Tribute: Director Tony Scott

Posted on August 20, 2012 at 9:33 am

We had some very sad news this morning. Director Tony Scott has died at age 68, an apparent suicide. Like his older brother, Ridley Scott, Tony will be remembered for a powerfully imaginative visual style. He is best known for testosterone-fueled films like “Top Gun,” “Crimson Tide,” “Days of Thunder,” “True Romance,” and “Enemy of the State,” but he worked with his brother and other directors on a wide range of productions that included cult classic “Donny Darko” and the hit television series “The Good Wife.” May his memory be a blessing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAfbp3YX9F0

Related Tags:

Directors Tribute

Interview: Writer-Directors of “ParaNorman”

Posted on August 16, 2012 at 8:00 am

I loved seeing the “ParaNorman” panel at Comic-Con, so I was especially excited to get a chance for an interview with writer-director Chris Butler and co-director Sam Fell, and I had a blast talking to them about why kids and grownups like scary movies and the challenges of stop-action animation.

You really pretty much made a list of everything that is impossible to do in stop-motion and did it. I mean, tossing toilet paper around?

Chris: I know, that was certainly…

Sam: It was a real trick, there, and I remember when I first wrote that scene I thought, “What would work so well in stop-mo would be toilet paper kind of sculpting forms of zombies…” and then when it came to do it, it was like the most difficult thing you could ever do.

Chris: It was long-time that Brian worked on that toilet paper, it was his specialty, and he was doing it for like a year. He’d come up with these, almost like these platters of toilet paper styles and techniques…

Sam: And we’d go to see it, and he’d say, “Look at this,” and you’ll hold up to the light and you’d say, yeah, I can’t see the wires…And you’d go, oh, that’s pretty good…and you’d make his day because you’d like his toilet paper.

What were some of the other big challenges? At Comic-Con you said no one had ever done stop motion characters with thick necks before.

Chris: Normally with a puppet you want a separate head and then a neck between the two and you can articulate them all around and especially with our technique where we change the faces so there’s a natural line under here, so you can change the faces…but with a fat neck character, it’s very hard to articulate and…

Sam: It does not move the way skin does…

Chris: And there are horrible bulges, and it’s very hard to know how to separate the face from the neck, and this is one shape, so…

Sam: Technically a nightmare. We all knew it was very dangerous territory. We sat around and discussed, “Should we change the design of this character?” And it was like, no, no, because that’s him, and so let’s find a solution to make it work. That’s the approach at Leika and it was the approach on “Coralline.” We took it even further on this. It’s easy to see stop-motion as this little bit of nostalgic history, it’s this cute charming thing from old TV shows. And it’s a beautiful hand-made thing and we loved that aspect of it, but that’s no reason to not take into the future with all the innovations that we have at our disposal.

Chris: We have a visions effects department now integrated into the studio, you know? And it’s all just on desktops, now, so it’s relatively cheap and it’s not like having to go to some big, expensive post-house any more. They’re there, so when you’re designing your shot, you can be, “Hey, come on down,” and they tell us how things should be done or how many passes we need or make suggestions.

Sam: So you can plan a shot around them is what you’re saying, as much as anything.

Chris: It’s very efficient.

If you could take home one of the props for the movie and live with it in your house, what would it be? I know I’d pick the alarm clock!

Sam: Everyone says the alarm clock or the tooth brush.

Chris: I like the van, I guess, or the station wagon. I love those vehicles.

Sam: It’s actually not a prop, but I think it’s a thing of beauty: the dead judge’s cape is so beautiful, it’s a work of art because it’s not just a cape that’s been designed correctly, it’s a cape that’s been designed correctly and then has the asymmetry of the design style, plus it’s animatable, plus it’s got all the rottenness of being in the grave for 300 years. It’s an amazing thing.

Chris: A lot of construction to it.

You tread a very fine line there between scary and reassuring and funny and I love narratively the way you resolve that, but visually, how do you calibrate that and what do you look at?

Chris: The zombies were possibly the scariest thing, they have to play both ways. One thing we knew is that they’ve been in the ground a long time, so we weren’t going to do gore, but I think it was just going through that whole ensemble of zombies and figuring out how they were rotten in the different ways, and that gave us goofy and scary.

Sam: And I think that’s the benefit of telling a story like this in animation—is that you’re already one step removed from reality, so the very process of charactering in the first place is a safe distance, I think, for kids to be, you know…

Chris: To be dealing with a rotting body!

Sam: Yeah, if we’d done this in live-action, it would’ve been more gratuitously gruesome, more grotesque, and I think doing it this way you can design those zombies so that they are cool images…

Chris: and you can have the idea, as well, like we figured out how his face fell off, you know? So his jaw is still flapping, he’s got that flapping bit? But because it’s stylized, it’s sort of art…

Sam: It’s taking advantage of cartooning, if you like, that aspect of animation, whereas I wouldn’t say this movie is a cartoon, because there are real things at stake; you think of the characters as real people, but certainly it’s useful to be able to stylize in that way…

Caricature.

Sam: Yeah, exactly.

(more…)

Related Tags:

Interview: Peter Hedges of “The Odd Life of Timothy Green”

Posted on August 15, 2012 at 8:00 am

I am a huge fan of Peter Hedges, who wrote the book What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and wrote and directed Pieces of April and Dan in Real Life. No one is better than he is at showing us messy families who sometimes hurt each other, do not always understand each other, but really love each other. I loved talking to him about his new film, “The Odd Life of Timothy Green,” an endearing fable about a couple named Jim (Joel Edgerton) and Cindy (Jennifer Garner) who try to come to terms with their inability to conceive a child by writing down the qualities they wished their child would have and then burying the list in the garden. Somehow, a little boy who has all those qualities appears, calling them Mom and Dad. And he has leaves growing out of his ankles. Hedges wrote the screenplay based on a story by Ahmet Zappa, the son of rock legend Frank Zappa.

What made you decide to take on this project?

What I’m looking for is a story. Sometimes I adapt someone’s novel. “Pieces of April” was original. “Dan in Real Life” was a rewrite of a script. In this instance, I sat down with Ahmet Zappa and he said “I have an idea about a couple that can’t have a kid and he grows out of the ground and he has ten leaves and they’re ten qualities,” and there was so much of the story that didn’t exist, but there was this incredible jumping off point. I felt like I could write about things that matter most to me — being a parent, and family — and yet there was this magical element that I never would’ve thought of. There was some preexisting story, but so much of the story didn’t exist. Most of the characters weren’t even in the story that I first heard. I kind of adopted his concepts and he was so encouraging that I bring all of myself to it. With the help of all my collaborators, I just kept writing draft upon draft upon draft. I feel like it’s comparable to someone who’s adopted a child, and they feel no less the parent because they actually are the parent.

Very apt! And you had a real casting challenge to find the child for this movie.

Sometimes it’s right in front of you; that’s a theme that I’m going to write about in the future. We did a nationwide search and who knew that a boy who had only been in one film before when he was six, playing a small role in my previous film, “Dan in Real Life,” would be the kid we cast as Timothy Green.

I didn’t think he had enough experience to play Timothy because he’d only done that one film, but we kept doing callbacks and there were a lot of amazing kids who came in to read, but they weren’t really Timothy. CJ is just a remarkable guy, and he kept coming in and after three or four callbacks it started to dawn on me and the casting team that we had our guy, and so, obviously, if you don’t have the right Timothy, you’re going to have the wrong film. And he was the right kid. He’s really a special guy, and we have a great trust of each other—he taught me a great deal, I think more than I taught him.

I love it when Joel Edgerton says instead of “Have a wonderful day!” just “Have the day that you have.” The movie’s very smart about being a parent and what our hopes are and what our mistakes are.

The number of times I catch myself telling kids “Have fun,” my kids, “Have a great time,” and “Do well.” And I started to realize in my own life, I’m constantly putting pressure on my kids when I think I’m being supportive, so we have to be careful about the words we say. Which is, you don’t have to have a great day. You can have a terrible day. Have the day you have. Just have it. And so it seemed to me that the act of parenting is always an act of revision. You constantly—in my case, with my life—you are constantly evaluating each other, refining our tactics, developing new strategies….right when we figure our kids out, they change.

Ahmet brought a magic element that I would never have thought of, but what I could bring was all this experience having been a parent and all the mistakes I’ve made and we’ve made and all the things we’ve done right. I felt like, here was an opportunity to explore the crimes and misdemeanors of parenting, all the great parental crimes and the minor parental crimes. And here were characters that were going to have an accelerated learning experience, they were going to be thrown into it.

Nature is brilliant, because when you conceive a child, and then you’ve got those months to prepare, and then the baby comes out and the baby sleeps and you have time to kind of evolve and figure out what the next stage requires. But for Jim and Cindy—this is what they want more than anything—they suddenly get a ten-year old boy, and they don’t have the tools or the experience. They’re just going to do a lot of the things we do, but do them maybe in a bigger and more delicious way, and hopefully it will be relatable, identifiable, and we’ll see ourselves up there. We’ll see at times the parents we hope we are, but oftentimes we’ll see the parents we are horrified to realize that we also are. I think for me, if I write it well, it will also be a chance for me to maybe find some new ways to approach the remaining time I have with my kids while they’re still at home.

What do you think families will talk about when they see this movie, afterwards? What would you want them to talk about?

What I always hope is that people will end up talking about their own lives or thinking about their own lives. They think about their kids or their parents. The good news is that everybody’s a kid (or was) and for people that aren’t parents, everybody has parents or had them, so I hope they’ll see themselves up there. For me, the great films or even the good films remind me that time is ticking and that life is fragile and that we’d better get living and be more alive and be more willing to love. Frequently, I go to these movies where I forget about my life, and I escape, and then as I’m leaving I have this feeling, I feel work begin to creep back in and by the time I’m home, I’m thinking about the bills I need to pay and I just had a vacation from my life. There are other times where I have a feeling that I’ve gotten to take a vacation but I also feel like I’ve been nourished or I feel more energized to be better, to be more, to be better, to mean more, to live more fully, and that’s what I’d like people to feel from this movie. Probably the simple version would be, you either go home and you wake-up your kid if they’re a baby and hold them, or you call your mom or your dad and you check-in on them or you squeeze the hand of the person next to you and go for some ice cream and you say nice things to each other, maybe something like that.

Related Tags:

Directors Interview Writers

Interview: Tony Gilroy, Writer-Director of “The Bourne Legacy”

Posted on August 8, 2012 at 8:00 am

Tony Gilroy, who wrote the Matt Damon “Bourne” movies, takes over as director for chapter four, “The Bourne Legacy,” with Jeremy Renner taking the lead role. It turns out, as they tell you in the trailer, there was never just one. And that does not mean just one “Bourne”-like spy. There was another secret program that has become out of control. I spoke to Gilroy about the new film.

Tell me a little bit about how this character is different from Jason Bourne.

Aaron Cross is part of a different program, developed by the same sort of mastermind, by Edward Norton and his little agency there. The program is tasked with completely different objectives. The Treadstone program that Jason Bourne was part of was assassinations, they were assassins, it was rather pure and simple. The Outcome program that Aaron Cross is part of is not part of the CIA, it’s sort of been franchised out to the Pentagon, the Department of Defense, and their responsibility is very long-term, submerged, isolated immersion into the most dangerous places on the planet, really, and as warrior spies. There’s a real intelligence aspect of it. So the skillsets are—obviously they have to kick ass, physically, all of the bad-assery is the same—but the personality type and the things they’re looking for are very different, though. The Outcome agents have to have a real, very nimble intelligence, have to be able to be socially flexible, have to be able to blend in, have to be able to have a really high level of curiosity, so it’s a different set up. And their problems are extremely different. Jason Bourne, obviously as everyone remembers, he wakes up, he has amnesia, he can’t figure out who he is and we basically play his moral quandary for three picture about hoping he was a good person and finding out he’s not and trying to deal with that. Aaron Cross is the opposite of that. He knows exactly where he came from all too well and remembers everything and is just desperate not to return to where he started.

You did a terrific job in casting the film. Tell me about one of my favorite actors, Oscar Isaac.

No secret, we had a very public search for who would play Aaron Cross. Jeremy was not available to us for much of that, his name came up very, very late. We looked at a lot of really amazing people over a long period of time. Oscar was a very strong contender at one point for the lead in the movie. He came in and did just an astonishing audition for us. It was such a great audition that it was really hard to ignore and so we flirted with that idea for a long time and when it came time to make the film there was a very significant part—Character number three, who’s the only other Outcome agent that Aaron Cross meets, and they have a couple of scenes together. I called Jeremy and said, “Hey, no secret, Oscar was a contender for this part, do you have any objection seeing if he’d be interested in coming to play number three?” and Jeremy’s like, “Oh my God, he’s great, bring him.” It was very exciting to have the two of them in the scenes we had together. Oscar’s just going to be a huge star; he’s a really remarkable actor.

Do you think that the success of these films or the enduring appeal of these films says something about where we are in terms of our lack of trust in large institutions and the government in particular?

We’re playing on that. It doesn’t start off trying to be an issue film. You don’t start off the movie saying, “Oh, we’re going to make a movie about an issue” or “we’re going to have issues in the movie” or “it’s a political movie.” It never begins like that. It really starts first and foremost with the character, and is there something really desperate for the characters involved? Any sort of larger theme is really, really down the line. You hope that there’s something there, but the first important thing is that the characters are alive and really need something. The other part of it is we really need to make—these movies are a ride, this needs to be a two-hour, really exciting adventure, and that’s the twin motivator. Those are the two engines on driving this forward. If you get all that stuff, if you get other stuff in there, it just enriches it. The idea that you can make a movie and people are just on the edge of their seats for the whole two hours, that’s a victory and the extra credit is if you can have people talk about the movie two days later and argue about it or provoke some other conversation. That’s the cherry on top.

I loved the house Rachel Weisz’s character lives in. I thought it told us a lot about who she was. What did you have in mind for the role that the house was going to play in telling the story?

Even in the script, it was a very, very important thing, and it was the location that we struggled the most to find. We actually found the perfect house, and we fell in love with the perfect house, it was just extraordinary. We walked in and said, “Oh my God, this is just fantastic,” and we thought we were going to be able to shoot there, and it turned out, the house was too fragile to have us work there. We were in despair and we ended up building it almost inch-to-inch in a variety of ways, I don’t want to get into the whole movie magic of all the things that we did, but we really rebuilt that house. What you said is absolutely true, more than any movie I’ve been on, the house really identifies her character in an extremely economical, visceral way. And then on top of that is the idea that you could have an action sequence play for 10, 12 minutes inside your character’s consciousness in a way. If the house represents her, the fact that we can have a huge action sequence almost inside the interior life of the character, whose life is in danger, it’s a really cool opportunity, and we knew how much we wanted to get out of it. Kevin Thompson, the production designer, couldn’t be happier with it and the house is really the crowning achievement of a lot of deep work on the movie, a lot of people worked really hard to make that happen.

Do you think there will be other Bourne characters or is Aaron going to continue forward, or what’s going to happen next?

I don’t know! I really don’t know. There hasn’t been any real substantive, concrete, even sideways conversations about what’s exactly going to happen. I think that next Friday the movie is going to come out and we’ll see what audiences say, and that will tell us a lot about who, what, where and when. I think, I hope.

Before I let you go, I have to tell you that every time your first film, The Cutting Edge, comes on TV, I watch it again.

Oh, I know, it’s the gift that keeps on giving, I don’t know what to say about that, it’s a long, weird trip from “The Cutting Edge” through everything else, I’m so happy it’s back there in the beginning. Every time I see Blades of Glory, I get a thrill because…

It’s a tribute!

I’m a big Blades of Glory fan.

Me too!

Related Tags:

Directors Writers

Smile of the Week: Marc Erlbaum’s Progress on “The Meaning of Life”

Posted on July 30, 2012 at 9:41 pm

I was delighted to get an update from Marc Erlbaum about what has happened since our interview about his new documentary on what people think about the meaning of life. Here’s his latest, a sweet reminder that while we sometimes focus on all that is wrong so that we can work to make it better, sometimes it is just as important to focus on what is right.

And here is an interview with a man who wants to help us see what — and who — we over look.

I’ve added my support to this wonderful project and if you want to find out more and look at additional stories about what people find meaningful, check out lifemeanswhat.com