Interview: Michael Showalter of “Hello, My Name is Doris”

Posted on March 10, 2016 at 3:12 pm

sally-field-doris — Copyright Roadside 2016

Writer/director/actor Michael Showalter has a great eye for talent. The original “Wet Hot American Summer” was a career starting point for Bradley Cooper (who missed his Juilliard graduation to be on the set), David Hyde Pierce, Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, Amy Poehler, and many more performers who went on to starring roles. “The Baxter,” with Showalter as a man destined to have his bride run out on him at the wedding, starred Peter Dinklage, Justin Theroux, Michelle Williams, and Peter Dinklage. In “Hello, My Name is Doris,” his star is not a new talent, but he gave two-time Oscar winner Sally Field a role that gives her a chance to show us that at age 69 she can still astonish and surprise us. She plays the title character, who has spent her life taking care of her mother. As the film opens, at her mother’s funeral, Doris has to begin to figure out what her life will be.

Your casting choices are always impeccable, even in the smallest roles. How you approach casting, or do you just to know everybody?

I weirdly know a lot of people even though I’m not like a social person really at all. But I do know a lot of people or I know people who know people. Sally Field was a total shot in the dark. I certainly don’t know her other than I’m a huge fan of hers and have been for a really long time. I felt that she would be amazing in this part and offered her the role not thinking that she would want to do it but she did want to do it and of course once she is cast the rest is pretty easy. Once you are able to tell other actors that Sally Field is playing the lead role it’s pretty easy to cast the movie after that because all the other actors want to work with her.

when I’m casting usually I do have a couple people in my mind. I watch a lot of movie and I see a lot of TV shows so I kind of know who is out there and I go, “Gosh, if we could get that person it would be amazing. Wendi McLendon-Covey for example who plays the sister-in-law, I always knew she would be so good in this part. I think she’s so funny and interesting and I just always envisioned her and Natasha Lyonne and just people that I know or whose work I like and then you just go and you make them an offer and a lot of times you’d be surprised that people are interested. People want to work.

Doris has an exceptionally eclectic wardrobe in this and it is fun to see how people react to it. How did you create her look?

I live in LA now but have lived in New York for many many many years. Doris is a New York kind of person that you encounter. You see people like Doris who are kind of eccentric. Their clothes are very wild and specific and collected and interesting but they don’t necessarily talk that much, you just see them on the subway or on the bus or walking on the street. I just wanted, I like the idea of a character who have this sort of fashionista quality but it was kind of all cobbled together. She’s probably been collecting clothes and buying clothes and buying jewelry for years and that’s this character’s armor in a way. She’s lived in a little bit of a fantasy. That’s kind of how she get through her days, by putting on these clothes and becoming different characters the way that you can use clothing to do.

I like clothes a lot. I myself don’t wear interesting clothes but I appreciate clothes, I like costumes and I like fashion and kind of pay attention to it. And so we always knew that her costume and her wardrobe would be a really, really important part of the character. And her hair piece and the cat eyeglasses and wearing two pairs of glasses at once. A lot of that stuff was Sally Field. She really dove into creating the character and the way she looked and the specificity of it and that piece was entirely Sally’s creation. She had a name for it, Beverly, they called the hair piece Beverly. So when we would be shooting she would say someone, “I need you to come get Beverly for me.”

What did she want to know before she agreed to the role?

She read the script first and then took the meeting with me so it was more about me answering some of her questions. She knew I wanted her to do the movie it was about her wanting to know how are you going to balance the comedy and the drama? Wanting to just meet me and see what kind of person I was, did we click? I think wanting to know how we’re going to make this movie on such a low budget. She has never done a movie with such a low budget.
Sally has done huge giant Hollywood movies and has done that for a long time so how are you going to make a movie for no money? How are we going to shoot this movie in such a short amount of time? Like do you know what you’re doing was essentially what you wanted to know and I just tried to be as honest with her as I could and just to say I have faith in myself, I have faith in the other people that are working on the movie and we want to create an environment that is conducive to you doing the work, the best work you can do. Sally Field has three sons. One is a very successful writer, her two older sons are both filmmakers and the youngest son is in film school. And they all to varying degrees were familiar with me and some of the other things I’ve done and I think they kind of recommended me to her and said, “You should do it, he is legit.” And so she agreed to do it. She took a huge risk on me and on the project and she’s just been fantastic obviously in the movie and I love working with her.

And this began as a short film, right?

Yes, the short film was called “Doris, the Intern” and it’s nine minutes long or something like that and is really just a very silly, sweet comedy about an older office worker named Doris who is a little bit like this Doris but not nearly as fleshed out, more just kind of a cookie lady working who becomes romantically infatuated with a much younger intern. I think in the short film he was 19 years old. And nothing happens with them at all. There is no relationship; they don’t really even know each other.

It’s much more kind of from afar and basically the way that movie ends is that she sees that he has a girlfriend and she kind of does something kind of rebellious to make herself feel better about it. It’s a really sweet little movie and I really like the main character and felt that she was really charming and comedic and different and kind of adventurous in a way that was really surprising. And then I kind of envisioned the whole role around that character. And Laura Terruso and I spent a couple of years fleshing it out and created the story adding in all of the elements of the hoarding and the mother and the brother-in-law, the whole hipster culture and the whole idea of the way she dressed being so extreme, really just invented the whole story around her that we could use. But we did keep the spine of the love story that it all kind of hinges on that she had this crush on the younger coworker.

It is a lot of fun to see Doris meet young hipsters who see her very differently from her friends, family, and co-workers.

I think she finds a community of people who believe in personal expression and who are also searching for an identity that fits them. That is so much of what being in your 20’s is about. It’s such a quest for identity and to kind of really define who you are and what kind of person you want to be and you are questioning a lot of those things. And Doris is too. She has been in a world where she has known no acceptance and then she finds all this acceptance in this most unlikely of places. You think she’s going to go to that concert and she’s going to look totally different and everybody’s going to laugh at her and it’s going to be a big disaster and it’s totally the opposite. She fits right in with them and she is immediately accepted and nobody questions her. It just seemed like a kind of a wonderful idea.

I also really loved the Tyne Daly best friend character, so fierce.

These characters are roughly the same age as my parents. Over the course of my life I’ve known a lot of women just like Roz that were friends of my parents, super lefty intellectuals of a sort, very high idealistic who were young people in the late 50s and early 60s who just have a certain kind of way about them. They grew up together on Staten Island all their lives and they have a million stories together.

The movie is an unusual mixture of comedy and drama with some very serious moments.

I just sort of go a little bit by intuition. I like it that it has both. I’m not interested as a director in just doing a comedy are just in a drama. I think life is like that, I think life is both, life is funny and serious at the same times at least that is how I try to approach it and so in terms of a strategy it’s more just kind of that I think the lens I see the world through is the comedy the humor and the sadness live hand-in-hand so I just tried to portray that the best I can.

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Tribute: Pat Conroy

Posted on March 5, 2016 at 1:07 pm

“A story untold could be the one that kills you.” The man who said that was the great Southern writer Pat Conroy, who told his own story of pain and abuse and loss through the characters in his books. Today we mourn his loss.

Conroy wrote with great compassion about dysfunctional families and with evocative lyricism about the South. For both, he had an elegiac tone, but he also wrote of the healing power of love and forgiveness. “No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.” He wrote about the terrible sins and crippling pain of the South and of his family.

The Great Santini, inspired by his father, became a movie starring Robert Duvall.

The Lords of Discipline, inspired by his years at the famously brutal military academy, The Citadel, was filmed with Bill Paxton and David Keith.

Conroy spent a year teaching school on a tiny island off the coast of South Carolina, where the children were so isolated that they barely understood that there was a world across the water. His book The Water Is Wide became the film “Conrack,” starring Jon Voight.

Barbra Streisand directed and starred in The Prince of Tides, based on his book about a man who leaves the South to go to New York when his twin sister is hospitalized following a mental breakdown.

“Here is all I ask of a book,” he wrote. “Give me everything. Everything, and don’t leave out a single word.”

Thank you, Mr. Conroy. May your memory be a blessing.

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Tribute: Harper Lee

Posted on February 19, 2016 at 12:13 pm

In 1999, when there were top 100 lists everywhere of the best this and that of the 20th century, only one title was on both the list of best novels and the list of best movies: Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Today, we mourn the loss of Miss Lee, whose later-year troubles, with reports that her new book was published without her informed consent, will fade while the original book and movie will never dim.

When I was writing my first book about movies that help families discuss important values like integrity, courtesy, empathy, and helping others, I realized that I could have included To Kill a Mockingbird in every category. It is one of the best movies ever made that shows us how children see the world. It has one of the most beautiful and evocative movie scores, by Elmer Bernstein. It has Gregory Peck’s Oscar-winning performance as Atticus Finch, a lawyer so principled he inspired generations of idealistic college students to go to law school. (Their chagrin on seeing a different version of Atticus in the later book will fade as well.)

It is about race, family, honor, and standing up for what is right. It has Robert Duvall’s first movie appearance, where he breaks your heart without saying a word. And it has one of the most beautiful final lines in all of literature, again about Atticus, who was sitting by the bed of his injured son, Jeb. “He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.”

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Interview: Paul Dalio, Writer/Director of “Touched With Fire”

Posted on February 10, 2016 at 3:56 pm

Paul Dalio is a rap artist, writer, and director whose own bipolar disorder inspired his new film, “Touched With Fire.” In an interview, he talked about how he portrayed the subjective experience of mania for the bipolar poets played by Katie Holmes (Carla) and Luke Kirby (Marco) and how bipolar disorder affected the way he wrote. The imaginative vocabulary and rhythm of his conversation echoed the speeches he wrote for his characters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5xTorJad3w

It is very interesting because when I was in the hospital, I just started kind of rhyming compulsively, unconsciously and not trying but it came out that way rhythmically. There were so many rapid associations, with a kind of vivid sensuality that came from hearing each sound and hearing how the sounds move together. There is this rapid burst of emotional rise that almost can’t be satisfied just by normal sentences but almost needs that rapidly repeating sound of the same word that escalates in beat, the same way that music has a burst. And it comes out in these words that have rapid associations. People in the hospital would communicate in ways that might not make sense to us. They would use these word plays to have double meanings or triple meanings. If they’re talking about an egg it could mean the origin of the cosmos or the birth and they might say the egg head as legs and just find some kind of association between them and almost test to see if the other one understood it and then they would play back and forth like that.

I never was into poetry or rap at all until I was manic and then when I left the hospital I couldn’t write screenplays because I couldn’t write things for sane people anymore. I just wasn’t able to tap into the sane mind. But I still had the artistic urges and so it took the form of these raps because rap was almost a way of purging the poison in my veins that I kind of needed an outlet to release. So it was very toxic, what I was experiencing and it was always like puss coming out in words through these vicious, sharp, violent rhymes. I almost took on the identity of the lunatic and every stereotype assigned to me I would wear that face to exaggeration, almost to mock the people who were creating the stereotype and laugh at it and own it to like the tenth degree and be in their face about it, flaunt it. I was certainly going manic again in the rap world, doing rap battles. You are basically competing to see who can be more rhythmically intense with rapid rhyme schemes and more assaulting the person, or more creatively painting out a picture how you are going to cause their demise. And so I would be like the alter ego of Jack the Ripper or the Lunatic Under the Moonlight or breaking out of the Luna Band. It kind of became a way of finding company, too, because you can’t really be around happy people, but the people who I was hanging out with wore suffering as a badge and they embraced my insanity because I was coming up with this crazy stuff. And so that definitely was an outlet, especially when you’re battling a lot of this freestyle improvisation. So you are just kind of writing outbursts of euphoria. And when you write that burst first of euphoria comes out in words there is kind of a thrill to kill in terms of the playfulness of what happens when the two battle rappers bond over assaulting each other.

The film is deeply humane and very sympathetic to both the people with bipolar disorder and other forms of mental illness and the families and health care professionals who try to help them. Dalio said it was important to him to show parents who were caring and supportive.

I did want well-intentioned parents out in the audience to be able to see themselves in these parents. It’s very easy to make the parents the villain, but that’s not at all helpful. I wanted the ones who do want to do right for their children to be able to not only see themselves in the parent but see themselves through the children’s eyes so they can at least know what their children are going through, to at least open up a dialogue to have a talk with their children. There’s just no guide book for something like that. It’s just throws you so off of your orientation as a parent. One of our colleagues put it like this: you’re trying to be reasonable in a very unreasonable situation. That’s what it’s always like for my parents and I wanted to capture the different dynamics that would cause conflict between parents and children. In Carla’s case the intense love and fear is manifest through her very strong mother, which is both life-saving and crippling for Carla as she is trying to break free and be her own person but also needing her mother to survive. And with Marco and his father, it was a different situation. A father is trying to reason with a very erratic person who is rationalizing his own psychosis as very reasonable in itself. And it’s hard to deny that it’s not reason, the books on the floor you can look at titles, you have your patterns and so it is so hard to reason with that.

Dalio literally moved the walls of the rooms in the film to convey the distorted and often exhilarating thinking of Marco and Carla.

Obviously the room colur was reflecting Van Gogh’s starry night but in the initial state there was a lot more clearly man-made stuff, the markers and the construction paper and it was bright light and very even lighting and it was day time. As they started to slowly go manic we had these sliding panels so that we could make them more and more mazelike as they got more and more manic and project more and more spotlights on them and darken the other lights and strip away all of the production and the design that wasn’t celestial looking. And we had it slowly transform progressively as the mania does, it creeps up on you slowly and it’s not like stuff that isn’t real, it’s almost like enhanced reality that can lead to distortion, beautiful or ugly distortion. So yes there was definitely that and the actors had a blast with it.

And in that case while there were lines of dialogue that were written, I gave them a lot of freedom to improvise. I flooded their minds with a whole bunch of loosely associated things that manic people would connect to each other like 13th hour or Christ was the 13th, the 12 minutes of the clock, the pyramids of the corners 3×12, and we did that right before the scene so they just got flooded with it. Then I said, “Take that stuff and go figure out how to go out to space together.” So they were able to just free flow and improvise and use that stuff to passionately connect on going to their planet where they belonged and as the steady cam sort of become more disconnected from the symmetry of the ground and kind of just circled around and floated with them. I would ask the camera operator to be like a plane going that way and just kind of be with them and circulate with them. It was magical how they did it. How they did it was extraordinary actually. They have amazing imaginations and free chemistry. We wanted to show how letting go of the sense can feel very freeing.

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Interview: Nicholas Sparks on “The Choice”

Posted on February 6, 2016 at 8:00 am

Copyright Warner Brothers Entertainment 2015

Nicholas Sparks is one of the must successful and best-loved authors in the world. All of his books have been New York Times bestsellers, with over 100 million copies sold worldwide, in more than 50 languages, including over 65 million copies in the United States alone, and all of them have been made into movies, with stars like Paul Newman, Kevin Costner, Ryan Gosling, Channing Tatum, Rachel McAdams, and Robin Wright. Sparks is the man behind some of the most memorable love stories of the past 20 years, including “The Notebook” and “Dear John.”

The newest film based on his books is “The Choice,” with Benjamin Walker and Teresa Palmer as a couple who meet as neighbors on Sparks’ beloved North Carolina coast. I was delighted to get a chance to talk to him about what he loves so much about that setting and why letters are always a key feature of his stories.

Why are old-school letters on paper so important to your characters?

When I went off to college, back then they use to charge per minute on just regular phones. So I had to correspond with letters. My mom would write three letters a week and one of the high points of my day was to reach into the mailbox and to get letters. I was from that generation. I’m a person who is used to handwriting thank you notes and things like that. That has just evolved over the years into letters of appreciation for those people with whom I worked and of course letters to those whom I love. And so for me it’s natural and almost expected even in the age of email and texts and things like that, and it is sad to me that there will be some people who never get a personal letter ever in their whole lives.

In “The Choice,” Travis and Gabby learn that sometimes the people who bother us are the people who are best for us. Why is that?

I think that is hard to be bothered by someone unless you have some sort of relationship with them in general. I don’t mean really bad people, but the people who just get to you — you really can’t hate someone so much deep down inside unless you love them. And I think that by bothering what these people are doing is essentially challenging them to be the best versions of themselves. That’s a wonderful thing that we should always aspire to be, to be the best version of ourselves that we can possibly be. But the conflicts of the choice we see when Travis (played by Ben Walker) is saying “You’re bothering me,” he is saying “You are making me a better person, you’re making me the best version of myself and that’s hard for me at this time in my life.” And I think there’s something wonderful in that because that is a lifelong journey with ups and downs.

The beach and the ocean always play a very important role in your stories and it’s never been photographed more beautifully, more lovingly that it is in this film. What do you think we learn from going out on the water and experiencing that atmosphere?

There’s a few reasons why those elements seem to recur in both my novels and my films. I like stories that are set in coastal North Carolina. North Carolina is a little unique in that it’s a state in which the closer you get to the coast the smaller the towns become. And small towns on the beach means a slower pace, a slower rhythm of life and I think a slower rhythm of life allows people more time to think, more time to simply be alone and simply just be like Travis does in his chair, his single chair on the back lawn until he brings a second one and I think that’s when people are able to connect at the most human level, when the world slows down enough for each of them to really be able to talk and listen and be heard.

In the film, Travis tells a lie about a lizard, and lets a little girl think that her lizard has not died. Do you think that was the right thing to do?

I think in this particular context yes because it was a lizard. I certainly would not have done the same thing with a kitten, or a dog but as a father you do want to shelter your kids from the harsh realities of life when it’s possible while at the same time preparing them for a life that will be include some harsh reality and I know that often there are moments in which it’s very hard to have certain kinds of conversations with your children and certainly those conversations would be different depending on the child’s age.

Travis and Gabby both learn that they jumped to the wrong conclusions about each other; is that something that is true to an extent of all people who fall in love?

Their first impressions were made during a moment of emotion, so to speak, or at least hers were, and when people are in an emotional state they are not always the people that they are the rest of the time. Their emotions were faulty so that led to I guess a faulty persona that wasn’t necessary reflective of who they are most of the time. At the same time I think that first impressions can be very accurate, not always but I think a lot of people can form opinions about another person within a few minutes of talking to them if they given the chance to really have the kinds of conversations that lend themselves to it.

Do you ever learn something new about your story by seeing it in the film?

Without question I learn something new every time. I learn different ways in the future for example to condense two characters into one for the sake of efficiency. I learn to think in terms of even when writing to think in terms of making the scene visual to the reader.

What is the biggest challenge do you think of taking a novel and making it into a movie? Doesn’t it lose some of the descriptive language that you have worked so hard on?

Primarily I think what’s lost is the ability to have characters be introspective so you know what’s going on in their heads. At the same time, a novel is a story told with worlds and in film it’s a story told with pictures. So some things are better in one, like introspection, and other things are better in another like arguments or car chases or fires. Anything exciting always works better in film or even in this particular case the scenery works better in film that I can ever hope to portray in the novel. So the challenge is to take a story told with words and put it into a story told with pictures, well knowing some things work better in one than the other whilst still maintaining the spirit and intent of the story, the spirit and intent of the characters. I think that certainly “The Choice” was able to do that. And I have been very fortunate in that all my films were able to do that.

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