I chatted with Danny Boyle recently about Sunshine,
and confirmed what I probably already knew in my gut — that the guy is
whipsmart, intellectually curious and therefore predisposed to make the sort of
movies that, to whatever degrees they individually fail or succeed, still have
an involvement, strong visual sense, momentary hold or some other element that leaves them kicking around in your head for a bit, unlike so much cookie cutter
studio product.
I certainly had problems with the latter-act narrative bends
and turns of Sunshine,
but one thing it most certainly has going for it is a legitimate sense of
uncertainty and ambiguity with respect to who’s getting out of any given
situation. “What’s lovely about an ensemble in space is that you don’t really
know who’s going to dominate in the end, and you can also kill them in any
order that you want,” says Boyle. “And there are some great deaths available in
space; because it’s so hostile, you can kill people in interesting ways.
That was one of the joys — getting all these actors together and then killing
them.”
Great actors, indeed; Boyle and his casting director put
together an interesting and disparate group that includes Rose Byrne, Cliff Curtis, Chris Evans,
Troy Garity, Cillian Murphy, Hiroyuki Sanada, Mark Strong, Benedict Wong and
Michelle Yeoh, but it’s not just a collection skewed toward international
commercial viability, as you see with some movies. “The original script doesn’t
define their gender even, and it certainly doesn’t define their nationality or
race,” notes Boyle. “It’s interesting, because space movies tend to quite
colorless like that — it’s just a group of people, and you can identify with
any of them, because they don’t have any social conventions that they’re
obeying on Earth. But for me, I felt that it should be an American-Asian
mission, because all the advice was that in 50 years time the only economies that
would be able to pay for this sort of staggering cost of space travel would be
the American economy, maybe still, but certainly the Asian economies that are
emerging. And (people we talked to) said probably India
and Brazil too,
but we sort of ignored that a bit, because it was getting too disparate. So we
made the movie mostly American and Asian, and then I just started to search for
my favorite bunch of actors to create an interesting mix. Michelle was the
first to be cast, and I remember saying to her, ‘You can play any part you
want.’ And she picked Corazon, which is actually a Mexican name.”
At the recent press day for The Bourne Ultimatum, Matt Damon revealed that he’s seen “hetero life mate” Ben Affleck’s directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, and “it’s fantastic. The performances are great and every actor is going to want to work with Ben after they see this thing.” Damon also revealed that while they’re not currently working on a script together, there is the loose sense of a plan to reunite for something that would involve more than just appearing in front of the camera. Gone Baby Gone releases in limited fashion from Miramax on October 19; for its trailer, and thoughts on the same, click here.
At the recent press day for Stardust, I asked former Warner Bros. executive turned independent producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura (Transformers, Shooter) about the phenomenon of the runaway producer’s credit, and how the moniker is now passed out seemingly willy-nilly, to every actor’s manager, studio vice president, star’s family member or what not. It was unusual and a very big deal a decade ago when Face/Off had nine producers; now that runs about standard for big studio projects and genre fare. Recently, Material Girlshad 19 credited producers, for Chrissakes.
Still, despite the gold-foil-star absurdity of it all, di Bonaventura doesn’t see a way to fit the genie back in the bottle. “I don’t think there’s anything that can be done about it,” he says. “A lot of people are granted producers’ credits for different parts of the function, so what’s happened is that there’s been a sort of dilution of what it means to be a producer. …It was resolved in terms of how many people could go up and be presented an Oscar, but in terms of how many people get credit on a movie, there’s no contractual limitation on it.”
“There’s vanity credits, sure,” di Bonaventura continues. “But the truth is that there are a lot of people who don’t go on set who make great contributions to movies. So it’s a tricky [situation], because it’s not clear-cut who’s doing what. If you bought the project and you put the director and star into it, you did pretty good, right? So you mean you’re not a producer if you don’t at least go to the set? It’s one of those arguments where you can argue any side of it unfortunately.”
He’s right, of course, except that the dilution of other Hollywood credits (just like any out-of-work yahoo can call themselves an actor, director or writer) doesn’t typically engender the ability for one party to materially take advantage of another. A dodgy producer who’s amassed a passably legit credit list can leverage that cachet into option windows on written works or, ya know, sex with stupid aspirant starlets or other favors. The charlatans and jerk-offs may certainly be known within the industry’s core, but Hollywood does its second-class citizens no favors by not addressing the issue more aggressively.
During a recent interview for Sunshine, the subject of humanity’s self-destructive impulse — a steady thread through many of his movies — came up with filmmaker Danny Boyle, and in asserting his personal optimism, he made an interesting connection to the rest of his canon, and how maybe his experience on The Beach has informed his work since. “Yeah, I think [issues of man grappling with self] are certainly there, and I think that’s why a lot of my scenarios are almost apocalyptical. I love those set-ups. But I think you
do battle against it. I am
optimistic and positive, and I want that to be in all the films. The only
one I think it’s not in, in a funny sort of way, is The Beach, which is a very depressing film in the end, a very
negative film in many ways. It surprised me why it came out like that.
Because normally, even in the bleakest scenarios, I kind of dig out
some spirit and hope.”
“The Beach was a
big film, but it wasn’t a big film — it just was big, though it shouldn’t have
been. It became,” continues Boyle. “It wasn’t Leo, who was fantastic. But it’s a big movie star,
and a big studio, and it suddenly becomes a gross, inflated thing. Suddenly
there’s 400 people working on the film everyday, and you think, ‘I don’t need
400 people to make this film, it’s a film about a bunch of hippies in a jungle!
I need only maybe 30 people.’ And it just grows like that. So [Sunshine] was big,
yet we controlled it. We kept sealing it — I didn’t want money, I didn’t want
loads of extras. I wouldn’t have got it anyway, because we didn’t have any big
stars in it. But I didn’t want money, I didn’t want a big star in it… I wanted
to try to make it with restraints, real disciplines that we had to work around
and be creative about how we got round them, and to make it feel like $150
million, but not force it.”
No Harry Potter expert, I, but Dylan Callaghan has a nice, short and very to-the-point interview with the writer of the fifth film, Michael Goldenberg, on the Writers Guild of America site. Regardless what one thinks of the movie — and the book is said to be somewhat unwieldy in its adaptability, perhaps a smartly chosen break for scripter Steve Kloves — I think Goldenberg’s comments about organic restrictions is a smart one, and one that obviously informs The Order of the Phoenix.
At the recent press day for The
Bourne Ultimatum, Julia Stiles took some time to also talk about The Bell Jar, the filmic adaptation of
Sylvia Plath’s novel to which she is attached. “That book is very meaningful to
a lot of people, and so we don’t want to disappoint them,” says Stiles. “In
terms of people not wanting to see an indictment of Ted Hughes again, although
the book is probably inspired by Sylvia Plath’s personal experience, it is not
her autobiography, and it takes place at a time in her life before she met Ted
Hughes, although she was writing it while she was married to him. So I’d really
like to keep the book separate from her autobiography. What I’m trying to do is
make it something that will pleasantly surprise fans of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, because I think her biography
has overshadowed the book a lot, and people think of her as this brooding, dark
poet, because of her death. But actually the book that she wrote is incredibly
vibrant, and has these beautiful images and hallucinations that she had that I
think would be perfect for a film.”
For those perhaps worrying, Stiles says she wants her
version — which is being penned by actress-scribe Tristine Skyler, but still
shopping for a director — to be a movie unlike the previous, 1979 version of The Bell Jar, directed by Larry Peerce
and starring Marilyn Hassett. “I saw [that movie] and I don’t want it to be
anything like that, with all due respect to the people that worked on it,”
Stiles says. “Stylishly, the way they shot it was very dark, and the images in The Bell Jar call for something like
what Julie Taymor did with Frida, [which
capture] that intense artistic drive that Sylvia Plath had, and that Esther
Greenwood has in the book. …The character in the book, you could say that she’s
almost manic depressive, in that she experiences these extreme highs and
extreme lows. And that needs to be reflected, which I don’t think you’ve seen
in any other movie that deals with depression.”
At the recent press day for The Bourne Ultimatum,
Matt Damon took some time to also talk about family life with his wife Luciana Barroso and new young daughter, Isabella. “Being a dad is still great, it’s been just amazing,” he says. “I mean,
these stages just go by… incredibly fast, you
know? The little discoveries every day — so much is happening, so much changes
in the first year. I mean, she’s walking around now. She’s 13 months old,
so it’s just amazing. It happens at warp speed. I see why, when parents
see little babies, they get that thing, they go, ‘I want another
one,’ because the stages all just fly past. And if you’re with her every
day, which I’m lucky enough to be, you don’t necessarily [notice it]. It’s only if you’re taking
pictures or it’s only if people you haven’t seen for a couple months come by that you
even realize [how fast things are moving].”
“Right now, she kind of sounds like a crow,” continues Damon, making a high-pitched squawk for illustrative purposes. “And she points at things. This morning,
she pointed at the ceiling, and there was nothing on the ceiling. And she
just went, ‘Caw!,’ like that. And I was like, ‘Well, that’s the
ceiling,’ and she just laughed. And I was like, ‘I don’t
know what’s funny about that.’ So I’m trying to figure out what’s going on
in her head. Sometimes you know… you go, ‘Oh, you want some milk?’ And she [laughs], and you go, ‘All right, she was thirsty. That’s good, she communicated.’ But then sometimes she just has these things that I just have no idea what she’s
thinking. So I’m working on that.”
At the recent press day for The Bourne Ultimatum, Matt Damon took some time to talk about his career in general, and where he sees things headed in the future. “Well, you know, the career [path] that I think Ben and I look
at… (George) Clooney’s definitely doing it right now, and Clint Eastwood. Those
are the careers where they’re acting, they’re writing, they’re directing, and they’re
doing it on their terms. I mean, I think that’s the biggest. I love making
movies. I love everything about it — I love writing and I love acting,
and I really want to direct. So I’ve been taking this last 10 years to really
carefully study these directors that I’ve been working with. And I’ve worked
with a lot of really good ones at this point, so I feel like I’m ready to
do it. And that, to me, would be great — to have a long career. I mean, it’s so
hard to have a long career in this business. …I mean, I’m still here after 10 years, and we’re all probably a little
amazed by that. [laughs] But yeah, so at this point, I just want to just be
smart about the work that I’m doing and try to have integrity about the choices
I make, and that’s it.”
At the recent press day for The Bourne Ultimatum,
David Strathairn took some time to also talk about his work on the forthcoming fantasy
film The Spiderwick Chronicles, directed by Mark Waters. To wit:
“It’s going to be completed in the near future,” says the
Oscar-nominated star of 2005’s Good
Night, and Good Luck. “I play Arthur Spiderwick, the man who has written a field
guide to the magical kingdom of trolls and goblins and fairies and sprites, which
he’s locked away because it has all these dangerous secrets, it’s kind of a
Pandora’s Box with the fairy kingdom. He’s gone off into the world to contact them
because he really believes that the world is full of them,” Strathairn
continues, describing his character as a “mad botanist” and naturalist. “Maybe
he’s eaten too many mushrooms, I don’t know,” he jokes. “But he believes that there
are things we cannot see.”
Adapted from Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi’s best-selling
series of youth-skewing books, with a much labored-on screenplay (John Sayles, as well as Ted Elliott
and Terry Rossio), The Spiderwick Chronicles is set for release from Paramount and Nickelodeon Films in
February of next year, with Martin Short, Andrew McCarthy, Joan Plowright and Mary-Louise Parker joining young Freddie Highmore (Finding Neverland) and Sarah Bolger (Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker) as the obligatory kids inspired by wonderment. For more information, click here.
At the recent press day for Hairspray, John Travolta talked about his newfound experience with women’s grooming and fashion
for his role as hefty home laundry operator Edna Turnblad, mother to inveterate
dreamer Tracy (Nikki Blonsky).
“I don’t know how [women] do it, I really don’t,” Travolta
says. “I mean, of course, this is 1962, and of course, there was a lot more
accoutrement in those days, right? Bras, bustiers, what have you, especially if
you were overweight. But I do remember my mother wearing stockings, a girdle, a
bra, and then high heels. Of course, that was enough to exhaust her in getting
ready. And I remember I thought, ‘What’s up with this? Why is it so exhausting?’
Well, cut to 40 years later, I know exactly why it’s exhausting,” says Travolta
with a laughs. “I tried it. It’ll take your breath away, putting all that on.”
While some of his preparation brought back thoughts of his
mother, Travolta didn’t fashion his specific movements on her, per se. “I have
a library of memories because I grew up with a lot of great women. But I also
grew up with a lot of women in theater, and women on films,” he says. “And I
think that collective memory of watching… you know, I like watching women. As
an actor, I observe as much as I can. I think I never thought I’d ever have to
use it, but it didn’t mean that I wasn’t noticing it. And I think that, you
know, you watch her mother’s friends, you watch the ladies on screen, on stage,
you get to build up a knowledge of behavior. And to that degree, it became, ‘Oh,
this is interesting. I wonder what it would be like to try this?’ or ‘I
remember so and so, and they looked like that.’ And of course I had people
reacting to me in fame, you know, whether it be fans or whatever. So with Tracy,
the character in the movie, becoming a local star, I could [show a] fan’s
reaction to that to a certain degree. So it was a mixture of things, really.”
At the recent press day for Hairspray, Michelle Pfeiffer talked about how she was inspired to believe in herself and strive to achieve — issues at the core of the buoyant musical. “It was my mother,” says Pfeiffer of her inspiration. “My mother didn’t have a career, and she
used to always say to me, ‘Michelle, there are two things you need to do before
you get married: you need to have a career, and you need to live on your own.’
That was her mantra to me, and then my dad inspired me [too, because] he had a
very fierce work ethic — he instilled in all of us kids the desire to succeed…
it didn’t matter what you chose to do, it was that you did it the best that you
could. So I kind of had a man’s work ethic for the time, because that was who I
emulated. Now it’s sort of everybody’s work ethic, men and women.” For Pfeiffer’s thoughts on her work in the upcoming Stardust, meanwhile, click here.
For 18-year-old Nikki Blonsky, director Adam Shankman’s
adaptation of the stage musical Hairspray represents a life-changing experience, as
well as a dream come true. Plucked out of obscurity from a Great Neck, New York Coldstone Creamery ice cream shop, Blonsky was a hardcore fan
of the show. “I auditioned for Broadway two years ago, and they told me I was
too young,” she says. “Then I saw the Broadway show when I was 15, and I was
hooked. I loved it. I wanted to play Tracy
more than anything.”
“And then the next year, I read up on the web site where it
said, ‘We’re making the movie, and [looking for] ages are 17 to 24,’” Blonsky
continues. “So I said, ‘Oh, I’m 17! Let’s do it — this is perfect!’”
The rest, as they say, is history. “To hear my own version
of ‘Good Morning Baltimore,’ and to look at the soundtrack and say, ‘Oh my
gosh, I am on a soundtrack with Michelle Pfeiffer, Christopher Walken, Queen
Latifah, John Travolta…’” Here Blonsky trails off and laughs, a huge smile
spreading across her face. “It’s mind-blowing, just totally mind-blowing. My
life has completely turned around, I’ll tell you that much. I have extremely
supportive parents, so I’ve always been very happy and content with my life
with them and everything. But when you’re finally doing what you want to do in
life, it’s this level of joy that I never thought was possible. I mean, I’m
just happy 24-7, I’ve just never been this happy!”
At the recent press day for Hairspray, Michelle Pfeiffer also talked a bit about the forthcoming Stardust, based on Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel, and directed by Matthew Vaughn. “It’s one of those movies that’s kind of hard to describe in
one sentence or one word, it’s kind of everything rolled into one,” she says. “It’s sort of
a fantasy/mythic/romance adventure… it’s a lot of different
worlds going on at one time. Somehow it all comes together and it all works;
it’s one of those times where everyone being in a different movie isn’t a
bad thing.”
Pfeiffer plays 5,000-year-old witch Lamia (“It’s hard to say which one’s more evil — [her] or Velma Von Tussle; it’s a toss-up”), but she says the film’s heavy prosthetics left her a bit cranky. “I did not enjoy [those], that was four to
five hours of make-up every day, and it was just not pleasant,” says Pfeiffer. “In fact, I was told
by the producers of Hairspray
that I was not allowed to talk to John (Travolta) about
prosthetics. They said, ‘It’d be better if you didn’t swap horror stories…’ But
John fortunately had done his homework and was prepared, and he knew how to set
things up in a way that would make things as comfortable for him as possible.
I, on the other hand, was unprepared, and just got through it.”
In the end it was worth it, though, Pfeiffer says. “The movie is stunning, it is. It’s really beautiful. I
mean — I’m not, I look hideous. Some of the older parts I look OK, but
we poke fun at this quest for eternal youth and the degree to which women will
go to to get it. …When I talked with
Matthew (Vaughn) that was the thing that intrigued me, because it wasn’t really
in the script or story. The storyline of eternal youth was, but we decided to
have a little bit of fun with it, and we do. It’s kind of silly.” Stardustopens August 10 nationwide, but I’ll be seeing the film Monday, so I’ll post some thoughts on it this coming week. For Sienna Miller’s thoughts on the movie, meanwhile, click here.
At the recent press day for Hairspray, Michelle Pfeiffer talked about why she
hasn’t been seen on screen since 2002’s underrated White Oleander. It’s a messy tale, for those who haven’t heard about it. To wit:
“I spent a couple of years trying to get this movie going,
called I Could Never Be Your Woman,
which Amy Heckerling directed and Paul Rudd stars in with me,” Pfeiffer explains. “It hasn’t
been released and I’m not sure when it will be. But I really, really loved that
project and, frankly, for a few years everything paled in comparison, and it was the
only thing I’d wanted to do. So that was sort of to be my big comeback, and
that was two years ago.“
What’s the delay? “It’s not really legal problems, it has something to do with
deal stuff,” says Pfeiffer. “There are no legal battles per se, but I think it’s about finding
the right distribution deal that everyone can be happy with. It’s the first
time something like this has happened (to me), and initially it was very frustrating. But now that
it’s been two years, I’m kind of not thinking about it, honestly. I would love
for it to come out, but the ship has sailed and I’m moving on.”
Of course Pfeiffer’s being fairly gracious and forgiving. Her make-nice statements are the press-pattycake equivalent of styrofoam packing popcorn — not totally forthcoming, but not necessarily false, either. The film is basically the biggest casualty of the implosion of upstart Bauer Martinez, which in turn is partly a result of the poor earnings of both National Lampoon’s Van Wilder: The Rise of Taj and Harsh Times, but also some rather shady and/or dizzying basic-level mismanagement. (Also caught up in Bauer hell: The Moguls, formerly known as The Amateurs, and Richard Gere’s troubled The Flock.)
Still, Pfeiffer insists that fans needn’t worry about her totally disappearing. Apart from the forthcoming Stardust, she’s also eyeing a couple other projects. “I’ve actually been working the last two years, it’s just that
now everything is coming out,” she says. “It’s kind of natural that I was
due to take a break. It wasn’t a conscious decision… but I’d worked pretty hard for a long time, and it
probably
made sense for my psyche.”
At the recent press day for Hairspray, John Travolta put to rest rumors that his work in the film — a colorful, toe-tapping musical based on a stage musical based in turn on John Waters’ 1988 film — might have inspired a desire to return to roots, so to speak:
“You know, honestly, I did stage from the time when I was 12
to 26 years old — even when I was in film — and I know it’s sacrilegious to say,
but I did my 13 or 14 years on stage,” Travolta relates. “It’s a lot of work in a different way.
Movies are hard, there’s no doubt about it, but then they’re over. You commit
to a year-long run, or a two-year run of a Broadway show, and you want to be digging
ditches at the end of it, because it’s the same show, same dialogue, same
everything — and after about six months you run out of ideas. It’s take 500,
and you don’t know what to do with it.”
Michael Moore first made his name as the director and namesake star of 1989’s critically touted Roger & Me,
about the effects of General Motors’ plant shutdown in Moore’s hometown
of Flint, Mich. He then parlayed that to-scale success into two
television series and a flourishing life as an author and guest
lecturer. After the turn of the century, Moore would further hone his
own particular brand of “shanghai journalism” in the Oscar-winning Bowling for Columbine and the all-time box office documentary champ, Fahrenheit 9/11.
For years fairly consistently lampooned by the Rush Limbaugh set because of the left-leaning nature of his political views, it was around this time — in 2002, leading up to the Academy Awards in the spring of 2003 — that the level and volume of vitriol directed
Moore’s way became downright deafening. If we were a nation in the
midst of a cultural war, 2004’s Fahrenheit 9/11 was regarded outright as a weapon by the Republican right, and all sorts of measures were taken to blunt its impact.
This cottage industry of politicized “response” (read: retaliation) is
nothing new, really, and despite the level of chatter, Moore was only
the latest in a long line of public figures to feel the sting of
righteous reaction — novel, perhaps, merely because he was a successful
filmmaker. But if teenage crushes burn bright and long, the same could
be said of political grudges. So as things got worse and worse in Iraq,
Moore — and his pointy-headed reasoning — became a point-of-comparison
whipping boy for those who would assail the decisions or policies of
the Bush administration. With no Democrats of note in positions of
significant power (until the midterms of 2006), if you wanted to either
insult a dissenter or (more likely) rally the base, you dragged out Moore’s name.
What does that do, though, moving forward, for Moore’s viability and
stature as a filmmaker? Regardless of the message in his latest film, the health care documentary Sicko, he’s
the main story wherever he goes, and his high negatives — while almost
certainly topping Bush’s numbers — aren’t exactly the foundation on
which to build a populist progressive agenda. It’s so bad that
otherwise perfectly reasonable adults I know — both folks who’ve voted
for Bush twice but now consider him adrift, those who voted against him
in 2004, and those who never voted for him at all — speak of Moore with
conspicuous malice in their voices, and talk, sight unseen, of not
going to see “movies like that.” For more on Moore, in the form of a feature from FilmStew, click here.
There’s a time-honored axiom in the film business that comedy is harder
than drama, so while dramatic performances are typically lauded come
awards season — and the actors that give them both well respected and
rewarded — Hollywood also enthusiastically keeps its eye out for new
comedic talent, since more often than not it’s those types of movies,
typically cheaper to produce, that keep their coffers filled.
After first gaining recognition for his contributions as a
correspondent on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, and more recently on television’s The Office and in 2005’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin — a rare, R-rated comedy smash, to the tune of $175 million worldwide, that wasn’t also pitched solely at a teen-skewing audience — Steve Carell has emerged as one of the most sought after comedic actors
in Hollywood. (Ben Stiller and Will Ferrell can’t headline everything,
after all.)
Evan Almighty, then, easily represents Carell’s biggest screen venture to date,
because it just so happens to also be the most expensive comedy ever
produced. Still, he’s not feeling any pressure. In fact, he seems… strangely normal. “I’m willing to take pretty much any job offered to me,” says Carell, with enough amiable modesty and seeming sincerity to allow him
to pull off such gross misstatements. “I’m pretty amenable, I don’t
really have a path set, like, ‘Well, I need to do this kind of
movie and then that, and then I need to switch it up and play a
psychopathic killer. I don’t look at it that way. …I know that there’s a
window of time that I’ll be able to do these things, so I’m just trying
to do that now, while at the same time be very cautious to not let it
interfere with my family life.” For the full feature piece, from FilmStew, click here.
Steve Carell’s latest film, Evan Almighty, may be a grand-scale misfire of sorts, but the actor is feeling good about his upcoming slate of projects, including this fall’s Dan in Real Life.
“I thought the script for [the movie] was great and Peter Hedges is a very thoughtful filmmaker,” says Carell at a recent press day. “Pieces of April I thought was fantastic, and he wrote About a Boy and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, so he’s a really accomplished person, and I thought, ‘That’s somebody that I’d love to work with.’ It wasn’t so much, ‘Oh, I want to do a romantic comedy with Juliette Binoche,’ it was more like, ‘Wow, I think that could be good, and really interesting, and I think the script will be really good.'”
“The movie involves a guy who was fairly recently widowed, three or four years before,” continues Carell. “And he’s been raising these three daughters on his own. And they’re reaching a point in their young adult lives, at least two of them, where he doesn’t know what to do. He still has one that’s kind of a baby girl that he can manage, but… one of the themes of the movie is that he kind of doesn’t take his own advice, and kind of lets things get away from him in terms of his own kids.”
“So did I take my own personal experience [into the film]? I don’t know. I don’t know that I even have a personal take or mental manual on how I’m raising kids,” says Carell, himself a father of two. “I think with everyone it’s just day-to-day, and you try to deal with each situation as it comes.” For Carell’s thoughts on Get Smart, meanwhile, click here.
Steve Carell’s latest film, Evan Almighty, may be a grand-scale misfire of sorts, but the actor is still feeling good about his upcoming slate of projects, including next summer’s Get Smart.
“Get Smart was something I loved growing up with as a kid,” he says, “and getting the chance to bring that to a movie screen is…” Here Carell trails off, as the wide grin of a man getting paid to play for a living breaks out across his face. “We’re 12 weeks in, we’re almost done shooting it and I think it’s going to be fantastic. I’m very bullish about Get Smart for next summer.”
Michael Showalter plays an average guy in The Baxter… a really average guy. In honor of that film’s off-kilter delights, as well as his 37th birthday today, here’s a reposting of an interview with him from the fall of 2005, on occasion of the movie’s original theatrical release. To wit:
For someone whose comedic resumé includes inspired absurdist
fare like Wet Hot American Summer and
the new Comedy Central show Stella, Michael Showalter is remarkably relaxed and low key in person, cycling through
bottled water and fiddling with the string on a hooded sweatshirt as he
discusses his feature film directorial debut, The Baxter. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise, though, since guilelessness is always the leavening ingredient in his often willfully incongruous
comedic collaborations.
Showalter, of course, got his start as part of the sprawling
comedy collective The State, which achieved a cultish following in the 1990s
via an eponymous sketch show on MTV. Showalter and his cohorts — including Stella and The Baxter costars David Wain and Michael Ian Black — met as
freshmen in college at New YorkUniversity
in the late 1980s. “It was just one of those things — a large group of people
all in the same place at the same time with exactly the same goals,” Showalter
recalls.The Baxter, which
he characterizes as a deadpan cartoon in which “all the characters are
participating in the same drawn reality,” marks Showalter’s film debut as a writer-director,
though he has plenty of experience helming sketches.
He also stars in it, playing Elliot Sherman, the very
embodiment of romantic compromise. If George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone”
announces swaggering screen bad boys and exotically flavored orchestral scores
herald the arrival of cinema’s most sensitive heartthrobs, Death Cab for
Cutie’s “The Sound of Settling” would serve as the putative theme song for
Elliot, a dowdy but sincere accountant who finds himself caught between
well-heeled fiancée Caroline Swann (The 40-Year-Old Virgin’s Elizabeth Banks) and Cecil Mills (Michelle Williams),
a bookish temp who seems on the surface a much better geek match. (Both she and
Elliot read the dictionary as a book.)
The film’s story finds Elliot awkwardly attempting to assert
himself. Though he’s not a 40-year-old virgin, he is a man-child whose
politeness has metamorphosed into serial acquiescence. When Caroline’s dashing
ex-boyfriend BradleyLake
(Justin Theroux) arrives, Elliot recognizes the familiar warning signs of an
impending dumping.
Showalter’s leaping off point for The Baxter was the great screwball romantic comedies of the 1930s
and ’40s, films in which second male leads like Ralph Bellamy and John Howard
took it squarely on the chin when the Cary Grants of the world swept in and
relieved them of their women. (For a modern day comparison, think of Bill
Pullman’s jettisoned character from Nora Ephron’s Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan romantic
comedy Sleepless in Seattle.)
It wasn’t a role that Showalter originally wrote with
himself in mind (Edward Norton’s name was bandied about at one point), but when
it became clear that it made the film financially feasible he rose to the
challenge. “Well, my attitude was that I wanted to do what was best for the
film,” Showalter says, “and at that time I saw myself playing Elliot as being
in service of the larger good.”
Like many comedians, Showalter seems to blanch a bit when
discussing the roots of his own inspiration. “I haven’t given it a lot of
thought. I like smart, fast, tight and clean,” he says. “I definitely like
tension, that’s something I like to try to find. And I think that I like
awkwardness. That’s something I find funny — human awkwardness. The Office is the funniest thing that
I’ve seen in a long time, and that’s basically because it’s just non-stop awkward
tension between all these characters, that constant sense of wanting to crawl
inside your own skin and die. But I really couldn’t define it beyond that. I
don’t think I have a formula.”
Showalter — who says he devoured all types and sub-genres of
comedy growing up — may not have a set creative formula, but he does have a
distinctive voice. His comedy is very mannered, driven by a sense of
playfulness. If there’s a tension, it’s never malicious, but rather balanced
perfectly between earnestness and silliness. It’s micro comedy instead of macro comedy, Showalter
concedes — comedy of protocol and words that isn’t built for breakout
mainstream success. “Probably not,” says Showalter when asked if he could ever envision
transitioning to more overt, studio-friendly fare. “I think The Baxter is a very independent film. I
think that it’s accessible in a way that some of my other stuff isn’t, but I
[also] think that it will not and cannot possibly be appreciated in the same
way that Wedding Crashers is. It’s
too stylized, it’s too specific.”
“I don’t have a good sense of what the bigger audience
likes,” Showalter continues, “and that’s partly why I think I exist in the
margins in my career. But I know what I like and what appeals to the
sensibilities of people I know.”He’s hoping those sensibilities help the whimsical Stella carve out as comfortable a small
screen home as that of Cops spoof Reno 911!, conceived and rendered by his
fellow ex-Staters. “We’re flying blind,” says Showalter of his show with Wain
and Black, a piquant staple of VH-1’s I
Love the ’90s specials. “It’s about these three guys who get into utterly
insane misadventures. We just take something small and take past the point
where it’s at all logical.” He’s not kidding. A recent episode found the guys
growing their own vegetables (indoors, naturally) to save money ($50 a year!) only
to become itinerant farmhands for the very crew boss whose agricultural advice
they failed to heed.
If Stella doesn’t
stick, Showalter won’t be gloomy for long. “It took me until when I started
doing The Baxter to really feel like
I was ready to step out on my own,” says Showalter. “And I’m grateful for
having had the opportunity to sort of stay inside the bubble for so long. What
I want to do now is sort of bounce back and forth between the collaboration and
working as an individual.”
That means, given his druthers, definitely more writing, and
almost certainly more directing. “I don’t think I could give up writing, but I
think I could give up acting,” says Showalter, who’s also a big sports fan who
likes to play poker and chess. “I would never in a million years tell you that
I’m an actor. …I just think doing this and getting paid at all seems like such
a novelty and farce that I never got too hung up on the money. If you’re paying
me to write this stuff that feels so much like my own, I’m just so lucky, so I
never got too up in arms over it.” For a review of The Baxter, click here; to purchase The Baxter via Amazon, click here.
It’s a cool, sunny Los Angeles day and David Goyer is where any
self-respecting comic book aficionado would be on such a clear morning:
inside, in a dimly lit room. Except instead of poring over copies of
the latest hot titles and dissecting minutiae to do with color, shading
and character, Goyer is in the edit bay tinkering onThe Invisible
— a film that represents a bit of a change-up, and a departure from
the graphic novel subgenre for which he is most well known. In the wake
of The Invisible’s $20 million spring box office take, Goyer has now been tapped by Universal to do an update of The Invisible Man, and may or may not direct a Magneto spin-off for 20th Century Fox.
Directing is something of an intriguing new, well, direction for Goyer who, as a kid
growing up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, always just wanted to write comic books,
which eventually led to his bringing them to life for the big screen.
As a writer, producer and occasional director, Goyer has exercised his
passion for telling brooding, character-driven stories by helping
translate comics both obscure and hugely popular. To him, it’s no
coincidence. “In retrospect, most of my movies are kind of about
outsiders,” Goyer says while fiddling with a coffee cup. “Even going back to Dark City or Batman or Blade
— they’re all about these people who are outsiders and alone. I didn’t
have a lot of friends growing up, so that clearly must be why I’m drawn
to these kinds of stories.” For the full feature piece, from FilmStew, click here.
Nikki Reed is no longer the messed-up young girl from Thirteen, the breakthrough film which she co-authored with director Catherine Hardwicke, based on her own slippery-slope experiences of an emancipated adolescence. Of course, she never really was that girl, as she’s quick to point out. Refreshingly unguarded during a recent sit-down chat at a Los Angeles hotel, Reed has a sly, astute and furtively confidential tone — when she appends a questioning “you know” to the end of a sentence, it’s not some vacuous, Valley Girl vernacular, but rather an intimate, imploring solicitation of deeper agreement and common ground.
Reed’s most recent films — Mini’s First Time and Cherry Crush, the latter of which hits DVD in a few weeks — didn’t catch fire at the box office, but with a Kevin Smith television pilot (Reaper) and a couple more indie flicks in the can (Familiar Strangers, Privileged), the 19-year-old Reed stands poised to make another full-frontal assault on Hollywood in the near future, all with an eye toward eventually writing and producing more of her own projects. “I didn’t know I was going to act until four years ago,” Reed says. “I did Thirteen and was like, ‘Whoah, that was cool, what a funny mistake.’ And then all of a sudden I moved out and couldn’t go back to school and that was my only choice. So I acted to pay the bills. Now I’m acting because I enjoy it. And that’s all I can say about it, because it’s not going to be the rest of my life.”For the full feature piece/interview, from FilmStew, click here.
It wasn’t too many years ago that the peddlers of reality television
were regarded in Hollywood as a band of gypsy reprobates, gatecrashers
of the industry whose stolen time in the sun surely wouldn’t last long
when stacked up against the quality and tradition of conventional
programming. Six seasons of American Idol later — and after four straight
years of that being the top show on television — how quaint and downright silly
that notion now seems. Reality TV, of course, has spread like a
wildfire, rapaciously and unapologetically gobbling up standard,
scripted fare, and giving viewers both a window into and mirror image
of lives less ordinary.
But there’s another more diagnosable and largely undiscussed trend
bubbling just beneath the surface: namely, the manner in which the conventions and modes of expression of these reality shows — from direct-address “confessionals” to lurking camera angles and ironic framing — are bleeding into scripted entertainment and other Hollywood art forms, from Michael Moore’s incendiary and populist documentaries to hit sitcoms like The Office.
With the release of this past week’s kids’ flick Surf’s Up, another frontier has been crossed. The choice of docu-style in such a mainstream piece of animated fare is
more than an unusual one — it’s downright groundbreaking, basically
staking the movie’s box office odds on the assertion that kids already grasp
this new style of storytelling. For the full feature piece, from FilmStew, click here.
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer wings into theaters this weekend, and I’ll have more thoughts on the movie soon. In advance of its opening, however — and though busy preparing for a family vacation — writer Don Payne graciously took some time recently to submit to an email interview. To wit:
Brent Simon: So I
know you’ve said that you were a big fan of comics growing up. I read a few
here and there, but then mostly got into books, dime store-type serial
mysteries, etc. What do you think it was about that form that most appealed to
you — the combination of word and image, the fantastical storylines?
Don Payne: I
think it was both. As a kid (and as an adult), there’s just something appealing
about superhero stories and seeing them told in the unique visual medium of
comics. I was particularly drawn to Marvel comics because their characters
seemed very real to me. I suppose it’s because (as has been said many times
before) the Marvel heroes weren’t perfect — they all had human flaws. Spider-Man
was a nerdy high school kid who had trouble with girls, the Fantastic Four were
a dysfunctional family with money problems, Daredevil was blind, the X-Men were
victims of intolerance, etc. Even as a kid, that made the comics all the more
interesting to me.
BS: Was writing a
constant for you as a kid, or were you into entertainment more generally, and
then gravitated to writing later, in high school or college?
DP: I was always
into sci-fi, comics and fantasy, thanks largely to the influence of my older
brother. I made up my own comics and stories as a kid. I also did a lot of
acting and, by the time I got to high school, I was making movies with a Super
8 camera. By the time I got to college, I knew I wanted to work in film, and by
the end of my senior year at UCLA, I knew I wanted to be a screenwriter.
BS: What do you
take as the major themes of Fantastic Four? And with so many comics out there,
why do you think so many people still care so strongly about it?
DP: I think the
strength of family has always been a major theme of the Fantastic Four, and
people can relate to that. As much as they squabble and bicker with one
another, at the end of the day, they really love each other. Any one of them
would sacrifice his or her own live to save the life of any other member of the
team. Another thing that’s unique about the F4 is that they have
no secret identities. Originally, they didn’t even have costumes. They’re
dealing with issues of privacy and celebrity, which other superheroes don’t
have to contend with. I also think the uniquely cosmic, sci-fi elements of the
comic have made them popular as well. And, of course, the popularity of any
dramatic work depends on the appeal of the characters — and all four members of
the team are great characters.
BS: Coming on
board to a sequel must be a somewhat strange feeling. You know you’re wanted,
as it were, because you’ve been selected independent of any carryover loyalty
from the first film, but you also don’t have any of that battle-tested shared
experience of the franchise. So after being hired, describe the process: Did
you meet or talk at all with any of the actors, collectively or individually?
Director Tim Story, Avi Arad and other producers? Or was it more just a matter
of getting on the same page with the studio, and then hunkering down on
something everyone had signed off on?
DP: I did feel
like the new kid on the block when I came on board. Pretty much everyone else on
the project had worked together on the first film. But the people involved were
very welcoming and accepting of new ideas. I had meetings with the studio,
director Tim Story and Marvel producers Avi Arad and Kevin Feige since the very
start of my involvement on the project — actually, even prior to that — so I
knew them all. They had their ideas about what they wanted to see in this film,
I had my ideas, and it was my job to put them all together and make it work. By the way, for the record, the official writing credits on Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
are, “Story by John Turman and Mark Frost, Screenplay by Don Payne and Mark
Frost.”
BS: The first
film was a $330 million worldwide hit, yet was also rather tepidly received in
some fan-boy corners, and critically as well. To what degree, if any, do you
think studio reaction to the first film helped shape the main narrative choices
of the second movie?
DP: There was a
learning curve with the first film. I think everyone involved in the production
was trying to find the right tone. Now people have a better idea what the
strengths of the franchise are, and I think that’s allowed us to try some new
things in this film. The inclusion of the Silver Surfer shows that they’re
willing to go a little more cosmic than in the first film, which is great.
BS: Not meant as
a loaded question, honestly, but rather as a general query offshoot given your
insider’s point-of-view — in your opinion is there too much studio emphasis
placed on attempted pandering to the Internet-fed, loud (but presumably loyal)
core audiences of adapted works, rather than merely investing in the craft of
storytelling?
DP: I think
everyone involved in a movie wants to tell a good story. I also think it’s difficult
to pander to the “core audience,” because the fan base isn’t some monolithic
entity. It’s made up of individuals who, while they all share a love for the
source material, have many different opinions of how they’d like to see it
executed on the screen. You also need to make a movie that has crossover
appeal, something that’s going to please mainstream audiences as well as the
hardcore fans. On the other hand, if there’s a big consensus on a
particular issue among the fans, you’d better not ignore it. It’s not just
because the fans make up a large part of your audience — they’re also in tune
with what made the material great to begin with. The big things that the fans
love are the reasons that the source material is so popular, and that popularity
is why the movie is getting made in the first place. So you want those big
things to translate to the screen.
BS: Were there
any discussions that you recall about the first movie’s performance overseas,
where it did, I think, slightly more of its overall business?
DP: I think
people realized that the Fantastic Four’s popularity wasn’t just limited to the US audience. I
also think that’s why this film has such a global scope to the action — which
is a great thing, in my opinion. In the comics, the Fantastic Four weren’t
limited to New York, like Spider-Man and other superheroes seemed to be. They went around the world,
across the galaxy, and into the Negative Zone.
BS: In your
opinion, what makes the Silver Surfer such a good villain, a fan favorite?
DP: There are
many, many reasons. First off, he’s not merely a villain — he’s a conflicted
soul, a tortured individual. He’s noble and selfless, having sacrificed himself
to save his home planet and the woman he loved by agreeing to serve Galactus. And
yet, in doing so, he’s also taking part in genocide on a cosmic scale. So
there’s a real complexity and moral ambiguity to his character. And if you’ve
read the comics, you know he’s ultimately not a villain at all, after his sense
of compassion is reawakened. He’s also got the power to manipulate matter and
energy, and he’s a silver guy who rides on a flying surfboard. So that’s pretty
cool.
BS: What was the
hardest part of the overall writing experience? Coming from more of a comedy background, did you find crafting action scenes with the potential for swirling special
effects mind-bogglingly difficult, or was it a sort of cathartic, left-field
release?
DP: I think the
hardest part of the job for any writer is to reconcile the various visions and
ideas of the director, the studio, the producer — sometimes even the actors — with
each other and with your own. It’s a collaborative process, but the writer is
the one who’s got to make it all work in the script. I also had the added pressure of this being a big franchise
film featuring a superhero team which I cared about a great deal. As a fan, you
want it to be something that, if you had no involvement with the movie
whatsoever, you’d come out of the theater thinking you’d just seen something
great. I actually kind of stumbled into a comedy career. I got my
MFA in screenwriting at UCLA and wrote a lot of non-comedy scripts while I was
in school. I only wound up in comedy because that was the first break I got in
the business. I’d written genre stuff before, so I always loved writing big
action/special effects sequences. And, of course, I think if you spend years
reading the visual medium of comic books, you get a good background for writing
action sequences.
BS: So here’s a
fun one. When you’re laboring on a script like this one, where secrecy matters and
what not, and pesky reporters and writers (like me last year) are all angling
for some minute scoop (be it about character, content, cameos, design or tone), do you have to sign a lengthy and detailed non-disclosure confidentiality
agreement, or does Rupert Murdoch simply appear via teleconference, mutter “We
know where you live,” and shoot you a stern stare while casually burning stacks
of $100 bills? That is to say, I know you and many other folks take the (quite
reasonable) blanket position of not talking about anything, but do studios like
to explicitly spell out what they don’t want discussed?
DP: No one has
ever come to me and said, “You can’t talk about this.” But some things are just
common sense. You don’t want to spoil the details of a movie you’re working on.
You want it to be experienced in the way that movies are supposed to be
experienced — in the theater when it’s finished.
BS: I received some
reader-submitted questions, a lot of which centered on the movie’s PG rating,
so a couple queries there: was that rating part of a studio mandate, based on
discussions and/or some sort of research tied to the first film’s performance,
or was it a little more vague than that, meaning a borderline call that the
MPAA just happened to find not deserving of a stricter rating?
DP: I have no
idea why it got a PG rating. There was never any mandate that I ever heard of
to limit or modify content to get either a PG or PG-13 rating — certainly not
in the writing process. There are some pretty intense action sequences in
there, more intense than in the first film, so I was a little surprised by the
rating, to be honest. The bottom line to me, though, is whether a movie is good
or bad, not what its rating is. To tell you the truth, I think some of the hullabaloo I’ve
seen online about the rating brings up an interesting issue. A lot of the comic
book purists — the ones who would like to see as literal a translation of the
great Stan Lee/Jack Kirby works onscreen as possible — are the same ones who
are worried about the film’s PG rating being a negative. But the comic book
stories as written by Stan and Jack never included anything that would have
been the equivalent of a PG-13 rating. They were written to include a young
readership. It’s more in keeping with the spirit of Stan and Jack not to forget
that audience. And I’m not talking about dumbing anything down for kids, but
making a movie that can include them and spur their imagination and sense of
wonder — like the comics did for me and for so many other fans out there. And,
hopefully, the movie will introduce a new generation of kids to the comics as
well.
BS: Another
reader expressed appreciation about the character of Silver Surfer making his
way to the screen, but wanted to ask about the message board speculation of Galactus
being teased as a cloud/vortex, and not being true to the comics’ form everyone
knows Galactus as. Your thoughts/comments?
DP: I can’t talk
about Galactus in detail, but I will say this. Whatever his onscreen
manifestation is, it doesn’t preclude any form he might take on in any future
film. Galactus is a being who wields virtually limitless, godlike power over
matter and energy. I think he could assume any manifestation he so chooses.
BS: Finally, how
much on-set writing work (or, conversely, slack-jawed, good-time loafing) did Rise of the Silver Surfer entail versus
your feature writing debut, My Super
Ex-Girlfriend?
DP: On both
projects, my time on the set was severely limited because of my full-time job at The Simpsons. (I’m now a consulting
producer on the show. I only go in two days a week, which frees up a lot more
time for me to do feature work and to actually see my family.) On Super Ex, I was able to get out to the
set New York for about three
weeks during production. The director, Ivan Reitman, thought I’d be bored, but
it was my first experience on a movie set, so every minute was fascinating to
me. For Rise of the Silver
Surfer, I went up to Vancouver
for a couple weeks to do some rewriting shortly before the start of production.
It was a great experience seeing this amazing production apparatus gearing up
to make the film. After production started, I kept in touch via e-mail with
director Tim Story on the set. He would send me requests for little fixes or
alternate lines of dialogue when he needed them, and I would turn them around
pretty quickly.
BS: And hey, any
involvement on The Simpsons Movie at
all?
DP: None. But I know
all the guys who wrote it, and I think it’s going to be great. I just hope I
can score a free ticket.
 script that he wrote that maybe we’ll do one day, but we don’t even get around to talking about our work,” she insists. “When we get home, it’s like, ‘Did John do his homework?’ <b>I mean, I would love to get his feedback on a lot of things, but literally I cannot get him to read a script. And do you know how I find out about what he’s doing? The trades!</b> Honest to God, he tells me nothing.”</p>
<div class=)
Michael Moore first made his name as the director and namesake star of 1989’s critically touted Roger & Me,
