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Q&A with Ava DuVernay, David Oyelowo, and Carmen Ejogo

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

How did you approach your preparation for portraying Dr. King?

Oyelowo: After I read an early version of the script back in 2007, I just knew this film and playing this man was going to be a part of my future. So my preparation started then – I started stubbornly preparing for a gig that no one wanted me for! I would watch everything, read anything, and talk to anyone who would talk to me. But to be honest, the real revelation of how to get under his skin occurred when I found rare piece of footage online. In it, Dr. King sat in a hallway, and a light got shone upon him, and a camera was unexpectedly thrust in his face. There’s a brief moment you can see between him being unprepared and then turning himself on, so to speak. That was it. That was the man I had to go and find.

“I knew playing this man was going to be a part of my future.”

Can you talk about shooting the scene in the kitchen where they address his infidelity?

DuVernay: The creation of that scene during the re-writes had to do with the insistence that his infidelity be in there somewhere. It was about saying, “This marriage is important” and how to do that without beating you over the head with it or picking the low hanging fruit. A couple other scripts tried to deal with it in different ways, like depicting him and his girlfriend. But I only needed to know how it affected their marriage. That’s the context I wanted. I think that’s related to point of view. Maybe it’s me as a woman director, maybe it’s me as a black director, maybe it’s me as a black woman director, but I was very interested in what Coretta was thinking. That all lent itself to the writing of the scene. I remember shooting . . . it was a late late night after a long long day, and it was basically the Carmen show. David was great with his body so rigid and silent, but you (Carmen), we just let you go and you did amazing work with it.

Ejogo: We had wonderful rehearsal process, which gave us the opportunity to really feel it out prior to arriving on set. It was very indie feeling – we didn’t have a lot of time to shoot the scene. We prepared what the space between us would be. For me personally, the great gift of that scene was that it also allowed the work I did with Coretta throughout the rest of the film to have a somewhat different flavor in that this was the moment the vulnerability is finally revealed in this woman. There is an attempt before and after to keep face, to keep the marriage together, to be the supportive wife and not ask a lot of people herself, to be there for the kids. But this is the scene where she’s really given the opportunity to confront Martin and let him know just what she’s up against to make that happen. Oddly, the simplicity of the staging is what allowed the words to really sing. The writing for me makes that scene just so incredible.

Oyelowo: The original script was more focused on LBJ. King was not as prominent a character, and it was Ava who came along and imbued it with this humanity. And the thing that only she could do was to highlight the women in the film, and the movement. Even though it was a civil rights movement, there was sexism and women who were just as brilliant, just as powerful, and just as worthy of leadership were sidelined. So talking about the scene we’re talking about, what I was really keen on was to feel Coretta’s power. This woman introduced Dr. King to the idea of civil rights. He was a preacher – that was the line he was going. She was the one that had lived in the dangerous, racist part of the south. She educated him, and he was vocal about that. But because of sexual politics at the time, the chips fell the way they did. When we were blocking that scene, there was a discussion about whether he should be standing or sitting, and I felt sure I wanted to sit, to be low down sitting, looking up at her, because we often see Dr. King in a pulpit, looking down on a congregation. I think that helped demonstrate the power, intellect, and articulacy of this woman, despite the emotion she put forth in the scene.

 

Q&A with Mike Leigh, Timothy Spall, Marion Bailey, and Dorothy Atkinson

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

Mr. Turner seems to use a wonderful shorthand of grunting in the film at times to communicate his point.

Leigh: I can see why people think that, but it’s not completely accurate. What we tried to do was get at what we understood from the descriptions of Turner. And he did grunt, but – and we also have this in the film – he was capable of great articulacy and a great number of classical references. I think it’s more complex than that, some people have written that he just communicates with grunts, and it isn’t true.

Spall: Interestingly enough it was an organic part that happened when we were growing the character. It wasn’t an external or objective decision that was made, it grew out of the character we were building, a mixture of this earthly almost beast-like character and this immense polymathic intellect and this amazingly curious mind that stored all this knowledge he was garnering. He had a very implosive character both intellectually and emotionally. This is a man who could say a million things and could talk for hours. But in life he never explained his work, so this grew out of somebody with a billion things to say, which manifested itself in a grunt . . . occasionally.

“Turner was always pushing the boundaries.”

Ms. Atkinson, Hannah is part of the family as Mr. Turner is growing up. Can you talk about developing her?

Atkinson: We really had very few facts about her life to go on. She was involved with the family for forty years and she stayed on at the house after he died. We knew that she had this skin condition. And we just talked about people I had known throughout my life to help me build the character. I found myself going back to my childhood and thinking about grownups that I knew. The ones that I examined were the strange people that you look at – they’re kind of the Eleanor Rigby type – and you think, how did she get to that point?

She was very much a part of the family. Not a normal setup. She worked for them, but she’s always been there and supportive. She was secretive inside, the perfect person to have around – no judgment. She saw Turner in his most relaxed state.

Ms. Bailey, can you talk about Ms. Booth’s life and character?

Bailey: Again, there wasn’t a great deal to go on, I tried to read as much as I could on what was known about her. Different people had different opinions. Ruskin was actually very nice about her, and said she was warm. Other people were appalled that Turner spent eighteen years with this woman who was illiterate, garrulous, and possibly – some people suspected – money grubbing. I wanted, along with Mike, to depict someone who was tough but warm and independent, and who could love him unconditionally without any loss of her own selfhood. That was my aim. Particularly since in this historical period women are often seen as the wife or the daughter or the girlfriend. But these women fascinate me in their own right, to think what they might have gone through as their own person. Of course my depiction of Ms. Booth was very literate, very sharp. She’s not stupid. Perhaps to some extent she replaced his father. She must have intuitively, instinctually had a great sense and feeling about his art, if not intellectually. She would have known nothing about the history of art, but for him to stay with her for eighteen years, she must have understood the levels of the man as an artist.

One of the most moving moments in the film was when he was listening in on Queen Victoria in the museum.

Spall: I think a lot of artists and people who create, even if they’re lovely or difficult people, filled with different traits, share one thing. They’re often trying to do things that are different or misunderstood. They follow their own path. Turner was always pushing the boundaries, because he’d done everything he had to. He had a good woman, he was safe, he had enough money, so he was able to go out and go with what was in his heart and gut, while not needing opinion to fall back on. He did want people to appreciate his work but never wanted to explain it or talk about it. He wanted to accept their praise but somehow feel evaded by it. I think that odd mixture of wanting to be loved and feeling that once you do get understood, you want to tell people to sod off was very much a part of him. He always wanted royal approval but every time he went anywhere near it he got a kick in the backside.

Q&A with Pat Healy

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

I couldn’t help but think about Compliance while watching Cheap Thrills. In that film, you were the sadist, the controller. There are very similar themes here but in this case you’re on the other side.

It’s kind of interesting. In Great World of Sound, I almost play a version of the Ann Dowd character from Compliance, where I’m in the middle of the higher ups who are telling me to abuse other people and I don’t quite get it, and then in Compliance I graduate to the sadist. And then, for me, I played a sort of sweet character in The Innkeepers. People have said about Cheap Thrills that it’s interesting that there’s this everyman character and within him is this beast, this wild person.  In all of these movies – The Innkeepers, Great World of Sound, Compliance – I play repressed, sort of coiled-up characters. This movie was such a treat because I got to play all that initially, and then let it all out, which was very cathartic and fun.

“He may not be heroic, but he’s the hero of this movie.”

Can you talk about working with Director E.L. Katz and developing your character over a compressed 14-day shoot?

We shot the beginning and the end of the movie first, with Amanda Fuller, who plays my wife.  So I knew how I started and I knew what I looked like when I was done. That gave me a really good barometer of where I needed to go. The makeup was so good. I was looking at it under fluorescent lights at one point, and there was something that clicked in my mind that this is what this guy really looks like deep down on the inside. Like Breaking Bad, no one wakes up one day and decides to be a bad person, there’s already something about them. I spoke to Evan (E.L.) about it. You can enjoy the movie as a story about a good guy that suddenly turns, or you can look at it like he’s someone that’s not in touch with his feelings. He’s living the life that he thinks he should. There are some hints that maybe he lived a bit of a rougher life before, but now he’s conformed, and has the nice parted hair and the glasses and the job and the family. All it takes for someone like that, who is hanging on by a very slender thread, is the perfect storm of bad external circumstances to bring out whoever is really on the inside. It’s a crazy movie and there are all kinds of crazy things that happen to me, but what I liked is that I got to play this character realistically. If you play this story for laughs, big, then it’s silly. But if you play it realistically, straightforward like a drama, then you believe it. So we got to a place where we were playing it for real.

Did you get a chance to rehearse?

Not really. We did one read through, which David Koechner couldn’t attend. We shot with two cameras, and sometimes we didn’t even know if they were getting what we were doing. We knew what we were doing was great, but we wouldn’t know where the cameras were, which I now realize was by design. It has this sort of voyeuristic feel, like you’re in the house with them, watching from around the corner. Sometimes we were just doing things that we hadn’t rehearsed at all and hopefully everyone knew their lines, which they did. We did one or two takes. There’s nothing we shot that isn’t in the movie except for the first thing we did, where we took a little camera to show me on a bus going to work in the morning.  But pretty much everything we shot ended up in the movie, that’s how crazy it was.

Worse things happen in earlier versions of the script, if you can believe it.  But we never wanted Craig to leave the house and go and get robbed or some ironic twist. The sort of twist is that there is no twist. He may not be heroic, but he’s the hero of this movie. That last shot certainly gives you something to chew on. Some people will applaud it, some will sit in stunned silence, but everyone talks about it. In South Korea, when we screened the film, I’m told that I was thought of as a superhero, and this is like a superhero origin story, and I am a great father that goes to these great lengths to provide for his family. That was just one interpretation of the movie.

Was there any room for improvisation during such a short shoot?

The script was really tight, so there wasn’t any room for story improvisation. There are little lines and flourishes here and there that David does. It was almost like doing a play. There was a great quote from a writer for the NY Star Ledger, Stephen Whitty, who wrote that it “plays out like some scummy Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” That’s kind of what it is. We love Tracy Letts’ plays like Bug and Killer Joe, and this movie is kind of a tightly contained 4-character chamber piece, except with cocaine and cleavers and blood. And because of the way they shot it, with two cameras, it really felt like a play, and there wasn’t too much room for improvisation.

 

Q&A with Justin Chadwick, Anant Singh, Idris Elba, and Naomie Harris

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom.

Would you have made the film any other way, looking back?

Singh: Having been in this industry for a long time, trying to get movies made is very challenging under any circumstances. It’s difficult trying to tell stories from South Africa, to get those stories distributed, and to get people to see them. In my past experiences, whenever studios and organizations get involved in the production, whether it’s in the US or in Europe, they want to be involved in every aspect, which is understandable. But as a South African, and as a producer who wanted to tell this story, I always felt it was very important that we were able to keep that creative integrity, which is a commitment I made to Mr. Mandela. And you can’t really do that if you have outside partners involved at every stage. So in this film the challenge was even more immense, because to do justice to the story you had to have an even more epic scale. The budget of the film was 35 million dollars, but if a studio were doing the exact same film it would cost over 100 million. We shot the film, and I think it’s great that people responded to it. People like Harvey Weinstein and the Weinstein Company have embraced it, and now our partners here and all throughout the world are helping us deliver a film that we are proud of.

“We were completely free to make the movie in the way that we chose.”

Chadwick: We were completely free to make the movie in the way that we chose. For Naomie and Idris and myself, knowing that Mandela and his family and comrades were actually part of the development, we thought they might want us to do certain things. The Mandela Foundation looks after the legacy of Mandela, maybe they want certain things, but it was absolutely the opposite. They said, “Show him as the man, flaws and all, and show her as the woman, flaws and all; be truthful. The archive is open to you, we’ll help you in whatever way.” They never asked to look at a script or said we couldn’t do something, as long as it was coming from a place of truth. I’ve been on the other side of that in Hollywood. So this was completely liberating for us, because we could tell the story we wanted to tell.

Is there anything you found incredible or remarkable when doing your research for the role of Winnie Mandela?

Harris: It was all massively surprising for me, because I didn’t actually know who Winnie was when I actually signed up to do the part. When Anant asked me to be part of this film about Mandela, I thought, how amazing, a celebration of Mandela’s life. He’s such an extraordinary individual and it’s so important that the world never forgets this man. So I thought that Winnie was a supporter, the wife who stood by and supported him. I didn’t realize she was an integral part of the anti-apartheid movement, and ultimately Mandela may never have become the Mandela that we know without Winnie. She was so important to the Free Nelson Mandela campaign, and she is an activist in her own right, and all of that was a complete revelation to me. It just made it even more important to me that her story be told, because I think so often when we remember these great men, we forget the women.

Did you ever feel like it was too much of a burden to try to portray these characters, because they are so polarizing and large?

Harris: Definitely in the beginning. It was without a doubt the biggest challenge I’d ever taken on as an actor. It felt like a huge sense of responsibility, and I’d never played a role where people had been so opinionated about it. One of the joys of acting for me is to be free, to create, and I felt very straitjacketed in the beginning. The greatest and most liberating thing about meeting Winnie was that she said, “You’re the right person for this, go for it. You can do this.” That’s ultimately what you want. So it’s mammoth, but in that sense of responsibility as well comes the joy, because we have the honor of representing these incredibly iconic figures who influenced not just the history of South Africa, but the history of the world.

Elba: I never really felt burdened. I felt that we shared the responsibility, but the responsibility became the drive to get it right. We used that responsibility and took care of it like a baby, like somebody had handed us their child and said, “Look after this child.” It informed every decision we made, even though we had a very particular lens and point of view, we took on everyone’s point of view, because it was our responsibility to at least have it in our palette.

Chadwick: It was energizing. We all were aware of it, but when you start a project like that you just have to make it true, and real. That was every day – make sure we catch the detail and the truth in every scene. I was driving everybody mad, because I was going, “This is the most important scene of the movie, this one now that we’re doing.” “But you said that about the other scene we did this morning!” “Yeah, but this is REALLY the most important…” There was no scene we could leave behind without nailing.

 

Q&A with Alex Gibney, Betsy Andreu, and Jonathan Vaughters

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

What was involved in the production of making such a visually and sonically rich film?

Gibney: At the Tour de France we had a full ten cameras, and we were able to put a camera inside the car, sometimes two, and then at every stop along the way we had three cameras in every car. We had two cars, so you take what’s called the “Outside Course” course, and you go to a place where the team’s going to ride by, and we’d stop and set up three angles. Then the race would go by and we’d pick up and move to the next spot. We had two cars doing that and we had to be very careful about where we were going to set up. Sometimes we would use different lenses, sometimes we shot in slow-motion; it was very complicated. In one case, we had a wonderful little accident, which was that the tiny little camera that we put on the bike of Popovich – one of Lance’s domestiques – had a very weak microphone. And the thing about the tour itself is that it’s very noisy, and it’s noisy in a way that’s not very appealing . . . there are all these motorcycles, huge honking trucks everywhere, helicopters above. You see it [on TV] and you think “Wow, it’s so beautiful and elegant and so quiet,” but it’s not quiet at all. There’s a deafening noise. And this little microphone on Popovich’s bike was so weak that it didn’t hear the motorcycles. Instead you could hear the spokes, the wheels turning on the bicycle, the gears changing, and it’s very powerful. We were able to get an angle of the sport that you never saw before, because the motorcycles can’t get there, which is inside the peloton, that magnificent organism of cyclists as they move through the landscape.

“He was talented and he was the best of a dirty era, but he was breaking the rules.”

The film shows how prevalent doping is in cycling. Does this make the whole sport suspect? How should Lance’s records be dealt with? 

Gibney: I, as a historian, would be more comfortable if they put an asterisk next to Lance Armstrong’s record of those seven years instead of eliminating them. I think deleting them is bad history; it’s what Robespierre used to do. When we see how the cycling governing bodies were complicit in his victories, then it’s convenient for them to eliminate their own responsibilities. When it comes to doping, it was not a level playing field because Lance had power that other cyclists didn’t have, both from his sponsors and those within the cycling organization who gave him a pass when it came to rigorous tests or tough questions being asked. That being said, Lance was not the only person who was doping. I’m not one of those people who believes he was just an average joe with no cycling talent who took these drugs, sat on a bike, and watched the bike go. I think he was an extraordinarily talented cyclist. You have to remember he started doping pre-cancer, so the doping itself doesn’t necessarily explain the extent of his success. I think he was talented and he was the best of a dirty era, but he was breaking the rules. You have to take all these things into account. It doesn’t mean I approve of doping, because I don’t; it doesn’t mean I don’t think it should be cleaned up, because I do. But we all have this tendency to want to put people in a box. If we find out someone committed a crime or does something wrong, we want to say, “Well, he was just a completely bad guy; he was never talented to begin with.” But the problem with that is if Lance was the only bad guy, then you don’t really see what happened in the sport as a whole and it’s not good history.

What do you think should be the focus of any future films about cycling? 

Vaughters: We love winners in our society. It’s inspiring. And winners are uniquely driven individuals, and sometimes that’s a little pathological. Everyone you see in the pelotons at the Tour de France is so motivated. With that warrior mentality and that winner mentality, it’s easy for doping to enter into the equation. A phrase I used to hear all the time is, “You don’t show up to a gun fight with a knife.” The rationale is: It’s ok, it’s an arm’s race; they’re doing this, so we have to do this. People don’t realize that these guys consider themselves at war with the other teams. It’s not friendly fundraising in the French Alps. So the focus of a future documentary on cycling should be that this sport’s gone through a tough time, and there have been massive efforts to clean it up, but also to look at how hardened these athletes are, and how hard that decision is for them to actually say, “Am I going to put the integrity of the sport and myself above the taking-a-knife-to-a-gunfight mentality?” You have to decide that every day. I think that’s an interesting look into the difficulties that athletes face and how we as a society, in a way, force the athletes to face. They end up being iconic for us, being our heroes, leaders of society, people we read about in magazines, so on and so forth. That pressure forces them into this decision-making process that not many people have to face down in their life.

Andreu: I would hope that it’s going to be how cycling cleaned up its act. We went through this super dark period, the corruption of the UCI— which I call the “Union of Corrupt Individuals”—and we have a new president now, which I think is a great achievement. That’s a testament as to the power the truth has and why it matters so much. We didn’t have the cooperation of all the federations who turned a blind eye or the governing body that just liked the money made from it. It will show the young kids who want to get into the sport that they don’t have to dope. I don’t care if it’s for baseball, tennis, football, cycling, I have young kids and no kid should ever think, “Do I have to take a supplement from the guy at the gym if I want to hit a homerun?” That’s wrong, it’s not acceptable, and I think the next film can be an uplifting one and say, “We cannot forget our past but it’s not going to define us, and our future is going to be brighter.”