Interview: Oren Moverman on “The Dinner” with Richard Gere and Steve Coogan

Posted on May 5, 2017 at 12:20 pm

Oren Moverman directed “The Dinner,” a provocative film about mental illness and its impact on the family, about the challenges of being a parent, about marriage, politics, and insanely pretentious food. It stars Richard Gere as a politician and Steve Coogan as his estranged and bitter brother, with Rebecca Hall and Laura Linney as their wives. They meet at a very exclusive and expensive restaurant for a difficult conversation about their teenage sons, who have done something terrible. It is based on a book by Dutch author Herman Koch.

“The movie is an annotation of the book,” Moverman said in an interview, “It really touched upon the lead character’s mental health, the kids’ mental health, where genetics and learned behavior kind of intersect. All these things seem very interesting to me and I’ve been involved in the last few years with The Campaign to Change Direction which is a mental health organization. When given the opportunity to write the script for me to direct I thought that should be a big part of it because I think it’s a big part of a discussion that’s actually never really discussed fully. I think that there is a certain kind of stigma within families, within groups about the person who is suffering from this, a lot of kind of burying this in the family vault. It’s dirty laundry. There’s not a lot of discussion that we have very openly about mental health issues. This movie can’t really avoid that — it’s at the core of the main character’s behavior, the core of the way the family was shaped, the extended family and then the kids. And so I wanted it to be a discussion and since we had a politician in the movie, I thought well he’s a man of grand gestures let’s give him an issue to fight for that is mental health and the bill that he is trying to pass and have that be sort of the ticking clock for that night. So, it all kind of came together from the book, it’s at the core of the story and hopefully it kind of shakes people up a little bit and gets them talking about that as well.”

Moverman supports the recent statements from celebrities like Prince Harry about the importance of destigmatizing mental health and mental health treatment. “I think the impact is tremendous. He started it, Prince William joined him, in talking about their relationship and their mental health as brothers who experienced traumatic events. I think that when people like Lady Gaga and Bruce Springsteen come out and talk about these things, people are listening because everybody feel so alone, so isolated in these problems. When you start the conversations, just like anything else you realize, well this is not that far-fetched, this is not just my problem, there are people out there suffering. The truth is that one out of five adults everywhere is experiencing some sort of mental health issue and so it’s not something that’s unfamiliar and kind of remote and over there. It’s really something that we all have in our lives. Not talking about it, not dealing with it, not treating it, not trying to prevent it is at the core of so many problems we have as a society. So, I applaud people of influence who step forward and say, ‘I have been dealing with these issues and I’m not going to hide it anymore. I’m going to talk about it and hopefully be able to help other people deal or take an active step towards kind of resolving these issues.’ If we all understand that there’s so much of it, our lives are complicated, our existence are complicated, our genetics are complicated, this world, the modern world is creating a lot more isolation than before, the feelings that people have to go through every day could be quite impactful on the rest of our lives and the rest of the people around us in their lives. So it’s something very fundamental that’s kind of been lost in the way we bury the conversation which is the loss of community, the loss of people finding common ground and helping each other or looking out for each other. I think it’s at core of a lot of our problems, this kind of disintegration of the community as the building block of the society.”

He wanted to set the difficult, painful conversation in the ultra-exclusive restaurant because “that was a fun part of the book. It was the comedic element of the book. I felt a little comedy could help there but also I think that there is a reason why this restaurant is so absurd is because these people are very privileged and they’ll be coming to a place that’s very civilized, very civil, that has its own rules and behavior and they’re bringing a subject matter that is quite savage and vile into this pretend world and all the pretense goes away by the end of the night. It’s kind of a battle without a lot of civility over the savage act. So, I thought the setting was appropriate, of course the problem with a setting like this is the idea that this should be a private conversation. So ultimately, they do find a private place to talk it out.”

Nothing is more painful than being the parent of a child with a big, awful problem that you cannot fix for him, as we see in the different ways that the four parents respond, and especially as they reveals some surprises about their strengths and weaknesses. “We talked about starting one place and finishing at another and really revealing layers upon layers of complexities that you don’t really see when we start off. I have to say that that was one of the finer things about the book. You start off thinking our narrator is to be trusted, Paul, the Coogan character. You feel like you can walk down this road with him because he’s like us, he makes fun of the pretenses at the restaurant, he’s really kind of a guy, he’s kind of a dude in the book and so we trust him and then we go through this whole process of the story to realize at the end how troubled he really is. I think every single character in the book goes that way and then what we tried to do is sort of imitate that in the movie. You see Richard Gere and he’s a politician and you say, ‘I know exactly who this guy is and I know exactly what he is going to stand for and I don’t like him because he’s a politician.’ and then he turns out to be something completely different but then again..is he? Is he fooling us? Is he charming us? All these things kind of become really fun to mix in and to really understand that our way of assessing people is not necessarily the way they really are and if you go into sort of a deep painful place something emerges that make maybe their true self are their true self in that moment and that can be quite dramatic.”

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Directors Interview

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.”

Screenwriter Allan Loeb on “Collateral Beauty”

Posted on December 16, 2016 at 10:27 am

I was very touched by “Collateral Beauty,” the story of a grieving father named Howard (Will Smith) who engages in a very literal way with Death, Love, and Time, and I enjoyed talking to the Allan Loeb, who wrote it.

Three of the characters in the film are actors, and we first see them rehearsing a very literary production. Was that a real play?

Oh, that’s so funny that you asked because I was watching it at the premiere last night and when that scene came on I thought, “I wonder if anybody knows that this is nothing that’s real.” I completely wrote it. I wanted to give it a cheesy, Shakespearean vibe, the kind of thing pretentious actors in The Village want to put on. That was all just improvised, spur of the moment, sitting at the computer. I was just like, “What sounds really over-the-top?” And I wrote that dialogue and when Helen Mirren delivered it you’re like, “Oh, that sounds pretty good.”

If you listen carefully, what Helen Mirren says in that kind of quasi-Shakespearean language and then what Jacob Latimore is saying and then what Keira Knightley is saying relates to the roles they take, Death, Time, and Love. When you break down the dialogue they are speaking of who they are.

I read that you write while you walk.

That is absolutely true. I’m a huge walker. That’s what I do most of my day. I walk different routes. I like to shake it up and I’ve lived both in LA and New York. New York is easier because you just hop out and you walk or you jump on a subway but in LA, I might be the only person in LA who drives to random weird LA neighborhoods, parks the car and walks for 5 miles. I’ve had people I know say, “Did I see you walking on Hollywood Boulevard the other day?” And I am like, “Yes that was me” and they’re like, “Where were you going?” “Nowhere. Just walking, just doing my thing.”

I’m in my head, I’m listening to either music, mostly listening to music and meditating on certain things, elements of whatever script I’m working on or if there is a character, dialog, and I am jotting it into my phone. I also make a lot of phone calls while walking and I listen to podcasts. It’s my exercise and it’s how I try to keep sane in a stressful world.

Did you think about possible letters to other abstract concepts?

That’s kind of the process I did when coming up with this idea: who or what abstractions should he be writing the letters to, and I did land on Love, Time and Death as the kind of godfathers of abstractions. I guess Forgiveness could be one, Patience could be one, Peace could be one, Healing or Catharsis or these things, but I think if you break them all down as I wrote out every one possible I said, “This is kind of a son or a daughter of Time, Love or Death.” I kind of thought those three sat over all the rest in some other way shape or form. And that’s kind of how I landed on Time, Love and Death.

It’s interesting that you set it up at the beginning by having it expressed in terms of exploiting those concepts for the purpose of selling products to people.

Yes and not just that, it’s not just that Howard said, “These are how we do our job, and this is the way we can connect,” but it is his worldview, it’s what he believes. He truly believes as I do, that love, time and death are the godfathers of all abstractions and the reason we’re here and the elements that connect us all. So if Howard believes that, later on in the movie when you find out that he’s been writing letters, it makes all complete perfect sense that those are the three he would be writing letters to.

Howard spends days building elaborate domino structures and then knocks them down. Where does that idea come from?

It was one of those things where I was kind of thinking, “What is this guy doing?” He’s really checked out. I wanted him showing up to work but if not working, what would you be doing? And I thought, “Well, he could be sitting in an office just staring into space, but that’s a little boring and expected so what could he be doing that just is about the passage of time?” And so the dominoes were something that made sense to me because I feel like there is the passage of time of time with dominoes. You build them all up and then knock them down, and then build them up again and to what end? It’s kind of a Buddhist belief with mandalas, sand mandalas that these monks create so meticulously and then they wipe them out. This was kind of our version of that and that’s why the dominoes were always in the script. But when Will read it the dominoes really spoke to him. He told me that he was kind of obsessed with the mandalas in the Buddhist tradition and that concept of kind of praying to time or honoring time or honoring beauty and honoring, almost celebrating the destruction of everything in a way but not in a malevolent way. Just understanding that everything beautiful perishes. It’s about relief and acceptance and all these concepts and I feel like the dominoes are kind of another expression of that but at the same time cinematically I thought, “Hey, that would look really cool,” and it did.

In a world of email and text, what is it that letters can do that no other form of communication can do?

In this day and age communication and email and digital communication creates an immediacy and it’s about getting business done and it’s a means to an end. But when you go to the mailbox, when you open up an envelope addressed by hand, with a stamp — in the olden days that was normal, that was it but now it’s something special. I like to send cards for no reason to people. I’ll send these cards, a quick post in the mail and you wouldn’t believe the response. It’s like a really quick way to get people to go crazy and say, “That was amazing.” You can just jot a note down, throw it in the mail and people basically treat you as if you flew across the world. It’s so appreciated and it’s so funny and it’s a real statement on how rare and special it is now, the art of letter writing, the art of post.

Recent films have been a little skittish about acknowledging the possibility of a spiritual element. This is more like classic films along the kinds of “Miracle on 34th Street” or “Here Comes Mr. Jordan.” Are you was fan of some of those old movies?

Oh yes, “It’s A Wonderful Life,” “A Christmas Carol,” in terms of the holiday fables and then of course I grew up on all the great high concept movies like “Big” and “Groundhog Day” and “Peggy Sue Got Married,” those magical realism movies which are really devices just to meditate on real issues in our lives and regrets and how we have lived our lives. Those are all fables. I wanted this to be a fable, too.

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Interview

Interview: Office Christmas Party Directors Josh Gordon and Will Speck

Posted on December 7, 2016 at 8:00 am

Not since “Snakes on a Plane” has there been a movie title that so perfectly conjured up exactly the kind of entertaining chaos in store for viewers. Josh Gordon and Will Speck (“Blades of Glory,” “The Switch”) have a gift for wild comedy with a tender heart. In this story Jennifer Aniston plays Carol, a tough businesswoman (and martial arts expert) who is something between the Grinch and Scrooge, cancelling the Christmas party in the branch office run by her brother Clay (played by T.J. Miller) and threatening to shut down the office entirely and fire the staff. Clay and his top executive Josh (Jason Bateman) think that if they can woo a big client (Courtney B. Vance) by entertaining him at the party, they can save the office. The cast includes Olivia Munn, “Saturday Night Live” stars Vanessa Bayer and Kate McKinnon, “Fresh Off the Boat” star Randall Park. And it takes place in my hometown of Chicago with some locations I know well, including a stunt on the Clark Street Bridge. It was a lot of fun to talk to Gordon and Speck about the fun they had making the film.

I really enjoyed your Chicago locations.

JG: Will and I grew up sort of loving the same movies and a lot of them had actually been shot in Chicago, everything from “Risky Business” to “The Blues Brothers” and “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” so there’s something about the city. It has a character and a quality that really is like no other city, with a subversive sense of humor, and it looks great on film. So when we were developing the movie we knew we wanted to shoot it in Chicago and luckily the studio let us shoot there for a couple of weeks to really get all the exteriors. Then we based the sets on the old IBM building. The architect was Mies Van Der Rohe who built a lot of downtown Chicago in the 70.s and we just re-created basically that building.

I read that T.J. Miller agreed to be in the film without ever reading the script, just based on the title. Is that right?

JG: He did read it eventually. But we had worked together with him on a commercial campaign for Motorola a couple years before and had such a good working relationship and a good experience that based on that plus the idea of finding the character a little bit and the concept itself, he was eager to sign on.

He was one of a group of very skilled improvisers in your cast.

JG: Yes, we were really lucky with this cast. Everybody was our first choice. And when you get talent like that you don’t want them just to read the script three or four times and then move on to the scene. So we encourage improvisation and these guys are all kind of pros in it. TJ is a stand-up and obviously Jen and Jason are really good on their feet and so you go into the edit with many jokes as you can. There is a ton that we had to leave on the floor that actually will go into the extended cut.

It’s a fairly new idea, but over the past few years we have had a series of R-rated Christmas movies.

WS: We are an R but not a hard R. There’s some drugs in it and some nudity but for the most part we feel like it doesn’t go to a place that will make anyone uncomfortable. We love movies with a lot of grit and reality in a very ridiculous situation, like “Risky Business” and “Midnight Run,” movies that have the concept that is very funny but that are really grounded in the real world.

JG: And also movies that were well made. They weren’t just comedies; they had emotion and they made you invest in a story too. We wanted to make a movie that ultimately is a Christmas movie. It just arrives through an adult kind of tone but it’s really got a heart and a fun emotional center to it. It is really about Clay and it’s and around the idea that you spend most of your life working with your coworkers, who really are kind of like your other family and then one night a year, lubricated by alcohol, you meet them and it’s disastrous but there can be a breakthrough. So that was really important to us, to have both heart and comedy.

Yes, One of you said that this was comedy plus danger, which I presume is not just the physical danger but the danger of destroying your entire professional life by what can go on at a party like that.

WS: Yes or your office physically. Obviously there are a lot of different kinds of humor in the movie. There is a lot of physical comedy and a lot of verbal comedy. The thing about an office is it’s a very democratic moment when you have this office Christmas party and everybody has got a story to tell. We really wanted to tell all of those stories so the people watching the movie can really relate to it and find themselves in the movie. So there are a lot of great parts for women in the movie, from the CEO to the intern. We really wanted to look at every experience you could possibly could have at a Christmas party.

I love the diversity in the film. Was that a conscious decision?

WS: Yes, we wanted to change things up and give the actors a lot of opportunities where you don’t always see it. There is a character that is a pimp in the movie and we thought, “Let’s make her a women and not just go down the expected kind of thing you’ve seen five times before.” That’s really the exciting time that we’re in right now. Women have really proven themselves again and again in the comedy space, and so there are all these great people to pull from and we’re very excited about it.

In an ensemble movie like this where you have so many very, very strong performers, how do you give everybody their moment, their time onscreen and yet keep it cohesive?

JG: I think for the most part we follow the script, which has a very democratic structure where each character is sort of given their moment but it doesn’t feel that unbalanced. We try to be as much an ensemble movie as possible, so we wanted to give everybody their heroic moment and their funniest moment and not really feel like we were top-heavy or are favoring one energy over another. So I think at the end of the day we wanted to feel like a whole experience of a group of people versus just focusing on one storyline.

And you have worked with Jennifer Aniston and Jason Bateman before in “The Switch” and they have worked with each other in other films, too. Are you developing a repertory company? What does that bring to a movie when you have that relationship, that trust?

WS: Gosh we really hope so! We really love those guys. Jason is very much in Josh in his wheelhouse. He has a very subtle brand of comedy that brings a sort of gravity to our work. And Jennifer was just brave and funny and willing to do something really different from what we have done with her before which was more in the romantic comedy space. We worked a lot with her on her character. The one thing that we struggled with internally was we wanted her to be a strong CEO. We didn’t want to do that thing where you sort of say, “Oh she has no life and she wished that she had a relationship, that she had a family or a kid.” We wanted to stray away from some of the clichés of the powerful woman who has nothing to offer. So I think what we tried to do was dig into the idea of what was motivating her drive was very thought- out, which was her childhood, and the idea that you can actually be an overachieving kid and have a sibling who is kind of troubled and that sibling gets all the attention and it leaves you really wanting for the rest of your life and I think that’s what motivated her kind of evil. So we did talk a lot about how to balance the humanity in her and not have her be two-dimensional but also not have her a cliché with that role and try to have the warmth in her kind of sneak up on you as she is helping to sort of save Clay. But in the beginning after that first conference scene you get what drives her and she is not just mean.

We have also worked with Rob Corddry before and T. J. on the commercial campaigns. So we love collecting really smart and talented people and if we’re lucky enough to continue to work with them in the right way we absolutely will.

Did you collect a lot of stories from friends about disasters at office Christmas parties?

JG: It’s amazing when you say you are making a movie about an office Christmas party how many people come up to you and offer stories. So we just started collecting these stories and we wanted give the audience an experience that they expect, hitting all the things that you expect to see when you see this kind of movie but then also really taking the audience to unexpected places and surprising them.

What makes a successful office Christmas party?

JG: It depends on what you define as successful. I think for us it is always the typical stuff which is great music, great lighting and an open bar but I think that’s what is fun about the idea of the movie is that it can be just rife with danger. Office Christmas parties usually are really bland and when you have to actually use it to save your company and that’s the tool that you get in your quiver it’s really miserable.

WS: And by nature offices are places that are meant to repel real emotions and too much fun. They tend to be pretty dry places so as a theater to set a sort of raging party they usually don’t mix well, which is why I think they are so funny and why they are so rife with potential for a movie. We all set out to make the office Christmas party that we wish we did go to. Now we feel like we have.

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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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