Enter 45 year-old Sandra Bullock. Despite having scored plenty of box office success with the Speed films, While You Were Sleeping, the Miss Congeniality films, and her most recent one, The Proposal, she’s mostly garnered her reputation as an actor as an everywoman.

The actress’s latest film is the drama The Blind Side. In it, she fills the big shoes of one Leigh Anne Tuohy, an upper-class East Memphis, Tennessee woman who took in and adopted Michael Oher, who transformed from an inner-city, underachieving teen to a newly-minted offensive tackle for the Baltimore Ravens. Sandra said she was instantly enthusiastic and inspired by the film, based on a true story originally accounted in the book The Blind Side: Evolution Of A Game, by Michael Lewis.

“First of all, it was a beautifully executed book and especially for someone who’s been around football players her whole life, still knew nothing and didn’t care anything about the game,” Bullock claims, “By the end of the game, I was in such awe of what it takes to be an athlete and what the coaches contribute to these children’s lives and how they support and push and inspire. I had a real sense of jealousy that they got to experience that and I never did as an athlete or as someone that is able to be brought to that point. But even though I never thought I could make this movie, the inspiring part of the movie is here’s this family that does this, didn’t do this because somebody was writing an article or book or making a movie, but did this because that’s where the instinct said this is what we’re going to do and we’re going to give love and reach out a hand and everybody that came and questioned them.”

“And of course, we don’t trust anybody that does anything nice, that’s just the sad world we live in, but they didn’t care and they kept going and it makes you feel like you need to step up your game. So if whatever wonderful actress was going to play Leigh Anne Tuohy, it was going to be an inspirational story, a true life story that we’re capable of so much more than we think we are, because we don’t really live in a world that supports the good that we can do, they all want us to do something bad that sells some papers or some news report.”

However, Bullock says as much as she instantly loved the film and the character, she was terrified she would not be able to embody the larger-than-life Leigh Anne Tuohy.

“Initially, when I was approached with the film, it was a beautifully written story,” Sandra recalls, “You can see it played out. I didn’t know how to play Leigh Anne. I didn’t know how to approach it or what I could bring to it, so I kept saying, no, this is not going to work for me. Then [Director] John [Lee Hancock] said, ‘Well, why don’t you just come meet Leigh Anne.’”

“So I met Leigh Anne for the whole day and I left there completely exhausted because of the energy she has, but in love with this human being and who she is at this time on the planet, but I still didn’t know how to play her,” she continues, “I had no idea. I didn’t know how to bring that to life and be truthful and do a good job with it. I don’t know at what point I said yes. I don’t recall. I don’t think I ever said yes or agreed to do the film.”

We asked Sandra how she did manage to muster the creativity to play Leigh Anne.

“That’s a tough one,” she says, “Because I do think that I try to get as close…I mean, you don’t meet an energy like Leigh Anne’s ever. She might not be famous here, but she’s known in other places. I felt a great sense of fear in trying to tackle that person she is, but also a great sense of obligation to be true to this wonderful dynamic.”

“John could not explain Leigh Anne to save his life and when I met Leigh Anne, I said, now I know why you can’t, because she’s original,” Bullock adds, “But there’s such a dynamic that exists between those people and their children that you want to pay homage to them. I wanted to as closely as I could, so I did my best.”

Bullock had plenty of praise to go around, first to the young actors Jae Head and Lily Collins who play respectively Sean Jr. and Collins Tuohy, as well as Quinton Aaron, who plays Michael Oher in The Blind Side.

“The caliber of working with these three young actors was extraordinary.” Sandra says, “They might not have had as many years as we do under our belt, but you’d never know that walking onto set. And the love and the comfort and the joy and the professionalism of these three gave on a daily basis. The hardest part is listening and reacting to what an actor gives you and they would just floor me. You’d see either one of them behind the camera.”

“Once we told Quinton that yes, you do have to show up for my close-up when you’re not on camera, once they realize that, was astounding,” she continues, “ It doesn’t require a lot of years in the business because we’ve worked in the business for many years with people who don’t even show up for your off-camera. But it’s amazing the professionalism you get from these guys and I’m so excited to see what they do with their lives and their craft, because if this is where they are now, I cannot imagine what they are going to accomplish in the future.”

Others Sandra praised included the local talent of actors in Georgia, where the film was shot.

“We just assume that the great actors are in New York first and L.A. second and it’s so not true,” Bullock believes, “It’s a testament to John and his casting, finding the people, finding the best people for the role. There’s such amazing talent everywhere and it’s exciting that these sort of ‘new Hollywoods’ and new filmmaking communities that can benefit from these great faces and character actors and leading actors that just are fresh and exciting and bring an authenticity to the piece. But that’s smart casting, too, and that’s John.”

Bullock says she came off inspired by the real Leigh Anne Tuohy after doing The Blind Side…and she says by just how real of a person she felt Tuohy was.

“WWLAD: What Would Leigh Anne Do? That’s what I’d be saying on set,” she says, “We are the same person now. The nice thing is we get to play these people and get to experience lives that we normally get to come in contact. The beauty of Leigh Anne is, one of my biggest questions was how do people use their faith and their religion as a banner and they don’t do the right thing, but they go, ‘I’m a good Christian and I go to church and this is the way you should live your life.’ And I told Leigh Anne, and this was a live interview that we had, and I said, ‘One of my largest concerns stepping into this was that whole banner hold.’ I said, ‘It scared me because I’ve had experiences that haven’t been great. I don’t buy a lot of people who use that as their shield.’ And she was so open and honest and forthright. And I said, ‘Wow! I finally met someone who practices but doesn’t preach.’”

“You know, we’re so quick to tell people how to live their lives and so lucky that I’ve been able to stay on my path, even though I’ve deviated sometimes, but I never felt like I was OK by 100%, didn’t really matter, but, you know,” Sandra continues, “And then, you meet someone who blazes trails and they do it as a family and you feel validated for taking your trip rather than someone else’s. In terms of what she’s getting, she’s going, ‘This is the last time I’m doing this,’ and ‘I’m not doing any more press junkets,’ and ‘This is your thing’ and I go, ‘This is your story, this isn’t my story.’ She has no idea the path that she’s begun in terms of adoption and fostering. No one’s really…It’s not on the forefront of people’s minds. It is on the forefront of my mind every day when I get up, when I look around, I go, is he, is she, what’s their situation, and it’s because of this family. And I think that what they’re going to do for our country in terms of being aware of that is I don’t think they realize the profound effect they are going to have. So I’m happy that being me is great for me. And you see this family, they were themselves for no other benefit than because they wanted to reach out, lend a hand, and had no idea that they would get a son in return.”

Sandra says that she was particularly inspired by Tuohy’s fervent devotion to Christianity in her desire to help Michael Oher.

“I’ve had the blessing of my not having a restored faith, but I now have faith in those who say they represent a faith,” Bullock claims, “Where as before I would say, do not give me a lecture on how to live my life when I know I’m a pretty decent human being. I might not go to church everyday, but I know I do the right thing or try to. You’re going to church and you’re still sleeping around on your wife and spending everybody’s money. How are you better than I am? So I finally met people that walk the walk and that’s made me happy, really happy.”

Bullock says that part of her determination to portray Leigh Anne realistically was to mimic her distinctive, real-life wardrobe down to a T.

“I mean, hello?” Sandra remarks, “Everything I wore was what Leigh Anne wears. Every design label was what Leigh Anne wears. Every makeup was from her palette. Her watch is her watch. Her nightgown wasn’t…I remember sitting with John and going, ‘John, you got to e-mail Leigh Anne and ask what nightgown she wears.’ And you see John going ‘Eh,’ because he knew what the reply was going to be. All he gets back from Leigh Anne is, ‘Y’all need to get a life!’”

However, the one aspect of Leigh Anne’s distinctive style that the actress says she will not emulate is her blonde hair.

“I like blonde highlights, but I needed to have the whole thing,” Bullock says, “Like I’d have to change my whole wardrobe. There was a very important person in my life who just didn’t want me being blonde, thank God! Thank God! There was not an appreciation. There was a little person who thought I looked like an angel. But there was a big person who said, ‘I don’t like the blonde on you, take it off.’”

Despite years of critical drubbing for her choice of films, Sandra Bullock’s box office success is bigger than its ever been with The Proposal, released earlier in the year, grossing $314,600,057 worldwide. Bullock shared with us what she felt made the film a success and why she’s not rushing to do any more movies just yet.

“The Proposal, aside from all the right people and the right elements being in the right place, I think nudity had a great deal to do with the success of that film,” Sandra says, “If I had known that, I would have done it a long time ago. Picking roles, My way of choosing them now is vastly different now than it was a long time ago. But that, I can only be that way now because of what I learned from the past, so I’m choosing now not to choose any work, because when you have had such a nice ride, unexpected rides and fulfilling rides, you don’t really want to take a step backwards.”

“So it’s really made me satisfied in a way that I wasn’t looking for,” she adds, “But I was blessed with it and I really feel full, in a good way, where I don’t need to rush out and go find something. I don’t want to. The fact is that I’m staring at a stack of scripts and I can’t bear to open them. I don’t want to step in that world right now and enjoy where I am. I think it was over time, just having good life experiences that I was actually cognizant of in my work and could remember and that I was very satisfied with. I just want to enjoy the ride instead of blasting forward and trying to fill a void in the workplace that doesn’t exist.”

The same, Sandra says, goes for her second occupation as producer.

“To me, the producing falls into the same as acting,” Bullock believes, “It requires so much time out of your life and I take it very personally, I realize. So if I do something, it has to be something I love and I don’t want anyone else to do. So when I open projects, maybe something will appeal to me. I’m not opening them because I don’t want anything to appeal to me right now. I’m so happy at where I am right now. I don’t want to be tempted to move from this place that I am, I’d like to be just happy where I am, which is producing and acting right now.”

]]> http://www.thecinemasource.com/blog/2009/11/20/sandra-bullock-interview-for-the-blind-side/feed/ 0 http://www.thecinemasource.com/blog/2009/11/20/john-cusack-interview-for-2012/ http://www.thecinemasource.com/blog/2009/11/20/john-cusack-interview-for-2012/#comments Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:03:48 +0000 Rocco Passafuime http://www.thecinemasource.com/blog/?p=17809 John Cusack is an actor who has been one of the few actors lucky enough to mostly be the sole living, breathing special effect of his films, from Say Anything to Grosse Pointe Blank, Being John Malkovich, and High Fidelity. Now, the 43 year-old Cusack will have to compete with explosions, natural disaster, and destruction a la the power of special effects in the film 2012.

The film is directed by German filmmaker Roland Emmerich, famous for special effects extravaganzas like Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Day After Tomorrow. John first shared with us his reaction to the script.

“When I read it, I was sort of a little bit stunned because if you’re on page 20 or 30 and it says, ‘And Rome fell and Paris falls,’ you think, how are you going to shoot that?” he recalls, “And you have no clue. The scope and the size of it was something that I knew had never been tried before. But I thought it was atypical from these scripts or the ones I had been offered anyway, as the geography got shorter and shorter where the characters could be safe and the time ran out, that the characters really started to find the need to reconcile their relationships with each other.”

“Usually, when the action starts halfway through, the screenwriters just say, ‘OK,’ and they just keep the explosions rolling,” Cusack adds, “But the characters kept developing and stuff and it was actually kind of surprising and a little bit elegantly written that way. So I liked the script and it was a page-turner and it was great and I was happy to get offered it, so it was really nice.”

Cusack said he also felt there were elements of his character, divorcee Jackson Curtis, that he could relate to in the script.

“In the script, I liked a lot how he was, I could probably relate to how he was somebody who gets television when he’s working, when you start to make a film or you’re writing something, I can get that way a lot,” he notes, “He was a guy whose family life suffered a little bit because he was too obsessed with his work.”

“So I liked the idea that television sort of saved him because he would focus on the next hour, like let’s get out of L.A., find a way out of California, so you sort of get another ten yards down the road,” John adds, “So I related to that part of the character.”

As praised as Emmerich’s films have been for their memorable action spectacle sequences like the destruction of the entire White House by an alien spaceship in Independence Day, they have often been criticized for severely lacking quality in casting, character development, and dialogue. Contrary to this, Cusack says Emmerich has a great reputation with the actors he works with.

“He’s great,” John says, “He’s got a great reputation with actors. Because if you do one of these movies, too, you check that out and you’re thinking, life may be a little too short, especially with the guys you hear about. But he’s great and he hires actors and he’s very collaborative and works with them and has a great set. I think he sort of learned. He said to me, ‘Look, my special effects are only going to be as good as the actors I’m cutting to.’”

“So he spent as much time on every character and he never did not have enough time for actors,” he continues, “He would always say let’s talk through and follow an actor’s instincts and very rare for an action film director. I think there’s only four or five people on the planet right now and can master special the effects, but also have total control over a film, write it, and work with the actors, and give them as much time as they need. Just maybe [Steven] Spielberg and a couple of other people who can do both those things.”

Cusack also notes that Emmerich was prepared with what he wanted his special effects to look like from the very beginning.

“He’s incredibly prepared,” he notes, “So any sequence that we were in, if we were in the plane or in the car, he would have a video, kind of a bad video game from the seventies or eighties, but kind of a representation of what would happen and what would we be seeing.”

John says 2012’s timing is not only perfect because of its escapism in a world currently in a malaise of economic doldrums, but because of the political uncertainties that still exist in the world as well.

“I think, probably, in today’s society, this film gives voice to a lot of collective fears and paranoia and also, it should probably entertain and distract from some of the woes that people are experiencing,” Cusack believes, “I think it should be escapist entertainment with a little bit of a social conscience that hopefully gets people to react to global warming and some of those things. I think, today, right now, people want to have a good time at the movies because there’s so many troubles in the world right now.”

However, Cusack doesn’t believe that the film gives credence to the Mayan legend that the film’s plot is based on.

“No, I think if the world ends, it will be manmade,” he says, “And if that may happen, it’ll probably take more than two years. I think the global warming thing is definitely a real deal and obviously loose nukes, nuclear weapons, those types of things.”

John says though that his nomadic life as an actor keeps him personally from being afraid of natural disasters.

“I think it scares the hell out of people,” he remarks, “But I don’t have a fear of natural disasters and I don’t know why. I’ve been in bumpy, turbulent plane rides. I have fears of other things, but not that and I’ve also been very lucky because I live in Chicago and L.A. and I have a gypsy life as an actor because I’m always on the road.”

“So I always see the L.A. earthquakes and stuff on TV because I’m never there, so I’m never there when they hit,” Cusack continues, “I’ve been there for like a tremor, but I’ve never been there for an actual earthquake. If I did live through it, I probably wouldn’t be so cavalier about it.”

When asked about how he managed to deliver great performances to a green screen, Cusack’s reaction was humble.

“I don’t know,” he says, “It’s sort of like any other film that has a thing when you’re getting a phone call and you find out news that someone is passed away and you got a camera in your face, I don’t know. That’s just sort of acting. I don’t know what you do. You just sort of imagine. And then, on bigger movies, you have to just wait.”

“You understand that it’s like a marathon and a lot of different times, you have to do a lot of covers to cover themselves and you sort of have to have a sense of, oh, well, this is the angle it’s going to have to play in, so you sort of don’t burn yourself out,” John adds, “You sort of wait to do it when it counts, so that’s just maybe the technique of being around movies for a while and knowing that the DP (director of photography) and the director are trying to sort out how to do things, so you don’t want to give everything when it doesn’t count.”

One thing John says he’s not lucky to have to worry about with doing 2012 is producing it.

“When I saw this, all I thought was I’m glad I’m not responsible for this because it was like watching the circus come to town everyday with huge moving parts,” he notes, “I thought it was the biggest thing I ever seen and I just had to come do my part, which was a lot of work. But the stuff around you, it was a massive production. It has to be one of the biggest films ever made.”

“They had everything,” Cusack continues, “They had an entire city block, port concrete, white picket fences, facades of buildings, and then they had the whole thing on these gimbals, so the whole place would buckle. It was pretty crazy. If there was an earthquake, you were walking on an earthquake, it was pretty hard to stay upright.”

John also shared what he thought was the best special effects sequence in the film.

“I thought the stuff with the water was pretty extraordinary because it’s just so hard to do that,” Cusack says, “Because just the CGI special effects of water is, I know how difficult to do and that was pretty amazing. The underwater stuff I thought was kind of claustrophobic at the end when everybody was drowning. That seemed to work pretty well. But I’m looking at it like, oh, I could have done better, I’m probably not the best person to say.”

We asked Cusack how he enjoyed working with co-star Amanda Peet, who he’s worked with previously on the films Identity and Martian Child.

“Really fun, really loving. She’s great fun to work with,” he says.

We asked the actor to comment on Peet’s remark that she feels Oscars will becoming his way soon.

“Well, maybe it’ll be easier to get one now, they’ll be giving them out like hot dogs, like here you go, here you go,” John jokingly replies.

However, he says he has no regrets about not getting to work with his famous sister Joan.

“Look, I was happy I got to do another one with Amanda, so I didn’t want to push my luck,” Cusack remarks.

As someone who is noted for his political activism, we asked Cusack if he feels 2012 stands with the many environmental documentaries released in recent years like An Inconvenient Truth.

“I think this will add to, it’s part of the zeitgeist of the fear of all that stuff,” John says, “Roland made the movie Carbon Neutral and he did the movie The Day After Tomorrow. So I think he wanted it to be part of that larger kind of conversation. But, as I said, it doesn’t have much of an outward political message, except for a feeling of international unity towards facing a common problem. And so, it offers you feel which you then hope it would be expressed, but it’s mostly supposed to be a pretty fun popcorn movie.”

John also explained that it’s this simple message why this particular disaster film will appeal to people.

“The feeling of the movie is be grateful for what you have and reconcile with people you want to reconcile with and enjoy your life and live it to its fullest right now, because you never know,” Cusack believes, “Then, probably, on a secondary level, it’s to address global warming and make sure people do the right thing that way. But mostly, I think it’s hopefully that feeling that you’re entertained and if you got a problem with your brother, work it out. The movie’s optimistic and at the end of the day, the boat is going to open its doors up to more than the rich and the powerful.”

“Also, that sense of when real disasters strike, the illusion that there’s any differences between countries and ethnicities and religions, all that just stripped away and people are just people,” he adds, “So I think that’s why these stories have a hold on the imagination to us. People like that feeling when people get to that place where there’s no more China, U.S., Russia, Christians, Jews, Muslims, there’s none of that stuff and everybody’s in it together. I think people, of course, want that unity because people aren’t really barbarians and horrible people at their core. So I think the movie offers a way to get there without going through a real disaster or it gives you that feeling of better angels of people’s natures.”

We wondered if Cusack believed if that message has inspired him in his own life.

“It makes it easier to do, but somehow, when you get back to Hollywood, it’s harder, but yes,” John replies.

However, John says the only thing that doing the film has not inspired him to do is participate in the TV series rumored to be in the pipeline as a follow-up to the film.

“No, not me, no, I wouldn’t want to do a TV show,” Cusack insists, “It’s hard enough to do movies when you’re just working with a couple of people. I think TV shows are kind of committee decision-making and I don’t know if that would be the best thing for me for my personality.”

However, Cusack did say that the final cut of the film did leave him riveted.

“I knew going in that Roland wasn’t go back and do anything like this,” John says, “Do you remember ten or fifteen years ago when Terminator 2 came out and everybody said that special effects made a huge leap?”

“I knew he wanted to do the same thing here,” he adds, “He wanted to try to take special effects to a new level and I think he’s sort of done that. So I had a sense of that, too, but then, you can see with some of the things he did with water which they say is the most difficult thing you can do.”

John says his next project will be The Hot Tub Time Machine, which he will co-star in with Chevy Chase

“Yeah, it was something I produced, very, very ridiculous silly movie, but it’s the most important hot tub film ever made,” Cusack claims.

Cusack says that, at the end of the day, when it comes to his career, he feels fortunate just to have the opportunity to do films that will allow him to express the full range of his talent as an actor.

“I’m probably not the best person to say,” he believes, “You sometimes get cast in stuff that you really want to do and sometimes, you get cast in things that are too plain and you try to put your own spin on it and sometimes you get great, great roles.”

“So I guess it’s a little bit of a crapshoot where you try to just find things that in the piece that you want to express, something that touches you, that is part of you,” John continues, “And when you can find that and the director and the studio and you don’t screw it up and you get lucky and it works, which is rare, then it’s a good performance, so I don’t really know.”

One film he still feels particularly proud of as it approaches its 20th anniversary this year is his iconic breakthrough in the teen drama Say Anything.

“I have a great fondness for it,” Cusack says, “It was a great collaboration with Cameron Crowe and I was really proud of the movie, so it’s really nice people are still remembering it so many years later. I’m always kind of delighted that people still like it.”

]]> http://www.thecinemasource.com/blog/2009/11/20/john-cusack-interview-for-2012/feed/ 0 http://www.thecinemasource.com/blog/2009/11/20/amanda-peet-interview-for-2012/ http://www.thecinemasource.com/blog/2009/11/20/amanda-peet-interview-for-2012/#comments Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:01:02 +0000 Rocco Passafuime http://www.thecinemasource.com/blog/?p=17796 Amanda Peet does not strike one as a traditional leading lady. Throughout her career, she has played supporting roles in countless films ranging from The Whole Nine Yards and its sequel The Whole Ten Yards, Saving Silverman, Something’s Gotta Give, The Ex, and The X-Files: I Want To Believe.

Now, even as the 37 year-old actress stars in what is inarguably the biggest movie of her career, it’s once again a role as a supporting player. It’s the special effects disaster film 2012, directed by who she calls the “master of disaster”, German filmmaker Roland Emmerich. Emmerich is best known for such special effects bonanzas as Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Day After Tomorrow.

“I really loved The Day After Tomorrow,” she enthuses, “I was like riveted and terrified. And Independence Day, I saw when it came out and I remember loving it and being so entertained, but I don’t remember it, because it was such a long time ago. But The Day After Tomorrow, I feel like I’d scen it recently enough when I met him that I felt like he was going to deliver something awesome.”

“You’re not signing on to work with a first-time director or somebody who’s only done character dramas or something like that,” Peet adds, “So I definitely think he’s somebody who’s very bold and sort of the master of this genre, so it was kind of a no-brainer.”

As praised as Emmerich’s films have been for their memorable action spectacle sequences like the destruction of the entire White House by an alien spaceship in Independence Day, they have often been criticized for severely lacking quality in casting, character development, and dialogue. Peet says that she believes both personally and professionally, Emmerich is, to borrow from the most recent example of this type of spectacle-driven style of film commonly shredded by critics, “more than meets the eye”.

“Well, I think Roland’s a master storyteller and a master entertainer and I don’t think that his primary focus in terms of this particular movie or some of his bigger movies is, OK, how can I really be topical and socially enriching right at this moment with this particular movie,” Amanda believes, “You know the movie is not Syriana. But, at the same time, I think that Roland is incredibly considerate and aware and concerned and I think that we’re all really anxious.”

“We live in unstable times and I definitely think he’s sort of playing with that idea that we all live in fear of some great catastrophe, whether you believe it’s a manmade catastrophe or something else,” she adds, “I think we go to the movies to have a catharsis, sort of like, OK, there’s a global catastrophe, what happens? And I think Roland’s fantasy is that nations come together, that it’s this great equalizing thing, and people come together the way New Yorkers did and help each other, and that’s his fantasy and he dares to dream.”

Amanda also says her faith in 2012 paid off in observing how much equal attention Roland brings to the actors’ performances.

“I think this is partly why he’s so gifted at these kind of massive shitkickers, because he knows there has to be a human element, there has to be like a personal relationship that is, at least, somewhat compelling.” Amanda believes, “Otherwise, when you see these massive catastrophic scenes, I think you’re kind of impervious to it. That’s why I was saying he’s surprisingly intimate. He wouldn’t leave a scene.”

“There’s one scene where we’re putting the safety vests on the kids and it took us a long time to shoot it because you’re not there, you don’t have that emotional, it’s not there yet,” she continues, “Eventually, he said to me and John [Cusack], this is about you two and you should look at each other a lot. It’s not about the kids. I think he really strives for that and he doesn’t…so whether he’s the master of disaster and he’s this guy who works on this epic scale, he’s also incredibly intimate and he doesn’t know how to do it without making those little moments really important.”

Amanda says she was also surprised by how calm and even-keeled Roland is as a director, dealing with both a massive production and a massive cast.

“The thing that surprised me the most about the experience was how easy it was and how sweet Roland is and he never loses his temper or raises his voice and he is really intimate and just so gentle,” she believes, “It’s hard for me to believe how anyone can be in control of that many people and so many different aspects of a difficult production on that scale and not be a lunatic egomaniac tyrant and he’s none of those things at all. It’s just bizarre. I don’t know how he gets anything done being so gentle.”

Another thing Peet says she was surprised by was how Emmerich’s massive vision for the film managed to feasibly come into fruition in the final cut.

“Well, Roland would show us the pre-vis (pre-visualization) on the laptop the idea of what was going to happen,” she recalls, “They’re crude, but they still made me laugh and still think they were going to be scary. It’s sort of like a video game. He doesn’t draw them. He has people who do that for him. But it was certainly nothing compared to what the final product was like. It was kind of shocking and amazing.”

“I had no idea how he was going to make the cars look like they came out of a plane,” Amanda adds, “I was like, there’s no way he’s going to do that. There’s tons of things where I was like there’s no way he’s going to do that and he does. He’s very bold and his boldness pays off…unlike me. My boldness doesn’t pay off. My boldness is embarrassing.”

One aspect of doing 2012 that Amanda says she loved was getting to work with co-star John Cusack, who she has worked with before twice in the films Identity and Martian Child. This time around, Cusack and Peet play divorcee couple Jackson and Kate Curtis.

“Well, at least, we got to do something, like we were lovers in this movie more than we were ever allowed to be, so that was kind of fun,” Peet says, “He’s very special to me. This is our third one. Also, every time I work with him again, I remember how he’s just so brilliant. Really, very rare, like people ask me what’s so great about him and I can never explain it.”

“He has this vulnerability, this sort of Tom Hanks everyman thing, but yet, he’s kind of slightly more edgy maybe and he has a very dry sense of humor always and intelligence, I think,” she continues, “Not that Tom Hanks doesn’t, but I think he elevates everything that he’s in. He’s just really special. He should have a lot of Oscars coming soon, damn it!”

One of the tricky aspects Amanda says of doing a film like 2012 is how much she had to interact with green screen technology.

“You watch the pre-vis and you get what the beats are, what the scary beats are and the horrendous moments of horror and then, it’s really sort of ridiculous,” Peet notes, “You have our first AD (assistant director) Tommy [Gormley] would sometimes just narrate the visuals and you would just look at a spot on the wall and pretend that this horrible thing was happening and something my acting teacher told me never to do, never conjure up something that’s never there, always respond to real things, but in this case, it was there. I got paid to do something else. It’s probably not a good idea to get too used to that for the very reason she was afraid of.”

“My acting teacher never believed in those kinds of classes where you sit in a chair in the middle of the room and just cry about your dog or something,” she continues, “She always believed that emotions should just be byproducts of your action in a scene with another person or if it’s not another person, then you’re like Jason Bourne and you have an action, you’re running to get something or save someone. You’re responding to the given circumstances before you not just conjuring an emotion by yourself because that would be gratuitous and indulgent and probably fake. All things I was during this shoot, you can ask Roland, who would be like, ‘Cut! This isn’t a silent movie, Amanda.’ He was like, you got to bring it down. It’s hard to because you can’t see your own face. You’re obviously responding to nothing, so it’s hard to calibrate these things. It’s not hard for John. As soon as John was there, we were like Tom McCarthy and like, ‘Wow, we suck! We really suck!’ Because we want it to be really big.”

Peet says 2012’s timing is not only perfect because of its escapism in a world currently in a malaise of economic doldrums, but because of the political uncertainties that still exist in the world as well. She also explains why even in such presently chaotic times like this one, she believes the film will instantly appeal to audiences.

“It’s sort of a coordination of our anxiety that we all feel these days,” Amanda explains, “Whether you’re worried about the Middle East or North Korea or nuclear terrorism, biohazard terrorism, we all feel vulnerable and we’re all, in a low-grade way, anticipating something. And we’re being told that our planet is falling apart, so I think it’s that.”

“And it’s a little bit like when you go and you’re younger, and maybe others go now, but I can’t anymore because I just get sick, but you go to an amusement park and you go on a rollercoaster,” she continues, “It’s a controlled way to scare yourself. It’s like a safe enactment of something really scary. And you kind of get to anticipate up, up, up and you feel the suspense and you know it’s coming, but because it’s in a safe, controlled environment, you can kind of weirdly enjoy it in this sort of masochistic way.”

Amanda also believes that there’s more audiences will come away with from 2012 that two and a half hours of spectacle and peril.

“I think usually in disaster movies, the idea is that you want in your final moments to make the best decisions you can possibly make and hope that your last choices are honorable and you can sort of rectify some of the mistakes you made in whatever small way,” she says, “I think that’s a really compelling thing for audiences, whether it’s a play or a TV show or a book about war, or whatever, what would you do if it were the end. That’s sort of the question. I think Roland loves that, loves people in that situation. I’d really hope that they’d come together and I definitely feel like my generation just got a little bit of a kick in the ass with Obama and everything like that, so I feel like I woke up a little bit and hopefully, people will feel a little bit more involved now.

“I wasn’t here for September 11th, but I was born, grew up, and raised here, so a lot of my friends were here, so I heard about different stories,” Peet continues, “My mom worked on the hotlines. She was a retired social worker, so she went and worked the hotlines and Starbucks stayed open until 1:00AM. The New Yorkers came together and everybody was everybody’s neighbor and that was a great thing. For Roland, that’s the point of the whole movie, it’s what his dream would be if something like this would happen. It’s his fantasy of how things would be.”

There’s already early word that 2012 will be a springboard for a TV series that will continue the story. Peet says she’d be happy to do one, on one condition.

“If Roland were involved in it, I’d do it, yeah,” she replies.

She also says she would also be open to doing another special effects film, providing it had the same level of talent as with this film.

“Yeah, sure, if it was a good script and a good director and great co-stars,” Amanda says, “When I turn the pages and read a script really quickly, I know it’s a good sign. It’s always a bad sign when you’re kind of trying to get through it throughout the day or throughout the weekend or whatever. But I’m not a writer, so I don’t know how to create suspense and calibrate making the audience really uncomfortable, but also sucking them in, I don’t know how they do it.”

Amanda also stresses that the final result of Roland Emmerich’s latest foray into disaster-laden spectacle pulls out all the stops and will have something to delight everybody, even the filmmaker’s most hardened critics.

“If you like to go on a rollercoaster, then you’re going to like this movie,” Peet states, “I think awesome is a really good word to describe this movie. Roland said he felt that it might be his last disaster movie and it looked like he was going for broke. Roland said he felt it might be his last disaster movie and it definitely feels like he was going for broke. So if you want to see the master of disaster in all his glory, this is probably the one to see.”

Though Peet says the one thing she does not believe in regarding 2012 is the actual Mayan legend the film itself bases its plot off.

“No, I couldn’t be more skeptical about it,” Amanda says flatly, “I don’t believe in it. I think there’s a lot to fucking worry about with our planet, but that’s the least of my worries.”

Amanda shared with us what is next on the horizon from her.

“I shot Nicole Holofcenter’s next movie with Catherine Keener and the lovely Rebecca Hall and Oliver Platt and it’s called Please Give and it’s coming out in the spring,” Peet reveals, “It was my life’s ambition to work with Nicole Holofcenter and I’ve been stalking her for like eight years, poor woman. So I feel like I can almost walk away now that I’ve worked with her, but not quite.”

“And then, I did Gulliver’s Travels with Jack Black and Emily Blunt and Jason Segel in London,” she adds, “So much green screen and I’m so glad I did 2012 right before that because I wasn’t as flummoxed when I got there. I was talking to an ‘X’ on the screen and Emily Blunt over here, pretending that the ‘X’ was Emily Blunt. It was a lot easier because I had that little bit of experience.”

Peet mentions that one holdover from Please Give was working alongside actor Oliver Platt.

“We saw each other twice,” Amanda says, “We had just done Nicole’s movie, but we spent a lot of time with him there luckily. We only crossed paths mainly on Nicole’s movie because he plays Catherine Keener’s husband and I try to seduce him, so we mainly worked a lot on Nicole’s movie.

Finally, we asked Amanda if she could pick any next film, what type of genre would she prefer.

“I think if some genie came and said, ‘I’ll grant you a wish. What movie would you like to do?’ I’d probably would like to do a comedy, a romantic comedy or a Grosse Point Blank kind of comedy or something like that,” Peet replies, “But they are very hard to pull off these days. Almost everything’s been done, chemistry’s hard to come by, but mostly, I think a good romantic comedy script is really hard to come by. If I could have anything, it’d probably be something like Studio 60 where it has a lot of comedic aspects to it.”

]]> http://www.thecinemasource.com/blog/2009/11/20/amanda-peet-interview-for-2012/feed/ 0 http://www.thecinemasource.com/blog/2009/11/20/ben-foster-interview-for-the-messenger/ http://www.thecinemasource.com/blog/2009/11/20/ben-foster-interview-for-the-messenger/#comments Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:57:43 +0000 Rocco Passafuime http://www.thecinemasource.com/blog/?p=17783

If there is one thing consistent in actor Ben Foster, it’s his intensity, from TV series like HBO’s Six Feet Under to films like The Punisher, Hostage, Alpha Dog, and 3:10 To Yuma. He brings it to what may arguably be his most intense role yet as Staff Sergeant Will Montgomery in the drama The Messenger. The 29 year-old talked about how he prepared to play a character who has to tell the widows of soldiers that their spouses are dead.

“[Director] Oren [Moverman] set a field trip with us to go to Walter Reede, spend time with the soldiers there and particularly, in the amputee ward,” Foster said, “We had the full support of the Army, which was still shocking. We were advised by Lt. Col. Paul Sinor, who’s head of the casualty notification office of the entire U.S. for two years.”

“The guys in the background on Fort Dix are soldiers that had just returned, so we were surrounded by those who had served and it made the experience a lot easier to absorb and think less and feel more,” he continues, “We spent a lot of time together sharing experiences. I came down about eight weeks early before prep and the emotional landscape, it was something that was very important to, I guess, tune into early on.”

Foster said he had a simple method for approaching such difficult subject matter as an actor as the loss of a loved one.

“It’s such a beautiful script, so the voices were clear,” Ben believes, “But it’s like any of us who deal with trauma and have to get through the day, when we have to get through the loss and show up to work.”

“And how do you get through that day, do the stupid, clumsy, menial human being tasks that we all have to do, take out the garbage, do the laundry, pick up your socks, and someone that you love is gone?” he adds, “So approaching it in a very simple way, it’s difficult out there being a person and these are extreme circumstances, but universal.”

It was brought to Ben’s attention how the romances in the film between the different characters, such as between Will and Olvia, played by Samantha Morton and Olivia and Tony, the latter played by Woody Harrelson.

“Absolutely,” he says, “And hopefully, everybody addresses life like that. Everything should be a romance. This is cold, if not. He recognizes different…like any of us who recognize, we say I can recognize that quality or feel that quality in ourselves in someone else or they remind us of something we don’t like which may also be part of us.”

“It’s a difficult one, the relationship between Will and Tony only because they got big hearts and don’t know where to put it and eventually they connect,” Foster continues, “And with Sam, Olivia’s…there’s that frequency of saying you have felt the way I feel and there’s an attraction there that we don’t always understand, but we say, oh, that person feels how I feel, but I don’t know how to deal. I need to get closer, maybe grow together in some way.”

Foster said what haunted him most about doing research for his role was his up close and personal encounters with injured and maimed Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans at Walter Reed.

“You can’t walk through an amputee ward without being confronted by so many stories and that’s one hospital, one wing, in one very short period of time,” Ben says, “I don’t have a particular one, it’s a life-changing experience to see the effects of war outside these cold, chilly statistics.”

“When you see the scars, you touch the scars,” he adds, “I’m touching the scars on a young boy where his leg used to be and I’m walking away trying to get my head right and my face starts to burn with the antiseptic. I touch my tongue and I taste the burn. It gets under your skin to see the results of it up close as a civilian that it alters the way you read the news or have a conversation or listen more importantly.”

However, Ben notes that the encounter was not as up close and personal with the notification office.

“If I was getting the news that a loved one was gone and an actor came at my door, I would shoot them at this point, like you’re driving along, but he did address it,” Foster explains, “Yes, it is a military film, but we did address what’s beneath that and that’s…what’s it like, we’ve all done that, we’ve all tapped into that place and be honest with ourselves.”

“It’s clumsy, it’s awkward, and as Woody’s character says, ‘There are no happy customers,’ so if we can be honest with ourselves and say, yeah, we get that call and we keep getting that call as we get older,” he adds, “And at some point, someone will get it about us.”

Foster shared with us some of his favorite war films.

“Not as a specific genre and not as somebody who says, ‘Get me all the romantic comedies now!’” he says, “But I do like The Last Detail, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, they are terrific films that deal with war, but I think on the shelf where The Messenger, it’s more Hal Ashby than Stanley Kubrick.”

“I mean, how do you approach the stylized approach, sometimes stunning, exquisite films across the board,” Ben continues, “I feel like I’m watching a movie and that’s always really exciting, but I very rarely get lost in those characters. I’m more looking at a great piece of art and sometimes, when I’m watching those movies, I don’t get a visceral human connection.”

Finally, we asked Ben if he took it upon himself to make his intense and even physically violent scenes as realistic as possible.

“Hit me, just hit me. Tell me I’m bad,” he jokingly begins in a whisper, “Everybody approaches their day differently and whatever gets you there, there’s so much complication about performance and you’re trying to create this internal space where you can feel and connect to somebody. So if there is a way to support these windows of togetherness, be it through violence…I guess violence is intimate as well.”

“You do what you have to do to get out of your own way, so you don’t have to think so hard, how would I?” Foster continues, “And it just becomes, here we are, so whatever it takes on the day. Obviously, there are going to be lines, but you address them on the day. I’m not going to go knocking on doors, telling people that their kids are dead in preparation, but I will walk around at night and allow those pictures to rise up and sit with them. If an actor needs to come into contact, that’s what we need to do, it’s a case-by-case.”

]]> http://www.thecinemasource.com/blog/2009/11/20/ben-foster-interview-for-the-messenger/feed/ 0 http://www.thecinemasource.com/blog/2009/11/20/jason-schwartzman-interview-for-fantastic-mr-fox/ http://www.thecinemasource.com/blog/2009/11/20/jason-schwartzman-interview-for-fantastic-mr-fox/#comments Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:54:01 +0000 Rocco Passafuime http://www.thecinemasource.com/blog/?p=17770 When an actor has an opportunity to work with a filmmaker of extraordinary caliber, it becomes the potential high point of their career. When such an opportunity becomes also the opportunity to do voice work in an animated film, it’s even more so.

Jason Schwartzman has worked with filmmaking wunderkind Wes Anderson’s Rushmore and The Darjeeling Limited, as well as the latter film’s companion short Hotel Chevalier. Now the 29 year-old actor will reunite with Anderson on his first animated film The Fantastic Mr. Fox, based on the children’s book by Roald Dahl.

In the film, Schwartzman plays Mr. Fox’s 12-year-old son, Ash, and we quickly discovered he has quite a bit of pride beaming in talking about him.

“Have you seen him next to the other foxes?” Jason remarks, “He really is much littler than the other foxes. When I saw him standing next to George Clooney’s fox and Meryl Streep’s fox, I realized just how little he really was. He’s very small. Do you like him? Do you think he’s cute?

Jason says he had no qualms about the idea of playing an animated fox, which he says he did by taking the fox element out of the equation.

“Wes brought me to the studio where they were building the foxes and all the sets,” he recalls, “I was able to see what they look like and what the sets would look like and look at all the clothes and everything. And it was really exciting and really a thrill. But it’s odd. From that point on, I never imagined myself playing a fox when I was laying down the audio tracks. I think it’s for a number of reasons: One is the script. If you wanted to, you could remove any reference to them being a family of animals and actually, it plays out almost exactly like a story about people and about a father who’s feeling a certain way about where he is in his life, a kid who’s 12 years old who feels awkward about his height, that he likes a girl who doesn’t like him back and in fact, likes his cousin, he wants his father’s love, a wife who feels, can sense this husband’s longing for something else. It all feels like it could be people.”

“So when I was laying down the voice, I never imagine myself playing a 12 year-old fox,” Schwartzman continues, “I just thought, ‘I’m going to play a 12-year-old kid,’ who actually is feeling a lot of the same things that I felt when I was 12 and 13, and still linger on into today, certainly in this day and this age for me, like I wanted to be a better athlete or I felt for sure, at that time, it took me a little bit longer to grow, so I was much smaller than everybody else and was very insecure about it. Definitely, you can highlight that I liked girls who didn’t particularly like me back and not only did they not like me back, they liked people who were very close to me, so I had to witness it. It was a drag.”

He adds that it was Anderson’s unusual method of recording voice dialogue that made the film feel less than your traditional cartoon fare and more like a world beyond what one could capture in live-action.

“The other reason why I didn’t imagine myself playing the fox was because the way Wes had us all laying down the voices for this movie,” Jason says, “He got all the actors to do it live, for the most part. So instead of a typical animated movie where everyone’s doing the voices in a really fancy recording studio with good microphones and compressers and audio equipment and going for a hi-fi sound in a very controlled environment in seclusion, Wes basically felt like, ‘Wait, we’ve got this great cast. Why don’t we all go out and do it on location more like a radio play?’ And that’s how we did it.We all went to these various locations as a cast. And if a scene needed to be shot outside, we’d go outside and find an atmosphere that felt like it was the one that was in the movie, and we would act the scenes outside there. There was one guy with a microphone recording the whole thing. If there were birds outside, there were birds animated in the scene. If there were crickets, those were the real crickets that were there. If we had to dig in the ground, we really got on our hands and knees and we really dug. If you see us eating in the movie, we’re truly eating.”

“So it was nice but was happens is, it really doesn’t make you feel like a fox,” he adds, “It makes you feel like an insane kind of human sometimes when you’re digging in the ground. But, if George Clooney is staring at me, playing a scene, acting a scene, I’m not imagining myself being a fox. I’m just being there and singing with him and pretending to be his son and do it realistically, which was great, because then when I went to see the movie, it was like I hadn’t even been part of it as an animated movie. It was great because I just kind of handed over the voice performance to these incredible animators who did the whole movie, really, and brought all these characters to life and made my ears twitch and the way my character spits and all this stuff. Our characters get laughs for things. We’re not even saying anything and they get laughs. That’s something we can’t take credit for. That’s all these amazing animators. So it was great for me to see the movie for the first time because it was almost as if I had nothing to do with it. It was fun.”

What added to the intimacy of this project, as with Wes Anderson’s films in the past, adds Jason, was having he and the cast in close contact with one another.

“I’ve only worked with Wes now on only three-and-a-half movies, if you count the short,” he says, “On Rushmore, that was just such my first experience, it was so unusual and I didn’t know what to expect. I thought that was the way people made movies. It was only when I went on to make other movies that I realized just how special that experience was. And now I really appreciate these experiences we have together, because he really does, even back then on Rushmore, he wants it to be a very close-knit group of people working intensely together, but he wants it to be very close even after hours. So we would go to work all day and then, go home and Wes and I would eat dinner together and have the scripts at the dinner table and work on scenes for the next day. We would drive to work together, and he just paid such loving care to me.”

“On Darjeeling, the idea was that we would all live together in this house in India,” Jason adds, “He that maybe we would play sports on the weekend together, that we would really be on a real moving train that goes all around the desert, that there wouldn’t be trailers really on the train, that the actors would all have to stay together and exist together in this little room. I think the idea is just about keeping it focused on the work but also keeping it fun, but it’s unorthodox. I mean I’ve never been on any other movie where there haven’t been trailers and I think it’s nice. Because I think it allows you to work harder, in a weird way, because you are so close that you have no excuse not to work harder. I didn’t literally shack up on this one, but we were all living together in one house. It was pretty amazing, it was pretty wild.”

Another unusual aspect of this production was how Wes Anderson often corresponded with the crew via e-mail. Jason clarified for us how this method worked.

“It’s a misconception that it should be considered a negative way to direct a movie, because basically, in a movie, there’s one, maybe two or three, but primarily one main unit of people who are directing the movie, and that’s the actors and crew,” Schwartzman explains, “Sometimes there’s a second unit doing close-ups and stuff. On this, there were over 30 units all working simultaneously. And on a good day for a unit is like one or two seconds of captured motion. Basically, the idea was that if he was there in England, he almost wouldn’t have been able to direct the movie because he would have been too close to it. Plus, he was editing it and doing the score all in Paris simultaneously, then shooting it.”

“What they did that was amazing was there was e-mail, but even more incredibly was that Wes had a feed of every camera that was shooting live on his computer,” he continues, “So he had 30 live feeds of every unit that was working, like a director would direct a live football game, go to that camera where you have all the screens up. That’s how he made the movie. Allison Abbate, the producer, I want to echo her, she did Corpse Bride and all those, she is very experienced in stop-motion animation. And she said to me that the way Wes did it was actually pushing it in a great, new way a director can direct a one of these movies and using technology in a more efficient, productive way. Instead of walking around and going, ‘Oh, it looks OK.’ It would’ve been more of a waste of time if Wes had probably been there live, because he would’ve just had to walk around all these places. But this way, he could walk through it all the way live and he’s editing it in Paris with the editor and doing the music in Paris every day. He’s able to do music, editing, and direct these things live.”

The actor shared with us his own childhood experiences and how they may or may not have shaped his portrayal of Ash Fox.

“I think I got into enough trouble to say that I had a childhood and that I had definitely did things that are typical of youth and stuff,” he reveals, “I was never really, really, really bad, like a bad person, because even though I did and still sometimes have a problem with unreasonable authoritative figures or unreasonable adult, like a teacher who’s just mean. I don’t like those types of people. For the most part, I generally always just had really bad luck. Like I was always the kid who would get in trouble. If there were six kids and they all did something bad, they would only see me. And I realized that about myself at a very early age, so I did my best to stay out of trouble. Like if six of us were sneaking out of a bunk to go visit the girls in seventh grade on a school field trip, we would all sneak out, but the flashlight would hit me in the face, and all the other kids would scurry and I would get in trouble.”

“But I didn’t break any rules,” Jason adds, “Typically, I was a loner. And I had plans for big forts, mazes and water-slide parks and stuff like that in my backyard. So I was much more of the kid who I could picture now, from my parents’ point of view, babysitting and I would walk by with a hammer, dragging giant piece of trash. “What is that?’ ‘Nothing.’ And then I’d nail it up against a wall. So I was more like a kid like that, kind of to myself. I played video games when I was little, but not really. At a certain point, I lost interest in video games and was much more excited about making things.
When I was little, my elementary school had a guy who would film the school functions with a video camera. All the kids loved this guy, because he was very fun. So he decided to start a summer film class. It wasn’t fancy. It was like five kids who liked to hang out with this guy. We would go out and make movies with this portable camera, and I literally started to write movies.”

We asked Jason how playing Ash Fox compared to playing characters in his previous films with Wes Anderson.

“Well, first off, I would say that so much of it is right there in what he writes in the attitude of the character, what the character is going through, the moods, and how the other characters react to the characters I’ve played,” Schwartzman replies, “I think we all do so much of the work for each other. Like in Rushmore, if I make a face, it’s usually the way Bill Murray reacts to it that’s really the funny part. I think it’s not only how my characters are written, but how the other characters are written that define each other. I think that he writes such great characters. My first and foremost focus when I’ve been able to work with Wes is to ask as many questions as I can about, ‘What do you want to see? What do you want me to try to do for you?’”

“I feel like not only is film a director’s medium, but when you working with such a great director as Wes and such a great writer, I want to see the movie,” he continues, “I love the movies, so I want to help tell his story. I just want to do the best I can so he can do the movie that he’s the most proud of. That’s kind of how I base my characters. ‘Tell me what appeals to you about this character? Why did you write this character? What do you want to see in this character?’ And he’ll give me information, and I’ll sit on it and think abut it and every day just go to work, try to say the lines and not mess the lines up. I do try to tap into what the feeling is he’s going for. On Rushmore, it was my first time ever acting. On Darjeeling,” we wrote the thing together, so I was tapping into my own things that I put in the script. And on this, I was just thinking specifically about what I was like when I was 12.”

Schwartzman also shared with us how it felt being a nearly 30 year-old man playing a 12 year-old boy in the form of an animated, anthropomorphic fox.

“Pretty amazing,” Jason enthuses, “Because of this movie, I am the son of George Clooney and Meryl Streep. It’s not something I’ll probably have the chance to do again. When Wes first told me about my role in it and that I’d be playing a young fox, I thought I’d maybe (raises his voice pitch) ‘talk like this,’ but he wanted me to speak normally and just be me and act like however I felt I should do the character. It’s pretty amazing when I see this movie. It definitely gives you range bragging rights. Like, ‘Yeah, I’m a 30-year-old, but I play a 12-year-old.’”

Jason’s not only proven his skills as a dramatic performer, but he’s also proven himself adept as comedy. In the past, he’s done comedies like Slackers and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and in the HBO comedy series Bored To Death. We asked him whether comedy is more his preference than drama.

“I still don’t really feel that way, and here’s why: I was never the funniest kid in my school.” Schwartzman claims, “I was more like the eighth-funniest or the fifth-funniest. There was this one kid, Amos Buhai, and I still know him pretty well, he was the real deal. He was the Bill Murray of my high school.”

“I don’t know if it is for me,” he adds, “This industry is a mysterious, capricious, bizarre industry. And I really do feel so lucky. I’m happy that I’ve been able to keep working and working with great people, but I always feel like an imposter. Like, ‘Oh, it should’ve been Amos or it should’ve been that guy.’ I just think that a lot of things in this world are pretty funny and also pretty sad at the same time.”

Finally, we asked Schwartzman about what to expect from the upcoming season of Bored To Death and what will happen to his character, Jonathan Ames, a struggling writer who has a second, unofficial career as a private detective.

“I’ve already found out a lot about the second season,” he says, “It’s new troubles and more troubles.”

Anderson’s unique path as a filmmaker has only gotten more so as the most arguably mainstream film of his career is at the same time his most radically departure yet, his first animated film. It’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox, based on the children’s book by Roald Dahl

The 40 year-old filmmaker is not only directing his latest project, but co-writing, overseeing the editing, and even supervising what songs are shown in the film. As song cues in scenes have become a very key part of Anderson’s highly unique style, we asked Wes how he chooses a song to fit a particular scene.