Loud and clear
My interview with Stephen Daldry, director of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, in today’s Irish Independent
When the Oscar nominations were revealed a fortnight ago, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was the very last film to be announced in the Best Picture category to audible gasps – of delight? Shock? Outrage? – from the assembled press.
The movie’s director, Stephen Daldry, was probably the most surprised of all. Though ‘Day & Night’ met Daldry to discuss the movie before the nominations came out, when I asked him if he had hopes for his film making the list, he replied: “I don’t. I’m always surprised when it happens. You can never anticipate or expect it. The most important thing is not wanting it.”
Come on now Stephen, everyone must want it though? “Do they?” he counters. “In my experience if you really want something and it never happens…” He trails off, before continuing: “I think you need to take it with a pinch of salt.”
In that case Daldry must have pinched enough salt over the past decade to season a dinner-party platter of steak cutlets. Extremely Close and Incredibly Loud is only his fourth movie, and yet Daldry has managed the very rare feat of earning Best Director Oscar nods for his first three efforts, Billy Elliot, The Hours, and The Reader, whilst the movies also received multiple other nominations and wins for their stars Nicole Kidman and Kate Winslet.
Still, while Daldry is no doubt chuffed that his movie is now competing for the golden baldies, it sounds like he won’t be losing any sleep over not making the cut himself.
“In terms of my top 10 things to do of an evening, going to the Academy Awards would not be one,” he says with a smile. “It’s so tense.”
It must have been equally tense when the marketing folk at Warner Bros first got wind of this latest movie that they’d have to sell. First off, there’s that title. “I did consider changing it,” Daldry admits. “I hope, in the end, people will just say Loud and Close. It is a tongue-twister, but we didn’t change it in the end because of Jonathan’s book.”
The ‘Jonathan’ in question is author Jonathan Safran Foer, who wrote the 2005 novel upon which the film is based. The story’s narrator is a nine-year-old boy named Oskar Schell (played in the film by newcomer Thomas Horn), who discovers a key in a vase that belonged to his late father Thomas (Tom Hanks, making what is essentially an extended cameo in flashback) that inspires him to search around New York for information about the key.
Which brings us to the main concern in making and selling this movie: its subject matter. Hanks’ character Thomas dies in the Twin Tower attacks, making Loud and Close one of the few mainstream films to incorporate the 9/11 terrorist atrocity into its narrative.
It’s a risky move for any filmmaker, even 10 years after the event. “I wasn’t so much nervous, as aware that it’s an issue,” Daldry explains. “Some people think it’s time to make a piece of art about it or tell a story about it, and some think it isn’t. Some people need to make up their own minds, particularly in America.”
Daldry adds that he hadn’t planned to make a “9/11 movie”; “it just happened that this was the particular story that caught my attention,” he says. “There are thousands of stories that need to be told, and over time those stories will come through.
“This is just one story. I think it’s hard for those families [affected] because while we all suffer loss, the difference in this situation is that it’s catastrophic loss in a very public arena. For the kids, it’s not just that they lose a parent, but that they’re still barraged with the images of how they died 10 years on. That’s extraordinary.”
Daldry insists that the studio was always very supportive of the project, though the results, it’s fair to say, have been mixed. A lot of US critics haven’t been kind to the film, with reviews swinging from praise for being “a film with sentiment and substance” to accusations of being “nauseatingly precious”. It’s certainly one of the most critically divisive movies to make the Best Picture Oscar roster in the past decade.
Even long before its release, Loud and Close was one of the movies (along with the likes of War Horse and J. Edgar) targeted by critics for being blatant “Oscar bait”, films made entirely to win awards.
It’s a term that rankles with Daldry. “It implies that you’re disingenuous about what your intent was, so in that sense it’s slightly irritating,” he says.
Say what you like about this and his other films, but Daldry certainly can draw A-list actors. The 51-year-old is, first and foremost, a theatre director, which is perhaps why so many star thesps seem to keen to work with him.
Take Loud and Close’s female lead, Sandra Bullock, for instance. This is the first film Bullock has made since winning her Oscar for The Blind Side. Presumably she jumped at the chance to star in a Stephen Daldry movie to further bolster her ‘serious actress’ credentials.
“Sandy was fantastic to work with,” Daldry gushes. “I went to see Sandy in Austin, Texas where she lives, and I sold it to her as being this unusual mother character who is having a really difficult time.
“I said, ‘You’re not going to be sympathetic for most of the movie, and you’re going to have to bare your soul’. And she was really up for it. She’s a joyous person, as it Tom Hanks.”
Both stars accpeted that their roles involved taking a back seat to a child star. Indeed, the majority of young actor Thomas Horn’s scenes take place with the legendary (and now Oscar nominated) Max von Sydow, playing a mute lodger of the child’s grandmother who starts accompanying Oskar on his New York expedition.
Daldry seems to have a special talent for dealing with young and inexperienced actors, and I ask him if being the father of an 8-year-old girl himself helps with that.
Before we get to that, it’s worth mentioning Daldry’s complicated personal life. He identifies as gay, but is married to American performance artist Lucy Sexton. In an earlier interview he explained that while he does sleep with his wife, he always admits to being gay as it’s easier for people to comprehend. “To marry your best friend is one of the great gifts of life, and to have kids with your best friend is fantastic,” he is quoted as saying.
But back to the question: does being a father help when dealing with child stars? “Not really,” he replies. “All you need to do is create a methodology that’s clear so that you can have a language in which to talk to them. Thomas was fantastic – he’s a very clever, smart kid, and he learned the methodology quickly. Kids are unburdened with a lot of the – what’s the nicest way of saying this? – baggage of how these things are meant to happen.”
As for what Daldry does next, he’s involved as one of the creative directors of the opening ceremony for this summer’s London Olympics, and he says he’s “angling” for a certain project, but won’t confirm what.
Contrary to long-standing reports, it doesn’t look like his next move will be to adapt Michael Chabon’s 2001 Pulitzer Prize winner The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay as a TV series. “That was just something I said off the cuff,” he says.
As our time finishes, I ask Daldry whether or not he thinks all of these literary adaptations, like Loud and Close, are a sure sign that Hollywood is creatively bankrupt, and that the industry has officially run out of original ideas.
“Stories come in a variety of ways,” he answers. “Stories are repeated and adapted and moulded and re-invented in a whole variety of ways. It doesn’t really matter where the story comes from. All I want to know is: is it any good?”
*Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is released next Friday.
PANEL:
Other literary adaptations coming our way in 2012:
*On the Road: Walter Salles’ take on Jack Kerouac’s seminal 1957 Beat novel has Sam Riley playing Sal Paradise and Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty. Kristen Stewart, Kirsten Dunst, Amy Adams and Viggo Mortensen also star. Due this summer.
*Anna Karenina: Keira Knightley plays the titular heroine of Leo Tolstoy’s tale opposite Jude Law and Emily Watson from Joe Wright, director of Atonement. Due in September.
*The Great Gatsby: Baz Luhrmann directs Leonardo diCaprio, Carey Mulligan and Tobey Maguire in an intriguing/ominous-sounding 3D version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s American classic. Out in December.
Tags: 9/11, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Oscar, Stephen Daldry
Posted on February 10th, 2012 at 15:20
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