Declan Cashin

Writing: the art of applying the ass to the seat

My interview with Michel Hazanavicius, director of The Artist, in ‘Day & Night’ in today’s Irish Independent

Hollywood is a town and a business where, as screenwriter William Goldman once noted, “nobody knows anything”, meaning nobody really knows what film will do well, or why.

With that in mind, consider the case of The Artist. This is a black and white, silent movie about black and white, silent movies. It’s directed by a Frenchman with an unpronounceable name, and has unknown French actors in the lead roles.

The biggest American star in the film is John Goodman, the husband from ‘90s sitcom Roseanne. Oh, and there’s no sex or violence. And one of its key characters is a dog.

So what then if I told you that The Artist has been winning unanimous rave reviews ever since its debut at Cannes during the summer, and not just from snooty, elitist, chin-stroking, goatee-sporting, black turtleneck-wearing, Cahiers du Cinema-reading critics?

Actual real people seem to love it too. At the public screening I attended, people cheered and clapped at the end. Not many films provoke that response anymore.

Now, heading into the busy awards season with six Golden Globe nods to its credit already, The Artist is currently the firm favourite to win the Oscar for Best Picture next February.

As an unlikely sleeper hit/little-movie-that-could, with a joyous, song-and-dance finale, The Artist is not unlike Slumdog Millionaire, which ended up bagging eight golden statuettes.

Its writer and director, Michel Hazanavicius, still seems buzzed about the response to his movie as he speaks to ‘Day & Night’ in The Dorchester in London.

“I don’t know if it’s good or not, but people enjoy it,” he says in accented English. “It’s a good feeling, especially in this case because it’s such a strange movie, and people really didn’t want it at the beginning. I felt alone for a long time.”

Indeed, it has taken Hazanavicius a decade or more to get the project to the screen. The movie is set in the dying days of the silent movie era of the 1920s, where silent star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) finds his career crashing and burning with the advent of sound – so-called ‘talkies’.

At the same time, Peppy Miller (played by Hazanavicius’ real-life wife Bérénice Bejo), a former chorus girl with whom Valentin once shared a scene – and a brief romantic entanglement – becomes the biggest star in the talkies.

The plot is essentially a mash-up of Singing in the Rain and A Star is Born, but is told without any dialogue, save for a few intertitles, practically no sound (with the odd ingenious exception), and just Ludovic Bource’s musical score for accompaniment throughout.

It’s a crowd-pleasing love story that seems so simple on paper. “But to be simple is the most complex thing,” counters Hazanavicius.

He explains that the initial idea for the movie arose from his attraction to the silent format. “I wasn’t a specialist in the silent era or anything, but I thought it was amazing the way this device makes you as an audience member become involved in the storytelling process more than any other form of cinema.

“You really feel that lack of sound, so you put a lot of yourself and your imagination in the movie. You bring the movie closer to yourself.”

Although Hazanavicius knew he had a good idea, he never thought the movie would get a release outside of the European arthouse arena, and certainly not in America, where it was partially filmed in Hollywood (mogul and Oscar’s ‘King Midas’ Harvey Weinstein snapped the release rights up after seeing it at Cannes).

“Berenice reminded me last week of a conversation we had soon after filming. We were trying to find out how we could send some DVDs to the American crew just for them to have a chance to see the movie,” he explains.

Though the movie has been well-received practically across the board, there was always the chance that it would be accused of being a novelty or a gimmick. Indeed, ‘Sight and Sound’ magazine implied as much in an ambivalent review in this month’s edition. That must sting, surely?

“It’s part of the game,” Hazanavicius shrugs. “What I can say is I tried my very best to avoid making it a gimmick. I worked on a story first. When I had that, only then did I think about making it silent or in black and white.”

Like many ‘historical’ movies, The Artist tells us as much about the present as it does the past. It’s a love letter to Hollywood, for sure, but it also has resonance for today’s crop of stars.

Afterall, this is a movie about an established box office champ being rendered irrelevant in a changing system, usurped by cheaper, baggage-free unknowns, something that the likes of Julia Roberts and the Toms, Hanks and Cruise, must currently understand only too well.

Was Hazanavicius making a deliberate point about contemporary movie stars in The Artist?
“The notion of what’s new is very important to Hollywood,” he answers. “Some people have a very long, stable career. However, even then people always want some fresh things.

“But I think American cinema now is very rich. It still does some things very well. For instance, Rise of the Planet of the Apes is the perfect Hollywood movie: really well-written and directed, and Andy Serkis’ performance is something new. It was very surprising.”

Hazanavicius also sees a more universal theme in the movie that might explain why it has got everyone, erm, talking.

“It’s the story of a person having to face transition, and that is a very deep fear of our times: how fast the world is changing,” he says. “All of us, in every industry, have had or will have to face a transition period and to adapt ourselves. That theme can touch people.”

Lastly, it would be remiss of us not to mention the movie’s real top dog: Valetin’s canine co-star and loyal pal, played by the scene-stealing mutt Uggy, who won – I kid you not – the Palm Dog prize at Cannes this year (Jean Dujardin, meanwhile, won Best Actor).

“Originally I thought it would be a fun, cool angle for the story, but I didn’t realise myself until editing that the dog was becoming the star of the movie,” Hazanavicius explains.

“The main character is selfish, egocentric, and proud, and you could dislike him. But he has a dog that loves him, so you trust the dog’s affections.

“The thing is the dog [conveys] that with no words. He doesn’t have access to language, so in a way it crystallises the entire movie. The dog is the ultimate silent actor.”

PANEL:
Hazanavicius says that there was no tension when directing his wife Berenice in the movie. Well, almost. “There was once when we were tired I guess,” he recalls. “We didn’t agree on something, so we went for a walk behind the set and had an argument.

“I remember this camera loader was there trying to work looking very uncomfortable, but our argument was done in five minutes. Really I feel very lucky that I’m able to share all this with her.”

*The Artist opens in Dublin on January 6th, and elsewhere in Ireland on January 13th and 20th.

My interview with Jeremy Renner in ‘Day & Night’ in today’s Irish Independent

It’s hard to know where to start when talking to Jeremy Renner, so much does the Artist Formerly Known as ‘What’s His Name Again?’ have on his plate right now. With no less than four major movies coming out over the next year – including Marvel’s much-teased, much-awaited The Avengers – Renner is clearly a star operating at the height of his power.

But just a decade ago, Renner was so poor that he was living by candlelight and surviving on a food budget of $20 a month.

Sitting today with ‘Day & Night’ in a suite in London’s Soho Hotel, Renner’s stature hasn’t just grown professionally. His biceps – and here I must beg forgiveness for my momentary lapse into Mills & Boon territory – are so big as to be bulging out from underneath his check-shirt.

He’s currently fighting-fit having enthusiastically taken on a tough training regime for his roles as ‘the new Matt Damon’ in The Bourne Legacy, which he’s now shooting, and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, the fourth movie in the Tom Cruise-produced-and-starring action spy franchise.

Renner stars alongside the Cruiser as a new and reluctant recruit to Ethan Hunt’s team, who have gone rogue after the IMF (erm, not that one; rather ‘Impossible Missions Force’, though, on second thoughts, maybe they are the same entity) is implicated in the bombing of the Kremlin.

The stakes are high for the film, and there are inevitable rumours that our Jeremy could ‘do a Renner’ã and inherit the franchise from Cruise in the near future.

First off, what I – what we all – want to know is what Cruise is really like. Is he, as many suspect, as mad as a bag of cats? “He’s so likeable and generous,” Renner gushes. “There’s no air around him like, ‘I’m a big movie star’.”

But even Renner would have to admit that it has been a difficult six or seven years for Cruise, and that his image and box office clout have taken a battering?

“There’s no stopping somebody’s will if they really want something, and Tom has a really strong will to work,” Renner deflects. “Whatever setbacks, whatever anybody wants to say in a negative light, that’s not going to stop a guy like Tom from doing anything.

“He always comes back. He takes chances. When you have that mentality it’s limitless what you can do. Some people will love it, some will hate it, but who cares?”

Renner seems to have a confidence and level-headedness that belies his three years in the Hollywood spotlight ever since breaking through with an Oscar-nominated performance in Kathyrn Bigelow’s multi-award winning The Hurt Locker (he bagged a second consecutive trip to the Oscars this year with his incendiary role in Ben Affleck’s The Town).

That self-possession is not just a result of turning 40 this year, though he doesn’t look it (“Must be all that smoking and drinking,” he quips).

Rather Renner has earned every moment of his recent success, having toiled in obscurity and struggling to make a living for the best part of 20 years. Californian by birth, Renner was two years into a college education that incorporated criminology and psychology when he discovered the campus theatre apartment, and got the acting itch.

He dropped out, and signed up to study at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco instead. He moved to LA, and worked mainly on stage before landing his first major movie role as a serial killer in the acclaimed Dahmer (2002).

The following year, he took on a mainstream role in the action thriller SWAT, opposite Colin Farrell, and the two became good friends. Indeed, the Dubliner introduced Renner as a Best Actor nominee at the 2009 Oscars, reminiscing, in particular, about a wild trip to Mexico, during which, Farrell revealed jokingly (we presume), the pair ended up spooning in the same bed.

Does Renner care to fill in the blanks? “Oh yeah, I remember a lot of that week,” he says, with a faint smile. “It was over Thanksgiving 2002. That was fun. He’s a good cat. It has been nice to have him as a good buddy all these years.”

Renner also seems to have something of a bromantic crush another Irish star, Michael Fassbender. “We share an agent, and he’s a handful of fun to go out with,” he says. “We’re dying to do a project together.”

His heightened profile has also meant more attention on his private life, which appears to both annoy and amuse Renner. “Anyone I ended up touching at the Academy Awards, I was [apparently] having sex with,” he says. “They had me having sex with seven gals and one guy, who’s my brother. Where would I find the time? If I pet my dog does that mean he’s blowing me? Come on!”

So is he single right now? “Yeah, I’m single,” he replies. “Again, where would I find the time? I’d be a terrible boyfriend or husband at this point.”

All these Hollywood A-list concerns are a far cry from those pre-SWAT days in the early Noughties. “Sure it was a struggle, but it is for a lot of people,” he says. “You need to have the endurance and perseverance to stick it out. I worked enough that it kept me afloat and courageous enough to keep going.

“The lowest point was in 2000/2001. That’s when I was pretty poor, and couldn’t even afford power. But knowing that I can live on $20 a month on food is a wonderful thing. I’m certainly not going to force myself to do something I don’t want to do.

“Even at that moment of living by candlelight I still wouldn’t do a job for money if I didn’t feel like I could do that job like I wanted to do it. It’s not in me.”

So let’s talk some of those upcoming movies, starting with The Bourne Legacy. “It’s not the character Jason Bourne,” he explains. “It has the same feel to it, the same composition, tone, and pace, but the characters are different.”

Then there’s The Avengers, the movie that assembles a range of Marvel superheroes including Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man and Chris Evan’s Captain America. Renner plays Hawkeye.

“I’ve seen as much as you have essentially,” he reveals. “There’s not much I can say. It was very physically demanding.

“My part is pretty segregated from the other guys, but there were two days when all of us were there in costume. It was cool, but kind of nerdy and ridiculous. I mean, I was there standing around in costume drinking a cappuccino, while Chris [Hemsworth as Thor] was there with his hammer in one hand and a fruit smoothie in the other.”

Renner might be insanely busy at the moment, but he’s relishing the opportunities, an attitude and outlook he attributes to achieving success a little later in life.

“No-one can fuck with me at this point,” he explains. “It’s a wonderful sense of self to have: to have gone through enough hell, and success, and hell again to feel like I can really endure anything. Everything I have in my life I’ve worked my ass off for. So I really appreciate it and enjoy it.

“I learned a lot from Colin, who had the experience of having a lot of movies come out in quick succession. But he was a lot younger [having that success] then I am now, and whether it was him being younger or not, he got off track a little bit. I learned what not to do.”

Did Farrell advise him? “He didn’t sit there and say, ‘Don’t do this or don’t do that’,” Renner says. “I just kind of watched and observed him. I chimed in when I thought he was going a little too far or whatever. But he’s back and better than ever, and I couldn’t be more proud.

“It could have happened to me. What if The Hurt Locker had come to me at 25 or 30? How would I have responded to it?

“I really enjoyed the Academy Awards because I had certain friends who helped me with that, and had enough sense of self to think, ‘This is kick-ass. I can just stand here at this plateau of my life, take a deep breath, and go, ‘Wow. Fucking fantastic’.’”

PANEL:

Next up (March, to be precise) we’ll see Renner star opposite Gemma Arterton in the fairytale re-imagining Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. “It’s an action move with a fantasy element,” Renner explains. “I haven’t seen the finished thing, so we’ll see what it ends up being, but it certainly looks fun so far.”

*Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is out on December 26^th.

My interview with Rooney Mara, star of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, for movies.ie

This time last year Rooney Mara was best known for playing the lead role in the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, and had was starting to get strong notices for her brief but vital turn as the girl who dumped – and inspired – Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) in David Fincher’s The Social Network.

Now the 26-year-old star is about to go supernova having landed one of the most coveted female roles in modern movie history: Lisbeth Salander in Fincher’s US adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

Mara is electrifying in the role, going beyond just the requisite extreme physical transformation, to present a tough, vulnerable, smart, kick-ass character that puts the likes of Twilight’s disturbingly passive Bella Swan into harsh perspective.

Having just earned a Golden Globe nomination for the performance, and with an outside chance of getting onto the Oscar shortlist to boot, Mara spoke to movies.ie in Stockholm to discuss the career-making – if not defining – role:

Q: Were you ever scared about taking on such an iconic part?

RM: Probably for a little while. I certainly had to do a lot of things that were scary, like learning to ride a motorcycle, but I don’t know if I was ever scared of actually doing the role. As soon as I was cast I just had to let all the pressure and fear go. I couldn’t think about that.

Q: Did it affect you knowing that someone else – Noomi Rapace – had played the role to great acclaim three times in the Swedish movie versions?

RM: I’d seen the first Swedish movie long before I knew I was going to be doing this part.

It affected me before I got the role for sure, because it adds pressure, and [Noomi] did an amazing job with it. But as soon as I’d read the books myself, and as soon as I’d got the part, I couldn’t think about it again. We didn’t use the Swedish movies as a reference point or discuss them on set. We just always went back to the books.

Continue here.

John Banville writing about Irish emigration in today’s ‘New York Times’.

My interview with David Fincher for ‘The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’ in ‘Day & Night’ in today’s Irish Independent

How about this for a light, cheery conservation of a chilly winter’s morning? “To me, your life is ending at one minute at a time.”

Too grim, perhaps? Let’s go with something else. “I’ve been told it’s the most tasteful rape scene imaginable.” Oh dear.

Welcome to the dark world of David Fincher, who is now, thanks largely to the success of his Zeitgeist-nailing hit The Social Network earlier this year, arguably the busiest and buzziest film director working in Hollywood today.

When ‘Day & Night’ meets Fincher on a drab Monday morning in the Hilton hotel in the heart of the Swedish capital of Stockholm, the 49-year-old is still putting the finishing touches to his ninth feature film as director, the US adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

The opening instalment in the late author Stieg Larsson’s 50m-selling Millenium trilogy has already been made into a well-received movie in Larsson’s native Sweden, and made an international star of its phenomenal leading lady, Noomi Rapace.

However, Fincher’s version – we hasten to say ‘remake’ – has gone back to the bleak, exceedingly violent source material to fashion its own take on the tale, resulting in what an early teaser trailer heralded as “the feel-bad movie of Christmas 2011”.

There’s also an American actress, the relatively unknown Rooney Mara, playing the central role of the ass-kicking, bisexual-Goth-hacker Lisbeth Salander alongside Daniel Craig’s investigative journalist, Mikael Blomkvist.

“Alright, let’s go, because my answers are not sound-bites, they’re sound-meals,” Fincher announces as he enters the hotel suite.

Frankly, it’s a surprise to find him in such good form. Not only has he spent the best part of a gruelling year filming this movie, anecdotally Fincher has something of a reputation for being gruff, abrasive, and difficult to work with.

“I think I’ve had a pretty honest working relationship with anyone I’ve worked with,” Fincher says of his reputation. “If I have any issues I’d probably tend to be a little more honest than reassuring.”

With The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Fincher says he wanted to create “a truly adult franchise”. “In selling a movie, the best example of material that seduces millions of people into a movie theatre doesn’t often include the word ‘sodomy’,” he says.

“The way you get people into theatres is by assuring them that everything is going to be okay, not by making them uncomfortable. But it’s an adult book. It seemed to me that if teenagers get their blockbuster books adapted, why not adults?”

Anyone familiar with said books, or the Swedish movie adaptation, will know that sexual violence is one of the key talking points about the material, in particular a gruesome rape scene that has ensured Fincher’s movie received the once-dreaded ‘R’ rating in the US.

“In adapting the book, it wasn’t like, ‘Oh here’s something really pervy we can make’,” Fincher states. “It’s not so much what you see and what you talk about, it’s how you talk about it, or what you show.

“I showed the rape scene to someone who said, ‘It’s the most tasteful rape scene imaginable’. But still, it’s effective. You don’t see anything, and you don’t see anything gynecologically, but you’re not left lacking for information either.”

Considering the physical and emotional demands of the role, the casting of Lisbeth Salander was crucial. By all accounts, every twentysomething actress in Hollywood auditioned or was at one point considered for the part, including, but not limited to, Carey Mulligan, Scarlett Johansson, and Mia Wasikowska.

In the end, Fincher settled on 26-year-old Rooney Mara, hitherto best known for her role as the girl who dumps Mark Zuckerberg in the opening bar scene of The Social Network. It’s a career-making – if not defining – role, and, it must be said, Mara already seems over-awed by the attention the part has brought her, if her over-cautious, borderline monosyllabic demeanour on the Stockholm press day was any indicator.

“When casting, I always try to find to find the person to whom I can turn the character over, and where, if you’re to pre-imagine a movie, you can see them in it,” Fincher says.

“By the same token, you want to collaborate with them to see what they’re thinking about the character. In the case of Salander, we looked and we looked and we looked, and right under our noses was the perfect person.”

After two-and-a-half months of screen tests and unofficial auditions (one of which required the actress to get drunk one night and come into the office hungover), Mara was hired.

It’s a measure of Fincher’s standing in the industry that he was able to make a $100m+ budget movie – the first of a potential and potentially lucrative trilogy – with an unknown in the female lead.

Born in Colorado in 1962, Fincher started out in the business in George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), working on the likes of Return of the Jedi and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

He left the company in the mid-80s to helm high-profile TV commercials, which led onto an extremely prolific period as the in-demand director of music videos for, amongst others, Madonna (‘Vogue’ is one of Fincher’s credits), Aerosmith, The Rolling Stones, Nine Inch Nails, and Michael Jackson.

Fincher’s first movie as director was the commercially disappointing and artistically frustrating sequel Alien 3 in 1992, but he really made his mark with the dark serial killer thriller Seven (1995), starring Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman.

He re-united with Pitt in 1999 (after 1997’s under-appreciated The Game) for what is still the most controversial movie of his career so far, Fight Club, which was attacked by various American campaigning groups for all manner of perceived indiscretions, including the insensitivity of its release just months after the Columbine high school massacre, and even for allegedly encouraging copycat acts of violence and domestic terrorism.

Any flack that comes his way upon Dragon Tattoo’s release should be a breeze in comparison, but is there a part of Fincher that enjoys stirring trouble, requiring him to defend his output?

“I don’t defend anything. Maybe I stupidly don’t feel the need to,” he replies. “Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but to say that I actively felt that the stir about Fight Club was absurd…” He pauses to smile, before continuing: “The movie itself is absurd, and it’s meant to be taken that way.”

Fincher can’t seem to get his thoughts in order on this one. “We were making a coming-of-age, absurdist…” Pause. “To me, your life is ending at one minute at a time.” Pause. “The line from Fight Club, ‘You’re not your fucking khakis’, is right up there with, ‘Plastics, Benjamin’ [from The Graduate].

“It’s not a call to arms. It wasn’t supposed to be and I don’t think it was. But there are so many people who are looking to be offended by things. If you’re not willing to engage with something on all of its levels, there is a reductive kneejerk reaction that can be had to just about anything.

“I’ve gotten into fistfights with people over Seven. This woman once said to me, ‘There’s no reason to show Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in the box at the end’. I was like, ‘I’ve seen the movie a lot of times, and I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. You thought you saw something’.”

Fincher’s subsequent movies – Panic Room, Zodiac, and the technically impressive but oddly incurious The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – consolidated Fincher’s position as a stylish directorial whizz. The Social Network, however, was the game-changer, winning three Oscars but not one for Fincher, despite being the heavy favourite going in (he lost to Tom Hooper for The King’s Speech).

“I’m not disappointed by those things,” he says. “I wish I could enjoy sitting in a room being sweetly eulogised, but the waiting…there’s nothing worse than that. I’m very happy when it’s all over.”

As our time comes to an end, Fincher offers his last words on Dragon Tattoo. “This movie is for parents, not their kids. It’s not a date movie,” he says, before there’s another characteristic pause, and the hint of a smile returns. “I guess it could be.”

PANEL:

There’s no escaping Fincher’s work for the next couple of years. Right now he’s producing a US television update of the BBC series House of Cards, and working on a new spin on 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. His name is also attached to at least five other movies, including The Killer, The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, and an animated comic book movie, Heavy Metal.

*The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is released December 26^th.

2011: the year in Lego.

Gracing the cover for the first time…

Excitement builds. I’m seeing the already controversial prologue to the movie on Wednesday afternoon in the BFI Imax. Sure to whet the appetite even more.

…according to US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Watch her address to the UN in Geneva  here