Interview: Gretchen Mol on “A Family Man” for Where to Watch

Posted on August 14, 2017 at 5:18 pm

My interview with Gretchen Mol about “A Family Man” appears on Where to Watch. She talked about giving some complexity and depth to the “you’re never home” wife character.

The movie is not “A Family Woman.” So much of it is his perspective and his journey. But one of the important things about playing a part like this, that it’s so important for my character to love him. She is there to show the audience that he is loved and loveable even when that might otherwise be hard to believe. It’s hard sometimes not to judge her for loving him but I had to as the actor kind of come to a point where I had to understand why she does. It’s funny because when I initially read the script I didn’t think of them as being super successful necessarily, but I did think she is attracted to his sort of kind of cockiness or that nature of that person. When he says, “What’s not to love?” she really loved that.

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Actors Interview

Interview: “Glass Castle” Writer/Director Destin Daniel Cretton

Posted on August 11, 2017 at 8:00 am

For WheretoWatch, I interviewed Destin Daniel Cretton, writer/director of “Short Term 12” and now “The Glass Castle.”

It’s not necessarily experiences that we have all gone through but I do think that there is something about The Glass Castle that still resonates and feels very familiar. We may not have gone through something to that degree but I think everybody has a Rex Walls in their life. Everybody knows what it feels like to want to love somebody so badly and have the struggle of how difficult that can be with someone who is either an alcoholic or has ups and downs in their life or who can’t be what we need from them. And it’s incredible to watch somebody like Jeannette go through something like that and come out the other end, not just learning how to accept that part of it but to take it and make it something that makes her so much of a better person. That’s really inspiring to me.

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Interview: Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, Directors of “An Inconvenient Sequel”

Posted on August 1, 2017 at 3:10 pm

For rogerebert.com I spoke to Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, directors of Al Gore’s new climate change documentary, “An Inconvenient Sequel.”

We see ourselves as filmmakers and as storytellers. We want to make films that move people emotionally. The most effective thing that cinema can do is get into people’s hearts and have them see a new perspective on life—step inside someone else’s shoes and mind for 90 minutes and experience the world in that way. Take them away, make them laugh, make them cry, all those things movies are good at. We also think they can be incredibly effective ways to see social issues through their characters. That’s why we make movies about remarkable people like President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives in “The Island President” and Al Gore in this film, who get up every day and are driven in an almost inhuman way to make a change in a problem that they see in the world and shine truth into a very dark arena where bad actors try to lie to the American public to gain profits for fossil fuel companies. To us, that’s a natural drama. And that’s primarily where we work—character-based films that we hope will bring issues to life through their stories.

We were amazed and heartened that part of Al’s message is this incredible hope with sustainable energy that can help get us out of this mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. Bonni and I have teenagers and so it’s become more of an emotional issue. As Al Gore says in the film, it’s more like civil rights or women’s suffrage or apartheid than like a petty political issue. It’s of utmost importance to the future of the planet.

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Directors Interview

Brian Selznick on “Wonderstruck”

Posted on July 28, 2017 at 6:58 pm

For Rogerebert.com, I spoke to author/illustrator Brian Selznick, who has written the screenplay for the film adaptation of his book, Wonderstruck. I was fascinated by his description of casting deaf actors as hearing characters in the silent portion of the movie.

I realized that with a silent section in our movie it gave us the opportunity to hire deaf actors to play hearing characters. Deaf actors were hired all the time in the silent movie era because they were so expressive. They knew how to tell a story without spoken language. And so we used six deaf actors as hearing people. We had these amazing days on the set with hearing actors, deaf actors, sign language interpreters. The rest of the cast, the crew and everybody worked together.

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Interview: “Baby Driver” Actor CJ Jones

Posted on July 20, 2017 at 8:00 am

“Baby Driver” has great action and music, but the heart of the film is in the quieter moments with Ansel Elgort’s character, Baby, and his deaf foster father, played by deaf actor CJ Jones. I spoke to Edgar Wright about working with Jones, and so I was especially glad to see this interview with Jones by Haben Girma. Here’s an excerpt:

Haben: Film is very visual. Deaf culture and American Sign Language are very visual, too. Do you think being Deaf gives you an advantage over hearing actors?

CJ: Oh, that’s an interesting question. Well, Haben, it is not about being hearing or Deaf, it is not about being black or white, it is not about labels. It’s about talent, integrity, uniqueness, and passion. I got the role because I demonstrated that I have the talent the director was looking for. I fit his vision. He was very happy that he made the right decision hiring an authentic Deaf actor.

Here’s a clip from Bleeding Cool: