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To check out my latest work, including reviews, interviews, and features for outlets like Slant, IndieWire, DETAILS, Filmmaker, Esquire, and South Philly Review, please visit my new home on Tumblr.

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Woody Allen Feature

I had a blast at the press conference for "To Rome With Love," a charming film too many are dismissing as merely "minor Woody Allen." The dais included Allen, Penelope Cruz, Alec Baldwin, Greta Gerwig, and Ellen Page. Naturally, much of the conversation came back to Woody, who's a fascinating person to share a room with, to say the least.

My feature, of which I'm particularly proud, is now online at Slant Magazine. To read it, CLICK HERE.

Dustin Lance Black Interview

Over at Slant Magazine, I talked politics and film with Dustin Lance Black, the world's youngest-looking 37-year-old, and an increasingly vital figure in gay culture.

Read the full interview HERE.

James Franco Interview

Far more interesting than much of what he puts on the market, James Franco is an interview subject to kill for. Timed to the release of his NYU thesis film "The Broken Tower," I give you my piece on the actor/director/author/artist, an article I'm very proud of.

CLICK HERE to read the interview over at Slant Magazine.

Willem Dafoe Interview

The Chameleon Sheds His Skin

One of the greatest character actors in the business, Willem Dafoe is riding high this season with roles in three very different, yet thematically similar, movies, two of which give him the rare opportunity to take the lead.

By R. Kurt Osenlund

Willem Dafoe

As Willem Dafoe approaches, the drumroll has already started. It's a Wednesday afternoon at Manhattan's Loews Regency Hotel, and not far from the interview suite, a big, noisy renovation project is underway. The rumbling and rattling of power tools all but shake the room. Outside the window, a massive scrim that's hanging down the length of a workman's scaffold is taken by the wind, wrapping itself around the building like a giant mesh snake. It's all so...cinematic.

“Well this is pretty wild,” Dafoe says as he eyes up the black, waving serpent. “I feel like I have to kill it.”

It's interesting that Dafoe's first impulse is one of knightly heroism. For many of today's filmgoers, this remarkably individual actor is a player of rogues, be them comic book villains (Spider-Man), seemingly demonic silent stars (Shadow of the Vampire), or duplicitous cops (The Boondock Saints). But with a staggering number of films under his belt (he'll tell you how many), Dafoe has in fact been the good guy, the bad guy, and just about every guy in between. For Martin Scorsese, he played Jesus Christ (The Last Temptation of Christ). For David Cronenberg, he played a twisted, black market video game technician (eXistenZ). For Lars von Trier, he played a gangster (Manderlay) and a one half of a deteriorating couple (Antichrist). For Pixar maestro Andrew Stanton, he voiced a hard-scaled, mentoring fish (Finding Nemo).

As Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ

Dafoe recently teamed with Stanton again for John Carter, Disney's mega-budget sci-fi spectacle that saw the actor take on his first motion-capture gig (he brings to life a green, six-limbed Martian). It's one of three movies Dafoe appears in this season. The other two are the Australian nature drama The Hunter and Abel Ferrara's intimate apocalypse tale, 4:44 Last Day on Earth, both of which cast Dafoe as the lead. In The Hunter, the 56-year-old star plays a mercenary hired to trek to Tasmania and kill a near-extinct animal. A conflicted drifter surrounded by moral and environmental stressors, the titular gunman requires the instincts and introspection Dafoe is wholly prepared to give. In 4:44, Dafoe is an extension of himself—an actor counting down our planet's last hours in an apartment with his younger artist girlfriend. Again, Dafoe is tasked to project a churning internal struggle, and again, he delivers.

For a man in his fifties, Dafoe is in remarkable shape, though he never seems aware of it. Dressed all in black, he takes a seat, kicks out one foot, stretches one arm over his head and grips it with his other hand, like he's doing a morning stretch. He slumps in his chair a bit, as if he's meeting with someone he's known for ages.

“So, let's begin,” he says.

R. Kurt Osenlund: This is a big month/year/season for you. You've got three movies: John Carter, The Hunter, and 4:44. Do you see a common thread among them? Because I see a planetary theme.

Willem Dafoe: You know, I'm kind of literal – I'm in all of them. The connection? You know, because I've been doing interviews, I get a little self-conscious and wonder if I'm full of shit, like I'm forcing an agenda, but they're all passion projects for the director. They're all special in how they were shot. I'd say with John Carter, it was motion capture, and the sheer scale of it was huge. On The Hunter, it was the fact that it was an Australian movie shot in Tasmania, with a director I didn't really know, but had a lot of faith in because of how he pitched it. And 4:44 was special in the way that we shot it—kind of loose, with people we knew, working with a scenario and a script in a very fluid way. So I guess they each have their specific process that's specific to them.

RKO: The Hunter and 4:44 are fundamentally human stories, but they also possess these eco-themes that seem to provide more legitimate dramatic stakes these days, seeing as audiences at large, not just select groups, are finally starting to take these issues seriously. Do you see it that way?

WD: I don't disagree with you. But as I'm approaching it, as I'm playing the characters, you can't play ideas, and you can't play situations. You play actions. So I didn't think so much about the eco themes. With 4:44, the fact that the earth is ending, and that there's some sort of disaster—that's a convention. That's really a convention so we can turn up the heat on two people in an apartment trying to find out how to live and trying to see what's important in their lives. For The Hunter, someone called it an eco-noir. So there are definitely issues and themes about ecology, and a responsibility or relationship to nature, but as I'm inhabiting the character, this is not really a concern of his. He sees it in much more human terms. When I'm working on something, I'm concentrating on the doing. The frame is so specific and so based on the doing that I don't have that kind of reflection or that kind of consciousness of the themes. I'm putting myself into a place where I'm trying to be responsive in a fictional setting, and find truthful behavior for me and for the character. I'm not thinking about what it means because I don't have to. If I think of what it means, then I start to interpret, or I start making choices that point to things. I don't want to be outside of it like that. I want to be the thing. I don't want to say what the thing is.

RKO: I think it's safe to say that you have one of the most unique and fascinating faces in film. It's led you to playing everyone from Jesus Christ to Max Schreck. Was there ever a time when you were dissuaded from pursuing acting because you didn't have a typical leading-man look?

WD: Um, depends who you talk to. [Laughs] Well...does Clark Gable have typical leading man looks? No. Nah, I don't think about that, you know? Because I never thought of acting as a career. I was lucky. I just followed situations, and people. I didn't think about what would and what wouldn't work. I was just dealing with one situation at a time.

RKO: You've made more than 60 films...

WD: Oh, more than that. More like 80.

RKO: Oh, wow. I stand corrected.

WD: Some small things, of course. But still, it's a lot. I look at the number and I think, how did that happen?

RKO: Was there ever, or is there still, a roster of roles you'd like to play?

WD: Nope. Not at all. There are some things, you know, that were fantasies that I could invest in because, for whatever reason, it'd be attractive to play certain characters. But I never know what a character is until I do it, and even then I sometimes don't know. It's really about the proposal for an adventure, a proposal for an investigation. If I know what the character is, it's finished and I'm not so attracted to it. I'm attracted to things when there's something there, something interesting, but I'm not sure exactly what it is. Inventing the character is chasing that thing and finding out what that thing is.

RKO: So it sounds like it's much more about the interior for you.

WD: I don't know. In a way, yes, in a way, no. I look at a script and I say, what is this person doing? Am I interested in doing those things? I never ask myself what they mean. Occasionally I'll say, “Am I the right guy to do this? Am I up to this?” Sometimes I'll do that. Because you want to be careful and you don't want to get this fantasy that you can do everything. There are lots of limitations, and sometimes I'm not the right guy. A couple of times I've said I'm not the right guy to the director, and he's said, “No, you're not the right guy, but I thought you were an actor, come on! I like the fact that you're not him, and I know you'll do something that will make you him. That distance right now will be fuel for you becoming him.” It's like—and this is paraphrasing, so if I fall on my face just forget it—but I love the idea Jackson Pollock had with his drip paintings. He said, “the painting's already there.” He just had to give himself to the impulse and the painting would...become. I feel like that a little bit. I don't see it before, but I have some instinct of what it could be. It's really the doing that makes it what it is.

Dafoe in The Hunter

RKO: Speaking of directors, you've pretty much always been an auteur's actor. How does that typically work at this point? Are you pursuing them or are they pursuing you?

WD: I mostly pursue them.

RKO: And, for you, how important in the process is the director?

WD: It's maybe the most important thing. Even more important than the script, because scripts have to be put on their feet. My favorite movies are not often due to the script or the literature or the psychology, but something else. It's the kind of poetry of cinema that only auteurs seem to get. And I'm really taken by this idea of attaching myself to someone who has a very personal vision. And it may not be mine. I attach myself to them and part of my job is to go toward their vision, and realize it. And that's the making of something. That's the transformation. That's the becoming that I love so much. Because you learn things along the way, and you have a little shift of perspective. So you don't quite feel like yourself. You let go of what you're holding onto as an identity and it opens you up to apply yourself to other considerations. I think an actor has to be in that state of mind. Flexible and ever-ready. And those opportunities are happening most often with people who are making personal work.

RKO: Is there anything that scares you? Because you're quite a bold actor.

WD: Well the boldness comes because I'm scared of things! I'm scared of corruption, I'm scared of boredom, I'm scared of being silly, I'm scared of being pretentious. But at the same time, I think you've got to reach, so you've got to be bold with risking to be pretentious. Because if you're too afraid of being pretentious, then you'll be safe. So yeah, I'm scared of a lot of things.

In Abel Ferarra's 4:44 Last Day on Earth

RKO: Looking at The Hunter, you shot of outdoor scenes in Tasmania. You've done some outdoor films before, like Platoon. How was this experience different?

WD: It's great, because there's no reference to another life. Nature is a partner that's stronger than you, more complicated than you, more connected than you. It's perfect. It guides you, and you play with it. The weather, for example, was a huge factor. It shapes so much, and it had a profound effect on how we made the movie and how we told the story. It's also easier to be neutral, and to start from a “zero place,” because Hollywood, filmmaking, career, banks, good food, all that stuff feels millions of miles away. You're just kind of stuck with the task at hand. So it gives you this kind of concentration you're not often afforded in this information-heavy, comfort-heavy, modern technological world. Strip that all away and there's a part of you that's kind of bare-assed and more naked with the task.

RKO: I imagine every film leaves a little piece with you. What did The Hunter and 4:44 leave with you?

WD: Well, The Hunter was a real adventure. It was a three-month period in my life where I was living in a very rural area, in Tasmania, at the edge of the world. Very remote. The making of the film is always so much stronger than the film itself. And it was quite a memorable shoot. So that's what stays with me. For 4:44, it continues, because I still see Abel, I intend to work with him some more, I have worked with him before. So, I don't know, because that's not finished yet. I feel like it's continuing.

RKO: Last question. It's the last day on Earth. What do you do?

WD: What I do in the movie, pretty much. Except I don't visit my drug dealer because I don't have one! And I never have had one, okay!? [Laughs] You know, that character could be me in another life. I mean, it's Abel's idea, but I collaborated on some of the activities, and I think it's pretty practical and pretty understandable that we'd all pretty much do the same thing. And that is, try to find some pleasure, try to find some solace. I think there's a tendency to wrap up and say your goodbyes to people. Make amends. Try to cleanse yourself. Because you're going away. You clean up and you get your house in order. It's a weird impulse, but I think it's pretty human. You either destroy your house or clean up your house. And that's really what it comes down to.


*This article was previously published in the April 2012 issue of ICON Magazine. It has been republished with permission.

Elizabeth Olsen Interview

Elizabeth Olsen is so pretty. And so damned talented. Meeting her in person, and having those two attributes collide, makes one feel a bit off-kilter. And also thrilled.

Read my piece on Elizabeth Olsen, whom I adore, now online at Slant Magazine. CLICK HERE.

Paul Dano Interview

It was my pleasure to speak with Paul Dano, whose career as a young, thinking man's actor has intrigued me for some time. It was also fun to, for a change, sit down with a talent who's my age. I didn't care for Dano's latest film, "Being Flynn," but he offered an expectedly pleasant chat.

The full interview is now online at Slant Magazine. To read it, CLICK HERE.

Steven Soderbergh Interview

For Slant Magazine, I chatted with poised-to-retire experimentalist Steven Soderbergh about Haywire and Contagion, as well as horses and books and cereal and male strippers.

For the complete interview, CLICK HERE.

Angelina Jolie Feature

Two weeks ago, I had the great and unique pleasure of attending a press conference for Angelina Jolie's terrific debut feature, "In the Land of Blood and Honey." Ms. Jolie was present. I sat mere feet away from her. I spoke to her. She responded, and looked into my eyes.

Seriously, as much as I love the opportunities I get to meet with famous folks I admire, and as surreal as it may be at times, I'm not the starstruck type. I enjoy approaching interviews in a way that's both casual and very much about the work at hand. But this was...well, my heart was beating big time when it came time for to ask a question. (It's Angelina, dude.) I'm proud to say she answered the question well.

My article on the experience is now online at Slant Magazine. CLICK HERE.

Interview with Cast and Crew of 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy'

I was thrilled to interview Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Peter Straughan and Tomas Alfredson--actor, actor, writer and director of "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," a gorgeously constructed, perplexingly smart spy thriller that stands among the year's very best films.

Take a read of my feature on these fine gentlemen, now online at Slant Magazine. CLICK HERE. And please be sure to swing by The House Next Door, where I'm regularly posting articles on Oscars, Posters, Stars on the Rise, and more fun stuff. GET IT HERE.

Michael Fassbender Interview

IT'S TRUE.

Kirsten Dunst Interview

This article was previously published in the November 2011 issue of ICON Magazine. It has been republished with permission.

The Upside of Apocalypse
In the new Lars von Trier film Melancholia, Kirsten Dunst plays a deeply depressed bride who welcomes the destruction of the planet. But in Dunst's own world, things have never been better.

By R. Kurt Osenlund

BETWEEN SMALL SIPS OF GRAPEFRUIT juice, Kirsten Dunst keeps giggling. It's morning at the Crosby Street Hotel in SoHo, and the 29-year-old actress, who's been lending her smirky, all-American looks to movies since the age of seven, is still reeling from the night before, when she and True Blood hunk Alexander Skarsgård, her onscreen fiancé in the new Lars von Trier mind-rattler Melancholia, finally blew off some steam amidst a nonstop press tour for the film.

“We celebrated,” Dunst says, her playful laugh and expression making it especially hard to believe that 17 years have passed since she played the youngest March sister in Little Women. “It was the first time we had a chance to celebrate.”

She may not have much time for it, but Dunst – or “Kiki,” to her fans – certainly has cause for celebration these days. In addition to winning her the Best Actress award at this year's Cannes Film Festival, her performance in Melancholia is earning her the greatest praise of her career and putting her on the short list of contenders for this year's lead actress Oscar. In the movie, which makes no bones about its ending (the world is spectacularly, unapologetically obliterated), Dunst plays Justine, a deeply depressed bride who strains to feign happiness at the start of the film, and whose name, one can only assume, is a nod to the Marquis de Sade's doomed and tortured rebel heroine.

Such is perfectly appropriate, considering that von Trier has gained a reputation for casting actresses in roles of near-sadistic turmoil, from Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves to Charlotte Gainsbourg in 2009's Antichrist. In Melancholia, Gainsbourg stars opposite Dunst as Justine's relatively level-headed sister, Claire. The two actresses chatted about their director while doing the rounds at Cannes (where, two years ago, Gainsbourg also picked up a Best Actress prize for serving as von Trier's muse), and Dunst says she initially sought advice from her Spider Man-3 co-star Bryce Dallas Howard, who in 2005 got in front of von Trier's camera for Manderlay. To the certain disappointment of sensationalist rags, the consensus seems to be that working for von Trier is by no means torturous, but rather liberating and, by all evidence, rewarding.

“I was completely drawn in by Lars,” Dunst says. “I really love his films. I'm always drawn to directors first, and he's one of the great auteurs of our time. He's also one of the only ones writing roles like this for women. It's just an opportunity that doesn't come along very often for anyone.”

Dunst would know. After more than two successful decades in the business, she certainly doesn't have much reason to complain, but like most American actresses, highs like Spider-Man and Marie Antoinette and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are punctuated by lows like Elizabethtown and The Crow: Salvation and How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. She's right: there just isn't a flood of compelling roles out there. But Melancholia presents a meaty and challenging one, requiring the conviction to handle a mercurial rollercoaster that includes chirpy denial, profound discomfort, debilitating sadness, eerie aloofness, nudity, sex, and grace under the ultimate pressure— impending annihilation.

It's no secret that von Trier has been battling his own depression, and that it's manifested in his work, from the crushingly troublesome mood evoked by Antichrist to the titular destructive planet in Melancholia, which, as it heads inexorably toward our comparatively puny orb, represents Justine's heavy, ever-encroaching blues. Through the course of the movie, which is quite deliberately split in two, Dunst is tasked with convincing you of Justine's emotional shift, from an ill-behaving and nearly catatonic bride (she systematically ruins her wedding before descending into a state in which she can't eat or bathe) to a woman who finds a strange comfort in imminent doom, holding it together while everyone and everything around her falls apart.

“We talked about it, Lars and I,” Dunst says of Justine's curious arc. “We talked about how, sometimes, when people are depressed, the most horrendous things make them kind of step up to take care of everyone more than anyone else. There could be a lot of reasons for it, but it seems that, when you're in a depressed state, having something really bad happen gives you a kind of life again.”

She doesn't speak much about it, but Dunst suffered from a depression of her own in 2008, shortly after the Spider-Man trilogy closed on a sour note and shortly before Hollywood saw the first year-long drought of Dunst releases since 1992. Reportedly claiming to have felt abysmal for roughly six months beforehand, Dunst checked herself into a Utah facility for treatment. Upon completion, she went on to star in All Good Things, a fact-based New York thriller that, prior to Melancholia, earned her “best ever” raves. Call it the Von Trier Syndrome – depression leading to creative awakening. Her experience certainly informed the way she approached Justine, and her full emergence from it, she says, made tackling the role possible.

“I feel like, to play somebody like this, you have to be in a really good place,” she says, “because you can't play depressed when you're depressed—you can't do anything. There are many who know what that feels like. I think most people have gone through their own version of depression. It's a very normal thing.”

“Normal,” however, isn't the way anyone is going to describe the experience of Melancholia, an extravagantly visceral titan of a movie that, like most all of von Trier's work, is unshakable to the extent that you might want to clear your post-screening schedule. Regardless of how one feels about the apocalypse (whether you'd greet it with an atheistic calm like Justine, or a terrifyingly frantic desperation like Claire), von Trier uses his singular intuition and formidable visual and aural skills to dig right under the skin, penetrating your surface as he presents the smashing of the Earth's crust.

Dunst proves instrumental in her director's artistic goals, nailing that challenge of embodying an antiheroine whose inner life defies typical development. The true strangeness of it all is that, in discussing the role, Dunst never gets more than a touch serious, maintaining a steady levity that comes as a bit of a shock given the character and material in question. Something suggests that out of the actress's emotional lows has emerged an invigorated, and yet, selectively objective, artist, one who knows when to keep seriousness at arm's length and when to her hurl herself headlong into demanding, provocative work. Which, thankfully, seems to be a new habit.

“Whatever this film would have been – a fun experience, a weird experience, whatever – I was ready to do it,” she says. “I'm up for an adventure.”

***

Miranda July Interview

As mentioned, I enjoyed a lovely Q&A last month with Miranda July, the gal behind "Me and You and Everyone We Know" and "The Future." It was an unnaturally smooth interview, with each answer somehow leading into the next pre-planned question (was she reading my mind?). The finished piece is now online at SouthPhillyReview.com; however, it only includes about half of what was discussed. I'm totally screwing up the flow of converstion here, but below are some tidbits that didn't make the final cut, followed by a link the the article proper.

R. Kurt Osenlund: You deal in themes of human connection, and you seem intent on stripping down this veneer of modernity to get at something more basic and simple. Is that something that you struggle with in your own life?
Miranda July: Well, I think the best thing that can come out of every single day of my life is a good idea. Connection, yes, but a lot of days I don't even really see anyone. Most of the hours are spent trying to figure out how to be totally free, and to feel something and have something come out of that. Modernity, like the internet and stuff, is usually in direct opposition to that free feeling – it dices up the day into these somewhat useless portions, where my mind is kind of shattered. But there's a whole lot of connection, too. I'm pretty diligent – I keep in touch with friends all over the place.

RKO: I enjoy how you'll make something like the internet seem trivial, but you'll apply a whole lot of importance to something seemingly insignificant like a hair dryer, which brings up questions of relativity like, “Why is this thing less important than that thing?”
MJ: Right. Well, I do. I like that in stories, too, but it works so well in a visual medium. I love these really potent objects, especially when you're dealing with these kinds of metaphysical, or spiritual, and, certainly, psychological, things that are like, “What are we even talking about here?” or, “What's real?” It's good to have these real objects that are so mundane they're kind of funny, and yet they're turning points. They matter, and they do matter in our real life. You know, we have all these objects and they're not to be overlooked.

RKO: I just want to check and make sure the tape recorder's still running...important object, this.
MJ: It is! See?

RKO: My partner works in assisted living, and he has a resident who, for years, has been making up dirty limericks with his wife, just like the older gentleman in "The Future." So I have to ask where that came from.
MJ: Oh! That's all real – that's him! It must just be a thing that's from another era. But he's not an actor. He's playing himself. I met him, as Jason does, through the classifieds. I was doing another project where I was interviewing people selling things in the classifieds, so that's how I found him. He made nine cards a year for his wife, a lot of them really dirty. That part didn't exist in the movie until I found him. He's the only person who's improvising. So, yeah, that was all true. Sadly enough, right after I finished the movie – the day after – he died.

RKO: Wow. How often do you encounter elements like that? And how often do you think you'll use them and then reject them? What's the cutting-room-floor-to-final-cut ratio in terms of the quirkier things?
MJ: Well, the classifieds interviews I did, the whole story of that project is coming out in a book in the fall. It's called “It Chooses You.” I did that book partly because there were about 10 other people I met, and I wasn't looking to put them into the story, but they were just so interesting. There's a ton of stuff like that. Even this movie started out as a performance, but there are a lot of things in the performance that didn't make it into the movie – whole scenarios of what happens when time stops, some too complicated to shoot. And then there's stuff you just have to fit in. At one point, the cat was very controversial – everyone was like, “You gotta cut out the cat. How does that fit in? It's like a different movie or something.” So you have to know – you can't cut out everything. You have to stick by some things until they work.

RKO: Clearly the cat in the new film represents change and the future for this couple in the way a child would, and it scares them. What else does the cat symbolize for you?
MJ: Good question. Because it doesn't just symbolize a baby. I would think, “Does it work as a baby?” Then I'd also think, “Does it work as me with my parents? Like, where I'm the cat?” There's that feeling of sort of always waiting for you parents to really see who you are, which is never gonna happen, for me at least. They're great people, but I could wait forever, you know? So that feeling of waiting for them to come get you – it's a very young feeling, but I think you can stretch it into as much of your adult life as you want to. And then there's a point where you start to let go of that. It's kind of sad, almost like a death of some longing in realizing, “That's on me. No one's ever gonna come. Not even a great love is gonna fix that thing.” It's sort of just yourself – your loneliness that you're stuck with. So sometimes I would think of it that way. And other times I'd really just try to think of it as a cat.

Read the rest at SouthPhillyReview.com! CLICK HERE.

Interview with 'Another Earth' Filmmaker Mike Cahill

(This article was previously published in the July 2011 issue of ICON magazine. It has been republished with permission. You'll remember I reviewed "Another Earth" last month and didn't much care for the film, just its ideas and its promotion of low-budget sci-fi. Well, here comes my interview with the director and co-writer, Mike Cahill, a nice Brooklyn fella who'll hopefully learn to better match concept with craft next time 'round.)

Film and Other Frontiers
With Another Earth, debut filmmaker Mike Cahill helps boost a new emergence of shoestring-budgeted arthouse films, which tackle big-budget concepts and prove there’s ample room for intelligent life in the sci-fi genre.
By R. Kurt Osenlund

BIG-BUDGET SCI-FI CAN show you anything you want. Hollywood has successfully stripped your imagination of its limits. Unfathomable is the new commonplace. Odds are you barely batted an eye when Harry Potter and his pals soared before your eyes on the back of a photorealistic dragon, or when Jack Sparrow was swarmed by a ravenous pack of perfectly plausible mermaids. The downside to the constant wow is desensitization. In response, indie film has been increasingly tackling bigbudget premises with low budget productions, aiming to bring some gritty verisimilitude back to the sci-fi genre. Though bankrolled by Peter Jackson, District 9 seamlessly blended first-rate effects with an exotic, documentarystyle war zone. And just last year, with his film Monsters, CGI-artist-turned-director Gareth Edwards showed how a great creature feature could be made with little more than storytelling savvy and a laptop computer.

It’s from this tradition that filmmaker Mike Cahill’s feature debut, Another Earth, emerges. Leading off with the concept of a duplicate Earth that becomes visible in our atmosphere and contains a duplicate global culture (another you, another me), it’s a movie that studios might have hired Michael Bay to twist into an apocalyptic vomitorium, showered with supersonic explosions and urban hysteria. Instead, it’s a modest drama with a sci-fi backdrop, a balancing act of intimate human conflict and mind-boggling circumstances. Its protagonist is Rhoda (co-writer Brit Marling), an MIT-bound physics student who, on the night she discovers the new planet, crashes into another vehicle, killing a mother and child. Her crime lands her in prison for four years, and when she’s released, she’s nearly catatonic with guilt. She takes a thankless, antisocial janitor job (“Out, damned spot!”), and her only goal is to win a seat on a spaceship bound for Earth 2, where she can hopefully start anew. And then she meets the man whose wife and son she killed...

Cahill is a lean, 30-ish, even-tempered type who pulls his long brown locks into a tight ponytail. He seems more musician than scientist. He greets with a quick exhale of a cigarette drag and an instinctively outstretched hand. But amidst this late-night lounge persona lies an astro-geek of sometimes staggering proportions. During an interview that proved particularly otherworldly for this writer (it began at a hotel, then
continued in a car, then continued at a train station, then concluded with a phone call), Cahill talked space, cinema and the enduring powers of both.


Mike Cahill

R. Kurt Osenlund: Are you an astronomy nut? Space junkie?
Mike Cahill: Am I an astronomy nut? I mean, I’m obsessed with Carl Sagan and particularly [Sagan’s former assistant] Dr. Richard Berendzen. He lectured on pulp physics. I had this audio book of his that I used to listen to while driving. What was so beautiful about what he did was he took the mysteries of the cosmos and told them through emotional narratives that a layperson could really comprehend. I sought him out and asked him to be part of the film and he basically accepted. So yeah, I guess you could say I’m an astronomy nut. I haven’t studied astronomy but I do love it.

RKO: The timing of the final shuttle launch is great for your film. What was it like to find out that such a momentous event would be closely coinciding with your movie’s release?
MC: At the time, I was thinking, well maybe there can be an infusion of passion for the stars and maybe there can be noises made and ideas shared. I think it’s sad and yet, maybe this will reinvigorate a certain amount of passion for space discovery. It’ll probably raise interest in the film, too, which...well, that’s an interesting point. It’s weird—life is like that. We find connections, and yet, sometimes it’s just so random. But I never would have dreamed it was going to work out this way.

RKO: With a movie like this, you need to establish rules to define the sci-fi elements, and to largely account
for the stuff that bends reality. What were those conversations like? The ones that set the rules of Another
Earth?
MC: Well, the idea stemmed from a notion of string theory in the multiverse—this parallel world which mathematically seems to be theoretical to the next. Current theoretical physics seems to be suggesting that there is a multiverse, or there are parallel universes. The simple way to explain it is that the universe is infinite, and yet the particles in the universe are finite. The strange quality of an infinite universe and a finite number of particles means that, much like a deck of cards, it is shuffled an infinite amount of times. If you shuffled a deck of cards an infinite amount of times, you will come up with an order that is exactly the same but one card is swapped with another. It has totally different implications in the world of science, but we took that and used it by putting this new Earth in our orbit, or next to our orbit, so that there was a possibility of actually confronting the self. It’s like bending science for the purposes of metaphor.

Small budgets, big concepts: "Primer," "Monsters"

RKO: Whoa.
MC: Haha, yeah, tell me if this is boring you! It can get very nerdy. But, basically, I took that notion and put it through an artistic lens. The rules were such that this other Earth was hidden on the opposite side of the sun. How it arrived there is a mystery—perhaps through a wormhole connected to a parallel universe. We did establish certain rules and followed them, and at one point I thought of putting them in the script [more explicitly]. But it just seemed to be more something you were lectured on and less something you felt emotionally, and I wanted to stick to the emotional aspect.

RKO: Earth 2 is always literally looming overhead in this movie, and it seems to be alternately growing and shrinking. Is there an exact science to its proximity? Because as it changed in size, I was reminded of the original King Kong, and how there were size variations in the puppets they used.
MC: It’s a combination of things, really. The planets are supposed to be on interconnecting ellipses, so it actually really is moving closer to us. It starts off as a tiny blue dot in the sky and by the end there’s this looming, iconic earth up in the sky. But all of that’s essentially a poetic reference. The idea is that the exterior world mimics or reveals the interior world of the character. So, in some ways, the encroaching closer and closer intensifies as the drama gets deeper and deeper and the stakes go higher and higher. It reflects that in a tonal way.

RKO: Rhoda keeps an image above her bed. It’s of a nebula, if I’m not mistaken, and it’s an image I actually took from a childhood textbook and held onto because I found it so fascinating. I was struck by it in the movie. Can you tell me where you got it and why you chose to use it? Anything particularly special about it?
MC: Oh, wow. Well that’s one of the Hubble Telescope’s first images after they fixed the blur. When they first launched the Hubble, the image they came back with was a laughing stock, because it was out of focus. So they sent a team up to fix the calibration of the focus, and that image—which is a three-pillar nebula that shows the birth of stars—was one of the first things that came back in focus. I love that image because it’s iconic of the universe and the creation of a star, the genesis of a star, which is really powerful. Rhoda’s obsession is the stars and it symbolizes her passion.


Co-star William Mapother, Brit Marling and Cahill at Sundance 2011.


RKO: Rhoda is a 20-something ex con presented with the contrasting successes of friends and family members. It’s like the world is passing her by. As a working artist who’s chosen to pursue dreams that don’t exactly follow a set model of rules, have you ever looked around at peers and felt similar feelings? Have you ever been Rhoda?
MC: I think so. Yeah, there’s that awkward moment where she runs into an old friend of hers, and the four
years she spent in prison were the four years he spent in college. And now he’s off to business school in Boston. I can identify with that. America is such a place where there’s the progression from high school to college and then from college to life after college. So there’s this sense of where you’re supposed to be, which feeds into the movie’s notion of these ideal paths we’d like to take. But life doesn’t always work out that way.

RKO: There’s very little interaction with Rhoda’s family in this film, or at least her parents. We don’t quite get a sense of what they think about her circumstances. Did you intentionally alienate her? Or did those relationships just not fit into the story you were trying to tell?
MC: There was a lot more interaction with the family in the script, but the first edit was two hours and 40 minutes. I cut a lot of it. There’ll be about four or five scenes in the extras with the family. They struggle with trying to help Rhoda reintegrate into life and she kind of rejects it. But it felt a bit tangential to the ultimate story—I wanted it to be a nice and tight 90 minutes.

RKO: Without giving too much away, there’s a love story in this film, and there’s a point where it crosses a very crucial boundary. What is the moment like when you decide to cross that boundary, and why did you choose to cross it? Was it always written to be the way it appears in the film?
MC: It was. And it’s a very crucial moment because the kinds of stories that interest me the most are not just the stories where the protagonist has to choose between right and wrong, because it’s obvious what they should do—they should choose what’s right. I prefer when the choice is more complex. The scene in which they have that passionate night together...in some ways it’s right because they’re in love. It’s a beautiful moment. However, its only beautiful in the world that they’ve created together, and if that bubble were to burst—which, eventually, it probably will—the fall from that levity they have will be even steeper. So the stakes go higher. I like that notion that one really has to reckon with the idea—what is right and what is wrong. And, here, what can be perceived as wrong also can be perceived as right if you don’t acknowledge the past. I like the complexity of that situation.

Marling and Mapother

RKO: This is a movie that’s basically tethered to one very big idea. It’s right there in the title. What’s more important for a filmmaker—a strong core idea or strong execution?
MC: I think those two...it’s hard to put one as more important because a great core idea that’s executed poorly does not transfer anything. It becomes unarticulated. So the execution is vital, but the strong idea allows for the imagination to roam, so I think the two work in tandem with one another. This is a concept that opens up so many different possibilities and so many different stories and it’d be fun to tell many more.

RKO: When Another Earth was screened at The Franklin Institute last month, a woman in the audience remarked about how there aren’t many events anymore that unify Americans—or the world, for that matter—the way the original moon landing did. Do you think we’re still able to experience that sort of collective awe, and do you think movies have the power to create it?
MC: I definitely think movies can do that. Movies can move people in collective groups, and allow them to connect on an emotional level. The moon landing was an emotional experience that people shared together, and cinema is something that’s an emotional experience that people share together. It becomes one of those things that unites and I think one of the big questions we ask—one of the things we deal with in the film—is the question of our aloneness in the universe, as a society and and as individuals. To escape that loneliness is a deep primal urge that we have. I think through cinema, we can connect.

RKO: Finally, the inevitable question—If you met you met the other you, what would you say to him?
MC: I’d ask if he’s lived a meaningful life. And if he’s making movies, I’d tell him I’d like to see them and that he should watch this one!

Eva Green Interview

This article was published in the May 2011 issue of ICON magazine. It has been re-published with permission.

The Good Witch
Currently starring in the arthouse drama Cracks and the TV series Camelot, actress Eva Green says she has ambitions to soar beyond the dangerous, mysterious roles that have become her trademark. Too bad she’s so bloody good at playing them.

By R. Kurt Osenlund

IF EVA GREEN HAD HER WAY, she’d be starring in a remake of Mata Hari, the 1931 espionage drama that saw Greta Garbo don the bejeweled headdresses of the titular dancing spy. The larger-than-life character is the one 30-year-old Green says she’s most desperate to play, which, of course, couldn’t make more sense.

Widely regarded as the 20th century’s foremost femme fatale, Mata Hari, who in 1917 was executed for allegedly spying for Germany during World War I, would prove the ultimate conquest for Green, whose relatively short filmography is already brimming with vamps and vixens to be reckoned with.

“I think it’s always interesting for a character to have a secret,” Green says in a recent phone interview, the poor connection no match for the rich timbre of her distinctive voice. “Something dark for the audience to discover.”

“Dark” and “secret” are words that spring to mind just from looking at this French actress, her ambiguous pout and smoky-eyed stare as unnerving as they are sexy. Over the past decade, Green has portrayed a witch in The Golden Compass, a princess capable of murdering her own son in Kingdom of Heaven, and the enigmatic double agent and Bond girl Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale (“It made me famous,” Green says of the latter).


Green with Daniel Craig in "Casino Royale"

But femme fatale archetypes, Green insists, aren’t the only characters she’s after, nor is fame a primary pursuit. Her upcoming films include the German-made cloning drama Womb and the Sundance selection Perfect Sense, two little-known projects in which she plays a “nerdy, shy character” and a “normal character,” respectively. She can currently be seen in Cracks, a boarding-school period piece from Jordan Scott, daughter of Green’s Kingdom of Heaven director, the great Ridley Scott. While she certainly meets Green’s criteria of dark and secretive, Green’s character, an ostensibly id-driven English swimming instructor known only as Miss G., doesn’t wield any literal weapons or ensnare men. She does, however, bewitch the bevy of teenage girls who idolize her, and are entranced by her feminist impulses, her wild stories and her worldview, which bucks the norms of the film’s 1930s setting (smoking and preaching the supreme merit of “desire!” she’s like Mona Lisa Smile’s whore cousin).

“Don’t think; do!” Miss G. tells her captivated pupils, whose social hierarchy is dependent upon who can best fill the role of teacher’s pet. But is Miss G. as free-spirited and forward-minded as she seems? Green, who in her own life is more thinker than doer (“I should cut off my head sometimes in order to get things done,” she says), had a blast constructing, then deconstructing, her complicated screen persona, who’s surely the main attraction, if not quite the main character. Known for her bold fashion sense and occasional modeling gigs (Emporio Armani, Dior), Green worked closely with costume designer Alison Byrne to develop a look for Miss G., whose flowing frocks and glamorous headbands and hairstyles evoke film actresses of the era.



Green as the mysterious Miss G.

“We wanted her to look very much like a movie star,” Green says, “Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis. I imagine that Miss G. is sewing during the night—everything has to look perfect.”


But, naturally, everything is not perfect, and as the mystique of Miss G. unravels, her wardrobe does, too. Jewelry, tailored jackets and finger waves give way to frumpy housecoats, unkempt coifs and no makeup. It comes as no surprise that Green reveled in the character’s downward spiral, digging into the aesthetic and dramatic opportunities of a classic movie breakdown. But the arc of Miss G. is what appealed to the actress

most—the chance to embody a strange woman with a wide, metamorphic range of “colors,” a word Green drops a lot when discussing the parts she chooses.

“It’s difficult to find good, multi-faceted roles in movies for women,” she says. “I need to fall in love with the character. I cannot just do something for the sake of it or for the money, otherwise I think I’d die. I have to fall in love with it. I’m picky—too picky, probably.”

Green in "The Dreamers"

Green’s discriminating instincts haven’t exactly steered her wrong. Along with a perceptive mentor and a whole lot of nerve, she has them to thank for her breakthrough. In 2002, when Green was discovered by Italian provocateur Bernardo Bertolucci and offered a major role in his forthcoming film The Dreamers, she was urged by her family and entourage to decline. The 2003 movie, which co-stars Louis Garrel and Michael Pitt and shows a whole lot of skin, didn’t scream “wise career move” to Green’s camp. But Green ignored the warnings, having long been a fan of Bertolucci’s controversial classic Last Tango in Paris. The Dreamers, a daringly beautiful film (which, incidentally, features Green doing Garbo while play-acting scenes from Queen Christina), became an arthouse and critical success, and it gave Green a helluva first experience as a bigscreen actress.

“I had to pinch myself every day, like, ‘Oh my god, I’m in a Bertolucci movie,’” Green says. “We used to go to his house every weekend and he’d talk about the cinema and music and art. It was just amazing. It was a great start, for sure, to work with Bertolucci. It was hard, though, because when you start with somebody so great, you think you’ll be disappointed after that.”

Green with her "Cracks" costars, including Juno Temple and Imogen Poots

Though she doesn’t say it, it’s fair to assume Green hasn’t met such disappointment, nor has her career gone the way of recently-deceased Last Tango star Maria Schneider, who never truly regained the attention that, for better or worse, her baring-all breakout brought her. Green, who cites French luminary Isabelle Adjani as her childhood icon and actorly inspiration, has starred opposite Nicole Kidman, Orlando Bloom, Daniel Graig, Judi Dench, Jeremy Irons, Romain Duris, Edward Norton, Kristin Scott Thomas and Ewan McGregor. As is the case with Cracks, it’s not uncommon for her to be the most indelible player of the movie in which she appears.

Born to a French mother and Swedish father and raised partially in London, Green has an alluringly odd, uniquely exotic appeal, which undoubtedly affects the sorts of scripts she’s offered. Is it a help or a hindrance for an actor to have a trademark package of characteristics that inevitably paints a specific picture in the minds of filmmakers and casting directors? Green seems torn on the question. She’s aware that she’s sometimes perceived as being “mysterious” and “not from this world” (“It’s kind of true,” she laughs), but she also doesn’t want to be pigeonholed, or “put in the femme fatale box.”



Green in TV's "Camelot"

Yes, the femme fatale. Despite her best efforts to deflect it, and despite a clear capacity for dramatic range (The Dreamers, which may still boast Green’s best performance, is, for a large chunk, lighhearted), the femme fatale thing has a way of hovering over Green, not like a dark cloud, but, perhaps, a dark halo. Her other current role is in Camelot, the Starz TV series based on Arthurian legend. She plays Morgan le Fay, Arthur’s cunning sorceress of a half-sister who battles him for the throne. Morgan—or Morgana, as she’s often called—is right up there with Mata Hari in the rogues’ gallery of cultural and historical vamps. It might be somewhat unconscious, it might be partly due to forces “not from this world,” but Green sure seems to have cornered a market.Which, box or no box, is not to be undervalued—there’s something to be said of an actress who knows just how to play to her considerable strengths.

Green’s next big project is Dark Shadows, Tim Burton’s much-anticipated adaptation of the 1960s-era gothic soap opera. Starring alongside Burton muse Johnny Depp, and among a cast of characters that includes zombies, ghosts and vampires, Green plays Angelique Bouchard, a villainess who practices witchcraft.

“She’s kind of dark,” Green says with a laugh and a light, submissive sigh. “So, here we go again.”

***

Tom McCarthy Interview

This article was published in the April 2011 issue of ICON magazine. It has been republished with permission.

The People's Champ
With his new sports-tinged dramedy Win Win, Jersey-born writer-director Tom McCarthy continues to exhibit his trademark instincts for reading people and telling human stories, bruises and all.

By R. Kurt Osenlund

IN HIS OWN WAY, actor-turned-filmmaker Tom McCarthy is America’s answer to Mike Leigh. Though more structured, safe and genteel than Britain’s kitchen-sink master, McCarthy possesses Leigh’s same extraordinary empathy for his characters, and for humankind in general. With great intuition and compassion, the writer/director consistently lays down predominantly neutral turf, upon which his players unfurl their isms, inadequacies, flaws, virtues and hard-won joys. He loves his characters and delights in all their blemishes and bright spots, and in turn, his adoration is felt and shared by the audience. Such is but one of the reasons why the title of McCarthy’s new film, Win Win, is so perfectly apt. The movie concerns the victory-conscious worlds of sports and law, and deals in both opportunism and symbiotic relationships, but its title chiefly reminds us of what’s been true of all of McCarthy’s work: when there’s this much care and understanding put into the story and the people within it, nobody loses.

As he did with his first two features, The Station Agent (2003) and The Visitor (2008), McCarthy populates Win Win with inherently decent people who are prone to losing their ways, but have unexpectedly strong capacities for kindness. In their ups and downs, no one ever goes so far as to step out of character, nor does anyone’s actions or feelings ever bleed into sentimentality. McCarthy is far too gifted a screenwriter for any of that. The way he shapes his people is presumably the way he regards all people: optimistically, yet realistically; knowingly, yet curiously.


Peter Dinklage, Patricia Clarkson and Bobby Cannavale in The Station Agent


“I like to travel a lot,” McCarthy says during a recent Philadelphia press tour for Win Win. “I started doing it at a very early age. I love meeting different people and I love taking things away from those meetings. I just remember so many things. There’s something about that experience of bumping into people randomly, in other cultures or communities, that I’ve always found fascinating.”

McCarthy may have modeled Peter Dinklage’s Fin McBride (The Station Agent) after a little person he encountered at a train platform, or based Richard Jenkins’s Walter Vale (The Visitor) on a professor he had in college, but he didn’t need to venture far to gather inspiration for his newest characters. Set in the all-too-familiar suburbs of New Jersey (McCarthy grew up in New Providence), Win Win stars Paul Giamatti
as Mike Flaherty, a husband, father and small business owner whom McCarthy’s no doubt met 100 times. A small-time attorney whose practice is struggling, Mike is having anxiety attacks. He coaches high school wrestling on the side, which allows him to vent his anger and feed a passion of his youth. His wife, Jackie (Amy Ryan), is a wonderfully maternal, Bon Jovi-loving Jersey girl, but also a judgmental conclusion-jumper. His best friend, Terry (Bobby Cannavale), is loyal and successful, but brazenly off-color when it comes to his ex-wife. And Mike himself just wants to do right by his family, but takes advantage of an elderly client as the clouds roll in on his good judgment.


Alex Schaffer and Paul Giamatti in Win Win


“Being from a suburb, you get to a certain age and you look back and you’re like, ‘they weren’t all perfect people,’” McCarthy says of the flawed folks who’ve inevitably informed his writing, “but I’m also at an age where I can look back and see the beauty in it all.” He throws in an irresistible anecdote about how he’s on New Providence High School’s Wall of Fame alongside Enron CFO Andrew Fastow, a guy he grew up
with. “The joke is that the plaque reads, ‘Andrew has been written about in The Wall Street Journal,’” he says, unable to avoid a laugh. “But seriously, I know that family—it’s a very good family. They’re really nice people, good parents—I used to go to their house to hang out. There were just some bad choices made. I can’t think back and say ‘Oh, that’s right, [Andrew] was an asshole,’ because I don’t feel that way about him. He’s just a pretty decent guy who got off base and made some bad decisions.”

Unless he’s just putting his game face on for a room full of journalists, McCarthy, 44, is surprisingly guy’s-guy-ish for someone so adept at crafting such sensitive tales of frailty and morality. Clad in jeans and a sport coat, he’s loose and casual. He gets amped up about the athletic content of his film, and he lets a whole lot of curses slip. But he’s also expectedly contemplative when discussing his process, which he says, isn’t “over-intellectualized,” but is certainly very involved, impassioned and consuming. He says his story development remains rather fluid right on through the editing and post-production discussion stages, but it begins with jotting things down in a notebook, which he carries with him everywhere he goes. For Win Win, he frequented high school wrestling matches with his co-writer and longtime friend, Joe Tiboni, scribbling
details and inspirations onto paper.


McCarthy on the set of Win Win


That kind of preparation aided in the molding of characters like Kyle, the film’s star attraction and star wrestler played by first-timer Alex Shaffer, a Hunterdon County, New Jersey teen and bona fide, nationally ranked wrestling champion. In the movie, Kyle first crosses paths with Mike in a very Tom-McCarthyan, fortuitous-yet-uncontrived sort of way, sitting in front of the home that belongs to his grandfather, the same elderly gentleman Mike is manipulating. Kyle joins Mike’s wrestling team, is welcomed into the arms of Mike’s family (he’s estranged from his addict mother, played by Melanie Lynskey) and, of course, complicates the story’s frayed moral fabric.

McCarthy chose wrestling as a plot element not just for its rarity at the movies, not just for its allegorical support of Mike’s own personal struggle, but because he, too, wrestled in high school. He wasn’t a phenom like Kyle or Alex Shaffer, but he had an affinity for the sport, and still does. It’s one more reason Win Win is his most personal effort yet.

“I didn’t realize it was my most personal film until I finished it,” he says, “I’ve written about a place where I grew up and about people I know inside and out. I felt so close to some of these people and felt like I understood them in a way that was so immediate to me. I even developed it with a lifelong friend—that process alone was very personal.”

And, yet, the movie is also McCarthy’s most accessible, an attribute that doesn’t often mesh well with personal in regard to film. The comedy is broader, the structure more traditional, the appeal more mainstream. It’s the kind of sports movie people love, where the sport in question is lowest on the list of what it’s about. So, what makes Win Win still true to McCarthy’s oeuvre and worthy of the arthouse? McCarthy has a marvelous knack for repurposing tropes to serve his unique perspective. He’s aware of the reactions he’ll elicit, and he knows how to please a crowd, but rarely does he ever sacrifice grace, tact, wit or cleverness. He’s a pro at gifting his characters with endearing idiosyncracies, not trendy, flash-in-the-pan quirks. He achieves a uniform naturalism, but laces it with heightened irony, and finds great running gags in such things as an impressionable young girl dying to know the meanings of adult words. His humor is handled as gently as his post-recession commentary. Even in the way he forms his script, he breaks rules while following them. He places multiple guns on the mantle (a tree ready to topple, a boiler ready to blow), but never do you see them go off.


McCarthy and Paul Giamatti


Much of McCarthy’s considerable skill comes back to his understanding of, and interest in, people. He’s a filmmaker with an uncommon aptitude for interpreting, respecting, processing and conveying the human condition. Perhaps his work as an actor, getting inside the skin of his characters, has played a large part in this. He’s appeared in more than 30 films and TV shows, including Good Night, and Good Luck, Flags of Our Fathers, Duplicity and The Wire. Or perhaps it’s all that note taking, all that observation and people-watching, that’s made him so perceptive. He offers some more anecdotes about his trip to Philadelphia, and about the things he saw that wound up in his notebook.

Of his visit to the restaurant Fork, he says, "I walk in and all I can focus on is this guy—silver hair, straight back, amazing bright pinstripe suit, great shirt, eating by himself, probably 65 to 70. I’m like, ‘Okay, who’s that?’ I wanted to get a cup of coffee and just sit and watch him. He was such a great character. A lot of times, that’s where it starts for me.”

He continues, “Driving over here, we stopped in the car and I looked over and there’s this statue of a guy on one of your buildings [the John Wanamaker Statue]. I’m thinking, ‘Who is that? What if you were his widow and you pulled up and saw that? What would it mean to you? Would you flash back? Would you just keep going?’ Then it becomes, ‘I’m gonna write that down. I’m gonna write something cool about that.’”

***