Interviews: “Art and Craft’s” Sam Cullman and Jennifer Grausman

Posted on October 23, 2014 at 8:00 am

The documentary “Art and Craft” is the extraordinary story of two men. One is Mark Landis, an artist who created counterfeit paintings and then disguised himself as various philanthropist personas and donated them to art museums over three decades. The other is Matt Leininger, registrar at the Oklahoma City Museum, who recognized the fraud and pursued clues — and then pursued Landis. I spoke to directors Sam Cullman and Jennifer Grausman about the film, which raises questions of art, ethics, fraud, corruption, mental illness, and how we decide what we value.

How did you meet Mr. Landis?

JG: I read an article in the New York Times in January of 2011 that told the story, mostly from the point of view of Matthew Leininger who had been tracking Landis and that of some of the curators he had donated work to. I pulled the article out and put it in the drawer and was still thinking about it a week later. There were really two stories there. One was the crazy story of a forger who had never sold his work and donated them instead.

I had never heard of anything like that and was so curious about it. Then also the Times sort of described Matthew Leininger as the Javert to Landis’s Jean Valjean and that literary reference really caught my eye as the narrative. I called Matthew Leininger and he was open to coming down. And so Sam and I shot with him until February of 2011 and while we were there, he told us more about the story and we realized we really had to talk to Mark Landis. And so we got in touch with him, originally I think we emailed and then sent him our past movies and then I started talking to him on the phone over the course of several months. And then he invited us down to Mississippi to film him.

Do you think there is a connection between art and mental illness?

JG: It’s interesting. I’m certainly a non-expert so I don’t want to talk about it generally, but I think in this case, Mark has always had this ability for drawing and painting and it is very much a part of his growing up and childhood, working to copy images out of catalogues from museums. It was good for him because there is some sort of comfort when he was alone and also because he was good at it. The art is interesting to him but really it’s been visiting museums and a way to interact with people that’s been really helpful for him. He’s made his own way in the world by doing this and it is sort of an unusual story but it’s his story.

And what we’ve been told by mental health professionals is that it’s been a story that is actually inspiring to them and to other people living with mental illness because he really has found his own place in the world and has not been committing violent crimes and has not been physically hurting other people. And so they find the story to be empowering in that sort of way. For people in the art world – it’s a difficult issue because it portrays bring out issues of authenticity and originality and the importance of that and really what we hope here in terms of artistic intentions.

It’s only the art world that would sort us take a step back and say, “Well, maybe this is his art. Maybe the whole pretence is the art.” It is some kind of a performance art or a conceptual art.

JG: Right. And Mark would not say that, but certainly other people when seeing his story or hearing his story have comments on that. We started the film thinking it was just an art world caper which was what drew us in but I think probably what made all three of us stay interested in the story was meeting Mark and understanding that it was really much broader than this art world framework. You know it really is a portrait of a person, of this unique individual and what he’s searching for.

SC: Mark uses Magic Markers and frames bought from Home Depot and he really has very, very little patience or interest in trying to approximate the actual material used of the era. For him it was really about the art and craft of it all. He says that he doesn’t really consider himself an artist but someone who is just good at arts and crafts.

And why do you think the priest persona was so important to him?

SC: I think Mark has definitely a religious background but I don’t know that it really had much to do with that. I think he describes it as a moment of inspiration. Sometimes he likes to point to the fact that there is like this yarn that every family has got. One child that is great at business and one child is a doctor and you get down to the last kid, and he goes to the church. I think he is tongue in cheek obviously about that but he had often posed as a philanthropist and this idea that a guy from a wealthy family, from the church just felt like a persona that he could be convincing with. I think another inspiration was this TV show called “Father Brown”.

Why did it take so long to bust him? Didn’t the museums ever try to insure these works?

JG: I don’t know actually if they did. I mean there are so many museums and that was over thirty years and there were varying degrees of when museums found out they were fake. Some figured it out right after Mark left their offices and some figured it out six months later, and some didn’t know until Matt Leininger posted on the Registrars list about it. I’m not sure on the specifics.

As you tried to kind of put a narrative around all of the material that you would have put together, what did you see as sort of the through line of the story?

SC: The through line kind of fell into our lap really. It really became the exhibition. There was something that Matt had mentioned in our first interview with him – he described it as a dream, to bring together all of Landis’s known forgeries under one roof and invite him as a guest of honor. We didn’t really know that that was going to come into being and when it did, it became clear that this was going to be the place for the film to end up. We begin with a chase and end up with the meeting of protagonists and the antagonist and you never know which is the antagonist and the protagonist until you get to the end – or maybe you never really know and you’re always asking in your head to figure on your own who’s the villain.

It’s been compared to Jean Valjean and Javert from Les Miserables, but it’s also a little bit like Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty; it depends on whose side you’re on.

SC: Or Tom and Jerry. I think the thing that makes Mark remarkable aside from the most remarkable thing is that he decided never to profit from these fakes. He has this incredible range of what he makes copies of. Typically these master forgers focus on one particular artist or an era. Mark did everything from 15^th century icons all the way to modern art, Picasso, and you know, even cartoons. So I think that is pretty remarkable. I think that is a real distinction.

Does he ever create his own art? From his own ideas?
JG: Mark really hasn’t done much of that. He talks about how he went to art school to study photography and he learned all the processes, but then he just didn’t have anything he want to take a picture of. So he does have some original work based on photograph, primarily a portrait of his mother and a Joan of Arc painting. But actually now there is sort of interesting byproducts of a lot of the publicity early on and then the film is that Mark has been approached by some women in his town to do commissions, photographs or paintings based on photographs of their children and grandchildren and occasionally a fake. Also in the course of making the film Mark was also included in this exhibition called Intent to Deceive, this travelling exhibition. The curators helped to create a website for Mark called www.marklandisoriginal.com and so he is now going to able to do commissions.

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Interview: Ted Melfi of “St. Vincent”

Posted on October 19, 2014 at 12:55 pm

Writer/director Ted Melfi got Bill Murray to appear in his first film by calling him. Murray does not have an agent or a manager. He has an 800 number. And Melfi left message after message until Murray finally called back and asked Melfi to pick him up at the airport. Apparently his pitch skills (and driving skills) impressed Murray because he stars as the title character in Melfi’s “St. Vincent,” as a bitter Vietnam vet who drinks and gambles too much and has sex with a pregnant stripper (Naomi Watts), and, desperate for money, agrees to babysit the son of his new neighbor, a single mom played by Melissa McCarthy. I talked to Melfi about the film.

I heard about the unusual path to getting Bill Murray, and want to know how you cast Melissa McCarthy for what is essentially a dramatic role.

Once Bill Murray signed on, everything kind of became a lot easier. Everyone wants to work with Bill. And my first choice for the role of Maggie was Melissa. And I told the producer Jenno Topping “I really want to try get Melissa McCarthy,” and she said, “Oh my God, I think that’s brilliant.” And so we told Harvey Weinstein and he said, “I don’t see it. I don’t see it at all.” And he’s like ”I don’t think it is going to work, the movie is a drama with some comedic moments and she is a purely broad comedic actor,” and I said to Harvey. “She’s an actor, first and foremost.” “I am not going to lie, I just don’t see it.” And I said, “Well, what if I get her to audition?” And he said, “Well, sure if you can get her to audition, well of course we will look at it.” And so I called Melissa then I said, “Melissa,” I said, “I don’t know, I said “Who am I to ask you this, who am I at all, but I really want you to play this part and I think you really want to do it too, but do you think you’d be willing to audition and go on tape for it?” And she said, she actually said, “F**k yeah.”

On a Friday, she came over from her show and I taped her doing a couple of scenes. And I sent them to Harvey Friday night and Monday morning my phone rings and it is Harvey, and he goes, “Ted, I don’t say this often and you might not ever hear it again, but you were right and I was wrong. She is a revelation. I can’t take my eyes off her. I can’t see anyone else in this part. She makes the movie for me.”

Tell me about working with Jaeden Lieberher, who is so good in the film as Oliver. How did you find him and what were the challenges of directing a child in a story with very adult material?

I have done a lot of commercials and I have worked with a lot of kids over the years. I really have a good connection with kids, I have two kids myself. So I don’t have any problems with working with child actors. I find that child actors are the purest form of acting because
they are not spoiled yet. They are not ruined yet. And so, I was looking forward to working with the kid. The biggest problem with Oliver in this film is finding him. It was so hard to find. It took a sixteen hundred auditions, sixteen hundred kids across the country.

I think that is where comedy lives, that is when you do things that are completely inappropriate and then you make them appropriate, you make them okay. But Jaeden’s mom, her name is Angie, she is just this fantastic lady and they are just game for everything. It is not about money or desperation or pleasing you. It is literally about the art. Jaeden actually gets mad when he has a day off, he is like, “What? I want to be working.” He was born to be an actor.

How did you find the determination to keep calling Bill Murray’s 800 number?

My wife says I have what is called happy delusions. I guess I have had this disease for most of my adult life or most of my life in general. It is like I don’t stop. I actually put it in my calendar: “call Bill Murray” every day, every other day, once a week. People think I’m crazy and I guess I am. I am just so persistent, I mean, I don’t know much about myself, only that I am persistent. I am so persistent that it drives people crazy. Maybe it is all OCD, I don’t know, but I just keep going and I keep going, and I keep going. I probably just wore Bill down even if it is to call me back and get a restraining order.

The first time I met him was in the town car driving for three hours from L.A. to the Pechanga Indian Reservation. When I screened the movie for Bill for the first time, we screened the movie on an airplane from Atlanta, Georgia to LAX and then we took a town car to somewhere else. Bill loves travelling. I don’t know if he loves travelling but he’s does it an awful lot so I assume he loves it.

So tell me a little bit about what your concept for the clothes worn by Murray as Vincent.

Ted: Our wardrobe stylist is brilliant. Kasia Walicka-Maimone. She lives in Brooklyn. She does a lot of Wes Anderson’s work. Kasia was saying, “Okay, who is this guy?” And I said, “Kasia, let me give you one thing that I have, that I believe this guy…that encapsulates his entire existence.” So I gave her the only pair of shorts I held on to from college, green camouflage cargo shorts. I said, “That is what I want him to wear.” And she looks at it and says, “Now I know who he is.” And she took that thought and my shorts and she found the shorts and she found a couple of them, and she just rolled with it. And she’s from Brooklyn, and she just found all these vintage shirts and short sleeved shirts that are pit stained and red sweatpants and sandals and flip flops and that hat he wears. And for Daka (the Watts character) she invented something we called chic trash.

What was your inspiration for the film?

The movie is based on two true stories of my life, two inspirations. Eight years ago my oldest brother died and he was thirty-eight, and it was just kind of totally unbelievable. And he had an eleven-year-old daughter, the mother was not in the picture, so my wife and I adopted her and we moved her from Tennessee to Sherman Oaks where we live, in California and we put her in Notre Dame High School when she was ready for high school and in her sophomore year she goes to a world religion class and in this world religion class, the teacher assigns her this project, find a Catholic saint that inspires you and find someone in your real life that mimics the qualities of that saint and draw a comparison. And so she picks St. Monica of Rochester, the patron saint that adopted children because she just got adopted. And she picked me. So I said, “That’s a movie.” I couldn’t get it out of my head. It made me feel very proud and happy and it was a very emotional time.

And I said it is not going to be me, it’s going to be an old guy that doesn’t have much to live for anymore. And the second part of the story is like “Who is Vincent. Who was Vincent?” And Vincent was inspired by my father-in-law, my wife’s father who was a drunk Vietnam vet who abandoned all his kids. He abandoned my wife when she was nine, smoked, drinks, gambles – just not a good guy. Twenty five years later my wife is in a psychology seminar in Los Angeles, in one of those “Find Your Life” weekend seminars? And the assignment is to get complete with the people in your life – which means, make amends. And so she sent a Dear Dad letter to this address she found in the white pages. Two weeks later the phone rings. He says, “Kim, it’s your dad.” And then she just starts crying. And from that moment on they became father/daughter, for the last ten years of his life, she even helped him through his cancer when he died and he became a saint for her and she became a saint for him. And that was Vincent for me, that guy.

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Directors Interview Writers

Dear White People: Interview with Writer/Director Justin Simien

Posted on October 15, 2014 at 3:55 pm

“Dear White People” is fresh, provocative, timely, and very funny. In the tradition of “Higher Learning” and “School Daze,” it is the story of four black students at an Ivy League college, all making different choices about adapting or challenging the biases and privilege of their classmates. At the center of the story is Sam (Tessa Thompson), an outspoken woman whose program on the school radio station is called “Dear White People.” Sam is unexpectedly elected to be the head of the house that was once exclusively for black students but now has been opened up to everyone through a school-wide program of color-blind placement. Meanwhile, a white fraternity is holding a party where attendees come in exaggerated and racist “ghetto” costumes. Over the final credits, we see photos from real-life “ghetto” parties on college campuses.

Writer/director Justin Simien sat down with a small group of journalists to talk about the film, and he was as thoughtful and engaging as his film.

“I think college is such a great microcosm for a larger American experience. And particularly this sort of vaguely Ivy League college. I wanted to deal with the aspect of America where everyone is sort of cutthroat and has ambition and wants it. I wanted my characters to be in that particular environment because there are a lot of black places and white places. For me, I left my home community. I went out into the world to do something in particular and I found myself always being the only black person in the room. And so I wanted to find a way to create that in a microcosm where we could get into all the issues, Which was just easier to do at the school level. And some of my favorite movies do that. “Fame” and “Election,” and “School Daze” really effectively uses school as microcosm and for me there was just no other place to set the movie really. And also I started the movie in college so it was sort of obvious thing. And as I kind of continued to be the only black person in the room, as I left college it progressed in my professional life. It just still made the most sense.”

When he was in college, Simien began the film as “2%.” “I was in college and I was having a conversation at the black student union and my really good friend and I were musing like, ‘Are we friends with these people just because we are all black or because we would like them?'” That led to the first version of this story, influenced by director Robert Altman, which followed eight or nine characters through a year of college, as a way to talk about identity. “It was terrible! I thought it was funny in certain parts but film school doesn’t really prepare you to write multi-protagonist screenplays so I kind of kept working at it through the years and wrote other things and started life as a publicist. I always returned to it and I reworked it as a TV show and I reworked it as a different kind of screenplay.” The script evolved over time to respond to changes in history and culture. “Obama had been elected president and this ‘He’s really from Kenya’ crap started. The post-racial bubble of America began to burst a bit and that’s when the movie became ‘Dear White People.’ That’s when it really became more about the American black experience at large as I understand it and that’s when I started to take more of a satirical tone, that’s when it really began to be about something. And so I just worked that script with every possible waking hour that I had. And I took it to a workshop, and we all truly loved it and that’s kind of really the beginning of what ‘Dear White People’ is now.”

Originally, there was a blackface party in the script and he took it out as too over-the-top. But then news stories about actual parties on college campuses began “my kind of rabbit hole research experience where like I realized how prevalent the blackface parties were and was just kind of interesting that in the Facebook age, they are now just bubbling up to the mass culture. And so for me, that was really just a really truthful but visceral way to kind of re-create the experience of what it feels like to see myself as interpreted through the eyes of a culture that doesn’t know anything about me. So especially when it comes to commercial black culture, the stuff that sells T-shirts and jeans and shirts and music and whatever, white people are actually setting, creating what black culture is in order to sell products. And often times that culture is confusing, it doesn’t represent me and it’s kind of the viscerally offensive. Nothing articulates that feeling quite like a black face party; people who in their minds are either celebrating or I don’t know what they think they are doing per se but it just feels so oppressive to see that imagery. And it was something that happened. So to me, it was just, as a storyteller, it was like the perfect storm of something that really happens and something that perfectly articulates without words, the feeling that I am trying to get across in that moment.”

With all of the focus on identity and authenticity, it was an interesting choice to have the central character be a woman. “I don’t think there was a part in this where I sat down and decided she was going to be a woman for any particular reason. Sam White just came out as Sam White and that’s the truth. And what I wanted to do with her character is sort of create someone who authentically had an opinion, had a point of view who then became a spokesperson and then that identity became too constricting for her. She was angry at a certain point in her life and she communicated that and now she has always be that in order to hold the movement. And that’s kind of what I wanted to talk about; her character. I can’t really say why but I knew that I wanted, for all the characters, for you to think that you knew who they were at first glance and as you discover more about them, to be surprised at the layers underneath that and the things that sort of went into the creation of that person.” In one funny moment, we find out that Sam listens to Taylor Swift. He has especially enjoyed having black audience members confide that they, too, have some secret “not cool” favorites.

Simien says that all of the characters are aspects of his own feelings and experiences. “I would say that I have been all of them at some point. I have done those things to get along as a survival tactic. I have sort of clinged to no identity. I have sort of hinged everything on my black identity like Sam and sort of tried to be the correct black male like Troy. And I have tried to sort of like use my blackness to get ahead like Coco.”

Hair is very important in the film, as indicated on the poster. All of the black characters change their hair in some way during the course of the movie. “There are so many angles to black hair. Like I remember when I had had that was never as big as Lionel’s fro but it was fro-ish I would say. That line about, ‘It’s a black hole for white people fingers’ was really true. It was like, ‘Get out of my hair please!’ But then there is also like curiosity about hair extensions and weaves and like all like. Black hair just no matter who you are whether it’s natural or whether it’s not natural, whatever, it’s an area that is ripe for micro-aggression and identity. And because African-Americans feel the pressure of being held to a standard of beauty that’s more European. It’s also rich for specifics of racial identity. Like should you wear hair natural or should you straighten it? That becomes like a very racially charged decision for people and it divides us internally and it’s just a interesting rich topic. And so I think for that reason subconsciously frankly it all seeped in. But even with where Lionel nets out with his hair and I won’t say it in case there is anyone who hasn’t seen the film, it was almost a statement for me too because to me it’s really about being authentic to yourself. There are a lot of people walking around with fro’s and natural hair do’s and it has nothing to do with the way they see themselves. That can equally be as about fitting in with a trend or a standard of beauty as wearing your hair straight. And for me, the characters were all battling to figure out how to be authentic, not to be black or authentically black because that’s a moving target that isn’t real. Authentic to themselves because authentically black is, it’s fiction, it’s an illusion. There is no such thing.”

Toye Adedipe was the costume designer who helped create the look of the characters. “It takes place in the heightened reality,” Simien said. “I love the theatricality of film making. I just love movies that immediately tell you that you are watching a movie. And the clothes had a big part to play in that. And because we were dealing with the archetypes and we were dealing with the hyperreality, the hyper style, it was important to me that the clothes reflect that. The black hipster look is something that hasn’t really been in the movies since maybe early, early Spike Lee. I thought would be really cool to showcase that in the film and also at the same time, say things about the characters. And so just like every piece of art in the movie, the clothes were just as much a character that anything is because we were really creating this world. There were lots of references. ‘Well, today Sam is Lisa Bonet and tomorrow she’s going to be Annie Hall and then she was going to be Angela Davis.’ We had that kind of conversation about all of the characters. Because we were thinking about identity and not to get too deep but we are in a postmodern age of filmmaking and everything is very referential and their identities a very referential so it was fun to sort of pull from things that already existed out there in order to create their looks. The only exception to that was Lionel who really pulls from nothing. He is certainly a lot of fun too. To make someone who had no fashion sense was really fun because Tyler is very stylish and Toye is very stylish and that was kind of fun too creating his look, his sort of non-look together to tell the story of his character.”

Next for Simien is a Dear White People book and a possible television series.

Interview: David Dobkin of “The Judge”

Posted on October 14, 2014 at 3:47 pm

Interviewing David Dobkin was a double pleasure for me. First, I loved the film he co-wrote and directed, “The Judge,” starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Robert Duvall. And second, he is the son of old friends Jim and Irma Dobkin, now sadly gone, but still great influences on the lives of our family. The night before our interview, I did a Q&A with David at a screening of the film, and he talked about how his lawyer father used to cross-examine in him in the kitchen when he got into trouble, and how that experience inspired the father-son relationships at the heart of the film. Dobkin, best known for wild comedies like “Wedding Crashers,” brings to “The Judge” a maturity and richness of storytelling, and co-producer/star Robert Downey, Jr. gives his most open and vulnerable performance as the arrogant criminal defense lawyer whose own defenses must crumble.

I love the use of sun flares in the movie, visually striking but also dramatically impactful.

Janusz Kaminski and I spoke very early on. It’s such an honor to work with Janusz. I couldn’t believe it; he was the eye I wanted and when I first sat down with him like five minutes in I said, “Look, if you do the movie…” and he’s like, “No, no, I’m going to do the movie.” And I was like, “He just said he’s going to do the movie!” But I said, “You know, I think that the movie’s about perception and the movie’s also told strictly through Hank’s point of view.” And I wanted to rack focus , I wanted there to be layers and depth and I wanted there to be the idea of the things that we perceive and then the things that are real. And he just started to backlight and hit the lens with the flares all the time and with the lights, it’s his instinct to start to do that and especially in the courtroom and in other certain moments. And at moments it’s beautiful and at moments it’s distracting and interesting, you know, like when he pulls into the driveway and he talks to his daughter and there’s that beautiful sunset which is really a light that he put right in the frame. So he had this weird subconscious thing going on and you just trust. You speak about what the ideas are and he will find a language to make that happen.

And the color palette was very elegant and elegiac without being too somber.

Just keeping it very realistic and not too glossy. We didn’t want the movie to be inaccessible. We wanted it to be real. We didn’t want to over-Hollywood it. We want to feel the people. You know, even the make-up for the women, there’s very little going on.

How did being the son of a lawyer influence you in thinking about these characters?

A lot of it was subconscious at first. I think that I was very drawn to the drama of the law. I got in trouble a number of times when I was younger with the law and having my father be a lawyer, that was a very sacred thing. And there were a few times, I never lied to my father, it was something that he kind of imbued on me very early on that I would always be okay if I didn’t, but the few times I’d tried to, there were a couple times when I was in the kitchen in my house trying to get out of a situation and not quite telling the truth and the way he could look at me and cross-examine me I was like, “Wow.” I knew what it was like to be in that dynamic and I chose very quickly not to. I was like, “I’m just going to tell the truth and he’ll help me sort it out.”

So, you know, the law was always something that was very sacred. That courtroom in the film was like a church to me, not in the religious sense, but in the sense that Robert Duvall’s character really revered what the law stood for, as a man. \He believed in honor, he believed in responsibility and consequences. All those things were very important to him and they were imbued into me so I thought naturally all of the sudden I’m making a family drama based on some very autobiographical elements and the courtroom just suddenly showed up as the place where that was going to happen.

My father believed that people, if given compassion, will actually become the best of themselves. Looking back, for a guy who never went to therapy, it was more a therapist’s kind of point of view than a lawyer’s point of view. Which is that “I understand the behavior that happened in this incident came from something and somewhere that was unintended.” And we can heal that. He really believed in that and so that was his sense of justice and I think as a storyteller, I think that’s been imbued in me because my characters always go through their hard lessons of what they need in order to come to a place where they can find compassion for the people that they’re in conflict with.

Even in your comedies, you have had a lot of characters who have a lot of growing up to do. It’s interesting to me what in this film, the big confrontation goes right back to the teenage years.

I remember every Thanksgiving coming home and you know, I deeply love my parents and you would come home and the first few hours was so pure. Maybe even though it was only the first hour, but as soon as people’s behavior kicks in and it’s just, you know, it’s rote, you just happen to, you know, an inflection of a voice listening, you know within a day, you’re like, “Oh, we’re back into this again! Like I’m fourteen years old.”

No matter how long you’ve been away, you still sit in the same seats at the dinner table.

That’s interesting you said that. I always explained it to Downey that “You come home, your mother is gone so there’s an empty seat at the table, but you don’t have a seat. You’re not really invited back with the family. They go to breakfast, they leave you behind. And when your father gets in trouble, it is a chance for you to try to win back that seat and your place that you finally have something to do. By the way there was a scene that is not in the movie where someone says to him, “The way a surgeon is not supposed to operate on their patients, a lawyer should not represent his family.” And he says, basically, he goes, “The one place, the one thing I can control is the courtroom.” It is amazing that we’re always trying to win that acceptance still, you know. Or some of us are, at least for me I was trying to. No matter how much they were accepting me, I somehow thought there was more I had to do.

You have a lovely, very classical, Hollywood score in the film from Thomas Newman.

He did this really amazing thing -— and he did it unconsciously because he’s a true artist — but the first time we see the courthouse, he brought horns in and it seemed like “Oh yeah, that’s a color we expect to hear.” It felt like an old movie thing which I really loved. And then he did something really brilliant which is when the judge later in the movie talks to Hank about the importance of honor and the importance of legacy, he brings the horns back in. It imprints on you: “Oh, this guy actually has a very deep sense of the world and the way he believes it should run. That’s what he’s been protecting. It’s not just his own personal legacy, it’s what this town expects and it’s important to him.” He says, “Forty-two years I sat on that bench,” and they don’t deserve what he’s gotten them into, that’s what he’s concerned about and the pressure that it places on Hank. And at the end of the movie in a very significant moment when he does something truly unexpected and he claims responsibility for his actions which he preaches from the beginning. His words come back in and that scene played a certain way always. It was always a really powerful moment but when the horns came in and you understood it, the movie’s intelligence rose exponentially like it’s just that the emotionality of it. There’s no way you could have contextualized that moment that way without that color coming in from the horns, even if you are not aware of it.

You worked very closely with Robert Downey, Jr. on the development of this script. What was that like?

He is Tony Stark. He is that colorful and that fun as a person like if you bump into him and you’re sitting at the craft service table and he’s just as funny and entertaining. So Tony Stark is very much him which is I think we know that, that’s why we love that character. It was really fun to use that same persona in this movie – something similar and say, “Here’s what a real version of that guy would be like and here’s what would happen if we took that persona and we took him through a true dramatic arc and saw what happens when that guy’s got to go home and face his family.”

I like the way you have him begin with the fancy suit and the fancy car and the fancy house and then end up in his old bedroom with junk all over, wearing his high school Metallica t-shirt and riding a bicycle.

It was fun because there was a very clear delineation between this guy who’s so snapped together and then he goes home and he is slowly unraveling and becoming his younger self again. You know the bicycle was Robert’s idea. Originally that scene was Hank putting on his clothes and they don’t quite fit anymore and going for a jog and realizing that he can’t even make it. And Robert had this memory of this old bicycle that he had. The one we got is the exact bike that he had as a kid. He said, “I used to go ride with my bike and I would bike down the road and close my eyes.” That’s exactly what he used to like to do when he felt free and comfortable and he felt taken care of. And I was like, “God, that seems broad but let’s do it.” And as usual with Robert, it was just—-there’s something fun about seeing him kind of get beaten up a little bit, you know, everything go wrong for him. Seeing like just the normality of life get the best of him is really satisfying.
N

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Interview: Ned Benson of “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them, Her, and Him”

Posted on September 26, 2014 at 3:59 pm

Every story has at least two sides, especially the story of a relationship. Writer/director Ned Benson explores romance and loss from the perspective of the man (James McAvoy) and the woman (Jessica Chastain) in two separate films, “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him” and “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her,” both to be released at the same time next month. First, though, is “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them,” which combines the two. I spoke to Benson about how his leading lady persuaded him to add the title character’s point of view and the famous director who invited him to dinner.

What is it that makes us so curious to look inside the different characters and show us what the other character does not see?

When I started this I had only written a male perspective of it. And Jessica actually asked me some questions about the character of Eleanor Rigby and where did she go, who was she. I knew that I wanted to write a love story, I knew I wanted to make a film about a relationship. And then all of a sudden I was like, “Wait! There’s no better way to show a relationship than get both perspectives of it, both sides of what these two people were going through, are going through.” So that spun this whole other script and that became this 223 page two-part script that an untested first-time director was going to try make with an actor who was about to be in a Terrence Malick movie but had not been seen in anything yet. And my producer is a first-time or a second-time producer so we were sort of three untested delusional people trying to make this movie.

I think we’re all very different and sometimes we narcissistically project ourselves onto other people and don’t allow them to be exactly themselves. I wanted to show the differences and the different personalities of people in terms of the way they deal with things which makes them exactly who they are and ultimately that’s the thing we love about them.

Tell me little bit about some of the visual cues that you used to help the audience keep straight whose view we were getting.

We created different color palettes for each of them. Different production design, different costume design. We created different visual rhythms for each character in Him and Her. So his film has a cooler, more detached feel with a sort of fluid visual rhythm because he is constantly moving. If he stops he’s going to feel something. He is running forward into his life wholeheartedly and running after Eleanor. And she has retreated into this sort of warmer color space with a more handheld feel. Her film is a bit more interior because she’s a bit more interior character. We sit with her and feel what she’s going through more.

I did the same thing with the production design and costume. And then the actors and I worked together to create different intentions for each version of the scenes that overlap. Because there are four scenes that overlap in Him and Her that are essentially the same moment but shots from different perspectives, different angles, different writing, different experiences with the same moment as if you and I are having this conversation right now and we’re each going to walk away with a different perception. Sometimes we misremember, sometimes things emotionally resonate with us more and I just wanted to show that with those moments that the things that resonated more with each of them. So for example in one of the overlapping scenes which occurs in a bar and then continues into a car ride. James is wearing a sort of white light collared shirt in one version of the event and then he’s wearing a dark gray in another version. That played into the color palette that I was dealing with because I was dealing with mood but I was also dealing with memory and how we mis-remember certain things.

Do you consider yourself a romantic?

A cynical romantic yes. I’m romantic in the idea that I believe in love, I just don’t know what it is necessarily in terms of how to do it right or how to make a relationship endure because I’ve never made one endure. I’ve been in long-term relationships but it’s something that’s interesting to me and I love the way love evolves and even though those relationship are over I think both my ex-girlfriends and I all have a great respect and love for each other and that love has just changed.

Jessica and I were in a four years relationship which is how we developed a script together so that’s definitely infused into the story. I have such great affection and respect for her as a person. She’s a wonderful human being and a great collaborator. She’s going to be a part of my life always. Eleven years ago she ran up to me at a film festival with my short playing that she had just seen because she won tickets to it on NPR and said, “I want to work with you.” She had just graduated from Juilliard and done an episode of ER, so that was it. And then we grew together which is really cool.

Why is the character called Eleanor Rigby? Is she one of the lonely people like in the Beatles song?

I was listening to it while I was outlining the script or the story and figuring out what the story was. And just one day I was like, “Wow!” You know because I heard the “all the lonely people where do they all came from” and that mood just sort of infected the whole thing and infected each of those characters because they each were sort of going through their own quiet crisis. So that instilled itself into it and I named the character because of that. But it was also this abstract idea because I’m the child of two baby boomers and my dad got kicked out of high school for stealing a TV to watch the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. My parents gave me this wonderful music education. I look at my parents’ relationship and how I am a reaction to and a reflection of it in a weird way and how that infects my relationships in a good way or in a bad way. So I wanted to use that in terms of these two characters and their parents in the story. In the movie, her parents met at the Beatles concert that was supposed to happen but never happened. So since his last name was Rigby, they named their daughter Eleanor.

How did you use music in the film?

I try not to let music dictate feeling. I would rather let acting and talking do that. There’s a lot of diegetic music existing within the scenes because I love doing math but on top of I that I looked into working with this wonderful composer who when he saw the films decided that he had this great idea to look at scene and see what objects existed in them and then create the instruments based on those objects. So they were based on things that existed within the film and ultimately I wanted a very atmospheric score but sort of like felt very theorial and existed within the mood of peace and sort of acted like a collaborator as opposed to a dictator feeling and then he wrote some beautiful songs on a big beautiful score. We don’t have ‘Oh so much score’ between three films but he did such a beautiful job and that was really cool to experience and get like, I love music in terms of when I write I usually listen to music and it’s a very important part of my artistic process and even when we’re shooting I was playing songs for the crew and what rhythm we’re going to shoot at and I gave playlist to each of the actors in terms of like what their character was listening to what their moods were. It was really cool to sit with somebody and hear sketches and then get to give notes on those sketches and feel like oh you can could push the guitar there a little bit or you could use the glass a little bit more because he create this wineglass instrument.

I think it works always but I think if you see Them first you can expand into these other two films and have those characters in each of these separate films be fleshed out more. And I think if you are going to watch all three that is the way to do it. But I don’t think it matters whether you see Her or Him first it will change your experience because one will give subtext to the next or change your opinions about a character from one to the other. But if you’re into this type of subject matter this type of film I encourage people to try and see all three. I would love that but again it’s sort of out of my hands.

Who are some of the directors you admire?

One is Robert Altman. I met him and his wife at a brunch. I was a kid, a friend of mine was invited and I tagged along. It was in my 20s. I remember I walked outside he was sitting and smoking and he was like, “Come on, sit down” and just we started talking. And I geeked out! I was like, “Could we talk about the multi-track song in “The Long Goodbye,” could we talked about “McCabe and Mrs. Miller?” He sort of looked at me like…”Sure!” And I’m sitting with him, incredible. And then he said, “Why don’t you come to my house?” And I went to with my girlfriend to this dinner at his house in Malibu that he and his wife hosted and Paul Thomas Anderson was there, all these other movie people, and I felt like I was in a Robert Altman movie myself.

What is next for you?

I just know that there’s always room to improve, there is always room to improve in your writing, there is always room to improve in directing. The only point is to make better and better films. I was lucky that I get a chance to make three the first time and I am hopeful my writing or directing will improve in the next one and I hope that I get to make more.

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