Stephen Frears and Ali Fazal on “Victoria and Abdul”

Posted on September 25, 2017 at 11:09 pm

I spoke to the director and co-star of the new film, “Victoria and Abul,” based on the real-life story of Queen Victoria’s last friendship, with the Indian man she called her “munshi” (teacher).

At rogerebert.com, Stephen Frears said there was one aspect of Victorian times he’d like to have now:

Confidence. In Britain we were very, very wealthy. We were very secure and very confident. Nowadays everyone is so neurotic; the country is so neurotic. We were robbers and thieves, though, so the confidence would have been nice but unfortunately it was all based on imperialism. Very, very tricky; never have an empire.

And he explained why he had to have a native of India to play the part of Abdul.

There are a lot of Indian actors in England, Asian actors in England but you couldn’t get that sort of wide-eyed quality. We hired an Indian casting director and I went to Bombay and a bunch of Indians came in to see me. When Ali came in, by the time he left the room I said, “Well, I can see why she’ll like him.” It was really as simple as that.

For the Motion Picture Association of America website Where to Watch, Ali Fazal talked to me about the magnificent costumes.

Oh God, I loved all of them. Every time I got into something, it was almost like what do we have on the menu today? That would be the sort of marvelous majestic-looking wardrobe and costume that I had. Consolata Boyle is truly a genius when it came to the authenticity of costumes that I wore, of course my particular favorite was the one he wears in Florence the scene where we’re dancing together. I give her a lot of credit for how I was able to flesh out the scenes. It’s the costumes that really tell the passage of time and the progression. So it was a really, really intimate journey that Consolata and I had over the costumes in this film. So yeah I’m very, very deeply attached to my costumes, every single thread and the buttons and the hooks and the Angrakhas and everything.

And what he hopes people will see in the film:

I think as clichéd as it sounds, it talks of love and hope and they’re the most abused words on the planet right now. We’ve tried war and politics and diplomacy and none of it really works. I really hope people see that, that in the middle of all that chaos there was something like that, this relationship that existed. It can happen today.

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Battle of the Sexes Composer Nicholas Britell

Posted on September 23, 2017 at 8:00 am

My interview with “Battle of the Sexes” composer Nicholas Britell is on the Huffington Post. Here’s an excerpt:

Musically it was a wonderful experience to work so closely with John and Valerie. We spent months together while they were editing the movie. I came up with a series of musical theme ideas and we mapped it out over the course of the film. There is a Bobby Riggs personal theme which is scored for a small jazz group with an upright piano and a double bass and a drum kit and then there are a few woodwinds here and there. And then there is a Billie Jean personal theme that reflects the changes she experiences. The colors of that theme change over the course of the film, so in the beginning it is more of an ambient soundscape and by the end it’s actually a full 79-piece orchestra. Her theme evolves until it finally reaches its full scope where there is a big cello in the match with her theme and then at the moment of her victory, there is a full orchestra taking it over. So it was exciting to see the way in which the geography of the musical ideas could live in parallel to the story.

And one of the things we really utilized throughout the film was the evolution of instrumentation. We thought a lot about the musical colors themselves. One of the first things we talked about was how this is a big story set in 1973, so what should the music actually sound like? We used some old-style equipment to try to have the music feel like it might have been recorded in the 1970s. One of our first ideas was: what if I were to write classical style music but written for 1970’s rock band instrumentation, electric guitars and electric bass and drums and an electric rock organ that is woven in through the whole movie. In the beginning, it’s very quiet in the background and in the tennis match you really hear it and it gets focused on. We started with the 70’s band instrumentation and as we explored the film and worked on it together, we started saying, “What if we had woodwinds here?” and “What if we have strings?” The movie responded so immediately to those experiments. The movie wanted the largest scope as the story unfolded.

My review of Battle of the Sexes.

My interview with Nicholas Britell about his score for “Moonlight“

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Interview: Writer/Director Danny Strong of “Rebel in the Rye”

Posted on September 19, 2017 at 2:48 pm

Danny Strong has appeared in “The Gilmore Girls” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” wrote the “Mockingjay” films that finished the “Hunger Games” series, co-created “Empire.” He wrote and directed “Rebel in the Rye,” with Nicholas Hoult as J.D. Salinger, now in theaters. It is a touching, thoughtful story of a young man who is passionate about being a writer but only after the searing trauma of military service in WWII is he able to fully find his voice to write one of the most influential novels of all time, Catcher in the Rye. Salinger also wrote some acclaimed short stories and novellas, and then moved to New Hampshire, and made almost no other appearances in print. In an interview, Strong talked about why Catcher is his favorite of Salinger’s works and about telling the story of a man almost as famous for his decision to stop publishing as he is for what he wrote.

Do you have a favorite Salinger book?

Catcher in the Rye. I think it’s the best work but there’s sort of an intellectual bias against it. I reread it when I wrote the script and it was terrific. I loved it. It was so funny and insightful and Holden was just a terrific character. Certainly a scholarly point of view is that the later works are better, Seymour: An Introduction and Franny and Zooey. But for me Catcher is the richest as a story as opposed to just a philosophy. There are long religious passages on Franny and Zooey where we’re out of the story range and into the philosophizing range which some people enjoy in their literature. I read this letter of his that he said “sometimes I wonder if I’m propagandizing for the religious point of view” although he says it in a different phrasing, and then he says “but I just can’t help it when I just sit down and what’s inside of me comes out.”

Salinger was supported by and influenced by his professor Whit Burnett, who tells him that the story is everything. Is that right?

Yes, and there is something in the swami’s line about “Do you write to show off to your talent or to express what’s in your heart?” For me it’s the story and what happens and when I see a film that’s what I value most. The characters’ arc is the story. That’s the difference between plot and story. The plot is what happens and story is what this is all about, what you’re trying to say, what you take away from it. So the character journey is to me what’s ultimately the story. And then what makes a story good is when you have terrific characters in it that are dynamic and they’re entertaining, insightful or interesting; all of those things.

Salinger famously prohibited a film version of Catcher in the Rye, even though some of Hollywood’s top directors were interested. Could it be a movie?

People have asked me if I could make that would I? No. I don’t think it would be very good. What happens is he wanders around New York City and he encounters people and he’s antsy. I mean literally it’s the internal monologue and it’s the way he phrases things that makes it so engaging and entertaining and what happens is fine but it’s not cinematic to me.

For a man who was cynical and sarcastic, he was almost obsessed with innocence.

You can be sarcastic and still have “innocence,” right? I mean for me it was more of a loss of youth that was ripped away from him because of the war, because of trauma, because of seeing dead bodies in the Holocaust and nearly freezing to death, as he said, the smell of burning flesh that you can never get out of your nose. But you look at his writing before the war which wasn’t nearly as sophisticated, but nonetheless was very witty and had that sarcasm and was an exploration of Upper East Side life in a way that is quite fun to read. It just doesn’t have the depth that he hit after he experienced what he experienced.

It’s just a small body of work and it’s fascinating to me how obsessed people are with him over this the small body of work and how meaningful it is, people’s attachment to him and protectiveness of him over such a small body of work.

Why did he isolate himself?

He was part of the community in Cornish and he’d come back to New York from time to time and go to the same bookstore and vacation in Florida so he wasn’t a hermit, but he seemed to have an inability to really function socially and needed to be isolated. I view that as just another symptom of untreated PTSD and untreated trauma. I think when you look at someone who writes for forty to fifty years in a room by himself and never shows that work to anyone I view that as therapy, as someone who it’s therapeutic for them and it’s healing for them. In the case of the film and the story in the film t’s a triumph for him to a certain extent, that he’s become the ultimate writer, that he can just right for the sake of writing and he needs “nothing in return” and that’s the journey.

It is a Zen type journey which I believe is completely accurate for him. I think that that was him and that’s who he became. His writing became this meditation that was some sort of relationship with a higher being. I think maybe that’s intellectually how he talked about it, but for me I just see it as therapeutic; as someone who has a racing mind, a troubled soul who’s trying.

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Interview: Ron Hall of “Same Kind of Different As Me”

Posted on September 12, 2017 at 1:01 am

On the Huffington Post, I interviewed Ron Hall, whose wife inspired him to befriend a homeless man named Denver Moore. Their book, Same Kind of Different as Me: A Modern-Day Slave, an International Art Dealer, and the Unlikely Woman Who Bound Them Together inspired a film starring Greg Kinnear, Djimon Hounsou, and Renee Zellweger. It will be in theaters this fall.

He wasn’t really looking for any friends. He considered himself like the lion in the jungle. He had this very angry persona that was his protection and his self-preservation. I wasn’t looking for any friends like him either, truthfully, I was only doing this to repay Debbie for the forgiveness that she had shown me after my infidelity. At her insistence I pursued him for about five months until I finally got him in my car. I took him to breakfast and he thought I was in the CIA. He said, “Why would some rich white man be trying to follow me around?” We ordered breakfast and I found out a lot more about him. He came from a plantation and he had never been to school in his life. He said “Well, so what is it you all want from me?” I said, “Well, I just want to be your friend. Straight up, that’s all I’m looking for.” That in a way was kind of a lie. I was wanting to be more friendly, I wasn’t really wanting to be his friend in the real sense.

That’s how arrogant I was. I didn’t think he had anything to offer me in a friendship. In my mind if he cleaned himself up a little bit, behaved himself I would let him hang out with me for lunch and things like that, and take him around and show him a few nice things and try to make him feel bad about making all the bad decisions in his life that keep him from being like me. I didn’t have any respect for homeless people at the time because I felt most of them laid their own bed and they will have to lay in it.

Anyway after a couple of weeks I saw him taking trash out of the dumpster so I stopped by and I said, “Hey, you want to go get some coffee?” So we were sitting there at Starbucks and I’m trying to explain to him what an art dealer does and he was totally uninterested in that so after a few minutes of me talking he said, “Are you through talking? Tell you the truth there’s something I heard about white folks that really bothers me and it has to do with fishing.” He said, “I heard when white folks go fishing they do this thing they call catch and release.” I said, “Yeah, Denver, they sure do because it’s a sport, don’t you get it?” He said “No, no man I don’t get that at all. Back on the plantation where I grew up we’d go out in the morning, we’d get the cane poles, dig us a can full of worms, we’d go sit on the riverbank all day long and when we got something on the line we were really proud of what we caught and we’ll share it with our folk. It occurred to me that if you are a white man that’s fishing for a friend to catch and release, I ain’t got no desire to be your friend.” My mind flashed back to Debbie’s dream of a poor man who was wise. If I ever heard from God in my life it was at that moment and I knew that I had to accept that friendship and I had to catch and not release. I said, “Okay Denver, if you will be my friend I will not catch and release,” and he said to me “You have a friend for life;” and I said, “Okay, you do too.” The fear I had of him or becoming his friend evaporated.

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Interview: Terry Fator

Posted on August 15, 2017 at 12:32 pm

Terry Fator is pure entertainment. His act, including more than a dozen puppets and an astonishing range of impressions and characters, is non-stop fun. There is something to make anyone laugh, but, even harder to find, there is a lot to make everyone laugh. In this divided world, Fator manages to find a way to make everyone in the audience feel comfortable and welcome, and to leave his audiences astonished by his versatility and delighted with his gentle humor. He is one of the most popular performers ever to appear on “America’s Got Talent,” where he won the top prize, and is now a headliner at The Mirage in Las Vegas. In an interview, he talked about getting started in grade school, the only thing that made him nervous on “America’s Got Talent,” and the trick to doing Donald Trump.

Have you always loved performing before an audience?

Yes, I was always an entertainer from the time of about two or three. I could always impersonate everything and anything. I was the kid that probably was incredibly annoying because I could be at K-Mart and then they would say, “There’s a Blue Light Special in the Boys Department.” And I would go, “There’s a Blue Light Special in the Boys Department” in exactly the same voice. When a siren went by I tried to impersonate the sirens. I was one of those kids that just knew how to copy people and things and animals and everything else.

I remember standing on a table, singing to an audience and they were cheering and laughing. I remember distinctly thinking, “I really like this feeling. This is a great feeling.”

You appear in the wonderful documentary about ventriloquists, Dumbstruck. Some of the families are not very enthusiastic about ventriloquism. What was your family like?

I was always kind of a weird little comedy kid anyway so I kind of brought laughter into the family. We had a difficult childhood. My father was very abusive and we worked a lot. I was always the kid that could find the comedy in whatever situation so you know we also worked a lot. My parents had a janitorial business. Because there were no other workers other than the family there were times when we had to work thirty-six straight hours with no sleep. We would clean apartment complexes and we would have to do two hundred fifty apartments in a weekend and so we would just work, work, work a whole weekend without any kind of rest or sleep. I was that kid that was always finding the comedy in whatever and cracking jokes. So I think when I started doing ventriloquism, it was something new but I was making them laugh so they didn’t really care.

My dad was never supportive but my mom was supportive and my brothers and sister were. One time, I was maybe eleven or twelve, and I told my family. I said, “I can’t seem to get a rapport with my puppet. It doesn’t feel like it’s a real person so I’m going to carry my puppet when I’m around the house and bring my puppet to dinner. And don’t think I’ve lost my mind. I’m not losing my mind. I’m just trying to learn to talk with my puppet as if it’s a real character, a real person.” So I would sit there and I would have the puppet interject at the dinner table and I never did cross a line. I felt like they were family members – the puppets you know. And no, I’m not afraid for a puppet to sit alone in the room with me at night. They don’t come alive unless I’m holding them.

What kind of an adjustment did you have to make going from relatively small audiences to the kind of audiences that you get now?

The odd thing about the “America’s Got Talent” thing, the only time I got nervous was when I was when I wasn’t sure if I was going to go through to the next level or not. That was when the nerves were but it was more of trepidation. “Oh my gosh, is this the end? Am I going home or am I going to get to go through?” It never even occurred to me that I was on television in front of millions of people. I totally forgot that there were cameras there. All that mattered as soon as I set foot on that stage was the live audience and the judges.

An audience is an audience and I do it for the love of the audience and for the love of the craft. Being famous has its perks and being successful is great. But the only reason, the real drive for me and the reason I want that fame is because it translates into people in my audience that enjoy what I create. The rest of it just doesn’t matter to me at all. It really matters that for every person that’s there to give them the best show that they can and the fact that somebody is enjoying what I create is what drives me.

What makes someone a great ventriloquist?

I think the real key is creating characters that people fall in love with and identify with. We are kind of magicians in a sense in that we make inanimate objects talk.

How long does it take you to introduce a new character?

Every character is different. It depends on who that character is and the characters also evolve over time. With Donald Trump I tried really, really hard to get the voice but it’s really physically impossible to do Donald Trump’s voice without moving your lips and the reason is you have to purse your lips in order to get that certain tone. So I really didn’t focus as much on trying to get a real legitimate impersonation of his vocal tone and more just to keep the bigness of his character. I don’t do political humor, I don’t bring politics at all into my act. I’m one of those people that just feel that you know we’re entertainers and it’s not our job to try to convince one person, any one of our political opinions one way or the other. They are there to be entertained. The reason that I never had a Barack Obama or George W. Bush or Hillary Clinton puppet is because those people are known specifically for politics. With Donald Trump, he is an iconic person that we all know of for several different reasons, whether it’s a reality show or the guy who owns the Miss Universe pageant or the Trump Tower or a casino owner. I don’t make fun of Donald Trump because I don’t want to irritate half of my audience. I just have fun with the bigness of his character, with his personality. I just want to have fun and make people laugh so I am a very positive person and all my comedy is very uplifting and positive.

Originally published on Huffington Post

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