Interview: Rama Burshtein and Hadas Yaron of “Fill the Void”

Posted on June 3, 2013 at 2:23 pm

“Fill the Void” is an Israeli film with a rare, intimate, and very sympathetic portrayal of a very observant Orthodox Jewish community. It is the story of a young woman, still in her teens, who is under pressure to marry the husband of her sister, who died in childbirth. If this was an American movie, it would be about the girl’s rebellion. But this is a far more complex, layered, sensitive exploration of the girl and her world, and therefore a much more fascinating story. The lead role is played by Hadas Yaron and the writer-director is an Orthodox woman born in America and raised in Israel, named Rama Burshtein. We met at a hotel in Washington to talk about the movie.

What makes a good marriage?

RB: You’re good. What makes a good marriage? This is not a quite popular view I would say but I think it’s about defining men and women and knowing how they’re different. Okay, this is how it works for me. I need my husband to be a little bit more, for me to hold more, to hold that passion…to feel that sexiness. This is what I need. He needs to be a little more open and it’s me making that. I have to make him want me. Like especially if I’m like dominant and a strong person than I really have to work hard to make him more than me. In a deeper way. He’s got the stamina. I know it is so not popular and some want to crucify me for saying that because it’s very not feminist to say. For me, it’s only about being in love and being passionate so I don’t care about being equal. I really care about really liking him for the rest of my life you know and really being attracted to him and that he’s going to be the center of my life. It doesn’t mean I don’t do other things, I’m sitting here and yet when I ever, ever have to make a choice it will be him. It will always be him.

Okay, and what about you, Hadas? What do you think makes a good marriage?

HY:Well, I’m not married. It’s funny because I’ve been listening to Rama. I have a boyfriend and the words you said really stayed in my head, the words you said to me about how God’s journey is planned in relationships and I really remember that. The whole thing with two weeks of not touching and then two weeks of this and so holding it and bringing it back. I remember I told him; maybe we can do that, like for one week to be a bride again after being separate. I think it’s about being real with him and so that’s hard sometimes…to be really exposed and then feel that the other person really gets you.

One part of the most striking parts of the movie are these very structured “dates” where the couple essentially has just one meeting to decide if they can spend their lives together. There’s this plate of cookies that no one ever touches.

RB: No one ever touches it. You know if she asks her mother for more time, she will have more. It’s about seeing if there’s chemistry and if you can go to the next date. Actually, the first one is just to know if you can go to the next one. And, by us we come and sit for three hours or four hours and some of that’s him being a man for the rest of my life and her being the woman for him for the rest of his life. They’re both tuned in on it and the concentration is on that. So, everything he says is very important and everything she says is critical and the concentration is so strong. I got married like this. When I sat with him for the first time every answer he gave was to tell me if he could be there for me forever or not. It is amazing! It’s so strong that when you decide to get married you actually nourish it from that first meeting for a long time. Because like I said everything is there now it’s just puppy love but you felt everything there and you know what kind of home you can have. How do you see life but in such a way you say that’s all I ever wanted, for him to really want me forever from the first time. This is it! This is what you want.

Did you intend the final scene of the film to be open to interpretation?

RB: The weird thing about this film is that people read it the way they read it. Some people think her mother pressures her to marry her late sister’s husband, but the mother never pressured her. She speaks to the father. She speaks to the matchmaker. The only time she speaks about it is when the mother and the father are in front of her telling her the offer and the father doesn’t want it. We get the feeling that she’s pressured but there was not real pressure on her. People really read into something that is not there.

I think she knew what her mother wanted.

RB: Wanted is not pressure. Wanted is fine. For me it was really intentional that she will not pressure her, that she would keep her feelings to herself. The mother is in sorrow. She is mourning and she is trying to do her best and yet she does not really pressure. The only one that she is a bit manipulative with is her husband, which is always what women do to their husbands. She tells him “You have to ask her, I would die to go.” This is what I believe. I believe that everything at the end comes together and you see it in life. There’s like a big plan because it’s really far out from what we want to feel. It happens with feelings and emotions and then suddenly you are realizing things…it’s like combining with the big plan. The big plan was for her to marry him. Something had to be done…an offer had to be made. The mother had to really push the father for everyone to actually get there. First of all her husband is gorgeous and sexy…he’s there…he’s a man…why not? In terms of the film of course.

And, then she’s beautiful and young and everything and all the complications and intentions are strong to say a true love story is not that complicated…and at that moment at the end where you don’t know what you’re feeling and you’re comfortable because it combines everything. It’s easy for us to say just make it like a love scene. It’s how you feel and wanting and not knowing where you’re going and the whole thing together …this is real. It doesn’t mean it’s not about love. It’s just a little different language, which is a true language because it is the way you experience it in your life. Not Hollywood.

The last shot is a shot that says see the real thing…it’s real. You can go all the way with everything in it. Sometimes you use too many emotions and then the viewer doesn’t see all that. They didn’t see the feel and they see the confusion. They just went with her being excited towards that night.

So, how do you talk to Hadas about portraying all of that, without any lines of dialogue?

RB: I think that when we did the film and we got prepared for it the one thing I knew is that it’s going to be a mixture of feelings of emotions and we were talking a lot about it…about trying to hold two different emotions together. On the one hand you want that aand it’s not just doing that it’s just jumping from one emotion to another. Right? We talked a lot about that. For me, this is being Jewish. A good example for that is when I just got into the religion a friend of mine was about to marry her eldest son in the evening and in the morning her mother passed away very suddenly. So, about 12 o’clock in the afternoon we buried her mom and then 7 o’clock that night her son got married. And, I was looking at her because she was just for the ceremony then she had to go but, that moment he got married she was there, she was happy and like a few hours ago she was really sad because her mom in a very surprising way just passed away. And, looking at that and looking at her, you think this is incredible…you can just jump from those feelings. This is from me being Jewish…really this is Judaism to be able to hold two things together.

And, what do you want people to take away from the film?

HY: I guess it’s just about being real. That’s something I learned. It’s the most difficult place to get to…like the most real, deepest, and the best place to be.

Related Tags:

Interview: Directors/Writer/Star of “Desperate Acts of Magic”

Posted on May 17, 2013 at 8:00 am

Magic is in the air. And on the screen. Two big-budget films with some of Hollywood’s biggest stars playing magicians are being released within a few months of each other. In March, we had the silly comedy The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, with Steve Carell and Jim Carrey. Coming up is the enormously entertaining “Now You See Me,” with Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Morgan Freeman, and Isla Fisher.

And there is also a very nice little indie romantic comedy, with magicians played by real-life magicians, called Desperate Acts of Magic. I enjoyed it very much, and was very glad to get a chance to speak with Joe Tyler Gold, who wrote, produced, and stars in the film, and his co-director, Tammy Caplan.

Tell me how this movie came about.

Joe: I was a magician for many years and I did tons of kids’ birthday parties and entered lots of magic competitions. We were looking for something we could produce on a low budget. I had a lot of magician friends and there was a magic convention in San Diego happening in 2010 that we knew was coming up, so we went at it and put a script together and there you go.

Tammy: Joe was trying to figure out what we should work on next, what he should write next. I said to him, and this is based on an acting exercise that we know, “If you were to write about something that was deep and personal to you, very meaningful, what would you write about?” And he talked about this one event that happened at this magic convention that he did and the impact of that event always stayed with him and so I said, “That’s what you should write about, that’s what you should go with.”

Joe: Back in 1998 I competed in a magic competition actually with that very act, the act that I do in the movie. We didn’t get into the finals. They said there wasn’t enough magic but that they liked the act a lot and they asked us to perform on the evening show. The girl that I was doing the act with at the time was an actress and she wasn’t my girlfriend and she went off with a new boyfriend to a bed & breakfast. And so the performance actually never happened. And so that was always something that was kind of a regret of mine…

Tammy: Because at the time in Los Angeles at this convention it really was full of the cream of the crop of the magic community and he kind of regrets that this could have made Joe’s career really go along better. So we decided the film should have a happier ending.

Well that’s the beauty of fiction, isn’t it, that you can give yourself a happy ending.

Tammy: Yes and this is sort of life imitating art because the movie itself is a happy ending. I do think it’s kind of interesting the way we shot it because we shot it on such a low budget and because Tammy and I took on so many of the roles of the crew. We shot a day or two a month over 18 months. We kept our day jobs and each month we would save up the money to pay for the next shoot day. And that also allowed us to very carefully craft each shoot day and figure out how the magic was going to be done. And teach Valerie Dillman the magic since Valerie, who plays the role of Stacy Dietz is not an actual magician. She learned magic for the role.

What do you think people will be surprised by, when they see it? What will they learn about the magic community?

Tammy: I think one thing is the way we portray female magicians because there never has really been a magic movie with a character, a fictional magic movie, with a character of a female magician. And you know when you see characters on TV, women playing doctors, lawyers, teachers, musicians, then it feels natural in the real world, to see these types of people. You don’t think twice these days when a doctor is a man or a woman. But when you think of a magician, you think of a stereotype that comes up and it’s always a guy, sometimes very stereotypically, in the tuxedo with the rabbit in the hat. But magic is a really beautiful art form. It takes as much skill as playing an instrument or dance. There is a great way of telling stories through magic. Once there are more women in magic, I think you’ll see more interesting stories and I think it’s really going to help the art of magic as a whole.

Do you think there are still a lot of barriers to women in the world of magic?

Joe: Yeah, I do. I mean, it’s opening up and there are a lot of women in magic. There really are. But one of the difficulties is it is still very much a man’s profession. And you know I mean the Magic Circle in London only recently started to allow women into their organization. I just think that it’s more difficult to gain respect in the world of magic as a woman. And that there is an assumption when you see a woman involved in a magic act, that she’s an assistant. They always have to work a little bit harder to convince anybody that they are actually a magician. I almost think that the word “assistant” is kind of ridiculous. When you have a play and you have a couple people in that play who might have smaller roles you would never call them something else. You know, if they have ten lines in the play they’re still an actor in the play and they are in the program and they get a bow at the end. It’s strange to me that if two people are performing an illusion, and one is sawing the other in half, that one is automatically in some sort of a superior position than the other. And even stranger, and I mention this in the movie, is that when you do have the woman sawing the man in half, they still call it “the Assistant’s Revenge.” She’s sawing the magician in half and she’s still the assistant.

Tammy: I mean it’s just weird that …the fact that you even have to call a female magician, “a female magician.” You know, you don’t call a painter, “a female painter” or “a male painter”. It’s just “a painter.” And oftentimes, what’s so strange is that a magician will have a female assistant and maybe the magician is doing some act where, I don’t know, let’s say he’s making fun of the fact that, you know that he’s this middle-aged balding guy, let’s just say. But then there’s the assistant comes on and she’s this 19 year old in a skimpy dress and that has absolutely nothing to do with his act. It’s almost as if there is some disconnect story-wise, between what the magician is doing and what the assistant is doing.

One of the things that I really enjoyed about the movie is the way that there was a story to the act. The audience in the movie and the audience at the movie both wonder if the magicians are really fighting.

Joe: I always like telling stories with my magic and many magicians do this. That’s one of the reasons I really enjoyed making the movie is that it really allowed me to tell a longer story through magic. Because I tried to use the magic to advance the story and incorporate it into the story as much as I could. And it can sometimes be difficult to do that in a 6-minute act.

One of the things that I thought about as I was watching the film is that you had a very big challenge in that difference between a film and a live performance. We’re very used to “Bewitched” with Samantha Stevens twitching her nose and something appearing or disappearing on screen. You had to really do all those tricks and persuade the audience that you were really doing all those tricks. How did you stage the tricks so that we know they were really being performed and were not special effects?

Joe: It’s a challenge for sure, because and Harry Potter and all the special effects movies, people just assume that it is effects. And we contemplated putting something at the beginning of the movie, you know, “There are no camera tricks involved.” One thing that we did was, we tried not to cut away in the middle of the effects as much as possible except for story. And we tried to keep people’s faces and hands in the shot at the same time.

Tammy: There’s very few places where you are just seeing hands alone and not the person. It was always important to us and sometimes it’s a bit of a challenge to be able to get the person’s face and the trick because you need to be able to see what’s going on with the trick. So we really want to be able to see what the actor was doing at the same time.

Joe: We also populated the movie with a lot of real magicians. Most of the cast were actual magicians. Now, not everybody is going to know that, but you know, those who do, will know that those are real magicians and hopefully they’ll understand that they are really doing legitimate magic. There’s a lot of slight of hand in the movie. When you see a movie and Harry Potter is flying around on a broomstick you know it is special effect. But when you see slight of hand, you frequently will go, “That must be dexterity.” Once you know that, you kind of prove to the audience that you are doing slight of hand. Then later when you do other types of magic, hopefully they go for the ride and assume that it’s also legitimate magic.

Tammy: And also because we are a lower budget, independent movie you know that we’re doing the magic for real. We didn’t have the money to do the Harry Potter special effects.

What got you interested in magic to begin with?

Joe: I was interested since I was 8 years old, but I started performing probably about 13. And you know, “Burt Wonderstone” has it right. A lot of guys get into magic to, you know, to meet girls, you know. I don’t know that that was the motivation. But you know, it’s a fun thing to do. When you’re a teenager, it’s nice to kind of feel empowered and maybe that you know something that other people don’t know. That eventually evolved into being at a party and not knowing what to say and having an icebreaker. I would stand around in college just riffling a deck of cards.

Tammy: Well, you meet people in the magic community. Joe met people at magic camp that are in the movie that he’s known for years, practically his whole life.

Joe: It’s true, it’s true. I attended Cannon’s Magic Camp which is actually where I met Jonathan Levitt who played the role of Steve and where I met several other cast members, as well. And these are friendships that have lasted my whole life. And so that was something that really fed the interest for me. As a teenager I was the editor of a magic magazine and I would go to magic conventions and I would go to Magic Club meetings. So you know, certainly I wasn’t meeting girls at a lot of these places. It must have been something else. When I sent out my college applications, my essay statement was, “I like to make people laugh.” And that’s what I always really enjoyed is making people laugh. And I continue to try to put a lot of humor into my magic and into movies that I’m making.

Who are your magic idols?

Joe: I’d say Penn & Teller, for sure. What they do is so unique and also they always have a strong point of view and a statement that they make. Female magicians, I love Tina Leonert. Oh my gosh! Google her and take a look at her act. It’s so beautiful. She always tells a story.

Tammy: Mac King.

Joe: He’s my mom’s favorite magician, too, so she’s not alone.

Where can people see the movie?

Joe: It’s playing in NY and LA. And then we’re also doing these “Tugg” screenings.

Related Tags:

Actors Directors Interview Writers

Interview: Margaret Talbot on The Entertainer

Posted on May 15, 2013 at 3:28 pm

I loved Margaret Talbot’s book about her father, actor Lyle Talbot, The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father’s Twentieth Century. His career spanned the full range of entertainment from the traveling shows of the 1920’s to movies in the golden age of Hollywood co-starring with Bette Davis, Mae West, Carole Lombard, Mary Astor, Ginger Rogers and Shirley Temple. He escorted starlet to glamorous nightclubs and visited William Randolph Hearst’s legendary San Simeon. He helped found the Screen Actor’s Guild, he played Ozzie and Harriet’s neighbor on television, and he appeared in films directed by the notorious Ed Wood.

Here is a trailer for one of his films.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kox3loxojR0

And you can glimpse him at a barbecue with the Nelson family in this Coke commercial.

I’ll be interviewing Ms. Talbot at a screening of her father’s best film, “Three on a Match,” on June 7, so if you are in the Washington, DC area, come join us. And she took time to answer some of my questions about her father and the book.

You had every biographer’s dream — a subject who kept everything in an extensive and detailed series of scrapbooks. What prompted him to keep this record and was it something he shared with the family? Or did you really go through them for the first time when you were working on the book?

Yes, I was so lucky in that respect. Although my Dad was not a writer—so he didn’t leave behind a stash of letters or a wonderfully dishy diary—he did, from the time he was a teenager, keep scrapbooks full of newspaper clippings, theatrical programs, menus, train tickets, snapshots, caricatures and poems by fellow actors. I think that as a small-town boy from Nebraska who left home to join a carnival, became a matinee idol in travelling theater troupes and ended up in Hollywood at the dawn of the talkies, he had a sense that his life was a real adventure, and he wanted to chronicle it. That impulse was so helpful to me in recreating not only the events of his life, but also what I was even more interested in getting at—the texture of the times he lived through. Sometimes I wonder what it will be like for future biographers, writing about people from our own era and beyond, when we are keeping less paper and writing fewer letters. (There will be plenty of tweets and e-mail of course, and they constitute their own kind of record—more granular in a way, but not as deep as the best letters.)

What were some of the other sources you used to research the productions your father was in?

Well, I watched a lot of movies, of course, which was great, and I spent time at libraries and archives, from the Nebraska State Historical Society to The Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in L.A. The Herrick Library was a favorite of mine, as I’m sure it is of anybody doing research on the history of film. I particularly loved their extensive collection of old fan magazines

Your father was one of the guests at San Simeon, the Hearst Castle, where William Randolph Hearst’s extravagant property included a private zoo. What were those visits like?

Kind of like a fairy tale, it always seemed to me when my father told stories about it. He’d get an invitation—more like a summons, really—to come up the next weekend, say. A limousine would pick him up and take him to the train station to board a train called the Midnight Lark where he’d have his own compartment. A limo would pick him up at the train station in San Luis Obispo. On the drive up to the mansion, he’d see the animals from Heart’s private menagerie. And my father loved that as a guest you were free to wander the grounds and do whatever you wanted; your only obligation was to be present at dinner, and dressed elegantly for it. Very Downton Abbey. Only with more drinking—some of it furtive, since Marion Davies, Hearst’s charming mistress and co-hostess, had a problem with alcohol.

Your father’s career spanned everything from traveling shows to movies, radio, Broadway theater, and television. Which did he like the best?

He loved theater—almost all theater—the best. He was one of those actors who really thrived on the reactions of a live audience.

He worked with Hollywood greats and with Ed Wood, often called the worst director in history. Who did he respect the most, and what did he think of Wood?

He had a great admiration for William Wellman, whom he called by the nickname Wild Bill. The way my father described him, Wellman was a tough and cunning but fundamentally decent guy. He liked to get authentic looking fights and action scenes, and for a movie called “College Coach,” in which my Dad played a football player and the extras were all real football players from USC, Wellman took the college players aside and told them my Dad had played football for Nebraska, so they didn’t have to hold back; they could tackle him for real. My father was nearly knocked out but he told the story with a chuckle: Wellman had chutzpah. As my father always remembered about him, Wellman had been a flyer with the Lafayette Escadrille in World War I, been shot down, and had a metal plate in his head. So you didn’t mess with him.

As for Wood, my Dad hadn’t talked about his experience with him much—it was kind of embarrassing to him, even though he was a never-turn-down-a-job journeyman actor—until the Tim Burton biopic about Wood was in production, and renewed interest in Wood’s weirdness led reporters to my Dad, who had been in “Glen or Glenda” and “Plan Nine from Outer Space.” Then my Dad started talking about “Eddie”—how sweet he was, how sincerely he’d believed in what he was doing. Also how he’d pay my Dad at the end of each day of filming with a wad of crumpled up small bills he took from his pocket; how he never had permits to film anywhere and the crew was forever having to pack up the set and scurry away when the cops or a building owner showed up; and how, once when my Dad allowed a soused Eddie to sleep over, Wood had showed up at the breakfast table wearing my mom’s negligee, which he’d found hanging on the back of the bathroom door.

Which do you think were his best performances and why?

I think he did some excellent theatrical performances late in life, when he really got to inhabit character roles; he did a great run as a wheel-chair bound head of a Klan-like group called “The Knights of the White Magnolia” at the Alley Theater in Houston, for instance. But on screen I like him best in a couple of his early pre-Code movies from Warner Brothers—“Three on a Match,” and the afore-mentioned “College Coach.” He was good at playing weak-willed, vain or hedonistic—but not wholly bad characters. He wasn’t a tough guy but I don’t think he was a really commanding, sweep-you-off-your-feet romantic lead either, like Clark Gable, whom the studio was always trying to make him into the second coming of. He wasn’t that macho; he had a kind of softness.

How did he feel about shifting from leading man to character parts? Why did he pride himself on never turning down a role?

For a moment, when he was first signed by Warner Brothers and brought out to Hollywood in 1932, it looked like he might break through to star status. One of the film magazines I came across had a spread in 1933 on the future stars of tomorrow, one female, one male. The female being touted was Katharine Hepburn and the male was Lyle Talbot. It didn’t work out that way, of course, and I’m sure at some level that was a disappointment. You don’t get that close and not feel some sense of loss when you don’t make it into the stratosphere. On the other hand, he had a very healthy and realistic sense of how hard it is to make it in Hollywood at all, and over the years, he came to see himself as very lucky. Chose to see himself—with my optimistic mother’s help—that way. He loved to act, loved to work and wanted to be working as much as he could. He felt very lucky that he could make a living and a life, support a family, as a working actor and never had to take another kind of job.

What was his role in the founding of the Screen Actors Guild and why was that important to him?

He was one of the 21 original members, a founder of the Guild, and very proud of that all his life. He came from the theater world, where he felt there was more solidarity among performers, and where they had had a union, Actors Equity, much longer. For him, the main issue was the hours that studios demanded at that time, and therefore the control they exerted over your life. It’s interesting to me that Hollywood remains one of the few sectors of American society where unions are still quite strong.

What was the biggest surprise to you in learning about his life before he married your mother?

The whole Midwestern magic and hypnotism circuit that he worked in was a fascinating revelation for me. He had certainly talked about it, and as a kid I loved the story he told of his first job in show business: as a hypnotist’s assistant having rocks broken on his chest while he was supposedly in a deep slumber. But I didn’t know much about that world, the fact, for instance, that there was a hypnotism craze in the first decades of the 20^th century. It was sort of the popular counterpart to the discovery of the unconscious at that time, and hypnotists were blamed for all kinds of things—misbehaving teenagers, runaway wives, bad investments. My research into that subculture really plunged me into what the critic Greil Marcus calls “the old weird America.”

Also, while my siblings and I certainly knew my Dad had been married before, we didn’t know how many times! It turned out to be four. My mother was his fifth wife, and though she was 26 years younger, and for that and other reasons, theirs didn’t seem at first like a promising union. In fact, it turned out to be a wonderfully happy one, which produced four children, allowed my father a whole second life, and lasted until my mother’s death. In many ways, this book is their love story.

Related Tags:

Actors Books Interview Writers

Interview: Tina Gordon Chism of “Peeples”

Posted on May 9, 2013 at 8:00 am

It was a delight to talk with”Peeples” writer-director Tina Gordon Chism, who instantly made me feel like an old friend. She wrote a movie I love, Drumline, (featured in my new book). And now she is a first-time director with a movie produced by Tyler Perry, starring Craig Robinson as Wade Walker, who meets the family of his girlfriend Grace (Kerry Washington), including her terrifying father, a judge (David Alan Grier). Gordon Chism is as beautiful and charismatic as any actor in her all-star film.

I was so happy to see Diahann Carroll in this film!

To write a cheeky comedic grandmother and give it to Diahann Carroll — she’s so specific about the roles she takes and we’re having fun with her in this way — I’ve never seen her do anything like this before. My casting director ran down the hall yelling, “SHE SAID YES!!!” I owe her quite a lot because the first day of shooting was her day, with Melvin Van Peebles (who plays her husband), and I’m just thinking, “Oh, God.” It was tough to face that on my first day. And it was set outside but it was snowing, so I had to move everyone indoors. Then it stopped snowing, so I could move half of the scene outside. My head was spinning out of control. I was just out of my body with first-day jitters. And Diahann Carroll made a speech, saying she was very excited to play with this new group of actors and she was very excited to play this grandmother who was a little risque and funny. That settled me. It brought me down for a moment so I was able to do my job and think. She blessed the Peeples movie and all of us were just in awe and grateful and kept the vibe going from there.

I heard there was a special culinary benefit from having Tyler Perry as a producer!

In Tyler Perry’s studio, there is a woman who makes exquisite honey-baked biscuits.

Your movie is about a situation we all suffer through — the daunting introduction to the family of our significant other.

I was dating a guy who seemed so perfect and his family seemed so gorgeous and perfect — the “chocolate Kennedys,” like the way Wade describes the Peeples in the movie. Then when I met them, I was like, “Do you ever talk about the fact that your father is this and your mother is that?” No. My family is like Wade’s, more accepting and grateful and open, encouraging everyone to be honest with each other and with themselves.

You assembled a very impressive cast.

More than anything, I wanted everyone in the cast to be very intelligent and witty. I was looking for something real and alive behind their eyes, where I know someone’s home. With Kerry Washington, I admired her social activism and came from a high achieving family like the one in the movie. After she came on, I worked around her to find the mix. Craig Robinson is a classically trained musician and just so lovable as a man. And for the younger brother, I could have picked a rapper with a huge fan base but Tyler James Williams brought an openness and lack of self-consciousness. And Kali Hawk as the sister — she would not give up. After we did not initially pick her, she did another audition tape and showed she could improve.

There are two key songs in the movie — Wade sings a silly potty training song to kids and later does what was supposed to be a 70’s disco hit called “Turn You On” that sounds like the B-Side of a forgotten Donna Summer record.

Stephen Bray is an amazing musician, and he understood we needed comedic tones but genuinely catchy tunes.

It is still very rare for a woman to be a director. Was it a big challenge for you?

I really think females are more suited for directing, and it baffles me that you still have to push the boys club to see that. We want the same things they do, but we are natural multi-taskers!

Related Tags:

Directors Interview Writers

Interview: Tom Shadyac of Life’s Operating Manual

Posted on May 5, 2013 at 3:59 pm

I am always happy to get another chance to talk to Tom Shadyac, the mega-successful Hollywood director (Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Bruce Almighty) who now devotes his time to exploring the meaning of life and sharing what he has learned. I last spoke to him about his documentary I AM. Now he has written a book, Life’s Operating Manual: With the Fear and Truth Dialogues, and was nice enough to talk to me about it.

I like your imagined dialogue between fear and truth, especially when fear says you have to own things and truth says “I own this choice.”That was a really meaningful exchange. Can you to talk a little bit about what ownership means?

We’ve limited ownership to things. And truth is saying is that ownership can be in a much larger context. So our society values ownership of material goods, properties, personal possessions and what I wanted to do is say you also must own the choices you make in your life. And so you must own the fact that you value community more than you value your things. You can own the fact that you value love more than you value profit. So it’s just a way again of looking at some of the concepts that we take as truth and turning them upside down.

If you turn it upside down you at least look what is scaring you right in the face and it’s generally less scary than you think.

That’s all how dragons disappear. Not only in mythology but in our lives. I believe that any fear examines and if it doesn’t dissipate it very well may be a truth. So I don’t run across the freeway because it’s true because I will get hit by a car. If my fear is telling me I can’t have an honest conversation with my spouse or my parents, examine it and you see that it dissipates. You can actually can stand up in your own voice and have a respectful conversation.

It seems we live in a moment in history where it seems very easy to feel despair. How do you maintain a sense of joy when it must feel very frustrating?

Well first of all the results are not up to me. So my job is to share what I’m experiencing and what I am seeing and then feed the results into bigger hands. But I also know that a body kicks the hardest when it’s dying. So fear often peaks when something is about to be lost. So I think we see a lot of that fear even in the way we do business with each other. I think that people can see that it’s built on a house of stone and see that it’s going to fall and so I think that at that point fear begins to peak. So I don’t know where we are in this cycle. But I know that regardless of late in the cycle or early in the cycle of change, the truth remains the truth and you just want to stand on that.

But you feel called upon to deliver the message, so doesn’t it get frustrating when people don’t listen?

Well I’m a human being and I am having human experience so I would be telling you a half-truth if sometimes I don’t become frustrated or sad. But I get a hold on that quickly because I can see the arc of justice, the arc of the universe is bending towards justice and it may a long arc but it is still bending toward justice. So I can imagine how frustrating the first twelve people who started the anti-slavery movement were. Because people just didn’t see that beauty in all races. And now you look back and you say, “Wow.” Because they were standing on a truth it was just a matter of time. The way it is now for the rights for the gay and lesbian and transgendered community. The result to me is already written. The arc is bending toward their justice. And it may be frustrating now in the immediacy of it today but if you look at human history we always move towards justice even though we don’t see it in the present. So if you look at the arc of the human species over time it is an evolving arc. You see these turns. We don’t see them because we stay stuck in the day to day, in the crimes committed today. But we don’t see the acts of love. We don’t see the tending in the overall towards justice. So slavery while it still exists its illegal and while women are no longer considered property in most countries they are gaining more and more right believe it or not wars are happening with less frequency. So I lean on that and I think whoever set this universe up knows what , that energy knows what it’s doing and I do believe that energy makes love more powerful than hate. And if it were the other way around I would have no hope. But because it is so I believe that I trust in that law and that we will eventually wake up.

You write about the idea that DNA somehow knows the difference between joy and negative feelings. And that a lot of the feelings of isolation are loneliness that people have is because they just don’t open their eyes to see that everything is connected to everything else and that they are a part of that.

If you could use your question as my answer I would be very happy.

What can you say in a book that you could not say in a movie? There so many different ways of getting a message across. Why do a book?

A movie is for visual imagery. In the book you can get more into the thought process. You can dive a little deeper into an argument and a discussion. A movie is grounded in the term “move” so you’ve got to keep moving from image to image. In a book you get to move but you move from idea to idea. So they are both moving but one is using visual imagery and that can be expansive but it also can limit you. So in a book I got to expand somewhat on some of the ideas. And also I am creating a lot of questions. I am shaking people’s foundational paradigm. That’s where fear comes in, the dialogue between fear and truth. As I was writing this book I could hear the questions. I could hear them through my own fear and in the questions of others. So that’s why I believe I created and followed that thread and wrote the book, with half of the book in dialogue. Because it’s one thing to read an essay and talk about the economy of the way we educate and fear immediately rises up and tries to stand on what is known and not what could be. And so fear calls everything unrealistic. And I think a book can be a potent tool for answering that. So the conversation is furthered. It becomes furthered inside the book itself. Whereas if I had written this book as simply essays there could have been a million questions arising and I could have written a follow up to answer those questions but I think with this one we are able to widen the conversation and include the answers or a perspective on some of those questions.

Your research is so far reaching and multidisciplinary. How do you go about it?

I am a layman when it comes to much of this stuff but I read a lot. I am fascinated and curious. So I look for evidence when someone tells me a philosophical trope I know that trope needs to stand in the world or it is a trope. It doesn’t have any bearing on how we live. I found a wealth of evidence that science is discovering. And I have had the fortune of talking with some of the leading thinkers in cellular biology. Or whether it’s in other of the physical sciences that some like Linda Kaggert who is a friend and whose research and she’s a journalist and whose writings have opened me up to, I’ve been fortunate enough to get a sampling across many disciplines. And it makes sense to me. This gives me the philosophical reading and the spiritual reading that I have been doing for my whole life. Those connective ideas that support all the major faiths. Even our laws, that laws that we write are under girded by the same principles that our moral leaders espouse. And now I’m finding that morality inside of nature. And nature can be what we call aggressive and cruel but it’s not how nature thrives. And the moralists are simply coming on to tell us that if you want to live and you want to thrive. If you want to be a system that works well this is what you’ll follow. You’ll follow those moral laws that have been set up inside of life. And I heard that many times from Gandhi and Martin Luther King that they believe the moral principles were actually physical laws like gravity is a law. And just like gravity that law exacts itself whether you believe in it or not. So if I go out and hate today the law will tell me that will somehow diminish my health and my path, the freedom of my path. And we see that all the time in the lives of others. From stories of people who have chosen lives of hate and aggression and murder we see how it breaks down from their cellular biology to their ability to be free if you will. A murderer whether he’s convicted or not is always a murderer. He has to lie he has to create a world of lies and a web of lies that he is now stuck in.

Would you describe yourself today as happy?

Yes but let’s talk about what happiness is. I’m much happier than ever. But I prefer the word contentment. I don’t walk around 24/7 smiling and with birds chirping around me.

There’s a difference between pleasure and happiness.

Happiness to me as I write in the book is an indication of the system working well. Like you say your computer is happy and it’s working well et cetera. And it’s not up to me to judge whether I am working well. I can tell you that I am working in a more content, efficient and joyous way than I have ever worked before. I embrace the ups and downs. I am in all kinds of uncertainties now. I have such joy and fulfillment and I have areas of deep sorrow. And I embrace them all. I think that life is symphony and without the low notes you don’t get the base for the explosion of the high notes. I’ve learned to embrace and continuing to learn to embrace all of life’s colors.

We make a terrible mistake if we think that happiness is the essence of all sadness. I don’t think that’s true. It’s sort of like white is all the colors of light mixed together. Happiness is all the emotions together.

Beautifully said. Once again I choose your answer.

What’s next for you?

Have you seen the French film “The Intouchables?” We’re remaking that here. Most of the English speaking world has not seen it. So we are remaking it here and were getting our cast together now. Iit was a beautiful film. Hopefully we can bring to America and English speaking countries what worked about the French film and then we can add a layer of depth and maybe even humor. Because we get a second crack at their brilliant work.

Related Tags:

Directors Interview Writers