Interview: Director Joseph Cedar on “Norman”

Posted on April 20, 2017 at 8:00 am

Israeli-American Joseph Cedar wrote and directed one of my favorite movies, the Oscar-nominated Beaufort, and I am a fan of his film “Footnote” as well. Both are in Hebrew. So it was a great pleasure to talk to him about his first English language film, “Norman,” starring Richard Gere and Steve Buscemi. Gere plays the title character, a schmoozer and small-time wheeler-dealer who gets caught up in international politics when he befriends an Israeli government official who ends up as Prime Minister.

Who casts Richard Gere as a shlub?

I think it’s the ultimate challenge. I like it when actors act. It’s gratifying to see an actor do something that is very far from who he is or how we perceive him in other films, his persona. It’s also gratifying to see an actor do something that is genuinely difficult that other people can’t do. And I found that in what Richard was doing, it’s like watching a circus act. It’s was remarkable for me in every scene to see him just be someone he’s not.

The hair really helps create his character, very different from the more glamorous image we have.

We did something with this whole physical appearance which is subtle but changes the way he looks to an audience. More importantly, it changes the way he looks to himself. He’d come out of makeup and wardrobe and look in the mirror and he wasn’t seeing the Richard Gere he is used to seeing on a movie set. That is helpful to create a body language that was different and specific for Norman. And this made it possible for him to do things that he doesn’t normally do in movies. So we did play around a little bit with his physicality.

It was almost as surprising to see Steve Buscemi as a rabbi.

That’s less of a stretch in my mind, I think Steve Buscemi would make a great Upper West Side rabbi. He’s a New Yorker and that is in itself most of the research but I did introduce him to a rabbi and I think it was more for Steve to feel comfortable not trying to be something that’s exotic. I introduced him to someone who gave him license to basically be himself. The character he plays was something we discussed like I would discuss the character with any actor but it was more about the circumstance that he is in, the financial situation his synagogue is in and just how communities are organized at least in New York. Those were the things that we spoke about. I thought it was interesting for him and for me to be a big part of where Norman sits in the grand scheme and the big deal that he is putting together.

It seems to me that one thing that makes it possible for Norman to succeed as much as he does is that he has no social shame. Most of us would cringe at making ourselves vulnerable to so much rejection.

What’s odd about what you just said is that in a different context someone who is shameless is considered a negative thing but I think it’s actually a really positive quality not to have pride or to be willing to take humiliation. It’s something that most of us aren’t willing to do and many times we rely on other people not having those inhibitions, those blocks that we put on ourselves.

I have to really not look at Norman from the outside but be in Norman’s shoes. Norman isn’t aware that he’s doing something that is humiliating. He sees his goals and obviously he is doing things that most people won’t do to achieve that goal but he has his way of denying the insult when it happens. He thanks most people after they push him away. It’s part of what allows him to do what he does and it’s his survival tool, not really being aware of how other people see him.

I think the point for me in just figuring him out is just realizing that it’s not really humiliating, wanting something and being willing to do everything including doing every once in a while a conniving trick if it’s serving something that he thinks is good, then I respect that. The world needs people who are willing to do what Norman does.

Could Norman tell you exactly what he wants? A specific policy goal or project or just being a part of things?

Is it self-serving or is it a mixture of wanting some influence or having a position or having access to something that is good for Norman — but isn’t there also always something else or there might be something else that can be a result of that that is good?

I think it generally starts out that way but then it can get lost. Look at your Prime Minister character, Eshel. He begins as somebody who says, “No I couldn’t let you buy me these very expensive shoes,” and he ends up as somebody who has to do a lot of compromising.

What happens in that scene from my point of view is morally challenging. If I put myself in both these characters’ places, I don’t think I would accept a $1200 gift from someone I just met and I probably wouldn’t give a gift that is so expensive to someone I just met. So there’s something that feels wrong about the whole encounter and what makes it happen is that both sides convinced themselves that it’s okay. Eshel’s character convinces himself that by accepting the gift he is actually already returning the favor and that he is in a way giving Norman some sense of being part of an important mission or something bigger than himself by offering him a representative in this case of Israeli government, by offering him something that would make them feel more comfortable or feel better about himself. Norman is seeing this as an investment that will help him forward other initiatives that he has been trying to do and has not been successful. It’s a risky investment because Eshel may never call back or may never deliver or may never turn into someone who actually has power, but it’s worth it to him on instinct. He feels that this can work because he really needs to take every opportunity he can to get in. To have a foot in the door.

But that brings us to his downfall. Because he has that strategy or that impulse to take every possible advantage he gets into a conversation on a train that turns out to be kind of disastrous to him because it’s too revealing.

I agree with you in calling it an impulse, it’s not really something he can control, it’s what he does, it’s who he is, it’s an expression of his deepest core. He can’t hold back.

Norman does what he does on instinct. He is wired this way and it’s a survival thing more than a planned-out business scheme. It’s just how he survives. It’s his function in the world.

You live in both the US and Israel. We seem to be in a uniquely tumultuous moment. What comfort do you think people can take from watching this movie?

Hopefully there’s a lot of comfort to take from watching this movie but none of it should affect their mood about what’s happening in America. If anything the times we’re living are times that call for action. We shouldn’t take things for granted and we should try to influence our surrounding.

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The Writer of “Groundhog Day” is Living It Over Again — As a Musical

Posted on April 11, 2017 at 3:16 pm

New York Magazine has a fascinating article about Danny Rubin, screenwriter of comedy classic “Groundhog Day,” who is now adapting the story into a Broadway musical.

This is the story of how Danny Rubin wrote Groundhog Day not once but twice — maybe more times than that, but who’s counting. It’s unusual for any artist to live so long under the shadow of a single work, let alone a story that is itself intimately concerned with limits and repetition. It’s more unusual still for an artist to return to that story in another medium for an encore nearly three decades later. Yet here Rubin is, in a Broadway theater, listening to his words echo, again and again and again, into the dark.

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Interview: Ash Brannon, Director of “Rock Dog”

Posted on February 24, 2017 at 2:42 pm

Ash Brannon directed “Surf’s Up” and co-directed “Toy Story 2,” two of my favorite animated films. He took on quite a challenge writing and directing the endearing new international production “Rock Dog,” inspired by a Chinese graphic novel about a sheepdog from Tibet who wants to be a musician. I was lucky to get a chance to talk to him about it.

Like the surfing penguin story “Surf’s Up,” “Rock Dog” is the story of an animal character who is passionate about something unusual for his species. “Characters with big dreams, impossible dreams, those are always a place to start when you are making the movie, aren’t they?” Brannon said.

He especially enjoyed working on an international production that came from China. “I hadn’t heard of the comic book. It was very big in China but not outside of China so the producer on the show told me about it and I was kind of intrigued by the challenges of the show. Doing something with fewer resources of time and money and a chance to build my own front-end team to put the story together. Also, I thought it would be fun just to work with some different cultures and discover what we have in common, what we don’t have in common when it comes to making movies, and so that’s kind of the long and short of it. The pleasant surprise was that stories like this work pretty much all over the world. Especially the musical theme shows music as universal, a thing we all have in common. It’s a really magical story, too. When you see a kid bang on pots and pans or strum a guitar or play the keys on a piano for the first time and discover that they can make sounds and eventually pleasing sounds that can really touch the hearts of people, that’s an amazing magical thing. And so, I wanted to tap into that and I discovered in working with the Chinese artists that they feel the same way. So, it was nice to kind of transcend some boundaries in making this movie.”

The film is inspired in part by the real life of the rock star who wrote the graphic novel. “He’s pretty much like Bodi in this story. He was going to go into international finance. He was in business school and then he heard a Bruce Springsteen song one day in college. This is back in the 80s or 90s, so you can imagine what kind of bootleg it takes to get Springsteen songs into China, but he fell in love with music and asked permission from his mom and she said, ‘Yes, go follow your dream.” He went off to Beijing, taught himself music. He was busking in the parks and he went from a very, very modest beginning to quite a fortunate career.”

The look of the movie is also very different from the graphic novel. “One great gift that Michael gave the team, because it was entirely an American team of artists who put the movie together, was his generosity and his trust in letting us go where we thought we needed to go and adapting the graphic novel and that extended to the designs. One reason we had to kind of depart from it was to simplify the characters because of our budget and make sure that nothing was too complicated so everything went in a simplified direction for that reason.”

One of my favorite things in the movie was the opening sequence, done in a dreamlike collage style. “It was something that the partners in China really wanted. I think they liked the opening of ‘Kung Fu Panda,’ for example, kind of a 2D graphic style. We really wanted to set up very quickly and bring you into the story almost like a book to help you understand the setup of this village of sheep and the guard dog and how Bodi’s father ended up locking up these musical instruments away for fear that his son would stray from the path of making sure he grew up and became the next guard to protect the sheep. So, it was a nice shorthand way of doing that and that’s kind of how we approached the opening.”

The rock star voiced by Eddie Izzard in the film lives in a fabulous mansion, and Brannon explained that they took advantage of one of the benefits of animation — there is no limit to imagination because what they create does not have to built. “We had a fantastic art director named Christian Schellewald who I met at DreamWorks and I let him run with the concept of what a rock star’s house must look like when money is no object. So we went outlandish with the enormous waterbed and the massive living room and the over-the-top music recording room. It was fun just to do things you can only do in animation that would look kind of crazy in live action.”

He said that in casting the voice actors, who include Sam Elliott, Luke Wilson, and JK Simmons, “naturalism is key. I really like actors who embrace improvisation and who can really act through their voice only. I mean when you think about it, live action actors bring so much to their performances visually, right? Their facial expressions, gestures, and so forth and their looks. When you take all that away sometimes actors don’t have anything left. So I look for actors who can really bring a texture that is interesting to listen to, people who can emote entirely with the voice alone.”

The movie features a rock ‘n’ roll park based on a real-life park in Japan. “These kids are amazing, as talented as anybody who’s getting record label deals. They are singing their hearts out. You can go anywhere even in America and you find these musicians in New York or LA, San Francisco, anywhere they have such passion for making music you almost feel like if they could not make music they wouldn’t survive, it’s like breathing for them or eating or drinking. So, that was the thing that struck me and its universal. People need to make music. It’s part of what sustains us on earth. And that’s the feeling I wanted in our movie.”

Interview: W. Bruce Cameron, Author of “A Dog’s Purpose”

Posted on January 23, 2017 at 3:47 pm

“A Dog’s Purpose,” in theaters this week, is a love letter to dogs and the people who are lucky enough to be loved by them. A dog named Bailey loves a boy and then, as he dies and is reborn as other dogs, he becomes an important part of the lives of others as well. Dennis Quaid stars as the man who reunites with Bailey in his new form after many years.

The movie is based on the best-seller by the same name and I spoke to its author, W. Bruce Cameron, who also wrote the similarly endearing 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter: And other tips from a beleaguered father .

We agreed that it is a challenge to find the right name for a dog. He said “you have to wait for the personality to assert itself. Of course that means that you call the dog ‘Hey, puppy!’ and the dog thinks its name is Puppy. My dog Tucker came with the name already stuck on him and it was a perfect name for him. I can’t imagine calling him anything else. As long as you fall in love with the dog, the name is going to be fine.” Tucker was a rescue dog. He was abandoned as a newborn in a box outside of the animal shelter. “My daughter, who runs an animal rescue was called because this was a death row case. Three newborn puppies would have overwhelmed the resources of the shelter. So, they asked her if she could help out, and she happened to have a lactating German shepherd whose puppies had weaned the day before. So she brought in these three puppies that were still slick from being born and said, ‘Hey, remember that wild weekend at the Sigma Chi house?’ and presented her with the puppies. I took him over when he was seven or eight weeks old. She was in Denver and we were in LA so I told her we were not going to come get the dog and she said, ‘I’ll be there on Wednesday.’ Her goal in life is that if you don’t have a dog, she will make sure you get one, and if you have one, she will persuade you to get another one. And if you’re allergic to dogs, she will get you a cat.”

He had dogs when he was growing up, starting at age 8, the same age as the boy in the book. “None of the kids in the neighborhood had dogs. My dad walked in that labrador and we started running together and rolling around together like we found each other after years apart. And then suddenly some of the other people in the neighborhood started getting dogs, too. Pretty soon we were overrun with them. So I always had dogs and our friends had dogs, and our dog needed a friend so we got Gypsy and she needed a friend. So most of my teenage years we had three dogs.”

He loves hearing from people about their dogs. “The Dog’s Purpose premise has gotten me so many emails and comments from people who say that their dog is so much like one they had when they were young or years before that it seems like the truth. The idea that you would come across an old friend later in life.” But he does not have any tips for training a dog. “Tucker is Exhibit A for showing that I don’t know how to train a dog. He’ll agree to some things. He’s the only dog I’ve ever owned who is willing to stay. On the other hand, if I throw a ball and tell him to bring it back, he will run after it and sniff it and look at me as if to say, ‘Why are you throwing this perfectly good ball away?’ I think I’m good at training dogs, but none of my dogs agree with me on that.”

The search for purpose for a dog he says, “is just the search for the right person. That’s their ultimate purpose. But they have another purpose, too. They are so joyous and so happy to be with you. If you want to go for a walk, they’re happy to go wherever you want to go, they’re happy to come back from the walk. With the exception of a bath, they’re happy to do whatever you want to do. If you come back from taking out the trash, they’re happy to see you. And they’re with us such a short period of time and don’t seem depressed about that. The lesson of that is that we should live like the dogs. We should have every day be joyous. My advice to anybody including myself is if you’re going through a bad period and you just can’t see the world’s on your shoulders and no day is a good day, you’re missing the whole point of the experience. And that’s something dogs know from the moment they come bounding up to you as a puppy.”

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Interview: Kenneth Lonergan on “Manchester By the Sea”

Posted on November 18, 2016 at 3:28 pm

Writer/director Kenneth Lonergan spoke to a small group of journalists about his exquisite new film, “Manchester by the Sea,” starring Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams, and Gretchen Mol. Affleck plays Lee, a man who is the guardian for his teenage nephew Lucas after his brother dies. He has difficulty adjusting because he is still dealing with a loss of his own.

It is not the usual Hollywood story of redemption and it includes some surprising humor, so we began by asking him how he developed the script.”I just try to be as strictly faithful to what I imagined it would really be like as possible and hope that that would give a ring of truth to it. It was a little bit of a special challenge with this story because he does go through some things that really no one should ever have to go through and nothing like that has ever happened to me, fortunately, and I wanted to be respectful of that and not rub people’s faces in it too much and not exploit it for sentimental value. I felt a little funny writing a story about this terrible thing that really happens to people so I wanted to treat it with some respect and some verisimilitude and part of that turned out to be including other things are happening too, like the fact that the kids life is totally different. He’s had a rough time, too, but he is very resilient. He is young and he has got a lot going on and there’s a lot of life bubbling up around Casey’s character that he is not a part of. The draft before last I think was a little too heavy, like a little too grim, a little relentless. I had shown Casey the script just to get his opinion and he agreed with me. So I didn’t take out anything but I added a little bit more, some other elements around Casey’s character. We’ve all had the experience. You walk out of a hospital room in terrible distress and a bunch of kids walk by and they are shouting and laughing or you walk by a couple having some idiot fight that you have had yourself many times and it’s just the whole different level of experience side-by-side with yours and that to me felt more like life than just being grim and heavy about everything, letting the grimness and heaviness affect the whole world of the movie.”

The movie trusts its audience to be patient and lets the information about what his going on and what has happened in the past come out gradually. We asked about the jigsaw-puzzle construction of the film. “The initial draft of the script wasn’t going too well. It was started before the accident, before the tragedy, it started at the beginning and it just went chronologically and I got bored very quickly so I started over. I’ve often done this when I don’t know what to do, I just throw out everything and I only leave what I really like. And the first thing that I liked was him a shoveling snow and doing his chores as a handyman. So that’s where I started and I had written all this material about what had happened to him in his past and when I brought that in later as flashbacks when he’s going home, that felt really full and good to me so that had a side benefit of creating a certain amount of suspense. Like what’s with them? What’s going on with him? And doling out the back story in sections I think creates a little bit of interest in what’s happening with him, what happened to him to make him so seemingly detached and strange. I figured if I can follow it, I figure the audience would be able to follow it. I’m not really, really good at guessing what people are going to like or what they’re going to be interested in and so I just to interest myself and hope and figure they will come along with me.”

Affleck gives a performance of enormous sensitivity. “He’s just great and I’ve always wanted to work with him. We’ve been looking for something to do together since 2002 and I just think he’s just a really special actor. I just love him everything he does. He’s just got this strange private inner life. You don’t quite know what’s going on with that but you are interested to find out. He’s really funny, he’s got an amazing depth, he is great to work with, he’s really thorough and it just breaks your heart to watch him I think in this movie.” Lee is not very expressive emotionally, a challenge for an actor. “It’s just too much, there’s more pain than a person can express or endure and every time I had him finally cracked , it felt false to me because I just don’t think he can afford to do that. I think it becomes undone after he gets himself beaten up and when he is sitting on the sofa crying, I think that’s the most he can do, kind of just let himself be undone, but I don’t think there is an eruption coming from him because it’s too much. He is warding off too much distress. So I think that’s why it just always felt like it was false to me or too on the nose or something. I mean early drafts of the script I had him pull over to the side of the road when he is driving to town and cry in the car and I was just like, ‘No, I would do that — I cry in commercials — but he is in a lot more pain than I am and he can’t afford to do that.'”

Michelle Williams, who has a small but memorable role as Lee’s ex-wife Randy, “does like to ask a lot of questions and I really like that because I like to try to answer the questions and I like to ask them myself. So we talked about the relationship when the marriage is going well, we talked about just generally sort of person she was, we talked a lot and she did a lot of work on her own about the difference between the present and the past for Randy, the past and the Randy in the present. She worked out all that stuff about her costume and her hair in consultation with me but she sent me photographs. Her haircuts might be sound like a superficial approach but this is someone whose life has been destroyed who’s starting over and stepping out. My idea about Randy is she is one of the pretty girls in high school but she really doesn’t care about that so she wears sweatpants and T-shirts, she’s got three kids, she doesn’t have time to like doll up and she has a great, really good relationship with her husband so she’s just lying in bed with a cold. And then we discussed that after her life is undone and she comes back she doesn’t have that kind of self-assurance anymore, so she is more nervous, so she needs a little bit more of armor when she goes out. So she gets her hair done, she wears makeup now and she has a nice coat and she’s just much less relaxed and that’s a real profound change based on a really devastating tragedy that she’s getting around but she’s also someone who is trying to start over and is able to do that, not that she’s going to be able to put it behind her but she’s at least able to move forward. So, it was great having those discussions with her because she is so creative and so thoughtful and so empathetic and she really worked so hard on these small scenes. She just shows up at a set and just gives it everything. And it was really freaky because we’d be working and Michelle would come and give it everything and go away and then we’d be working some more and then like two days later and give it all. I mean it’s very impressive, I love her.”

The city in the title is, as its name shows, on the ocean, and the water is important to the story. An early flashback scene shows Lee, his brother (Kyle Chandler) and his nephew having a lot of fun fishing on a boat. “The ocean doesn’t suddenly turn into mud when something bad happens to you. It is still very beautiful there. That’s one of the problems for Lee because he used to love it and now it’s agony for him. It’s also says something about the music that I think lifts the perspective of the movie a bit above the ground and maybe, to me it’s like you’re driving and you are focused and you don’t notice that there’s this big blue sky overhead and it is there and so occasionally you just see it again. I didn’t set out to do that but I think that’s one of the things the music does.”

He talked about the decision to have a resolution that is imperfect and messy, not the usual movie ending of hope and redemption. “I find people really responding to just that. There are a lot of good movies about that but we all know there are lot of really sickening sentimental movies about that that are essentially as fictional as lies, emotional lies. We all know that life doesn’t work like that. And I think it’s an insult to people’s intelligence to be preaching to them how they are not dealing with some tragedy properly. I think people are a little bit sick of that. When it’s done well it’s beautiful but when it’s done in the same old routinized sentimental way it’s kind of insulting. People go through really horrible stuff in life and I don’t think it’s so terrible to put some of it on the screen in a way that is truthful. People find that to be somewhat helpful to see your own experience reflected honestly by these performances makes people feels less isolated. I hope for that.”

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