Interview: “Elysium” Villain Faran Tahir

Posted on August 9, 2013 at 8:00 am

Faran Tahir comes from a family of actors. He was born in Los Angeles to Pakistani parents and studied theater at UCLA and Harvard. He has appeared in “Star Trek” and “Iron Man” and on the television series “Warehouse 13.” He talked to me about playing a bad guy (who happens to be the President) in today’s release, “Elysium.”

You play the President in this movie! That must be pretty cool.

Not a bad thing to play, right! To be the leader of something. The way I look at any character is, “Can the audience, can I connect to the character?” You always build from that essential connection, making the person as human as you possibly can. When I was living with this character, I didn’t want to put the label of “good,” “bad,” or “evil” on him. I wanted him to be more of a person and let the audience decide where he lies in their minds and in the heart of the story. He is a politician so you needed to see nuance and have an angle of this politicking in dealing with issues. So that’s how I see it.

Whoever the bad guy is, he or she thinks that they’re completely justified in what they’re doing. Their actions might be perceived as bad, but to them, they’re natural. That’s just what they do. The challenge is how to step into those shoes and see the world from that perspective. Your own personal values and inclinations might play a part in it, but you do have to put them on the shelf for a little bit and just see the world from those eyes. That’s the beauty and the challenge of acting and that’s what attracts me — to see the world from someone else’s perspective. You learn a lot, and not just from the bad guy, just to see the world from a whole new set of eyes.

Was there a lot of green screen in this movie? What kind of a challenge does it create for an actor to know that whatever you are interacting with will be added later by a computer?

There was nothing but green screen! It’s very exciting because you don’t know what the final product will look like. So your imagination is working overtime to create all that in front of your eyes as much as they will later. To me, that is a lot of fun. My background is in theater and that extends itself to that kind of acting because on stage you don’t have everything in front of you. If you’re playing in “The Tempest,” you have to create that storm yourself to convey the emotions of the character. It’s when you walk on the set that the green screen is most apparent to you. But when you get into the reality of the character, it doesn’t make any difference. You’re just playing the scene, the emotion of it. A person standing and just watching — it might look very odd. But when you’re in the scene, it’s a non-issue. You are given some idea of how it’s going to look and technically, you are told, “Look over here, look over there, that’s where it’s going to be,” and you take it from there.

You are working with an exciting and visionary director, Neill Blomkamp.

Neill is a genius. He has amazing vision, an amazing quality of taking hot-button issues that are current to us right now and setting them in the fictional zone so we all can examine them from all different angles. As a director, you know he knows where he wants you to go, what the vision of the film is, but there’s this amazing laid-back quality and he lets you organically find your character. He gives the trust to his actors that they will get there. He is there to guide you and stay true to his vision, but there’s never any shoving down his version. He lets you find your reality and your truth and for an actor that’s an amazing gift. He has an affinity and a connection to actors that is amazing to watch.

You’ve played a lot of villains. Who are some of your favorite movie villains?

Robert De Niro in “Taxi Driver.” He did some horrific things but there was a connection that you had with this guy, an amazing feat for someone to pull this off. He took you on the journey. You knew he was not a good guy but you trusted being led by him on that journey. That is genius, both De Niro and Scorsese.

What do you want people to talk about on the way home from “Elysium?”

This movie has something for everyone. If you’re looking for science fiction, it’s there. If you’re looking for action, it’s there. But the thing that I want people to be talking about is the way it raises some interesting and important issues and I’m hoping it sparks that conversation. No matter what side of the argument or issue you fall on, it should spark a debate.

What was it like to grow up in a family of performers?

Our dinner time conversations were sometimes about sports and all of that but a lot of time about literature, television, theater and all that. And it got heated. We all had our point of view all points of view were listened to at least. But they also had a very practical, pragmatic approach to the business of performing. There was the other side. When I wanted to become an actor, they did not try to dissuade me but their question was “Why?” They wanted to prepare me for the ups and downs of this life, how to handle success and the failures and disappointments. As a parent, you don’t want your kids to be broken people. There was a nice mix of dealing with the creative side and the practical side. My parents told me to be my own best critic. You will know when you have done a good job, a decent job, or a bad job. Listen to your own inner voice.

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Elysium

Posted on August 8, 2013 at 6:01 pm

The best science fiction acts like a narrative Rorschach test, taking specific elements of our current condition, extrapolating into the future (usually dystopically), and allowing the audience to project our assumptions — and our fears — onto it. “Elysium” is a smart sci-fi thriller that bundles the action and visuals we want from big-budget sci-fi with some provocative ideas about the logical consequences of the decisions we make on some of today’s most contentious issues.

The word “elysium” means a place or condition of perfect happiness. Imagine a place of no worries, no illness, no want. There are endless, perfectly manicured green lawns and soft breezes lightly flutter the sheers on windows that look out on exquisite landscapes. That is home to the wealthy residents of “Elysium,” the space station. It orbits above the now-despoiled planet earth, where the 99 percent live Hobbesian lives that are brutal, nasty, and short. In other words, the set-up is “Wall•E” for grown-ups, without the “Hello Dolly” dance number and cruise ship atmosphere.

Max and Frey meet as children on Earth, and he promises to take her to Elysium some day. They grow up to be Matt Damon and Alice Braga, and meet again when he mouths off to a robocop, who breaks his arm, and she is a nurse in a health care system that provides only the most basic first aid for Earth residents while Elysians have access to a kind of tanning bed technology that cures all injuries and diseases and even reverses the effects of aging.

Max is exposed to a lethal dose of radiation at the plant where he works, making more robots to wait on the residents of Elysium and enforce the brutal restrictions on Earth. A robot informs Max that he will experience catastrophic organ failure and die in five days. The arrogant Elysian CEO in charge of the factory, John Carlyle (William Fitchner), is only concerned about whether Max will get the sheets dirty and how quickly he can be gone.

Max knows that breaking into Elysium and hacking into a med-bed is the only way he can stay alive. And the only way for him to get there is to do a job for his old boss, Spider (Wagner Moura), capturing some data from Carlyle. To keep Max strong, Spider’s henchmen surgically attach a cyber exo-skeletal device to his arms, spine, and skull. He gets help from Diego Luna, a highlight as Max’s old friend from the car-stealing days. It gives him extra power and a sort of USB plug in his brain. And it turns out that Frey also has a desperate reason to get to Elysium. And that the Secretary of Defense (Jodie Foster, dressed in spotless white) is in the midst of orchestrating a regime change, so the data downloaded into Max is of vital importance. She sends a scary operative with a lot of firepower (“District 9’s” Sharlto Copley, scary good) to get Max.

As he did with “District 9,” director Neill Blomkamp adds just enough allegory to this story to give extra weight to the heart-pounding action. Both of the worlds are thoughtfully conceived, especially the burned-out, graffiti-covered remains of Earth. The details are evocative and compelling — a robot asking blandly whether Max is using sarcasm, Spider’s hodgepodge lair with its hobbled-together computers. Foster’s recent performances have been disconcertingly mannered, with head-shaking to indicate the intensity of emotion. But Damon is top-notch as Max, terrific in the action scenes and even better as we see him becoming more human.

Parents should know that this film includes constant sci-fi peril and violence with some very graphic and disturbing images, many characters injured and killed, constant strong language, drugs, drinking, and smoking.

Family discussion: What elements of this story are based on current issues and controversies? Why did Max say no to Frey? Why was the story about the meerkat and the hippo important? What will happen next?

If you like this, try: “Upside/Down” and “Mad Max”

Interview: “Elysium” Composer Ryan Amon

Posted on August 5, 2013 at 8:00 am

Ryan Amon talked to me about the YouTube video that led to his first feature film score, in this week’s “Elysium,” directed by Neil Blomkamp (“District 9”) and starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster and how two notes create a mood.

How did you get involved with this project?

I had been doing trailers and before that I was an assistant on reality TV, so I had a lot of experience writing on deadline, but never anything like a film, which is a very different approach. I was living in Bolivia, where my wife’s family is, on a different continent when I got the email from Neill Blomkamp, who was in Vancouver. He had come across a YouTube video that a trailer music fan had posted. Someone had taken one of my tracks and posted it. Neill must have been searching through and found it somehow. And I got a one-line email: “Is this you?” I thought one of my friends was playing a prank on me. I’ve got very funny friends who have done things like that in the past. So I didn’t think too much about it until his assistant Victoria followed up, and I thought, “This is real.” Then I got nervous. He was still in the early stages but a few months later, he got in touch by Skype, with me still in Bolivia, and he talked about the film a little bit and his interests and my interests, and he offered me the job. You can’t turn that down! It was awesome.

When you have to write music for a story set in the future, how do you approach it? Do you try to project ahead to what kinds of instruments or genres will be used?

That’s tricky. I thought a lot about that one. His approach on this was not letting me see much of the film. I was working while they were filming. He didn’t want to let me read the script or see any footage. I had a few sketches of Matt Damon’s character in his exo-suit. So I had a few images but basically knew nothing of what was going on. My direction was to write something dark and then something light. It was a huge blank canvas for me. It was really hard but it was also very liberating and gave me a lot of room to experiment.

As for the future thing, who knows what music will sound like in 150 years? I knew I wanted to keep it relevant. Sometimes using too many synthetic elements, too many synthesizers, could backfire. In the 80’s, all those synthesizers sounded cutting edge and futuristic, but now they sound dated. So I wanted to steer away from that and bring in more orchestral elements. I took some traditional instruments, even piano strings, violin strings, and I scraped them metallically, and tried to create a sound that wouldn’t feel dated, even if we watch the film 20 or 30 years from now. We recorded in Abbey Road with the London Philarmonia. My first picture, and I’m in Abbey Road with a full orchestra!

Did you take a picture like the cover of the Abbey Road album?

Yes, we had to do that! It was freezing, in January, but it was still fun.

Before you were in Bolivia, where were you? What is your background in music?

I never really had that much interest in the classical side of things. I was classically trained and played piano and played the saxophone in a jazz band. But I was more interested in science, in biology. The music fell into my lap a little bit. I promised myself I would not try to do music professionally. But when I was in college I ended up enjoying coming back to my dorm room to play my guitar or I would write music on the piano instead of going to class. And I said, “Why am I enjoying this more, when it used to be such a struggle?” I think when you get older you are more comfortable embracing the areas where you have a gift, start to appreciate it more and want to explore it. I went to the McNally Smith College of Music in St. Paul to learn the technical things and got an associate degree. It was very new, more of a guitar school than anything back then. They only had a songwriting course at that time, so I studied film scores on my own, by ear, watching a ton of movies to see what worked and what didn’t. That’s what I was trying to train myself to do, to be more cerebral.

I entered a competition through BMI called the Pete Carpenter fellowship that allows one or two students every year to go out and shadow Mike Post in his studio in Los Angeles. He teaches us the way he approaches TV shows and we get to score a few scenes as practice. That was invaluable. And I knew that was what I wanted to do. I went back home, packed up everything I had in my car — and it all fit — and went to LA. I worked at IKEA and Virgin Records, and then through BMI I got a job as an assistant for a group that was doing reality TV. So that was a fast and steep learning curve. We had to produce at a very high level but also very, very quickly, two to three tracks a day for the show. It goes into a library and the editors get to place it where they want to. The most valuable thing was learning to use the software.

How do you begin to work on a movie score?

In writing a film score you have to be more of a psychologist than a musician. I approach it a bit differently. I sit at the keyboard and play intervals, just two notes at a time. These two notes, played on one instrument, what emotions does that evoke for me? I make a list of vocabulary words, as many as I could, of what these two notes felt like. I realized that a lot of music can be written from our background in music theory. But I felt it could be much open than that, a much wider spectrum of colors and instruments. So I always try to write from someplace deep inside, not to sound cheesy, but I try to write from my heart and not my head. In a way it’s cerebral, but I’m like channeling it. For dark and light it’s almost like not having an image in front of you can help sometimes. You can picture the whole world in your mind the way you do when you read a book. It’s fun to do that musically — what would light sound like? What would dark sound like?

So when you saw it with the footage, how did that go?

It was a little bit cringe-worthy to me. The original idea was that I would do some of the music first and they would use what I wrote as a temp score, and then we were going to manipulate it and see what’s working and what’s not. Sometimes Neill likes experimentation and wants you to go off and do your own thing, but sometimes he knows exactly what he is looking for and he will push you to search for it until it clicks. So there was a lot of music written for this film. I did over 200 tracks and they chose a handful. When I saw the temps with my music I thought, “Oo, that’s completely different than what I thought it would be — it looks different or the editing is slower or faster than I thought.” So that was terrifying at first, but as we went along I flew up to Vancouver to work with the post-production team for the last few months. It was definitely a surprise to see some of the matches between the music and the visuals.

What are some of the movies that inspire you?

My favorite movie was always “Jurassic Park.” That film score by John Williams is perfect and Spielberg is such a great story-teller. I love “Braveheart” and I would love to do a movie like that in the future, very raw and the power comes from traditional instruments. I love that old sound from the old world, what it might have sounded like in those days. I love hybrids, too. That’s a little bit of what I became known for when I was doing trailers.

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