We mourn the loss of one of the great stars of the golden age of Hollywood, Maureen O’Hara. The Irish-born actress was made for technicolor. Her fiery hair, creamy skin, and green eyes made her an icon of classic films, many of them opposite John Wayne. Their storm-swept kiss in “The Quiet Man” is such a classic moment that Steven Spielberg appropriated it for a scene in “E.T.”
Ms. O’Hara’s endurance was often ascribed to the feisty intelligence she projected onscreen as well as her undeniable beauty. Her porcelain skin, green-hazel eyes, coltish jaw and cheekbones, and cascading red hair photographed superbly from any angle. She was promoted as the “queen of Technicolor” — a motion picture process much in vogue in the 1940s and 1950s.
Trained in fencing and fond of doing her own stunt work, she held her own in swashbucklers opposite Errol Flynn (“Against All Flags,” 1952) and Tyrone Power (“The Black Swan,” 1942). Those and other adventure yarns set the template for Ms. O’Hara’s screen persona: an independent-minded woman who knew her way around a sword.
She is most often remembered for her films with John Wayne, but she starred in a wide variety of classics, from the original “Parent Trap” to the original “Miracle on 34th Street” and the Oscar-winning “How Green Was My Valley.” She was superb in costume dramas, doing her own stunts in swashbucklers like “The Spanish Main” with Paul Henreid, “Sinbad the Sailor” with Douglas Fairbanks Jr., “At Sword’s Point” with Cornel Wilde, and “Against All Flags” with Errol Flynn. She was a superb light comedienne in “Sitting Pretty” and, opposite James Stewart, in “Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation” and touching as the beloved of Quasimodo in “Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Her grace and beauty were matched by her talent, wit, and charm. May her memory be a blessing.
Our MVP this week is one of my favorite actresses, Amy Ryan. I have been a huge fan since I saw her in “Gone Baby Gone,” where she played the mother of the missing child.
And she was wonderful with Paul Giamatti in “Win Win.”
I was fortunate to be able to interview her about “Jack Goes Boating,” co-starring and directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Here she talks to Vanity Fair about her role in “Birdman.”
This week, she appears in two very different films, “Goosebumps,” as a recent widow moving to a new town with her son, and “Bridge of Spies,” where she is the devoted but concerned wife of Tom Hanks’ character. Coming soon: “Infiltrator” with Bryan Cranston.
Brie Larson is one of the most talented and dedicated young actors in Hollywood and also one of my favorite people to interview. We first spoke when she was still a teenager about her appearance in Hoot. And I was honored to get a chance to interview her again, this time in front of an audience, when her film Short Term 12 was shown at Ebertfest. “Room,” based on the Emma Donoghue novel, is the story of a brave and resilient young woman we only know as “Ma,” who has been held prisoner for seven years in a locked garden shed by an abusive rapist. She became pregnant, and when we first see her it is the fifth birthday of her son, Jack, played by Jacob Tremblay. Ma has been careful and loving in explaining the world to him in a way that he can understand and a way that will keep him hopeful and confident. She tells him that “room” is real and everything he sees about the outside world on their barely functional television is pretend. But he is getting older, which means he is beginning to question some of what she has told him, to understand what he is seeing, and, maybe, to be able to help her escape.
One of the most painful scenes in the film comes after they escape, when Ma agrees to be interviewed by a television newscaster, played with just the right hint of oily charm by Wendy Crewson. Ma agrees to the interview to get some money so she and Jack can begin to become independent.
There was so much in that scene and it was one of the scenes that I was most excited about shooting because it has so much about our culture wrapped up in it. There are so many levels to it that fascinate me. It’s a moment where Ma is trying to take an easy way out and the easy way out is selling herself out and telling her story out and wanting to just get it over with. And it’s a chance for us to look at the media and the way that we sensationalize something that is extremely personal. You spend so much time with Ma and Jack and you get so close to who they are and the privacy of and almost sacredness of that space in room and you respect them both in a way that when it comes time to do that interview scene you feel that this interview is taking something that’s not hers to take. And I don’t think that’s a side that we see, we don’t see the personal side of these stories a lot of the time, we just see the interview. And we just want the baseline to be, ‘Oh good, they are okay’ and ‘Look at them back in normal society with the curled hair and the lipstick on, wearing a nice dress and pearls and she’s going to be okay.’
What we don’t see is the façade that we’ve created for us as human beings in a society and the codes that we have created as to what is socially acceptable, what’s good TV, what’s ours for us to know and take and even down to the makeup and the hair in particular. I was obsessed with it being the scariest and worst you’d ever seen Ma, that after watching her with this raw face for so long that you get so used to that as being her beauty. And when it comes to her joining society and doing what we’ve all agreed is beautiful it looks garish. It’s like a kabuki mask that you just want her to take off so badly. And then the question itself being whether or not she should have been given Jack up I think is one of the ultimate questions for any mother being, ‘Did I do well enough given the circumstances?’ I think every mom struggles with these moments when they feel that they let their kid down and they weren’t able to be the perfect mom. Ma did an extraordinary job given the circumstance but when that question arises after she’s lived five years with him feeling like the most selfless person that she could be at that age, given those circumstances to be asked that question I think is digging into the most tender wound that she has and the biggest fear that she has and the biggest regret and wish that she could have given him more.
One of the many challenges of the role was that the story is told not by Larson’s character but by Jack, from his perspective and in his voice. Larson, who began acting professionally as a child herself, understood the kind of support Tremblay needed while filming. “When I agreed to this movie, I agreed to explore motherhood. And so I knew that that job was not something that I was just going to play on screen it’s going to be something I was going to explore every way possible and Jacob, although he is such a brilliant actor and so much more than I could’ve ever imagined our Jack to be, there are still certain things that an adult can do, multitasking that the kid can’t. He doesn’t understand continuity; he doesn’t understand he can’t touch her hair in the middle of the scene and screw it up and then keep going. So I had to be constantly on watch to make sure that he was focused. If I noticed he was mumbling a line I’d just ask him to repeat it and kind of stay with him and stay on it and I found that for myself the fact that everyday shooting this movie the number one priority was him and I was second was my favorite part of it. Just like Ma herself, I never had the ability to be too precious with what I was doing. It was all about him and getting him to where he needed to be, and if I got something good then that was great. But it was all about him and I found that to be an incredible way to work. In my mind, if I’m uncomfortable with it, it’s an act of service. And so if I can be of service to him, then that was only going to help the overall finished product of the movie.”
To make him feel comfortable with her, “we just hung out. There is no trick, we just really like each other. We spent time in the room everyday for about three weeks and built the toys that you see in the room and made two portraits of one another. We laughed a lot and learned about each other’s favorite animals and favorite food and favorite color and just created the rapport that was really real, that we really felt comfortable being physically that close. We spent every second together. So we were pretty close by the time we started shooting by the end of the film we were absolutely inseparable.” When Larson and I spoke, she had just called to wish him a happy birthday.
The film is not about kidnapping and rape. It is a heightened version of the experience all parents have in balancing the desire to protect children by controlling everything around them with the inevitable loss of control as they grow up. Larson said, “It’s the Plato’s cave allegory, it’s mythology. You get to basically see the intensity and complication that comes with a parent-child relationship and all the ways that the beauty of the closeness and also the complication of that closeness and the ways that we have to learn how to grow up and the times that it feels like it’s just too soon and we are just too young but it’s what’s served to us and we have to try and find a way to make the best of it.”
Interview: Jon Gries of “Endgame” (and “Get Shorty” and “Napoleon Dynamite”)
Posted on October 9, 2015 at 3:27 pm
I’m a big fan of actor Jon Gries, who always brings something very specific and interesting to his roles. In “Endgame,” the story of a championship chess team from a school in a poor community from writer/director Carmen Marron, it would have been easy to make the school principal just the usual clueless or bureaucratic obstacle, but in just a few scenes Gries created a character who was vivid and real. I was delighted to get a chance to talk to him.
“One of the things when I approached the role I tried to avoid is, obviously being so many different characters that have been regurgitated time and time again and they’ve become almost cliché. And I think I just try to find some bit of humanity. You know, I think it helps, I know somebody who is a principal and she would always talk to me about how difficult it is being a principal. Not so much because of the students but because of all the pressures that came from the Board of Education, and she had teachers that were underperforming, and that she could not fire them and that she had so many problems with just the way the structures were set up with just the teacher’s union. It totally shined a different light on that experience for me. And so I think that was the beginning, I think that started my quest for this role and probably how to play it. And it has its trappings and pitfalls and all you can try and do is cleave onto a little bit of sanity and a little bit of the right thing.” He admired Marron’s work in bringing it all together. “We shot of my stuff relatively quickly and she was always just very open. I think that’s very important for a director to be just open and trust that your performers are going to legitimately get you what you want or surprise you. And if they’re wrong or they’re not going the right way the you know, you just talk about it but until then the good thing about Carmen is that she is just not the kind of director who feels like they have to direct but that just kind of lets it happen. Those are the best directors because there is a sense of trust and a sense of allowing for the collaboration to really take hold. We talked about it. It’s not like I wanted to surprise her. We talked about where we were going with this and we were in agreement so it is good in that regard. Really there were days when she was under incredible stress because there was such a tight schedule. She really had to get it done. And it’s not an easy thing when you’re working with a lot of children. There’s a lot of kids who are non-actors in the movie so you have to educate them and at the same time not remove them from being kids because you want them to be able to be who they are. That’s what you really are trying to have in your film so I thought she did a really good job.”
He was brought into the film by his “Napoleon Dynamite” costar Efren Ramirez, who plays the chess team’s coach. “He contacted me and said, ‘Hey come on we’re doing this movie and there’s this part in it. I’d love to have you come down and do it.’ And you know honestly, normally I might have not even played the role because I’m always looking for more to do I’m just too greedy. I want to chew the furniture and whatever I can do and this guy was just kind of tapestry of the whole film. But once I got down there and I was getting involved and I was very pleased that I was a part of it and I was really happy to be there to support Efren as well because I think he’s so good.”
Gries also appeared in one of my favorite films, “Get Shorty,” where his character is a low-level hood who gets shot by both Dennis Farina and Gene Hackman. “That was a lot of fun to do and it was a lucky experience in the sense that when I got that job I was probably the 200th person who read for the part. My agent, she is now deceased, a woman named Suzanne Smith was quite an amazing agent. When she called me up she said ‘I don’t want you to ever forget this because this doesn’t happen. They’ve read Matthew McConaughey, Steve Buscemi, they’ve read a lot of people for that same role, and the fact that you got this part – it’s nothing short of a miracle.’ So I did. I felt lucky to be a part of that. I really was. To work with the amazing Dennis Farina and Gene Hackman, how lucky is that and the amazing incredible Delroy Lindo and John Travolta. With people like that, it’s just ‘Okay I have to really rise to occasion or shut up.'”
The best advice he ever got about acting: “Simply just tell the truth and just know who you are in the scene. Know your relationships and know who you are.”
The Hollywood Reporter quotes Meryl Streep on the disproportionate number of male film critics on Rotten Tomatoes: “The word isn’t ‘disheartening,’ it’s ‘infuriating,’” she said. “I submit to you that men and women are not the same. They like different things. Sometimes they like the same things, but their tastes diverge. If the Tomatometer is slided so completely to one set of tastes, that drives box office in the U.S., absolutely.”
Streep made these comments in London, where she is appearing at the premiere of her new film, “Suffragette,” about the women who fought for the vote in the UK.
In a related story, The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has launched an investigation of gender disparities in the film and television industry, following a request made by the American Civil Liberties Union in May.
