate and unfortunate in that department – to incur the wrath of the devotees. [Laughs] Fortunately, the ones that bother to say anything to me have been nice, but I don’t look online. [Laughs]
I bet! Some people are vicious when they can hide behind a computer!
SAM RILEY : Yeah. It’s pathetic. Daytime TV is also terrifying. I was watching it while waiting for my make-up this morning… I’m wearing make-up. [Laughs]
You can’t tell. [Laughs]
SAM RILEY : Thank you! She’s an artist! [Laughs] Two things that are totally terrifying… the internet and daytime television.
What did you see?
SAM RILEY : ‘Kelly and’ something?
Oh, she used to host with Regis. ‘Live With Kelly And Michael’.
SAM RILEY : Oh yeah! I remember him! They had Charlize Theron on, and Josh Hartnett. Oh god. I’d be terrified! [Laughs]
Why?
SAM RILEY : Well, because it’s live. I don’t know. I’ve never done live TV I guess… and a roomful of screaming housewives…
What direction to you see yourself going next? Is going back to music in your future?
SAM RILEY : I’m tempted by it, and there’s a guy in Berlin who works at a record company that every time we have slightly too much to drink with each other I get to thinking ‘I’m gonna do another album!’ [Laughs] There’s unfinished business. Otherwise, with films and things, I don’t really know. I really enjoyed the experience of doing something so different with this film. You never really know what’s going to happen after. I’m always just waiting for something interesting… And there’s always karaoke. Do you sing?
I do. I used to work at a bar where I would jump up and sing Salt-N-Pepa or Joan Jett every night. Oh yeah, I can rap. [Laughs] What is your go to karaoke song?
SAM RILEY : [Laughs] ‘Hammer Time’ [You Can’t Touch This]
MALEFICENT explores the untold story of Disney’s most iconic villain from the classic “SLEEPING BEAUTY” and the elements of her betrayal that ultimately turn her pure heart to stone. Recently, WAMG sat down with director Robert Stromberg, as well as stars Elle Fanning and Sharlto Copley in a roundtable discussion (with a small group of press) to talk about bringing the classic story to life… with a twist. Check it out below. Also, be sure to tune in Monday for my exclusive interview with actor Sam Riley.
Driven by revenge and a fierce desire to protect the moors over which she presides, Maleficent cruelly places an irrevocable curse upon the human king’s newborn infant Aurora. As the child grows, Aurora is caught in the middle of the seething conflict between the forest kingdom she has grown to love and the human kingdom that holds her legacy. Maleficentrealizes that Aurora may hold the key to peace in the land and is forced to take drastic actions that will change both worlds forever. The film stars Angelina Jolie as Maleficent, Sharlto Copley, Elle Fanning, Sam Riley, Imelda Staunton, Juno Temple and Lesley Manville. “Maleficent” is produced by Joe Roth and directed by Robert Stromberg, with Angelina Jolie, Michael Vieira, Don Hahn, Palak Patel, Matt Smith and Sarah Bradshaw serving as executive producers. Linda Woolverton wrote the screenplay.
The part that resonated the most with me was the theme of female empowerment. I’m wondering what were the challenges bringing that to life. I would imagine with our modern day sensibilities, you sort of have to do that.
ROBERT STROMBERG : I was drawn to the strong female character. Maybe I picked up a little something from James Cameron because he loves the strength in female characters. We had discussions about that in the past. She is a superhero in her own right, but the strength of being a female and how to stay strong yet find the softer emotional attachment, it was a really interesting conundrum. It was fun to play with that.
We’ve seen you talk about, how as a child, you always had a dream to be a Disney princess. So what are the realities of then finally getting to be one, and it’s not just something animated.
ELLE FANNING : I know. It’s crazy. That was my dream when I was little. People would ask, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ And I would say, ‘A Disney princess.’ That’s the ultimate goal in life. And to be able to say that you actually – I’m still like pinching myself to say that I’m Aurora. It’s so weird for me. A little girl came up to me the other day because she had been seeing the trailers and stuff. And she asked, ‘Are you Aurora?’ And I’m like, ‘I guess I’m Aurora.’ It’s like crazy.
You get to own it.
ELLE FANNING : Yeah, I get to own it [laughs]. Yeah, it was a really special thing, and also, my first meeting that I had, because I heard that there was going to be a Maleficent movie, so I was like, I know it’s going to be from the villain’s point of view, but that means there has to be a Sleeping Beauty in it. So my ears perked up, but then, Rob [Stromberg], the director, wanted me to come in for a meeting – he and Linda [Woolverton], the writer – and from there, that meeting they gave me the part, and that handed over the script. And that was kind of like handing over the crown. And I was like, ‘Oh!’ That ride home, I was reading it in the car. And I kind of got motion sickness reading, but I was still reading it. I was so excited.
This is an exciting character for you because you get to flesh out the character more than past stories have done. What was your approach to take him and build on what we’ve seen?
SHARLTO COPLEY : I suppose I don’t like generally playing villains, which is interesting. What attracted me to this was, I suppose, the idea of playing a character that in a very female-centered form, is almost like a cautionary tale to men; I sort of saw it like that. I always have to find some sort of way in to play the character that I think is true to human nature, not just one person. So a lot of people might look at this role and go, ‘Oh, what a horrible man and really crazy!’ For me, it’s so universal what I’m actually drawing on to play him; I’m just doing it in an extreme way. So the man who works his whole life and make a hundred million dollars but has traded his wife in for someone younger and never spends any time with his kids – all he ever really gave them was money and maybe started with the best of intentions years ago of wanting to be the good husband and provide is an example of that you’ll see all around you. For me, Stefan is an extreme example of that sort of male drive and ambition and ego, if it runs away with itself, what it can do, and often actually does do.
What is it about villains that you don’t like that makes you not typically choose to play them?
SHARLTO COPLEY : I just…I don’t know. I suppose I’m not really a naturally brooding person. As a child, I was cast as Happy in “Snow White” when I was 9 by my teacher. It’s like, ‘Which child is the happy one, is always smiling? Sharlto.’ [Laughs] I suppose my default position is more happy than brooding and interested in doing evil things. Also, I think in today’s society there’s a lot of glamorization of villains as well, which I find very strange, especially if you come from a violent place like South African like I did. It’s very easy to glamorize violence as a nation. I think in America – now getting very carried away – it’s easy to glamorize warfare in video games or in movies or whatever when you’re doing to war with Iraq. If suddenly you were going to go to war with Russia tomorrow, suddenly it would just change everything again. You’re suddenly back in a society that’s going, ‘Whoa, whoa, what?’ Society has gotten to that point of being safe and protected and not really understanding what evil and violence actually means.
What impressed you most about working with Angelina Jolie on this film? She this wonderful duality to her character.
ROBERT STROMBERG : That’s my point. When I first learned I was doing this film, she was attached. There was this visual part which is perfect – of course it works. What I was pleasantly surprised was the depth of emotion of the character that she had been preparing for a long time to bring that to this iconic image. It’s this superpower. We had talked at length about how we wanted to escape from this one dimensional character which you can argue the character is in the classic telling of this. Her character goes through so many emotions but we wanted her character to be dark but explore how to have fun with evil and then to have redemption, regret and other emotions. She did her homework. She was ready. I just had to be there to capture those moments. I always like the first takes because they feel like the most honest takes. It wasn’t too much experimenting with this.
Would you say this part hinges on her playing it?
ROBERT STROMBERG : Absolutely. There are a lot of great actresses out there. First of all, in real life, she’s a strong person and a mother – ironically with some adopted children. You can apply all of those elements to the character in the film. That’s what probably makes it very honest and something that everyone – especially her – relates to. In my opinion, it wouldn’t have been the same emotionally if it were played by someone else. I was very fortunate to have her.
What were lessons that you learned from her both as an actress and just Angelina as a person?
ELLE FANNING : I mean, I think that she’s the perfect role model. I feel like whatever she’s like wanted to do, she’s done. Now, she’s directing and being a mom. It’s like she’s done everything, and she’s still not done with doing everything she wants. It’s just so incredible. You hear that name, and it’s like, such an intense name. And you think of all the pictures that you’ve seen of her and her at events and stuff. And you find her to be very – I was kind of scared. I was like, ‘Oh, she’s going to be really intense lady.’ And then you meet her, and it’s like she’s not – she’s still like everyone walks into a room and everyone looks at her. She’s so powerful. But I got to know the side of her that was more sensitive and really playful. Like they would yell cut, and all her kids would like – they were on set all the time – they went to her. And she’d be holding Vivienne and Knox on her hip. Like to see that, and learn she’s very into the detail of things. She’s very specific like with her outfit. Like it really mattered, every little thing mattered which to me, I learned from that as this character’s going to live with her forever, in her acting career, for life. So for me, I took that away to always really pay attention to all the little details. They all come together to make the final.
Your character also has a physicality to her too. Did you go back into Disney archives and look at the Mary Costa and the dancing girl.
ELLE FANNING : Right. Well, I had seen the Sleeping Beauty ballet. I do ballet, so that was – I don’t know. I think that one of the reasons that I do dance is like because it helps with acting, and it helps your physicality of it. Even though you’re playing someone with bad posture, you know the muscles to use to kind of do that. But I did watch – I’d seen the animated one so many times, but I watched it again right before we started filming because she has certain hand gestures. Like the way she walks and her posture. So I tried to bring all of that physicality into this one because that’s what you fall in love with when you see her. You fall in love with kind of the outside because she’s kind of one-dimensional in the animated. So for ours, we tried to make her more layered and have that depth. But then on the outside, look like the character that you love.
To that point, given the name of the title character and the legacy she carries from Sleeping Beauty, were you happy to see the PG approach here – that it’s not necessarily about the evil but about the second chance and righting a wrong?
SHARLTO COPLEY : I think fairy tales over ages have interesting messages. I resonate with the idea of love saving you from pain and darkness, which is does. So in the story, it saves Maleficent from that, but it doesn’t save Stefan – he’s too far gone. The way I played him and certainly how I saw it was that he always loved her, the whole way through, but he had compromised something that he could never come back from; the guilt of that drove him literally crazy. All he could do now was hang on to that typical go at power; he couldn’t allow himself to be wrong and go back and let love same him, basically. That was attractive to me; the idea of that message in the tale was interesting to me.
It must be interesting in general to play opposite Angelina Jolie, but to see her in the horns and costume – tell me about the sheer fun of doing those scenes with her.
SHARLTO COPLEY : What was interesting to me was that Angie has, I think, an enormous range as an actress to play very soft and vulnerable if she wants, or very hard and like,’ leave me a long, I don’t need you,’ as a woman. There are very few actresses who can do that whole range. And there’s fewer, still, movie star actresses who are known and loved by people that will choose a role where they are going to say, ‘I hate you,’ to a baby and know that they can come back from that and know that the audience will know there’s still heart there. I think when I first met her, one of the things she had said, ‘I hope we work together one day,’ she had spoken about what I did with my character Wikus (from District 9) as well, where you’re playing with those layers of constant vulnerability and toughness, and incompetence or competence, these different aspects we have as actors. So to do that with her, to know that she’s going through that, my character is going to explore the opposite of what I did with Wikus – he’s going to start nice and end badly. There was a lot of back story with the characters that doesn’t make it into the cut of the film in the end which was a lot of fun, which was the degradation of their relationship whereas he’s getting older and suddenly he’s feeling inadequate because he doesn’t have wings and he wants to be the man in this relationship and she doesn’t understand that as a human he wants to build things – what’s wrong with wanting to build castles and what’s wrong with ambition? I don’t have magic; I need to chop trees down to burn wood to stay warm – it’s not magic! What’s wrong with that? So we had a lot of fun, playful, off-camera all the time arguing from the position of our characters, me arguing on behalf of humans and men, and her [for] magical creatures and women. It was pretty fun.
I’m wondering what the breakdown of practical versus CG was like? Did you have a preference?
ROBERT STROMBERG : AVATAR was pretty much all motion capture. ALICE IN WONDERLAND was all green screen. When I did OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL, I wanted to reintroduce set. It was only after learning the importance of scene by scene what should be built and what shouldn’t. I brought all of that knowledge into this film and realized that, we have a lot of visual scenes, but we had a lot of emotional scenes. I wanted actors to physically touch things and go through real leaves and walk on grass. It helped them. It helped me in terms of blocking scenes. It became crucial in that we didn’t have a lot of things that weren’t actually there. Again, pulling from the experience on those other films what’s going to be there and creating things so you can get an honest, emotional performance talking to a tennis ball.
How was Angelina able to handle the physical nature of her role – flying and such?
ROBERT STROMBERG : She was gung-ho to do everything. There are limitations. There’s a point where we realize some things have to be either a stunt person or CGI – not just for the obvious reasons of danger but so we can do some things we can do with the character that would take her into that superhero quality to it. There are some of the fight scenes she did a lot of it. But then you get into some shots that require almost acrobatic-like moves, we had to talk about other ways to accomplish that.
I’m curious because there is a definite difference between 14 and 16. Do you enjoy looking back on the film now as kind of a time capsule, or is it kind of slightly awkward in your youth too?
ELLE FANNING : It’s funny because movies that I’ve looked back on now, that maybe when I did them I was too young to see. And it’s kind of looking at it like baby albums. You’re like whoa. You get to – and it also like captures the way you were in that time. So it’s fun for me to look back at them and I like it. I kind of enjoy it. Like that’s little me. But now, I look at this, and I think I look younger. I feel like whoa, even though it doesn’t feel like that long ago, but I guess it kind of was. It’s like a documenting each stage of life, yeah.
THE SINGLE MOMS CLUB is in theaters now and to celebrate WAMG sat down with Terry Crews, who plays Branson in the film, to talk about love scenes, football, and the musical HAIRSPRAY. Check it out below!
When five struggling single moms put aside their differences to form a support group, they find inspiration and laughter in their new sisterhood, and help each other overcome the obstacles that stand in their way. THE SINGLE MOMS CLUB stars Nia Long, Amy Smart, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Zulay Henao, and Cocoa Brown, making this one film you don’t want to miss!
This film celebrates all of the single mothers out there. Was that one of the big draws for you to be a part of this film?
Terry Crews: Oh, big time! First of all, that’s my big audience! [laughs] To be honest, it’s really a cool place to be! I’ve got EXPENDABLES for the guys, and then I have ‘Everybody Hates Chris’… shows like that for the ladies. WHITE CHICKS, or that kind of thing that makes the ladies laugh.
When I met my wife, she was a single mom, and it really resonated with me that Tyler is doing something like this. Hollywood really doesn’t represent everyone in most things, so it’s really refreshing to have a single mom being represented in all different ethnicities and cultures… There are billions of people on Earth, and each one of them has their own story. That’s why you can just keep making entertainment. Forever! Everybody’s story is different, and even if it’s similar once the time changes it’s a whole different story. You know what I’m saying? I love it. I absolutely love it.
You have such an amazing chemistry with Cocoa Brown, and you are actually friends with her husband. Did that help aid the chemistry between you two, and how were those love scenes knowing her husband?
Terry Crews: Yeah, well believe me! We were on the phone! [Laughs] It’s funny, because I called my wife and was like “I’m about to do a love scene with Cocoa! It’s ok! It’ll be fun! It’ll be good!” [laughs] and then you hang up! And she called her husband. I talked to him and was just like “Hey man, I just want to let you know that I respect her, and let me tell you… it will all be pro.” You know, you just want to get it out in the air. You have to respect the other persons life partner. I’ve been fortunate in my business to have people who always think that way, because I’ve heard horror stories of people who didn’t and that is not a good place to be… but Tyler’s sets are a family set. They’re very, very cool, and Cocoa is just such an amazing person, so we laughed, we joked, and we did the scene, and it was a lot of fun!
Tyler is known to have short shooting schedules with really long days. How was that for you, and did that give you a chance to improvise on set at all?
Terry Crews: He’s like Clint Eastwood. Clint Eastwood shoots the same way. He shoots two takes and he’s out. They’re done by, like, 6pm, which is unheard of. That’s the only way I can compare it. People say that Tyler rushes, but Clint Eastwood rushes… Clint Eastwood does it the same way. A lot of people don’t want to wear the actors out… but, I do know this. I warm up way before I get there.
Do you?
Terry Crews: Oh yeah! I’m in the trailer doing the things, and doing the things so when I get on set it’s action. It’s go. I’m on full speed. You don’t want to warm it up, and then wait, because what happens is they say “Ok, we’re moving on” and you missed it. This is my nightmare – to go home wishing that I would have put something out on-screen, and wanted to give that performance, but not have been able to. That’s a nightmare. For an actor, that’s a nightmare. What I do is I give it 100%, and I say ‘Tyler, if I’m giving too much just pull me back.” You can never turn a guy up, but you can always turn them down. Turning someone up is too much. They’ll turn off on you. So, I give it 110% and he’ll go ‘Oh, ok! Give me an 8! On a scale of 1 to 10 I’ll take an 8.” [Laughs]
I have to ask this because I’m from St. Louis. We currently have the Rams, but there are rumors of the Rams coming back to LA. Are you kind of excited about that since you played for the Los Angeles Rams?
Terry Crews: Eh. I don’t care at all, to be honest with you. I’ve been in the NFL, did my whole thing. It’s like having a favorite movie studio. I’ll do a movie for Warner Bros. I’ll do a movie for Lionsgate! I’ll do a movie for Universal! [laughs]
That’s a great point!
Terry Crews: It is! And what people don’t understand is that in the NFL the money goes to the same people. It goes to the same place. They revenue share. So, their records don’t even matter. See, I’ve seen the Wizard…
[laughs] That’s a great way to put it!
Terry Crews: [Laughs] It’s like the curtain went down “Oh, boy! Wow!” and you realize that this is the reason that players go from team, to team, to team. Brett Favre can be on the Green Bay Packers, and then he’s on the hated Minnesota Vikings the next year! How can this happen? [laughs] Guess what? It’s because everybody is getting the same money. So, I learned to relax with all of that, but I love a good game… just like I love to see a good movie. I don’t care who makes it. A good game, ahh… I can appreciate a wonderful game. That’s why the Super Bowl sucked. [laughs]
I’ll tell ya, I’m a baseball girl. I’m not that much of a football girl, but I sat there during that game, bored out of my mind!
Terry Crews: Yes! It’s like watching a bad movie! [laughs]
You’ve done comedy, you’ve done voice-over in animation, you’ve done action – which I’m really excited about THE EXPENDABLES. Is there any type of role that you’d love to play, that maybe you haven’t yet?
Terry Crews: I want to do a musical.
Do you really?
Terry Crews: I want to do a musical bad.
You’ve certainly got the voice for it.
Terry Crews: I would love to do a musical. Dancing… singing… the whole thing. HAIRSPRAY was my favorite movie that came out that year. That, and 300. It’s weird. I’m that weird. [laughs] 300 and HAIRSPRAY! That’s a swing, right? Terry Crews is everything in the middle of that! [laughs] I love HAIRSPRAY! The music… just the whole thing. I get down with that! I love when you do it right. One of my favorite moments in movie history was when Spike Lee did SCHOOL DAZE. He had good and bad hair… that whole musical segment of good and bad hair. You hadn’t seen a musical in years, and he did a segment right in the middle of that. A song, dance, music, people, stage, lighting… the whole thing! I said “That is HOT!” Spike knew it was hot. That’s me. I wanna do one of those. I would love to do that!
TYLER PERRY’S THE SINGLE MOMS CLUB is written, produced and directed by Tyler Perry. Lionsgate and Tyler Perry Studios Present, A Tyler Perry Studios/Lionsgate Production.
Welcome, beloved guests. The time has come to check-in to THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL. Upon arrival, be sure to take in the beautiful world surrounding you, as created by director and co-writer Wes Anderson, as well as the wonderful hotel aesthetic, brought to you by production designer Adam Stockhausen. This week, WAMG and a few members of the press sat down (in a roundtable discussion) with Anderson and Stockhausen to talk about Anderson’s all new caper THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL. Check it out below!
THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL recounts the adventures of Gustave H, a legendary concierge at a famous European hotel between the wars; and Zero Moustafa, the lobby boy who becomes his most trusted friend. The story involves the theft and recovery of a priceless Renaissance painting; a raging battle for an enormous family fortune; a desperate chase on motorcycles, trains, sleds, and skis; and the sweetest confection of a love affair — all against the back-drop of a suddenly and dramatically changing Continent.
You have an amazing cast in this film. How do you go about managing a cast of this size, especially with their schedules and everything else?
Wes Anderson: Well, with the schedules, you’ve just got to figure it out. It’s a puzzle. I don’t really remember anybody who we were really up against it with, like they were only giving us this amount of time and that sort of thing, so it worked out fine. Mostly, people who are going to come, who are well known and have agreed to do a littler part, they just want to know you’re trying to make it. You’re looking after them and trying to get them done in as reasonable timeframe as you can and so on. With this kind of group, it’s not really a big thing of managing them. They’re all people where you bring them together and say, “Please do what you do.” They’re so authoritative and they all have so much of their own processes. We do all kinds of preparation, get everything set, and then they come in and it’s sort of becomes a little chaotic. We work very, very quickly and they just sort of take over.
I love the worlds that you create in all of your films, but especially in this, it’s kind of a culmination. How did you go about collaborating together to create such a rich, lush world?
Adam Stockhausen: It starts with research and with location scouting and things are pulled from the real world from places that we see, even places we don’t end up shooting. But there are always tons of details and amazing things that you see just traveling around and looking at stuff. And so, that’s kind of half of it. And then, I think in this case historical research of hotels and of travel and of all these different things. And then, you take that and Wes thumbnails through the key sequences to begin, and then, more and more and more of the piece as we go. And then, you lay that all out on a gigantic table and start breaking apart what’s a set, what’s a location, what’s a miniature build, what’s a painting, what’s whatever, and work through step by step by step.
Wes Anderson: He does a thing where he just gets millions of images and we start looking at them together and I say, “I like this. I like this. I like this.” He’s great at gathering and shaping those. And then, each day even in the earliest of phases of prepping everything, he’ll usually come to me at some point during the day and say, “Okay. Can we do 45 minutes at 3 o’clock?” We sit down and he says, “Okay. I’ve got this done.” He’s got things in different stages of preparation and different options of ways we can go and that sort of stuff. It goes like that over and over and over again.
Adam Stockhausen: Yeah. It keeps going, because in the process of shooting, there’s new stuff coming every day, and you can’t possibly design all of it at one time at the beginning, so it’s really a rolling process. So, we’ll work all day shooting something, and then it’s like, “Great, but before we relax, we have to talk about what shoots next Wednesday, because we just got brand new sketches for that.” That process goes and goes and goes.
Was there anything that you brought to Adam and said, “Let’s do this” and Adam said, “No, I can’t make that happen” or that Adam brought to you where you’re like, “No, that’s not quite my vision”?
Wes Anderson: No, because he didn’t really do that. I mean, I won’t say, “Do this impossible thing.” I might say, “Do this almost impossible thing.” But his response to “Do this almost impossible thing” is, “Okay. Let’s look at it and figure it out.” But essentially, he’s going to say, “We’ll do it. We’re going to make it work somehow.” But sometimes that means he’ll say to me, “Okay. I know that here’s what we want to do. If we do it on this day, we can do this. If we can shuffle something around and I can do it two days later, we’ll get the thing from such and such and we’ll be able to do that and we’ll make a choice that way.” Often, it means we find some other approach because of something that’s going to cost this, and we think that’s not really so valuable to us. So anyway, it’s always changing. It’s always evolving. And this thing you were saying about traveling around and discovering things scouting, that’s a huge part of this thing if you just gather all this stuff and we want to share it.
Adam Stockhausen: Because the real items just have their own stories. It’s so nice to have the real thing, not sort of a cardboard version of it that we faked the real thing, but the actual thing.
Wes Anderson: The actual real thing and we’ll see these things and say, “Now why do we keep seeing this? In this part of the world, we keep seeing this happen.” I’ll say, “Well, these things over the doors mean this.” There’s history in all this stuff.
Can you talk a little about how this project first came together, and what inspired this particular story?
Wes Anderson: Well first, it was just this character played by Ralph (Fiennes). And, it wasn’t a hotel concierge. It was just a guy which is inspired a bit by an old friend of mine and my friend, Hugo (Guinness), who wrote it with me. We had written a kind of short story version of a script inspired by our friend, but we didn’t really know what to do with it or where it would go. It didn’t really quite take off and it was short. And then, over the years, I started thinking that I would like to do something related to Stefan Zweig’s work. I started reading this writer who I’d never heard of and I just had this idea of doing something like his work. And then, Mike sort of combined them and in the process of that had this idea of him being a hotel concierge. We always said our friend would be the greatest concierge and he said it. He said, “Oh I’d be wonderful. I’d actually be the very best.” We sort of put that altogether and then we made the script very quickly. After that, we just needed the ingredients.
What was the thing from Stefan Zweig that you wanted to tell on-screen? Was it the storytelling?
Wes Anderson: It wasn’t one thing in the end. The first one I read was “Beware of Pity” and I immediately just loved the way we get into the story in that and it’s something he does over and over again in his fiction. In America, we didn’t really know Zweig until a few years ago. He was just out of print except for some of the biographies maybe. But I loved the way he began a story. I loved his voice and that book was just a favorite of mine. Then I read more of the fiction and I kept seeing this device of somebody would meet somebody else in some settings. Sometimes they’re away from where they live and they meet some mysterious person and then eventually some things happen and eventually that person says, “Well I could tell you my story if you wanted to hear it.” And that’s the thing. That’s the novel. That’s the story. But also, I read “The World of Yesterday,” his memoir which is kind of a portrait. The most memorable thing to me perhaps in it is his description of the Vienna before 1914 and the Europe before 1914 and what it meant to him and what he thought he was participating in and how suddenly and radically it changed and was just obliterated over the continuing years, first nationalism and then these movements of fascism and socialism and how they played out in front of him. His account of that became a kind of backdrop to me for what our story could be, even though our story really has nothing to do with it. The actual story in our movie is not really related to any Zweig story, but it’s that stuff.
Jeff Goldblum talked about you making other films and books available to them while they were on set. As vibrant as your script is and the set designs and this world that you created, what do you hope that they take from those other sources?
Wes Anderson: Nothing in particular. It’s just that everybody is there together and I’ve got all this stuff that I’ve been looking at. Now they want to just work on their thing and they’ve all got their own process, so I think it’s just for fun. And then, maybe they’ll use it one way or another. I don’t know what they do. It’s just, “Here’s the stuff that relates to the movie that we’ve got if you’re interested.” And literally, it’s sitting on a table there and people come by and take a movie. Sometimes maybe they’ll just like that movie. When you finish work, practically everybody in that place is going to watch a movie at night anyway. They’re tired. They have dinner. They go up to their room. They’re watching TV.
Do you remember what specifically you left for them? I mean, Jeff mentioned some movie titles.
Wes Anderson: Yeah, we had one called LOVE ME TONIGHT. That’s a Rouben Mamoulian [movie]. We had lots of Lubitsch (Ernst Lubitsch) movies: THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER, TROUBLE IN PARADISE, TO BE OR NOT TO BE, DESIGN FOR LIVING… all the Lubitsch musicals. We had lots of ‘30s Hitchcock movies: THE LADY VANISHES, THE 39 STEPS, and also SABOTAGE and YOUNG AND INNOCENT and the Max Ophuls movies: THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE and LA RONDE maybe we had that. We had Ingmar Bergman’s THE SILENCE because it’s set in a hotel in a made up Eastern European country and a train and all that sort of stuff. In fact, we made their hotel corridors. His are in black and white so we had to guess.
Adam Stockhausen: They’re very similar. All the hotel details are taken from that.
Wes Anderson: Yeah, we just took them from his movie.
How do you bring your audiences into your films? In THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS you have someone narrating the book. RUSHMORE has you opening the curtains and then stepping in. In this film, you have multiple layers. You have a girl with the book, and then that goes to the author (Tom Wilkinson) reading the book, and then going onto F. Murray Abraham who is narrating his own story. Was there anything to bringing more into the different layers that you had in approaching this?
Wes Anderson: Did you ever read Roald Dahl’s “The Wonderful Story of Henry Suger”? It’s one of the children’s books but kind of for older children, I guess. That one has a very similar thing: a layer, another layer, another layer. There’s a guy who’s in a house and he finds a book and he opens the book and in the book a guy describes what happened to him and he meets somebody who then tells him a story, so it really does have all those layers like that. And Zweig does this all through his work. I think there’s a mystery about it and there’s sort of a feeling of setting a stage and giving some meaning and some context before you get into things happening in one thing after another. And also, somehow I feel like without me deliberately wanting to say one thing or another about it, it’s something about just storytelling as some kind of thematic whatever-it-is is in there.
Touching on that and playing off of that, I think that’s so clever that it’s this meta-comment on storytelling and playing around with storytelling devices. A lot of people talk about “save the cat” moments in films, but you have a “kill the cat” moment, and I think that’s so funny.
Wes Anderson: They do that to make you like a character.
Here you have it where you’re already not liking the character, but you really don’t like the character. There’s a visceral reaction to it.
Wes Anderson: Is that right when people kill a cat-like that? I was thinking of it in Berlin and I said, “Why do you kill animals?” and these people said, “Well we don’t kill animals. These are actors.” We feel like what actor doesn’t want a death scene anyway? If I was a cat, I would say, “I would love it if you kill me in this one.” I have a great way I’m going to do this. So, I feel like I’m doing a favor to these animals.
Everybody talked about how on the set you had this great communal atmosphere. Is that something that was particular to this film or is that in all of your films where you bring the cast members together and you all eat together and you have this great atmosphere. Does that aid the shooting process for you? Do you feel like you get more from the talent that way?
Wes Anderson: I don’t know, but it’s definitely this one more than any of the other ones, we were all together. Adam and Bob Yeoman, our Director of Photography, and Milena (Canonero), our Costumer Designer, and the whole cast, we were all together in one little hotel that we took over and we had a cook that we brought in. It was a very comfortable, modest, but just terrific little hotel. In fact, the guy who owned the hotel and his wife, we cast them both in the movie. But we cast him as one of the people in the front of house at the front desk of the hotel and he was in a purple thing and everything. We would leave work and then we would go back to the hotel and he would already be there in his regular clothes. I don’t know how he always got there ahead of us but we’d leave him at one hotel and he’d be waiting at the other hotel. I just think it’s more fun to have everybody together. And also, what I don’t really like is I’ve had this thing where everybody has trailers and nine different people are leaving and they go watch ESPN or something like that, and we need them back on the set, and then one of them says, “Has so and so come back on the set? Well let me know when he’s on his way and then I’ll come.” And you’re just wasting time. I feel like everybody can go home when we’re finished with the whole movie, but until then it’s nice if everybody just stays together and stays in it. I think most actors like that. Most actors want to kind of just commit themselves to it because it’s not a day job for most of these people. They would do it for nothing, and in fact, they have to if they work with us.
Do you have a favorite set or location that you worked on for this film or any of his other films?
Adam Stockhausen: There were tons and tons of really fun ones for this one. The hotel is obvious and it was a lot of fun, but there were some little ones that were a lot of fun. One of my favorite stories from this one is this scene where they’re in a telephone booth in the middle of this snow-covered field and we have these mobile haystacks that you could get inside and walk around. One of my favorite days of shooting it was the day we were marching the haystacks around the field trying to line them up just right.
Wes Anderson: We were talking with them on walkie talkie and there were seven guys inside the haystack and we’re saying, “Go to the right” and the haystack just moved left.
Were there any particular challenges to playing with the different aspect ratios?
Wes Anderson: The only real challenge was from lawyers who just don’t know. Aspect ratio for whatever reason is like a thing that goes into contracts. You’re required to deliver a movie between 90 minutes and 120 minutes in the 1:85 or 2:35 ratio. And so, the lawyers see this thing. We’re going to do it in a bunch of different things here, and they were like, “What is this?” and they think it’s a problem. For us, after we paid these fees for it to be argued over for a certain period of time, we then just did it and it’s simple enough to accomplish. This sort of square ratio that most of the movie is in, every movie is shot that way essentially. Every movie except for a super widescreen movie is shot this way and then cropped. The negative is this. It’s just using a whole negative, and that’s the way all movies were like up until 1954, I think. And the other formats we’re using are just normal formats. We just shot them each like a different movie, and then it all gets put together. All the prints, almost everything, is done digitally now, so it’s very simple for us to decide how we want to present it. It was a very smooth process.
What are you working on next?
Wes Anderson: Well, I just can’t say. I have this thing I’ve been working on, but it’s so early and I just feel like it’s … Because I’ve just been working on it, I’m kind of inclined that I shouldn’t say anything about that. It doesn’t sound good the way I described it and I could describe it better. I don’t want to put the bad version out there before I’ve had a chance to make a better one.
Fox Searchlight Pictures in association with Indian Paintbrush and Studio Babelsberg present, an American Empirical Picture, THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL, directed and written by Wes Anderson and story by Anderson & Hugo Guinness. The film stars Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revolori, F. Murray Abraham, Mathieu Amalric, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Jude Law, Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Saoirse Ronan, Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, Tom Wilkinson and Owen Wilson.
The creative team includes producers Wes Anderson, Scott Rudin, Steven Rales and Jeremy Dawson, executive producers Molly Cooper, Charlie Woebcken, Christoph Fisser and Henning Molfenter, co-producer Jane Frazer, director of photography Robert Yeoman, A.S.C., production designer Adam Stockhausen, editor Barney Pilling, music supervisor Randall Poster, original music by Alexandre Desplat, associate producer Octavia Peissel and co-producer for Scott Rudin Productions Eli Bush.
