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Q&A with Don Cheadle and Emayatzy Corinealdi

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

This is not a typical biopic in that you mainly focus on the darkest period of his life. Why did you choose that window?

Don Cheadle: When you’re hearing the story of Miles Davis and all of those prolific years, how he left Juilliard and went to New York and he was playing with his idols and then going, that’s not quite it, I want to find something else, and he leaves that, and seeks out something else, then he starts working with Gil [Evans]. And then he tries classical, this dynamic movement into modality, and that changes music, and then everyone wants to play modal, and then he moves into modal swing, fusion funk . . . he’s all these different things. And then he just shuts it down for five years. I thought, what’s happening there? What does that mean? What’s he doing during that period? How does he come out of that period? Does he come out of that period? What does he say when he comes out of that period? For me, it was a very intriguing part of his life as a jumping off point. As filmmakers, we were attempting to externalize an internal process. We wanted this mercurial storyteller – being Miles Davis – to take the reins and say, I’m going to tell you what this is like. We wanted to let him play, that was the conceit. I wanted it to feel experiential more than informational.

“I wanted it to feel experiential more than informational.”

Your performance of Francis Turner is so nuanced. What drew you to her?

Emayatzy Corinealdi: For me the thing that was the most interesting was the request he made of Francis, to leave her career. And the fact that she did it, whether it was willingly or unwillingly. That was most interesting to me as a woman. It might have been more common in that time period than it would be now, but given where she was in her career, she had already achieved so many things – especially for a black woman of that time – that it was interesting that giving up dancing was something she was willing to do. That drew me in. And of course, I was intrigued by the dynamics of their relationship. It was up, down, sideways, it was everything. That was something I didn’t know about Miles Davis. And I didn’t know much about Francis Taylor coming into the project so I was very curious to explore it all.

Miles had other wives and many other women. What was so special about his relationship with Francis?

Cheadle: They were both really at the height of chasing their artistic expression, discovering what that was about. This possessive nature of who he was and jealousy and fear went into his wanting her to be his and only his. But her saying yes, agreeing to it . . . once they signed that contract, that was a contract signed in blood in a way, and there was only one way that relationship could devolve from that point. To me, the success of that relationship is her leaving.

Corinealdi: Absolutely.

Cheadle: The success is her saving herself and never returning to that dynamic.

One of my favorites lines in the film is what Miles says during a session, “Be wrong strong.” Can you talk about its meaning?

Cheadle: It was the Miles philosophy from the way he approached his music. I talked to a lot of musicians that played with him. I was talking to Herbie [Hancock]. The first time Herbie played on stage with Miles, Miles just started playing, and Herbie looked around, he didn’t know what they were playing. Miles came over to him and asked what was wrong. Herbie said, “I don’t know what to play.” And Miles goes, “Piano, motherfucker. That’s why I hired you.” He was like, go, follow your instincts, and then I’ll follow you. Tony Williams was 17 years old when he was running Miles’s band. Who would put a 17 year-old in charge of your band? But Miles knew he needed someone that needed to be chasing something. Herbie also said Miles told them that they were being paid to practice in front of people. If Miles heard you performing a solo in your room and you came down and played it on stage, you were fired. It was about chasing something and being wrong strong, if you’re going to be wrong. Fear no mistakes, for there are none. That was something Miles always said. Always be in pursuit of something, the next thing. A lot of people rejected Miles when he went away from playing acoustically, thinking that’s where he belonged. That’s the epitome to me of being wrong strong. If you’re going to be wrong, commit to that mistake and push it all the way.

Did that philosophy make its way into any of the performances?

Corinealdi: My approach with Francis was that their relationship was such a major part of her life. My focus was on her truth and what she felt were the things that were important to her. There were things that were really instrumental to making or breaking their relationship. So in that sense there may have been some things that happened that she had to be wrong strong about. If some people in her life may have felt that it was a wrong decision to give up her career, she was wrong strong because she did it and committed to it. But at the end of the day, again, the success in their relationship was that she was able to extricate herself from it. To me, that’s what highlights her strength as a woman.

 

 

Q&A with Quentin Tarantino, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walton Goggins, and Kurt Russell

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

Where did the idea for this film come from?

Quentin Tarantino: It started because while I didn’t really want to write a sequel to Django, I did like the idea of maybe a series of paperback books like “Further Adventures of Django,” or something. I thought that was kind of cool, and so I let it be known to publishers that I’d be interested in that. They sent me a few different synopses of a possible story between Schultz and Django that could happen. I realized that I couldn’t let go; I couldn’t let anybody else write it. So just for fun, I started writing it— it wasn’t a movie, it was just going to be a Django paperback. I started writing this story, and I didn’t even know where I was going with it. I started with the stagecoach and Django and John Ruth and Daisy Domergue. I had written the stagecoach stuff with Django, and then I went on a big trip to a bunch of different film festivals that took me around the world. While I was in Mexico, I’d been writing, and I hadn’t got to Minnie’s yet, I was still in the stagecoach. Then I realized what was wrong with this story: Django. Django’s fucking it up. Because there should not be a hero in this story. Everybody should be fucked up to one degree or another. I mean, you can like this one more than that one, but they all should be questionable guys; they all should be bad guys. There should be no moral center as far as this story’s concerned. So Django had to go. And I came up with the idea of the Major Warren. That was how it started.

“Quentin is an analog guy in a digital world.”

How did you approach the different layers of John Ruth?

Kurt Russell: How much would you all love to spend six months working with Quentin? To tell you the truth, what I say to this question doesn’t matter. What does matter is the incredible opportunity to work with purity; that’s really rare. There’s no human being I know in this business who’s more pure than Quentin Tarantino. All the actors on this shoot had the time of their lives because they were getting to work with him. Quentin knows I’m not just blowing smoke up his ass because there’s nothing more fun than getting caught blowing smoke up Quentin’s ass. It’s an impossible thing to do.

It’s on the page, you do what you do, and then he edits. It’s his invention, not mine. So all I can do is have a great time, because you got to understand something: you as the audience get to see something we don’t. We all know the story. We never get to have this moment. The moment that we get to have that you never get to have is being, everyday, working with each other, trying to create something for you that will be your unique experience. We share the experience of having done it on the day, and for that I’ll always be grateful.

Can you talk about the character of Mannix?

Walton Goggins: Every actor works their own way to solve their character; they look to the material and the story. The story is pain. When you’re in a Tarantino story, there isn’t that much for you to do. Either you get it or you don’t. You understand the way he’s visually going to tell the story and the colors and his palette—

Tarantino: That’s a little easy for you to say. The thing is, you owned the character so much that you can say it’s easy. But not everybody else coming through the door is going to own it the way you owned it.

Goggins: I read the script at his house and I was outside by his pool and he heard me every so often say, “Fuck! Oh my God!” When it was over, he said, “Do you have any questions?” The first question that I had was, “Well is he the sheriff or is he not the sheriff?” And he looked at me—I couldn’t believe he said this, I really couldn’t believe it—and he said, “I need you to answer that question, and I don’t want to know your answer to that question.” For me it was like what’s in the brief case in Pulp Fiction. It’ll die with me… You turn yourself forward to the Quentin Tarantino train, you get that invitation, and you don’t ask which station you’re going to pull into. You’re just on the ride. Quentin is an analog guy in a digital world. He’s a person who stops the scene to see the sunset. At least I think that’s all our experience.

You had a lot of physical hits in this movie. Can you talk about your experience?

Jennifer Jason Leigh: I just had the time of my life. It didn’t matter that it was so sticky and I had brains in my hair. It was kind of miserable, but I’ve just never been happier in my life than I was working with these people. With Quentin, he could do anything and you just trust him so implicitly that you throw yourself in there with everything that you have and everything that you didn’t know you had but he believes you have. It makes you think, “Maybe I do.” There’s nothing more fun than risking everything with people you admire so deeply and that you actually grow to love. And then taking a hot shower at the end of the day.

I do get beat up quite a lot, but it was Kurt beating me up, so I was never afraid for half a second—I never flinched. They’d tell me, “You never flinch. You don’t give it away. You don’t anticipate anything.” And I was like, “Yeah, because I’m working with Kurt.” You put anyone else there, I’m going to be terrified, but I knew he would never miss. So I was so free to just be there, be in the moment, and was surprised. When you’re that focused, you actually forget. We’d be playing the scene and we’d forget what’s coming, and then we actually surprise. That’s really fun.

Tarantino: Daisy is different from the other characters, and actually Jennifer’s job is different from all the other actors. In every one of their first scenes, you get real good sense of who the other characters are. You get a real good sense who John Ruth is in those first two scenes in the stagecoach, you get a real good sense of who Chris Mannix is in those first scenes in the stagecoach, as well as Warren. When Tim [Roth] comes in and has his little speech, you have a bit of a sense of who he is, and it’s the same thing with all the other guys. Except for Daisy. The thing is, you never see the real Daisy until the last chapter. There’s no way an actor could come in and audition for that role, and just jump to the last chapter and do anything resembling what we need them to do on screen. You have to live that character. You have to live all those other chapters to get to that last chapter, to really deliberate. It’s a character you have to live.

Why did you shoot in 70mm?

Tarantino: I thought it would be very exciting to do. We had a script reading of this in Los Angeles right after I finished the first draft, and that was a really exciting experience. I was really confident with the material, so if we did this in a little 99-seat theater in the Bowery, it would be really good. If we did it on the London stage, it would be really good. If we did it on 16mm, it would be really good. Since I felt that strong about the material, I thought, “Let’s do it the big way. Let’s do it in 70mm. Let’s make the weather a real thing, a character—that’s hard to do on stage.” I’ve seen the movie in digital, and it looks really beautiful and it rocks and it does its job. But before we lose the option altogether for film, I wanted to make this film an experience. It’s so expensive that the distributor is going to make an effort to have it shown in 70mm. I’ll thank the Weinsteins till the day I die for letting me do it this way.

Q&A with Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Phyllis Nagy, and Todd Haynes

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

How did you all work together during the rehearsal process?

Rooney Mara: We had two week to rehearse before we started shooting in Cincinnati. Really those two weeks just consisted of the three of us [Blanchett and Haynes] sitting around the table and reading through the script with a lot of the other actors. But it’s not like we spent the rehearsal time acting out the scenes; it was more about talking through the movie and forming a relationship and a bond and a trust.

Cate Blanchett: There was a shared understanding of what function every scene had and marking the depth of the subtext. It was also just developing a shared visual language. Often in a film of this scale, a director can feel frustrated with the time that’s having to be spent away from the actors doing location scouts or that the actors have to be called away for costume fitting, but Todd understood that all of those aspects were really a part of an actor’s element of creating a character.

“There was a shared understanding of what function every scene had.”

Todd Haynes: Cate was also spending extracurricular time hanging out at the house of Rindy – her daughter in the film that was played by twins. I shared in some of this, but she went beyond and had dinners at their house. We really loved the whole city of Cincinnati and the generosity of the people, and the quality. Our first reason for shooting there was the look of the city, but the people, the extras, and the day players who all contributed were so rich and diverse.

You’ve been with this project for 18 years. What’s the process been like?

Phyllis Nagy: There’s pre-Liz Karlsen [producer] and Number 9 Films and Christine Vachon, and post. The film you screened today came together in about four years from attachment and Liz purchasing the rights to the novel, and today. So relatively quickly, all things considered. But before that, the film was actually developed in the UK with the help of Film4 and primarily Tessa Ross, who would inject money into it every so often for a new script or when it stalled. But really, until the current team came aboard, there was me and a computer that sat on idle for five years. I’d have little spurts depending on who was interested in doing it. But there was no clear…I’ll use the word “vision,” and I don’t mean it pretentiously. Once the current team was in place, then we had that vision.

All the physical interactions were so delicately rendered that a light brush of the shoulders has a strong impact. How much of that body language was in the script, the direction, and the performances?

Blanchett: It’s a dance. You put your hand on the table and then Rooney moves hers away and you think I shouldn’t have put mine on the table, what am I going to do with my hand now? It’s a push and pull thing. There’s so many of those beautiful observations that are often very dangerous and dark in the book, which were peppered throughout the script.

Nagy: All the script can really do in that is suggest a road map for their road trip. But all the rest of it is in the attention to detail and pacing that Todd and the actors and the camera provide. I think it was a happy confluence of all elements. Like a baton handoff in a race and it all worked. And accidentally too. Sometimes things happened on the day of the shoot.

Haynes: It was a combination of all the accidental things you mentioned and then very very specific contact that is often non-verbal. Carol putting her hands on Therese’s shoulder as she plays the piano. That moment was just an adjustment in the camera position that Ed [Lachman, the Cinematographer] and I initially thought would be omitted since we were just adjusting for the next part. But something strange happened and you could feel your stomach shifting in the frame when that hand goes on the shoulder and the camera is doing a re-position. Because the camera doesn’t move much in the movie, you take notice when it does. And we kept it in the cut and it conveyed something bigger that was important for that moment.

This film really beautifully portrays female camaraderie, especially in the scene where Sarah Paulson’s character, Abby, drove Therese back. Can you talk about that scene?

Nagy: Abby doesn’t drive Therese back in the book. Therese drives herself but takes a detour, and she takes on jobs, where she isolates herself to make herself stronger. So she does that apart from Carol in the book. They’re not in the same place, and then she goes back, and we proceed from there the way it does in the book. So, yes, it was an opportunity to actually address the female friendship aspect of this, which is a strong running theme.

Blanchett: Sarah had little screen time but used every second so potently and beautifully. And the lack of ownership that Abby – even though it’s very clear in that it wasn’t a sense of ownership over Carol but a sense of care and investment in her well-being – shows that their relationship might not have necessarily run the way she wanted it to.

Haynes: You remember, Cate, when you saw the first cut, I think it was that scene that really broke you up.

Blanchett: Yeah.

Haynes: That one moment in the film, there’s something Sarah does with her mouth, kind of purses her lips, and there’s just…

Blanchett: It’s that well of stuff she’s sitting on.

Haynes: And you said something about how it just made you think anew what women at this time in history had to deal with, and what their lives were like. It’s just so interesting how an actor can convey so much, as Cate said, with such economy, in such a brief moment.

The film is interesting in how guilt-free the women seem to be over their feelings, for this time period. Can you talk about Therese’s exploration of those feelings?

Mara: Therese doesn’t really have the language to describe the feelings that she’s having. To her, she doesn’t have any judgment on those feelings because it’s so outside of her realm of possibilities. I think there’s a line in the book where she’s talking about Carol and how she couldn’t possibly be in love with Carol because Carol’s a woman, and that doesn’t happen, that’s not possible. I think she’s very naïve about her own feelings.

Blanchett: But there’s a level of exposure I think that they’re both experiencing. You might not necessarily call it love. But I think there’s a nakedness; they feel exposed to one another. Those feelings kind of get tossed around like a washing machine. Often you don’t know why you’re feeling what you’re feeling. It’s just uncontrollable.

Haynes: And there’s a motor that’s kicking in, even when the pieces of those feelings don’t collate. All of a sudden you realize you’re following the motor, and the engine is driving you, and the desire is literally pulling you from place-to-place, completely, sometimes inexplicably, and against all better judgment.

 

Q&A with Cate Blanchett, James Vanderbilt, Dan Rather, and Robert Redford

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

What compelled you to make this film?

James Vanderbilt: I’ve always been fascinated with journalism and I always sort of looked at it as the road not taken. If I hadn’t gone into our silly business, I would’ve gone into that silly business. I just always loved journalism films, and grew up with All the President’s Men. When I was looking around for something to direct, I read the Vanity Fair excerpt of Mary [Mape’s] book, and I was really taken by the story. One of the things that fascinated me about it was how much I didn’t know about a subject I thought I knew a lot about.

“Journalism seems to always be under threat.”

What was the draw for you to work with this first-time director?

Cate Blanchett: It’s interesting that Jamie said he was looking around for something to direct, because there was such a clear directorial hand already, a vision, you could feel in the script. Bob and I talked a lot about this together. Often when you work with someone in the theater or in film who is directing for the first time, the thing that gets jettisoned first is atmosphere and tension, but Jamie’s script had oodles of that already. You could feel the film. It leapt off the page.

How did you prepare for the role and what influence did Dan Rather have?

Robert Redford: I met Dan many years ago in the early 70s, when he was working at 60 Minutes on an environmental issue out west. We didn’t know each other that well, but we’ve had interactions over the years. Thematically, journalism is a big interest for me, as I think some of my work in the past indicates. I think journalism is essential for society, just like art. I cannot imagine a society without journalism, without journalism representing the checks-and-balances that we so need. Journalism seems to always be under threat. What Jamie did was, he took a story that we sort of thought we knew—it was never given full exposure for obvious political reasons—and he dug down deep, deep, deep, to get to the story beneath the story. He dug down to the bones, and he put the narrative on the shoulders of the characters. It was a joy to work for him. The intriguing part of the story is beneath the story that you think you know. That was attractive for Cate and I because we’re actors playing characters. I think that’s what I appreciated. And my relationship with Dan, because I thought Dan and Mary deserved their day in court, and they weren’t given that. I’m sorry it took so long to get there, but I’m happy to be a part of it.

Dan Rather: I have faults and weaknesses and have made a lot of mistakes, but I tried throughout my career to be a play-no-favorites, drive-hard reporter who was loyal to his people and supportive of his people. Bob catches the essence of that, and I have great gratitude for him doing it.

The environment of the film is of a very specific world—the newsroom. Can you talk about the research process and attention to detail?

Vanderbilt: The great thing about what I do is I get to ask people what they do for a living and just sit there and listen. I got to do that with Dan, who was so kind to open his life up to me. I spoke to Dan, I spoke to Mary. I spoke to a lot of different people who worked at CBS, and also some who didn’t work at CBS but were around newsrooms to try and get the flavor of it as much as possible. All the factual stuff was pretty clear-cut. We knew what happened on what day and when they got the documents, but I needed to make sure it felt authentic and real to people who actually do that job. That was really important to me and that was also the fun part. We get to portray that and put on that show. Dan and Mary did come down to set about halfway through shooting. It was funny because you sort of get into this deep dive of making a film and then you go, “Oh wait, the real people are actually coming.” I panicked a little. What if they walk in and go, “Oh no no no!” But they were wonderful. When you’re directing a movie and somebody comes to set, the unfortunate thing is you have but five minutes with them and then you have to keep directing the movie. But the producers were able to spend time with them and the actors got to go around with them.

Rather: I was amazed at the accuracy of detail. I had no idea. This was my first experience with a full-scale movie set. The effort that went into the accuracy of detail made it clear to me the accuracy of the film. This is a really accurate film. My opinion—and my opinions are frequently wrong—is that I think this is the best thing that’s ever been on the big screen about the craft of reporting.

Redford: I think details were very, very important because sometimes the tiniest detail contains a big story. With All the Presidents Men, the attention to detail was so strong that we were going to film in the Washington bureau of the Washington post. We went in there with the production designer, and it was a disaster because the regular newsroom people couldn’t focus on their work. We got in the way. So we couldn’t film there. We had to go all the way out to California and duplicate the newsroom on a stage at Warner Bros. There’s a likeness between All the President’s Men and Truth, in that two reporters are working against the odds to uncover a truth that the powers that be attempted to block. It’s their struggle, about their work, their relationship, and their loyalty to one another that I think carries the frame. The difference is that in All the President’s Men, these two reporters were slaving away against all odds to get to the truth, and they were supported by their editor and their newspaper. They had support of their bosses. In Truth, the two ended up not having the support of their bosses, and that’s the sort of the story that Jamie is trying to tell. I think it’s a worthy story.

Blanchett: I found it a very interesting detail that when Mary and Dan were in Afghanistan together, Mary took her curling irons with her and somehow, even though there’s no running water, she was still able to have her curling irons. I know this sounds like a very shallow detail but when I first met Mary, I was awestruck by the organizational skills that her handbag represented. She’s meticulous. You see the moment with the folder that Mary presented. Of course I read Mary’s memoir and after meeting with her, we Skyped. I asked her a lot of very stupid questions, which she was very gracious in answering. Inconsequential details will help you to get as much of the flavor of the person as possible.

 

Q&A with Ryan Fleck, Anna Boden, and Ryan Reynolds

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

What was it about the riverboat casinos in Iowa that compelled you to write this story?

Ryan Fleck: In 2007, Anna and I were making our second movie, Sugar, which was a movie about a Dominican baseball player who spends some time in Iowa for a farm team in the major leagues. When we were shooting, on weekends, running out of things to do in Iowa, we discovered these riverboat casinos that don’t move—for legal purposes they have to be on a body of water. They’re these kind of old classic steamboats that have slot machines and poker rooms. So we would go play blackjack. We had never been to place like that. We’d been to Vegas; we’d been to Atlantic City; we’d been to the big, fancy casinos that are trying really hard to be glamorous. These just weren’t pulling it off. It was really interesting to see the anti-glamorous version of a casino. There was a story in there somewhere that we hadn’t seen on film before. We were also very inspired by films from the ’70s. It’s like John Huston’s Fat City. We always thought that this is to the casino as that movie is to boxing. It’s about that sort of underground gambling world.

“It was really interesting to see the anti-glamorous version of a casino.”

Anna Boden: We made another movie after Sugar, and then came back to, “What are we going to do next?” That location stuck with us. We decided that it should be this road trip and it should start in Iowa and go to New Orleans. The first thing we did was we took the road trip ourselves and explored all the places from Iowa to the south. We met people, took notes, and kind of created the textures of these two characters. It was from observation, and then invention on top of that. Then we went and cast our two actors. That was the final thing that brought it together and brought the two characters to life.

Can you talk about the preparation for the role?

Ryan Reynolds: The preparation was easy. It was really just to spend time as much time as possible with Ben [Mendelsohn] at the tables and keep him out of as much crippling debt as possible. Ben, he’s in it, in some sense he’s a method actor, and working with method actors can be interesting at times because their process suddenly becomes your process, and you’re kind of held hostage by it. But Ben has this unique ability to be method but also inclusive and incredibly generous with his work. We just hit it off from the moment we met. To be totally frank, I was kind of in love with Ben. I still am. I’m fascinated by him. He’s such an interesting creature. We spent days at these tables and it was very easy—the poker part was very easy—but what I loved the most about it was just those characters. You think these people who sit at these tables for twelve hours a day are the real grinders. That’s their job is to sit at a casino with that fucking slot machine sound behind them for twelve hours a day and never see the sunshine. You think they’re not going to have anything to say or any kind of opinion, but they’re fascinating. They’re there to talk as much as they are to play, these guys love sharing stories, and they each have their little kind of succinct wisdoms they want to impart, these little effervescent witticisms. It’s nonstop entertainment. You had to drag us away from those tables. We loved it, we loved learning about it, we loved being in their world. You go down to the Deep South and sit at these riverboat casinos, and these aren’t people who have a tremendous interest or access to pop culture. I swear to god Tom Cruise could have sat beside them and they’d have no idea who he was.

It can be hard to hold down a conversation during poker because you have to focus, but the more you do it, the more adept you become at it.

Reynolds: That’s the game though. They want to talk to you, they want to see what you are, who you are, and what your tells are.

Boden: We didn’t know anything about poker when we started researching this project, but when we were on our research trip we had to force ourselves to sit down in a tournament. You pay like $65, and you play until your chips run out, which is the cheapest way to be a bad poker player in the world. I would play extremely conservatively, so I was slowly bleeding my chips the entire time, but I got four hours at the poker table with these people for $65. The whole theme of rainbows came out of one of those trips. One of the guys at my table kind of said to himself, but also kind of to everyone, “I drove to the end of a rainbow once, there wasn’t anything there, it just faded out into the trees.” It felt like it was this beautiful little metaphor for Curtis and Gerry’s whole journey, but also gambling in general. It was just this beautiful weird piece of wisdom that one of these guys said and it stuck with us, it stuck with the writing, and influenced the whole script.

Fleck: A bunch of stuff that Ryan says in the movie we learned from people on our journey. In St. Louis, there’s a guy that actually appears in the movie on the steamboat. Ben beats him in the hand where they’re kind of one-upping each other and he ends up folding. That guy, Paul Harris, told us a story about the disassociated person, the person who puts on a disguise, goes into a casino, ends up winning a ton of money, and has to sneak away.

What were some of the biggest challenges and how did you deal with them?

 Reynolds: I can speak to one. We shot in three states in one day. If I remember correctly, the driver motorcade was driving around. I thought it was really charming and funny. Ben and I would just jump in that Subaru. When he was driving, I could only see death on the horizon, because he’s Australian—he’s just not a big driver, certainly not a big driver on this side of the road. But I found that so refreshing and so much fun for all of us to travel around like a family, just like a big gang slugging our way up to Mississippi or back down.

Fleck: And we mounted two cameras on the hood of the car in a very old school way, 35mm film cameras, driving on the highway, the same stretch of highway from St. Louis to Memphis. It was really nice to not have to worry about faking the landscape in Louisiana. We primarily shot mostly in New Orleans, but we took this trip to St. Louis and Memphis and Tunica so we could have those shifting landscapes be accurate as they’re driving in the car.