Interview: Natalie Portman on “A Tale of Love and Darkness”

Posted on August 31, 2016 at 3:44 pm

Oscar-winning actress Natalie Portman wrote, directed, and stars in “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” based on the international best-selling memoir by Amos Oz. It was a pleasure to speak to her about the challenges of adapting the book and directing a child actor.

What do we learn from the troubled but tender relationship between Amos and his mother?

The film and the book are very much about what happens when expectations don’t line up with reality. And I think that a lot of the things that they might tell young people about what happens once you have a job or once you go to college or once you get married, these things are like the way to happiness or something, once you’ve got to those realities and you achieved those whether you call them goals or expectations and then they are different than you expected them to be, and then dealing with those differences can be one of the most challenging things in life.

In the film, the child’s father is fascinated at the derivation of and connection between words, possibly because it takes place at a time when modern conversational Hebrew was being invented.

It’s a really fascinating time in history because not only was this country of Israel being created by a group of refugees, which I’m not sure has happened before, but also they were revising the language as you said, a language that has been spoken purely in a religious context, in a Biblical or liturgical context for hundreds of years and then all of a sudden it needed to be used for everyday usage and needed to be updated rapidly. And so it’s really fascinating seeing how they came up with new words, what they drew from. Ohad talked about his uncle in the book who was one of the architects of modern Hebrew, creating new words, from biblical words and he created the word for “shirt” and he says in the book, “If my uncle hadn’t invented the word for shirt we would still be saying, ‘I put on my coat of many colors this morning.'” And it’s really amazing how they introduced these new words and got them really accepted into everyday usage. And what an exciting time to be a writer, too, because you could literally invent your language as you were inventing your story.

You began acting when you were very young and now in this movie are working with a very young actor. What did you learn from your experiences as a child performer that helped you direct this actor?

I think the most important thing was that when I was a kid I felt that everyone on set made sure that the environment felt like playing more than working and I wanted to repeat that for Amir because the film is quite serious in tone. The atmosphere should always be positive for him so I really tried to make sure that everyone was very calm on set and between takes we would goof around and make jokes and not have it be a stressful environment for him.

You have worked with so many outstanding directors, very different directors in terms of their approach and their style. What were some of the things that you tried to take from your experiences and use as a director?

I have been lucky to work with so many people who I admire so much and I took a lot from many different directors I worked with. From Darren Aronofsky, I saw how he worked with each actor really individually. He would do different things with different actors to elicit their performances from them which I thought was really smart because everyone needs something different. And from Terrence Malick, I saw that you don’t have to play by the rules at all. You just need to make movies the way that you make them and the way you want to tell them. And then Mike Nichols just always always says, “Keep reminding yourself what story you are telling, where you are in the story and claim the big moment.”

What do we learn from the scene at the end that gives us a glimpse of the main character as an adult?

The book actually deals with many different time periods including the present. I felt that it was important for me to show where he ends up because he did and end up fulfilling his mother’s dreams in a way by becoming this pioneer by becoming a writer. After all of her storytelling, somehow his mother’s absence turned him into the man he became. He was so influenced by her but also he gave himself his own name. Ohad means strong in Hebrew and it.s part of remaking himself.

How did you use your character’s clothing to tell her story?

I actually was lucky enough to have the great designer Alber Elbaz who formerly designed at Lanvin for the past ten years and is originally Israeli also. He did all of my costumes for the film. We really wanted to tell a story through the wardrobe. I like this European elegance that they had but also poverty. They don’t have a lot and she’s wearing the same clothes over and over again. But they’re beautiful clothes that she had from Europe. She had three outfits. Also the clothes helped tell the passage of time. We go from a more 40’s silhouette to a more 50’s silhouette which helps us understand the time that has gone by.

What were you looking for in the movie’s score?

The music was an amazing part of the film to do and to learn. It’s actually really surprising to me how hard it was because I really love music and I’ve always known very specifically the kind of music that I want. But the problem with this film, the music that I felt fit emotionally, when you put it next to the actual emotion on the film, it kind of doubled the emotion and was too much. And so I realized that you have to actually had to go against, and again, it can’t be the exact same emotion you’re going for. I worked with a really close friend, the composer Nick Britell who was amazing. He would just sit with me and try hundred different things because I really needed to hear it to make sure it was right. He wrote so many beautiful pieces for the film. I’m so proud of the work that he did and he added immeasurably to the film.

What do you want this film to tell people about Israel?

I don’t intend to be educational on this film. It’s really very much about a family. But I think if there’s anything that movies can do it is that they can remind us that people and places that we might not know about or that we might have preconceived notions about or even prejudices against, they can make us relate to someone as a human and hopefully you just see them in a different way. A movie can help you relate to the emotion and it might of someone that you might never meet your whole life.

“Southside With You” Interview — The People Who Made the Obama Date Movie

Posted on August 25, 2016 at 8:00 am

The most charming and romantic film of the year is the lovely “Southside With You,” the story of the First Couple’s first date. Michelle Robinson was recently out of law school herself when she was asked to be mentor/supervisor of a law student named Barack Obama. She agreed to go with him to a community meeting and insisted that it was not a date. But it ended with their first kiss, at a Baskin-Robbins that now has a plaque commemorating the historic event. “Southside With You,” like “Before Sunrise,” is the story of two bright, curious, vulnerable, committed young people getting to know one another and falling in love. Three journalists spoke to the people who made the film, writer/director Richard Tanne, and stars Tika Sumpter and Parker Sawyers.

Tanne said, “I was just really struck by the two of them as a couple, just the way they looked at each other, the way that they flirted, there was something authentic about it and vibrant and even a little sexy. I think that that is a rare thing in people and I think it’s an even rarer thing in public figures. So when I did end up reading about their first date, it just got me really excited because the conflict was: she’s not interested and he has one day to win her over. That felt like a really good romantic conflict to hang a movie onto. Not to mention there’s another aspect of it that we know what they went on to accomplish together, and the history that they have made, but the two characters don’t, so there is a dramatic irony running through the entire movie. Whatever your relationship is to the Obamas you’re going to bring that to it as well. And there’s a tiny bit of almost suspense in the fact that if something had just gone wrong on that date where would we be today? It would be a different world.”

Sumpter and Sawyers were careful to give performances, not impersonations. Sumpter said “We definitely when we started this process Rich and I said, ‘We do not want to impersonate; we want to embody the essence of who they are,’ and so for me I took the whole ‘Okay this is Michelle Obama’ off and went back to the girl who went to a magnet high school, who was told no, that she couldn’t get into Yale, just back to that family, the essence of her family, her parents who worked really hard, and I related it back to my life and said, ‘okay a lot of girls can relate to her’ and that’s why she’s so accessible. Even in the dancing scene, with the drumming, it’s like look at Michelle now, she’s dancing with Beyoncé! So I read books, Invisible Man which we thought they obviously would read in school and then also her brother’s book A Game of Character really helped me to see who she is and who she was during that time. So that informed me a lot about their family, like how tight they were and how they gave those kids so much confidence that they could do anything they really wanted in the world, even if the world told them they couldn’t, so that was part of my process….I think what intrigued me and what I really got from her, I just felt like she didn’t apologize for who she was. She didn’t dumb herself down. She spoke her mind and I think a lot of the time women are constantly saying ‘I’m sorry’ for the things they shouldn’t be sorry for or trying to dim their lights so that somebody else can feel greater. And it’s like ‘No, if I’m going to be here you come up here and we see each other.’ And so that inspires me to this day because I’m like ‘Wait, I can be just as smart, I can say what I need to need to say’ without people looking at me like ‘she is such a bitch or whatever.’ It’s like ‘No, nope, I am actually smart and I’m speaking my mind like you would.’ So I think that inspired me and intrigued me for the movie and in life.”

Sawyers said, “I took Richard’s notes before I sent in my tape for the audition. He told me, ‘Just be a guy, trying to get a girl,’ that’s it. And so obviously I worked on Barack Obama as we all know him now and then dialed that back and then overwhelmingly used Richard’s notes just to be a guy talking to a girl. He’s really trying to charm her. He knows he is going to graduate from Harvard and do well, he knows he’s working in a law firm, he knows these things in his life, he knows he is probably going to make a lot of money but he doesn’t know if he can get this girl if he doesn’t act right and really put his best foot forward and so for me that was the goal in that film…So to normalize how I think and just to realize how normal they are, that was the biggest thing.”

As the couple discuss their families, we see the contrast between Michelle’s loving, stable home and Barack’s absent father. Sumpter said, “I think sometimes life brings you the person that needs to teach you something about yourself and I think she came from such a stable background and he didn’t, full-family wise. I think she was a little bit wound up, like she wasn’t used to telling people about MS and all that stuff, so there’s something about him that made her feel comfortable enough to speak about that. There is an empathy there as you go on in the movie the way he speaks about his father. There’s some kind of connection there where she felt comfortable enough and I think that affected her, it enabled her to share about her dad and what’s going on and her dad was a huge influence in her life.” Sawyers added, “I think she helped him understand what a father could be. What he missed out on. And he enjoyed hearing that. And then perhaps looking forward to the future he thought. ‘I can be a good father even though I didn’t have one.’ I listened to his interview with Marc Maron, and in it President Obama does say that Michelle had the family, the roots, not a perfect family but a great support system. That’s one of the things that attracted him to her and he also mentioned that he was late like all the time and she had to stop him once and say, ‘Listen, my dad had MS and we would get to my brother’s basketball games two hours before so he could walk the stairs. He didn’t want to sit in the handicapped section, and he wanted to walk up the stairs by himself and he was always on time, so stop being late.’ He told that story.”

Tanne said first and foremost was the love story “and to try my hand at a movie where I could be in an unfolding mood over the course of a day. I love movies that take place over the course of one day. One of them being “Do The Right Thing,” which takes place on a hot summer day. And that’s one of my favorite movies, obviously the Linklater movies and then those were sort of a gateway drug to the Éric Rohmer films where he invented the romantic walk and talk and philosophical ambling movie. The opportunity to show all the little moments between two people that most romantic movies leave out.
I wanted moments on the cutting room floor, that’s what I wanted in this movie to be. So we were cutting it together from the kind of quiet minutiae that other movies might ignore. I really like that. And the great things about these two actors is that with Tika, she almost could be a silent film star, like a Lillian Gish but now. And I think one of the great discoveries of the movie is her facial reactions and her eyes and the way that she responds to things. In a way I wish I could go back and rewrite the script and have less dialogue. The more we made the movie the less the dialogue was important and just the way that they were interacting. Parker for this being his first leading man role in a movie ever, Tika has been leading on TV shows and other movies but for him it was the first time out and he was able to meet her at that level and they were able to really exist in the moment. And for a movie like this that’s what it needs to be, you need to find those moments. They would just sit with each other and we could just roll the camera and wait for them to react and have those little moments where she looks at him and he is not aware that she is looking. And then she looks away and he looks back. And so they found those things organically, some of them we worked on, some of them we said, ‘Hey this is a turning point where emotionally where you are starting to let your guard down,’ but for the most part it was all found organically in the moment. So again the fact that he was able to do that his first time out, the fact that she’s kind of a master at it, it was really nice to have that.”

A turning point in the movie is when Michelle sees Barack speak to a community group that has had a setback and is feeling disappointed and let down. Tanne spoke about the challenge of writing a speech for a man who is known as one of the greatest speakers of our time. “It wasn’t too daunting because by the time I got to that scene in the movie, which is the middle of the film, and I wrote it in order, so by then I was really familiar with the characters. I knew who he was at this point in the story, I knew who she was at the point in the story and the underlying goal was, he’s got to impress her with this speech. Now there is a duality there because it’s not like he wouldn’t have been there if Michelle wasn’t there that day but it’s a benefit that she is. So he may have even been showing off or hitting it harder that day because she was there. So I knew how powerful it needed to be but I also was aware that he was a little bit rough around the edges, not as fully formed yet and I was familiar with the Altgeld Gardens at that time. I had done my homework and I just felt like I had a good sense of what a meeting like that could have been like. So without sounding too artsy fartsy it sort of just wrote itself. And then in doing it, Parker actually came to me before we shot it, maybe a few weeks before, and he was like ‘I think we should start working in some of the more practiced Obama mannerisms because this is him in a different setting.’ And it’s public speaking. He brought up how there was a video of Obama at age 29 on the Harvard campus defending a professor at the rally. He was already sort of fully formed as a public speaker at that point. So we figured out this was a year earlier, so that was really the first point in the movie where we actively went after some of the mannerisms.”

Sawyers said that he practiced the speech, even buying his visiting sister a spa day to get some time alone to rehearse in his hotel room. “It was one of those things where if Barack speaks to the people the way he wants to speak to people to move them that will indeed move Michelle because she would see who he is. So I wasn’t necessarily playing for Michelle in the way I acted, it was more like, if I just do what I do then she’ll see I’m not this bad guy.” Tanne added, “We must have shot that scene from seven or eight different setups all the way through from the beginning to the end, what was that a 15-minute speech? Something like that? And he didn’t trip up once on a single word, I mean it was remarkable.”

The first stop on the date is an exhibit that features the work of artist Ernie Barnes. Tannes explained, “I couldn’t find any information about what art they saw that day so I just love Ernie Barnes’ art and I took a risk in writing the scene to his art because you never know if you’re going to get the rights. Luckily the Ernie Barnes Family Trust read the script and they really responded to the script and they’ve been incredible from the time we shot all the way through letting us use the imagery in the trailer, giving us the works for the end credits, works that aren’t even seen in the movie. I’ve always loved his artwork which I first saw in Good Times and that’s how it all came about. The exhibit they visit is an Afrocentric exhibit so there are other artists there but the bulk of the dialogue could very easily derive from just looking at the Ernie Barnes’ work because it covers the spectrum of black life. And so it led to them talking about their family members and their experiences as kids and it just prompted all this really interesting discussion from the two of them.” Sawyers agreed. “It was a perfect inspiration.”

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Interview: Chad Hartigan on “Morris from America”

Posted on August 20, 2016 at 11:28 pm

Being 13 is agonizing because of the upheaval that makes you feel like an outsider from kids, from adults, and from yourself. In “Morris from America,” the title character is a 13-year-old who is an outsider. He and his father have just moved to Germany, where everything is different and he does not know anyone. He cannot speak the language, he is younger than the other kids, and he and his father are the only black people in the community, and, it seems, the entire country. Craig Robinson and Markees Christmas give outstanding performances as father and son. Writer/director Chad Hartigan has created a sensitive, funny, poignant film and it was a pleasure to talk to him.

I love that conversation between Morris and his father at the end of the film. Tell me a little bit where that came from.

It’s probably a little bit of a fantasy. I don’t have kids myself and so if I’m imagining what I might be like as a dad of course I’m going to come up with a sympathetic and wise version. I really like the idea of a dad who is really trying his best and a kid who is deep down a good kid. Two things that I think most people would find inherently undramatic but that I thought you could still have a dramatic relationship between them.

I understand that the movie is in some way sort of autobiographical, that you lived abroad when you were Morris’s age. Is that right?

Yes but that’s kind of actually maybe the least autobiographical thing about it. I did live in Cyprus until I was 12 or 13 and then we moved to the States. So it’s almost a reverse scenario. My mom is American and I have always had an American accent and I went to an international school in Cyprus so I was very well accepted there. In the States it took me a long time to make friends but no one ever thought or assumed I was a foreigner, so I kind of got away with it a little bit. The movie is autobiographical more in the sense of the specific things that happened to me during my painful adolescence and falling in love for the first time with a girl.

The bad hip hop in the film is what I wrote when I was young. I really wrote that when I was 12 and my teacher found it and gave it to my mom and I got in big trouble. When I was collecting anecdotes from my life I thought, “Oh, wouldn’t it have been funny if I got in trouble because these are so bad instead of what I actually got into trouble for, because of the content.” But when he raps well at the end that we had to outsource to someone who was better than me.

How do you find a person that age who is self-aware enough to be able to give such a sensitive portrayal?

It was extremely hard. It took months and a lot of looking and that’s also the quality that’s hard to kind of gauge. You can never really expect that one is going to come in and nail it from a technical acting standpoint so you have to be looking for other things and a lot of the times you are not even sure what those things are yourself. You are maybe just looking to be surprised in some way. Markees had a very stiff actual audition but he surprised me with the questions that he asked. I always asked the kids if there’s anything they wanted to know before we started, about if they thought of anything reading the scenes and he just asked the questions that in their simplicity made it seem like he was thinking about this in a much different way than all the other kids.

How do you make him comfortable with some of the sensitive and vulnerable scenes? He is so natural.

In January I did a call back with Markees and the call back was still a little bit stiff. I wasn’t totally sure if he was the one, to be honest, but we were going to shoot the movie in June and we had already spent so many months casting that I was faced with the decision of either keep waiting and hope that a kid walks in the door and blows my mind or cast someone now and use the time from January to June and work with him. And I decided to do that with Markees. I really just went to his house about once a week and not to rehearse or anything but just to hang out and for him to get a feel of who I was and build a relationship and to meet his friends. I think that in the end that was really was essential because on the set in a foreign place I was the one person that he was most familiar and most comfortable with.

It was a great pleasure to see Craig Robinson in a more serious role. He gives a beautiful performance.

He wasn’t the first person I saw in the role either, but sometimes the movie god is looking out for you and giving you what you don’t always know you need. We had another actor we were talking to and that broke down and then someone brought up Craig and I was like, “I love him but can he do this? Can he do the German, the monologue?” I wasn’t sure but I got to meet him and talk with him and I asked David Gordon Green who directed “Pineapple Express.” He spoke very highly of Craig. So that was another case where I was like, “Well he is willing to take a chance on me, I should be willing to take a chance on him.” We did and I’m very happy that we did.

What made you decide to set the film in Germany?

I knew I wanted to make a film in Europe just because I’m a dual citizen and feel like it’s a part of my identity that I want to take more advantage of. And then when I came up with the coming of age story I was like, “Well, since I lived there as a teen this one might make sense,” Germany was the most recent country I had visited so I started writing it for there. The more I put into it the more it the more it just felt like the right fit. They all speak English there. I tried to learn for the movie, I tried to really do a crash course and I did learn enough to get by ordering at restaurants, that kind of stuff but it was a fact that they all spoke enough English that’s that made it easy to work there.

There is a moment in your film when Inga has a difficult message to deliver about Morris and the father’s reaction to her is very surprising. Tell me a little bit about what you wanted to achieve with that interaction.

I believe that good screenwriting and the hardest kind of screenwriting is when two characters are at odds with each other or arguing and the allegiance of the audience can shift between them or that one half of the audience can be in one character’s side on the other vice a versa because it’s much more common and easier to just have one person clearly be right and that person is sort of the surrogate for the right. But I like the fact that some people think that she overreacts by even coming there in the first place and bringing this up and that some people think that he overreacts by really shutting her down and telling her to mind her own business. I’m always just trying to find a way to make sure that not one person is 100 percent right when I write a scene like that.

What advice do you give young filmmakers who come to you for help?

I like to tell young film makers, especially ones that are just graduating now, that there is no rush to either make films or if you do want to make films, to worry about them being successful. I really feel like I was lucky to come out of film school at a time when there wasn’t an intense pressure to be so productive and so successful so young. I just think that it really takes a lot of time, a lot of failure and also the more you live your life not trying to make films the more you’ll have to pull from when you do make films. So I think that if people can just have patience it really is a virtue in this career.

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Interview: Ira Sachs on “Little Men”

Posted on August 13, 2016 at 6:35 pm

Ira Sachs is one of my favorite filmmakers and one of my favorite people to interview. So it was a very great pleasure to speak to him about his new film, Little Men.

The last time we spoke, you were still a fairly new father. The parents in this film really struggle with their middle school children, especially when they decide to give their parents the silent treatment.

I actually think about the challenges of what it is to be a good parent and that’s something I totally empathize with Greg Kinnear’s character in “Little Men.” And I had thought even the last couple of days how challenging it is not to impose yourself and your own experience and your own ambitions on your children. So what I hope is that my kids in middle school can talk to me and I can listen, but it seems really a hard one. Like to maintain conversation with your kids, to be able to continue to be in dialogue with them. It’s what Greg Kinnear is not successful at in in this film on some level and why he regrets his own choices as a parent. He tried to cover up the tough stuff and I think kids pick up too much for you to do that. When I see parents who are not tortured by the teenage years is because somehow they were able to establish some version of that, some intimacy. Intimacy with your kids is not a given. And probably also to let your kids have their privacy, like not assume that everything is part of your story, and let them have their own stories, that’s what I think my parents did really well.

Tell me about my favorite scene in the movie which was that fantastic apparently improvised scene in the theater class.

Thank you. And thank those actors and kids. Michael Barbieri who plays Tony had gone to the Lee Strasburg Institute to study acting from when he was nine years old and when we shot the film he was 13. That is his acting teacher so they had this kind of warm familiarity. What was important to me in that scene was that the character Tony, his dream is to go to Laguardia High School for the performing arts as an actor and I wanted the audience to know how talented he was so that they could hope for him that he could achieve his dreams. I will tell you that Michael Barbieri has been accepted to Laguardia High School so he will be going there in the fall. That scene reminds me actually of “The Carol Burnett Show” in the sense that the wall drops for a moment and you feel totally included in what’s going on in the performance. I saw clapping during that scene is that that scene really lets the audience in, in a really entertaining way.

And your husband went there, right?

My husband also went there, yes. In a way art has the ability to transform lives in many different ways including a shift in kind of class experience that it can give access to. I

I loved it when Tony said he was reading the Eugene O’Neill play “Ah Wilderness.”

I’m glad you noticed that because I wrote that line and I think it’s one of the funniest in the movie personality. It’s the seriousness of kids. I was a theater kid. I was involved in the Memphis theater growing up and I remember how seriously we took ourselves and how we wanted to be good and all that. Michael has had a very interesting year since this film premiered. He was cast in “The Dark Tower” with Matthew McConaughey and he was just cast in the “Spider-Man” Reboot playing Spider-Man’s best friend. So he’s gone from never acting in a movie to spending eight weeks on a Marvel set and that’s because there’s something inherent, some star talent there.

Greg Kinnear’s character is an actor appearing in a production of Chekhov’s “The Seagull.” Why choose that play as a counterpoint to your story?

Chekhov is the playwright who gives me the permission to focus on the intricacies of everyday life and believe that if I do so with enough rigor and compassion that the stories will be monumental. Really I think that I don’t make small films, I make big films but I made them about the intimate things that happen between people in their everyday lives.

I like the way your films have nice people who have mostly good intentions and but who end up hurting each other. You do it in a very balanced way. And there’s a lot about real estate too I noticed in this one and in your last film, “Love is Strange.” That’s another areas where you Chekhov are alike.

Yes, totally. That’s also Henry James and Edith Wharton and Shakespeare. I mean the questions of home and property and holding on to what they have are the stuff of literature forever really. Oedipus has to go walking, he’s thrown out. These questions are timeless and meaningful. The moral ambiguity I would say, is something that I tried to construct from the screenplay forward. It was important not to stack the cards in anyone’s favor. So the landlord would not be super rich and the tenants would not be super poor. Yhey were both in fact pretty much middle-class families that are fighting for whatever space is left. And I think that creates the kind of suspenseful situation for the audience because they don’t know who to root for.

What I love about Paulina Garcia’s performance is she doesn’t shy away from the ugly, she doesn’t try to sugarcoat her character. This is a woman who is really pushed into the corner and just trying to fight. She’s also trying to protect her son and her livelihood. And she just continues to make some choices, and she continues to make the wrong choices strategically. I have great empathy for that. She used the tools that she has. She is also an actress who is able to sort of inject drama into a scene, you know as soon as you see her that something is off in the story and I think you’ll get unsettled and that’s what the film wants to do because everything unravels in the course of the story.

In the middle of the movie, we see a scene from the Chekhov play. What it was like to essentially direct Chekhov in the middle of all this?

Ira: To be honest it was not the same as what I wanted to achieve in the acting class, where I really wanted you to know this kid had brilliance as an actor. That was not so important for Chekhov. I feel like every small production of Chekhov in a basement in New York City is not stellar but I wanted it to be a good and respectful and I wanted you to understand his investment in it was real and serious.

I think that came across, I thought the detail that really nailed that was the set. It looked exactly like a thoughtful, creative, no budget set. A lot of artistic integrity behind it and no money.

And that’s exactly what it was. We didn’t have a lot of money to put into that scene but wanted it to be very good.

The credits show you’ve got an army of associate producers.

Most of them are people who generously supported the film with their investment. So it’s part of the way that I was able to continue to make films and also to do so truly and independently so that I don’t have one single financer. Instead I have a group of investors who come to the film with lots of different reasons for being involved and believe in me and my autonomy creatively. So it allows me to make very instinctual films.

I’ve begun to think it’s a dress shop like the one in the story and the film can serve as a metaphor to the place of personal and art cinema in our culture in the sense that the numbers don’t really work if you consider capitalism the defining arbiter of value. But if you consider value to be a number of other things including aesthetic, political, social, artistic, then there is a real need and purpose for films like this. But it’s a challenge within the larger structure to hold on.

I run a nonprofit called Queer Art. It was kind of a hobby for six years and then two years ago we formally began to file the 401(c)(3). We support LGBT artists in all disciplines, writers and filmmakers and poets and musicians and really what I believe is if you set up the apparatus which can support the individual artist that’s as significant as a building or putting money in any one film. It’s like a larger apparatus that kind of works the kind of help protect individuality. That’s why it is important for me that films like this find an audience because I think when people see the film they connect to it in a really personal way.

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Interview: Mike Birbiglia and Gillian Jacobs of “Don’t Think Twice”

Posted on August 2, 2016 at 3:51 pm

Writer/director/star Mike Birbiglia calls his new film, “Don’t Think Twice,” “The Big Chill” of improv. Like the all-star 80’s classic, it is a bittersweet and often funny story of the stresses old friends face as the hopefulness and sense of endless possibilities of their 20’s hits the reality of their 30’s. Keegan-Michael Key plays one member of a small improv group called “The Commune.” When he gets a chance for breakthrough success on a “Saturday Night Live”-type comedy series, it forces the rest of the group to think about what matters to them and whether they will be able to achieve their dreams.

Birbiglia and co-star Gillian Jacobs spoke about the film in an interview.

The Commune leads off their show by asking the audience who had the worst day and using the details of their story to provide the premise for improvising a scene. Where does that come from?

MB: I do an improv show in New York called Mike Birbiglia’s Dream at the UCB Theater. I came up with that prompt one day as an idea because I feel like we can prove in real time the old trope that comedy is tragedy plus time. We had one the other night at the Del Close Marathon where a girl, 19 years old, said. ‘I just realized that my dad was cheating on my mom with prostitutes because we share an iCloud account.’ And so we were all empathetic and sympathetic and trying to create scenes that were respectful of that but also were comedic scenes and it was hard. For about 15 minutes there were not a lot of laughs at all and then eventually we found the laughter, and she found the laughter. Tammy who plays Lindsay in the film, was in that show. She called me the next day and she said, “Wow! That show yesterday, that was wild.The woman who made the suggestion thanked you on Twitter so you should respond.” That was really rewarding. We have to fund that hinge point, that pivot point.

GJ: I remember one show we did at UCB during rehearsals. Someone told us about his friend who had died recently and he was a very young man. For the first couple minutes there was nothing funny but then you realize, “Well, we’re not documentarians.” You’re not telling the story of that person’s life. You’re using that situation as an inspiration. Once people give themselves permission to let themselves be free to associate around any detail in the story, some absurd coincidence or detail about it, and build from there, maybe rather than tackling trying to make raw pain funny then you can sort of laugh around the incident as well.

MB: But also like in the film the scene where something happens to Bill’s dad and they are driving home and they are joking about it is an example of how with friends you can joke about things that are really sad and have it be cathartic. And I think that that can happen in theater also, I think it can happen in film also. You can express love by calling out the truth out of the situation as opposed to dancing around it.

Because The Commune is built on teamwork — the last thing they say to each other before going on stage is “I’ve got your back” — the struggle with feelings of jealousy and competition is especially painful.

MB: I wrote this thing on my wall early in the writing process: ‘Art is socialism but life is capitalism.’ It’s not in the film because it would be too on the nose. One of the guiding principles in the film is that in a lot of ways what you do with the group you’re collaborating with is more idealistic than the actuality.

GJ: I don’t come from an improv background but I really relate to the story in other ways. I went to Juilliard and in your third and fourth years of school there, agents and casting directors and managers start to come and it is really kind of what happens in this movie where some people start getting a lot of appointments and other people don’t. You try to sort of keep it quiet but they would put these yellow envelopes on the board and everybody knew that that was a meeting request and it would start to shift the dynamics because up until then it’s all about the group and much like the improv world. But then you realize you are all about to be set forth into the commercial world of this business and not everybody’s going to have the same career and even if somebody is deemed more talented within the confines of the school it doesn’t mean they’re going to have the most successful career. So I’ve just now start to remember how that starts to affect all of your dynamic. After you do a showcase for agency managers and casting directors and you get this folder and some people had a folder that was thick and some people had a folder that was thin. And there’s no fairness to it because it’s not a fair business.

MB: In a lot of ways, that’s what this movie is about. Life is unfair and improv is a great metaphor of that. My wife said that when she saw my improv group one, “It’s funny that everyone’s equal on stage but offstage that person is a movie star, that person is on “Saturday Night Live,” that person lives on an air mattress in Queens in a one bedroom with five dudes. And I thought that really hit me hard, I was like, “Yes, that’s a movie,” that’s a nice tension to explore.

What the difference between what makes somebody good at improv versus what makes them good at a more structured traditional theater performance?

GJ: I think in theater it demands that you say the same words every night and make it feel fresh and new. Improv demands that you be operating at the highest level of your creativity intelligence. So these two skills are both very important but I’ve seen people who are very skilled at one area struggle with the other. Either improvisers feel constrained by having to say the same thing over and over again or people who are really good at doing scripted work feel intimidated and exposed doing improvisation.

MB: You’ve got to remember that improvisers are writers and actors and directors all simultaneously. That’s what’s happening in real time because you’re writing on your feet, and you are acting out the words and you are directing what the staging is. You’re deciding what staging is. When I’m taking the subway to my improv shows I will be writing in my notebook different actions that I see people doing on the train whether it’s eating yogurt or looking at where their stop is, or tripping or holding a baby. It’s not preparing scenes and ideas as much as it is stoking your brain to think observantly. Just to place observations in your head, so that they are available somewhere.

Why is ‘yes and’ such an important part of improv?

GJ: Without agreement you just have people arguing. I think that it is important to establish a world of place for the characters in improv and there is nothing to be gained from disagreeing about that. So you have to establish the principle that if some person establishes one thing we’re all going to go along with it and that we are all building from it. Also it is important to stop being critical and judging ideas as good or bad because I think if somebody doesn’t have a lot of experience you worry their idea is going to be bad, it’s not going to be good enough, if not going to be active enough and so you can start to think critically about people’s suggestions or what they bring to it but once you get out of that and think whatever they come up with is the right thing right now and so I’m just going to build on it just makes everything so much easier and better. But I think we are used to being critical and evaluating ideas.

MB: And our fear leads us to say no all the time.

GJ: Or you came up with an idea and you can’t let it go because you think your idea is the right one and the good one. You thought you were coming in as a duck, you thought it was very clever that you were a duck, and they thought that you are a dog and now you are a dog. And now you are dog and it’s better that you are a dog. I also have learned as an actor, this ties in the principles of improv, sometimes someone gives a piece of instruction and my first reaction is “I don’t want to do that.” I’ve always learned that every time I just say yes and go for it something happens. Whether it’s what the intent of the direction was or not or something new happens. It’s just remaining open to other people’s ideas. And I think Keegan-Michael Key is in such a playful open place as a performer that he makes it fun to come along for the ride.

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