Archive for October, 2009
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31st
Oct
2009
Or...my favorite pitch meeting ever.
In 1978 my partner, David Isaacs and I were head writers of MASH. That fall we also signed on to write a pilot for CBS. Our producer was Allan Carr (pictured above). He was this rather flamboyant character famous for throwing lavish parties in the “King Tut Disco” in his home, producing such films as SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER and GREASE, and winning a Tony for producing LA CAGE AUS FOLLES on Broadway. He looked like composer Paul Williams -- short, cherubic, bespectacled.
We arranged a meeting to pitch our pilot story. Since we were dealing with MASH all day the meeting was set for 6 PM at his Benedict Canyon mansion (“Hillhaven Lodge”, complete with a giant eight foot Oscar statue in the driveway.)
We show up and are told by the butler he’s not ready. The butler ushered us onto the lovely outdoor patio where a bottle of wine was waiting for us as well as a Chasen’s ice mountain of fresh seafood. An hour later we’re still waiting although the bottle is now empty. And we start getting a little giddy. We were wondering how we could steal one of his ceramic flamingos. Would Allan notice the two long flamingo legs sticking out of my briefcase? We were really starting to get punchy.
Finally, we hear “Hello, hello” and quickly put on our serious game faces. A moment later Allan sweeps in wearing nothing but a flowing white caftan…and a layer of thick white cold cream all over his face. Holy shit! We almost lost it.
And now, not only must we somehow maintain decorum, we have to pitch a complete pilot story. Behind Allan sat the flamingos, making it even worse.
We somehow managed to get through it. Imagine this surreal scene – a normal pitch meeting, the producer and writers polishing a story, trading ideas, everyone acting as though there’s nothing unusual even though the producer is in a dress with Crisco dripping from his face.
We wrapped up the meeting, said goodbye, shook hands, he closed the front door, and we rolled around on his front lawn for 45 minutes laughing.
The pilot didn’t go thank God because shortly after that Allan had his stomach stapled. Lord knows what the story meetings were like following that.
In 1978 my partner, David Isaacs and I were head writers of MASH. That fall we also signed on to write a pilot for CBS. Our producer was Allan Carr (pictured above). He was this rather flamboyant character famous for throwing lavish parties in the “King Tut Disco” in his home, producing such films as SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER and GREASE, and winning a Tony for producing LA CAGE AUS FOLLES on Broadway. He looked like composer Paul Williams -- short, cherubic, bespectacled.We arranged a meeting to pitch our pilot story. Since we were dealing with MASH all day the meeting was set for 6 PM at his Benedict Canyon mansion (“Hillhaven Lodge”, complete with a giant eight foot Oscar statue in the driveway.)
We show up and are told by the butler he’s not ready. The butler ushered us onto the lovely outdoor patio where a bottle of wine was waiting for us as well as a Chasen’s ice mountain of fresh seafood. An hour later we’re still waiting although the bottle is now empty. And we start getting a little giddy. We were wondering how we could steal one of his ceramic flamingos. Would Allan notice the two long flamingo legs sticking out of my briefcase? We were really starting to get punchy.
Finally, we hear “Hello, hello” and quickly put on our serious game faces. A moment later Allan sweeps in wearing nothing but a flowing white caftan…and a layer of thick white cold cream all over his face. Holy shit! We almost lost it.
And now, not only must we somehow maintain decorum, we have to pitch a complete pilot story. Behind Allan sat the flamingos, making it even worse.
We somehow managed to get through it. Imagine this surreal scene – a normal pitch meeting, the producer and writers polishing a story, trading ideas, everyone acting as though there’s nothing unusual even though the producer is in a dress with Crisco dripping from his face.
We wrapped up the meeting, said goodbye, shook hands, he closed the front door, and we rolled around on his front lawn for 45 minutes laughing.
The pilot didn’t go thank God because shortly after that Allan had his stomach stapled. Lord knows what the story meetings were like following that.
31st
Oct
2009
From Christopher Lloyd, co-creator of MODERN FAMILY. This comes from a current article about the show in ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY. If I can read between the lines, I think he's happier at ABC than he was with his previous network. "Getting notes on creativity from Fox is like getting notes on fashion from the Braille Institute."
And from Jewish Punk Rocker Patrick A. or "Aleph", the 26-year-old founder of Punk Torah, an outreach effort to inspire Jewish spirituality:
"When I'm on stage screaming, hitting my face with a microphone and pouring beer on my head, at least I'm singing about the Torah."
31st
Oct
2009
ADAM GOLDBERG: SHOOTING TO THE MUSIC
By
Alex Simon
Adam Goldberg first brought his unique brand of manic intensity to Richard Linklater’s ensemble classic Dazed and Confused in 1993 and has since been featured in such varied films as 2 Days in Paris, A Beautiful Mind, Saving Private Ryan, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, The Hebrew Hammer and I Love Your Work, which he also directed. An actor with a talent for mining the neuroses of his character for both comedic and dramatic effect, Goldberg also played recurring roles in “Friends” and “Entourage.” Goldberg's music CD, "LANDy, EROS AND OMISSIONS," hit shelves June 23 of this year from Nine Yards Records.
Goldberg’s latest film, (Untitled), is a satirical comedy that has him playing Adrian Jacobs, a brooding avant-garde composer who falls for the gorgeous owner (Marley Shelton) of a trendy New York art gallery. The quirky worlds of contemporary art and music are set on a hilarious collision course in co-writer/director Jonathan Parker’s film, which also features support from Eion Bailey, terrific as Goldberg’s self-obsessed brother, and Vinnie Jones, whose wild comedic turn in the film is sure to redefine his career. The Samuel Goldwyn Films release opens in a limited theatrical run October 23.
Adam Goldberg sat down with us recently to discuss film, music, and the savant-like genius of Steven Spielberg. Here’s what followed:
I thought (Untitled) was an interesting companion piece to I Love Your Work, with the former being about pretentious people in the art world, and the latter about that crowd in the world of indie film.
Adam Goldberg: (laughs) Yeah, that’s true, I guess. I think (Untitled) is a bit more dry in terms of its tone. I guess that’s what I responded to. It’s funny when you get a script for a small film; you never really know what its status is, in terms of financing. It can be pretty nebulous. But once I read the script, I didn’t care about those things. I wanted to make it, and help facilitate it in getting made anyway I could. I responded to the character and that the world is one that I’m somewhat familiar with, but had never really been in the middle of before. I also liked that it was so tightly-written and didn’t feel like it would necessitate a lot of improvisation, although many times that is how I look at a piece of material, in terms of what I might bring to it in that regard. But this script really spoke for itself and required me to adapt to the script and the character, instead of the other way around.
Adam Goldberg in (Untitled). How were you familiar with the art world before?
My dad was kind of into it when I was growing up.
Is your dad an artist?
(laughs) No, he’s a wholesale food distributor, but he was an art lover, and we used to go to museums and galleries all the time, and was exposed to lots of modern art as a kid. As far as the musical side of it, I hadn’t necessarily known people who were doing things that were so minimalist or absurdist, but I’d always been a big Steve Reich fan, and enjoyed that sort of experimental music, so that’s where that element came from. So it appealed to me on many levels.
I thought the film was very well-cast, down to the smallest roles. You see Vinnie Jones in an entirely new light here.
Yeah, right? (laughs) He actually came in at the last minute, one of those little miracles that happen sometimes. He’s a really funny guy, which a lot of people don’t realize. They’re used to seeing him as an action hero.
L to R: Goldberg, Marley Shelton, and (Untitled) co-writer/director Jonathan Parker.I was surprised to see that you were born and raised in L.A. I always figured you were a native New Yorker.
Yeah, that’s a common misconception. I was born in Santa Monica, but when my parents split up, my dad stayed on the West side, and my mom and I moved to the Wilshire/Crescent Heights area. I went to school at Oakwood, which was the fancy private school in North Hollywood. The tough kids from North Hollywood High used to beat us up.
When did the acting bug bite?
I started performing when I was really little, like six or seven. I did plays and things for my parents and their friends. I took acting lessons starting when I was about 14, then did school plays and Equity waiver plays, and it progressed from there. I also started shooting my own little movies around then. I wound up dropping out of Sarah Lawrence College and going to Cal Arts for film school, then dropped out of there after ten days, because by that point I realized I couldn’t stand being in school anymore. So making movies was always my goal ultimately, but then I started getting jobs as an actor.
Goldberg in a still from (Untitled).But the prize you always had your eye on was making your own films?
Yeah, exactly. I thought I’d go into filmmaking through the front door, as opposed to the back door, which is what happened, I guess, just not to the extent I imagined. It’s more a function of how little I write. (laughs)
For someone who’s always aspired to be a filmmaker, you’ve gotten to work with some amazing directors.
Yeah, my first film was with Richard Linklater and then with Spielberg, I showed him my first film I made, and he helped hook me up with the head of post-production at DreamWorks to help me finish it, which was an incredibly nice gesture, but at the end of the day, I think it actually ended up costing us more money. (laughs)
Dazed and Confused holds up really well. What was the atmosphere like on the set?
It was a huge party, sort of like this super-condensed college experience that I never really had. It was six weeks of this group of 15 people, all staying in one hotel together, and having a blast, but also taking it really seriously. We all felt that it was going to be an important movie, even though the studio ended up dumping it, and it didn’t get the audience it deserved when it was initially released.
Goldberg in Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused, his film debut.Now it’s sort of viewed as the ‘90s answer to American Graffiti.
Yeah, lots of comparisons were made between the two films, and I think Richard actually pitched it that way. But once it was made, it almost felt like it had been around for a while, which was strange. We all sort of knew it was going to be this cult thing, but were still really frustrated the way it was released. It was the beginning of the mini-majors. Grammercy was Universal’s art house distributor, and I think they’d only released one other movie prior to ours, and it would have been a fine release if they’d continued to platform it. They debuted it on something like 250-300 screens, and it was doing really strong numbers, so what they told Rick was that it would be platformed, and opened wider and wider, if it opened well, and they just never did. That was an example of great casting, although I don’t think anyone’s career really took off from it, except for maybe (Matthew) McConaughey, whose life literally seemed to change overnight after that film. There were a bunch of people, like Vince Vaughn, who auditioned for it and didn’t get it, but there was this amazing group of actors who were all about 21 or 22, and we got put together. Now when you look at it, it’s like a who’s-who. It was everybody’s first or second film. You could say the same thing about School Ties, which had come out just before.
Goldberg in Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. We have to talk about Saving Private Ryan.
At this point, everything seems to be like a memory of a memory, so I have to really dig to go back there. I feel almost disconnected from the experience, because it became so much bigger than our experience with it was.
I know that Dale Dye put you all through a truncated version of boot camp to start with.
Yeah, very truncated, because we were all big pussies and wanted to leave, and (Tom) Hanks sort of made us a deal to stay one more day, then we could leave early, because we were all ready to walk on the third day, not that we were allowed to. (laughs) We were just dying. We were all so sick and tired and freaked out because we were supposed to start shooting the day after we got out. We were just big pansies. Looking back though, it was an invaluable experience, and one of the more important elements of having done the film, to prove to myself that I could get through the kind of experience that otherwise I never in a million years would have subjected myself to. And it certainly helped me take a more subjective approach to the whole thing. I was also reading a lot, and watching lots of WW II documentaries.
What were you reading?
Oh gosh, anything I could get my hands on. Obviously Stephen Ambrose was a big guy in that department, and he was advisor to the movie, although I never met him till the press junket. There was just something about being with a group of people and being so totally sleep-deprived at the end of five days…I was really good friends with Giovanni (Ribisi) before the film, but by the end of that five days of boot camp, we weren’t allowed to call each other by our real names, and I’d look at him, and I wouldn’t even see him anymore as Vanni. I’d just see this look in his eyes, like “What the fuck are we doing?” and “How the hell are we going to get outta here?” We were so…it just made me really understand how the military worked. It was really surreal, the whole thing. It was done very fast for that type of movie, and was really exhausting, and you felt really worn down, and like you were really there. Also, just the machinations of how Spielberg shot, we were never near our trailers or the craft service table. We were just in the field, sleeping on our helmets. We were very disconnected from the fact that we were actors during the shoot. I remember we had to match our injuries from boot camp onto the shoot. We all had cuts and scrapes and things from boot camp that had to be reapplied with makeup as the shooting progressed. We were all really banged up.
Where did the boot camp take place?
It was across the street from where the production office was, in England on an old air force base. You could almost make out the production office from where we were. Vin Diesel and I kept having a conversation about making a mad dash for the production office and going AWOL. (laughs)
Did you actually bond with all the guys in your platoon?
At the time sure, absolutely.
Your death scene is still one of the toughest scenes to watch in any film.
Yeah, my mom was quite unhappy with me after she first saw the film. She said “If there’s ever another scene like that in a movie you do, don’t invite me to the premiere.” She was really upset.
Did you or the other actor actually get hurt? It looked like you were really beating the shit out of each other.
By that point, everyone was so tired and banged up anyway, we all felt like pieces of meat. It was great shooting that scene, really. It’s actually one of the best days I’ve ever had as an actor. I felt really euphoric after it was over. Anytime you do a big, dramatic scene there’s something cathartic about it. It was really rigorous and technically-complicated to shoot. I had this prosthetic body for a big part of the scene…There’s something about coming to grips with your mortality when you do a scene involving violence, same with the fight scene in Dazed and Confused. You’re no longer in your head as an actor, and stuff actually happens to you emotionally and physically. I’m not one of those guys who can turn things on and off. If it’s not happening, it’s not happening. I’d say 85% of the time, I’m in my head about things, but that’s one of those things where you can’t help but connect with the experience.
What was Spielberg’s process like?
There’s no way to really track what he did. He had the entire movie in his head. He didn’t storyboard it or shotlist it. There was no way to know what he was doing. (laughs) Plus, I was way too tired and way too into character to do anything observational. I’m sure, I hope, I picked up a little bit through osmosis. He’s such a different kind of filmmaker than the ones I use for my own frames of reference. He’s like some savant. (laughs) It’s almost impossible to trace what’s going on.
You know what’s funny? I just interviewed Matthew Modine, and he said the same thing, verbatim, about Kubrick.
I believe that. Yeah, there’s just no way to figure out what’s going on up there. There were so many cameras going, and he was just coming up with this stuff. It was great to see a guy who was known for being a very sort of “classical” filmmaker, operating on a very run-and-gun level and improvising, which is what he encouraged us to do. He kept referring to it as his “indie film,” which I guess, in a way, it was.
Let’s talk about what directing was like for you.
The first time I did it, it was a really small project. I Love Your Work was the same, actually, although I had a bigger budget than I did on Scotch and Milk, which cost 60 grand. To make a long story short, it just felt like what I’ve always been supposed to be doing, which is how it felt when I made those little movies throughout my life. It’s a similar feeling I get with my music, actually. It’s the thing I feel the most intrinsically able to do.
Goldberg and Marley Shelton in (Untitled).
31st
Oct
2009
MATTHEW MODINE: BETTER ANGELS
By
Alex Simon
Matthew Modine has been something of an iconoclast most of his working life. After being groomed for ‘80s teen idol status in early films such as Private School and Vision Quest, Modine was also one of the first actors of his generation, along with Sean Penn, to take on riskier projects, such as Robert Altman's Streamers, Alan Parker’s Birdy, Gillian Armstrong’s Mrs. Soffel, and Alan J. Pakula’s Orphans. It was his lead role as the cynical Marine Private Joker in Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam epic Full Metal Jacket that put Modine into the pantheon of young actors who were more than just pretty faces and knowing winks at the camera. This, after all, was the young man who turned down the lead in Top Gun, arguably the prototypical ‘80s blockbuster, due to its cold war politics. From the beginning, Matthew Modine carved his own path.
Born March 22, 1959 in Loma Linda, California, Matthew Avery Modine was the youngest of seven children born to Dolores and Mark Modine, who ran a string of drive-in movie theaters across the United States, prompting the Modines to pull stakes during Matthew’s formative years with great frequency. Contrary to some reports, the Modines were not “a close-knit Mormon family.” Mark Modine briefly joined the Mormon Church during a job stint in Utah, and was advised to join the flock for the betterment of his business.
After being bitten by the acting bug as a child, Modine dropped out of college and headed to New York in his late teens, studying with legendary acting coach Stella Adler, and landing his first television role in 1982 on an ABC Afterschool Special. More than sixty feature films later, including one (If…Dog…Rabbit) as a director, Matthew Modine’s latest turn is in the romantic comedy Opa!, featuring Matthew as Eric, an uptight archeologist who lands in Greece, hoping to unearth a cup that may have touched the lips of Christ. When a comely islander (Agni Scott) enters the picture and catches his eye, Eric finds his rigid value system being altered (and seduced) by the woman and the island’s charms. The Cinedigm release hits theaters in limited release October 16.
Matthew Modine, who lives with his wife on a 100-acre farm in upstate New York, spoke with The Hollywood Interview during a recent L.A. stopover. Here’s what transpired:
Opa! reminded me of an old-fashioned romantic comedy that could have been made in the late ‘50s with Jimmy Stewart playing your role, and Sophia Loren playing the Greek girl.
Matthew Modine: Yeah, we were joking during the shoot that it was a Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn movie. I like those kind of movies. I don’t like comedies that are, like, dick joke comedies. I like things that give me the opportunity to reinforce things I’m trying to figure out or believe in. One of those things was the idea of a Western man--and we think of Greece as being part of the West, but it’s really Eastern—and him arriving in Greece and these two mindsets butting heads: a conflict between materialism and spirituality. I thought my character really represented that, that kind of materialism. This cup that he’s seeking out won’t make anybody’s life different if he finds it. It’s just a thing, and the fact that he doesn’t appreciate that what’s important about it is maybe Jesus Christ drank from it. The taverna that rests over the cup’s burial spot now is sort of like the cup: a place where people have been sharing stories, dancing, gathering to share food. We live to work in the West, whereas in a place like Greece, they work to live. And I loved that, and taking a film like that gives me the opportunity to examine something that I’m struggling with in my own life, and being on an island with a couple of thousand people and seeing how they help one another to get by.
Matthew Modine and Agni Scott in Opa!I remember reading about your being an iconoclast in terms of your values system, going back to the ‘80s. After all, you were the guy who turned down the lead in Top Gun because of its politics.
Yeah, I really do believe that people want to be good. I think we have a violent history, a violent past, and this struggle that began in Greece thousands of years ago of logical thought, of empirical truth, of moving away from the mythologies, of “don’t tell me what you think. Tell me what you know.” Where is the scientific evidence? Not to discount the strange, unknowable spirituality of space, the vastness of the cosmos, but the idea of really solving the problems that exist before us where, if you have a different way of thinking, how do we sit down across the aisle from each other and share thoughts. It’s not about conservatism and liberalism. They really go hand-in-hand. They should support each other. If we didn’t have liberal thought, we wouldn’t have had the abolition of slavery, or women’s right to vote. These are things that are progressive ideas. Our country was founded on liberal thought, but that’s not to say that there aren’t great things about conservatism. One thing that we know about life on this planet is that it evolves, and when we wake up tomorrow we’re going to be another day older, and we’ll be evolving. So I’m digressing, as always (laughs), but I like to find movies being made by like-minded people. I’ll tell you a story. I went to Turkey last year for a film festival. And they asked if I wanted to go to Tiramisus, which was the town that Alexander couldn’t capture. It’s on the top of this hill, and is really amazing. You have to climb up this mountain on this little trail, and you get to the top of this mountain and see this city that Alexander couldn’t conquer, because it was too well fortified, and he said “To hell with it. Destroy it,” which meant to cut down their olive trees and burn them, because that’s what made the town rich. 2,000 years ago they made these miles and miles of terra cotta pipes that would carry the olive oil down into the port, where it was put into drums, loaded onto ships, and sent all over the world. You wander all over this town, and you just feel it’s so alive, then you walk into this amphitheater that was carved into the side of a mountain. And that’s how important theater and art is to our culture, going back that far. As we struggle through our lives, the people who tells stories and sing songs help give us a sense of who we are. Some of us don’t have time in their lives to think these things, that’s why there are some people, like myself, who are retarded enough to become actors, writers, directors that have this strange desire to do this, and those people come together to help give context to our lives. When I was up in that ancient theater, it really humbled me to think that I was part of that lineage. I never celebrate Matthew Modine in the arts. It’s not about me. I might happen to be on the poster of the film, but it’s really about those people sitting around the fire for thousands of years, telling stories. And we’re part of that thing that helps people figure out what the fuck they’re doing here.
Modine at Pvt. Joker in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket.Absolutely, and I think that’s something you’re born with. You had some help growing up because your dad managed drive-in movie theaters. Apparently you had your epiphany while you were watching a documentary about the making of Oliver!
Yeah, that’s right. I looked at the kids, watching them learning the songs and the process, and I just knew that’s what I was supposed to do. It wasn’t because of fame, or celebrity. I just knew that I was supposed to be doing that. It wasn’t about vanity at all. In high school I thought ‘Wow, this is kind of great because you can get laid.’ (laughs) Stella Adler, who I studied with in New York, said “If you came to my class to be a movie star, you can get up and leave right now. I don’t teach that. I teach you to be a human being.” That’s the final thing I say in my play “If I’m lucky, I’ll teach you how to be a human being,” and that’s why the Top Gun thing happened the way it did. I was in East Germany. I was at the Berlin Film Festival, and they asked me if I wanted to go into the Eastern bloc. I said ‘I can’t go into East Germany. I’m an American.’ They said “No, you can. Germans can’t go there, but you can.” I went over there and met Russian soldiers who were my age who gave me pins from their uniforms and we shared cigarettes. They were no different from my brothers who went to Vietnam. I thought ‘Wow, they’re just people, and who are the people who are telling me that the Russians are the bad guys who want to destroy the world, and who are the people in Russia who are saying that the Americans are the bad guys?’ These lies are being told by somebody. I learned that if you follow the money back to the source, you usually find the people who are perpetuating the lies, and if you can get to that cause, it’s the start of the solution.
Well, that was Watergate: follow the money.
Follow the money. Follow the money.
You got to work with two of my heroes: Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman, whom you worked with several times. Let’s start with Kubrick. I read your “Full Metal Jacket Diary,” and I know that working with Kubrick was a major intellectual, sensory and emotional experience. Tell us a bit about his process.
Well, the process was a mystery, and now will remain so forever. I think that you discover when you read the diary that the search that he was on and the discovery of the film that, while premeditated and thoroughly planned was like jazz music, or like a battle, was something that had to be improvised. Things changed over the course of the filming. Discoveries are made. Weaknesses are found, and so you have some performers who don’t fulfill what you imagine the film to be or you have some extraordinary surprises, like in the case of Lee Ermey, that becomes a major chord in the symphony that you’re trying to put together of filmmaking.
The diary contains a lot of great photos, as well as very revealing anecdotes about Kubrick himself.
Yeah, in fact I started a website for the book: www.fullmetaljacketdiary.com. There’s a link where you can register your book. I was just curious to see where it ended up. All the information is confidential, if anyone’s worried about that. It’s just kind of cool to know…I mean, Oliver Stone owns the book, so that was really exciting for me to find out. Probably I should have a forum on the site where I can answer questions about the book, too. But getting back to Kubrick, I think there was this perception about Stanley that everything was so premeditated and planned out, and I don’t think that was the case. He was very improvisational and all that preparation that he did in preproduction—if you look at “The Stanley Kubrick Archives”—it has to be subject to alteration. You start to play the notes. The thing that is exciting for me—and I thought of this recently when I saw an exhibition of Picasso’s work that he did toward the end of his life—was that a man like Picasso or a man like Stanley Kubrick, up to the final moments of their lives were still trying to uncover something, were still searching for something. I worked with Arthur Miller on one of his final plays, called “Finishing the Picture,” which was aptly titled because it was about the end of his relationship with Marilyn Monroe while they were making The Misfits, and “Resurrection Blues,” which Robert Altman directed at The Old Vic in London, where Kevin Spacey is the artistic director. And up until the end of his life, he was trying to solve this bizarre marriage he had with Marilyn Monroe, and with “Resurrection Blues” he was trying to come to terms with the uncertainty of life and the mystery of life, and God. Arthur was close to 90 when he did this play. Picasso was throwing gasoline on these final paintings and watching them melt. He was still trying to bend the form and find something hidden within it, just as he’d done with Cubism. I think that those three men are great examples of people who keep searching, who keep trying to find something. For me, Eyes Wide Shut, the reason that Kubrick had wanted to make that film for so long, before Full Metal Jacket even, there was something about that story that was very personal to him. Kubrick’s father was a doctor and Tom Cruise’s character was a doctor. As Jack Nicholson’s character says in A Few Good Men “You can’t handle the truth.” I think that was a big part of what that story was about and a big part of what many of Stanley’s films are about is telling the truth. When people start to tell lies, there is deception and there is mistrust, and from mistrust comes violence. Whether it’s The Shining or A Clockwork Orange or even 2001: A Space Odyssey, there’s an underlying story about the importance of telling the truth. Once people start to lie to one another, like in Eyes Wide Shut, Nicole Kidman’s character had this fantasy of fucking some sailor and was honest with Tom Cruise about it, and he couldn’t handle the truth.
Modine and Heather Prete in Arthur Miller's "Finishing the Picture."You raise an interesting question: what’s been the ongoing question or theme of exploration in your life, thus far?
Trying to understand that big mystery: what are we doing here? That’s what drives me with the choices I make. What are we doing here? What is the meaning of life? What I do know is that when I have my final breath on this planet, I don’t want to be gasping for another one. I want to feel that if my time came today, I could smile and exhale and say ‘Ah, that was good,’ because I didn’t harm anybody to live my life and achieve the success that I’ve had. There are a lot of people who step on people’s throats in order to be successful. There is that nature in all of us, like puppies at their mother’s tits. You don’t want to be that run shoved to the back on the back tit. You want the motherlode. (laughs) That’s instinct. But I think if we imagine ourselves to help one another when we’re suffering, that’s what Abraham Lincoln meant when he said “To summon up our better angels,” to summon up the better side of humanity.
You got to work with Robert Altman three times, twice on the screen, and once on the stage.
The thing about working with Bob was, it wasn’t just those times working with him on the set, unless you’re a schmuck, you become a part of his family. You’ll meet with him, have dinner with him, and you became a part of his life. Oftentimes you work with people on a film and then once you’ve wrapped, you never see them again. Altman chose people that he enjoyed spending time with, and fortunately I was one of those people that became a part of his extended family.
And in terms of his working process, apparently he was someone who really gave his actors a lot of latitude in terms of what they did in front of the camera.
Yeah, I’d say he gave those people latitude because he was careful about who he picked to work with, whether it was Shelley Duvall, Meryl Streep or Warren Beatty. He picked people because he was looking for people who understood the role. I had a big monologue in Streamers when we were making that in Texas and I wanted to talk to Bob about the monologue I was going to do. I was very nervous because I hadn’t had a role of that size before, and I was very nervous about the interpretation of what I was saying. He kept postponing and postponing our conversation about the monologue and finally the day came where he said “Okay, we’re going to shoot. Modine, you go first.” I said ‘Bob, I’ve never had a chance to talk to you about this.’ He said “Let’s just shoot it.” We shot it, did two takes, maybe three, and he said “Good. Let’s move on to Mitchell Lichtenstein.” And I was really upset. He sat down on the bunk with me and said “You see kid, if I was interested in my interpretation of the role, I would’ve played it. I hired you because I knew you were an actor who understood it, and could play it. My job is to be like the conductor who says ‘A little bit softer.’ ‘A little bit louder.’ Your job is to interpret the role.” And it was such an important lesson for a young actor to receive from such a masterful director that the responsibility of interpretation is mine, just like if I was a cellist or a violinist, I wouldn’t expect the composer to teach me the song. He would want me to know the song and come in, and play it. The way that a conductor looks at a musician looks at a musician when they’re playing, you can see in the conductor’s face what he wants the musician to do, and you could see the same thing with Bob. He was very much a masterful conductor.
Modine and Julianne Moore in Robert Altman's Short Cuts.By the time you did Short Cuts in 1993, you were a veteran actor, as opposed to a neophyte actor. Did you find the experience of working with him different at that point?
Yeah, in the sense that I had enough confidence to say to him in the scene with Julianne Moore where she takes her pants off and wanders around the house. I said ‘Bob, I know it says in the script that I’m chasing her around the house, but I don’t think this is the first time they’ve had this conversation. The difference is, today is the day when he’s going to put a period on this conversation, and get to the bottom of it. He’s going to sit in his chair, have his cocktail, and chase her around the room with his words and his thoughts.’ And Bob said “Fantastic. That’s what you’ll do.” That’s how he’d start every conversation on a set: “Okay Modine, what do you want to do?” And I think that created a much more powerful scene.
Any final thoughts?
I’ve been lucky enough to reach that point in my life, at 50, where there are so many tremendous roles that open up. When you’re young you get by on charm and looks, and when you’re middle aged there are some amazing opportunities that you have. I just hope all this work I’ve done over the last 30 years has prepared me for it.
The first ten minutes of boot camp from Full Metal Jacket.
31st
Oct
2009
This weekend MakingOf dusts off the cobwebs and digs deep into the Vault to pull out behind-the-scenes footage.
31st
Oct
2009
Sony's Michael Jackson documentary "This Is It" topped the Friday boxoffice with an estimated $7.9 million in U.S. and Canadian coin.
31st
Oct
2009
I think the real world (or le monde, as the image has it above) is starting to wake up to James Cameron’s Avatar. Within the last two days I’ve been asked about the film by three non-cineaste and non-geek folk, the type who seldom go to the cinema at all and rarely take a punt on anything in some way off the wall or ‘risky’. They seemed keen on this one though and from what I could make out they all seemed to be expecting the most epic action film ever made. Is that what they’ll get?
After the break, a closer look at the new Avatar trailer and some rather interesting Russian and French posters for the picture.
Vimeo user Gurisa edited together the following video which allows a clear and easy comparison between the effects work seen in the teaser with that in the new trailer. I was actually an hour into my own comparison when I found this, so I’m particularly grateful to Gurisa for the hard work.
There was a range of Russian Avatar posters over at Kinopoisk but almost as soon as I saved them, they vanished without explanation. I feel it’s my duty to park them here now, then. At least until they vanish again.
The same gallery also featured this French poster which declares a release date of December 16th. The plot thickens.
See how they lean towards the orange a lot more than the posters we’ve already seen? There’s not really this much orange in any of the official stills, either - though, of course, we saw plenty in the trailers and great deal in the Avatar Day footage. In places, this will be a rather orange film.
Is there some sly marketing plan that involves slowly introducing orange into the marketing materials? Maybe. Or maybe that idea is just nuts. Cameron’s definitely using the colour scheme to some effect in the movie, but are that advertisements really keying into that?
31st
Oct
2009
Troy Duffy is back! I did a post on Troy a couple of years ago and somehow, I can no longer find it in the database so I guess it didn’t make it through the myriad of WordPress updates and server changes I’ve had to go through since I posted it.
Suffice to say that in [...]
30th
Oct
2009
This has always been one of my favorite holidays, especially when the kids were little. Taking them trick-or-treating and seeing them so excited and happy was one of the true joys of parenthood. And then eating the candy they collected was fun too. Of course there’s always that one eccentric house. We had a dentist who gave out toothbrushes. Thank goodness he wasn’t a proctologist.
And where I liv
e, near UCLA, there was always a second wave of trick-or-treaters. Later, after the kids had turned in for the night, sorority girls in yummy costumes would ring the bell. I’d be holding the candy bowl for them in one hand and my Emmy in the other.
During Matt & Annie’s elementary school years there was also the annual Halloween carnival. This was a public school catering to the local neighborhood but we were hardly a typical neighborhood. One year I volunteered by making snow cones and Hugh Hefner and his six bimbos strolled up to my cart. He had a kid in the school. A noted soft-porn actress whose children attended the school offered this for the silent auction: A two hour nude session where you could photograph or paint her. The principal graciously declined that offer but I bet it would have brought in a lot more money than the autographed WINGS script I donated.
For the school’s “Haunted House” Gene Simmons participated. He would pop up and stick out that four-foot tongue. One mother was so freaked she literally sued the school.
Ah, good times.
One thing I learned though, Halloween is an OUTDOOR holiday.
My son’s birthday is November 2nd. (Happy upcoming birthday, Matt!). When he turned five Halloween night fell on a Saturday. So for his party we invited a bunch of his friends to the house where I would take them all out trick-or-treating and then they’d come back for pizza and cake. 5-7 PM. No muss. No fuss. Great plan.
Except it rained. No, it POURED.
First off, as parents deposited their kids they asked if we’d take siblings since they couldn’t take them trick-or-treating in the rain. Of course we said yes, and so at 5:00 I had forty screaming crazed children running around my house – chasing each other with hatchets, and fairy wands, and Star Wars phasers. After relentlessly trying to wrangle this supercharged mob I finally sat down on the stairs and took a breath. I was so proud of myself. I had gotten through it. It’s almost 7. Then I checked my watch. 5:20.
If you have little kids enjoy these precious Halloweens. Soon enough they’ll outgrow you, want to be with their friends instead, and trade phasers for tequila shooters. At least I still have my memories… and the sorority girls keep coming around.
One last Halloween note: I’ve always found it odd that Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t believe in this holiday so they stay home…on the only night of the year when people would actually open their doors to them.
Happy Halloween.
Boo!
30th
Oct
2009
It’s nothing like the merry-go-round of screenwriters but it does sometimes seem that pretty much all studio pictures go through a few directors on their way to the screen. Very often a director will board a project, wrestle with it for months, if not years, then depart. Other times, a whole list of directors will have passed pretty much as soon as they close the script and a project can find some time to find somebody willing to commit.
The last we told you, Marc Forster was going to direct zombie epic World War Z from a script by Matthew Carnahan. Some rumours bubbled up in the summer that he was off the project, but died down pretty quickly, and now word is definitely that he’s very much still in the driving seat. On the other hand, our last report on Joe Wright told you that he would be directing Keira Knightley in a new version of My Fair Lady and that, it has now become clear, isn’t the case at all.
World War Z is an adaptation of a novel by Max Brooks. The Washington Post today conducted an online chat with him and so, from that, here’s his word on the movie:
I can tell you that Marc Forster has signed on to direct the project. I just had lunch with him a few weeks ago and he is either the world’s best liar or he really wants to make this movie. Right now we’re waiting for a new draft of the script. That should determine the next step in the ‘development’ process.
Sounds to me like Carnahan’s draft is still pending, then. I know his fans will be pleased to hear Forster is still forging ahead here.
Over in the rather more gentile, less flesh-eaty realm of My Fair Lady, there’s bad news for fans of Joe Wright, and straight from the horse’s mouth. Screenrush tagged him on the red carpet last night, as he was off to see Nowhere Boy, and asked for some Lady details. Here’s what he told them:
It’s not happening. No. It’s all a lie. I kind of thought about for a couple of minutes and then decided not to do it and suddenly it got into the press that I was doing it.
His reason for not taking the gig? “No reason really”.
No Danny Boyle, then no Joe Wright. Who will be next British director to not sign on for My Fair Lady? Every day this film circles closer and closer to Oliver Parker…
