Interview: Rob Reiner of “The Magic of Belle Isle”

Posted on June 27, 2012 at 8:00 am

Rob Reiner (“The Princess Bride,” “When Harry Met Sally…,” “The American President”) is co-writer and director of the heartwarming new film, “The Magic of Belle Isle.” Morgan Freeman plays a bitter wheelchair-bound writer who moves to a small town and is befriended by a single mother (Virginia Madsen) and her three daughters. Reiner spoke to me about why this story was so important to him and the challenges of shooting on a very low budget. It is available now On Demand and will be in theaters July 6.

Tell me why you chose this project.

When I turned 60 a few years ago, I started thinking more and more about my mortality—that’s what happens when you get older. I thought of myself as a very, very, very young old person, like the beginning of old age. You start thinking about how finite your life is and how it becomes more precious, and that led me to wanting to make “The Bucket List.” No matter what your situation is, you try to find a way to enjoy your life and live it the best you can until you die. It was very similar when we got this script, it came in as a spec script and when I read it I thought, “Wow, this is also about a guy who has basically given up on life, he’s in a wheelchair, his wife just passed away, he can’t write any more and he’s drinking, and he basically shut the door on himself.” I love the idea of moving into this lakeside community for the summer and over the course of the summer his interactions with the woman next door and her children and the people in the town make him learn how to live again. I love this whole idea that no matter what your situation is, you have to find a way to celebrate life.

I like that too, and I like the fact that the movie has a lot of really nice people in it. It’s so easy to make everyone crabby.

There’s a speech that Morgan gives early on at this memorial service for one of the townspeople where he says, “You know, there’s something about this place that brings out the best in people.” The speech was written by the Fred Willard character, but he has Morgan say it. That’s why we call the movie “The Magic of Belle Isle,” because it’s all about how these people from this community interact with each other and do bring out the best in each other.

Fred Willard is one of my absolute favorites, and I was so delighted to see him in it.

He’s brilliant, he’s a great improvisational actor, he was in “Spinal Tap” and the Chris Guest movies, which have a lot of improvisation So he gave me a few freebies—that’s what I love about Fred. When Morgan comes to the memorial service, he says, “I brought the Cheetos” and Fred goes, “Nice touch…” He ad-libbed that! Not everybody can improvise the way he does, but when you hire him, you know you’re going to get a lot of freebies.

Tell me about working with Virginia Madsen and how she developed such a natural relationship with the girls who played her daughters.

I’m going to credit Virginia for a lot of that because she took it upon herself to spend a lot of time with the girls when they weren’t working. She really took it upon herself to make a family out of them and make them feel like she was their mother, and so I give her a lot of credit for that. I’ve always wanted to work with her in a bigger capacity than I did when I did “Ghosts of Mississippi” and this was a great opportunity. She brought so much to this movie. She actually changed the ending of the movie because she did something that wasn’t in the script when they’re about to say goodbye on the porch at the end of the summer; in the script it just called for her to give him a little peck on the cheek, kind of a chaste kiss and she felt like her character had evolved to a point where, even though she had shut down emotionally and was going through a divorce and didn’t see herself getting romantically involved with anybody, this man had brought out all these feelings in her, had re-stimulated these feelings in her. So, when she gives him that big, passionate, romantic kiss, Morgan’s reaction is very much the way I reacted, “Whoa! I didn’t see that coming!” And she said, “Well, if you want, we can do it the way it is in the script,” and I said, “No, you know something? I think you’re right, I think your instinct is right. I know it ups the stakes of this movie but I think it’s the right thing,” and it made us have to change the ending of the movie, which is that he comes back. Initially, he was just going to drive off and leave them.

You always have a real gift, I think, in your musical choices for your movies. Do you want to talk a little bit about the music in this?

Mark Shaiman did the music again like he’s done for so many of my movies. Ever since we did “When Harry Met Sally” together, he’s worked on every one of my films. He’s terrific and he’s incredibly versatile, and it was his idea at the end to bring back the Beethoven piece. We had a piece of score, but he said, “No, no, we’ve got to bring back the Beethoven piece there!” And also using that kind of Dobro blues guitar was also something that we worked on together. I love working with Mark because he’s incredibly versatile, he can do any type of movie.

Was there anything in making the movie that was tougher than you expected?

Initially I thought it was going to be very hard to shoot it in 25 days because we only had 5 million dollars. It was a small budget and a very short schedule, but I was very lucky because I had Morgan Freeman and Virginia Madsen, who are incredibly gifted, have great craft, and are able to nail it right away so we could move on very quickly, and that’s the way I love to work. If we get it right the first time, let’s move onto the next thing, and so that turned out to be okay. The bigger challenge was because we had such a small budget, we didn’t have enough money to buy two wheelchairs, and there was only one wheelchair. The only place that made that wheelchair was a factory in China and at one point, the wheelchair broke down, and we literally had to call the factory in China and have it Fed-Exed to America and wait a day to get it. That was a little bit of a nerve-wracking thing, but other than that we had a lot of rain and stuff, so we had to jump in and out of the houses, but we dodged rain drops and it was okay. It was the most glorious summer there and I had the greatest time. It was like summer camp, like movie camp.

What do you want people to take away from this film?

I want them to take away the similar feeling that they had when they saw “Bucket List,” which is that you live life and—unless you’re Shirley MacLaine—you only get this one life, so you’ve got to live it to the fullest. You have to celebrate it every step, no matter what your situation in life, you have to find a way to celebrate it.

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Interviews: The Director and Stars of “Beasts of the Southern Wild”

Posted on June 26, 2012 at 3:55 pm

“Beasts of the Southern Wild” is a lyrical tale of a six-year-old girl and her father living in “The Bathtub,” a fictitious community based on condemned parts of southern Louisiana. In an almost post-apocalyptic setting with no electricity, running water, phone, government, or business, they have a life filled with danger and deprivation but also with joy and a strong sense of home. The film has won prestigious awards at Sundance and Cannes and opens in theaters this Friday.

A small group of journalists met with stars Quvenzhané Wallis and Dwight Henry and writer/director Benh Zeitlin to discuss the film. Henry told us that he owns the Buttermilk Drop Bakery and Café in New Orleans, which was across the street from the studio where the auditions for the film were being held. “All the guys from the production company would come over and get donuts, get coffee in the morning, back and forth for the course of about a year. We would sit down and talk about a lot of things. They would put flyers in the bakery if anybody wanted to audition for this upcoming film.” Henry auditioned but then he relocated the bakery and the producers could not find him. They finally found him and offered him the part but he could not take it because of the demands of the business. He turned them down three times and then managed to work things out so he could do it.

He talked to us about his character’s behavior which at times seemed harsh and angry. “I often throughout the course of the movie was trying to emphasize with a passion and an urgency for her to learn how to do these things I’m trying to teach her because her daddy’s dying….She’s the most important person in the world to me and she don’t have her mother. So it is important to me as her father that she learn how to feed herself, take care of herself, and survive and be strong because Daddy’s not going to be here.” He identified with his character. “Everything I try to do in real life, the businesses that I’m building and everything that I’m doing is something to pass on to my children. No selfish needs for myself. Everything is for them. I brought that same passion about working things out in real life to make sure my kids are all right — I brought that same energy and passion to the movie. As fathers, that’s what we have to do.”

He had never acted before, but “you can’t get better than real life experiences. You could have brought an actor from outside. But I was in real water this high from storms. I was two years old when my mom and dad had to put me on the roof in the lower 9th ward when Hurricane Betsy came and flooded the whole 9th ward. I was in Camille. What better experience than actually going through that versus bringing in some actor from the outside that never done this before, that never seen a hurricane, that never been in a hurricane, that never had to evacuate their home, that never lost their home, that never lost their loved ones? I’ve seen bodies floating in the water after storms. Seeing things like that gives you a passion. I felt what they felt because I’ve gone through that in real life.”

Quvenzhané Wallis told us that the scariest part of the movie for her was the animals. “I wasn’t a fan of the pigs. I’d never even touched a big, I’d never even seen a pig, I didn’t know what a big looked like. I just knew what a pig was. It got me scared and they were forcing me to do it but I wouldn’t do it because I didn’t know what I was doing. I just didn’t want to walk up to it and touch it.” She said she enjoyed acting and wants to do more. And she talked about trying different things as they would do many different takes. “Every mood that’s in the catalogue or the emotion log, that’s what he wanted me to do….Benh just wanted to make it look like a real story.” But it did not take a lot of acting to show her character’s strength and ferocity. “That is me!”

Zeitlin told us the film is “a heightened reality that’s “a bit of a love song to the region.” There’s no place that exists in the world that is The Bathtub, but it’s all built of real things.” The crew would create the buildings the characters lived on out of trash, just as the characters would have. “Every piece of every house is something that we found somewhere in South Louisiana. It’s almost like a junk sculpture where you’re collaging together a lot of different things. It isn’t real in that you could go make a documentary about it but it is real in that it is all made from real stuff. It’s not a fantasy movie. It’s about what the world seems like when you’re six.” The movie is loosely based on a play where the character is an 11 year old boy and played by an adult. But Zeiltin realized that the character would understand everything differently as an 11 year old and he wanted the poetry of a six year old’s point of view.

They looked at between 3500-4000 children and Wallis was “so clearly the person” that “we knew what we were doing from then on.”

The Deepwater Horizon explosion happened the day they began filming and Zeitlin talked about what it was like to film in the midst of the spill and clean-up. “That cloud was hovering over the town, getting closer and closer every day. It added a lot of weight to what we were doing that really transformed the film.”

“The film is almost to me like a jazz funeral. No matter what is happening, you celebrate anyway. Dwight talks about this. He says, ‘We were partying before the storm, we were partying through the storm, and we’re partying after the storm.’ That’s not a superficial thing. It’s a refusal to feel sorry for oneself or be crushed by the weight of tragedy, a refusal to get defeated.”

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One of Aaron Sorkin’s Best Scenes

Posted on June 24, 2012 at 3:02 pm

Tonight is the premiere of the new HBO series “The Newsroom,” written by Aaron Sorkin, Oscar-winning scripter of “Charlie Wilson’s War,” “The Social Network,” “A Few Good Men,” and the television series “The West Wing.” I am a big fan of his series Sports Night, starring Josh Charles (“The Good Wife”), Peter Krause (“Parenthood”), and Felicity Huffman (“Desperate Housewives”). People often notice Sorkin’s “crackling” hyper-articulate dialogue, but what I love is the spacious and generous humanity of his characters. In one of my favorite “Sports Nights” scenes, Jeremy, a new employee, explains to his boss that he is embarrassed at having fainted on an assignment to cover a deer-hunting expedition.

JEREMY (Joshua Malina)

Not fitting in is how qualified people
lose jobs.

ISAAC (Robert Guillaume)

Yeah, but a lot of time it’s how
people end up working here. You had an
obligation to tell us how you felt.
Partly because I don’t like getting a
phone call saying I’ve put one of my
people in the hospital. But mostly
because when you feel that strongly
about something you have a
responsibility to try and change my
mind. Jeremy, did you think I was
gonna fire you ’cause you made a
convincing argument? It’s taken me a
lot of years but I’ve come around to
this: If you’re dumb, surround
yourself with smart people.
If you’re smart, surround yourself
with smart people who disagree with
you. I’m an awfully smart man and Mark
Sabath is an idiot. He had you and he
blew it. You’ve gotta trust us. Fit in
on your own time, when you come to
work for me you show up to play.
(BEAT) I’m going home.

You don’t know us very well. So if
it’s hard trusting us at the
beginning, maybe it’ll help a little
to know that we trust you. G’night.

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Interview: Lorene Scafaria of “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World”

Posted on June 21, 2012 at 8:00 am

Lorene Scafaria wrote the screenplay for one of my favorite romances of the last several years, Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist. And now she has written and directed another romance, “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World,” with Steve Carell and Kiera Knightley as neighbors who meet just as life on earth is about to be wiped out. I spoke to her about the role that music plays in both films (she is also a musician), and how contemplating the end of the world clarifies your priorities.

I want to begin by asking you about the music, because I know you, yourself, create music and music seems to be important in both this film and “Nick and Nora.”

It’s true, yes. I’ve got a pattern going, I think. But music is just so important to me, personally, obviously, and so I liked the idea that we’d have this sort of soundtrack for humanity in there What it really came down to in crafting the characters and everything, I just thought—what do you really want to consume at the end of the world? You know, besides as much food as humanly possible? And I feel like you know, really people dip back into music, that just is sort of a universal love for people, whatever the music may be. And so I did love the idea that certainly this girl is carrying around a bunch of records that, unless she finds the player for it, she’s just holding onto these possessions, but that this music has meant so much for her and her life that she will hold on to them. I’ve just always thought of music as a sort of collection of memories so that’s how I decided that it should be a major part of the movie. I knew I wanted it to be kind of classic rock, the kind I grew up with. I feel like friends’ older brothers got us into the Dead and Doors, really, so we were listening to that version of classic rock. I wanted to have that sense of nostalgia and feel like these could be songs that Dodge could be listening to or should be or would have if he were the kind of guy who really absorbed culture like that. They’re actually part of Penny’s collection, and so in a way I was using it as sort of dedications between the characters in a way.

The names of the characters seem very meaningful: Dodge and Penny.

Dodge, certainly, to me, is a man trying to outrun something and a guy who’s been sort of avoiding life his entire life—so Dodge felt very appropriate for him. I also loved that it was a very American name. And Penny — it’s like when you find a lucky penny. She was that little shiny copper thing for him to find. And Pen also means swan, so there’s something in there for both of them. Ridiculously, if you looked at all the names, you would find embarrassing things like that throughout. There was the character Roache that Patton Oswalt plays. He’s the kind of guy who’d survive the apocalypse, you know? The roaches of the world, they’re going to be fine.

Tell me a little bit about moving from being the writer to being the director and what you as a writer learned about writing from directing?

It’s now so much harder to write because I feel like I have this newfound perspective on it where I actually don’t feel as much of a free writer, now. I’m thinking of things a little too much from the director’s chair.

More logistically?

Yes, I’m sort of skipping ahead to, “Well, if I’m filming this…” That’s probably a good thing in the long run, to hone in on it. It’s definitely making me think so much more as a writer, now. When I started, I always wanted to direct. I directed a lot of theater when I was younger and always loved working with actors and then I made a short film a few years ago that I call the longest short, because it was like a 30 minutes. It was not something I was ever going to enter into festivals, I just wanted to prove to myself that I could maybe tackle a feature someday. With this one, I just was desperate to do it. From the very beginning I always wanted to be able to tell the story through to fruition and I can’t believe how satisfying it was. I’m a list-maker so I love to make lists and cross-things off. I’m not very organized, I just like to make lists. When we are filming something like the trucker’s scene and we get to cross something off a list. It’s been in my head for three years and it’s just so rewarding to see it through all the way. I’ve always enjoyed having a vision for the big picture and with this, so much was specific on the page. It was really fun to be able to do it all, actually.

One of the great things about your concept is that it’s tremendously clarifying; everything else drops away and you have to think about what your priorities are. I loved the way that, on their journey, Dodge and Penny meet people who deal with the end of the world in so many ways—mostly different forms of denial.

I try not to judge too harshly what it is that everybody would want to do in that situation, especially because everyone is dealing with their own mortality at the same time. I sort of loved that the two of them have these “higher callings” in a way—you know, at least they’re about human contacts and relationships and regrets and closure and all of that, and those always seem like the truest pursuits. I did so much research on what people would do, talking with as many people as possible about what would you do, what would you take with you, what would you want to hold in your hand? And you know, there were some very interesting answers across the board, but the most common was to be with family, to be with friends, to be with your loved one. I really liked exploring what happens if one person doesn’t really have that loved one, where do they go? And I do think someone like Dodge certainly would chase the past. I think most people would, I’m not sure everybody would be like, “I’m going to meet somebody new!” She’s lived her life much more to the fullest than he has, but has maybe her own regrets, like seeing her family.

One of the things that’s nice about it is that Dodge would not have done his some-day thing if not for Penny. She gave him a reason.

Yes, and through something so tragic. I don’t think any of this would’ve happened without the end of the world. That’s the kind of thing that is interesting. Sometimes the most tragic moments in your life, you’re like—“Why is this happening to me?” and it takes a little while, but then you think, “that might’ve been the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

If you’re a writer, that’s where you get your material.

It’s all therapy for me. You’re just seeing my glorified therapy session.

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Tribute: Ray Bradbury

Posted on June 6, 2012 at 3:32 pm

The world of science fiction and fantasy mourns the loss of the great Ray Bradbury, who died today at age 91. The author of classics that helped defined the genre, his works included books like Farenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and The Martian Chronicles. One of the greatest thrills of my life was my Ray/Ray interview with pioneering special effects master Ray Harryhausen and his best friend since childhood, Ray Bradbury.

Bradbury was nattily attired in suspenders and a tie featuring grinning jack o’lanterns.

“We met through our mutual love of dinosaurs. King Kong inspired us both. “The Lost World” — nothing like it had been done. My first influence was Lon Chaney. I have total recall from birth on, and I can remember when I was very young seeing “Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Then “Phantom of the Opera.” These things teach you about love, falling in love, stories for a lifetime. Then there was Buck Rogers when I was nine. I got the job of reading the comic strips on the radio. My pay was tickets to the movies — “King Kong,” “Murders in the Wax Museum.” I was rich! Because we are surrounded by reality, which is stupid, we fall in love with Beauty and the Beast, Jack the Giant Killer. When I was five years old, I fell in love with fairy tales. Love what you do and do what you love and forget about the money. I wanted to become a magician, and I did, didn’t I?”

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