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.
At the recent press day for Evan Almighty in Los Angeles this past weekend, Wanda Sykes was asked her thoughts about Paris Hilton, and the famously tart-tongued comedienne let loose in memorable fashion. “I’m losing sleep! Is she in jail today, or is she at home — oh, what’s goin’ on with Paris? It’s just so ridiculous how famous she is for absolutely nothing,” laments Sykes. “I mean, she is such a non-celebrity, but again, people are camped out in front of her house and want to see if she goes to jail. I mean, she’s rich, and she’s screwing up just being rich, you know? That’s pretty sad, when you fuck up rich. You’ve got to be the biggest idiot in the world if you can’t just sit your ass down for a minute and be rich.”
Here Sykes pauses for a laugh, and shakes her head. “If I was a Hilton, I would’ve been premature,” she continues. “I would’ve shot out of the womb early, as soon as I found out: ‘Wait a minute, I’m rich?! I’m outta here! Let me get my life started!’ I just think it’s ridiculous, the whole thing.”
In the dry, new Mob-informed comedy You Kill Me, her character, tart-tongued advertising saleswoman Laurel, pulls a knife on a guy to aid her unlikely new beau, alcoholic hitman Frank Falenczyk (Ben Kingsley), so what’s the craziest thing that Téa Leoni has done for love?
“I would have to say sex in a sauna is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done,” reflects Leoni with a slightly canted head, “but David (Duchovny, her husband) and I were in the throes of our newfound passion. And… don’t do that. Dry heat, air, need air, quick, get air, vomit… horrible,” she says, shaking her head. “It was terrible, [except] for the first four minutes, maybe. After that it was… no. I felt ill for about eight hours afterwards, I was completely dehydrated. And then, it’s not like you have cushions in there…”
His latest film, Mr. Brooks, is both a serial killer tale and an outlandish mash-up of unlikely thriller elements — a movie, in fact, that Kevin Costner admits he would have had quite a different reaction to if he hadn’t sat down to read the entire script through on his own. So what does Costner look for in a screenplay or project?
“Just fresh air, something that seems highly
original,” he says, from a recent press day in advance of his movie’s release. “I would never have done this movie if it was pitched to me. But I would have
never done Field of Dreams
if it was pitched to me [either]. It takes a writer that really has his muse working on
his shoulder, you know? And you just go, ‘Wow.’ It was just an incredible
window that they found into this subject, I thought. And Thirteen Days, for
instance… it was also great. The window into that story was through Kenny O’Donnell — not Jack’s point of view or Bobby’s point of view, you know? It’s hard,
writing. That’s why it’s hard to write. It’s not easy. It’s an art form.”
That’s one of the reasons that Costner doesn’t view himself as a typical writer. “I don’t think I’m a great writer. But I like to think I recognize a good idea,” he says. “But unlike conventional wisdom, I don’t go out and make a
movie when a script is 60 percent [ready], just because I got the actor now and the director,
and I think the job’s done. I’m anal. I don’t even go out to actors till my
script is 100 percent done, because I don’t want anybody changing it. Annette Bening
and Robert Duvall didn’t change a line on Open Range. Why? Because I was sure that it worked. And [in Mr. Brooks] we
didn’t change any lines, William Hurt and Dane Cook and I, in our half of the
movie. Not a line. Because I was positive it worked, you know?”
Erstwhile Gilmore Girl Lauren Graham didn’t only have to contend with the chance of Steve Carell cracking
her up on the set of the forthcoming Evan
Almighty — she also had to share screen time with some unusual animals.
“The amazing stuff with the animals was less what my
interaction was with them, but [just] watching these trainers get them kindly
and very simply to do what they wanted them to do,” she says. “Because I just
thought, ‘These giraffes have not been training to do Evan Almightytheir whole lives. How do they know to bring him the hammer?’ You know, so much of the stuff is real that you see in the movie. So that was
really amazing. I mean, we weren’t sitting around petting the lions or
anything, but it was cool to watch them walk by. You’re sitting there drinking
coffee, and you just got strangely used to it.”
“The animal we dealt the most with was Toothy the alpaca (note: above alpaca is for illustrative purposes only), who had… this huge underbite, and was really unattractive,” Graham continues. “And
I think we made the trainers mad because we called him Toothy and that’s not
his name. But the little boys who played our sons got really into Toothy as,
like, a mythical figure, even though he was right there. They’d be like, ‘Do
you think Toothy knows we’re rolling? Do you think Toothy knows we’re home?’ And
at dinner, and they’d be like, ‘What do you think Toothy’s eating for dinner?’”
Here Graham pauses for a laugh. “So he was the one that somehow, maybe became
of his unusual appearance, struck gold in our hearts.”
Steve Carell was out in full force promoting his new film, Evan Almighty, yesterday with a battery of press interviews in Los Angeles, but he took some time to talk about his The Office cast mate, Jenna Fischer, and how she was recovering from her back injury, suffered after falling down a flight of stairs last month in New York.
“She’s much better, she’s back in Los Angeles,” says Carell of Fischer. “She will be completely fine, she’s going to kind of just lay low. She wasn’t working this summer so she can take it easy and rehab it, but she’s going to be fine.”
Carell, meanwhile, had nothing but praise for his experience on the series in general, and doesn’t seem eager to yet bolt The Office for a full-time, film-only career, despite currently shooting the big screen adaptation of Get Smart for next summer. “I think, just in terms of writing and value, nothing beats that show,” he says of The Office. “It’s such a smart group of people, and people are really devoted to the show. The actors… I think are fantastic, every one of them. We’re very lucky. That sort of [group] doesn’t come together very often. It’s sort of a brain trust, especially the writing team.” For a more fully sketched feature and interview with Carell, click here.
Forgot to mention this back when it occurred on May 19, but Michael Madsen appeared in person at the Fangoria Convention in Burbank, and did his best Tom Sizemore impression, squinting, smirking and acting quite odd.
He was talking up his participation in Shifter, a Rage comic book series about a two-legged, sunglasses-sporting, Mob hitman werewolf. Set to launch June 27, the series is being inked and published with an eye already being cast toward big screen adaptation. Saying that he’d been “in Valencia shooting a motorcycle picture for Quentin Tarantino until 3 a.m.” (that would be Larry Bishop’s Hell Ride, produced by Tarantino), Madsen says that doing something for his five sons played a big part in tackling Shifter,
but that also, “I’m trying to get away from the villain thing for a
while, and be a hero, instead of the one who gets thrown out of a
window by Steven Seagal.” (Apparently Madsen momentarily confused
himself with… Gary Busey?)
Also on hand with Madsen were Amber Benson, who models/plays informant Kimmy in the series, and Rachel Miner, the ex-Mrs. Macaulay Culkin, who portrays assassin Poison. They appeared bored and increasingly irritated, while Madsen kept interrupting the moderator, glancing around and pounding his cordless microphone on his armchair and repeating into it, “Thanksgiving!” in a deep voice, a reference to Eli Roth, who preceded the awkward Shifter panel with a chat about Hostel: Part II.
Press conferences are always something of a dicey proposition, and you typically lose quite a bit of the (admittedly manufactured) informality of roundtable interviews in the translation to this format, no matter how well managed against free-for-all they are. Sometimes, though, as at the press day held in Los Angeles this past weekend for the forthcoming Evan Almighty, the tradeoff proves deliciously worth it, either because of an instinctive performance moment born of appearing in front of a larger group or… well, just a stupidly phrased question that provides its own inherent entertainment value. To wit, this exchange with Lauren Graham, above:
Question: In both this movie and in Gilmore Girls, you’re the sexy
mom…
Lauren Graham: Thanks.
Q: Not skinny at all, but very light…
LG: Mmm… wow, there’s that. Not at all? You wouldn’t say at
all?
Q: What do you do to…
LG: To be so not skinny?
Q: … do you work out, or…?
LG: (laughs) Well, thank you for part of that question. I
don’t have really any awareness of that. What I knew is that I thought that… You
know, we sort of discussed that I didn’t think [my character] worked. And so I
wanted her to feel kind of casual and natural, especially in opposition to this
guy [Steve Carell] who’s very buttoned up and has kind of gotten into this more professional
time of his life. I felt like this is a girl who’s known him a long time, and
knew him before all this stuff happened. And so I just wanted her to be kind of
a counterpoint for him. And the other stuff: like, if I did anything I wanted
to do, I would be, like, a lot… Uh, this is me like running and doing
everything I can. I’m sort of fighting a battle… I guess. I could go really far the
other way, so this… I work out a lot. I watch what I eat. It’s very hard won
even to be this not skinny. Yes! Next…
For the record, and for what it’s worth, the question came from a female reporter…
At some point, hubris and/or delusion knock down a lot of superstars, and it’s not particularly hard to figure out why. Once big
time success comes for any actor, their circle of trusted friends and
advisors tends to shrink, and with it the number of people who can
speak the brutal truth and play hardcore devil’s advocate in matters of
a career. If a star doesn’t have a strong sense of their own talent and of what
makes for worthwhile individual artistic pursuit, he or she can be in
for a bumpy ride. Whatever one makes of Kevin Costner’s past failures —
and between them, Waterworld and The Postman
spilled a lot of gossip column ink — it can’t be said that the 52-year-old Costner currently holds unreasonable expectations about his career. As both an
actor and director, he does what he wants and accepts the market’s
reply with more or less a shrug.
In 2005, Costner notably teamed with filmmaker Mike Binder for the idiosyncratic and at times downright combative The Upside of Anger, about a fallow, worn-down baseball player turned alcoholic deejay who butts heads in roundabout romantic fashion with widower Joan Allen. His latest film, Mr. Brooks,
is a dark and careening ensemble piece about a family man who
moonlights as a notorious serial killer, hardly the sort of
meat-and-potatoes career restoration project one would expect of a big
summer release. “I know maybe some longtime people who’ve enjoyed my
movies might be offended by this, might think that it’s too harsh,”
says Costner during a recent interview.
“I get that, and I accept that. But I don’t want to cater to my
audience, I just want to feed it, you know? Take it or not take it.
It’s an honest effort.”
This complete lack of illusions about Mr. Brooks’ place in the
current market stands in refreshing contrast to the manner in which
many stars hold on to a reflection of only their most idealized and
successful selves. “Yeah, there’s blood, there’s a lot of blood,” says
Costner of Mr. Brooks. “But that’s what this movie is about.
And there’s a lot of tenderness in it too, so what is everybody so
afraid of? Not being #1 at the box office? Well, we ain’t going to
be — we’re not even going
to come close.”For the full feature piece, from FilmStew, click here.
Hostel: Part II writer-director Eli Roth and cast mates Bijou Phillips
and Vera Jordanova
took questions at the Los Angeles Fangoria Convention at the Burbank Hilton a
couple weeks back, and the answers, insights and good-naturedly gory
reminiscences came fast and furious.
While the brief clip from the Hostel sequel showing an abortive escape attempt by Phillips wasn’t
necessarily anything to write home about, Phillips did dispute gossip that she didn’t enjoy the Czechoslovakian shoot, or was hell on wheels on set, as apparently reported elsewhere in some gossip rag. Also, Roth talked at length about his
actors’ performances (making up for the fact that so few questions were lobbed
their way, perhaps), and said — however dubious a claim — that the Motion
Picture Association of America did literally
say/admit that “good acting” was responsible for an NC-17 rating on the
first-pass cut of the movie. Roth says he believes that the torturous scenes of
women in peril — and Phillips’ anguished reactions in particular — were the ratings
board’s chief cause of concern, because they played as so disturbingly real. That was kind of the point, he argued, and that, “People who come to see Hostel: Part II know exactly what kind of movie they’re getting into. They’re looking for some fucked-up shit.”
After the 35-minute-ish session, the aforementioned trio
signed autographs, but the most unnerving sight had to be folks posing for
pictures (some with their children!) with two fake-blood-covered slaughterhouse
torturers standing on either side of a bound, gagged and scantily clad model.
Still trying to figure out a way to pour some Purell on my brain after that one…
In his latest film, Mr. Brooks, Kevin Costner plays a buttoned-up businessman whose family life masks a lifetime of serial murdering. It’s an audacious movie full of wild swings in plot, and one that refreshingly embraces certain excesses. Interestingly, though, one bit that could be overplayed but isn’t comes in the form of Mr. Brooks’ murderous id, Marshall, played by William Hurt. When Brooks has conversations with Marshall, time stops in the movie. But is the character, as seen, a randomly externalized presentation of Brooks’ inner psyche, or does Marshall actually have his own back story? According to Costner at the film’s recent press day, it’s the latter.
“I found Marshall
when I was 12 years old in a book of children’s dreams,” says Costner of his character. “And he would play
basically a Black Knight, an evil person. But I liked him so much in the book
because he was kind of cool. And I liked him so much, actually, I was afraid he
was going to die in the book, so I never finished it. And my father used to
discipline me with the idea that if I wasn’t good, that the Black Knight would
come and get me [because] he actually hid in my
closet. And like any young man, eventually you challenge your dad’s theory and
you open that closet. And there was my imaginary friend, and he was not scary
at all to me. So he’s been with me, sort of as my alter-ego. And that began
when I was 12 years old.” For a full review of Mr. Brooks, click here.
It was no small deal when author Thomas Harris and producer Dino De Laurentiis
agreed to cast an eye to the past, and, in the form of Hannibal Rising, new this week to DVD, explore the formative
years of the killer part made so famous by Anthony Hopkins. Casting a young actor in a role already so strongly entrenched in
filmgoers’ minds was roughly akin — in the gravity of genre terms — to
Ewan McGregor’s casting as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars
prequels. With a solid actor, you at least had a chance at critical
legitimacy. A misstep, though, could spell irreversible doom for the
entire franchise. De Laurentiis and director Peter Webber (Girl with a Pearl Earring) found their virtuoso killer in young French actor Gaspard Ulliel (below).
Hannibal Rising would stall at only $27 million
domestically, international audiences proved more willing to turn back
the clock on Lecter; it doubled those numbers abroad, and turned a
profit overall, perhaps setting the scene for further adventures in
slaying. After all, it’s an R-rated franchise whose four films have
cumulatively grossed over $900 million, not even counting the black
sheep of the brood, Michael Mann’s Manhunter. Ulliel’s
performance should certainly bolster that possibility of a
continuation; he received almost across-the-board positive notices for
his portrayal. Understandably, it’s also raised his profile. For the full feature piece, from FilmStew, click here.
The $80 million worldwide gross of 2006’s down-and-dirty
horror flick Hostel, and in particular its $19.5 million Stateside opening weekend, guaranteed writer-director
Eli Roth (above right) a couple more pictures, and he hasn’t been shy about exercising options
on a full slate of announced projects that, at times, has included up to a
whopping eight movies. Naturally, though, Roth can’t direct 24/7, nor in a
bubble (one thinks… that would present some practical hurdles), so he’s had to
trim his slate a bit.
Roth and a pair of his Hostel:
Part II leading ladies, Bijou Phillips
and Vera Jordanova,
appeared recently at the Los Angeles Fangoria Convention, and amidst information
about that movie’s production — shot primarily in Czechoslovakia, but including
location work in Iceland and the south of France — were plenty of questions about
Roth’s recent and upcoming work. Apart from exercising a pretty spot-on impression
of David Lynch (“OK, here’s the deal: rabbits!”), for whom Roth worked prior to Cabin Fever, Roth shared his thoughts
on making the Thanksgiving trailer,
as well as other tidbits. To wit, a brief sampler:
Roth said that making the Thanksgiving trailer for Grindhouse
was the most fun he’s ever had filming anything, and that he took particular
glee in corrupting an entire town’s schoolchildren for the outdoor processional
gone terribly wrong. “If you ever have a chance to film a parade scene where
you cut off a giant turkey’s head,” said Roth, “do it!” Asked if he would
consider extending Thanksgiving to a feature-length
production, as Robert Rodriguez has talked about doing for his trailer for Machete, Roth said he’d like to make a Thanksgiving feature, but
that the less-than-hoped-for theatrical grosses for Grindhouse have
cooled some at the Weinstein Company and elsewhere on the idea. “I made a pact
that Edgar (Wright) that if I did Thanksgiving, he’d do Don’t!,” says
Roth, in reference to Wright’s trailer contribution, before adding, “But it
would have to be, like, Dogshit ’95… instead of Dogme ’95 — shoot it down-and-dirty,
in like seven to 10 days, for under $1 million. That’s the only way it would
work. We’d have to put those limitations on ourselves.”
As widely detailed, Roth’s next directorial project is an
adaptation of Stephen King’s Cell,
penned by The People Vs. Larry Flynt’s
Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. And Roth doesn’t have any involvement in the Cabin Fever sequel,
directed by Ti West, beyond taking an executive producer credit. But the Thanksgiving experience got some other
creative juices flowing, and according to Roth he’s also going to direct an entire film,
called Trailer Trash, consisting of
20 to 25 phony, stylized previews. No word yet if these would be shot in consecutive
fashion either before or after Cell,
but one can imagine that a few of Roth’s friends will likely get involved as
well.
Amber Tamblyn’s
new film, Stephanie Daley,
about a small town teenager accused of murdering her newborn baby, is a pretty
hardcore drama, but that doesn’t mean that she and costar Tilda Swinton didn’t
find time for a little relaxation while filming in the tucked away regions of
upstate New York. “Tilda and I, because there was nothing to do up there, went
to Woodstock,” relates Tamblyn. “We
drove down there together a couple times and got lost. And we saw Grizzly Man
four times in the theater because we loved it so much. We were obsessed. We were even trying to compare
it in some way to Stephanie Daley,
and have those characters be other people. And you know Tilda — she was like,
‘I feel like I’m more of the bear
presence, let me explain why,’” says Tamblyn, affecting Swinton’s slight
patrician Scottish accent.
Bearish allegories aside, Tamblyn still keeps in touch with
her costar as well. “Tilda and I still have a joke, actually,” she confides.
“The final climactic scene where we’re sitting in the office and she… gets me
to start talking about [my character’s delivery] and says, ‘Was it down in the
leg of your snow-pants?’ After a while — because we shot that stuff
consecutively, all of the things in the office, all within four days, and
back-to-back — we started to go a little crazy with the dialogue, and the
back-and-forth of it. The psychology is so thick that we started saying each
other’s lines. And then we’d be like, ‘Oh, shit!’ So every once in a while I’ll
get an email from Tilda and the subject title will be her line of dialogue, ‘And
then what happened?’ And I’ll write back, ‘I don’t remember.’ It just became
laughable…”
Amber Tamblyn
got her start in television, and drew wide acclaim in CBS’ Joan of Arcadia, a blend of Quantum
Leap and Touched by an Angel,
centering on a frustrated teenager with a direct line to God. The big screen
has been nice to her as well, though, with The
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and The
Grudge 2 turning into solid hits, and affording her the opportunity to do
small, intimate indies like Stephanie
Daley, in
release now. Still, Tamblyn isn’t turning her back on the small screen.
“I just did a pilot for CBS, and I did it because Michael
Cuesta wrote it. Cuesta did L.I.E.
and 12 and Holding,
and created Dexter and has done a lot
of Six Feet Under. He’s a very
interesting director,” she says. “It’s a show called Babylon Fields and it’s with Ray Stevenson, Kathy Baker and Jamey
Sheridan and it’s about everybody coming back from the dead — everyone in the
world, Indian tribes, everything. It’s not an apocalyptic scenario, but it
really focuses on this one tiny town on Long Island and
this girl, Janine. Her father comes back from the dead, played by Jamey
Sheridan, and he’s a corrupt cop. What we, the audience, find out is that
someone, either Kathy Baker or myself, put an axe in the back of his head, and
that’s how he died. He finds the axe and places it in the back of his head and
realizes that that’s how he was killed, and then goes on to investigate his own
murder. So it’s about him trying to fix all of these awful situations and
relationships that he had, as well as other characters.”
“Eventually there’s going to be some really hilarious things,
like ‘zombie AA,’ where they all go to meetings so they don’t eat flesh,”
continues Tamblyn. “I mean, it’s really dark, dark comedy. It’s right up my
alley. I guess when I read it I was like ‘CBS is going to do this? Are you
kidding me?’ They said, ‘Yeah, they want their Heroes orLost, they want
something along those lines.’ So I said, ‘Well, if they’re crazy enough to put
money behind it, I’m crazy enough to do it. Let’s do it.’ It’s great.”
Tamblyn isn’t yet sure that the series will be picked up,
and it hardly seems to have the ingredients of a fuzzy, feel-good break-out
smash. Still, she’s not worried. “It’s a great character role,” Tamblyn says.
“My character, Janine Wunch, is this Long Island girl
who carries a gun, and is really kind of clumsy but sort of sweet and even a
little hardcore. I read it and everybody was saying, ‘Don’t go back to CBS, don’t
go back’ and I said, ‘I don’t have a choice, this is amazing.’ I mean, I don’t
want to go do Scooby Doo 5. There
aren’t enough roles to keep me sustained. A good script in Hollywood,
for me, comes along maybe three to four times a year, which is not enough. I
know that sounds ridiculous, but even then, sometimes I can’t do those, so that’s
the way it goes. So I’d rather be doing something like this where it’s
consistent and it feeds me. I feel like I’m always hungry for it. It’s very,
very cool. I think it’s going to be a big cult thing. I like sticking with the
cult themes — soap operas, horror films, that’s my target. All I need to get
now is a guest role on Battlestar
Galactica, then I’m good to go. I love that show. That and The Wire; it’s all I watch.”
Amber Tamblyn, on the cusp of turning only 24, has already shown an incredible savvy about mixing commercial fare with independent-minded material that speaks to a somewhat deeper appreciation of nuance and artistry. Her latest film is Stephanie Daley, a delicate diorama about the parallels in anxiety and denial between a teenager accused of murdering her newborn baby and the pregnant forensic psychologist, played by Tilda Swinton, assigned to investigate the case. Shot in wintry upstate New York, and coming during a painful real-life break-up, production left its mark on Tamblyn, who’s also busy prepping her second book of poetry. For the full feature interview on the film, from FilmStew, click here.
A long time before Stephen Colbert and the notion of
“truthiness,” Depeche Mode touched upon some of the same ideas of candor’s
malleability and, conversely, slippery slope perils when, in the early 1990s,
David Gahan sang on Violator, “You’ll
see your problems multiply/When you continually decide/To faithfully pursue/A policy
of truth.” After all, complete and unvarnished honesty can be just like handing
someone a cudgel if they don’t like what you have to say.
Writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait (yes, that Bobcat Goldthwait) explores this idea in the
unconventional-to-say-the-least romantic comedy Sleeping Dogs Lie,
a surprisingly deeply felt movie that takes a gross-out sex humor nugget and
grinds it down in purposefully awkward fashion into the shag carpet of the real
world. Melinda Page Hamilton stars as Amy, a seemingly normal young girl,
adored by her parents and golden-boy fiancé John (Bryce Johnson). Her future
looks bright until John suggests they tell each other their most intimate
secrets. When Amy finally relents — telling John about a time in college when
she performed fellatio on her dog — her connections to those she loves falls
apart.
That the movie is rated R for “strong and aberrant sexual
content,” (!) as well as drug use and language, is a given, but Sleeping Dogs Lie
isn’t shallowly explicit, unlike so many gross-out teen comedies. Rather, the
movie extrapolates forward from its premise in surprisingly effective if visually
threadbare style. In conjunction with the film’s recent DVD release— from First Look, and including an audio
commentary track from its writer-director — Goldthwait took some time to answer
a few questions via email, and even include a picture of his alleged inspiration. The chat is excerpted below:
Brent Simon: What sparked the initial idea for the movie?
Bobcat Goldthwait: It was this guy (below). I can’t resist
him. I’m attracted to smart people, so the glasses really got to me. When he
left me I was just so broken up about it that I had to memorialize it somehow.
BS: In your opinion, how long does one have in a new
relationship before unspoken policies about honesty’s proverbial
line-in-the-sand are hardened? Or is it that in matters sexual, there’s always
going to be a double standard, and/or hang-ups that come back to haunt and
complicate things?
BG: I just think a lot of bad or hurtful things are done in
the guise of just being honest. Some people have this idea that disclosing
terrible things makes them a good person — like just by confessing it, you are OK.
I don’t agree with that.
BS: Was Melinda Page Hamilton — who I thought summoned up just the right touch of an early Renee Zellweger’s crinkled-nosed angst — someone you were previously
familiar with, or did you cast her through an audition/general meeting?
BG: I had never met Melinda before she came in to audition,
but as soon as we saw her it was clear that she was far and away the best
actress for the job. I was so afraid that some manager or family member was
going to tell her not to do this movie. Actually, I know at least one of her
close family members tried to talk her out of it by telling her she could never
marry a politician with a scandal like this on her résumé, but thank God she
ignored them and came on board. We could not have made this movie without her.
BS: I’m intrigued by the much-undiscussed flipside of deceit
that the film tangentially raises — that it’s trying to live up to the lies we
tell about ourselves that ultimately makes us better people. What if any
“mistruths” have you told and then tried to live up to, sort of on the fly?
BG: “I’m a director.”
BS: What’s similar about episodic television directing and
film directing, and what’s the biggest difference or challenge?
BG: Well, the TV show I’ve spent the most time directing is Jimmy Kimmel Live, and that’s more like
being an air traffic controller with monkeys screaming in my ears — it’s a lot
of snap decisions and crazy, but ultimately pretty satisfying. Making a movie
is a little different, but mostly because I only have to look at one monitor at
a time.
BS: You shot Sleeping
Dogs Lie in
two weeks and some change, which must have been a crazy pace. What was the
worst day like?
BG: In hindsight it all seems really fun. I know we all had
a lot of laughs every day we were shooting or we never would have made it
through. Any bad example I can give you has a pretty good ending — like, when
we were shooting at one of the producer’s houses and someone unplugged his
fridge without telling him, and everything started to go bad and stink. But
then Bryce (who plays John) took out all the meat and started barbequing it in
the backyard.
BS:Sleeping Dogs Lie is set in the
awkward, messy confines of the real world, which is a long way from some of the
outlandish comedy for which you’re best known. Is there anything to the notion,
then, of the secret life or tears of a clown, which is to say that many if not
most comedians operate from a place of angst, uncertainty, self-loathing, anger
or some combination thereof?
BG: Yeah, comics are piles.
BS: What’s up next for you, and is there some great scoop
that you’d like to bestow upon me, thus garnering the site a bump in traffic?
Amber Tamblyn is no one-trick pony. The erstwhile Joan of Arcadia star, whose latest film, Stephanie Daley, opens in limited release today, is also a published author. Her first book of collected poems, Free Stallion, was released in 2005, and she’s already hard at work on another, more mature compendium. Continue reading Amber Tamblyn, Poet→
Jamie Kennedy knows he’s not the only one who rocked out in a Puma sweatsuit in the 1980s. To that end, he’s headlining Kickin’ it Old Skool, a comedy about a teenage breakdancing enthusiast who wakes up after 20 years in a coma to find that the more things change, the more he’s stayed the same. With the girl of his dreams (Maria Menounos) engaged to marry his grade-school nemesis (Michael Rosenbaum) and his parents drowning in the debt of his medical costs, Kennedy’s Justin Schumacher must rally his former squad, bust a move and win back the girl of his dreams. In conjunction with the film’s release this Friday, April 27, from Yari Film Group, Kennedy took some time to answer a few questions via email. Continue reading Jamie Kennedy Kicks it Old Skool→
Career management for anyone in Hollywood is a tough game, a slippery slope, the most inexact science, really. If
success comes a calling, choosiness must then be balanced with concerns
for not only a modicum of financial security, but also some loose sense
of supervision of profile. After all, familiarity generally breeds
success, and if too many risky indies all crap out, actors can find
themselves on the outside staring in, trying to get meetings with
up-and-coming directors, and phones calls returned from studio execs
who just a few short years ago were hounding them for a lunch
date. For women, the game can be even tougher, with less starring
vehicles and thus less statistical opportunity. Sigourney Weaver,
though, has had an amazingly diverse and successful career, numbering
more than 40 films. How does she do it — what’s her battle plan? Acting her age, as remarkably simple as that sounds. For the full feature piece, from FilmStew, click here.
I was combing through a few old transcripts recently, cleaning up the old hard drive, and came across an interview with Frank Spotnitz from about a year ago, about the DVD release of his ill-fated Night Stalker. At the end of the lengthy chat, which was tinged with all the emotional baggage of the flameout of a series about which he cared greatly, Spotnitz spoke in optimistic tones about his next project, another television pilot, called A.M.P.E.D., which sounded like it tilted heavily toward nature in the age-old nature-nurture debate.
“It’s a pilot I wrote with Vince Gilligan, another one of my
colleagues from the X-Files days,” says Spotnitz. “It’s really scary and funny, and it’s for Spike
TV. It’s about cops in a police precinct who go out every day into a world
that’s changed. The idea is that it’s exactly like our world today except that
a certain percentage of the population has begun to mutate, and the way that
they mutate is completely unpredictable. It depends on your individual DNA.
Quite literally some people are becoming monsters. So the cops go out and never
know what they’re going to encounter every day. It’s got a lot of allegorical
qualities for terrorism and racism, as well as just being a really fun and
entertaining show. We’re shooting it this summer (2006) and I’m not really sure
when they’re planning on broadcasting it.”
Ahh, yes, their plans to broadcast it. Lee Tergesen and Sarah Brown were cast in the pilot, which got underway in October of last year, but Spike TV didn’t pick the series up, and based on all available chatter, neither will anyone else. So it languishes, with Spotnitz’s words a reflection on what might have been, and a reminder that for all its glitz, Hollywood is still mostly of all a town of broken dreams, no-go projects and half-measures.
Legally Blonde,
in which she played one of Reese Witherspoon’s
enthusiastic, gum-snapping best friends, which catapulted Ubach to a higher
comedic profile. She reprised her role in 2003’s sequel, and had a memorable supporting
role in 2004’s Meet the Fockers, playing sexy maid Isabel, the
deflowerer of Ben Stiller’s Greg.
Ubach’s latest role (above) finds her costarring alongside veteran
actor Kurtwood Smith (That ’70s
Show),
droopy-faced indie stalwart Richard
Edson (known to an entire generation as the unruly valet from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) and up-and-comer Eyal Podell. A character-driven piece about a group of chronic, blue-collar fantasists and ex-cons who plot for
control of a venerable diner after the owner has an “accident,” Hard
Scrambledis written and
directed by Chicago-based playwright David Scott Hay, and was chosen from a
national script search sponsored by critically acclaimed trade magazine Creative
Screenwriting.In conjunction with its recent DVD bow, Ubach took some time
to answer a few questions via email. The chat is excerpted below:
Brent Simon: In Hard
Scrambled you play Crysta, a waitress, which is of course the stereotypical
job of aspirant actors-in-waiting. Any real-life experience slinging hash
(browns, that is), pie, etc.?
Alanna Ubach: The only job I had waitressing was at my
sister’s old restaurant, and of course playing Naomi in the movie Waiting.
BS:Hard Scrambled
is all about dreamers and schemers — what sort of crazy schemes have you
concocted in real life, whether they worked out or not?
AU: I had an ongoing daydream of being a rock star, and marrying
Adrien Zmed from Grease 2 when I was
nine. Those didn’t come true. I dream of being 5’5” (note: Ubach is 5’2”). Perhaps
one day they’ll invent a surgery to stretch short people’s limbs, and my dream
will come true!
BS: A familiar question, I’m sure, but were you driven by a
“performance instinct” growing up, and were you considered funny by your
classmates and friends in your teen years?
AU: I was very sarcastic, and as loud as a 90-year-old deaf
woman when I was a kid. I loved to imitate everyone in my family and make
everyone laugh, so yeah, I guess I was driven to perform at a very young age.
BS: Are you desperate to explore the relatively darker tones
of something like Hard Scrambled in
other projects, or it is more a case of, “Que sera sera.”
AU: I want to explore as much as I’m given the opportunity
to.
BS: What can we expect from Patriotic Bitch, your one-woman show — has it already had
its debut? And what’s the status on Equal
Opportunity, and what sort of character do you play?
AU:Patriotic Bitch
made its debut at the McCadden Theatre in L.A.
and got great reviews. I’m now in the early stages of getting it primed and
ready for NY. Equal Opportunity will
be playing at the Aspen Fest and I play an all-American secretary with a very
dry sense of humor.
Presented in 16×9 widescreen on DVD, Hard Scrambled’s
listed special features include interviews with Hay and the actors, cast and
crew bios and an amusingly billed “anatomy of a failed scene.” The two-disc DVD
also includes a dozen modules on the essential topics of producing and
directing. From screenplay structure, continuity and working with actors to financing,
editing, publicity and distribution, there are more than two-and-a-half hours
of bonus materials to complement the briskly paced, 84-minute feature
presentation. For more information about Hard Scrambled, visit the
eponymous web site by clicking here.
In Jake Kasdan’s new comedy The TV Set, Sigourney Weaver plays a television executive whose suggestions drive a new show’s creator, played by David Duchovny, completely batty. Instead of broadly pitched generalizations, though, the movie smartly captures the sort of sunny-faced over-pasteurization of ideas that seems to so often result in a drab sameness that infects so much TV product.
At roundtable interviews for the film recently, I asked Weaver if that sort of tyrannically unchecked pursuit of accord on display in The TV Set was in her opinion more particular to television, or also possible in the world of film. There are many fingers in pies in any industry, after all, and not all of the owners of said fingers fail upwards. They’re smart people (well, some of them), and they have good intentions, but ideas all manner of hair-brained, backwards, down-market and pandering seem to find their way to the screen with unerring frequency. Is there just not as much importance placed on the debate of ideas and the defense of artistic rationale in TV?
“Well, I do think there’s more direction by committee in television than there is in most of the films that I’ve been a part of because the directors are smart enough to get away, and shoot out of town,” Weaver says. “But one of the things I felt was very important with Lenny — and one of the reasons I based her on this woman I know who runs this nonprofit — was that I didn’t want you to dismiss her too easily. I wanted her to be smart enough and real enough so you kind of had to take her seriously, because I do think that she has a point-of-view that is successful in this world, and she can get results. And so I think that one of the reasons that Judd Apatow and Jake Kasdan are now making movies is because television didn’t appreciate them enough. I mean, Freaks and Geeks is one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen.”
Weaver is in a position to know, too. Perhaps unknown to many, her father was president of NBC in the 1950s. “He created The Today Show and The Tonight Show, he helped create the talk show, he created Your Show of Shows,” says Weaver. “He put opera and ballet and drama on television. And he had this thing called “Operation Frontal Lobes,” which was that every show, even if it was funny or silly, had to sneak some culture in. You know, even in Show of Shows, Sid Cesar had to sing an aria from Puccini or something like that. He had to trick people into seeing things that were good for them [because] he felt that television could make the man on the street the uncommon man.”
“And so I was very aware of my father while I was playing Lenny,” continues Weaver with a laugh, “because I had the advantage of having grown up with my father, and Lenny did not. Lenny thinks that what she’s doing is good, because she feels that after a long day and a long drive home on the freeway you shouldn’t make people think — that that’s too taxing, that what people want is to be comfortable and laugh and just be stimulated a bit. So she has a different philosophy. But I did think about my father quite a bit [during filming], and I think he would love The TV Set because it shows what he was up against. But in the end, the “Lennys” won. You know, he tried to start a fourth network twice and those families who ran the networks would not let him. He shook things up too much.”
At the recent press day for Mike White’s generally pleasantly offbeat Year of the Dog, Laura Dern talked some about parenting as a story device, and playing a mother on screen now that she’s one in real life. “The area of
parenting is so funny and interesting because you feel so out of control when
you’re given this job of protecting. It creates panic,” Dern says.
“Bret is deeply neurotic and a true perfectionist,” Dern continues, talking about her character. “The
difference between her and most of us in the world that are new moms, because I
think there is a level of obsessiveness and neuroses that comes with becoming a
parent, like… ‘Oh my God, my job is to protect you for the rest of your life? How did
this happen?’ So I think that’s innate in way, even though when you try to be
conscious and balanced it’s easy to get neurotic about one’s children. The
difference is most of us look at our children and say, ‘I want to control every
waking moment of the rest of your life and make sure it’s OK… too bad the world
isn’t like that.’ Bret says, ‘And I know I can.’ And she believes it in her core. That’s why she was so fun to play. Because anyone who has that kind of ego
it so fantastic. And Tom McCarthy was so amazing as her husband, because he’s
sort of like her dog, he’s sitting
there just acquiescing to whatever she says.”
Hannibal Rising would stall at only $27 million
Legally Blonde,
