COCKPUNCHER

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OSCAR NOMINEE JOHN PATRICK SHANLEY: The Hollywood Interview

A Conversation with John Patrick Shanley on the making of Doubt, the origins of Moonstruck, and the dire fate of his first novel.

By Terry Keefe

[Note: This article will appear in this month's issue of Venice Magazine.]

It’s hard to believe that it’s been 21 years since John Patrick Shanley’s screenplay for Moonstruck made a whole generation of moviegoers want to move to Little Italy, marry Cher or Nicolas Cage, Danny Aiello even, and look for the mythical Cosmo’s Moon. The young Shanley had already been having a good career run at that point, with a number of successful Off-Broadway plays, along with another produced 1987 film, Five Corners, which starred Jodie Foster, Tim Robbins, and John Turturro. But the capper for him during that period was undoubtedly his win at the 1988 Oscars for the Best Original Screenplay for Moonstruck. From there, he went on to continue his career as one of America’s top playwrights, with notable works such as “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” and “Four Dogs and a Bone.” He also directed the feature film Joe Versus the Volcano, which starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, in 1990. A near decade and a half later, in 2004, he found his greatest success as a playwright to date, at least as far as awards and ticket sales go, for his original play “Doubt,” which swept all the major theater awards, including a Tony for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. “Doubt” also brought Shanley back to the film director’s chair for the first time in almost two decades with his adaptation of the play, which will hit theaters this December.

Doubt takes place in the St. Nicholas Catholic School in the Bronx, in 1964, a time when the winds of change were coming to not just the United States, but the Catholic Church, an institution known to embrace change warily. The Vatican II proclamations by Pope John XXIII two years prior were designed to make the church more open, diverse, and modern. Embodying the spirit of Vatican II, in his outward manner at least, is the young Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), while Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) is an older nun who prefers the more rigid traditions to stay exactly as they are. The major mystery upon which the plot hinges is sparked by the observations of the young nun, Sister James (Amy Adams), who informs Sister Aloysius that she suspects an improper relationship of some sort between Father Flynn and a young student named Donald Miller (Joseph Foster II), the school’s first African-American pupil. (Note: There are considerable SPOILERS ahead.) Sister Aloysius, who sees the world in strict right and wrong terms, is certain that Father Flynn is guilty, although the actual proof is sketchy, and makes it her goal to force his resignation. Thematically underlying the story is the conflict alluded to in the title, of certainty versus doubt, and the primal question of whether we can ever really know the truth of an event which we did not see with our own eyes. Sister Aloysius is forced to confront her own morality of purpose when she meets Donald’s mother, Mrs. Miller [Viola Davis - read our interview here], who reveals that she believes her son to be gay, and that because of an abusive father and the fact that no other school wants her son, she feels that staying at St. Nicholas might actually be the best thing for Donald. While the plot of Doubt certainly comes to a conclusion, the mystery of what happened between Father Flynn and Donald Miller is left hanging for the audience to resolve themselves, or not. Shanley’s great achievement here is that he has managed to craft what is, on one level, a mystery, and on another level, he has created a platform to discuss the impenetrability of that same mystery.

Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius in DOUBT.

Shanley grew up in the Parkchester section of the Bronx, and attended Catholic School himself. We met in late November of this year.

What was the initial kernel of inspiration that got your writing of “Doubt” the play started? Was it wanting to write a story about the concept of doubt itself, or were there specific plot elements that propelled the writing?

John Patrick Shanley: Well, when I wrote the play, we were living in a time of great “certainty” in our country, leading up to the Iraq War, and I didn’t feel certain. And the culture around me seemed to be sending me the message that I didn’t feel certain because I was weak. I didn’t agree with that. So, that germ of an idea, about certainty and doubt, was there. But, it’s not something that I would have written about just by itself. And then I thought about the black mother, and I thought that was an interesting story. That’s when things started to get interesting. Because in all of my experiences of life, people have their reasons for doing things, and there are rarely very specific reasons why people do things. It’s usually a fairly complicated tale. And I wanted to tell that tale. So, I wrote the play. And [producer] Scott Rudin came to me and said that he thought it should be a film and that I should direct it. I said that I agreed, but I hadn’t directed in 18 years. It was very daunting because the play only has a few characters and a couple of locations, and I was wondering how I was going to open up this thing cinematically in a way that is meaningful, you know?

You did find a lot of ways to open up the story for film. How did those ideas come about?

I realized that as a playwright I had sort of hypnotized myself into coming up with a way of telling a complicated story, with limited characters, and in fact, that was highly artificial. And if I were to lose my self-hypnosis, I’d see that it was only natural to show the kids, the congregation, and the nuns in their convent. That there were lots of aspects that I could include which were organic, and would only enrich the story. The first big challenge I had in the adaptation was with the opening sermon. I thought, “What am I going to do? This guy talks for a long time. At a certain point, this is just not cinematic.” Then I realized that this movie is partially about the joining in combat of these two characters, the priest and the nun. So, I decided to introduce her during the sermon, and that would make it cinematic. Because then there would be her major entrance, which was non-verbal, up against his major entrance, which was verbal. And then the cutaway shots would have real significance, rather than just busying it up by trying to put various reaction shots and such. I also realized then how difficult this was going to be. I’ve written a lot of screenplays, and this was the hardest one for me. It was going to be trench warfare as a writer. I was going to have solve the problem of how to shoot it, page-by-page. There wasn’t going to be any overarching solution. I was going to have to exploit and investigate the physical world and environment that these people lived in, and how it affected them, and I was going to have to do that repeatedly. I came up with this idea, in my head, for Sister Aloysius, that she was kind of a submarine commander, of an old, broken-down submarine. She kept plugging leaks, and lights would blow out, and she was trying to keep this vessel going, but eventually, it was going to sink [laughs]. The future was going to come but she was trying to keep it out. There was a thing in the play about a windstorm, which you don’t see in the play, you hear the wind. And I came up with the idea that the wind could be a character of sorts in the film. That it could be strangely cinematic. So, piece by piece, light bulbs blowing out, window blinds being shut, the mouse, and the cat…I put it together. Lots of little solutions to the problem of opening things up. But I always wanted to make sure that those little solutions did a few things: they propelled the story forward; they propelled character; and they motivated camera moves. So if I had two or three people talking for an extended period of time in a room, these small events propel the action of the scene. The intercom ringing makes Sister Aloysius get up to answer it, and then the camera moves to deal with that. The small events become part of the larger story and have a purpose. Then, there were, of course, things that happened [in dialogue] in the play, that you had to show on-screen. In the play, they just say, “Father Flynn left.” Well, you can’t do that in the film! [laughs] You have to show the guy leaving! And that became a natural new scene, with the farewell sermon, and in that scene, I could let a few other stories play out.

While writing the piece, did you keep in your head your own version of what truly happened between Father Flynn and Donald Miller?

Let me put it to you this way - you never know what’s going on in somebody else’s head. You never know what’s going on in somebody else’s heart. A lot of time is spent coming up with a conclusion in this story, but it’s like life, you don’t get to know for sure what really happened. You don’t get to know for certain. I feel like the narrative form, because of television to some degree, has boiled down to posing a question and, at the end, answering that question. And that form has become the standard, but it’s a little different than what the experience of life is. In life, you don’t get to know everything. You get to know that you think you know, maybe. You receive a lot of information, or a little information, and you reach your conclusions from that. And yet, life is sweet, and life is provocative, and life is gripping…and why can’t you have all that in a story? I didn’t want to pull a parlor trick, or a puzzle, that’s not what the story is about. I wanted to have a fierce dialectic and invite the audience to continue the conversation after the movie, about whatever topics they chose to.

Did you find that postproduction was particularly challenging, because you really could sway the audience ‘s perception of Father Flynn’s guilt by the way the film is cut?

No question, this was a very difficult film to cut, because you have to leave just the right amount of space for the audience. And [editor] Dylan Tichenor was a great asset. The “Final Confrontation Scene” between Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius, along with the scene between Mrs. Miller and Sister Aloysius, were the most difficult scenes to cut. We thought the “Tea Scene” [between Father Flynn, Sister Aloysius, and Amy Adams] would be the most difficult, but Dylan just went through that quickly and did a beautiful cut right away. But we suffered over the Final Confrontation Scene. It was complicated scene because of the constant shifting between the two actors. I don’t even remember how many days we shot it, but we did endless coverage.

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams in DOUBT.

How do much direction do you give actors of the caliber of Phil and Meryl?

Well, what you do is…if what they’re doing is true and it takes the scene where it’s got to get to, then it’s valid. If it’s interesting. And most of the time, they’re interesting. But if you see something that isn’t grounded, which most of the time you don’t…there was a time when we were rehearsing the Confrontation Scene and Phil came over and asked, “How was that?” And I said, “It was good. It was very good. There was that one part that was a little maudlin by the window…” And he said, [quickly] “Let’s go over that!” That’s what he’s looking for with direction. It’s “Tell me when I jump the rails. Please, before it’s too late!” And then, if I see somebody do something and think, “Okay, that may well be over the top,” then I go back and say, “Okay, let’s take it down a bit.” There was a time in the confrontation scene where Meryl got very sarcastic, and I said, “Okay, do it again, but this time, take the high road.” And she then did a beautiful and quite different performance, and that was all the direction I gave her [laughs]. She was so impressive. And then, once in awhile, when someone knocks it out of the park, you stop a minute and say to them, “You knocked it out of the park.” Because they need to hear that. It gives them the juice to get to the next part.

You went to Catholic school. When you started researching this for the preproduction on the look of the film, what memories that came back did you find the most surprising?

I didn’t have to do any research [laughs]. Not for this one. I remember [costume designer] Ann Roth showed me the costumes for the kids, the jackets for the boys. I said, “You can’t use these. They’re all going to be in the same jackets.” She said, “But that will be visually boring.” And I said, “But that will be true!” [laughs] We had some wonderful fights, Ann and I. She’s very strong-willed, but she couldn’t tell me the kids should have different colored shoes on. They all have the same colored shoes on! She was like, “Give me a break!” [laughs] I said, “It’s wintertime. You can do it with the overcoats. They all have different colored overcoats on.” I have a good memory for this era, and we shot at the same school I actually went to. So, when the guys are playing in the street, it’s the same street I grew up on. When the woman cuts the pillow on the rooftop, that’s the rooftop I used to play on. The alleyway, the same thing. And I hired Sister James [whose name the Amy Adams character shares], my first grade teacher from that school, as my technical advisor. She was the one who told us things like that we had to put the rosary over the belt in this way, or it’s wrong.

Did Sister James get to see the play?

Oh yeah, Sister James saw the play in previews. I was in previews and I got this email from somebody which said, “I’m from the Bronx and I saw the play, and I know Sister James, and she’s really excited about this play, and she’s coming to visit.” I thought, “I thought she was dead!” I had no idea the woman was alive. None. I hadn’t seen her since I was six. And now she was en route to see my show. So, I rushed over to the theater and I sat with her, and I watched the play. She was now 70. She had been 21 when she was my teacher. I was in the first class she had ever taught. Now, here we were, 49 years later, sitting watching the play together. The designer had gotten a photograph of the school and rebuilt the school on stage. So, these two people who hadn’t seen each other in so long, we were sitting there looking back in time to this stage. It was very powerful. Afterwards, she was very enthusiastic and really liked the play, and she’d come with another nun. And then, I knew she liked it, because she came back with a whole bunch of nuns [laughs] ! And all of the nuns loved the play. They said, “Anything you need, you come to us!” And indeed, we ended up shooting in the College of Mount Saint Vincent, which is owned by the Sisters of Charity.

Shanley directs Meryl Streep in DOUBT.

The scene with Mrs. Miller and Sister Aloysius, when they discuss her son’s possibly improper relationship with Father Flynn, seems like it would be one of the hardest to write, because it is filled with so many emotions, with also a great deal of ambiguity in regards to how Mrs. Miller feels about the situation. Lots of drafts?

No, I wrote it the first time. It’s because when I was 15, I ended up by fluke, in a lay Catholic prep school in New Hampshire. I had a heavy Bronx accent. The teachers didn’t want me very much. I was kind of violent. The kids didn’t want me that much. There was one teacher who took me under his wing, and protected me, and educated me. He was a very good English teacher. Now, he didn’t try anything. He didn’t do anything with me, but it was in the air. I didn’t admit that to myself at the time though. Now, three years or so later, I would continue to see him, because I was close to this guy and connected to him…he introduced me to another 15-year old kid and said, “This is my son.” But he didn’t have any children. And then he did it with a second kid and said, “This is my son.” I felt very strange about that. Much later, we had a 30th year reunion, when people who went there got together for a reunion. One guy pulled me aside and told me that this teacher had abused him when he went to school there. He was traumatized. And that’s when I had concrete confirmation that that’s what was happening. Then, just a few years ago, I got a letter from this teacher, and when I looked at the letter, I knew he was telling me that he was dying. I was that connected to him, just intuitively. He told me where he was and that I could come visit him. And I didn’t go. I have no regrets about that, but it’s bittersweet. So, when I wrote that scene, that’s where I was coming from. A very complex equation. This guy who was good to me. Who, in fact, saved my life, and educated me. And yet, had done terrible things. But not to me. And how do I feel about that, you know? And then I thought, “Did I, when I was a kid, know? Completely know. And use the situation to my advantage, and walk that line with him?” That’s a line that Mrs. Miller is also walking.

Did anything in particular from your life inspire the story of Moonstruck?

I was around 35-36, and I knew lots of women in their 30s, and they all had this kind of similar story. That they had some type of guy they always wanted to meet, and they had been looking for him, but they never found him. And now they were in their 30s, and they thought, “Maybe I’m never going to meet that guy.” So maybe they were going to have to make this concession to marry a real guy, as opposed to the fantasy guy. I thought, “What if you did that and the right guy shows up right then and there?” Sally Field had taken me out to lunch, and she said, “I like your writing. Why don’t you write something for me?” And I said, “I’ll write something for you. But you can’t pay me. If you like it, then you can option it. If you don’t like it, it’s okay, we were never in business.” So, I wrote Moonstruck. Sally loved the screenplay, but nobody would make it with her. And so, I sent it to Norman Jewison, but I didn’t want to option it until I talked to him. I met with Norman and I said, “Is this particular script the movie that you want to make?” Somewhere in the middle of the conversation, Norman realized that he was in the first job interview he’d ever had with a screenwriter [laughs]. Because I was saying, “If you don’t want to make this, that’s fine, but I am going home. This is not the basis for a film. This is a film.” And Norman said, “Okay, let’s read it.” And he took half of the parts, and I took the other half, and we acted the whole thing out together. And in the end, he said, “Yeah, I’m making this film.” And I said, “Okay, we’re in business.” [laughs]

Cher and Nicolas Cage in 1987's MOONSTRUCK.

Moonstruck is a film that has been often imitated, never duplicated, over the years. It mixes tones so well. You’ve got a little magical realism, romantic comedy, and then the touches of absurdity, like Nic Cage’s wooden hand.

I grew up with a guy who caught his hand in a machine, it got chewed off, and he got a wooden hand. And he was always trying to pick fights with people, but people wouldn’t fight him. They’d go, “I’m not fighting you. You’ve got a wooden hand!” And he did that with me, and I knocked him to the ground [laughs]. He also stayed with me as a character.

At what point in your life did you start writing?

Grammar school. From 10 years old on. Most of it poetry, a few essays, and short stories. But a lot of it was poetry. I was pretty much exclusively a poet until I was 22 or 23. Then I got my first poems published, and I immediately stopped writing poetry [laughs]. I started writing short stories. The Paris Review said, “Not this story, but the next one.” I stopped writing short stories [laughs]. I wrote a novel for a year, and when I finished it, I burned it. Because it didn’t have a plot. And that’s when I started writing plays.

Was that the only copy of this novel?

Yes. It’s gone.

Do you regret burning it?

Never! [laughs] You’ve got a lot of bad writing to do in this life. Get it out of the way early [laughs].

John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt opens on December 12th, via Miramax Films.

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OSCAR NOMINEE Michael Shannon: The Hollywood Interview

Actor Michael Shannon.


MICHAEL SHANNON: ON THE ROAD
By
Alex Simon

Editor's Note: The announcement came early this AM that Michael Shannon was one of five nominees for Best Supporting Actor in this year's Academy Awards. This chat with Michael appeared in the December/January issue of Venice Magazine.

Actor Michael Shannon was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1974, and began his professional stage career in Chicago, where he worked with renowned Chi-town theatrical troupes such as Steppenwolf, The Next Lab and The Red Orchid Theater. He followed this with a year in London, where he performed in such diverse fare as “Woyzeck,” “Killer Joe,” and “Bug,” the latter being moved to New York, where it caught the eye of director William Friedkin, who adapted Tracy Lett’s play for the screen, with Shannon reprising his original role, opposite Ashley Judd, in 2006, which proved to be Shannon’s breakout year, also garnering attention for his role as a heroic former Marine in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center. Shannon had come a long way (over 30 television and film appearances) since his (very brief) film debut in 1993’s Groundhog Day.

Michael Shannon’s latest cinematic venture is Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road. Adapted from Richard Yates’ cult novel about young marrieds (Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslet) dealing with identity and social repression in mid-1950s Connecticut, Shannon nearly steals the show as John Givings, the mentally-ill son of terminally-chirpy real estate agent Kathy Bates (also terrific) who, at times, seems to be the only truly sane person in the room. The Paramount release hits theaters December 26.

Michael Shannon, who is a new father to a baby girl, spoke to us recently from his home in New York City.

You’re a native of Lexington, Kentucky. How does one discover acting in the South?
Michael Shannon: I didn’t know I was going to be an actor as a kid. It happened quite by accident. I’m not much of an athlete, and if you’re not an athlete in Kentucky, you’re a bit cloistered. I wanted something to do after school, and one day I looked on this bulletin board and had all the different teams the losers could be on like the math team, things like that, and I saw there was this thing called “the speech team,” and I thought that looked interesting. So I walked in and they said “Tell us a story.” So I made up a story, which I can’t remember now, but they liked it enough to let me be on the team, and said “We’re going to give you something called a monologue, and you’ve got to memorize all this, then use it in a competition.” So they gave me this thing from "Lake Wobegone Days" by Garrison Keillor called “Booger Days,” about a little boy who ate his boogers. So I studied that, and would practice it in my bedroom. I never got to compete with it, because I was a substitute, and no one ever missed any of the meets, so I only performed it in my bedroom. But that’s where I caught the acting bug, as it were.

From Lexington you went to Chicago.
Yeah, my parents divorced when I was very young. My mom lived in Lexington, and my dad in Chicago. So I went back and forth, and finally I just decided to go up and stay in Chicago. I started doing plays in little storefronts, basements…at the very bottom. I did a few shows at Steppenwolf eventually. I got my SAG card in ’92 doing some TV stuff in Chicago and then my first film was Groundhog Day where I got to have a scene with Bill Murray and Andie McDowell. And that was really exciting for a young guy. It’s a very seasonal movie, and always plays during the holidays so I usually have people recognizing me as “that guy from Groundhog Day” during the holidays.

Shannon in Bug.

Along with your $1.09 residual check from SAG.
(laughs) Yeah, right. Goes straight into my savings.

Let’s jump forward a bit and talk about Revolutionary Road. I loved your character because he was the only truth-teller in the entire film, and he was labeled “insane.”
Yeah, I think he is insane, though. I think one of the reasons he’s able to tell the truth is because he’s insane, and when I say “insane,” I mean he’s not trying to live an ordinary life. The idea that he’ll ever have his own little house with his own little family and his own little life is something that he knows will never happen. He’s going to spend his life going in and out of mental institutions. He’s cracked beyond repair. So from that perspective, it gives you a lot of liberty to say what’s on your mind, because you’re not trying to protect anything.

Shannon in Revolutionary Road.

I had no idea that the book the film is based on has been around since 1961.
Yeah, and I would have been completely unaware of it, had my girlfriend not given it to me. It’s one of the finest pieces of writing I’ve ever read. I’m hoping the movie actually inspires people to read that book, along with his other writings, especially his short stories.

What was it like working with Sam Mendes? Since you have such a strong stage background yourself, do you notice a difference when you work with a director like Sam, who’s done both stage and film work, as opposed to someone who’s strictly a filmmaker?
Yeah, one of the things I love about Sam is that he actually took notes during takes. I’d never seen that before, not with a film director. You see it quite often in the theater. Before one take, Sam came up to me, and he’d written down eight things he was looking for in that take, and afterwards, he walked up to me and said “You got all eight of them.” I was very proud of that.

The film felt like a real ensemble piece even though you have two of the biggest movie stars in the world playing the leads.
Yeah, I think what united all of us was a desire to capture the book, and our love of the material and were excited to see what each person was going to do with each particular part, and were rooting for each other to find the right stuff. Not only did we want to make a great movie, we wanted to honor this great book we had so much affection for.

One thing that must have been fun for you was the fact that your character is one that all the other characters react to, which is a much more powerful position to be in since in all your scenes, you’re basically controlling the action.
Yeah, it’s fun when you see Sam’s use of the reaction shots. Oftentimes when you’re talking, you’re watching how the other actors react to you. What makes my character powerful is the way others react to him, as you say. If the camera was just on me, and you never saw the way anybody else was reacting, it would have no impact.

Shannon in World Trade Center.

The other person kept thinking of while watching you, was Lenny Bruce. Like Lenny, I think this guy was a decade or more ahead of his time, and had he been born in a different time, maybe he wouldn’t have lost his mind, but been a really insightful social commentator.
As a group, we talked about the fact that it was an era of containment these people were dealing with, and had it been ten years later, during the era of liberation, he probably could have been a hero of some sort in a counter-cultural movement. The interesting thing to note is that the difference between John and Frank is not as large as it appears at first glance. Frank has probably had a lot of the same thoughts and feelings that John has had, and he almost went down that road himself, that’s why April’s even presenting the option of moving to Paris in the first place: that somewhere within Frank is a person who is as vivacious and humorous as John is. It’s just a matter of being contained. Frank stuffs his feelings, while John expresses his. As sophisticated as we like to think we are in this modern era, I think it’s a decision people still grapple with every day: do I be who I am or do I have to try really hard to be someone else?

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OSCAR NOMINEE VIOLA DAVIS: The Hollywood Interview

Viola Davis: Making Mrs. Miller in Doubt
By Terry Keefe

[Note: This article will appear in this month's issue of Venice Magazine. Pictured above is actress Viola Davis in her role as Mrs. Miller in Doubt.]

One scene can make a star out of a rising actor, although it’s a rare occurrence. Particularly when that scene is opposite the likes of Meryl Streep, who is certainly difficult to outshine. But Viola Davis is going to attract a great deal of notice for her relatively brief appearance in Doubt, to the point where she is already being mentioned as a likely candidate for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination. Davis, who plays the character of Mrs. Miller, is only in the film for an extended scene with Streep, and then makes a dialogue-free appearance in the ending. But her scene with Streep, who plays the strong-willed nun Sister Aloysius, is powerhouse acting defined, particularly so since Davis performs it throughout with a quiet intensity in which she effectively manages to scream at times without raising her voice.

Doubt, written and directed by John Patrick Shanley, who adapted from his Tony-winning play, is set in 1964, in the St. Nicholas Catholic School in the Bronx. A young, charismatic, and progressive priest named Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) has come at odds with the strict traditionalist Sister Aloysius, who is opposed to change as a general concept. But change is in the air nonetheless, personified by new student Donald Miller (Joseph Foster II), the school’s first African-American boy to attend. The true battle between Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius begins when a younger nun, Sister James (Amy Adams), shares with Sister Aloysius her suspicions that an improper relationship is occurring between Father Flynn and young Donald Miller. Although she has no real proof at all, Sister Aloysius becomes fully convinced that Father Flynn is guilty and sets out to destroy him. Although Father Flynn may well be innocent, Sister Aloysius has no doubt whatsoever of the moral certitude of her quest.

However, she doesn’t find the ally in Donald’s mother, Mrs. Miller, that she expected. (Note that there are SPOILERS ahead, as it is impossible to discuss this scene fully without revealing some key plot points). Mrs. Miller ultimately reveals that she believes her son may be gay, and that she also believes that the best thing for him would be to stay in the school. Donald’s father is apparently physically abusive of the boy, and if he ever found out that his son was having a relationship with the priest, Donald’s life would be in danger. As a black woman in the early 60s with little social standing, Mrs. Miller is not in a position of power with Sister Aloysius, but she must somehow convince her to leave the matter alone, because staying at the school is the lesser of two evils for her son, who she loves very much. As Mrs. Miller, Viola Davis embodies the pain of this horrible choice she must make in every gesture. The diplomatic manner she takes on to convince Sister Aloysius to back off is difficult to watch, but equally powerful.

Davis previously was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for her work in Antwone Fisher, and was also very memorable playing the housekeeper Sybil in Todd Haynes’ Douglas Sirk-inspired Far From Heaven. She has already conquered Broadway, having won a Tony for her work in August Wilson’s “King Hedley II.”

In crafting your performance, how much backstory did you create for Mrs. Miller, other than what was on the page?

Viola Davis: I created a bio that was more than 50 pages, which I wrote on her, her son Donald, and the dad. I wrote until I couldn’t write any more, because when you have just one scene in a movie….you have to come in with so much life already for that character, because, if you don’t, you’ll end up looking like you’re working too hard in that scene.

Did those 50 pages come out of research done by talking to people who had been through similar situations as Mrs. Miller?

Yep, I spoke with people who had been in similar situations. But when I say similar situations, I’m talking about women who had to be the advocate for somebody they loved, and women who were born in circumstances where they didn’t have a lot of options, where they were at the end of their rope, at the end of the road, and they basically had to beg for certain things. There were stories from my mom, which I had heard growing up. About how she was my advocate, and the advocate of my siblings.

Mrs. Miller has to push for what is right for Donald in that scene with Sister Aloysius, not so much in a rigid sense of right or wrong, but what is right relative to these particular circumstances.

Absolutely. It’s like they say in marriage counseling, not that I’ve been in marriage counseling but I’ve seen this on a show about marriage counseling, “Do you want to be right, or do you want your relationship to work out?” And here, in this scene, it’s like, “Do you want to be right, or do you want to save your child?” Remember that this is not a progressive woman. She’s just not. She is horrified by what may be happening. She’s not happy with it. But she loves her son, and she has weighed the two options. Because she believes that if you go to your grave and you are successful at everything else, other than being a mother, than you have failed.

Your dialogue about the father is so well-written, and performed, that I can practically see him in this scene. He lingers over it, although the audience never does meet him.

And she really doesn’t say a whole lot about him either. She doesn’t talk about where he works or how he looks. It’s just one or two lines. It’s so minimalist. So, it doesn’t take a lot of words, but it does take a lot of embodiment, because if you embody that life to begin with, that’s when the language comes to life.

As a performer, you had the pressure of having your character come in half-way through the film, after we’ve already gotten to know the characters of Phil, Meryl, and Amy very well, powerhouse actors all of them, and having to carry the bulk of one of the most pivotal scenes in the story.

Yes, although that would probably be a better question for Adrian Lenox [who played the role on Broadway], because she had a harder job to do in terms of that. Because she had to sit around for a lot of the play, until her scene came along. With me, I just came in on my day to shoot. I was like my character, I came in on the day I was called to the principal’s office. And it’s not difficult if you just play the scene. See, that’s your job – just to play the scene. You can’t think of anything else. You can’t think, “Okay, I’ve got 7 minutes of screen time, so I have to make the most of it.” Or “I have to be an advocate for gay rights.” Or “I’ve got to be the black woman.” You can’t do that. You’ve got to take all of that and throw it out the window, and you’ve got to play the scene. And what the scene is about is this: she loves her son; she’s terrified she’s a bad mother; and she wants him to survive. That’s it.

Her costuming is notable in highlighting the way she had to fit into the white person’s world. Her outfit is sensible, nice, but not too flashy.

There’s a formality to it, which was great because it reminded me of how people were very aware of how they came off in those days. They were aware of being polite. It reminded me to be polite as the character, because she’s talking with a white woman who is also a nun. Because I think that if I had come in wearing jeans or something, it would have given her a casualness which had nothing to do with the scene.

She’s also very formal in how she reveals her belief that her son is gay. She makes the decision to reveal this, but it is in almost as polite a manner as the rest of the conversation. That adds a whole new layer of tension to the scene, because it’s also obvious that she’s in agony having to speak about this.

Absolutely. She has to do it that way. I think when you come in and scream and yell about something, the other person ceases to hear you. I know that when people yell at me, I put up a wall automatically. And in this scene, I have to appeal to her heart. I know this woman has the power to make or break my son.

Let’s talk about your background a bit. You were born in South Carolina, and then moved to Rhode Island.

I was born in Saint Matthews, South Carolina in my grandmother’s house. My grandmother delivered me, because the midwife was late, as my mom put it. And Central Falls, Rhode Island, was very different from South Carolina. There were not a lot of African-Americans there at the time. Today, it’s much more racially mixed. And so, we were on the periphery there for a while, sort of fighting to get in. At the same time, it was also a fantastic place with small town values. I have memories of apple-picking, and going to the reservoirs, and parks. It was idyllic, in a huge sense, and in another sense, I was very much feeling like an outsider. We grew up poor. My father groomed and trained horses at a race track. So, that was my childhood. A childhood of very much feeling like an outsider, but also having real moments of pure joy and happiness.

Recently, you worked on the new Tyler Perry film, Madea Goes to Jail.

That’s going to give me incredible street cred with my nieces and nephews [laughs]. You know, there was a woman at my dad’s funeral and she prophesied for people. She was kind of a psychic. And my mom said to me, “You have to meet her, because she has something to say to you.” And I went, “Oh no. I can’t take it. I don’t want to know my future.” Anyway, I met her and she took my hand and she said, “Tyler Perry is going to offer you a movie, and do not turn it down.” I was thinking, “Of all the things you could have said to me. [laughs] You could have told me that one day I’m going to see God, and you told me that Tyler Perry is going to offer me a movie.” And sure enough, two years later, Tyler Perry offered me a role in a movie. I didn’t turn it down.

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BROKEN LIZARD: The Hollywood Interview

(The Broken Lizard team above, on the set of The Slammin' Salmon. From the far left corner, the five members are Steve Lemme, Kevin Heffernan, Erik Stolhanske, Paul Soter, and Jay Chandrasekhar. They're joined by co-star Cobie Smulders. )

With The Slammin' Salmon, the Broken Lizard guys are back with their funniest film since Super Troopers, and perhaps their funniest, period.

EXCLUSIVE to The Hollywood Interview.com

by Terry Keefe

I once shared a van ride with a few of the guys from Broken Lizard at Sundance, back in the mid-nineties, during their days promoting their first feature film, Puddle Cruiser, and what I recall most is that they were, for lack of a more colorful way to put it, cool dudes. They all seemed to be genuine friends and, most strikingly, lacked the need for verbal one-upmanship, or a desire to always be the funniest person in the room, that I've noticed amongst groups of folks in the comedy field when out in public together. They also felt like a real team, sort of closer to a tightly-knit rock band than anything you usually see in the film business, this side of Monty Python. And that spirit of camaraderie has clearly served them well. Some 12 years later, with three more successful features under their collective belts (Super Troopers, Club Dread, and Beerfest), they are all still working together, but more incredibly, they still seem like, from the short time we spent together this week at least, the same down-to-earth group of guys they were back then, even with a producing deal and suite at Warner Bros, as they now have.


As has been the case since the beginning, there are five official members of Broken Lizard: Kevin Heffernan, Jay Chandrasekhar, Paul Soter, Erik Stolhanske, and Steve Lemme. The group formed back in Colgate University, which actually puts them together for close to a mind-boggling two decades. They've shared writing credit on all their features and generally starred together in all of them as well. Chandrasekhar has served as director on their first four films, although Heffernan has now taken the helm for their newest, The Slammin' Salmon. The film is set to premiere this coming Saturday, January 17th at, appropriately enough, the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, at 10:45 (The screening is apparently sold out already, but check out the Slamdance schedule regardless. They've done more for American indie film than any fest next to their more famous counterpart and deserve the love.). The guys have described the experience of making the Salmon as "going back to their roots," as they raised the money to make the film independently and are heading to the mountain this year without a distributor in place. Although no one needs to point out we're in a rough economic time now, particularly for indie film, this is likely a project that the distributor checkbooks are going to come out for. I've seen the film with an audience now, and to put it succinctly, it plays.

(Michael Clarke Duncan as the Champ, above)

The plot centers around one night at the Miami restaurant of the title, which is owned by former heavyweight boxing champion, "Slammin'" Cleon Salmon, played by the film's secret weapon, Michael Clarke Duncan, as the boss from hell who will literally kick your ass if you piss him off. And it doesn't take a lot to do that. Salmon has just returned from a trip to Japan and informs his staff that he's in gambling debt up to his ears to the Yakuza. He proposes a contest to his wait staff, in order to motivate them to sell more food: the top-selling waiter will get $10,000, while the lowest-selling waiter will have a can of whoop-ass opened on him by the Champ. I have to say that there is little I have seen in recent years which is funnier than watching Michael Clarke Duncan scream threats, poorly-composed (deliberately, by the writers at least) insults, and profanities at the top of his lungs, all of which he does throughout the Salmon. It's a career-redefining performance for him, and I could imagine a successful spin-off film of this character doing just about anything: an adventure tale, a love story, a pirate movie, a Dogma film. I'd watch any of the above. The merchandising possibilities are also endless. I would definitely buy a talking action figure of the Champ loaded up with his best insults, and I don't think I'm alone.

As always, the Lizards fill out the cast to strong effect. Heffernan plays the beleaguered manager of the Salmon, who also has the misfortune of being the Champ's brother-in-law; Chandrasekhar turns in his funniest performance yet in a Lizard film as the waiter known as "Nuts" who has forgotten to take his meds; Soter takes on dual roles as a wimpy waiter and his abusive twin brother chef; Stolhanske is a jerky server who is stuck with Will Forte's diner that won't leave; and Lemme is a former employee, who quit when he got the lead on a network series, and is now forced back into the service trade when inexplicably fired from "CFI: Hotlanta".


I met with Broken Lizard at their publicist's offices at Miller PR last week.

(General introductions are made all around.)

Kevin Heffernan: You have the advantage of having seen the film!

Just last night. I think it's going to play well everywhere.

Kevin: Yeah, hopefully. We just wanna get it out there and get someone to buy it.

Slamdance is a great place to be showing it.

Kevin: Yeah, we're psyched.

Are you going to hit the streets of Park City with guerrilla marketing, like you did with Puddle Cruiser?

Jay Chandrasekhar: I don't know. I think we're like -

Kevin: A friend of mine said to me last night, "Should I print out some fliers for Slamdance, and we'll go up and down the streets and hand 'em out?" I don't know.

Jay: The screening sold out in thirty minutes.

Paul Soter: I know. Ten minutes, I think.

Erik Stolhanske: Ten.

Kevin: It's on Saturday night, at like 10:45 or something. It's a real nice slot.

Jay: It's the Stoner Special [laughs].

Paul: Post-dinner. Some drunks and stoners'll be in there yellin' and whoopin' it up [laughs].

I remember with Puddle Cruiser that you guys also went out on a multi-city tour with the film, in a van, was it?

Kevin: Yeah, we didn't get distribution...so we got a Winnebago. We went from college to college in the Northeast, in the wintertime. January...

Jay: January.

Erik: Genius.

Kevin:...and we just four-walled it, and showed it in all the colleges.

Paul: We'd drive off the road sometimes.

Erik: Didn't we write Super Troopers while we were in that Winnebago?

Kevin: Some of the stuff. When we're on the road, we end up writing a lot.

Was the script for The Slammin' Salmon written relatively recently?

Kevin: No, we wrote it a while back. Actually, what we did is we started writing Beerfest and Slammin' Salmon at the same time, and one was designed to be like a studio kind of movie, with a higher budget, and then we were like, "We should write another one in case we move outside the studio system, then we'll have a low-budget movie ready too," and so, we wrote it at the same time. And so, it was kind of sitting there, and we'd take it out and rewrite it, and put it away. And then, when the Writers Strike happened, it was time to take it out, because we couldn't get anything going in the studios, because they weren't doing anything.

(Paul Soter, April Bowlby, Jay Chandrasekhar, Cobie Smulders, and Steve Lemme)

It's a broad question to ask how you guys write together, but how do you write together?

Paul: It's always sort of an amorphous mix of hanging out versus working. And so, especially with something like Slammin' Salmon, we had the draft a long time ago, but we'd be hanging out and all of a sudden, somebody would start doing the Champ. For a while, there were places where we'd just start working suddenly, like if we were in a restaurant, we'd start talking about the script. And we'd come up with ridiculous shit that the Champ would say, or some scenario of the movie. And we'd write it down, and throw it into the mix, and so, it was a weird....

(Murmurs of consent from all the Lizards.)

Kevin: It was a very unique script for us, to finally sit down and make this film, really after it had a few years of being a back-burner project. But it has been kind of been cool that we ended up having a lot of time to flesh out different stuff and characters.

Is someone designated as the point person on the script who has to piece all these different ideas together?

Jay: Yeah, Steve was.

That's got to be the job from hell.

[General laughter.]

Jay: Steve was the point person on this movie. But we have had different movies where different people have been the point person. And it's tough, because you end up just being a scribe, writing down all the jokes. Everyone's laughing, and you're writing, putting it all down. You know, we used to have a system where we'd break up the script. We'd create an outline, which would have the scene and the jokes that would go in that scene, and we'd each write a fifth of the script, and then put it together, and the point man would try to make it smooth, and twenty drafts later you'd have a movie [laughs]. Now we break up the outline and one or two people go off and write it, so that it's a little more fluid, and then we still do twenty drafts to make the movie [laughs], but -

It seems like keeping a consistent tone would be one of the harder parts of the writing process you're describing. Is the rule basically that if it's funny, it can make it into the film?

Jay: No, it's more...things have to fit the tone of the movie, and fit the actual movie. That's the goal. But I mean, you know, we will throw in the occasional little bit that'll break the tone of movie a little.

Kevin, you've taken over the directorial reigns on this film, but the writing process with the group is clearly very collaborative. Is the directing process also very collaborative?

Kevin: It's very collaborative.

Paul: Yeah, that's just the way we work, and luckily, we've been able to figure out how to make it work.

Erik: A lot of guys haven't stuck around together as long as we have.

You guys have stuck together a very long time.

Erik: We get in our fights, and we have our moments, but we come back and get together.

Kevin: It's what makes it easy to be on set, because even when we have great differences, we get past it, which is probably why we stick together. So it's very, very collaborative, and, you know, it was collaborative on a lot of our other movies, and I was kind of involved in a lot of that stuff, so I felt like I had pretty good knowledge of it, and was able to now step into the directing role without feeling weird. It was very much...we were just making another movie, you know?

Jay, did you give Kevin any directing advice?

Jay: Well, what Kevin always did for me when I was acting [while also the director] was that he would direct my acting, so I would try to come in and do that for him, too. Because it's...the one thing that really falls off when you direct a movie is your acting. You don't really have the right amount of time for it. On this film, I found that what you get to do as an actor, is you get to sit in your dressing room and run lines with people, and try little things, so I was able to do things that I thought of for my character. When I was directing, we'd be shooting one scene, and I'd also be in the next one as an actor, but I was just thinking, "What are my lines? Okay, forget it, roll 'em, let's go." [laughs]. And so when I was actually acting in that next scene, it would really be the first time I thought about my acting for it. It's just not as good.

Kevin: Yeah, I'd be acting in the scene, and you're like, "Is that light in the right place?" Those things pop into your head.

It kind of worked performance-wise for your stressed-out manager character, though.

Yeah [laughs]. Jay was sometimes the stressed-out guy on Super Troopers. I was the stressed-out manager on this.

(Above, Heffernan directs Soter.)


Erik: And it's nice to have Jay back in the peanut gallery with us [laughs].

Paul: Acting. Dicking around.

Jay: Farting, and flirting with girls, and doing whatever, it's fun [laughs].

(Jay Chandrasekhar's character of Nuts, above, probably should have taken his meds before coming to work.)

If there's a creative discussion you guys have to have on the set, do you all sort of huddle together somewhere, away from the rest of the cast and crew, to talk about it?

Kevin: Yeah, yeah, it's those moments when we realize something like "This line's not working," you know? And then we have to talk. I was sort of like, "Get those guys out of their dressing rooms, they're playing their video games, what the fuck?"

[General laughter all around.]

So, we'd get everyone together, and somebody would come up with a better line. It was also good, the fact that we were in one location, because everybody was there and accessible, and people weren't spread out. It worked out really well.

I imagine you have to keep a united front up in terms of decision-making, as far as how the rest of the cast and the crew see you guys. Because there is the danger of people trying to play each of you against the others.

Kevin: Yeah, but I think over the years, we've been very good with that. You see on other projects that you work on, people undermine each other or whatever. But we've always managed to avoid that.

Jay: With other people, with the other actors, though, the rest of us don't really give them direction. I mean, the director is the guy who does it. Because then it gets a little confusing for them, because who the fuck are they supposed to listen to? We'll help each other come up with jokes, but ultimately, if the director wants something a certain way, then that's the way it has to be.

Since improv is obviously part of your background, do you guys typically do a lot of variations from take-to-take?

Kevin: We've always been kind of hampered, in that we've never had the luxury of doing that many takes. We've always been budget-hampered, and on this one, very much so. We shot in twenty-five days, and it was a very limited time. But I think we got a chance to do, you know, a couple of takes where it was scripted, and then I think everyone had a little freedom to try different things. Which was nice. I think in this movie, we did have budget constraints, but because we were all in that one location, it did free up a little bit of time. With no company moves, I think people had the opportunity to do a little more improv-y type stuff, in that stage-play kind of way. Which was a good feel.

There are a lot of advantages to being in one location, but you also had to keep a lot of people there all the time. Because the location was supposed to be a crowded restaurant and one single night. Lots of continuity things to worry about also.

Kevin: Yeah, it was tough.

Erik: And it was a huge deal with the background and the extras. Because you have access to these background actors for a few days, and so you're like, "Okay, I'm shooting in this direction and it's supposed to be 9 PM in the world of the movie. I've got to make sure that everyone who is supposed to be dining from 9 to 10 is in that shot." That's when I really didn't envy you, Kevin.
Kevin: Yeah, it's like if we're doing a scene in the kitchen, and if somebody is gonna walk through that scene, you've got make sure the continuity is always right. There's a lot of house-of-cards shit with this type of continuity.

Did you have Michael Clarke Duncan in mind from the beginning for the role of the Champ?

Kevin: We didn't know who we were going to get. We actually wrote the thing with Mike Tyson in our minds. It was Mike Tyson.

Did you think about actually trying to get Tyson?

Kevin: Well, we couldn't get insurance if we got Mike Tyson. [laughter] So it was like -

Jay: The face tattoo kind of somehow negates the funny in my mind.

Kevin: Tyson was a model, you know, and so we kind of wrote the voice, and we thought about that. And then we got to the point of shooting, and we were like, "Who the fuck is going to play this part? Who can do this?" He's got to be incredibly terrifying, and yet, have these flights of fancy in the dialogue, and do these funny things. And with Michael Clarke Duncan, I don't think any of us had seen him do these types of things before.

I certainly haven't.

Kevin: And we were like, "I don't know, but he looks great. And he's a movie star, and whatever." And he came in, and he just started improvising. And we thought, "Oh my god, the guy's awesome!" Last night, that's the first time I ever saw him with an audience. But I thought it killed, at that screening.

It did. The audience loved him.

Jay: I called [director] Adam McKay up and talked to him about Michael, because they worked together on Talladega Nights. And Adam said that Michael was an incredible improviser. I asked, "Can he do lines? 'Cause we've got huge monologues." And he said, "The guy's great."

Erik: And he was unbelievable. Honestly, like, he had a great improv for every take.

Kevin: And a different one. I tried to do it a little bit of justice in the outtakes at the end, in some of the takes where he would speak Spanish, and do other funny stuff. I was like, "Michael, you should be doing more of this shit," and he said, "Nobody asks me." So, hopefully, people will see this movie, and let him do more, because the guy's unbelievably talented. You can't find a guy that scary and that funny at the same time. It's just not...they don't exist.

What were some of your own restaurant waiting experiences?

Jay: Steve and I have waited tables at a place on the Upper East Side called Busby's. And we would just...we ran the place [laughs]. And so we would just order the customers their vodka soda and their Bloody Mary, and then also one for me, and you'd just drink, and you'd steal/eat food. Whatever they didn't eat, you'd shovel into your mouth. And we had a chef who just a total, total prick, yelling at us all the time. So we had to get our revenge. But yeah, we just wrote down stories from that time. And Steve went on...he had a longer waiting career, so he had more waiter jokes.

Erik: Steve once worked at City Crab, at 19th and Park, and he left after we sold one of our films. He kind of quit, saying, you know, "Fuck you," and then it took a long time to get paid, after we sold our movie. He had to go and ask for his job back, and he went back to waiting tables. Like in the film. They were all making fun of him.

I don't want to give too much away. But I love the little homage to Rocky III towards the end of the film.

[general laughter]

Jay: At first, we were thinking, "Not everybody's gonna get that." But the guys who are obsessed with movies, like we are, they love that shit. That's why we do stuff like that.

Paul: At a screening like that one last night, you've got people applauding at the end, but we also wrote an "Eye of the Tiger" version called "Cry of the Cougar."-- so next time you see the movie....

Jay: It's funny as shit, too.

Paul: We put a lot of care into writing the Mariah Carey version of "Eye of the Tiger."

Erik: The punch [the Champ throws at the end] looked pretty vicious.

Paul: It looked real last night.

Jay: So vicious!

I was going to ask about that.

Paul: How we did that shot?

Yeah. I couldn't find a cut in there. It looks like a real punch.

Paul: We shot it in reverse.

Jay: And...it works.

[General laughter]

Were you guys able to keep a straight face when Michael started going off with the screaming the first time you heard him? Because anything he says while yelling seems hilarious.

Jay: Yeah, he's so funny when he gets angry. You know, I mean, yeah, it was challenging. But you were also scared of him [laughs].

Erik: Yeah, it was very easy to get into the terror of it, too, because it was terrifying.

Jay: The voice is so loud, and it's coming from so deep, and there's something primal about it that makes you wanna do what he says.

[General laughter]

So, you have a lot of new projects going. Do you know which is the next one in the cue?

Jay: We wrote a movie called Road Scholars, where we play college professors. The senior class plays a prank on them - kidnaps them, strips them naked, and drops them off two hundred miles from school. And the movie's sort of somewhat like The Warriors in that we're trying to fight our way back to school.

Erik: They're these sort of academic, egghead guys who are completely up their own asses [laughs], and now they're dealing with the real world, not being able to sort of figure out how to get by. So, yeah, we like that a lot. We hope that's the next thing we do.

Are there going to be little posses coming after them, like in The Warriors?

Jay: [laughs] They're out in the middle of nowhere. They're going from the wilderness, to a weird rural area. They fuck up everywhere along the way, and....there's people coming after them, yeah.

If you really want to do a Warriors homage, you've got to have "In the City" at the end.

[General laughter. The Broken Lizards briefly harmonize Joe Walsh's "In the City."]

Is there some secret that's kept you guys working together, and getting along, for all this time?

Erik: Bills.

[general laughter]

Paul: The majority of what we do with our work is what you do with your friends when you're dicking around anyway. There's very little separation between what we do for a living and what we would do socially, and so it'll always be fun to do. It never feels like punching a clock.

Jay: It's just a job we enjoy.

How much test-screening do you do of your films while finessing them?

Jay: This one, we screened it about three times for three different audiences. Saw what worked, videotaped it, you know. Audiotaped it.

Paul: But, you know, you bring in friends, and I don't know if that's a great barometer, because they know you, they want to laugh, they want to be helpful, and so it's not really like just an audience of regular people, judging the movie for what it was. And I think that even though we had some friends there last night at the screening, that was the first time where I got the sense of "Okay, this is just a film playing in front of an audience, who are not invested to feel one way the another about it," and to have a very good response was, for me, "Okay, I can relax because it plays well, and it's fine, and it works."

Do you ever get back to Colgate to speak?

Erik: Two years ago, they were bringing in the new freshman class, and they brought us back. They showed Super Troopers, and they had a question-and-answer, and they threw a dinner for us downtown.

Paul: Up until a few years ago, there were still some of us who lived in New York, who were close by, and so they would say, "Hey, we're gonna screen this, do you guys wanna come up?" Not as much in the last few years, since we're all out here now. But, you know, it also got to be a point where we were still young enough to go and have a screening and party and feel like we fit in somehow at all [laughs]. This last one a couple of years ago, it just was very striking how suddenly we realized we don't belong there anymore.

[general laughter]

One last question: Super Troopers 2? I've heard it's coming?

Jay: We're halfway through the script. We're gonna finish it, polish it up, figure out how much it's gonna cost, and we're gonna talk to Fox. Hopefully, they'll wanna make it!

FIN.


SOME UNBROKEN BROKEN LIZARD LINKS FOR YOU:

Official Website

MySpace Page

The Slammin' Salmon TRAILER below (Note: This is the Red-Band Trailer, which has some profanity, or cusses, if you will.)

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Patrick McGoohan: 1928-2009

By Alex Simon

British actor Patrick McGoohan has died at age 80 after a short illness, according to a representative for his family. Once a front-runner for the role of James Bond in 1962, McGoohan found stardom instead on television, where he went on to portray spy John Drake on the hit British series "Danger Man" (aka "Secret Agent" in the U.S.). But it was McGoohan's turn in the 1967 cult series "The Prisoner," which he created, that truly cemented his status as a pop cultural icon.

Patrick McGoohan as Number Six in "The Prisoner."


"The Prisoner" told the Kafkaesque story of a British spy who resigns for unknown reasons, is kidnapped by his former employers, and is whisked away to "The Village" a picturesque, but remote, seaside enclave where all its denizens are given numbers instead of names. Every episode, a new actor would play the role of "Number Two," and would try to get Number Six to reveal why he resigned through a series of ingenious, and often surreal, means. The series remains a cult classic to this day, and is currently being remade by American Movie Classics for broadcast later this year.

McGoohan as King Edward Longshanks in "Braveheart."

McGoohan also appeared in such diverse fare as "Silver Streak," "Escape From Alcatraz," and as the evil King Edward Longshanks in Mel Gibson's Oscar-winning "Braveheart." His final role was the voice of Billy Bones in 2002's "Tresure Planet." He also appeared in, and directed several episodes of, the hit series "Columbo." The 6'2 McGoohan was an imposing presence with a stentorian voice who specialized in playing villains as opposed to heroes later in his career.

Thank you for it all, "Paddy Fitz." Be seeing you...

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Golden Globe Winner SALLY HAWKINS: The Hollywood Interview

Actress Sally Hawkins.


SALLY HAWKINS ON THE VIRTUES OF BEING HAPPY-GO-LUCKY
BY
Alex Simon

Editor's Note: This article appeared in the November issue of Venice Magazine.

English actress Sally Hawkins got her first break in cinema from iconic director Mike Leigh in his film All or Nothing in 2002, and soon followed with work in Leigh’s acclaimed Vera Drake two years later. It was heady stuff for the young actress, who’d just graduated England’s revered drama school, The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, a few years before. Born in London April 27, 1976, Sally made her screen debut on the British television hit Casualty in 1999, with work on the comedy smash Little Britain, as well as fine supporting work in Layer Cake (2004) with Daniel Craig, and The Painted Veil (2007) with Edward Norton and Naomi Watts. She also appeared in Woody Allen’s final UK production, Cassandra’s Dream, opposite Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell.

Sally headlines social realist Mike Leigh’s latest kitchen sink slice of English life, Happy-Go-Lucky, playing Poppy, a free-spirited young Londoner who always manages to keep her chin up and smile, even during life’s most discouraging moments. Shot with Leigh’s signature fly-on-the-wall style, Happy-Go-Lucky marks another impressive entry into this unique filmmaker’s cinematic canon, and boasts a star-making turn from the charming and radiant Miss Hawkins, who took time to speak with us during a recent stopover on this side of the Pond. Here’s what was said…

Mike Leigh really gave you your first break.
Sally Hawkins: Yeah, without him, I don’t know where I’d be. I really mean that. He’s phenomenal. He doesn’t suffer fools, and he’s completely honest, and just a really lovely man. He has no fear, and just says what he feels. You so often in life have people who are afraid of hurting your feelings or sort of approach you from around the side. Mike is just straight-on. In this business especially, it’s so refreshing.

I think we need more blunt instruments like him in the film world, and in general.
Yes, he’s honest and his films reflect that, and there are fewer and fewer of those kinds of films, aren’t there?


Sally and Eddie Marsan take the most neurotic driving lesson in cinema history in Happy-Go-Lucky.

His process that creates that honesty is very interesting, combining rehearsal with improvisation. Tell us a bit about that.
We start out with nothing, no script, nothing. He gets a collection of actors together and they flesh out the story. With something like Topsy-Turvy or Vera Drake I think they were more set ideas, but with Happy Go Lucky and All or Nothing, we start with one-on-one work with Mike, where you’re sort of building up the character and—I don’t know how else to put this—but he’s sort of plugging into your brain and sucking out everything that he needs: very detailed notes. He sorts out what he wants and what he needs. Whether you’re aware of it or not as an actor, he knows vaguely where he wants you to go. I was aware very early on that he was looking for someone who was open and high energy and full of life, love and positivity, who had a sense of humor and naughtiness about them (laughs). And that was quite apparent from early on.

So there wasn’t even a seed of your character to begin with in his head.
No, I think he just knew he wanted to follow someone who had a certain kind of energy and put it up on the screen. And the character that he wanted me to explore, he wanted to have those traits.

Just being around you this briefly, you really radiate positive energy and happiness. Was there a lot of you in this character?
I think there is, yeah. Definitely when life is going well, and I’m sitting in the Los Angeles sun (laughs), I have that same kind of positivity! But early on, he establishes a strong line with you that there’s you, and then there’s your character, and there’s a danger that if you allow yourself to believe that they’re you, it can get into some shaky territory. So he always refers to the characters in the third person, for example, when he’s working with you, just to make sure that line is there. You’ll take with Mike alone, and he’ll ask what was going on with your character in that particular scene, and you’ll also refer to them in the third person. So that line is maintained throughout. Before and after (the scene) he’ll ask you to warm up into your character.

How do you do that?
It gets easier as you progress through rehearsal. Initially, it might take half an hour or an hour before you realize that they’re there and you get a handle on the character, but towards the end of rehearsal, you find that you get better at finding the character, perhaps it’s just down to finding a particular gesture. Then by the time you’re filming, the whole process takes thirty seconds, and you’re there.

How long do you actually rehearse before you shoot?
It’s a six month rehearsal period before Mike shoots. He creates these incredibly real, rich, complex characters. They’re as close to real people as possible. You create them from birth, really. Then Mike takes the time to refine them, build them, and write them basically.

Sally and director Mike Leigh relax on the set.

It sounds like a very complex process.
It is complex, but it makes sense when you’re doing it, and it’s a lot of work, but it’s the most exhilarating thing for an actor, and it’s the most secure feeling I’ve had as an actor, because every single thing, every beat has a root, it has a reason for being there. It’s just so tight by the time it gets to filming, because it comes from this organic process. It’s like a piece of tapestry where you know every single stitch and every beat. I’m just full of metaphors today! (laughs)

How long was the actual shoot?
Four months, we overran slightly. So the whole process is the better part of a year, really.

What’s so fascinating is that you’re describing an epic filmmaking process that Mike Leigh has, for what seem to be “kitchen sink” films that most people would guess are shot and rehearsed in about 3-4 weeks.
Yes exactly, it feels like an epic, even though the tiniest moment might be happening on the screen, there’s this really thick, meaty thing behind each beat of the story.

Leigh and Ken Loach are sort of the two leading social realist filmmakers who have documented Britain since the ‘60s, where you feel like a fly on the wall watching them. In the U.S. we had Robert Altman, John Cassavetes and we still have Sidney Lumet, but most filmmakers aren’t doing things like this anymore.
Mike’s a huge fan of Robert Altman and Cassavetes, It’s fascinating to hear Mike speak about that: his influences, and what he’s hung on to from them, and then how he’s taken their methods and sort of put them through his own filter, so to speak.

Let’s talk about your background. Your parents are children’s book authors and illustrators.
Yes, and it was wonderful growing up and watching them collaborate: my Mom might do the rough drawings, and then my Mom might do the final drawings, or vice-versa. Then they both work on the text together. My Dad wrote a lot of the books, because my Mom was always trying to run around and do everything else, like manage my older brother and me when we were growing up (laughs).

Is your brother artistically-inclined, as well?
Yes, he a phenomenal designer and illustrator, and designs web pages.

You studied at RADA. What was that like?
I knew I wanted to go there early on, and enrolled at quite a young age, so I took every course I could. I was like a sponge. It was a good decision, I think, to go there so early, because if I had gone to university first, I might not had been quite so keen and wide-eyed, and putting the tutors up on pedestals, which is where they should be. It was a fabulous introduction to all these different techniques: Stanislavski, and the Method, and all these phenomenal and unusual texts…it was a really tremendous experience.

It sounds like you knew you were an actor from an early age.
Yeah, although it sounds like a bit of a cliché, I was introduced to acting in primary school. It was either art or acting for me, and when I found I was really most interested in making my friends laugh, once I got to senior school, I was aware of RADA and realized I wanted to pursue that line, instead of university, which is what they were pushing, because it was a very rigorous academic school.

L to R: Sally, Ewan McGregor, Haley Atwell, and Colin Farrell in Woody Allen's Cassandra's Dream.

You got to work with another icon of cinema recently: Woody Allen, in Cassandra’s Dream.
He was absolutely amazing, and in a completely different way from Mike. He’s a huge hero of mine, and was charming, disarming, and lovely, droll, bright and I’d do anything for him. The only way I can describe his process is working from the outside in, whereas with Mike it’s just the opposite. When Woody sees it, he knows when it’s right. It’s more about it happening and Woody capturing it, whereas with Mike, every moment is accounted for. Both do very few takes, interestingly enough.

I think the part of Happy Go Lucky that’s stuck with me the most is in the opening scene when your character’s bike is stolen, and instead of getting angry, she says “I didn’t even get a chance to say good-bye.” It was such a great, non-exposition way to establish who she was.
I’m so glad you liked that. That was actually born out of a five minute improvisation before we shot that scene. That’s one of the lovely things about working with Mike: these bits of magic just pop out of nowhere because of all the work you’ve done beforehand.

Trailer for Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky.

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Spoiler of the Month!

Jesus, haven't any of you seen "Old Yeller"?

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ELECTRIC ARCADE--January 2009

By Alex Simon

Welcome to our newest column at The Interview, Electric Arcade, where we review and discuss the latest video game releases for PC and home gaming systems alike.

Screen capture from Gears of War 2.



We kick off this month's edition with the highly-anticipated release of Microsoft's GEARS OF WAR 2 (XBox 360), taking up where part 1 left off, GOW 2 puts you in the role of Marcus Fenix, who must lead humankind in a battle for supremacy against The Locust Horde. Stunning, state-of-the-art graphics and sound, created exclusively for the high-tech wares of the XBox 360, help raise the bar on this outstanding action game, which combine eye-popping visuals with some truly stunning, and frightening, opponents. Enemy AI is quite good and requires the player do more than your typical "run and gun" shooter. Rated M.


BANJO-KAZOOIE: NUTS & BOLTS (Microsoft, XBox 360) is the third installment of the family-friendly game series that allows players to use their imaginations to build wild contraptions and inventions to do battle against the wicked witch and retain rightful ownership of Spiral Mountain. Nice opporunity for kids to develop their resourceful skills along with typical gaming fun. Features six different worlds to explore with over 100 challenges; Xbox LIVE compatible; 100 unique parts and blueprints you can use to build vehicles and inventions. Rated E.


LIPS (Microsoft, Xbox 360) is a karaoke-style game that allows players to sing along with some of rock's greatest hits, as well as the latest hitmakers and their music videos. With choices ranging from 1950s classics like "Stand by Me," to new music such as Duffy's "Mercy," LIPS features over 40 songs ready to go, and allows you to import your own music, as well. Comes with two, standard-size microphones. XBox LIVE compatible. Rated T.
Screen capture from Lips.


Scene It? Box Office Smash (Microsoft, Xbox 360) brings movie and trivia fans together for a game that provides hours of laughter as you challenge your friends and family to see whose movie knowledge reigns supreme reliving some of your favorite moments from the silver screen. Continuing the franchise’s social and engaging trivia experience on the Xbox 360, Scene It? Box Office Smash features all-new questions, more high-definition (HD) movie clips and several new puzzle types, giving you a trivia game overflowing with images as well as audio and video clips from hundreds of films you know and love.

The new game allows up to four teams to challenge one another from the comfort of a living room or via Xbox LIVE. Xbox LIVE lets players virtually put themselves into the game through custom avatars that respond to your play and react to one another throughout the course of the game. This special bundle edition comes with four wireless controllers. Rated T.


You're in the Movies (Microsoft, Xbox 360) puts the gamer in the middle of a real movie that you youself make, with more than 40 mini-games and clips from Hollywood classics old and new. Comes with an Xbox LIVE camera, which captures players' actions, which are then spliced into short films. You can become a B-movie superstar and appear in a series of chessy, low-budget-style clips, or become an action hero in a multi-million dollar blockbuster, a silent movie star, or step into the director's chair and call the shots while your friends and family act them out.

Clever game also takes you through the role of producer, trying to get a distribution deal, cutting a trailer, and more. It's like film school in a box! Great fun for film buffs and aspiring filmmakers alike. Rated E.
Screen capture from You're in the Movies.

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