Category: Film

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Casting Creates The Right Chemistry

Monica Corcoran Harel is an AwardsLine contributor. This story appeared in the Nov. 28 issue of AwardsLine.

A great film can feel a lot like a fantastic dinner party. Actors mingle and clash in the best possible lighting, and conversation is fraught with wit and emotion. The director usually gets the bulk of the credit. But before he or she can play the consummate host, someone must carefully select the right guests, send out the invites, and keep track of the RSVPs.

That would be the casting director, of course. It’s a job that can’t garner an Oscar, but its mighty importance is always felt behind the scenes. In his wildly amusing book If the Other Guy Isn’t Jack Nicholson, I’ve Got the Part, Ron Base writes of the near-casting decisions that would have changed film history. Imagine The Graduate starring wry Charles Grodin, for instance. Or a gum-cracking, mustachioed Burt Reynolds playing the paunchy, debauched astronaut in Terms of Endearment.

This season, a bounty of films showcases the brilliance of casting directors who hit their marks. Case in point: Jamie Foxx as a freed slave seeking revenge in Quentin Tarantino’s socially controversial Django Unchained, Hugo Weaving playing roles outside of his gender and ethnicity—also a controversial turn—in Cloud Atlas and an assemblage of Academy Award noms and victors in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. Ask any Scientologist about the controversy over this drama directly inspired by the life of L. Ron Hubbard.

Putting together a roster of stars is just a fraction of the work, though. In the case of Lawless, the project languished in uncertainty for almost three years and various actors were forced to jettison the film for other roles during the limbo. Originally, in 2009, the Prohibition era-Goodfellas had Shia LaBeouf, Ryan Gosling, James Franco, Amy Adams, and Scarlett Johansson at the helm. Three years later, when the film premiered in Cannes, Guy Pearce, Gary Oldman, Jessica Chastain, Tom Hardy, and Mia Wasikowska sauntered down the red carpet. Incidentally, LaBeouf never abandoned the cast and fought to attract talent.

“Every project brings its own unique challenges,” concedes casting director Francine Maisler, who sought out actors who would connect emotionally and physically with the time period. It’s a boon for the production that Lawless boasts the next generation of stars, like Chastain and Hardy. “Trying to realize (director) John Hillcoat’s vision and to present him with actors who find surprising and distinct ways of bringing the characters to life was exhilarating.”

For Victoria Thomas—who launched her career with Repo Man and cast Django Unchained—the leads are playing against type, which creates hype. “I think it was time to see Jamie in a badass spaghetti western hero role and Leonardo in a juicy bad guy role,” she says of Foxx and DiCaprio. “Jamie gets to be Clint Eastwood and Leo gets to be Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West.”

Of course, Tarantino has a reputation for casting the most unusual of suspects. Thomas and the director artistically tangoed with a shared love for ’60s and ’70s character actors like Earl Holliman and William Devane. “I think Quentin and I were looking at the same television shows growing up, just in different houses,” she says. “So even though we were working together for the first time, I felt like there was a fairly quick connection.” For Thomas, who is African-American, the greatest challenge was the often brutal subject matter and the rampant use of the serrated n-word. “I had to get used to hearing that word said to me a lot by white actors in casting sessions,” she adds.

Cloud Atlas, the epic and existential exploration that spans centuries with actors playing up to seven different parts, could be the longest journey for a casting director. It didn’t help that it was an independently financed movie and actors worked more for less pay. Lora Kennedy—who worked with the Wachowskis on Speed Racer—recalls her reaction when the brother and sister team sent her the David Mitchell book. “I was like, really? Who are we going to get to play all these multiple roles?” she recalls. Well, two years later, the complex project landed Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant, and Weaving. “It morphed into a rep company with everyone taking on more and more parts.” Not everyone was thrilled with the casting, though. The fact that Caucasian actors were transformed into Asian characters sparked some criticism online. “No matter how we did it, there never would have been a solution to please everyone,” says Kennedy. “We switch ethnicities and genders.”

Kennedy also worked with Ben Affleck on the political thriller Argo and was charged with casting 140 roles. Her biggest hurdle? “The sheer size of it. Just the magnitude of having to cast 100 speaking roles of white dudes who say one or two lines,” she says. To cast the Iranian actors, she consulted Tehran-born actress Shohreh Aghdashloo to make sure she connected with the right Persian actors, some of whom did not have agents. Aghdashloo’s daughter accompanied Kennedy on auditions to be sure that actors spoke the appropriate dialect of Farsi.

The Master, set in the ’50s, called for more than 70 actors who could physically and emotionally convey the post-war ebullience of the decade. “That means no tattoos and no plastic surgery,” laughs casting director Cassandra Kulukundis, who has consistently worked with Anderson since Magnolia in 1999. “I looked at real soldiers and Park Avenue socialites,” she says. The exacting director Anderson, known for surrounding himself with many of the same actors in his films, wanted big names—like Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams—alongside up and comers. “I needed newcomers who could go toe to toe with Phil and Joaquin and hang with them,” she says. In order to prepare them for trading lines with such luminaries, Kulukundis worked with them like an acting teacher or a spiritual guide. “It’s more like a workshop than an audition,” she says of the exercises that they do together.

Kulukundis likens assembling a cast for an Anderson film to “building a quilt” because the actors must gel onscreen as a collective being. The combination, or constellation, of talent trumps individual stars. It also guarantees a level of trust among the performers. “The actors must have great chemistry and no fear on the set. That is most important.”

No doubt, behind every good director is a great female casting director. Ellen Chenoweth has cast most of the Coen brothers’ films, while Juliet Taylor has worked with Woody Allen for nearly 40 years—going all the way back to Love and Death in 1975. (She suggested that he cast Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris.)

It’s time the Academy reconsidered its cap on categories and went on to reward some of these women—OK, and a few good men—with an Oscar for their vision and instincts. As John Frankenheimer once said, “Casting is 65% of directing.”

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Wallis Of Beasts Reflects On Her First Acting Role

Looking back at her audition for the lead role of Hushpuppy in Beasts of the Southern Wild, Quvenzhané Wallis is able to put it all in perspective. “If you are a 5-year-old, you just go ahead and try something,” she observes. “You don’t think about it. You are just a little kid.”

Of course, she’s older and wiser now. She’s 9.

Today, Wallis, pretty in pink sequins and skinny jeans, is offering this thoughtful career overview in the elegant lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. Her mom, Qulyndreia Wallis, is seated on a nearby sofa, but young Wallis fields questions about her first acting role all by herself.

In a way, however, both of Quvenzhané’s parents are with her every time someone speaks her unusual first name (pronounced Kwe-VAWN-zhan-ay). The first part combines elements of her teacher mother’s first name, Qulyndreia, and her truck driver father’s first name, Venjie. Her mother says that Zhané is the Swahili word for “fairy,” although no direct translation can be found on an Internet search. Qulyndreia Wallis says her own name means “to you with love.” The rest of the kids include Venjie Jr., 15; brother Vejon, 13; and sister Qunyquekya, 19.

Close friends, family, and her Beasts colleagues call her “Nazie,” but her mother doesn’t like to see it in the press because “I feel that if it’s out there so much, they drop Quvenzhané because it’s easy to go to Nazie.”

Quvenzhané Wallis stars as Hushpuppy, a strong-willed child who lives with her father in the bayou, in Beasts of the Southern Wild.

On the Oscar campaign trail to promote Beasts, Wallis, who loves math and hates writing, often finds herself far away from her life as a fourth-grader in Houma, LA, about 50 miles outside of New Orleans. The Big Easy is the home of Court 13 Productions and independent filmmaker Benh Zeitlin, director of Beasts, his first feature. Beasts—inspired by Zeitlin’s short film Glory of the Sea and based on Lucy Alibar’s play Juicy and Delicious —premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and won the festival’s Grand Jury Prize.

Oscar is buzzing—and already Wallis, who plays a brave little girl trying to save her ailing father, her close-knit bayou community, and herself during a violent hurricane, has picked up the Hollywood Awards’ New Hollywood Award.

After one movie, the Quvenzhané Wallis Acting Method remains pretty simple (in fact, some pros would do well to take notes): Director Zeitlin, she says, would tell her: “This is what you really need to be focused (on); you need to listen to this, you don’t have to listen to that. There was important stuff and not-important stuff. And then try it twice. And then do the real one about five times.”

Zeitlin says the key to coaxing Wallis into playing the film’s harrowing storm scenes was to make the whole thing feel like a game. “We tried to shelter her from the panic of a film set. We always tried to maintain energy on the set that a 5-year-old would want to be part of,” Zeitlin explains.

Getting the part was a game to her, too. “My mom’s friend called and said they were having auditions for 6- to 9-year-olds,” Wallis recounts. “My mom said, ‘She’s too young,’ and then she just hung up the phone and said, ‘Do you want to go to auditions?’ So we just tried it, and it worked. Because when you are a little kid you are bored all the time, and it’s like, OK, let’s go! It’s kind of good to do things while you’re young,’’ she adds, very seriously.

And what’s it like to watch the movie now? ‘’It’s kind of weird, because you see a bigger you,’’ she muses. ‘’And then you look at yourself, and you think, ‘Why am I so much smaller than the real one up there?’ And then you look at yourself and go, ‘Wait, I’m the real one!’ ’’

Wallis is equally enthusiastic about her fellow castmates, except one: The pig. She’s not talking about the cute, 20- to 30-pound potbellied pigs that were made up to look like the herd of giant prehistoric Aurochs that plague Hushpuppy’s dreams. No, this was a very large Vietnamese potbellied pig owned by Zeitlin, part of the menagerie of critters on Hushpuppy’s property. The pig plays himself in the movie.

The hardest thing was “when I had to touch the pig. I wouldn’t do that because he was Big. Black. Hairy. And. Different,” she says, pausing dramatically between each word. “It was so big, and I was so small, and I knew what it could do to me.” During filming, however, she came to love the pig, and would actually ride him around the set (she explains that now she’s too grown up for that). “We got to be best friends,” she says.

The only thing Wallis doesn’t have much to say about is her future acting career. “Um, I don’t know, really,” she offers shyly. That’s when Mom jumps in. “We just stumbled upon the industry with the blessing that’s been given us,” Qulyndreia Wallis says. “She had no clue what an Oscar was. I take her, and I show her and say, ‘This is what they’re talking about.’ ” She waves a hand at the posh surroundings of the Four Seasons. “All this is nice, but we have to stay focused on reality.”

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Q&A: Keira Knightley On Anna Karenina

Diane Haithman is an AwardsLine contributor. This story appeared in the Nov. 14 issue of AwardsLine.

Once director Joe Wright and London-based Working Title Productions selected Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to complete the literary adaptation trilogy begun with 2005’s Pride & Prejudice and 2007’s Atonement, the next step was easy: Wright’s Anna had to be Keira Knightley, 27, who had starred in both previous films and netted an Oscar nomination for portraying Elizabeth Bennet in Pride & Prejudice.

The actress, who has also starred in sexy Wright-directed Chanel commercials, has been called Wright’s muse—and his comments in a recent AwardsLine interview support this notion. Wright said when the two reunited for last year’s Coco Mademoiselle commercial, “I was kind of blown away by how she had grown up. I mean that psychologically and emotionally and sexually. And she had a new kind of power to her, a new womanly power, and I wanted to bear witness to that on the screen.”

Whew. In a recent phone interview from “very rainy” London, where she was at work on Kenneth Branagh’s Jack Ryan, Knightley shared her feelings about Wright’s breathless praise, mixed reviews, and her preference for the challenges of literary screen fare over Hollywood romcoms.

AWARDSLINE: Joe Wright waxed rhapsodic in his praise of what he called your new maturity as an actress. Are you feeling it?

KEIRA KNIGHTLEY: (Laughs). You don’t wake up the morning and say, “I am a woman now. Wow, I’m feeling really mature.” But, yeah, if the question is, “Would you have played this role like this five years ago?”, the answer is no.

AWARDSLINE: Anna Karenina is an iconic role. How did you feel about taking that on?

KNIGHTLEY: There are really so few wonderful roles for women, she’s up there as being incredibly complex and incredibly interesting. (But) I was much more frightened playing Elizabeth Bennet; she’s a character that you immediately fall in love with. Anna is absolutely not a character like that, so I don’t think I felt the same terror as I felt taking on Elizabeth.

AWARDSLINE: Wright said he wasn’t interested in a creating a likable Anna, and neither were you.

KNIGHTLEY: No (the idea) was to keep all the sharp edges. Some people might disagree with this, but I think there are some points in the story where Tolstoy absolutely despises her.

AWARDSLINE: The effort has brought mixed reviews, including New York Times critic Manohla Dargis calling you “miscast” as Anna. And some have quibbled about the stylistic decision to play out some of the action as theater, literally on a stage. How has that felt?

KNIGHTLEY: There is a big argument that says you are doing it right if you have people that hate it as much as you have people that love it. I do kind of agree with that. I actually haven’t read anything at all written about this. I know it’s been split because we knew it would be split from the beginning, but I actually don’t know what’s been said and what hasn’t been said.

AWARDSLINE: Do you make a point of that across the board?

KNIGHTLEY: Yes, definitely. I think you have to be careful where you take your notes from. So I’ve got about three or four people I talk to, and I pretty much ignore the rest. In watching yourself, it’s very difficult to remove vanity—you think, God, I look disgusting. At the end of the day, you can’t listen to everyone’s opinion or else you’d be very, very confused.

AWARDSLINE: I understand that style decision also had to do with money, to avoid expensive location shooting and keep the budget at $31 million.

KNIGHTLEY: Joe had always intended to make something that was stylized, (although) definitely less stylized than this. We couldn’t afford to do the naturalistic version that had originally been planned, but it wasn’t as though I was surprised that this was the direction he wanted to go. (Laughs). I did go, “Oh, God.”

AWARDSLINE: You have had the option in your career to do romcoms, the pretty-girl roles—why have you chosen to do these more substantive literary roles?

KNIGHTLEY: I try to do pieces that are as challenging to me as possible. Now one day that could be a romantic comedy or the Hollywood thriller that I’m currently doing (Jack Ryan), but lately they have taken a much more European, kind of a darker tilt. But it’s been more about what I wanted to explore, the worlds I wanted to explore.

AWARDSLINE: What would Oscar recognition mean to Anna Karenina?

KNIGHTLEY: It at least gives it a chance of having a life after it’s released in the cinema, online, or on DVD or whatever it’s going to be. (The Oscar campaign) depends on what distribution company you have behind the film, whether it’s well-geared toward the whole Oscar thing. It’s never anybody’s favorite thing to do, but when you have a piece of work that you are tremendously proud of, it all makes sense.

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Q&A: John Hawkes On The Sessions

Cari Lynn is an AwardsLine contributor. This story appeared in the Nov. 14 issue of AwardsLine.

Writer/director Ben Lewin’s boldly endearing film The Sessions is the true story of quadriplegic journalist and poet Mark O’Brien, who, at 38 years old, set about losing his virginity by hiring a sex surrogate, played by Helen Hunt. Veteran actor John Hawkes plays O’Brien in the film, embracing a physically and emotionally challenging role. In a recent interview with AwardsLine, Hawkes discussed the challenges of embodying a character who can’t move his body.

AWARDSLINE: How did this script come to you and how daunting—or not—was playing a man whose only movement was limited to the neck up?

JOHN HAWKES: I’d had some luck with the film Winter’s Bone and after that I got sent some scripts to consider. I hadn’t seen a character like this before—and that was the daunting part. Mark O’Brien lived in an iron lung from 6 years old on and only had 90 degrees of movement with his head. I wasn’t interested in him being more of an able-bodied Mark O’Brien and was glad the script wasn’t written that way. Disabled sex isn’t something we talk about a great deal, and I’m always interested in subjects I don’t know about.

AWARDSLINE: Lewin’s screenplay is based on an essay Mark O’Brien wrote called “On Seeing a Sex Surrogate.” Did you incorporate aspects of this essay?

HAWKES: Yes, Mark’s humor, straight-up. Mark was a living, breathing—although difficultly breathing—person on this planet, and he left us a great deal: his poetry, articles, book reviews, and his essays. Also, Jessica Yu, who knew Mark, had made (an Oscar-winning) short documentary film based on his life called Breathing Lessons. That was a really amazing study for me. I obsessed over that movie. My first impression of him was, Wow, poor guy. And my impression of him 30 minutes later was, Wow, amazing guy. I like detail as an actor, and I like to be really specific—the more truthful the details, the more universal the story gets for me. From his body to his attitude, to the music of his voice, to his dialect—these were great details for me. I think Mark could sometimes be an angry guy, and I wanted to bring some of that in, too, and there was a little bit of that in the script. I didn’t want him to be a puppy dog or a victim or a saint.I wanted to portray Mark in such a way that those who survived him could see something of their friend, their loved one, their family member in the work I’d done.

AWARDSLINE: Were there limitations on what you could capture?

HAWKES: His voice is subtitled in Jessica’s film. He doesn’t speak super clearly because his breathing is labored, so I didn’t want to do an exact interpretation, but I wanted to get close.

AWARDSLINE: Speaking of breathing, the movie opens with one of Mark O’Brien’s poems about breathing, which for him, wasn’t subconscious. How did you think about and incorporate breath while playing him?

HAWKES: I tried to emulate Mark’s breathing patterns as best I could, but I didn’t want it to become about that. I wanted to do honor to what he was dealing with and bring verité to the movie, but not so much as to be distracting to the audience.

AWARDSLINE: This role was extremely physically challenging. What was the “torture ball”?

HAWKES: I was lying on a soccer ball-sized (piece of) foam, which I conceived of and helped design with the props department. It was difficult and uncomfortable to find that kind of contorted position that was Mark O’Brien’s body. The script says that Mark’s spine is horribly curved, and you can’t disregard that as an actor. Sometimes I would do 40 minutes on (the torture ball) without moving. I couldn’t move my toe or swat the fly that kept wanting to crawl into my mouth. It hurt, but a minor amount of pain compared to what many people feel moment to moment in their lives.

AWARDSLINE: Was it ever a consideration to use prosthetics or other tricks?

HAWKES: The first time I met (director) Ben (Lewin), my concern was about an able-bodied actor playing this role. So many disabled actors aren’t working and should be. But Ben, a polio survivor himself, told me he’d taken a lot of time to try to find actors, able-bodied and disabled, but he hadn’t quite found his Mark. I insisted at the beginning that there be no body double, and Ben was cool with that. There were no prosthetics or computer graphics, and there was no makeup on me at any time.

AWARDSLINE: This could easily have been maudlin or depressing, and yet, the audience was often laughing.

HAWKES: Nothing avails us of those kinds of (negative) emotions more than laughing. It was important to me to mine the humor, as long as it wasn’t sophomoric or gag humor, which I love, but not for this script. Any humor that came out of truth was welcome, and I sought it every chance I could.

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Behind The Scenes On Argo

This story appeared in the Nov. 14 issue of AwardsLine.

With more than 120 speaking parts and a key scene that required 2,500 Persian extras, Argo couldn’t have struck the right note of realness without showing faces that lived through the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and that meant heading somewhere in the Middle East to shoot. Several locations were on the short list, including Jordan and Bulgaria, but ultimately Turkey won out for having the right Persian look. (Director and star Ben Affleck jokes that Turkey having a posh Four Seasons Hotel is what really clinched the deal.)

“In truth, it really was very similar architecture, and it was next to Iran, so I felt like we’d be able to get a lot of Farsi-speaking extras,” Affleck says. “As it turned out, that was a false assumption; most Iranians were afraid to be in the movie because of reprisal against their family, which kind of brought home the seriousness of the real story.”

Alan Arkin and director Ben Affleck on the set of Argo.

In fact, because the production had so much trouble finding extras in Turkey, some of the scenes had to be moved to Los Angeles, which has its own eager population of Farsi speakers. The pivotal airport scene moved to the City of Angels, and Affleck says he was overwhelmed by the passion of the Persian extras, many of whom had lived through the revolution and talked about family members still living in Iran.

“For them, it was like someone was telling their story. The whole movie absorbed an extra level of seriousness just being around the Persian population of Los Angeles. People in the crew were really, really moved,” Affleck explains.

The production team’s commitment to veracity—with the requisite dose of dramatic license—in telling Argo’s story of how the CIA and Hollywood teamed up for the top-secret rescue of six American diplomats caught up in the 1979 Iranian Revolution paid off with a warm welcome that has continued since the film’s Toronto Film Festival debut in September. Oscar pundits immediately bestowed best picture status on the film, and audiences have also shown their support, with Argo set to hit $80 million at the domestic boxoffice at press time. And during awards season, it doesn’t hurt that the film has an accolade-heavy cast that includes Affleck, who plays CIA agent and plot mastermind Tony Mendez; Bryan Cranston, who plays the Washington, D.C.-based agent running the logistics, Jack O’Donnell; Alan Arkin, who plays veteran (and fictional) producer Lester Siegel, charged with finding the right script to fool the Iranians into accepting Argo as a real film; and John Goodman, who plays Oscar-winning makeup artist John Chambers.

The film’s production path started about five years ago, when Smokehouse Pictures’ Grant Heslov and George Clooney optioned Joshuah Bearman’s April 2007 Wired article, “The Great Escape,” a tightly written, little-known story about how the CIA worked with Hollywood insiders to devise a fake production company, set up a fake film, and turn six trapped diplomats into a fake film crew as a way to smuggle them out of Iran. After the project was set up with the studio, then-Smokehouse development exec Nina Wolarsky suggested screenwriter Chris Terrio, who pitched Smokehouse and got to work.

Although the mission to Iran wasn’t declassified until the mid-1980s, Terrio says he had no shortage of material to consult when researching the political climate and top-secret event. In fact, the Wired article was the start of a months-long process of devouring everything he could find about the details of the mission.

“The article was really the beginning of a long trail,” says Terrio, whose script also incorporated details from The Master of Disguise: My Secret Life in the CIA, a book from plot mastermind Tony Mendez. “Then, of course, eventually you just have to sit down and write. You circle and circle, and convince yourself you can’t possibly write until you read one more book. Finally, you think, OK, I’m going to get fired if I don’t (start writing).”

Terrio successfully condensed his extensive research into a script that Heslov has called the best first draft he’s ever seen. Nevertheless, Argo would have to wait.

“We knew we had a script that we loved,” Heslov explains, “but we didn’t really have time to make it at that point because either we were making a film or George was acting in a film or I was producing a film. It was one of those (situations) where you know you’re going to make it (eventually). “

The script sat at Warner Bros. for a while before it landed in the hands of Affleck, who was looking for a followup to 2010’s The Town.

“Ben read it, and he actually called George and me,” says Heslov, who was working with Clooney on Ides of March at the time. “Basically, he pitched us on why he should direct the film. We were both huge fans of his previous films, and the way that he saw the film was right in line with the way George and I saw it.”

When it came to casting, Affleck didn’t have much trouble figuring out who would play the lead of CIA agent Mendez in the film.

“That part of me that will always be looking for the good role said, ‘I’d be good for this.’ The director part of me thought it would be too much trouble not to give the actor the part,” Affleck says. He was so eager to take on the film that Heslov says the director started prepping before the Smokehouse team finished Ides.

“Ben was like a pony at the gate, ready to go,” Heslov recalls. “The day that we wrapped the Ides of March, George and I jumped right in to producing Argo.”

Three separate locations—Turkey, L.A., and Washington, D.C.—helped bring the story to life, but along the way, the fact that the film was dealing with traumatic historical events was never lost on cast and crew, and the filmmakers carefully balance humor and drama. Though that balance was always a part of the script, according to Terrio, Affleck says seeing it through was thanks to the actors, notably the charming and all-too-accurate Hollywood-types Goodman and Arkin play in the film.

“All the performances were I felt very real, very honest—even the ones that had the most potential to be over the top felt very real,” Affleck says. “Reality being funny doesn’t feel different from reality being tense and dramatic. What would have picked away at the fabric of the reality that we were trying to construct would have been if the comedy had been arch.”

For Cranston, the real story behind what motivated Mendez and his fellow agents, as well as how the Hollywood component fit in, was the appeal from the moment he first read the script.

“These are guys that feel that they’re doing the right thing, with the knowledge that they (might) never have public praise for their work,” Cranston says. “There was no way of knowing that this file would have been declassified. And the Hollywood component—there was no financial gain to be had. No recognition. So why would they do it? Because they’re patriots.”

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Q&A: Richard Gere On Arbitrage

This story appeared in the Nov. 14 issue of AwardsLine.

Director Nicholas Jarecki’s Arbitrage tells the story of a charismatic businessman whose shady deals finally start getting the better of him. Richard Gere plays the smooth, successful commodities broker, and he’s earned some of his best reviews in years. Gere recently spoke with AwardsLine about his character, shooting in New York City, and working with a first-time director.

AWARDSLINE: Do you still look for the same things in scripts that you did when you first started acting?

RICHARD GERE: To be honest with you, I can’t remember that I was ever looking for anything. I was waiting for something to touch me. It’s like, I’ll be open to it, and see if it moves me. There has to be a “falling in love” moment. At the same time, you can’t know what the voyage is going to be. There has to be something that beckons that voyage and process. And I don’t know what that is. Things come out of nowhere, and you start evaluating the director, the cast, and all those other things going into it.

AWARDSLINE: You’ve said that the character you play in Arbitrage, who has been called a Bernie Madoff-type of antagonist, is really more of a guy in a bad situation, rather than a traditional bad guy.

GERE: He does bad stuff. Bernie, by all accounts, was a sociopath. I mean, this is someone who was off the charts. I don’t think (character Robert Miller) was a sick guy, in the clinical sense of sick. He’s sick in the sense of he’s not responsible in an emotional way to his world. But that’s a sickness we all can have. (Laughs).

AWARDSLINE: Were there any scenes that were particularly challenging for you during the shoot?

GERE: Shooting in New York can be a problem. I remember a scene (with Graydon Carter, who played James Mayfield in the film)—that actually turned out really well—at Le Caprice, the restaurant at the Pierre Hotel. It was one of the most trafficked places in New York, and we didn’t have enough people to control it; it was a small production, so just getting to and from the set was hysteria. It took me some concentration to keep at it (in the scene) because I was coming in from outside, so I had to walk through a crowd, come in the front door, and play the scene.

AWARDSLINE: Was there anything about working with a first-time director Nicholas Jarecki that surprised you?

GERE: No, I was just very open. (Sometimes when) someone’s directing for the first time, they’re afraid to include everyone—they have to prove they’re the director. But he never was like that. He would always encourage ideas and go with the best idea.

AWARDSLINE: What was the rehearsal process like?

GERE: He asked me, “How do you want to (rehearse)?” I said, “Slow, easy, as much time as we can. We don’t even have to talk about the script.” A lot of making a movie is the comfort level of the people. It’s just feeling open. We need to get along. We have to know something about each other. We made a lot of tea. He laughs about it because I insisted on having tea to make me feel (at ease). And you can’t lose that way. You hire the best, create an environment where the best will come out, and, of course, you’re going to be fine.

AWARDSLINE: A lot of actors are producing and directing in order to have more control over the projects that they do. You’ve dabbled in some behind-the-scenes work, too, but is gaining that control important to you?

GERE: I never felt a lack of it. Very rare were the times that I was locked out of the process. And most of the time that I was, it didn’t bode well for the movie. I’m rarely in a situation where, if you have a good idea, it’s not embraced. That’s stupid. And I don’t work with stupid people.

AWARDSLINE: Is the promotional work for a film more demanding than it was when you started in the business?

GERE: No. I’ve actually done longer interviews (for Arbitrage). The ones that are killer is when you do 150 in one day at, like, 3 minutes each. (To someone in the background) That’s tomorrow? (Laughs). That’s tomorrow! It’s deadly, but you try to make it sound like it’s the first time you’ve said it. But it goes with the territory. I mean, you have to do that with every movie.

A movie like this, they don’t have the kind of power to go out and buy television. I certainly am doing more on this picture than I would normally do because of where I am on the marquee (and) the fact that this company doesn’t have unlimited power to break through in the marketplace. So it’s up to me and (the rest of the cast) to do a job that maybe in the not-too-distant past would have been just a TV buy.

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Q&A: VFX Supervisor Eric Saindon On The Hobbit

When the Academy’s visual-effects peer group meets today to vote on this year’s short list, among the films they’ll be examining is Warner Bros. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Industry audiences and ardent fans will be pleased to see the familiar goblins and orcs, but visual-effects supervisor Eric Saindon says much of the technology underneath the characters is virtually unrecognizable from the first Lord of the Rings trilogy. Saindon recently spoke with AwardsLine about how much things have changed.

AWARDSLINE: What’s the biggest difference between the technology used on The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey?

ERIC SAINDON: Back on Rings, we motion-captured Andy (Serkis), but on the first two Rings we motion-captured him on a stage. We got very rough motion—it was not bad, and it gave us his general performance. Then we always had lots of video cameras on him so that the animators could go in and then hand key-frame all of his facial poses. On this film, we actually capture all of Andy’s performance when he’s acting with Martin (Freeman), and we capture all his facial performance. We have a small camera attached in front of his face that actually captures his exact facial performance. Instead of an animator going in and putting that animation—or Andy’s performance—back onto the puppet, we sit with Andy and we go through his (performance) as a separate thing: “OK, this is your happy face,” “This is your sad face.” Our computer analyzes what pose he’s in when he’s on set making all these faces and puts it back into the pose Gollum would be in if he was making the same pose. Rather than an animator going in and doing it frame-by-frame, the computer analyzes Andy’s performance and then fires Gollum’s muscles to do the exact same thing. Really, the big difference is on Rings, everything was captured post. Frodo (Elijah Wood) did his thing on set—Andy was there most of the time acting also—but then Andy would have to do it again. Three weeks later, Andy would have to do the same performance, and Elijah’s performance couldn’t change. (This time) Martin and Andy actually just acted together, they acted off one another, and that performance—that exact performance—went back onto Gollum.

AWARDSLINE: It’s amazing that Andy was able to achieve the performance that he did in those first films.

SAINDON: Well, he’s not afraid of the technology. A lot of people get the suit on, and then they freeze up. Outside of the suits they did great, but then you get them in the suit and it takes them two days to get used to (it). It’s definitely an art that not everyone can do.

AWARDSLINE: What kind of challenges did the 3D aspect of the film pose for you?

SAINDON: One thing we did a lot of on this movie is 3D scans of every single set, and with this 3D scan we could bring it to the computer and have a 3D representation of the entire set with textures, model detail—everything that was actually shot. Because everything was in 3D in this movie, we needed a proper depth. On Rings, we could easily just cheat something. A foot contact that didn’t work or something that didn’t look like it was the right depth or space, we could just scale it down a little bit. With this movie, because everything was 3D, we had to do it at the proper scale and the proper depth, so when you’re watching it, it doesn’t hurt your head, and it doesn’t pop out as (not looking) quite right.

AWARDSLINE: As the technology constantly changes and improves, does it ever get easier or faster to put together a movie like this? It seems like the answer is probably no.

SAINDON: I would love to say that it’s easier, but it’s never easier. Our computers are 50 times faster than they were on Rings, and it still takes all night to render a shot properly. (Plus), the audience is expecting more. The general viewer going to see the film can spot a digital double, where back in the day, they really didn’t think about it as much. So you could get away with a little more. But nowadays the digital doubles have to look just like the actors. On Rings, we did very simple digital doubles (with) little bit of cloth and a few strands of hair. On this movie, we’ve done full-cloth simulations, skin dynamics, fat dynamics. It’s taken to a much more extreme level. Obviously, you can do things with a digital double that you never could do before, but it also requires a lot more computer power—a lot more time—to get it right. On Rings, we had about five terabytes of disk space for the whole movie. Then on this one, we’re in multiple petabytes of information, which is insane.

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Behind The Scenes On Anna Karenina

Diane Haithman is an AwardsLine contributor. This story appeared in the Nov. 14 issue of AwardsLine.

The British are famous for understatement, and to call early reviews for English director Joe Wright’s new take on Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina “mixed” is an understatement indeed.

The movie, produced by London-based Working Title Productions (Atonement, Pride & Prejudice) and distributed domestically by Focus Features, arrived for its world premiere at September’s Toronto International Film Festival with an impressive awards-season pedigree. Anna Karenina reunites Wright with Keira Knightley, who also starred in Atonement and netted an Oscar nomination for Pride & Prejudice. Jude Law portrays Anna’s cuckolded husband Karenin, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson is Count Vronsky. (Working Title is also producing the upcoming Christmas movie musical Les Misérables, for Focus parent company Universal).

Keira Knightley, who stars as the ill-fated title character, and director Joe Wright on the set of Anna Karenina.

Anna Karenina has the added cachet of a script adapted by venerable British playwright Sir Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, the Oscar-winning screenplay for Shakespeare in Love), who Wright says wrote the Anna script in longhand.

In Toronto, Anna Karenina had Cleveland Plain Dealer film critic Clint O’Connor turning somersaults, calling the film “a stunning production, something akin to a grand dance.” But The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis attacked the film as “a travesty with a miscast Keira Knightley that is tragic only in its conceptions and execution.” The Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips split his own review down the middle: “Anna Karenina only half-works; Wright forces the comedy more subtly managed by Stoppard (who is, after all, one of the wittiest men alive). But it’s trying something.”

And “trying something” seems to be the goal, say three key members of the team behind this $31-million effort: Wright, Knightley, and producer Tim Bevan of Working Title.

“If a piece of work is universally hated, it hasn’t worked; it’s equally true that, if it’s universally loved, it also hasn’t worked,” Wright explains. “What you want is some debate, to create a conversation, and that seems to be happening. In a way, I think culture is a conversation between artists and the public, and also writers and journalists, so I’m very excited.”

Knightley agrees that sparking discussion and taking risks were their goals. “We definitely went into this with everybody saying, ‘OK, let’s hold hands and jump.’ We didn’t want to do something that felt easy,” she explains. “We all wanted to push ourselves.”

The creative team also includes frequent Working Title collaborators Seamus McGarvey (director of photography), production designer Sarah Greenwood, and costume designer Jacqueline Durran.

For his part, Bevan offers this quirky comparison: To the critics, Anna Karenina is Marmite, a yeast spread that Brits love on toast, but many Americans find singularly appalling. “People either hate it or love it,” Bevan says. “I think with any form of cinema, particularly these more artistic films, you need to take risks.”

Much of the Marmite factor of Anna seems to stem from the film’s stylized approach: Scenes dealing with the suffocating artifice of the Russian aristocracy are, for the most part, performed on a theater stage. The scenes about landowner Levin (Domhnall Gleeson), infatuated with the aristocratic Kitty (Alicia Vikander), play out in a naturalistic, earthbound setting. Wright says this decision was made after Stoppard had completed his script.

Getting Tom Stoppard to write the script was crucial for Wright, who sat down in Bevan’s office two years ago to discuss what literary adaptation might complete the trilogy begun with 2005’s Pride and Prejudice and 2007’s Atonement. “I said, ‘Anna Karenina,’ and Tim thought it was a good idea, but I backtracked a little bit and said, ‘Only if Tom Stoppard writes it.’ It’s a huge undertaking, and to me, Tom was the only writer really capable of doing the book justice,” Wright recalls.

Once Stoppard was onboard, the writer and the director agreed that, unlike some previous film versions of Anna Karenina, they would not eliminate the Levin-Kitty romance. “In terms of getting (a 900-page novel) to 120 pages of script, he said basically that anything that didn’t speak to various forms of love, he was going to lop out,” Bevan explains.

But both Bevan and Wright admit the choice to use a real stage within the context of the drama was as much about money as love. “The truth of it is, these (artistic) films can’t take huge budgets, they don’t do blockbuster business,” Bevan says. “We’re in an arena where very few people go, the $20 million to $30 million budget. That can be a very dangerous place to be. You are in the middle, but you have to make it look bigger, cost-wise. You have to give it an epic feel.”

A naturalistic approach would have called for too many locations, requiring expensive travel and hotel accommodations. Plus, Wright says, many potential locations in Moscow and St. Petersburg had been renovated to the point that they “had lost some of their magic.”

Then, too, some potential locations were overused. “When we found a location that we liked, we’d hear something like: ‘Yes, we’ve shot seven Anna Kareninas here before,’ which is really kind of depressing,” Wright says. “We were also looking for locations in the U.K., and a similar kind of refrain was heard. The guardians would say, ‘Yes, we’ve shot three movies with Keira Knightley here before.’ ”

Hence, the Anna’s world was devised as a stage, to the point of having some scenes choreographed like dance pieces. Wright says Stoppard’s script has remained virtually the same despite the change. And Bevan believes the unorthodox approach provides the raison d être for revisiting Tolstoy’s work yet again on film. The most recent version, a 1997 effort directed by Bernard Rose, starred Sophie Marceau and Sean Bean, and movie grande dames including Greta Garbo and Vivien Leigh have portrayed Anna over the years.

With or without the critics—or Marmite—the movie seems to be hovering on the Academy radar, and both the producer and the director say the recognition can make all the difference to a film like Anna Karenina.

“It’s a very difficult subject for me because I find if one focuses too much, or even at all, on the competitive nature of our business, the art suffers,” says Wright, who was nominated for a BAFTA Award and a Golden Globe for Atonement but has yet to be nominated by the Academy for his directing. “I find it to be quite unhealthy, personally.

“Having said that, I think nominations mean a great deal,” the director continues. “There’s kind of a club, I suppose, and it’s an entrance to that club. There’s a validation from your fellow craftspeople and artists, and I think that’s a really lovely thing. That’s talking from a director’s point of view—the whole awards thing has a very, very different meaning to producers and to boxoffice.”

Bevan calls the Academy Awards “the kings and queens, the extreme royalty of the awards season. Because of the web, the Academy Awards are acknowledged as being the benchmark.”

But there’s a downside to the Internet, Bevan adds. “Everybody thought it was piracy that would kill us, but actually I think it’s the speed of comment, because if your film is not up to it, people will know fast. There’s that instant judgment, which is fantastically liberating in one way, and frightening in another.”

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Q&A: Denzel Washington On Flight

Diane Haithman is an AwardsLine contributor. This story appeared in the Nov. 14 issue of AwardsLine.

With a lean, mean budget of $30 million, Flight is an action film that could not afford a big movie star like Denzel Washington. Then again, this morally ambivalent character study of an alcoholic pilot flying under the influence couldn’t afford not to have a big movie star like Denzel Washington if it had a shot at getting made at all. Washington, 57, sat down with AwardsLine to talk about how and why he got involved, and how the numbers added up to make the role of troubled Captain Whip Whitaker a gamble worth taking.

AWARDSLINE: Industry observers have said this film wouldn’t have been made without you. It has so many of what Hollywood would call negatives—it’s both an action film and a character study, and that character is not a straight-up hero, he’s an alcoholic.

DENZEL WASHINGTON: It was not a struggle to get it made, but the studio wanted to do it for a price, and we ended up with (about) $28 million, and (director) Robert Zemeckis made it look like $100 million, especially the plane sequence. So he and I threw our money back in the pot, took a tenth of our salaries.

AWARDSLINE: May I ask?

WASHINGTON: It’s a tenth of my salary. You do the math.

[Ed. note: According to industry trade sources, Washington’s salary in recent years for several major Hollywood releases was $20 million].

AWARDSLINE: Does that come off the back end at some point?

WASHINGTON: Let’s hope so. (Laughs). I keep hearing the buzz from people who say, “Man, I want to see that.”

AWARDSLINE: Your agent, the late Ed Limato, brought you the script, right?

WASHINGTON: I don’t know how long it had been kicking around before it came to me. It must have been somewhere in 2009. He brought me two scripts: He brought me Safe House first (and said), “These are two very different films,” and I agreed we should do Safe House first. This was a real change of pace.

AWARDSLINE: Why did you want to do it?

WASHINGTON: The script. As simple as that. Good scripts are hard to find, and this was one that was not a black-and-white kind of story. There was a lot of gray in there.

AWARDSLINE: There are character actors, and there are movie stars. I think it’s fair to say you are the latter. Did you worry that playing such an unattractive, raw character would tarnish your image?

WASHINGTON: (Laughs). I get that—“Denzel, don’t do that!” I remember we were doing (August Wilson’s drama) Fences on Broadway a couple of years ago, and we were doing a scene where my character is discussing with his friend that he’s seeing another girl, and he’s like, “Man, you’d better tell your wife!” And (in a later scene) I say to her, “There’s something I’ve got to tell you,” and the audience is expecting him to say, “I’ve got another girl,” and instead he says, “I’m going to be somebody’s daddy,” and somebody yelled out, “Oh, Denzel, thank you, sweetheart!” It’s a play, and she’s saying, “Oooh, Denzel!”

AWARDSLINE:  Did Ed Limato have those same concerns for you?

WASHINGTON: I said to him: “What do you think about it?” And he said, “You know, all that drinking and drugging!” And I said, “Ed, it’s a good story.” I’m not afraid of (the movie audience) saying, “Oh, Denzel!” And if they do, I won’t be there anyway. That’s what it’s all about for me. Especially in the last 10 years I’ve started really opening up, doing what I want to do—some small films, the stage.

AWARDSLINE:  Are movies in the $30 million range a dying breed?

WASHINGTON: What I think has changed a bit is maybe five or six years ago they might have given us a $50 million, $60 million budget, or more, but nowadays the studios are tightening their belts, and they knew it was a project we wanted to do. And I think they were smart, they said, “Look, we don’t want to spend more than, whatever it was, $28 million, $30 million.” And neither of us wanted to walk away from it, so we did it.

AWARDSLINE: It must be nice to prove you can make a commercial movie for that.

WASHINGTON: And there’s a market for it, I believe. And the actors, at least the big actors, will have to make a decision: Do you want to cut your fee and do something good, or are you just in it for the ($20 million salary)? And then also there’s the agent side of it, they are not exactly looking for the smaller films, they’re looking for big payouts, too, because they get 10%. Nobody wants 10% of nothing.

AWARDSLINE: For someone who already has a couple of Oscars, is it still exciting to contemplate that this might be an Academy-nominated role?

WASHINGTON: I try not to think about that ahead of time. You just try to do the best work you can, and then you get the movie out there, and we’ve been hearing good things. But you never know, you don’t want to get too high, and you don’t want to get too low.

AWARDSLINE:  What’s it like doing an Oscar campaign? Is it fun to talk about the film?

Washington: Not after the 395th interview.

AWARDSLINE:  I hope this is 394.

WASHINGTON: (Laughs). You are 392. You’re fine. But look, it’s part of the job, too. I want people to see it.

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Q&A: Bradley Cooper On Silver Linings Playbook

Paul Brownfield is an AwardsLine contributor. This story appeared in the Nov. 14 issue of AwardsLine.

For Bradley Cooper, shooting David O. Russell’s The Silver Linings Playbook involved a lot of jogging through familiar Philadelphia-area neighborhoods wearing a sleeveless trash bag over a sweatsuit; otherwise, all he had to do was convey the deep inner turmoil of a guy with bipolar disorder who’s off his meds and obsessed with his ex-wife and back in his childhood home after a court-ordered stint at a state hospital. Adapted from the novel by Matthew Quick, the film is at once an ethnically specific family drama, a romantic comedy, and a raw glimpse into mental illness. Cooper says he was as familiar with the milieu of his character, Pat Solitano, as he was fearful about whether he could go to the film’s deeper emotional places.

AWARDSLINE: When did you first see the script?

BRADLEY COOPER: I met David on the phone about another project, while The Fighter was in post. And then that project fell apart, and then he asked me to read (the Silver Linings Playbook) script. Not offering it to me, just asking me to read it. And then it sort of went away, and then I was shooting a movie in Schenectady in September, called The Place Beyond the Pines, and I get a call from him saying, “You know, it looks like it’s opened up and I want you to do it.” And I thought, “Well, aren’t you guys shooting in October?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Well, I wrap the last week of September.” He said, “Can you come down on the weekends?” So I did. And then I just drove from Schenectady to Philly—and a week later we’re on camera, and I have a trash bag (on) running down the streets of Philly.

AWARDSLINE: You not only star in the film, you’re also a producer. Was that something you knew you wanted to do?

COOPER: You know, it happened on Limitless. And I sort of realized as I’ve been getting older and more and more into this business that I don’t tend to think like a lot of other actors that I know. And I just love telling the story and how that all happens. So whenever a director will allow me to help them tell that story in other ways than just playing my role, I’ll jump to it. It was a really wonderful collaborative experience on set, and that just kind of bled into the post process as well.

AWARDSLINE: Russell’s reputation as being at times confrontational with actors precedes him.

COOPER: The reputation that preceded him for me was stellar. I spoke to Jessica Biel, who I’d been on The A Team with, and I said, “You know, I think I might do this David Russell movie,” and she said, “Run. Don’t walk to that.” She did a movie that never even came out with him, actually, and she loved him. And then I also spoke with Jason Schwartzman, who’s a buddy, and he could not be more effusive about what a wonderful experience he had with David. So I was going to do it anyway, but it just made me even more excited to know what it would be like. I had an instinct that it was going to be special in that way, and I wasn’t wrong. It’s a very unique way of making a movie, and I would love to do every movie like that.

AWARDSLINE: Meaning?

COOPER: There is no hiding. You’ve got to show up, and you have to be willing to go to emotional places in an instant and get out of your head. (You) give (yourself) over to the process and be dexterous with lines and improvisation, and do lines that he’s throwing at you, and also know that the camera can come on you at any time. He likes to flip to 360, which means that if we’re doing a closeup, he can turn the camera onto you if he wants to, if he likes what’s happening. There’s an electricity that is forged with those things in place, and that brings more real-time occurrences, which is what you dream of as an actor.

AWARDSLINE: The character you play, Pat, has all this pent-up rage. Talk about playing to the hinged part of his rage more than the unhinged.

COOPER: There needs to be a conflict, and his conflict is trying to keep it together. If he’s just unhinged, there really is no obstacle for him: He’s just a free spirit, and his free-spirit state happens to be completely fucking crazy. But this is a guy who’s trying to keep it together and keep his eye on the prize. He’s under the delusion that if he just gets his wife back and he gets his job back, everything’s going to be fine. If he can just hold onto that. He’s white-knuckling it, you know? Despite the fact that he’s living at home, he lost his job, he can’t drive a car, his wife has a 500-yard restraining order out against him, yet he somehow thinks that he can just hold onto this. That’s a guy who’s trying desperately to stay hinged. And he’s not taking his medication.

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Q&A: Naomi Watts On The Impossible

This story appeared in the Nov. 14 issue of AwardsLine.

Naomi Watts plays the matriarch in The Impossible, the unbelievable story of a family reuniting after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Though Watts’ performance has been praised for the emotion she conveys onscreen, the actress says the role was also physically demanding. She recently spoke with AwardsLine about the challenges of working with real water and the moving meeting she had with her real-life counterpart before production commenced.

AWARDSLINE: When did you first hear about the story of Maria Belon in The Impossible?

NAOMI WATTS: My agent called and said, “There is this movie about the tsunami,” and my first reaction was, “How’s that going to work?” It just wasn’t like a slam-dunk, “Oh, I want to do that.” But then he mentioned the director (J.A. Bayona), and obviously, I knew The Orphanage and thought that film was brilliant. Meeting (Bayona and producer Belen Atienza), the level of passion that came through in that meeting was so intense and so wonderful—it was very seductive. I knew right away that I wanted to do it.

AWARDSLINE: You spent a good amount of time researching the role and talking with Maria. What kind of questions did you have for her?

WATTS: I was very nervous. I just thought, Oh, God. I’m an actor, and this is a woman who nearly died and nearly lost her entire family. Is this going to be an uncomfortable situation? I felt frozen with fear on how to begin that conversation. We had a couple of emails in the lead up, and then finally we got in a room together. I think she had her own anxiety about it, and we didn’t actually speak for a few minutes. We just looked at each other, and it’s, like, just one look in her eyes told her whole story, and we both just started to cry. It’s such a big event that’s taken place in her life, and to be retelling this story brings it all up again. She was completely open to talk endlessly and with great detail about every beat in the story. I was very fortunate to have that guidance. When you’re making a film, it’s very easy to get caught up in the process, but we were always grounded by this very real thing that took place. Not just Maria. Every time you walked on the set there were hundreds of extras who were telling their version of their story. It was all deeply moving.

AWARDSLINE: How much time did you spend in rehearsals?

WATTS: With Ewan (McGregor), I didn’t have any rehearsals, but with Tom (Holland), we had about 3½ weeks together, and I just loved it. I went home at the end of the first day of the rehearsal and told Liev (Schreiber, her husband) how much I loved the director because I thought his way of doing things was just brilliant and fun. (Bayona) had us sit down in front of each other and draw each other. It felt kind of goofy and silly—particularly because neither of us can draw. (Laughs). But it was just, like, “Let’s do this. Let’s hang out.” (We were) free to explore weaknesses, strengths, whatever. It was (about) creating a forum so that we both felt completely safe and bonded and could have this family history.

AWARDSLINE: You shot the water sequences in a water tank in Spain—what was that like?

WATTS: Working with water is one of the more difficult things to do on film, and it certainly lived up to its reputation. But it was a very well-planned, worked-out science. They had this gigantic pool that had currents running both ways, and you were strapped into these sort of giant flowerpots, and you would just be forced to move with the current, against the current. Tom enjoyed it and thought it was like going to the water park. Me? No, not so much.

The underwater stuff was incredibly difficult, and I did not like that at all. It’s always nerve-wracking holding your breath, and obviously, the longer you hold it, the better the shot’s going to be so you always want to try to get the best stuff. But we were anchored into a chair (with) weights on us to keep us down. You had the oxygen tank right there up until you rolled, and you’d push it away and then the chair starts spinning, and you have to do all your arm-acting and head-flipping. There was one point when I was about to get out of the chair, and I couldn’t get out. It was a technical problem, and it really freaked me out. I remember being really angry when I came out of the water because it just made me panic, and that’s the emotion that came out of me. And it’s funny because when Juan Antonio had me resurface in the movie and I’m holding onto that tree and I can’t see any member of my family, he had me shouting and screaming and I didn’t quite understand it. I kept thinking, Wouldn’t I just be exhausted and terrified? It

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Q&A: Tom Tykwer And The Wachowskis On Cloud Atlas

This story appeared in the Nov. 14 issue of AwardsLine.

If there’s one memorable takeaway this awards season, it’s the day when directors Andy and Lana Wachowski came to town. During the height of their success with The Matrix franchise, which propelled the entire scifi genre beyond its Star Wars standards, rumors abounded about the siblings’ private lives, in particular Lana’s. But the Chicago natives arrived in Hollywood last month, ready to hug us with their new $100-million-plus epic Cloud Atlas, tri-directed with their new BFF, German director Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run). And the press hugged back: Lana boldly discussed her decision to become transgendered, while bloggers delighted in unpretentious conversations with the trio.

Halle Berry and Tom Hanks star as multiple characters in Cloud Atlas.

An adaptation of David Mitchell’s 2004 labyrinthine novel, Cloud Atlas follows the power of karma throughout various souls and eras, from the 19th century to a post-apocalyptic future. While the trio assembled an all-star cast that includes Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, and Hugh Grant, the major studios and indie financiers balked at the risky project, which employed a plethora of production crews throughout Germany, San Francisco, Scotland, and Majorca. But the Wachowskis and Tykwer were vying for something more than just a tentpole. Cloud Atlas wasn’t about the boxoffice, evident in the film’s $20 million domestic tickets sales over two weeks, rather it was about defying conventions, particularly by having its cast simultaneously wear several wigs (Hugo Weaving portrays a beefy female nurse and a leprechaun-like devil in two tales) and play against racial type (James D’Arcy plays a Korean man). Much like their celluloid forefathers Stanley Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey), Francis Ford Coppola (Apocalypse Now), and Michael Cimino (Heaven’s Gate), who were labeled crazy at the time with their epics and are now lauded as geniuses, the trio was set on blowing up the big-screen canvas with Cloud Atlas. Time will be on Cloud Atlas’ side, and the film has potential crafts awards this season, too. But this is the first time—and probably last—that three directors have banded together to mount a breathless epic. After all, the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change cinema are the ones who do.

Doona Bae and Jim Sturgess in Cloud Atlas.

AWARDSLINE: After Natalie Portman referred the book to you during V for Vendetta, was there any kind of bidding war? Or were your agents like, “Oh, no don’t option that!”

ANDY WACHOWSKI: No. This was right before Speed Racer so we still had some pull with Warner Bros. Joel (Silver) swept in and bought the property for Warner Bros., and I think that somebody was trying to negotiate the price down at the time, and they came in and just paid full price, so there was no real bidding war. After we broke from Joel, it was more of our project, and he let us have it.

AWARDSLINE: How did David Mitchell’s novel affect you?

LANA WACHOWSKI: We were all enamored with the way that he managed to pay homage to these kinds of classical forms of literature, and yet he found a way to reinvent them with this post-modern, tricky gimmick of inserting the different genres and modes of literature into each other. And thus by doing that, he accomplished something new. He made something that was original in feeling while still infusing it with this love of a more traditional, classical approach to literature. So we were left with something that we tried to do in all of our work. We tried to remain connected to a traditional norm and remain connected to the things that inspired us when we were young and have an amateur’s love of these classical forms. Yet (we) don’t embrace them in a nostalgic re-creation, but inhabit them with a pure form of nostalgia. The book had done that, and we were excited instantly about a way we could potentially do that with cinema.

AWARDSLINE: You had no choice but to finance Cloud Atlas independently. Do you still believe in the studio system?

ANDY: It’s complicated. We couldn’t have made the first Matrix unless it had been under the umbrella of the studio system. And the studio system, it’s not like it’s this rigid structure that doesn’t change. The studio system’s philosophies change. The way they make films change. When we were first getting into the business, the studio system was all about (getting) stars. They didn’t even care what the movie was. You just had to say who was in it, which The Player illustrated so eloquently: “Bruce Willis! Julia Roberts!” Since then, the studio has turned more toward spectacle and CG, and that’s not to say that the independent world is much different. There were a lot of independent distributors that we took Cloud Atlas to that rejected it, for example Summit. And Summit was one of the companies that were originally in on Bound, and we had a really good relationship with them, but now they’re tending to follow the studio model, which is more about what the product is. They have the Twilight movies, and they were trying to get a disaster film, Pompeii, made. So, it’s not an easy question to answer because the system is always in flux.

LANA: We acknowledge that structures are channeled toward the commodification of our art form to the point that it is only product, and the only point of making cinema is to create product that can have some financial return. The moment that starts to happen, whoever is thinking about this only as a means of financial gain, that is where the pathology resides. Long before there were the studios, human beings were trying to tell stories and communicate to each other through words and pictures, (and) once the studio systems are long dead, independent financiers are long gone, human beings will still be communicating with each other in words and pictures. The intent to share a perspective, through words and pictures, or the chance to offer someone else the chance to leave their perspective behind and look at the world in fresh new eyes, that’s why we do what we do, and that’s what ultimately will live on. There were tons of movies that made a lot of money and were utterly and completely forgotten. Likewise, there were movies that didn’t make money that are still around and are still important and relevant.

ANDY: And the industry will reinvent itself when that happens.

AWARDSLINE: You mentioned the studios’ need to attach stars. David Chase in his latest film Not Fade Away, a completely different film on a smaller scale, wanted a fresh face main cast. But Cloud Atlas is the opposite. Was there basically the notion that you needed as many stars as you could get in order to get this film off the ground?

LANA: No, it was more about the approach to storytelling. We thought that if there were all fresh faces, that you would get lost and lose connectivity. Because the face, the fundamental upon which we built the plot, was the moral arc theme at the end of the book. Can we turn away from our predator hearts toward a more compassionate, kind direction? So we thought, OK, here’s this really dark character Dr. Henry Goose, and here’s this character Zachry (both of whom Tom Hanks plays), and could we see this sort of soul evolve over a period of time? And if you didn’t know the actor, then they were completely invisible. Audiences wouldn’t understand the connection. We really wanted the two central actors, Halle Berry and Tom Hanks, to help the audience feel secure. Our structure was so experimental that we knew we needed something that was an island of stability.

AWARDSLINE: Did you have to wait to secure all of your financing before you shot one frame?

ANDY: Yes.

TOM TYKWER: The first presentation at Cannes 2011 was completely disastrous. Luckily, there were some unexpected candidates, like Italy, that came in. But many of those financiers (that) we really needed to get didn’t come aboard, so our financing wasn’t complete.

ANDY: And we went to Cannes last May with the movie in hand to show to the foreign territories that we didn’t have, which included England and France among others, and they said no. So we—

LANA: —We couldn’t sell the movie.

ANDY: There was no offer.

AWARDSLINE: So Focus International is your sales agent. And Warner Bros. took North American rights for $25 million, but were they always in?

ANDY: They played footsyfor a little bit, until we basically got on our knees, begged them, and crapped our pants in front of them, you know, “Look into your heart!” [Editor’s note: John Turturro’s line from the Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing]

AWARDSLINE: And by last fall you were shooting at least?

ANDY: Yes.

LANA: Yeah, like four days before we were supposed to start shooting and four days before the actors were supposed to get on a plane and fly over, a financier went bankrupt, and this big gap opened up. Then the bank called us, and said, “Look, we won’t post this loan unless you fill the gap.” We had lunch and we basically all decided to put our personal money, mortgage our house, fill that last bit of a gap.

ANDY: This was on top of us not taking our salary, so we were actually putting money into the movie without getting paid.

AWARDSLINE: So you’ve got your money, you’ve got Warner Bros.’ money, German money…

ANDY: Asian money, some Italian, some Russian, Korean, and also individual financiers.

AWARDSLINE: So what kept you going through this tumultuous preproduction?

ANDY: Everything. Our relationship, all those little components that would come in, the courage of the actors. We were buoyed by so many different things. One of us would always pick up the other two, sometimes it was the material itself—it was everything.

TYKWER: Sometimes, when we weren’t feeling OK, when we were beaten down so many times, we asked ourselves, Are we going to waste too much time of our life trying something that’s just impossible? Should we just take the latest job and take it easy? But, we all read the script and called each other, screaming with excitement, “We have to make this movie!” It was so obviously and so overwhelmingly Cloud Atlas.

LANA: It was this deep, profound love that we have for cinema and the experience that we had when we were little. We would go to watch large-scale movies that were about adult ideas, themes, ambiguities, and complexities. You already see a lot of this in everyday TV, and we’ve begun to move away from this experience in our culture where we make large-canvas adult movies. We loved them so much when we were younger, and we just wanted to make one last one. Maybe.