Interview: Liana Liberato of “Dear Eleanor”

Posted on July 13, 2016 at 3:18 pm

Liana Liberato (“Trust”) stars in the lovely Dear Eleanor, set in the 1960’s. She plays a girl named Ellie who is caring for her siblings after the death of her mother. She and her best friend take a road trip to try to meet former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. In an interview, she talked about acting in a story that took place long before she was born and what Mrs. Roosevelt meant to her character.

Why was Eleanor Roosevelt such an inspiration to Ellie and Max?

I know specifically for Ellie, Eleanor Roosevelt was an inspiration because she saw a lot of her own mother in her. She was a incredible humanitarian that believed in positive change. She believed in moving forward and changing the world. I think for Ellie, at that specific time, she needed someone like that to look up to. She needed someone who was going to encourage her to positively change her life and get out of the mental head space she was in when you meet her at the beginning of the movie.

Who inspires people today?

I think there are so many people out there who inspire us. I think the beauty of this era is the ability to reach other people so easily around the world. It doesn’t even have to be some huge celebrity. It could be your next door neighbor that inspires you. The person you sit next to everyday in class. Your barista at a local coffee shop. And I think it is really important to always keep in mind that you, yourself, have the ability to inspire the people around you. So know who you are and what you stand for and spread some good change.

If you could take a road trip anywhere, where would it be?

Well, one of my favorite places in the world is Montreal. So I would absolutely love to take a road trip there – and that is literally across the country so there are so many fun places to stop and explore!

What did you do for fun while you were on location?

We filmed just outside of Boulder, Colorado in Longmont. It was absolutely beautiful. Every morning before work I would go to Great Harvest Bread Company for breakfast and just snack on a huge sample of raisin bread to start the day off right. We would go into town and take yoga classes or just walk along side of the railroad tracks and enjoy the scenery!

What’s the best advice director Kevin Connolly gave you about your character?

Kevin had a lot of insight about Ellie that I loved. One of my favorite things about working with him as a director is that he’s also an actor. He understood my thought process and allowed me to experiment. Regardless of time restraints he was always conscious of us and our time spent with our characters. He is, hands down, one of the best directors I’ve worked with.

What surprised you the most about life in the 1960’s?

Oh gosh, the simplicity! Wouldn’t it be nice nowadays to be able to drop everything and go on a cross country road trip? Or not have to Instagram the whole journey and just enjoy time with your friends? That’s really what I loved about the story. Ellie and Max were just so trusting of those they came in contact with – they were aware of their surroundings and just took in everything they possibly could from the experience.

What was the biggest challenge Ellie and Max faced on the trip?

I think the journey itself is a challenge alone on their friendship. They obviously faced a lot of hardship on this trip. Ellie specially, I think, had to learn how to accept the love of her best friend. I think on that trip she realized she was deserving of a friend like Max.

What was the most important lesson they learned?

I think both of them learned to not give up when things got hard. And just because the circumstances around them can change doesn’t mean their friendship ever should.

Owen Suskind and His Parents Talk About the Autism Documentary “Life, Animated”

Posted on July 8, 2016 at 8:00 am

Owen Suskind tells me, “It feels interesting to be on the autism spectrum and fascinating.” His parents remember what he has said to them about how it feels to have autism. Ron Suskind reminds him, “Remember you said you see everything at once and you can remember all the moments in your life, maybe too many moments, but you go across them and you get a sense of what?”

“My place in the world,” Owen answers.

Cornelia Suskind adds, “And sometimes it’s a little overwhelming having all the stimulation coming in to you at once. You need to create a quiet space around you. When you were younger it was hard to communicate, language was really hard.”

The Suskinds were there to talk about their new documentary, “Life, Animated,” based on Ron’s best-selling book about Owen and how he taught himself about the world through Disney films. The movie is about Owen and autism and the scary and exciting adventure of leaving home, but most of all it is about family. The Suskinds are one of the most loving, devoted, and compassionate families ever to appear on screen. It is a joy to spend time with them, whether through the book, the film, or an interview.

Owen has regressive autism, meaning that he developed along typical milestones until about age 2½, and then lost his ability to communicate and continue to develop. He loved to watch Disney animated films but barely spoke until age 6, when he suddenly told his parents that his brother Walt did not want to grow up, “like Peter Pan and Mowgli.” Owen was using Disney films to teach himself how people feel, behave, and communicate.

“They helped me communicate to find my place in the world and get my speech back,” Owen said.

Cornelia explained, “Movies are always the same. Every time you pop it in, every time you put in a VHS it will always be the same movie and the same language and the same characters instead of constantly changing, the way it does with people, even my expressions, with you and me sitting here. it’s always the same, very, very exaggerated, very colorful. And I think the combination of the music and animation together activating those parts of the brain were really key in tapping into how Owen was feeling but not able to express.”

When Owen was younger, he preferred hand-drawn animation “because it does expressions and feelings.” Now, he likes computer animation as well, perhaps because it has come closer to hand-drawn in its expressiveness and richness of detail. He has very strong views about sequels: “The only four theatrical animated sequels I love are ‘The Rescuers Down Under,’ ‘Fievel Goes West,’ ‘Toy Story II’ and ‘Fantasia 2000’ and the only direct-to-video animated sequels I love are after the very first film of ‘The Land Before Time’ the animated film theatrical in 1988 were ‘The Land Before Time’ direct to video animated sequels. I would go all the way until the 10th one from late 2003, early 2004 and then conclude right there.” He loves to draw the sidekick characters, who have special meaning for him. His favorites are Sebastian from “The little Mermaid,” Iago from “Aladdin,” and Lucky Jack from “Home On The Range.”

Owen has his own YouTube channel, Owen’s Disney Club, where he discusses his favorite movies, displays Disney paraphernalia currently available for bid on eBay in a weekly “Finds of the Week” screencast, tours his personal collection of rare and hard-to-find Disney items, and interviews special guests.

Owen may be the only fan whose favorite Jimmy Stewart role is in “Fievel Goes West,” where his character says, “Just remember Fievel, one man’s sunset is another man’s dawn. I don’t know what’s out there beyond those hills but if you ride yonder, eyes steady, head up and heart open, I think one day that you’ll find that you are the hero that you’ve been looking for.”

Owen pointed out that Stewart, like a surprising list of other stars, made his last performance in an animated film. Another favorite is Mary Wickes, whose last performance was as a gargoyle in “Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Owen quoted her: “Life’s not a spectator sport. If watchin’ is all you’re gonna do, then you’re gonna watch your life go by without ya.”

Cornelia’s hopes for the movie are equally inspiring: “If we could share a little bit of a positive experience, not that obviously every minute in the film is a positive and our every minute has not been positive, but just the reality of it for people to get another image of what a person on the spectrum is like instead of ‘Rain Man,’ to see how fully realized Owen’s life is and that his wants and desires are every bit exactly the same as ours. I mean it’s extraordinary, it really is. So we’ve guided him for sure and try to teach him but he teaches us a lot more in a profound way.” And in this movie, they teach us all.

Alex Gibney on the Stuxnet Documentary “Zero Days”

Posted on July 8, 2016 at 7:00 am

You will not see a more purely terrifying movie this year than “Zero Days,” a documentary from Alex Gibney (“Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” “Going Clear,” “We Steal Secrets”), one of my favorite filmmakers. He spoke to journalists along with Eric Chien and Liam O’Murchu, two of the film’s most important figures, the men who discovered what they dubbed the Stuxnet computer virus, which turned out to have been developed by the Unites States and Israeli governments to unleash on the nuclear facilities in Iran. As an expert in the film explains, for centuries countries had armies and navies, and then in the 20th century they had to have air force capacities. But now, in the 21st century, wars will be fought through computer networks, probably more frequently and more devastatingly than on battlefields.

As a filmmaker, Gibney had a challenge to present a non-cinematic story in a dynamic visual medium. “It was mostly men sitting in rooms with suits on. The main character was a piece of computer code. Talk about challenging. You’ve seen ‘Enron.’ Back then I broke rule number 1A of the filmmaking manual which is never make a film about accounting.” He worked with a special effects company to “design a code, with the help of Eric and Liam, to be able to make it both accurate and also make it feel like it’s a living breathing thing. So it really was like entering the Matrix or something like that. That was key — it was to come up with a visual design for the film and then also a narrative design for what is basically a detective story. It’s kind of a spy thriller and Eric and Liam were the detectives.”

Chien provided some historical context. “I think the internet itself sort of changed how we function, our economy, a lot of growth, and the ‘internet of things’ will grow equally as well…It is very insecure and a bit worrisome and I think we fear that we will repeat mistakes that we made in the past. When we started computing it was quite open and free which was great and you could hack the computer in the old traditional sense of hacking the computer and that allowed the sort of insecurity where we are at today. We did not design computer and networking with security in mind at the start. We designed it so anyone can use it and it would be completely free. We sort of learned a lesson that you needed some level of security and that lesson currently is not being applied to the internet of things. That’s what worries us the most the right now. There is a lot of push right now to get internet of things on board with some sort of standard with some sort of default security.”

In the film, Chien and O’Murchu, in evaluating the Stuxnet virus to protect their commercial customers, quickly realized that the code was vastly more powerful and robust than anything they had seen before. The obvious conclusion was that it came from a government. But that does not mean they stop trying to find a way to stop it because it may be coming from “the good guys.” O’Murchu said, “It’s funny when you say bad guys can do this, how do you define that? The whole problem is that there are no good guys and bad guys here.” “In our world the good guys are us and the bad guys are anyone else,” Chien added, “anyone who is writing malicious codes to get unauthorized access to a computer that ultimately we normally are in charge of protecting. That is our view so we don’t ignore code because it looks super sophisticated or might be from a nation state. We have customers all over the world in countries like Germany and Belgium that Western countries have attacked equally as well and we’re responsible for protecting those computers. I would say in some sense fortunately code doesn’t come with a marker that says this is from this particular country and even if it did you can’t say that anyone would put in their code ‘Welcome from so and so.'”

The film begins with a sequence of witnesses saying some variation of “I can’t talk about it.” So how can Gibney be sure of what he is reporting? “Obviously, there are false flags. People lie to you all the time but over time you develop patterns and you try to convince yourself that actually you got the story right.”

The most candid (to a point) and compelling witness in the film is an unidentified (until the end) insider portrayed as a disembodied face made of cascading pieces of code, created for the film by a company called Scatter. “We wanted to create a character that would be in the kind of code world of the film but would also be a means of protection. So what we did was, we shot an interview with a woman, and we shot it in a way that was very much straight on but it was like we were mapping her in a 3-D space. And then it allows you to go in after the fact and both render camera moves and also break down the image into points, lines and flesh and recombine them in different ways so that they both mask the identity but also create that kind of interesting sort of hacked computer look of the character. And as you move around to the side because they were mapping only 180° in space, suddenly it starts to trail or get messy and if you go all the way around actually in the first rendering of the character we were able to literally jump outside the room and then track in, that was all after-the-fact. So it was really a wonderful device and it also helped us in terms of convincing sources to come forward that we would have a device that would be so otherworldly that it would mask identity.”

In this movie about secrets, Gibney was especially careful to protect his sources. “One of the things we did for protection was the combined testimony of a number of different people. While the New York times would frown on that technique within the context of the film I think it’s perfectly appropriate and also frankly it was key to persuading the sources to come forward and that was very important to us.” He believes that in documentaries “form follows content.” Some stories require more narrative shaping and commentary. With his Lance Armstrong film, “The Armstrong Lie,” “we hung out with Lance, we follow Lance, we don’t comment in addition I did interviews but we film for 21 days at the Tour de France. So it depends. In a lot of the films that I do tend to look back at recent events and understand them in a different way. Usually knowledge narratives get built around them and then I go in after the fact and say is this really what happened. It’s like cold cases. Is this really what happened or actually is it different than we thought it was? Is very hard to use cinéma vérité in the past, impossible in fact. I’ve got nothing against it; for the right film I love it.”

This movie can be seen as a companion piece to Gibney’s documentary about Wikileaks, “We Steal Secrets.” “It’s a matter of momentum. So far the momentum on the side of the government has been to make more and more things clasified. It becomes almost a default policy and to read more and more people into these secrets so that they are unable to talk about this. Well if you create a mountain of secrets and a huge number of people who hold these secrets it shouldn’t be surprising that there are leaks. Despite the Obama administration’s insistence on prosecuting people who leak more than all other administrations combined, you continue to get these big leaks in part, I think, because there is a belief that what the government is doing is hiding either misguided, immoral, or illegal behavior behind those secrets and therefore not being held to account. You are seeing that in the torture debate, you are seeing that in the drone debate and now you are seeing it with Stuxnet. So at some point they’ve got to wake up and understand that if they are misusing secrets James Harper lied before the Senate regarding the operations of the NSA, there’s going to be blowback and the blowback is more leaks.” Chien called it “rough justice.”

The movie calls for some international negotiations on the use of cyber-weapons. “I think the point is if we start then we’ve got a shot at it. To just throw up our hands and say ‘well, it’s impossible so let’s not worry about it,’ I think that’s just the wrong answer. We have to embark on that and part of it also is that these technologies that these weapons exist because then all of us as citizens can say well is this what we want, a complete Wild West world where everybody is launching weapons at each other all the time and we don’t know when they might launch or who might launch them, not a good thing. Someone in the film says, ‘Right now the norm is do whatever you can get away with,’ not a very good norm.”

Related Tags:

Directors Documentary Interview

Interview: Adam Devine of “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates”

Posted on July 6, 2016 at 3:46 pm

Adam Devine is a busy guy. He plays Andy on the hit television series “Modern Family” and a capella singer Bumper in the “Pitch Perfect” movies. He took time to talk to me about his wildly raunchy new comedy, “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates,” based on the true story of brothers who advertised on Craigslist for girls to take to their sister’s wedding.

You have an epic cry in this movie.

I’ve got a few cries in this movie. I’m a very emotional Mike Stangle. And that’s my actual cry; that’s what I look like when I cry. I’m a true mess of a human. I try not to cry often but when I do it is waterworks.

What makes somebody a good wedding date?

You need to go with the flow. You need to be willing to be cornered by that creepy uncle or weird aunt and have a decent convo with them and you know, no matter how dry the chicken is, say it is delicious. And hit up an open bar but don’t close the bar down.

The Hawaii resort location is just gorgeous. Did you have a lot of fun when you were not filming? Did you do some cool stuff?

Yes, we did all kinds of cool stuff. It was so awesome. We were there for two months so I was a Hawaiian boy for a minute. Zac and I went swimming with the sharks and it was so awesome. We weren’t even in a cage. We were in our boyshorts swimming and there were all these sharks around us and at one point this giant 13-foot tiger shark came out of the depths and Zac swam right over to it and grabbed its fin and rode it. Like an amusement ride. The video is online, you can look it up. It is bonkers and in the video you actually see my green trunks, like hard spin and swim aggressively back to the boat.

Other than your own, what’s the best wedding movie?

I love “The Wedding Crashers” because in the same vein as our movie. It’s a wedding movie but it’s not just about love and the wedding. There’s is a lot of really, really fun stuff. Sometimes I feel like if they get too hung up on the actual wedding and not enough about the fun in getting there. And I think our movie did a really good job with that.

You’re from the midwest, Iowa and Nebraska. What are weddings like there?

Midwestern weddings are awesome because it’s without fail it’s much Milwaukee’s Best as you can handle. And then you know your aunt is really weirdly proud about the beans that she brought for the reception. One uncle has cornered his high school friends to play at the reception so there’s like a really cool weird cover band that’s only covering Poison songs. So yes, I’m a huge fan of Midwestern weddings.

The movie is actually based on a true story?

At the beginning of the movie it says “based on a true story” and people are like, “Oh that’s not real.” but it 100% is actually real and Mike and Dave Stangle are everything you wanted them to be. You think “Oh they are not going to be as fun as you think they are going to be. Like in the movie these guys are super fun and party animals and crazy and then you meet them and they are the best. First of all, they came on set 11 am the first day that I met them. They were already drunk, that night they got kicked out of the Jacuzzi for making out with Australian girls and I’m like — all this cool stuff is happening the first day they get in and I’m the star of the movie and I wasn’t making out with Australian girls, I need to take a page out of the real Mike and Dave Stangle’s playbook.

I think they just go for it. They are the type of guys that, they just do everything until they are made to stop as opposed to asking for permission. They are like “Yes, it will be fine, and then “Would we be kicked out if we take it too far?” And I think that’s a good way to live your life if you want to have the best and most fun.

How did you and Zac Efron work out your brotherly chemistry?

I knew Zac a little bit. Not very well but we went to Hawaii a couple weeks early to sort of bond and rehearse and take scenes and improve them together and when you are shooting something on location and we don’t know anyone there, it was easy to bond with your castmates because you don’t have anyone else to hang out with. And Zac is like the best guy in the world so it super easy to become really good friends with him. And Sugar Lyn who plays our sister — I mean her name is Sugar for a reason. She is truly the sweetest girl you’ve ever met. So it was real easy to love her guts. And Anna and Aubrey are so funny and such good actresses and they really brought it. In fact, I would say for a lots of the movie their characters are way crazier than Mike and Dave. We are trying to hold it together for the family and they really get to let it fly. So it’s a really fun movie. It’s not like a movie where only the guys are going to like it or only the girls are going to like it. It’s really a type of movie that everyone can come and watch and have a good time. It’s not a remake; it’s not a reboot. It’s an original comedy that’s super funny and I’m willing to say that it’s definitely the funniest movie that you’ll see this year.

Related Tags:

Actors Interview

Interview: Johnny Simmons of “The Phenom”

Posted on June 29, 2016 at 1:55 pm

Johnny Simmons has the title role in The Phenom, an exceptionally intelligent and insightful film about a troubled young major league pitcher and the therapist who helps him understand the impact his abusive father has had on him. Simmons is one of my favorite young actors and it was a treat to get to talk to him about the role. The film was released in theaters and on VOD and digital June 24, 2016.

Simmons plays a character who does not speak much and through much of the film has very little insight about himself or the people around him. “It was challenge,” Simmons told me, when I asked him about acting when the character is so subdued. Writer/director Noah Buschel “kept constantly bringing it back and pulling it back and pulling it back and I think that that’s reflective in the outcome; you see that in the movie. So on the set, it was the first film where I ever left a set early because we got done shooting earlier that we even expected. I think we left like 1 or 2 o’clock in the afternoon which if you’ve ever been on set that is just unheard of. And I think it’s because Noah knew exactly what he was going for and it’s in his vision from the very beginning. So it was hard to do at times because you are going to want do something when you are an actor and I learned how to pull it all back honestly.”

I asked what Buschel first told him about Hopper, the character he would be playing. “The one thing that was a clicking moment for me was when he said if there was an empty chair in the corner of the room that’s where you would find Hopper. Once I heard that I was like okay. He is really shy.” It wasn’t so much that Hopper was trying not to feel anything. “I think he is unable to feel. I don’t know if it’s intentional but he is certainly cut off or removed.” Simmons loved the script the first time he read it. “I felt that I knew what I wanted to do with it at that point — which by the way totally changed. But I could see where I wanted to go right away. It’s like you start reading the script and you know what’s coming because you tapped into the way the writer’s head was when he was writing it. I feel like that very rarely happens but it does happen when you’re like – I know what he is about to say. And that’s such a cool feeling.”

He felt lucky that the original start date was pushed back, which gave him more time to work on the role. “So we had a lot of time to talk about it that’s one thing. More often than not especially on a smaller budget film you don’t have any time. So we have to kind of fall into each other’s arms and just trust each other. So you always wish your last day was your first day because what you know about the experience makes you feel like you are ready to begin.”

Hopper is caught throughout the movie between two symbols of masculinity: the therapist, played by Paul Giamatti and the father, played by Ethan Hawke. Simmons said that anyone can identify with the struggle to find a role model and the consequence of learning that someone you look up to is not all you had thought or hoped. “I know that I had to figure all that out as well and I think I’m still figuring it out. I don’t know if you ever arrive at the place where you are like, ‘Oh that’s who I want to be,’ because I have been lucky and also unlucky in that I’ve met a bunch of my heroes. It happened to me on this film. Luckily on this film everybody that I met was incredible but sometimes your hero can be a letdown if you let it be because you realize that they are just human. And then that teaches you something. At first it’s a bummer because you are like, ‘Oh damn, they are human.’ I think that Hopper is kind of in that group where he is just a complete anomaly, somebody who really makes it to the major leagues and he gets the opportunity to realize that having your dreams come true doesn’t necessarily mean roses and happy love songs. I don’t know if that’s the truth for everybody but it has definitely happened to me. I have a couple of friends who have gone pro in sports and if you are off by an inch it’s an entire mind game for the next week. That’s how it works, like your whole world is based around an inch. Being an actor but your whole world turns on an inch, too. I guess the goal would be to not let it be that. Everybody is going to have their own issues that they bring to the table but for me the best thing is just giving over to whatever is there and trusting whatever is there and enjoying it. It’s so easy to become caught up by ‘I’ve got to do this’ or ‘I’ve got to do that’ and most of the times the best stuff comes from when you are not trying to do anything and when you let go. Just trust those around you and trust yourself.”

Related Tags:

Actors Interview Sports