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Q&A with Ramin Bahrani and Michael Shannon

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of 99 Homes.

How did you come to this story, and what was the writing process?

Ramin Bahrani: I was interested in this whole world-turned-upside-down issue during the economic crisis. The focus was housing. There were four states that would be epicenters; Florida was one of them. I did a lot of research here and then spent a lot of time in Florida with fraud attorneys, real estate brokers, motels. All the things you see in the film are based on research, on real people, on real facts. Initially I thought I was just going to make a social drama, and quickly I realized how much corruption was involved, how many scams were involved, that everybody carried a gun, and I realized it was going to be a thriller. It was this kind of Faustian story, this deal with the devil film, but set in a world we hadn’t seen before. It was better to go somewhere with no preconceived notions and just let the location and the characters you meet tell you what’s going on.

“It was this kind of Faustian story, but set in a world we hadn’t seen before.”

Can you talk about your preparation and research for this character?

Michael Shannon: Ramin had done such thorough research himself that I just kind of followed his lead. He introduced me to somebody that he had spent a lot of time with who is a real estate broker down in Florida. I spent about three days with him, hung out with him at his office. He told me stories, showed me stuff, and I tried to soak up everything I could.

Would you consider your character, Carver, unethical?

Shannon: I think there is no denying that what he does to Frank Green is pretty rotten. But up until that point in time, I’m not so sure. I look at it like, when you’re a little kid, you get a new board game at Christmas, and you are so excited and you open it up and start reading the directions, and then you’re like, “I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. I can’t play this game.” I feel like that’s what a lot of these regulations and laws in the real estate industry are like. They’re indecipherable to the point that most people just throw their hands up in the air and assume they have our best interest at heart, which obviously they don’t. But Carver didn’t do that. Carver read the directions a thousand times, and he’s like, “Oh, yeah, I know how to play this game, and I can play with you.” The options we have are some sort of massive revolution, where we take to the streets with pitchforks and burning, and that doesn’t seem to be happening. Or you can either figure out the game, or hope that the game is going to take care of you, which it probably won’t.

Bahrani: The real heavy is the system. Carver has been gotten by the system. It’s hard to argue with some of what he says. I agree his actions are not ethical, but it’s hard to argue with things like, you did honest hard work your whole life, and all it got you was me knocking on your door. For Andrew Garfield’s research, he went down there and stayed in the motels—those are real motels off the side of highway 142 that lead to Disney World. So many families start piling up in there that school system diverts the buses to pick them up, just as you see in the film.  When Andrew was down there, he went to a Home Depot to talk to some day laborers, and this one guy said to him, I’m an out-of-work construction guy waiting for work. He said it got so rough he had to start evicting people. He told Andrew this; Andrew’s just listening. Then the guy said, I did it, it was very hard, but I had to do it. I couldn’t sleep nights. My kid’s hungry, my family has nothing. Eventually it got to the point that he knocked on the door and it was his best friend. He evicted him. So of course now they’re not friends. And then months later he just couldn’t tolerate it anymore and he just had to stop. Months after that, the best friend shows up and says, I forgive you. He asks, Why? The friend says, I’m doing it too.

It feels like there’s a lot of the authenticity is in the casting. Can you talk about how that came to be?

Bahrani: There are a lot of nonprofessional actors in the film. My first three films are predominantly nonprofessional cast. The sheriff here is a real sheriff, he does evictions—he’s done plenty evictions. The clean out crew, one is an actor, and the rest are real clean out crew. The people Andrew evicts, every other one is a real person. That’s really their home, and they’re telling some version of the story that is partially based on research I’ve done and partially based on their own story. The way the eviction sequence happens with the Nash family, you get great collaborators. You have an amazing production designer, Alex DiGerlando. He empties that house out, and then completely designs that house, so now we own everything in there and we  can do anything we want. Bobby Bukowski, great cinematographer, he’s blasting lights from the outside, and then working in prep very closely with Alex on practical lightings—lamps, lamps shades, more lamps, more bulbs—and that means the house is free and clear of equipment. There’s no film equipment anywhere, which means the actors can go wherever they want. They have dialogue, they have the script, but you throw a real sheriff into the mix and take-to-take, things are different. You just let the bulls loose and see what happens.

Shannon: Randy the sheriff, I just can’t say enough about that guy. He was the real calm in the center of the storm, because Andrew got pretty worked up, and they weren’t going to let us in that house. Sometimes, via improvisation, I would get to the point where I literally didn’t know what to do anymore. They wouldn’t let me in. Randy would just elbow me, be like, Yeah, I got it from here.

Bahrani: Just look how he kicks the door with his toe. You only see that in the television show, Cops. No actor would do that.

Shannon: There’s not really any lines or borders between who’s an actor and who’s not an actor. The dirty secret is that it’s really not that exclusive of a club, the actor club. We’re all in tune with trying to capture something. I know for me personally, before I did this movie, the foreclosure crisis was something I read about in the paper. I’d feel bad for people, but it was very abstract, just a bunch of words. I think everybody, actor, non-actor, crew, was really devoted to showing people, This is what it’s really, really like. Those people don’t really have a voice. They don’t get in the spotlight very often. It was important to give them this opportunity to respectively try and recreate that.

 

 

Q&A with Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig

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

How did you develop the wonderful physicality of Greta’s character Brooke? She emotes with her entire body.

Noah Baumbach: Well first, Greta was born. And grew up into that person.

Greta Gerwig: Not Brooke!

Baumbach: No, not Brooke, but you’re expressive.

Gerwig: Yeah, I’m expressive. I like big characters. I always feel a little put in a box when something is shot very close and it’s all face acting. That’s hard for me. I feel as if I have a clown face, in that it’s too big and makes too many expressions. I think the ideal of film acting is like . . . a flicker of emotion across the eyes, and I’m not like that! I feel like I need a medium shot all the time. I’m lucky that Noah likes to shoot that way. With Brooke, she sort of invokes another time. She doesn’t really dress like people who are on the move, wanting to start a restaurant right now. It’s more like an early 90s look, with all those blouses and trousers and coats, and the way she does her makeup and hair. It doesn’t feel like now. There was a particular walk she had in those boots with the heels, and we would talk about people we knew who influenced Brooke. Noah referenced someone he knew who used to stomp around in her heels. That’s something I thought about when I was doing Brooke. Frances [in Francis Ha] was so stumbly and down and inward. But Brooke is so straight on, ready to go, impossible to embarrass: striding and stomping ahead. I don’t know why those things matter so much to me in a performance, but if I don’t know what someone’s feet are doing, I almost can’t say the lines.

“If I don’t know what someone’s feet are doing, I almost can’t say the lines.”

What made you choose this particular house for the central set piece in Connecticut?

Baumbach: We looked at a lot of houses and wanted something surprising and unexpected in some ways. I liked how this house had all these exposed stairs where you could see people running up and down and in and out. Greta described it as a slamming door comedy with sliding doors. There are a lot of people trying to get doors open with two hands. I also liked how you could use inside and out because there were so many windows. It was kind of a pain to shoot because the weather kept changing – we were in the winter and it kept snowing – and it was hard to avoid any windows. But it was worth it because of the idea that they’re trapped in there but the outside world is always in view.

Gerwig: And as someone pointed out in an interview with me, we put them in a glass house and all the characters do is throw stones at each other! I was like, wow, we never talked about that. I’m glad we didn’t notice. Noah probably would have been like, we’re changing the house!

Do you usually try to develop characters or story first?

Gerwig: Characters and story come at the same time. It’s impossible to flush out a character and story independent of each other. You sort of find out who they are by what they do, and you find out what they do by who they are. It all grows at the same time.

The central relationship between Brooke and Tracy is so fascinating because there’s clearly affection, but they’re both trying to benefit from it at the same time.

Baumbach: One of the things we discussed about Brooke in the early stages of the script was that she felt like somebody you might meet at an important time in your life, but for a very brief time. I think it’s this thing that happens to you in your young adulthood where you realize you can outgrow people who are older than you. When you’re younger, you don’t think that’s possible because you think of adults and you think of children. That was something we were interested in telling. The Brooke/Tracy relationship had a melancholy baked into it because it was temporal. There is genuine love between these two people, and even though Brooke experiences Tracy’s story as a kind of betrayal, it’s ultimately freeing for her because Tracy loves her and she sees her, through her persona. Brooke needs that in a way because she can’t sustain this thing she’s doing. She’s actually very lucky that Tracy does that. You can argue it’s selfish of Tracy to have done it, which might be true, but it doesn’t mean both can’t be true. We like that these two people could have an argument where they both have points, and neither ever cedes their ground. But they could still come to some kind of peace and still have genuine affection for each other while disagreeing about what happened.

Gerwig: Brooke has her light show, and Tracy sees past it, but Brooke actually is inspirational. Despite the fact that the show’s fake, there is something real and very inspirational underneath it. Being seen is traumatic, but it’s also healing.

Q&A with Screenwriter Donald Margulies and Jason Segel

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

What was your experience like coming to this project?

Jason Segel: My experience in coming to this project was really unique – obviously, there’s only one of me. I had made a decision that I wanted to do something entirely different than what I had been doing. I had reached a moment where everything felt like it was coming to a natural end. My early thirties, my TV show that was on for a decade was coming to an end, and the kinds of comedies I had been making weren’t really working anymore. I thought I needed to go back to doing things that scared me. Like I could fall flat on my face. Then this script arrived, and there’s a line in where he says “I’m 34 years old and alone in a room with a piece of paper” and that is exactly how I felt. I had a blank canvas in front of me for the rest of my life and had no idea how I was going to fill it. This also seemed like a great opportunity to be terrified, and I was literally terrified up until they called action the very first time. And then they say action and you have a very limited amount of time to start acting before it gets weird! Then you have to just go.

“I needed to go back to doing things that scared me.”

The director, James Ponsoldt, was one of your students. How did this project get to him?

Donald Margulies: This has a wonderful backstage story. I’ve been teaching playwriting at Yale for 25 years, and I have taught some incredible people in the making. And James Ponsoldt was one of those shining young people. I saw his film Smashed and I sent him an email congratulating him. I thought he had done a really subtle, smart take on what could have been a very formulaic story. It was around the time that he and I reconnected that I finished The End of the Tour. That also coincided with him being on the verge of a tremendous career, and we are the beneficiaries. He is really just busting at the seams. I asked my producers if I could send the script to him, and they said sure. I woke up the next morning to a copious email from James – “Don, I can’t believe you sent this to me! I love David Foster Wallace, my wife and I had David Foster Wallace recited at our wedding . . . it’s a sign!” What was so extraordinary was that James was being wooed by everyone in town at the time, since he was between his two Sundance experiences. The fact that he made our movie his next project was just an extraordinary gift.

Segel: When I got the script, I was confused that it was sent to me. I’m self-aware, and I realize that I probably wasn’t someone’s first thought for this project. No one receives this material and says, “I think it’s Segel!” So I read the script and my agent said James Ponsoldt would like to speak with me about it. We sat down to talk about it and I asked him why, and he said “Dating back to Freaks and Geeks, whenever you were doing comedy, I felt like there was something sad behind your eyes.” And I knew what he was talking about. And he said it’s important that this movie not just try to deify David Foster Wallace, that he be portrayed like he was during this period: funny, young, alive. It just made a lot of sense to me. I hadn’t had anyone since Judd Apatow believe in me more than I believed in myself. James said, “You can do this.” It was really special. I feel lucky that I got to catch someone early on in what’s going to be an amazing career.

Can you talk about working with Jesse Eisenberg?

Segel: I didn’t know Jesse before this movie. We got to meet once before we starting shooting. The first scene Jesse and I shot is the scene where I show up at his house. We hadn’t had much interaction before that, and you can feel us sniffing each other out up there. He had no idea what I was going to do. I hadn’t uttered a word as David Foster Wallace in his presence, nor had he Lipsky in mine. There was a moment of “what’s this person going to be like” which I think really worked for the movie, because that’s exactly what’s happening. And it continued to be that way to some extent. David Foster Wallace writes a lot about tennis, and it felt to me like this weird thing of playing a friendly, competitive tennis match where you rely on each other for the volley because you want to get some exercise and you let it go on a while, but both of you are thinking, when I am going to level my big shot and win this point. That’s what every scene felt like. I need him, but I can’t wait to beat him.

Q&A with Barry Crimmins and Bobcat Goldthwait

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

How did this film develop?

Bobcat Goldthwait: Barry had written an article for the Boston Phoenix about his experience testifying in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. It’s just so funny and well written… it reminded me of a Frank Capra story. And that was in the mid ‘90’s. I thought, wow, I’d love to do this story. And of course I’ve known him most of my life, and I admire him… he’s like a big brother to me. I thought it’d be a good movie to make some day. I actually wanted to do it as a narrative, with another actor playing him. But my best friend Robin Williams, who knew I was passionate about telling Barry’s story, suggested that I make it as a documentary. And he gave me the initial money I needed to start filming, which was just in February 2014. So it all came together pretty quickly.

“This wasn’t going to be a straight biography of a comedian.”

What pushed you to that moment, when you decided to tell your story?

Barry Crimmins: My sister kept saying, “I’ve got to talk to you about something,” and she kept dragging it out over months. And I sort of always knew… but I never knew, you know? And then she discloses what happened to me, and I had always seen this picture of her in my head, of her on those stairs. And when she finally disclosed to me, between that and what other people sort of knew… at that point, the ship finally stood up in the proverbial bottle, for me. I was going to spend more time not dealing with it publicly at that point, but the Rodney King stuff happened. And we were doing a benefit for the Southern Poverty Law Center, and I was really upset about the way that people were talking about these kids in Los Angeles. And so I did this monolog saying, “you know, I was a kid once. Stuff happens to kids.” And that’s when it came out. I didn’t talk about it in public again for another year after that – I turned down a bunch of opportunities to be on daytime tabloid TV shows, because that’s not where this belongs. And then about a year later I wrote the Boston Phoenix piece. And since then, I’ve been a very public advocate for survivors of child sexual abuse. At the time I started this, male survivors of child sexual abuse were kind of unheard of.

The film begins as a classic homage, and then there’s a dramatic turn in the middle. How did you go about making that decision?

Goldthwait: I had an idea of how I wanted to tell the story—I wanted Barry’s disclosure to happen about forty minutes in. I also felt it was important, tonally, to let people know that it wasn’t just going to be a straight biography of a comedian. So that’s why we put in some of the political stuff, as a little “seasoning.” But I’m really glad we cut the car chases out… that was smart of us.

What was your first reaction when Bobcat approached you about making this film about your life?

Crimmins: He’s my buddy. And, I’m in show business. “A documentary about me? Great, let’s do it!” Bob knew I had stuff to say, and believe me… I’m not very commercially viable most of the time. It’s not like there are meetings happening right now where people are saying, “we need a guy who will denounce our thoroughly corrupt system… and that’s the light stuff. Then he’d go into the child rape.” But this is about getting the message out, for all of us. If you don’t have personal experience with this, believe me, you know someone who does. For instance, when people make your life hard, and you can’t figure out why. When people behave terribly toward you, they’re telling you they’re in pain. And if you can start to source that pain, you can start to understand why they behave the way they do.

Q&A with Oona Laurence and Jake Gyllenhaal

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

How did you two work together on the big dramatic scenes?

Oona Laurence: Those scenes were difficult, they’re really emotional. But I had Jake’s support and Antoine’s [Fuqua] support. And since we all went through this journey together, I got to know her [Leila] more as we went on. So when we shot those scenes, I really knew why she was crying. That scene was part of the whole journey. That was helpful in figuring out why she was crying and why she was upset.

“We needed to connect on a human level, not just character to character.”

Jake Gyllenhaal: There was a lot of improvisation. When Oona first came in to read, she walked in and we started to improvise different things. In explicit detail, I remember her saying, This is Jane my doll, and that’s John, and don’t mind his long hair, and I thought, this girl is incredible and then we started to explore. Antoine and I knew the only way this relationship would feel real was if we could actually connect to each other, on a human level, not just character to character. In the courtroom scene, there’s a lot of improvisation. Antoine had hired 5 or 6 real security guards and he said, Jake get’s wild – which I do – and just make sure he can’t get near Oona. And I didn’t know that they were real security guards. Antoine will roll for a long time, and as things got heightened, I tried to get closer to her. The first take I was able to hug her, and then I wasn’t ever allowed to do that again in any other take.

It was the same thing in the scene at the foster home where she hits me. That wasn’t written, we were just talking before the scene, and I said you can hit me if you want, and she said, I don’t want to hit you. And then we started to do the scene, and your dad, who is amazing, was like, it’s okay if you hit him (laughs) and I feel like there was a connection not just between me and you but also between your dad and me and you. There was permission given to enter the scene and give all yourself to the scene, and we all shared in that.

Can you talk about the incredible physical and emotional transformation you went through?

Jake Gyllenhaal: Antoine said he was going to shoot the film like a real fight. I didn’t know how to box so I trained for 5 months, twice a day. I figured if I trained twice a day for 5 months, that would be like training for 10 months! I would’ve done 3 times a day, I was so scared I’d look silly. I learned all the techniques and we’d go to fights on weekends and Antoine would send me film. I’ve seen so many fights over the past year, not just live, but the history of fighting and I was just in that world all the time. I didn’t do much else but learn how to fight and over time I went from pretty horrible to moderately okay. I really learned the skills and it changed my life in that way. We talked about the fact that Billy was not very articulate verbally, but he was hyper-articulate in the ring. That was where he could express himself. And the only place he really felt safe to express himself with his sensitivity and his vulnerability was with his daughter.

What’s the actor/director relationship like with Antoine Fuqua on set?

Jake Gyllenhaal: He was with me every morning when I went to my training sessions. From the very beginning. We were together through and through for all of it. So by the time we got to set, after discussions about character, the script, story, there was a secondhand language between us and we both understood exactly where we were going. We were extraordinarily close. When he lets an actor into the scene, he lets you go. He says, this is your space, you can’t break this – because it’ll hurt you – but this you can break and this you can break. He literally gives you space and says, do your thing.

Oona Laurence: He really let’s us do what we want with a scene, he let’s us direct it. He will throw certain things at us to experiment with, but otherwise we’re pretty free to try what we want to do. It’s great.