Thanks to Andy Blood for interviewing me about my favorite movie of the century (so far) and my thoughts on corporate governance, movies, politics, and culture.
Movies are not just a way to pass the time. They are a way to connect to ideas and situations and characters who challenge our assumptions and make us see the world in a new way. I like to remind people who read my reviews that movies are just the beginning of a journey of exploration and imagination and give them some ideas about where that can take them next. Plus, it gives me a chance to recommend some of my favorite books and movies and museums!
Anna Fricks stars in Wish for Christmas, a sweet Christian faith story about a high school girl who impulsively wishes that her parents were not so religious, mostly so she can go to a school dance on Christmas Eve. When her wish comes true, she is happy at first but then misses the compassion and warmth of her parents’ faith. Her mom and dad are played by the gifted comic actors Leigh-Allyn Baker (best known from “Will and Grace”) and Joey Lawrence (“Blossom”).
It was a pleasure to speak to Ms. Fricks about being in the film.
How did you first get involved with the movie?
I had a friend who was a director and she knew Alexandra Boylan, the co-writer and co-producer. She reached out to me and told me that she had these friends that were casting a movie and if I was interested then she could try to get me in the room for it. So, it kind of just fell into place. I was the first person to audition for the role of Anna and I went in and it just kind of fit. It was really awesome and I had a few more callbacks after that and I went to go meet them again to do a few more scenes and then I got the phone call.
What were they were looking for and how did they describe the character to you?
She was a mean girl. She is pretty straightforward like that and she’s very selfish, very conceited, and self-absorbed but she also had a big heart. That really helps me connect to the character, knowing that she still loves people even though she is very caught up in her own world and her own things. That’s what carries throughout the whole film. If you really pay attention you can see that even when she is not very nice to anybody she still treats people she cares about with love in her own way. So that to me was important to get across in my audition, her humanity. Mean people aren’t just mean people, they still have their loves and their joys. That was really important for me to show in her from the beginning. And as far as the change went and the way that she progresses throughout the movie, that was important as well. It’s easy to make it seem unreal. Because it’s a wish movie, you’re kind of like, “Oh that doesn’t really happen,” but it does have a little different twist because of the faith aspect of it. So making it real, making it seem really real was difficult but I really enjoyed that.
I particularly enjoy the interaction between your character and her parents, both before the wish and after the wish.
Yes, it was really fun, the first few days on set it was just me. And then they came in and it was totally different, not what I was expected because they just brought a new life to the set. There was never a dull moment. It was really fun. The first scene we did together was the scene at the breakfast table. It was interesting to just have that energy, and talking and laughing before the shooting and then they said “Action” and in an instant going into the character, but also including improv. We all added our own things and words and stuff and so that was really fun too. It made it a lot more loose and comfortable. So, they made it a lot easier to get work done.
Your parents are played by such experienced and talented comic actors. What would you say that you learned about acting from working with them?
Leigh-Allyn really helped me a lot just because she is very comedic and improvs a lot. I’m more of a traditional actress but working with her really made me love comedy and the improv aspect of it. So, talking with her about that and working with her on that just made me see the beauty of adding your own thing to the lines and just kind of having your own take on things, so that was really cool. It’s always inspiring to work with other actors anytime on any set and so when they’re really that good it’s absolutely awesome and I can walk away from that learning so much.
One thing I think that anybody who sees the movie can identify with is the stress between a teenage girl and her parents where she wants to do whatever she wants and they want to impose rules on it. Was that something that you could draw from your own life or people you observed around you?
Yes, I could totally draw from my own life. It was very easy to relate to that because I’ve been there, not as much anymore now that I’m older but when I was a preteen and a young teenager it was difficult. I grew up in a Christian home so it was very much that way when my friends could do things that I couldn’t and it just didn’t make sense to me. Now looking back, I think, “Thank goodness that they were like that because I would be a completely different person.” So, it’s really a “be careful what you wish for” type of situation that I can totally relate to.
When did you first know that you wanted to act?
The first time I ever did anything with acting, I was three years old and I somehow still remember being on that stage and loving it. So, it’s kind of crazy because I have been acting my whole life. I’ve always loved it. I’ve always wanted to do it. So when I was younger I don’t think I really knew what it meant to be an actress and to have a manager and agent. So my mom actually told me when I was younger, “Okay, we’ll wait until you’re about 16 and then, if you’re still serious about it, if you still want to, then we’ll pursue it.” So I took some classes in Atlanta, which is where I am from, all through my preteen years. I stayed serious about it, I learned about it, took classes, everything I could do and then when I was 16 I said, “Hey mom, you remember that promise you made me? I’m still interested. I want to do it.” So, that’s when I started pursuing it seriously, so sort of all my life but it definitely took some time to really start making it a career.
What’s the best advice you ever got about acting?
Just to make sure that you really love it because it’s a really difficult business to be in. Hollywood is a difficult place and the industry is kind of crazy at times. So make sure that you love it and make sure that it’s what you think you’re supposed to do. I think the only way that things have worked out for me is truly because of Jesus and following him because I’m striving to do it for His glory. So, I don’t know how else to explain that but I think if it’s truly what you think you should be doing then you should actually pursue it with all your heart.
Do you have a favorite Bible verse?
I do, Jeremiah 29:11 For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”
And Psalm 37:4, it is “Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.” In anything you do, delight yourself in the Lord and the desires of your heart will be His and not your own. So, He’ll make your heart full of His desires. So, that was really important for me to understand going into acting which was that this might be something I want but it’s also something that He has for me.
And you hope in your acting to exemplify some of the principles that are important to you?
Absolutely. I hope it will go far but for now I’ll just give Him the glory and I hope I can really be a light in the darkness that is Hollywood or on sets to be an example because you are actually going into people’s homes when you’re on their television screens or their computer screen. It’s like you’re a part of them for a second. So, I think it’s really good to be a good example for them and important as a Christian in this industry to really be that light and stay in Christ.
Interview: Pharrell Williams on the Music of “Hidden Figures”
Posted on December 21, 2016 at 3:37 pm
“Hidden Figures,” the true story of African-American women mathematicians at NASA during the 1960’s is one of the most uplifting films of the year. Its score is composed by by Hollywood legend Hans Zimmer with Benjamin Wallfisch and the best pop producer in the business and one of the most popular performers as well, Pharrell Williams, who told me “I’m lucky to be a part of this film.” Even before he got involved, Williams had begun to experiment with some 60’s-inspired compositions. “I grew up around that kind of music because I was born 11 years later. So I used to hear it around the house, my parents played it and at my grandmother’s house too, I used to hear the music. That’s a very crazy time, but it felt good and it was all music that evoked, music that came from the soul and that’s why they call it soul music. It was like you could just feel the core of where someone was coming from.” He used a mix of old and new instruments to create the sound.
Copyright 2016 Nell Minow
Williams has worked with a wide range of musicians and performers. “Collaborating allows me to channel and learn new ways of working, new ways of thinking, new directions. This is all an education. Life is an education, so every time I collaborate with somebody it’s like a crash course into the way that they work, into this new moment that we are sharing and into uncharted territories.”
He told me what he learned from Zimmer and Wallfisch about writing music to complement a story. “Hans always likes to find the poetry in a script and then he likes to parallel it with the score. And Ben is like a seeker of tenderness. I like to stoke the fires and try and stimulate something. So it was like this really interesting trio in the way that we worked. It was a whole lot of fun. And ultimately we came to the conclusion that when you think about scores there’s always like the default go to, Euro/Anglo angle when composing a score so we thought well, these women were not Euro and they were not Anglo. They were African-American, they were women and it was the 1960s, so those were our coordinates. That’s what we locked in on and that’s what we tried to chase.” He said this might be the music they listened to as they were cooking and driving to work. “This music was meant to be the backdrop to the most important dialogue and the most important stories in its universe, in its world and so the music was never supposed to shine brighter than what was going on in the film because that was the most important part.” He said that does not mean creating the melodies differently but “you’ll know when it’s doing too much. I tried to pull the fire out of something first. Like in other words if you ask me do that then I have to go to that dial I have to dive deep on the four dimensional level and try to well up as much fire as I can and then I dial it down once I’ve got it.”
Copyright 2016 Nell MinowKevin Costner almost turned down his role in “Hidden Figures.” Based on the remarkable true story of African-American women mathematicians at NASA in the 1960’s, it is an inspiring, uplifting story of the triumph of intelligence, hard work, dedication, and integrity, despite the powerful obstacles they faced as women of color. But the supervisor character played by Costner was the weakest part of the original script. “My character was one they didn’t have the rights to. So he really was an amalgamation of three people and it read like that. I almost didn’t do the movie because the character didn’t make a lot of sense to me, his contributions weren’t enough to prop up the girls. It was just kind of moving from room to room and saying things that were very contradictory. So when I approached the director about that I said, ‘Look, I like the movie, I think the girls are written beautifully. It’s not an MO of mine to want to increase my part or do whatever but there’s something very schizophrenic about this, and Theodore Melfi said, ‘Well you got me.’ and I said, ‘Okay, explain,’ and he said, ‘I couldn’t get the rights to that character, I spend the least amount of time with him and he is not one person. I know, it reads like three.’ And so I said, “That character doesn’t survive in this screenplay that well and he is also not propping other people up because he is saying some inconsistent things. He is giving some mixed signals. So we don’t have to make him better, we don’t have to make him bigger. We have to make them real.'”
He researched the era to understand how limited the technology was. The film shows the first mainframe computer being installed at NASA at a time when “computer” was the term assigned to the women who performed complex calculations by hand. “That was a first click, it was interesting to see that. It was a very crude time. We tend to think of it as very sophisticated, but my children have some toys at home that are more sophisticated than all the technology they had in that room.”
Even though the technology was very limited, Costner related to the role of a man supervising engineers and mathematicians. “I have technologies that I have supported and own and funded, so I deal with scientists and engineers. So I know what it is like to prop them up so that they can do their best work. I know their mindset and I know that they are not always possessed of managerial skills. They’re very individual and they are very creative. I think of them as artists but they have to be managed. But I can’t talk their language because once I quit doing percentages I was done with math.”
The haircut and the clothing helped him imagine the past, but some elements of the story are timeless. “There some things that are constant when it comes to behavior, when it comes to people who are insecure, who are selfish, who can’t give credit. That kind of person has emerged throughout time, the one that’s insecure, so the men are somehow not allowing the cream of the crop to have a chance. The best are not getting through the eye of the needle because of insecurity, not necessarily racism. There’s a big difference but the reality is, that’s a very human quality. So that existed in the 60’s and racism exists now, too. We can be very pleased with looking back and being happy that the story is told and how absurd it seems that woman had to be off-campus so to speak, how absurd to see that they had to be divided. Then the separate bathroom, the separate coffee pot and things like that. I hope people are feeling how absurd it was. I hope they are feeling a sense of shame because every time they do that means we have a chance to go forward. When they walk out of the theater they just have to hold up a mirror to where we are at today and we can still be found wanting in a very severe way. Ask yourself and then answer honestly. We have come a long way but there are other areas where we’ve just not. We have not evolved enough. There are more evolved people now than ever. There are more people that don’t want to accept racism, don’t want it to be here. There are more people that want to protect the planet now than ever. But the noise of the people that are not thinking that way is just louder. There are more of us than ever but they are louder than ever and it’s disappointing that people can’t have a level of empathy.”
Even with all of his experience and honors, Costner finds something new in every project. “I am still learning. I think I’m a better actor than I was three years ago because I tried.”
When a movie is called “Sing” and it centers on an “American Idol”-type amateur singing competition — with animal characters — it presents something of a challenge for its composer, who has to figure out a way to tie together a wildly and often hilariously disparate bunch of songs and singers. So it was a lot of fun to talk to composer Joby Talbot about how he managed to create a lively and engaging score that meshed with a bunch of iconic tunes from many different genres.
“The film is directed and written by my old friend Garth Jennings,” he told me. “I wrote the music for both of his other films, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Son of Rambow, and when he asked me to do it I completely leapt to the chance to work with him and with Illumination, one of the absolute greats in this golden days of animation that we’re living through at the moment. I love “Despicable Me’ and ‘Lorax,’ and all those other movies they have made. Garth explained what it was and he said that they made the decision early on they were going to keep the whole score and song elements quite separate. They do overlap occasionally but Harvey Mason Jr. and his team were in charge of the songs and I was in charge of the score. We realized very early on that the score was going to have a lot of work to do. It’s really important that in this film it is necessarily broken up by some numbers but there’s something that’s really a central kernel, and impetus of the film that really takes you through it. The score really helps you leap between the different storylines or the different characters but most importantly really helps you identify with the characters, helps gets across their kind of emotional journey and who they are and helps you really care for them and fall in love with them. That’s what I was setting out to do with the music. The music cues in the score, even though sometimes they are quite short when they fall in between songs just taking you from one to another, that doesn’t mean they are small or not important. They’re doing so much work all the time. The themes being developed and a whole number of different emotions being thrown at you — that is the work of the score, so it’s actually a huge challenge but I really enjoyed it.”
Talbot met the director in the 90’s, when he was playing in a rock band and Jennings was doing music videos. “I used to play in a band called Divine Comedy way in the 90’s in England and he was one half of Hammer and Tongs who made their name doing promo videos for pop songs. He’s one of the really famous directors in the golden days of the pop videos back in the day when there were enormous budgets and MTV ruled the world. Garth was one of the main guys and we met through our mutual friend Nigel Godrich, the producer of Radiohead and Beck, he’s got great, amazing talent, and Garth was directing actually a commercial for British telecom, the big telecommunications company in Britain and it was supposed to be like a sort of 90 second mini disaster movie with all kinds of objects falling out of the sky. Nigel suggested me for the music and although I hadn’t met Garth I actually knew his wife quite well. She had been in charge of the clothes we wore on a particular pop video that we did. Copyright 2016 IlluminationAnd we met and instantly we got on really, really well. Garth had never worked with a composer actually scoring in any of the films he had made and I felt incredibly lucky to be the guy who got that gig because and his approach as a director is inspired by people like Billy Wilder. He likes that kind of old-school moviemaking and he was adamant he wanted an orchestral score and he wanted it to function in a way those great orchestral scores of yesteryear worked. With my background in classical music that absolutely chimed for me and we just hit it off and never looked back really. Working with him is always a complete joy. I have a couple of collaborators in different fields who I really, really love working with and Garth is one of the best. He such a thrill to work with. We just get each other; it’s great.”
This film has animal characters that include a pig who is a housewife and mother, a shy teenage elephant, and the ape son of a crime boss. There are dramatic incidents which could be quite intense in another kind of film like a robbery, a parent in prison, and a fire. Talbot spoke about finding a way to musically reassure people that it’s exciting not too tense or scary. “There was one cue where they go to the visiting room at the prison and they were aware that that might be rather scary and alarming sequence for a little kids, so that was the one cue where they said, ‘If you could try and reassure us with the music rather than amping up the scariness but everything else, that would be great.’ I just was going with my feeling as to what the emotion of the scene was meant to be. The big robbery sequences were really kind of full contemporary action. So we brought in some really fantastic guitar and drum and bass players and overlaid it with big, bombastic orchestra. But those sequences don’t last that long, so you are just like catapulted into that world and then you are spat out the other end and you get on with the rest of the film. One thing I’ve learned pretty quickly, there was no putting any kind of intro into anything, it is just like, blam! We’re into the cue, here we go. The film actually lives or dies on whether or not you believe in these characters, believe in their motivations and care what happens to them and really root for them. The music has a huge role to play in that. For example, Meena the elephant is so paralyzed with shyness. It isn’t until later in the film that she sings and so the music really has to tell you what she’s failing to tell the world until finally of course in the end she has the opportunity to tell the world that she’s absolutely great. Tori Kelly has amazing vocal power. She’s incredible.”
The movie has a sensational collection of great songs, from “My Way” to “Shake It Off” to “Baby Got Back” and even “Bad Romance.” I was able to persuade Talbot to confess which is his favorite: “I am a big Steve Wonder fan, so ‘Don’t Worry ‘Bout a Thing.” But he adds, “The things that’s really nice about it is that you might go there knowing full well that you don’t like some song or kind of music and then you find yourself with a big smile on your face tapping your foot.”
