Tag: bill murray

Interview: Ted Melfi of “St. Vincent”

Posted on October 19, 2014 at 12:55 pm

Writer/director Ted Melfi got Bill Murray to appear in his first film by calling him. Murray does not have an agent or a manager. He has an 800 number. And Melfi left message after message until Murray finally called back and asked Melfi to pick him up at the airport. Apparently his pitch skills (and driving skills) impressed Murray because he stars as the title character in Melfi’s “St. Vincent,” as a bitter Vietnam vet who drinks and gambles too much and has sex with a pregnant stripper (Naomi Watts), and, desperate for money, agrees to babysit the son of his new neighbor, a single mom played by Melissa McCarthy. I talked to Melfi about the film.

st.-vincent-movie-poster-9I heard about the unusual path to getting Bill Murray, and want to know how you cast Melissa McCarthy for what is essentially a dramatic role.

Once Bill Murray signed on, everything kind of became a lot easier. Everyone wants to work with Bill. And my first choice for the role of Maggie was Melissa. And I told the producer Jenno Topping “I really want to try get Melissa McCarthy,” and she said, “Oh my God, I think that’s brilliant.” And so we told Harvey Weinstein and he said, “I don’t see it. I don’t see it at all.” And he’s like ”I don’t think it is going to work, the movie is a drama with some comedic moments and she is a purely broad comedic actor,” and I said to Harvey. “She’s an actor, first and foremost.” “I am not going to lie, I just don’t see it.” And I said, “Well, what if I get her to audition?” And he said, “Well, sure if you can get her to audition, well of course we will look at it.” And so I called Melissa then I said, “Melissa,” I said, “I don’t know, I said “Who am I to ask you this, who am I at all, but I really want you to play this part and I think you really want to do it too, but do you think you’d be willing to audition and go on tape for it?” And she said, she actually said, “F**k yeah.”

On a Friday, she came over from her show and I taped her doing a couple of scenes. And I sent them to Harvey Friday night and Monday morning my phone rings and it is Harvey, and he goes, “Ted, I don’t say this often and you might not ever hear it again, but you were right and I was wrong. She is a revelation. I can’t take my eyes off her. I can’t see anyone else in this part. She makes the movie for me.”

Tell me about working with Jaeden Lieberher, who is so good in the film as Oliver. How did you find him and what were the challenges of directing a child in a story with very adult material?

I have done a lot of commercials and I have worked with a lot of kids over the years. I really have a good connection with kids, I have two kids myself. So I don’t have any problems with working with child actors. I find that child actors are the purest form of acting because
they are not spoiled yet. They are not ruined yet. And so, I was looking forward to working with the kid. The biggest problem with Oliver in this film is finding him. It was so hard to find. It took a sixteen hundred auditions, sixteen hundred kids across the country.

I think that is where comedy lives, that is when you do things that are completely inappropriate and then you make them appropriate, you make them okay. But Jaeden’s mom, her name is Angie, she is just this fantastic lady and they are just game for everything. It is not about money or desperation or pleasing you. It is literally about the art. Jaeden actually gets mad when he has a day off, he is like, “What? I want to be working.” He was born to be an actor.ST. VINCENT

How did you find the determination to keep calling Bill Murray’s 800 number?

My wife says I have what is called happy delusions. I guess I have had this disease for most of my adult life or most of my life in general. It is like I don’t stop. I actually put it in my calendar: “call Bill Murray” every day, every other day, once a week. People think I’m crazy and I guess I am. I am just so persistent, I mean, I don’t know much about myself, only that I am persistent. I am so persistent that it drives people crazy. Maybe it is all OCD, I don’t know, but I just keep going and I keep going, and I keep going. I probably just wore Bill down even if it is to call me back and get a restraining order.

The first time I met him was in the town car driving for three hours from L.A. to the Pechanga Indian Reservation. When I screened the movie for Bill for the first time, we screened the movie on an airplane from Atlanta, Georgia to LAX and then we took a town car to somewhere else. Bill loves travelling. I don’t know if he loves travelling but he’s does it an awful lot so I assume he loves it.

So tell me a little bit about what your concept for the clothes worn by Murray as Vincent.

Ted: Our wardrobe stylist is brilliant. Kasia Walicka-Maimone. She lives in Brooklyn. She does a lot of Wes Anderson’s work. Kasia was saying, “Okay, who is this guy?” And I said, “Kasia, let me give you one thing that I have, that I believe this guy…that encapsulates his entire existence.” So I gave her the only pair of shorts I held on to from college, green camouflage cargo shorts. I said, “That is what I want him to wear.” And she looks at it and says, “Now I know who he is.” And she took that thought and my shorts and she found the shorts and she found a couple of them, and she just rolled with it. And she’s from Brooklyn, and she just found all these vintage shirts and short sleeved shirts that are pit stained and red sweatpants and sandals and flip flops and that hat he wears. And for Daka (the Watts character) she invented something we called chic trash.

What was your inspiration for the film?

The movie is based on two true stories of my life, two inspirations.  Eight years ago my oldest brother died and he was thirty-eight, and it was just kind of totally unbelievable. And he had an eleven-year-old daughter, the mother was not in the picture, so my wife and I adopted her and we moved her from Tennessee to Sherman Oaks where we live, in California and we put her in Notre Dame High School when she was ready for high school and in her sophomore year she goes to a world religion class and in this world religion class, the teacher assigns her this project, find a Catholic saint that inspires you and find someone in your real life that mimics the qualities of that saint and draw a comparison. And so she picks St. Monica of Rochester, the patron saint that adopted children because she just got adopted.  And she picked me. So I said, “That’s a movie.” I couldn’t get it out of my head. It made me feel very proud and happy and it was a very emotional time.

And I said it is not going to be me, it’s going to be an old guy that doesn’t have much to live for anymore. And the second part of the story is like “Who is Vincent. Who was Vincent?” And Vincent was inspired by my father-in-law, my wife’s father who was a drunk Vietnam vet who abandoned all his kids. He abandoned my wife when she was nine, smoked, drinks, gambles – just not a good guy.  Twenty five years later my wife is in a psychology seminar in Los Angeles, in one of those “Find Your Life” weekend seminars? And the assignment is to get complete with the people in your life – which means, make amends.  And so she sent a Dear Dad letter to this address she found in the white pages. Two weeks later the phone rings. He says, “Kim, it’s your dad.” And then she just starts crying. And from that moment on they became father/daughter, for the last ten years of his life, she even helped him through his cancer when he died and he became a saint for her and she became a saint for him. And that was Vincent for me, that guy.

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St. Vincent

Posted on October 16, 2014 at 5:29 pm

B
Lowest Recommended Age: Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating: Rated PG-13 For mature thematic material including sexual content, alcohol and tobacco use, and for language
Profanity: Very strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs: Drinking, smoking, alcohol abuse
Violence/ Scariness: Car accident, stroke, sad death, bullies, fighting
Diversity Issues: Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters: October 17, 2014

st. vincent bill murrayA crude, inconsiderate, bitter slacker — Bill Murray could play that in his sleep. And it would be pretty good. But he doesn’t. Bill Murray gives a beautiful, wise, complex performance as Vincent, an angry old man who drinks too much, smokes too much, gambles too much, pays a pregnant stripper for sex, and seems to get his only enjoyment from trying to make the rest of the world as miserable as he is.

Just as Vincent runs out of money, new neighbors move in next door. It is Maggie (Melissa McCarthy), a single mom, and her son Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher). Maggie, who just left her husband and is working double shifts to pay for Oliver’s private school, is so desperate she is willing to pay Vincent to be Oliver’s babysitter. He is completely inappropriate in every way, taking Oliver to the racetrack and a bar and introducing him to a “lady of the night,” pregnant Russian stripper (Naomi Watts as Daka). And yet, he is able to provide Oliver with support he does not get anywhere else, especially when it comes to dealing with the school bully (Dario Barosso). Vincent’s acerbic take on the world is a bracing change of pace from the chaos and sadness in Oliver’s family and the feeling of being an outsider he gets from being a Jew in a Catholic school, even one with a sympathetic priest for a teacher (Chris O’Dowd) and classmates that include a Buddhist and an atheist. Oliver is in many ways the only real adult in the story, wise and unflappable as the grown-ups around him fail him and each other.

Writer-director Ted Melfi spend the first half of the movie showing us the pressure Vincent is under and his inability to deal with it.  He is overdrawn at the bank and he owes money to a bookie (Terrence Howard).  His house and car are falling apart and he is, too.  He is callous, selfish, and rude.  But then we begin to learn that he is capable of great kindness and devotion.  He makes regular visits to Sandy (an exquisite performance by Donna Mitchell).  She is a beautiful woman with loss of memory who lives in an assisted living facility.  He does her laundry and dons a white jacket and stethoscope because she is comfortable thinking he is a doctor.  Clearly, he is much more to her, but she does not remember and he does not want to rattle her.  He also has a large white cat and seems to be very fond of it.

Meanwhile, Maggie is under a lot of pressure, too.  When she gets called into the school after Oliver uses his new lessons from Vincent to hit the bully in the nose, she dissolves into tears.  And Oliver’s father is suing her for custody, made much more difficult when he gives the court evidence of Vincent’s poor judgment as a babysitter.

It all comes together a little too sweetly.  Even the bully and the grouchy stripper get happy endings.  Oliver, while beautifully played by Lieberher, is too good to be true.  But Murray’s performance, especially as Vincent recovers from an illness, is never anything less than real, brave, and beautifully observed, and McCarthy, in a largely dramatic role, is outstanding as well.  This is a promising debut from Melfi and a quiet little gem.

Parents should know that this film is the story of a man who subjects a child to inappropriate behavior and experiences. It includes very strong and crude language for a PG-13, a stripper and prostitute, an explicit sexual situation, a child exposed to drinking, gambling, and sex work, and a custody battle with references to infidelity.

Family discussion: Who would you pick as your “saint?” Why was Vincent so nice to Sandy and so mean to everyone else?

If you like this, try: “Little Miss Sunshine”

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Drama Movies -- format

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Posted on March 13, 2014 at 6:08 pm

B+
Lowest Recommended Age: Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating: Rated R for language, some sexual content, and violence
Profanity: Strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs: Drinking, drugs
Violence/ Scariness: Murder, wartime violence
Diversity Issues: Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters: March 8, 2014
Date Released to DVD: June 16, 2014
Amazon.com ASIN: B00JAQJNN0

The_Grand_Budapest_Hotel_3Writer/director Wes Anderson loves precious little worlds and his movies are not just created, they are curated. There’s a reason that this film is named for its location, not its characters or plot. Anderson is the master of “saudade,” the nostalgia for something you never had or that never existed. The Grand Budapest Hotel is as romantically imagined as its name, more vividly realized than any of the human characters in the movie, and we instantly feel the pang of its loss.

We enter through a Sheherezade-ian series of nesting narratives.  A girl visits the grave of a writer, and we go back in time to see that writer (Tom Wilkinson) as an older man, talking about where writers get their stories (from real life), and then back again further as a younger man (Jude Law), actually getting the story in a bleak, bordering on seedy distressed version of the hotel, from an old man named Zero Mustafa (F. Murray Abraham).  And then we go further back in time to see Zero as a young man, a proud lobby boy in the titular edifice, a gorgeously splendid, elegant, and luxurious resort in the mountains of a fictitious European country called Zubrowka, somewhere in the midst of Switzerland, Luxembourg, Austria-Hungary, and the Balkans.  Anderson invites us into the artificiality of the memory within a memory within a story told by a stranger. He does not bother with cinematic tricks to make the hotel look real.  We see it made out of paper, with a paper finicula pulled by a string to bring the guests up the mountain, as though it is part of a puppet show, which, in a way it is.  At times it feels as though it is being put on with the marionettes from the “Lonely Goatherd” number in “The Sound of Music.”  There is no effort to make the actors playing the younger and older versions of characters look alike.  But the detail work is as meticulous as ever, so that must be intentional, and meaningful.

In the era of the Jude Law storyline, the hotel’s inept concierge is M. Jean (Jason Schwartzman).  But, as Zero tells the story, in the heyday of the hotel, the concierge was the legendary M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes).  A concierge is there to be the all-purpose fixer, finder, and minder, like the entire staff of Downton Abbey in one.  M. Gustave is infinitely attuned to the needs of the hotel’s wealthy, important, often noble (as in duchesses, not heroes), and always demanding clientele.  There is a reason they are always referred to as guests.  And if they require a particularly specialized and personal form of service, he is willing to oblige, even if the guest in question is a titled termagant in her 80’s (an hilariously unrecognizable Tilda Swinton as Madame D.)  Fiennes gives a performance as perfectly precise as his character, whose flawless demeanor evokes exquisite deference, competence, and discretion.  Like Anderson and Anderson’s autobiographical stand-in played by Schwartzman in “Rushmore,” M. Gustave is a showman, and one with an extravagantly grand and very ambitious sense of mise-en-scene.  Early on, we see M. Gustave striding through the hotel lobby, a gracious farewell to a guest on one side, sharp but not unkind directions to staff who are not up to standard on the other. Later, in two intrusions by this story’s version of the Nazis and later, as a prisoner, he responds as though he is in a drawing room comedy.  Fiennes pulls off the tricky balance between farce and drama as the story takes him through murder, art theft, love, war, and delectable pastries.  And he is matched by newcomer Tony Revolori as the young Zero, a refugee who aspires to M. Gustave’s savoir faire, and who becomes first his protege and then his friend. 

As always in a Wes Anderson film, starting with the very first scene of his first movie, “Bottle Rocket,” there is an escape.  M. Gustave is imprisoned, but still strives to maintain an aura of gracious living.  After a rough encounter with another prisoner, he is bruised but airily assures the visiting Zero that they are now dear friends.  He confronts the direst of situations — or tries to — as though they are at the level of an errant lobby boy.  But when he is deprived of his beloved fragrance, L’Air de Panache, he begins to crumble.

The details of the various time periods are, as expected, exquisitely chosen, well worth a second viewing.  Ant it is a bit warmer than Anderson’s previous films, less arch, less removed, softer toward its characters, even tender.  Anderson often makes objects more important than people but in this one, with the painting and the pastry almost character themselves on one side and Zero and his true love Agatha (Saoirse Ronan) still stylized but still heartfelt on the other, they’re getting closer.

Parents should know that this film includes wartime violence, with characters injured and killed, some graphic and disturbing images, strong language, sexual references and an explicit sexual situation.

Family discussion: Did M. Gustave and Zero have the same priorities? What is added to the story by seeing the author and Zero later in their lives?

If you like this, try: “Moonrise Kingdom” and “Rushmore”

 

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