Category: Interviews

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His Drama Zone: Walken Sparks Somber Stride in A Late Quartet

Craig Modderno is an Awardsline contributor

“I make movies that nobody will see.  I’ve made movies that even I have never seen,” exclaims actor Ronald Walken who has been working in pictures since director Sidney Lumet cast him in his first showy role as the kid in 1971’s The Anderson Tapes when the world met him as Christopher Walken.

“My hair was famous before I was!”

Even off camera, the actor’s wry sense of humor exudes. Blessed with a self-punctuated, Queens cadence, which he can easily massage from cryptic to sarcastic, Walken at 69 is continually in demand across every genre. His dramatic flair is so iconic, comedians from Jay Mohr to Kevin Pollak impersonate him.  Heck, Walken even impersonates himself (check out this hysterical video of him reciting Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face”)

Early this fall, Walken walked on the wild side in CBS Films’ shoot-em up comedy Seven Psychopaths as Hans, a rambling dog-napper who doles out screenplay advice until he dies (literally).  In the upcoming Stand Up Guys, Walken gets guffaws as a geriatric gangster. But it’s his turn as Peter Mitchell, a renowned New York City cellist who contends with his Parkinson’s disease, in A Late Quartet that has awards voters buzzing.  Rather than playing the heavy this time around, Walken’s Peter is one of his heaviest roles in years, rivaling his Oscar-winning supporting turn as Nick, the Russian Roulette Vietnam soldier masochist in 1978’s The Deer Hunter and his second Oscar-lauded role as a failed father to Leonardo DiCaprio’s master grafter Frank Abagnale, Jr. in 2002’s Catch Me If You Can.

 

Seven Psychopaths
Walken, left, relentless talks himself into danger in CBS Films’ Toronto Film Festival fave Seven Psychopaths

AWARDSLINE: What drew you to three distinctively different roles in A Late Quartet, The Stand Up Guys and Seven Psychopaths?

CHRISTOPHER WALKEN: I liked the scripts, and the directors. It’s strange that all these films are coming out now since they were all made during the past 2 years. I have no specific criteria — except the rare one that doesn’t have me kill someone goes to the top of my reading pile. (Laughs) It’s true. When I read a script that I cut out in my mind — all punctuation and directions which is the reason for my unusual screen patterns on camera– that process helps me find the character on my own and probably makes it easier for comics to impersonate my characters.

AWARDSLINE:  A Late Quartet seems like your most serious film in a while. Why is that?

WALKEN: Well if you won’t tell anyone it’s because I don’t kill anybody in the film. As I get older, I start to get parts for grandfathers and people who give great advice…the parts Michael Caine will seemingly be able to play forever.  I will still play wise guys, troublemakers because I like playing crazy guys and villains. Plus the economics of making films today are so unpredictable that even small films fall apart often right before shooting.

AWARDSLINE: What did you do to research your role in A Late Quartet?

WALKEN: I don’t like to discuss my process generally in preparing for a role. If I tell you I studied cello then you’ll watch my playing more carefully and perhaps pay less attention to the story.

AWARDSLINE:  Was it a competitive atmosphere between you and your co-stars on the film?

WALKEN: No, only what the script called for. They were all excellent actors and very nice people. We all knew we were making a very special film.

AWARDSLINE: Do you look for something specific in a dramatic role that tells you it will be a challenging part?

WALKEN: No for me it’s more of a feeling:  “Am I good at playing the part?” I read scripts for myself, which is why I erase punctuation because sometimes a question could actually be a statement. I read the scripts as if they play the way I think my character would respond, not what a reader would think how they would play my part.

AWARDSLINE: At this stage of your career what do you want from a director?

WALKEN: To hire me! (Laughs) I want him or her to be sure about the information and history of the project, so the actors become kids in a sandbox; feeling free, playing together. If you don’t cast well, the movie has a hard time getting a rhythm of its own. The best directors like Mike Nichols, Sydney Pollack, Marty Scorsese and Paul Mazursky to name a few who direct, are also excellent actors so they’re careful choosing the right actor. Besides Sidney Lumet, Michael Cimino and Steven Spielberg, who taught me a lot about my craft, I’ve been lucky in taking chances and calculated choices with some of the best directors of our times.

AWARDSLINE: What impact did winning the Oscar have on your career?

WALKEN: It was enormous. It brought me recognition from the industry that resulted in me receiving better scripts and for the most part not having to do auditions.

Christopher Walken
Walken logged a riveting Oscar-winning turn as the Vietnam soldier Nick in Michael Cimino’s 1978 film The Deer Hunter

AWARDSLINE: How competitive was campaigning for an Oscar in the 1970s?

WALKEN: I never campaign for personal attention from the media. I do go on press junkets when the film warrants that kind of attention because I consider that part of the job. Most films’ press peters out quickly, which is the good thing about the so-called awards season is that a fine film like A Late Quartet gets a special spotlight shown on it. I used to never do internet interviews because I don’t own a computer or a cellphone. My friends are surprised that I don’t, but sometimes I think we’re in an age of too much information.

AWARDSLINE: What was it like being at the ceremony where your film The DeerHunter faced strong competition from another Vietnam War film Coming Home?

WALKEN: I’ve been there as a nominee twice and there’s nothing better than winning. But I remember exiting the ceremony the second time and truly believing we were all winners even though only a few of us were holding statues. Then they give you a really nice dinner even if you didn’t win an Oscar.

AWARDSLINE: You co-starred in Heaven’s Gate, which is considered one of the biggest disasters in film history. What did that negative response do for your psyche?

WALKEN:  It wasn’t anything good. I never really understood what the enormous fuss was about. There was lots of stuff written at the time that was over the top, especially books written on how the failure of the film sunk United Artists. But since (director) Michael Cimino’s previous picture The Deer Hunter had won several Oscars, it created a new area of opportunity to bash Heaven’s Gate because the expectations were higher.

AWARDSLINE: You were supposedly the number two choice to play Han Solo in Star Wars. How did you feel when it became a classic worldwide hit?

WALKEN: No feeling because I was only one of hundreds of other guys who auditioned for the role. I don’t think I’m the best actor to play a role that spins off into an action figure doll.

AWARDSLINE: Another film you almost got the lead in was Love Story. Could you have said the line “Love Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry” with a straight face?

WALKEN: It was just as well that I didn’t get the role.  I believe an actor gets certain jobs at the right time in his or her career.  A critic once wrote of my stage performance as Shakespeare’s Romeo is that one of my unique qualities is everything I said sounded so sarcastic. Maybe if I had done Love Story then comics today would be having fun doing me doing my dialogue from the film!

AWARDSLINE: Is it true that at age 10 you did a TV Comedy skit with Jerry Lewis and he encouraged you to pursue a career in show business?

WALKEN: Yes. It was The Colgate Comedy Hour. They recently found a kinescope of it which I saw. I had a couple lines in the skit and it was shocking that I hadn’t changed my acting style at all. (Laughs) I’m amazed I’ve gotten this far. Knock wood, they let me continue. Maybe part of the reason is I don’t live my characters — many of whom scare even me — off screen. Perhaps the one little kid quality that I’ve duplicated was during the making of The Deer Hunter, I would hide in the shadows and watch my fellow actors because I knew how good they were.

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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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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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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.

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Q&A: Marion Cotillard on Rust and Bone

David Mermelstein is an AwardsLine contributor. This story appeared in the Nov. 14 issue of AwardsLine.

Although Marion Cotillard is the perfect blend of European elegance and natural allure, she’s never been afraid to portray characters lacking those gifts. Her Oscar-winning role as chanteuse Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose (2007) is a perfect example of that. But she’s also appeared in big-budget Hollywood films like Michael Mann’s Public Enemies (2009), Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010), and, earlier this year, Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises. Her latest role, as Stéphanie in Jacques Audiard’s French-language Rust and Bone, finds her playing an emotionally repressed whale trainer who loses her legs in an on-the-job accident and then must recalibrate her life.

AWARDSLINE: What attracted you to the role of Stéphanie in Rust and Bone?

MARION COTILLARD: First of all, I always wanted to work with Jacques Audiard, so I was thrilled when he asked to meet with me. I expected a very special story from him because all his movies are very special, but what I didn’t expect was a real love story. And I fell in love with the character—the evolution of her, the complexity. And how she goes from anger to power is something that really moved me.

AWARDSLINE: What was it like working with Jacques Audiard?

COTILLARD: It was one of the most interesting experiences I’ve had with a director. He doesn’t come on set with something very specific; it’s an exploration every day. He’s always seeking authenticity. We would try a scene many ways, but even when a take was totally different, the direction would always point the same way. And the take we finally chose was enriched by all the exploration around it.

AWARDSLINE: You were incredible—both emotionally and physically—in the scenes after Stéphanie lost her legs. How did you prepare for that?

COTILLARD: Physically, I started to watch videos of amputees. But very quickly I realized I didn’t need it. Because it just happened in her life, so I would live it with her. Emotionally, I saw it like someone who was struggling with life, like an empty shell, as someone who doesn’t know what to do with herself. And then there’s this dramatic accident. I saw it like a rebirth.

AWARDSLINE: And what about technically—what did you have to do?

COTILLARD: When I’m in the wheelchair, my legs were folded underneath me. For the scenes when I walk or am carried, I wore green socks and the rest was CGI. (Costar) Matthias Schoenaerts had to carry me in a very special way, because your center is different without legs. Also, I had to put my legs in certain positions so they could erase them easily, especially in the love scenes with Matthias and when he carries me to the sea. But that’s what we do: We try to make-believe things—first to ourselves and then to the audience. That’s acting.

AWARDSLINE: Did CGI make your job any easier?

COTILLARD: Jacques always says he wouldn’t have been able to do this movie even 10 or 15 years ago, because the evolution of the CGI was not where we are now. Those CGI guys were really amazing.

AWARDSLINE: Was it strange for you to watch the film?

COTILLARD: Yeah, it was. It’s always weird to talk about my impressions or feelings about a movie that I’m in. But I thought, This film looks amazing.

AWARDSLINE: What’s the primary difference between making French movies versus American movies?

COTILLARD: There’s a lot of technical differences. But the thing is, there’s as much difference between two French movies or two America movies—because every story is different, every director is different.

AWARDSLINE: You won the Oscar in 2008 for La Vie en Rose. How has that affected your career both internationally and in America?

COTILLARD: It opened the doors of American cinema to me. I had never dreamt of doing American movies, although I didn’t know whether it was impossible or possible. So that changed things. American projects came my way, and amazing directors wanted to work with me.

AWARDSLINE: Did you speak English before you started working in America?

COTILLARD: I did, but my English was very poor. My English really improved for Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, because I worked on it every day for six months.

AWARDSLINE: You’ve starred in some big Hollywood pictures. What’s their appeal for you?

COTILLARD: Sometimes when I meet the directors of very big blockbusters, I feel that for them making a movie is not a question of life and death—there’s not a deep need to be creative. Christopher Nolan is not part of that world. He is a real artist. So it’s a very big difference. And Michael Mann is a genius.

AWARDSLINE: Do you get different things as an actor from bigger versus smaller films, or do you find that acting is acting, regardless of budget?

COTILLARD: Oh, yeah, it’s exactly the same process. Each experience is unique. But my commitment to a project is t

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Q&A: Rachel Weisz on Deep Blue Sea

David Mermelstein is an AwardsLine contributor. This story appeared in the Nov. 14 issue of AwardsLine.

London-born actress Rachel Weisz first gained prominence as Brendan Fraser’s love interest in Universal’s big-budget reboot The Mummy (1999), a part she reprised in The Mummy Returns (2001). But it was her role as a meek diplomat’s fearless wife in The Constant Gardener (2005), adapted from John le Carré’s novel, that netted her an Oscar for best supporting actress. Though she has devoted much of her career to smaller films, she continues to appear in Hollywood blockbusters, most recently in The Bourne Legacy this summer. Next year, she stars in Sam Raimi’s highly anticipated Oz: The Great and Powerful, opposite Mila Kunis, James Franco, and Michelle Williams. She recently sat down with AwardsLine to talk about her current role in Terence Davies highly personal adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, which had a limited American release this spring.

AWARDSLINE: What attracted you to the role of Hester in The Deep Blue Sea?

RACHEL WEISZ: I suppose it’s the way she falls in love. I believe she had no choice. I found something so fascinating about it when I read it in the script. That falling apart, I was drawn to it. As women, we’re told, “He’s just not that into you,” so you’re not supposed to behave like that. You pull yourself together. But that wasn’t possible for Hester. It’s hopeless love. She’s no dummy, and I think she could see the situation for what it was, but you don’t choose who you fall in love with. It was her loss of control that interested me.

AWARDSLINE: Hester is complicated, not entirely likable or sympa-thetic. Are those qualities you overlook or do they enrich your portrayal of a character?

WEISZ: When I play a part, I never think about likability. I think if you ask the audience to like you, it’s all over. The most interesting characters are those you’re drawn to, then repelled by, and then come to understand. All that tension—I live that. But I don’t plan the tension. It’s just something that should happen. I don’t judge the character at all. It’s a bit like being someone’s defense lawyer—you have to believe in their innocence in order to defend them. Did I know that Hester was a pain in the ass? Yeah.

AWARDSLINE: What was it like to work with Terence Davies?

WEISZ: He’s very exacting, very particular about his framing. Things have to be absolutely in the center. I was used to more handheld camerawork, more like reportage. He created this kind of sculptural stillness. That’s the beauty of his films. I felt very restricted, but that was good because so was the character. She was hemmed in by the times. Terence is an extremely emotional person. He would be in floods of tears in one moment. I think he was Hester. I’m immensely fond of him. He’s deep.

AWARDSLINE: It’s been seven years since The Constant Gardener, for which you won an Oscar. What impact has that honor had on your career?

WEISZ: Immediately afterward, I was offered jobs by interesting directors, including Alejandro Amenábar. Peter Jackson offered me a role. I didn’t have to meet people. They just offered me jobs, these big fancy directors. People believe in you more after you’ve won an Oscar, but it’s up to you what choices you make and how that goes.

AWARDSLINE: Has it allowed you to be more choosy regarding roles?

WEISZ: I was offered more work after the Oscar. When I was younger, I would take whatever I was offered because it was money and work and experience. In a way, choosing is the hard part. I know that’s a luxury problem, but it’s true. I try to go where passion takes me. You never know how things will turn out. And you can’t really say it turned out wrong. Whatever happens, happens. The important thing is that you followed your gut.

AWARDSLINE: You seem to favor smaller, more independent films over bigger-budget projects. Why?

WEISZ: Probably, I just have weird taste. But I think that in big-budget movies there’s a lot of other stuff going on besides acting, like special effects. And there’s something about working on a film like The Deep Blue Sea, with no rehearsal and a concentrated shooting schedule. That’s what I like to do. Working with a green screen is easy. It’s just like being a kid. But it’s not nearly as satisfying. I prefer smaller movies because they tend to be more about character than about story.

AWARDSLINE: But obviously big Hollywood pictures are not anathema to you. What’s their attraction, and would you like to do more?

WEISZ: Just as you couldn’t watch a movie like The Deep Blue Sea every day, it’s the same with performance. You can’t plumb the depths all the time.

AWARDSLINE: Tell us about Oz: The Great and Powerful.

WEISZ: It’s the prequel to The Wizard of Oz, the genesis of how he became the Wizard and got to Emerald City. There are huge, fantastical special effects—and I can fly. I’d never done anything like that. I play Evanora the Wicked Witch of the East. She’s so bad, so it’s a total departure.

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Q&A: Jennifer Lawrence on Silver Linings Playbook

This story appeared in the Nov. 14 issue of AwardsLine

Actors go to exhaustive lengths to lose themselves onscreen, whether it’s by extensive research or thespian Method. Then there’s Jennifer Lawrence, who unabashedly admits her lack of formal drama training—an approach that’s paid off for her in spades given her portrayal of strong female protagonists. As the young unstable widow Tiffany who falls for Bradley Cooper’s bipolar ex-high school teacher Pat in David O. Russell’s romantic dramedy Silver Linings Playbook, Lawrence is a firecracker, going toe-to-toe with the Method master himself, Robert De Niro (as Pat’s father) in a hysterical scene where she debunks him of all of his Philadelphia sports superstitions. Since the film’s premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, Oscar pundits are projecting Lawrence to lock her second best actress nomination following her breakout in 2010’s Winter’s Bone. Mere cherries for Lawrence after her turn in March as the brave teen warrior Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, a part for which she was plucked from hundreds of girls. But Lawrence admits to brazenly pursuing roles, whether it’s tracking down her Winter’s Bone director in New York or Skyping Russell from her Louisville, KY, hometown. “There’s my desperation for certain scripts,” Lawrence says, “and desperation reads, and passion comes through.”

AWARDSLINE: You have this affinity for tough characters. Did you find any similarity between Katniss Everdeen from Hunger Games and Tiffany in Silver Linings Playbook?

JENNIFER LAWRENCE: It’s funny, I never thought that Tiffany and Katniss have anything in common, other than they have to do what they have to do and really don’t care what anybody thinks. However, the way they go about it is very different. Katniss would rather not talk if she doesn’t have to in every situation, and Tiffany has more words than there is time. I think great stories follow tough characters. They happen to be the scripts and stories that I fall in love with, but it’s all coincidental. Anytime my agent calls me and starts describing a character, if it’s anything about “strong,” “south,” or “woods,” I can’t do it. I do realize my characters have that in common, but I need to play someone weak and vulnerable (laughs)—go find some pathetic someone somewhere.

AWARDSLINE: Do you know anyone like Tiffany?

LAWRENCE: No, I never felt so much like a stranger to a character. I really didn’t have anyone to base her on or to rationalize what she was doing most of the time. And I loved that. She felt like this strange fascinating being, who even now is a mystery to me. I never felt like I locked her down. She was always growing and changing. And that’s happening as well with the Hunger Games movies and Katniss. One of the biggest things about Tiffany is her fearlessness, and yet she’s also very aware. Most people who are fearless aren’t aware of the worst-case scenario. They’re not aware of the consequences. But she’s both. She’s ferocious, fearless, and she’s aware of everything, and I thought that was fascinating. I wanted to go into the audition with David O. Russell that way.

AWARDSLINE: What discussions about bipolarity did you have with David and Bradley Cooper? I remember David talking about how he was personally connected to the material at the Hollywood Awards.

LAWRENCE: Bradley did a lot of research and really wanted to nail down exactly what his character was dealing with. I never felt (the need to do research). This is coming from a girl who never reads her lines until she shows up and does as little work as impossible because my number-one goal in life is having fun—I’m just kidding. I never felt like the medication or the diagnosis or the disease was in Tiffany’s world. Tiffany didn’t see a bipolar, manic-depressive in (Cooper’s character) Pat, she saw a desperate man who was misunderstood the same way she was, and they were perfect for each other. Bradley did more of the research, and I did more of the “OK, I’m shouting in the street, and I don’t know why” time to go with it.

AWARDSLINE: Does the fact that you’re now a huge boxoffice draw and an Oscar nominee inhibit you from the types of projects you’ll attach yourself to?

LAWRENCE: No, it doesn’t. In fact, it makes things a lot easier to get attached to. I’m still reading the same scripts—$1 indies—as I did before I was discovered in Winter’s Bone. The good thing is, when I fall in love with the script, I don’t have to wait for it to be made. I can find the right people and actually get it made. My biggest problem with Hollywood is that there are these incredible scripts that can’t find funding. And then when I’m driving through Westwood and see the posters of the movies that are in theaters, I’m like, “What’s going on? Why is it like that?”

AWARDSLINE: Harvey Weinstein has been a godfather to a number of actors and actresses. How was he during production?

LAWRENCE: I love Harvey so much. I don’t understand why everyone’s so scared of him. He’s like a big teddy bear. He’s a genius. I get it, if you’re trying to negotiate with him, he’s not like a big teddy bear. (But) I love how he makes movies. He has enough money that he can focus on making something good, and we don’t have enough people like him in this business. He’s the only person in this business who can be on the phone with a director like David O. Russell, and they can yell at each other and love each other and be completely honest. People who are upfront get a terrible reputation. They don’t sugarcoat it, they just tell you the way it is, and I think that’s wonderful and a great thing to be around. Yes, Harvey has given me career advice, and I rejected it and then regretted it.