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Q&A with Graham Broadbent, Sam Rockwell, and Martin McDonagh

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

What inspired this story?
Martin McDonagh: I saw something similar to what’s on the billboards in the film when I was on a bus going through one of the Southern States about seventeen years ago. It stuck in my mind and  I didn’t do anything about it for 10 years or so, yet it always kind of stayed there. For me it was the idea of discovering the kind of pain and rage of someone who puts up that message on a billboard. From there, I had been wanting to write a strong female part for a while, since my other films were very masculine. Once I decided on the person being a mother, I set out to write for Frances McDormand. After that it all fell into place. This character sort of popped up and it was all about who she is fighting, their reactions, and her reactions to them. The film becomes a bit about people changing instead of solving something. It’s all about how you move on when a crime isn’t solved. Do you stay in that place, emotionally, or do you change?

“it was basically Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, and I in a room drinking tea”

Dixon starts out the film as a terrible guy and then starts to have redeeming qualities. How do you take the character from the script and create this man?
Sam Rockwell: I just played a KKK guy in a movie with Taraji Henson and I was able to get in touch with an ex-white supremacist who now pulls people out of hate groups. I talked to him about this Ku Klux Klan character and he said to me it’s not so much that you hate black or brown people. It’s more that you hate yourself. I talked to him after this film, and in retrospect I think that’s the key to Dixon. He’s got this incredible loneliness, self-loathing… and this weird relationship with his mother. Then he has his complete turnaround through the dramatic device where he becomes a different person.

What is the initial reaction when getting a script from Martin McDonagh set in the Ozarks, after working on crime thrillers?
Graham Broadbent:  It’s great because Martin makes films so infrequently, so you’re desperate for the new script. With a script from Martin, the script comes in fully formed which is joyous and you just want to read and experience it. With this one, it was the same comedy and sadness as In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths. It’s walking that tightrope between the two, which I find ingenious and electrifying when reading a great script like this.

What was the rehearsal process like on this film?
McDonagh: I usually like to rehearse beforehand. For In Bruges, we had several weeks together and it was basically Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, and I in a room drinking tea and talking about the script and backstory. The rehearsal is more about an exchange of information and ideas. We had a bit of that on this film, but not as much because Frances wanted to keep the wall from day one to keep it fresh. She didn’t want to get into being friendly during the rehearsal process.

From a producing, acting, and directing perspective, how did you tackle the intricate scene where Caleb is thrown of the window?
McDonagh: It was written into the script to be one take. We deliberately found a town that would allow us to have a possible police station across the street from an office space with stairs. In pre-production, we made sure to give ourselves a day to do it and had every department come on board to plan and figure out how to achieve it. We had a fantastic stunt coordinator, Doug Coleman, who helped bring this to life. I don’t like CGI much so I wanted it to be as real as possible.

Broadbent: There was also endless practice. They would have meetings about the one-shot on days they finished early. It was an extraordinary production experience and Fox actually put together a featurette about how it was all shot. This was a piece of clockwork and it makes the film so much better.

Rockwell:  It was really thrilling! Doug Coleman, the stunt coordinator was the guy that coordinated the bear attack in The Revenant. He just made it fun. Doug was setting my arm on fire at one point and I was worried about it not being safe. He told me, “I set De Niro’s arm on fire in Cape Fear. You’re going to do great. We’ll have a cigar afterwards.” We felt his energy, much like you do when working with someone in theater, so I was ready.

Q&A with Richard Shepard and Jude Law

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

Mr. Law, when you play a character like this, what does that do to you over the duration of the production?

Law: Well, you pick up a lot of unhealthy habits! I was very ready to let him go, when we wrapped.
Shepard: Sad to let him go!
Law: Sad… but I was ready, because I felt so unhealthy. I just ate, and drank, and smoked for months. There was a wonderful confidence he gave me; a level of bravado; I felt like I kind of ruled the world, stomping around with those muttonchops. He allowed for a wonderful release. But he didn’t feel like he fit into the real world. Physically, I was tired… I felt very heavy.
Shepard: Jude’s not saying this, but on the last day of the shoot, he said, “I’m going to bury Dom.” And he physically… if you go to the Isle of Man, where we shot for two weeks, there’s a Dom Hemingway cross in the ground!
Law: We took all of the prosthetics (the nose, the hair-piece, the teeth), I shaved everything off, I took a beer, some cigarettes, his jewelry… and I put all of it in a shoebox and buried him.
Shepard: We had an actual funeral. And it was sad!
Law: It was sad. But it was the only way to purge myself: I had to leave him.

“I’m not trying to make a movie that’s easy for anyone.”

One intriguing element of the film is the score, particularly in the cemetery scene. 

Rolfe Kent did the score, and it’s very interesting, because Rolfe does a lot of comedies: He’s worked with Alexander Payne and Jason Reitman… and he’s done all of my movies. I actually met him twenty years ago at the Playboy Channel, where we were working on this weird sex comedy. And on this show, which ran for thirteen episodes, Rolfe was the house composer, Wally Pfister was the house DP, Alexander Payne, Antoine Fuqua, and I were house directors… It was this incredible group of people for this show that no one has ever seen, ever! But back to your question: Rolfe did five different versions of music for that scene. We just found it very difficult to get right. I’m lucky, with Rolfe, to be able to work with a composer that can translate my emotional directions into the final score.

In both this film and The Matador, you have a main character that is both reprehensible and likable at the same time. How do you create that dynamic?

Shepard: One of the things we talked about a lot was the fact that we cared deeply about Dom. If you care deeply about the characters you’re writing and believe they’re real human beings, then you can actually make them morally reprehensible and people will ultimately like them. And if they don’t like the character, then they’re missing the movie and I accept that—I’m not making the movie for them. I’m not trying to make a movie that’s easy for anyone. I want to find a character that’s difficult to like, and if you find the human being in the character, you care for him almost in spite of yourself: Even while the character is being awful, you find yourself rooting for them. That, I think, makes it interesting. Flawed characters, just by their nature, are very compelling.
Law: I think that, with a character as vivid as Dom, it helps you as an audience member because you can step back a little bit—he’s so clearly not like you. But at the same time, he’s dealing with issues that we all have. None of us is perfect, and in a way it’s easier to look at the human condition through a character that’s a little bit broader.

 

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 Matt Wolf

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

The scope of the film is massive. How did you approach this subject?

I should say that I’m kind of obsessed with hidden histories and forgotten biographies. That’s usually my starting point, and what I make films about. When I read John Savage’s book Teenage, I was totally impressed and it occurred to me that there were about twenty movies in there that I could focus on. There were so many fascinating characters and movements. It struck me that he was treating early twentieth century history through a punk lens, and I thought, what if I tried to make a “normal” PBS-style documentary, while also brushing aside a lot of those conventions and doing something inspired by that punk spirit? So that became the premise. And while it was a little intimidating to take on such a wide breadth of material, it was also that challenge that appealed to me. The foundation of the whole project was archival research, and identifying how far we could go back and what stories we could tell based on what footage we found. So I partnered with a team of archival researchers around the world: One who was based in New York, and who was kind of the leader, one at the National Archives, one in London, and two folks in Germany.

“A big reaction I’ve heard to the film is, ‘it’s so old, but it looks so new’ “

You blend recreations with archival material in a completely seamless way. How did you choose those characters, and how did you approach that technique?

I knew that this film would have a sweeping panoramic quality, but I definitely wanted to punch in on some characters. And John’s book is filled with that: There are characters you learn about in a paragraph, or a few pages, that are real people. I was looking for a group of characters that I felt could form a composite portrait of the teenager that was about to be born. And a certain level of diversity was important—not just of race, or gender, or region, but also of different styles of rebellion. I saw them all as teenage rebels but in very different ways. The characters I chose are really obscure, so none of these people were ever filmed. So I had to use filmmaking to bring them to life, and to create my own footage of them. It’s something I’ve done in previous documentaries I’ve made, and it’s proven to be a somewhat controversial device because it turns out that people sometimes can’t fully distinguish between the archival materials and the recreations! Which was a surprise to me, because as I was doing it I didn’t think it would be difficult at all—I thought, or at least hoped, that the audience would see them as recreations that were tastefully done. But that’s turned out not to be the case for everybody. Some people like the technique, some people hate it. And that’s been a learning experience for me. But I stand by the device, because I think the film would suffer without those stories, and I think those characters are so interesting.

The score and the soundtrack are such strong elements. Can you discuss your thought process?

From the beginning, the premise hinged on the idea of using contemporary music with archival footage. Something is just totally transformative about that: It kind of works with any contemporary music you put to archival footage. It sounds and looks great. It changes your relationship to the material. It’s funny, because I did put period-specific music to some of the footage at one point, and it immediately feels stodgy: You just think, ‘that’s exactly what my grandparents or great grandparents would have listened to,’ and it really locks the material in the past. But when you put contemporary music to it, it transports you and the material to a different place. A big reaction I’ve heard to the film is, ‘it’s so old, but it looks so new,’ and that’s a really interesting space to be in, that kind of blurring of past and present.