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Q&A with Damien Chazelle and Emma Stone

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of La La Land. 

How did you prepare for the role of Mia?

Emma Stone: I met Damien while working on Cabaret in New York. That was my first professional exposure to singing and dancing. The fact that I was doing a musical on stage was insanely good timing-wise because it felt like for the first time in my adult life that I had the stamina to do a film like this. For ten weeks, we would rehearse every day at our base in Atwater Village in LA. We would go every day to our dance lessons, then Ryan would go to piano and I would go to singing lessons.

“Either a scene would inspire a melody or a melody would inspire the writing.”

How did weave together the musical universe along with the reality of the story?

Damien Chazelle: It was a huge challenge to find that balance. I talked with Emma and Ryan about tone and how the more realistic scenes we were pitching would take place before and after the big flights of fantasy. We decided to approach everything as though it were happening in reality so that we could ground that absurd musical idea and make it feel like a natural outgrowth of the characters’ behaviors and emotions. This made the opening number particularly tricky because it’s the one number where we haven’t spent any time with any characters and haven’t been able to build up to it. We wound up doing the transition from real life in an abbreviated way via sound. Then the idea of different radios building on each other and the idea of everyone playing music leading into one person that starts singing and then it becomes a collective thing. We always had to get from idea to fantasy.

The audition scenes add to the contemporary feel of the film. What was it like filming those scenes?

Stone: It was very cathartic. It was nice to have a productive outlet to have bad auditions after years of having that experience in real life. That audition at the beginning where Mia is interrupted is Ryan’s story. That same kind of crying thing happened to Ryan. I liked being able to incorporate a couple of real elements into the film. You never feel that when you have bad auditions that they’ll one day be useful in some way, so it was nice to throw those in there.

How did you approach the epilogue number?

Chazelle: During much of the shoot it was this parallel thing that was building as we would shoot other things. Doing the real-life versions of these scenes and then doing the fantasy versions was a quick turn. In a way, this spoke to the idea that musicals are about wish fulfillment and dreams being real. I knew this would be a movie where I wanted the real story to be lifelike, but wanted to build to this big number where everything works out just so.

What was the process to score and create the music?

Chazelle: I worked with a composer, Justin Hurwitz, on Whiplash and on this movie. Early on when I thought about making a musical, he was one of the first people I talked to. Once I actually started the writing process, he was by my side creating basic melodies. Our dialogue consisted of this constant stream of inspiration, either a scene would inspire a melody or a melody would inspire the writing. It was this partnership that existed before the script was even written.

Q&A with Meryl Streep and Hugh Grant

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Florence Foster Jenkins. 

The opening scene is really beautiful, and frames the story so well. Can you discuss how that was conceived?

Meryl Streep: Well, it’s interesting that you mention that scene, because the script that we both received didn’t start that way. It started with a trial. And Bayfield was trying to get the inheritance that was due him— based on the will she always carried in her little suitcase. But in the film script we received there were evil cousins. And this sort of adheres to history: Somehow, the briefcase disappeared. And in the script, the evil cousins stole it on the night that she died. So he was without an inheritance, and he went to court to receive it. They actually shot it… Hugh should talk about that though.

“There’s only one thing harder than the ends of films, and that’s the beginnings of films.”

Hugh Grant: Yes, that’s right. We shot it. And I was rather good in that scene as well, actually [laughter]. Poor old Bayfield is being given a hard time in that scene by the family lawyers. This is three months after Florence’s death, and they’re saying, “come on you’re just a gold digger… you picked up her dry cleaning and you say you were her husband.” Because the problem was that they never got married officially. It was just sort of a declaration of love that they had—

Streep: It was a common-law marriage. They had rings… It was a little private ceremony at their home. But she had a husband already, which was a problem.

Grant: Yes. Who had given her more than just a ring! So anyway, yes, it used to start like that. And there’s only one thing harder than the ends of films, and that’s the beginnings of films. It’s so difficult to set the right note. And what happened was, that trial scene was designed to make the audience intrigued, and then you cut back to earlier in their story and you’re supposed to be wondering, “does Bayfield really love her, or is he just a gold digger?” But we felt that wasn’t quite right because the audience didn’t bond with him through that approach, and if they didn’t bond with him then they wouldn’t bond with her either, or the rest of the film. So the opening you saw today was shot months later, actually, as a new way of starting the film.

Streep: And it was my idea, the monologue for Bayfield… I just want to say!

It’s also a great way to open the film because it’s the one chance the audience has to see you as a duo, as a couple performing together, doing the craft that you love.

Grant: Well, I was nagging Stephen Frears throughout the entire shoot for more references to the fact that Bayfield was a failed actor. Because I thought it was charming that we both had insufficient talent and were slightly delusional. I always thought it’d be boring if people thought he was just a smooth, aristocratic ringmaster. And it was much more interesting if you knew that underneath, really, without this crazy world… he was nothing. He was an out-of-work actor.

Streep: It adheres more closely to what that relationship was, because we read their love letters — they were together for 35 years — and they wrote each other fervent letters and they referred to their love of art and music. And that’s where their affection connected.

Do you think, on some level, that she knew she had a bad voice?

While we were making it, there was a sort of a tug about what the story really was. Is this the story of Bayfield’s dilemma? In which she’s an object… she’s deluded, and he’s got multiple things going on. Or is she also a nuanced character? Do you question what she knows? And to me, it was more interesting to imagine that there was a sentience to her, a self-awareness and a sort of decision somewhere in her head to be happy. In spite of everything. In spite of her illness, in spite of his girlfriend… You know, I don’t know. I don’t know what the real Florence knew or cared about. So that was something that really engaged me.

They’re both part of this ‘club,’ and they’re all enjoying it immensely. How did you conceive that club? Was it just a bunch of hard-of-hearing people, or were they on her side?

Grant: That was very much one of my questions to Stephen Frears early on. To which I got the traditional Stephen Frear’s answer: “No idea!” I asked why the Verdi Club would fall for this? Why are they applauding so wildly, do we think? And my personal theory was that a lot of it was, in fact, just a love of Florence and what she represented. Her enthusiasm and all that. And then kindness. But I think also that those music societies in New York in the ’40’s were full of people who were all highly socially aspirant. They were all broken old countesses and such, and people who wanted to be in something.

Streep: People who had no other outlet, really. If they were educated and wealthy, they were not women in business, women in medicine, women in law, and women in government. The women who had a lot of money and education had clubs. And they could give their husband’s or their father’s money away.

Grant: They definitely didn’t want to be thrown out of the Verdi club, because then they might be thrown out of the Wagner club, or the whatever club.

Streep: Right. It was socially aspirant. It was where women found their place in the hierarchy of society. But I think one of the things that concerned me was that we not make fun of these ‘old biddies.’ One of the reason we couldn’t shoot this in New York was that we couldn’t find a group of women of that age who actually had gray hair! And that’s absolutely true.

Q&A with Simon Pegg and Karl Urban

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Star Trek Beyond. 

I love the intro, where it seems like everyone is settling in, but not necessarily in a good way. What’s it like living in your character for so many years?

Karl Urban: I think it was a bold, brilliant move for Simon [Pegg, co-writer] and Doug [Jung, co-writer] to start the film with scenes of weariness, to focus on the reality of being in space for that amount of time. I always liked the idea of seeing what happens in between all the big action spectacles. So we get a bit of the monotony and the inter-character relationships and I feel that there’s a real development from the first two films. Kirk obviously, is not too young anymore.

“It was a bold move to start the film with scenes of weariness.”

Simon Pegg: Don’t tell Chris [Pine] that!

Urban: I think all the characters have become more efficient at their jobs and you can see the little subtle things. When Spock and I are walking down as the attack is going on and he has his phaser on and is ready for action, it reminds me of what it was like when I watched the original series. A wonderful device that Simon and Doug utilized was splitting everyone up in the crew. I think that was really important in the 50th year of Star Trek to deliver something new to the audience. With these pairings, we get to see things that we haven’t seen before. And I really love the pairing of Spock and Bones, these two characters that are so diametrically opposed to each other. Obviously there’s some comedy there but also a heartfelt interaction and honest communication. I think that’s something that’s fresh and rewarding.

For a summer blockbuster, this film has some really nice, quiet character moments.

Pegg: Absolutely. This film is a particular kind of film; it’s a big summer movie. It has to check some boxes. But for Doug and I, and the cast involved, it’s more meaningful. I don’t think you can watch a film that is full of bangs and flashes and explosions and care about it if you don’t have some care about the people that it is happening to. We see wholesale destruction on a massive scale these days in big cinema movies. Things are destroyed willy-nilly all over the place, and it’s a bit numbing. There doesn’t seem to be any peril involved. Whereas if you instill the characters with a sense of something the audience can latch onto, it makes you feel a bit more. Justin [Lin, director] was at pains to make sure as well that we had a vein of humanity running through it, which gives us something to cling onto amidst all the inevitable action.

When you’re on the planet, Bones is really man-to-man with Spock. There’s no turbo lift or computers to talk to. You’re basically marooned.

Urban: I like the challenge to take these two characters who are so opposite and throw them into a survival situation. What was particularly appealing to me was that Spock was mortally wounded and McCoy has no medical equipment with him and yet figures out a way to stop the hemorrhaging by cauterizing the wound with various implements that he has around him. For me, that showed great ingenuity. I think this is probably the most well-defined version of McCoy that I’ve had the pleasure to play. Traditionally in Star Trek, he was a consigliere, a friend, a device that would bring forth Kirk’s existential dilemma. So pairing Spock and McCoy together was a wonderful opportunity to develop those characters. I get the feeling they learned something about each other from this experience. And then both of them withdraw from their respective positions, put the shields back up, but there remains a deeper respect, an unspoken bond between them, an understanding.

Can you tell us a bit more about Uhura’s special necklace?

Pegg: Doug and I had this idea of this love token of Uhura’s coming back later in the film to help them find out where she was located. So we had this idea of a radioactive mineral. We saw the humor that Spock is basically keeping track of her! But we didn’t have a name for it, so we reached out to the guys who created Memory Alpha, which is this Star Trek Wikipedia. It was an exhaustive, invaluable resource for Doug and I since we would fact-check everything, like what’s inside of a frozen torpedo or what year the first annex vessel made its maiden voyage. And we wrote to the guys and we said “Look, we have this thing and it needs a name, and we’d like you to be part of this movie and have your name in the credits, can you name it for us?” and they came back in about two hours with a really detailed, etymological breakdown of the word Vulcya in its syllabic structure, where it was from, what part of Vulcan, how it had evolved, etc. It just goes to show how awesome Star Trek fans can be. We just wanted a name, but fine, we’ll take this encyclopedia of the word and use it in the film. It was a nice way to include the fans in this 50th Anniversary. If it weren’t for the fans, the show would’ve been cancelled in its third season. It’s been kept alive by those people.

Q&A with Pamela Romanowsky

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of The Adderall Diaries. 

How did you get involved with this project?

Pamela Romanowsky: I came to this book as a casual reader. I got it from the same bookstore you see James [Franco] signing books in at the start of the movie. I lived next door to that bookstore for many years. I’d go in and ask what’s cool, what should I read, and one day the owner handed me The Adderall Diaries. I read it; loved it; thought about it for a long time. One of things I find compelling is that it has so many ideas within it. His brain is like a Ping-Pong match and then you add the Adderall and it’s about ten thousand things at once. I think anyone who read it would find something to attach to, but for me it was the opening quote that I use in the film: “We understand the world by how we retrieve memories, re-order information into stories to justify how we feel.” I was a psychology major in college long before my film life. So I studied memory and identity and human behavior and addiction, all in an academic way. It was exciting for me to think about some of those things cinematically. Memory in cinema is also kind of an obsession of mine. I like to see the ways different people represent it. But the more traditional techniques that have been used to identify flashbacks don’t necessary represent the way I process memory. For me, memory can be intrusive and sometimes unwelcome flashes of a smell or an image or moment and they really color the way that you’re in the present. That was primary to me – the idea of how the past colors the experience of the present.

“Memory in cinema is kind of an obsession of mine.”

James loved this book and I believe it was the first book he ever optioned. He had been working on the adaptation himself and then he and I made a short film together with other NYU grads. It was an omnibus project called The Color of Time and my piece was about memory. It was about how this poet is incapable of being in the present moment without all these things from the past flooding in. Once we finished shooting that James said, I have this book and it reminds me of you and maybe you’d be good at this because I haven’t quite figured it out.

One of my favorite scenes is the one where Stephen watches the videotaped confession of his father. What was it like shooting that?

We shot that scene on day three! Day two was the other hotel scene where Ed [Harris] throws the lamp. We didn’t rehearse at all. I had known James for several years at that point, and I had known Ed for about a year, so I had a lot of opportunities to discuss their characters with them individually. They only met for about thirty minutes the night before we started shooting. Everyone is really busy and that’s just how it goes. I hadn’t seen them in a scene together yet and there we were there on set, about to shoot this really important scene. We had actually run the scene through with the stand-ins in the morning and it wasn’t good. I was like oh cool, I’ve written the worst scene in the history of cinema, this’ll be a great day! And then Ed and James came in and I called action, and it was like lightning. There was the lightning I was looking for from the first moment. So I breathed a huge sigh of relief and thanked my lucky stars that I got to direct them.

My AD wanted to shoot Ed’s half of the recording that day and said he thought it would take about twenty minutes. And I was like, are you serious? Ed Harris needs to weep with regret, this is a whole day commitment! So I convinced him to move it to the next day and I think we had about an hour to shoot it. But after take three, we were done. Ed is a force of nature. He’s really incredible and does everything 100%. He did a couple of takes and then I said, Ed, I want you to crack open. Whatever moment it is for you in this where the grief hits you, I want it to break you and I want you to see it.  We did that take and you see it mostly intact on-screen. It was amazing. I cried at the monitor. The other half, with James watching the tape, was shot weeks later close to the end of the schedule, and James was nervous about it. I think anytime you have a scene that says “Stephen weeps” it’s like, well, what if I can’t. What if it’s not right. It was a closed set. We’d have him watch the tape and decided whatever happens happens. So I put on the tape and we did the scene and it was very emotional. What you see with James happened very quickly and naturally.

How did you integrate the Hans Reiser scenes with the rest of the story?

That was the hardest part for me because the Hans Reiser trial is such a huge part of the book that I couldn’t leave it out. It’s important in that it helps Stephen come to this realization. I thought of Stephen as the sun of his own narcissistic universe and then there are these five satellite relationships that orbit around him: his father, his girlfriend, his best friend, his editor, and his muse. He wants the story to be about Hans Reiser and he wants so badly for that story to mean something to him and he’s trying to connect to it in these different ways. Sometimes Hans says things that reminds Stephen of himself, and sometimes he says things and it’s like “Oh God, you’re my father, you’re full of excuses.” By the time he gets that conversation with Hans in jail, a light bulb finally goes off and it’s the last little nudge Stephen needs. He realizes if he claims victimhood all the time, he’s Hans. That’s the narrative purpose it serves. But the challenge of adapting the book was that it’s about all these things at once. It’s a psychological portrait of this person and all these relationships are important. It was really a balancing act in the script to chart the advancement of each relationship while making sure the other ones didn’t lose momentum.

What did you learn from this process?

I think the biggest takeaway was the weird dance of flexibility and rigidity that you have to learn. There are some things that are non-negotiable. Like, this scene is about this, and if that doesn’t happen, the movie doesn’t work. Other than those ideas, you have to be flexible all the time. You know, you get a location to shoot and you hear “There’s a pair of rare ducks that nested overnight and you can no longer shoot here.” And then you drive around frantically and you find another spot, and it needs to be woods, and they need to find a body, and you hear that you can use this spot, but you can’t dig, so you need to figure it out. I suspect shooting in general is unpredictable so knowing what the core of the scene is, what you need out of it, and having that emotional roadmap is really important. Then outside of that, you can be open to whatever gets thrown at you. Which is sometimes good. The scene where Christian Slater and James are alone in the courtroom was totally an accident that was born of one of the Jurors falling asleep so loudly and snoring so dramatically that is totally ruined the take. So we took everyone out and were shooting Christian’s coverage in this empty courtroom. Then I realized I liked it and we shot it that way. So I think knowing what you need from a scene and being open-minded is a huge part of the process.

The other is just resilience. It’s hard to make a movie. You hear no so many times. This is not a good idea. This is not financeable. There are so many no’s along the way that there needs to be some spark that convinces you to keep going. And of course once you get people to join you, it’s really exhilarating.

 

Q&A with Richard Linklater, Wyatt Russell, Blake Jenner, and Tyler Hoechlin

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Everybody Wants Some!!. 

You said that your biggest talent was in the casting of the film. That’s not something we always hear from directors.

Richard Linklater: I think the movie speaks for itself in that way. It’s like the vibe you get from people. It’s sort of like picking a team, to go with sports analogies. Who are the right role players? We meet hundreds of people so it’s important to pick the right vibe about who is going to get along together. If you make a few mistakes, it throws off everything. Even as we started, we had a three-week rehearsal workshop time, and Glen [Powell, who played Finnegan] said “Rick, did you sniff this out? Did everyone get along?” If there had been a jerk in the group, I would’ve been ready to fire him.

“The brotherhood and the camaraderie you see was given birth to before we even set foot on the set.”

What was it like being on Richard Linklater’s ranch for that rehearsal period?

Tyler Hoechlin: It was sort of everything. It was like the ultimate actor/adult/bro summer camp. We had the best time and we had baseball – I was about say baseball rehearsals! – we had baseball practice, script run-throughs, discovering things between the lines together and playing with certain things, like re-distributing lines when they didn’t fit one person to another. And dance rehearsals. The biggest part of the “homework” was just getting to know each other. That was the most important part. The brotherhood and the camaraderie you see in the film, all of that was given birth to before we even set foot on the set.

Wyatt Russell: I would say it felt like we made the movie in those three weeks, and then we just had to show up and put the costumes on and film it.

How did the costumes and time period affect your performances?

Hoechlin: I remember the first time I put on a McReynolds outfit, I walked completely different. We did everything in this movie together. Even if you weren’t working that day, everyone showed up to set everyday. When we finished, we’d all hang out. I remember putting on my McReynolds stuff and walking out with a little wig and going to a table that some of the guys were sitting at, and I felt myself walking differently. I was like, this is so weird, it doesn’t even feel like me anymore. I could not be any hairier or more confident. This looks good on me! I didn’t even have to ask.

Russell: I concur. Peacock city: population, you! Yeah, we had no choice but to really embrace it all. And with all the sets, the wigs, everything was just another layer. The music. It was kind of like an artistic Thanksgiving.

Linklater: For all that, I didn’t want the movie to call any attention to it. When you’re living in a period, you don’t realize it . . . I didn’t want the film to reflect on it ironically or otherwise, other than to just show exactly how it was.

While watching the movie, it feels like you know these guys from your own life, but you also can’t help thinking how different this would be in current times.

Linklater: Back then the drinking age was eighteen so practically every college student could go to a bar. Back then you’d have five guys driving around in a car singing Rapper’s Delight. A lot of the camaraderie comes out of sheer boredom. Group boredom. Ten minutes as we drive from here to there. Driving around and cranking the tunes.

Blake Jenner: As a guy, you had to do a lot of legwork back then. Now, I don’t think a young man would go to a girl’s dorm and leave flowers and a note on her door. I think it would be more like a quick Facebook poke.

Russell: You’d have to step up and like, buy her a cow on Farmville. That’s how I got my girlfriend.

The dancing in the film is almost a bigger part than the baseball in a way. Can you talk about dancing in the particular fashion for this time period?

Linklater: Disco was kind of on its last legs, as a commercial medium I think. It was wild to see these guys. It wasn’t choreography, it was dance lessons. It wasn’t going to be group dancing like you’re in something too elaborate. But it was pretty wild. That’s when I realized so much time had passed since that period. You know, you think in your own life, it wasn’t that long ago. But then I realized none of these guys had even been born back then.

Russell: It’s funny, when I was playing hockey in Europe, it felt like a weird version of going back to the 80s when you go to clubs. I think it would be fun to open up a kind of club like that right now. It really was fun because of the music and there really was more dancing.

Linklater: I would put it in the category of a kind of a mating ritual. Girls would ask the guys to dance. A mix and match kind of thing. And if you would keep dancing with someone, that was a good sign.