Interview with Vera Farmiga - 18th October, 2009

Promoting: Up in the Air
Venue: The Mayfair Hotel
Interview type: Press conference


Question (Q): It's a joyful script to listen to. It must have been a pleasure for you to read. How did you assess your character when you first read the script? Alex is a similarly free-spirited character, but of course with hidden depths that we discover later.

Vera Farmiga (VF): Yeah. I didn't have the luxury of reading the script without knowing what happens in the end, so I had preconceived ideas. And it was challenging to play a woman who was very much like a man. And oftentimes, when a woman behaves this way, it can be interpreted as – it was difficult for me to – it was a fine line, I found to tread, to have the softness and yet to sort of take control of her sexuality and unapologetically make demands that usually you see men making in scripts. And I really liked the male perspective on heartbreak that I hadn't read before.

Q: Obviously, unemployment features quite heavily in the film. Do you have any interesting experiences of being fired?

VF: I worked as an air-conditioning technician for Fedders & Emerson Fine Cool Air Conditioning, as a customer service representative, who repaired air conditioners over the phone, as much as I was able to tell them whether the VTU was too large a unit for the space they were trying to cool or whatever. And I guess I was too chatty on the phone. I didn't get fired, but they did want to demote me, take me off the phones and give me more of a clerical position, but I just shortened the chat.

Q: There were lots of real-life locations used in the film. Did that present any particular challenges?

VF: What was most amusing for me was to see the fanaticism that George attracts. I mean, that was overwhelming and so odd. For me, no-one ever knows who I am, they always think I'm a producer on the film, but watching George having to deal with that, and him having just to simply open a door and close it and then there's a standing ovation that goes for blocks! And he's so gallant and gracious and takes his bow. But I didn't think that it impeded any of the work.

Q: In the nude scene, was that really you? And if it was, how comfortable were you with it?

VF: I had shot this when I had about six pounds more trunk in my badunk-adunk. I was pregnant and I did do the scene. But I think my bottom had become too large (laughs). I didn't think so – I think that's a question for Mister Reitman, because I did attempt to do the nudity. I got to certainly choose my body double and I thought Jason did a good job of selecting someone that was pretty accurate – my body double, Trish has been in many films. Perhaps on the DVD extras...

END

Interview with Anna Kendrick - 18th October, 2009

Promoting: Up in the Air
Venue: The Mayfair Hotel, London Film Festival
Interview type: One-on-one


Q: It's a joyful script to listen to. It must have been a pleasure for you to read. How did you assess your character when you first read the script? Your character is a bit more explained from the word go, but we do discover a bit more about her and about her background. What appealed to you about it?

Anna Kendrick (AK): First it's that sort of rare thing, this girl who's so intelligent and complicated and her character does not revolve around a romantic storyline. And that was enough to make it fascinating in itself because it just doesn't happen, you don't read scripts like that. And I guess I'm normally so timid in real life that I get really excited by characters who get to kind of tell people off and telling off George Clooney was pretty awesome.

Q: There's a wonderful scene where you go to pieces in the airport after receiving a text message from your boyfriend. How much of that was in the script and how much of it was you on the day?

AK: You mean in terms of the crying? I don't really remember what was in the script exactly, other than that she just starts crying. And I knew that, like so many of the scenes that in some ways are really heartbreaking for me and for Natalie (Anna's character) and there's almost this desire to play it really heartbreaking and really unfunny, I think. I knew it was supposed to be funny but that it couldn't really be funny for me. And it was a long day of sort of trying different noises and it was kind of brutal, because I was so upset all day. And Jason would demonstrate occasionally, because he knew I was running out of juice, various squeaks and moans and wails and stuff and trying to find the right thing that was still not funny to me, but hopefully funny to other people.

Q: There were lots of different real-life locations in this film, including several different airports. When you had the meltdown, was that in an actual airport lounge?

AK: Well, actually, it was in a hotel lobby. It was a little uncomfortable. I guess because it was a hotel, we could sort of shut down the lobby, so there weren't that many looky-lous, but it was still just the space and the extras and even though they're part of the film, you don't really know them and it's still sort of embarrassing, but I think on that particular day it was less about other people and was just more about the space and feeling very – I wanted something to grab onto, it was a very uncomfortable day.

Q: Your character has her views of love and life deeply challenged in this film. Did it affect your own views on those in any way? Was it hard to resist them when someone as seductive as George Clooney is trying to lure you to the lone wolf side?

AK: I think obviously Natalie has really considered ideas about what she wants and what she expects and I don't have many of those same ideas, so I know that there are things that I want and expect from life that I won't get and refuse to accept just yet. But her views on love are not my views on love.

Q: You've gone from playing quite a small role in Twilight, which was obviously a huge success, to playing a lead role in this film, which will obviously be a big success too and against George Clooney, which is amazing. How did you feel when you got this role?

AK: I was sort of shocked beyond belief, because I thought Jason hated me. My audition was very strange and I think Jason was not trying to psych me out by not showing any kind of enthusiasm, but I thought he hated me and then when I got the job I was so shocked and I thought, 'Oh, he's just like that – he's just going to be a tyrant on set', but he's very, very nice. But yeah, I was very surprised and thrilled beyond words, I mean, the script is so beautiful. And I sort of didn't really think that George was doing it – for whatever reason, I just assumed that it was too good to be true, for a script to be this good and to be working with George Clooney. I just thought it was one of those things that was rumoured and then Jason told me the Italy story and I got really excited. And that was one of those moments where I was sitting at lunch with him trying to act like, 'Oh, right, of course I'm going to be in a movie with George Clooney, because I do that sort of thing'.

END

Interview with Paddy Considine - 27th October, 2009

Promoting: Le Donk & Scor-zay-see
Venue: Warp Office, London
Interview type: Round table


ViewLondon (VL): Who were your influences as a kid? Did you grow up watching films? Are you a bit of a film buff?

Paddy Considine (PC): Yeah. I'm not a film buff now, in terms of, you talk to some people about a film and they can tell you when it was directed, what film stock it was shot on, who did the catering and all that, but I was hugely influenced by films and television. When I was really young I was just totally obsessed with the escapism of Star Wars and the Superman movies, Clash of the Titans, things like that. It wasn't till I got a bit older, when I saw Rocky, that was the first film really that I watched and kind of went, 'Oh, wow'. Also, on TV there were things like Walter, Stephen Frears' film, I still remember that, the night it went out, on Channel 4, the first night of Channel 4. And then it turned into a lot of sort of drama, Alan Clarke's stuff, which was speaking a bit more about where I was at the time. And then the world opened up when it got into the Scorsese stuff and Coppola, who I think is the most astonishing film-maker living. Why he doesn't make films now, I don't know. And then the more realist territory, that kind of work. Ken Loach's Kes, for example, is my favourite British film ever made. I think when you see such naturalism in the performances, you're growing up in that kind of place, it speaks to you.

VL: Can you talk us through how Le Donk came about? You'd made short films with the character beforehand, hadn't you?

PC: Yeah, we did. We'd had him for a long time. I was just mimicking guys around the music scene in Burton-on-Trent, the little town we lived in. I just started mimicking these characters for mine and Shane's amusement and then after Shane started making films and I did Romeo Brass with him, we found ourselves with a lot of time on our hands, really – I was back on the dole and stuff trying to get work, so in that time we found ourselves making short films and I just put on wigs and put in teeth and would just do characters. We literally had nothing planned, we'd just grab a floppy hat and a wig and some teeth and create characters – it was liberating to do that, to go into town that day and say, 'Can we get into Burton Albion football ground?' to do some filming and that's how the short films came about. Le Donk was like that, it was just literally put the hat and wig on, let's go for a drive and see what happens. And we would go round people's houses who weren't expecting us to be there – it was a bit unfair, really, on some of them, but Le Donk would just pile in the house and away you go. And we always found it funny, but we always just thought it was just an in-joke and would only be funny to us.

VL: When did you decide to use him in a film?

PC: We tried to do something bigger with him before – we wrote a film with him as the main character but it didn't work. Whenever you tried to script him or anything, it was just bad, it just didn't work. He just has to sort of be alive and let this stream-of-consciousness come out of his gob and let him get on with it. But he wouldn't go away and so we got the opportunity to be at this Old Trafford gig where the Arctic Monkeys were playing and we just took him up there and made a story up and it just all fell into place. And it really was how it happened, Scor-zay-zee came on board, all the stuff about him walking around and plugging in a keyboard is true. And it was really liberating – I think I'd got a bit fed up of waiting around for other people to tell you when you can go and be creative. There's a process with making films and a certain way of doing things and with Le Donk we just thought, 'We didn't use to have to do this, we didn't use to have to have script meetings and wait for you to give us the go-ahead' so we just did it off our own backs and hoped that people liked it and if not, it was just an expensive in-joke. Well, not dead expensive, but a fifty grand in-joke.

VL: Speaking of in-jokes, I love the gag with [co-star] Olivia Coleman's baby. You didn't just think, 'Well, let's just use a different baby?'

PC: Oh yeah. No, it was just one of those things of like, if that's how big it is, we'll just have to get around it. And it's part of the charm. Because a lot of references have been made to things that have influenced this film, like Saxondale, and it wasn't that at all – I've only ever seen half an episode of that. I was working in Canada years ago and it was more stuff like the Trailer Park Boys and this Canadian film called FUBAR, which was also all improvised, like Le Donk. I thought that was fantastic and I showed it to Shane. So it's more from that than anything we've seen over here, although someone made a reference to Paul Calf's Video Diaries, which was fair enough – he was a bit ahead of his time in terms of how reality goes and everything.

VL: Since you mentioned Saxondale, someone mentioned at the Edinburgh Q&A that Steve Coogan ripped Saxondale off Le Donk because he'd seen the videos. Is that true?

PC: Well, the truth of it is, we'd shot the short films and when I did 24 Hour Party People, I gave Steve all these shorts that we'd done and he watched Romeo Brass and he watched these shorts and he really liked them. That's as much as I know about it. And then when it crops up years later as a series about a roadie in the Midlands it's like, “That's Le Donk”. I'm not kidding you – I had about a dozen calls and texts that day, who knew, going, 'Have you read this thing? It's Le Donk.” So you can call it coincidence. I think the point from us is, I don't care if Steve saw Le Donk and digested it and somewhere in his head then forgot it and came up with a great original idea – I don't care about that. I think our annoyance was that we want people to know that we did not rip off Saxondale, that's the only important thing.

VL: What have you got coming up?

PC: I'm doing a film called Submarine, with Richard Ayoade. We're shooting it in Wales and it's a great little character, a bit of a David Icke-style guru. It was just fun to do and with Richard, who's directing it, there wasn't a second thought about doing that film. I just really wanted to work with him.

END

Interview with Kevin Spacey - 15th October, 2009

Promoting: The Men Who Stare At Goats
Venue: Vue West End, London Film Festival
Interview type: Press conference


Q: Did you approach the characters as if you were recreating a real-life person, or did you start from scratch?

Kevin Spacey (KS): To me it was all in the script. I mean, there are times when you're playing someone who really lived and there is a responsibility about trying to make that as accurate as you can and even if it's not an impression, to embody that person, particularly if an audience happens to know who they were. But in this case, nobody knows who any of these characters were, so you can pretty much do whatever the hell you want. And also, my character was the most fictionalised of all the characters in the film, unlike the other characters.

Q: Have you ever had any paranormal experiences?

KS: I think working with George Clooney is about as paranormal as it gets.

Q: Did you go home and practise some of the psychic techniques that you learnt, or were you actively encouraged to do this by the director?

KS: I can admit I ran into a lot of walls in Puerto Rico. I never got through any of them.

Q: You've been away from the screen for a while, focusing on the stage. I wondered if you were waiting for the right script before you take a lead role again or are you just taking a break?

KS: I don't know – I did three movies last year, I did two movies the year before, I did two movies the year before that. I don't know what this break is you're talking about (laughter).

Q: Well, obviously you had the voiceover in Moon and the supporting role in Men Who Stare At Goats, but I meant an actual lead.

KS: Oh, an *actual lead*. No, I don't do those anymore. (laughter) No, I just finished two films in a row in which I'm the *actual* lead. I did a film called Casino Jack, about Jack Abramoff, who was a Washington lobbyist and a comedy I just did called Father of Invention. But I suppose I've been focused on building the theatre company over the last six seasons and things are going very well there so I had an opportunity to go out and do a couple of movies that I really enjoyed – I enjoyed the scripts and enjoyed the experiences of doing them. But my priority for the next six years will continue to be the Old Vic and I'll make films when they both suit my schedule and also to suit what interests me.

Q: There's a documentary that's just come out, called Starsuckers, that looks at the way that newspapers run made-up or exaggerated stories about celebrities. Do you think the media's obsession with celebrity is out of control?

KS: I don't get it. I don't understand the notion of people who might call themselves journalists, or who are in the profession of that, who would just make up stuff. I don't understand it as a function as a human being, I don't understand why that's of interest to somebody, to write something that's absolutely false in the hopes that 1800 outlets will print it. Obviously we live in a time – and maybe we always have, I don't know – where if you even bother to say, 'Oh, that story has no whit of truth to it', then they don't write that that story is false, they write that you have denied that that story was true, which is not the same thing as saying 'What we wrote was absolutely wrong'. So there's some people who choose to fight these kinds of things in the courts and there's some who choose to just go, 'You know what? It's yesterday's news, it's fish wrapping and I'm not going to worry about it'.

END

Interview with George Clooney - 15th October, 2009

Promoting: The Men Who Stare At Goats
Venue: Vue West End, London Film Festival
Interview type: Press conference


Q: Were there long discussions about the tone of the movie?

George Clooney (GC): The book, and there was a documentary done as well which was also very funny, it had such a unique tone, and I thought Peter just nailed the script. This is a script that’s been around town for a while, and all of us have been aware of it for a bit, it was named as one of the best un-made screenplays, so we were all anxious to get our hands on it, and see if there was a way we could do it, and [director Grant Heslov] had the right ideas.

Q: What was it like working with Ewan McGregor?

GC: After the restraining order, it was really hard to actually work with him. (laughter) It’s sort of shocking how absolutely fun and normal he is. We talk about the motor-cycle trips he takes around the world and down through Africa. He fits into this group of actors that are really fun to work with, they’re all professional, they do all their work before they show up, and so by the time you’re on the set, there isn’t a whole lot of misery. There’s the work between “Action” and “Cut” and then the rest of the time, you remember the rubber band fights, it’s fun. Actual food fights. I’m a big fun of his.

Q: Did you approach the characters as if you were recreating a real-life person, or did you start from scratch?

GC: It was whatever the script called for. We’ve done films before, like Good Night and Good Luck, where we had a great responsibility for accuracy, but this is one where we thought there’s something funny to be had, and we could just do it.

Q: Why has it been so hard to make films about the Iraq war, and are we now in a stage where we can make war films that will work?

GC: Any topical subject, if it’s Hollywood, will be a couple of years later, because you’ve got to write it, produce it and distribute it, so automatically you’re never going to be right on the cutting edge of stories. I think that we’ve been a little too close to the situation, and at times it’s such a polarising moment that it’s hard to make films that directly deal with that subject matter, since we’re in the middle of it still. We didn’t think of this as an Iraq war film, it’s a very different story completely. I’ve done an Iraq war film with Three Kings, which holds up and seems to be still relevant. I think this one is just a glancing blow at Iraq, it happens to take place there.

Q: You can’t seem to stop working with Grant [Heslov], writing and producing. Directing you in this, what was that relationship like on set, and who’s the boss?

GC: Grant’s the director, he was the boss. That’s the fun of it, directors are the dictatorship. I had nothing but faith in him, he’s incredibly talented and smart, so I’m lucky to be his friend for almost 30 years.

Do you believe in the paranormal?

GC: I’m not a big believer in much of that. Everybody goes through déjà vu and things like that, but I’m not a big believer in many of those things, I find them to be mostly coincidence.

Q: On a similar note, did you go home and practise some of the psychic techniques that you learnt, or were you actively encouraged to do this by the director?

GC: We kept trying. Busted a few clouds. It’s funny, there’s things that are made up in this screenplay, but the wackiest things are actually the real ones. When you read the book and you read about them literally trying to run through walls, they really did that - they believed they could.

Q: The script had been around for a while. Was there a eureka moment which caused you to take the script on as producer?

GC: These screenplays after they’ve been around for a while - even when they’re really good screenplays, things get attached to them and they get harder and harder to get made. There’ll suddenly be 30 producers and other people brought on, and it gets this baggage to it, that it really requires everybody being willing to come in. (So we were lucky to get) Kevin and Jeff and Ewan all being willing to come in and play ball and have fun on a film that isn’t necessarily a slam-dunk. It’s not Transformers.

Q: How was it working with the goats?

GC: Yesterday I was a fox (at the Fantastic Mr Fox press conference), now I’m working with goats. I tell you, this goat was a particularly nice goat. We spent a lot of time together. He wanted to go over the dying around me, so we worked on that for a while. The funny thing is, the goat was a great actor. He’d work it and really stare at the camera. If we could get Ewan to do that, it would help.

Q: Do you think the media’s obsession with celebrity is out of control?

GC: I’m the son of a news-man, I grew up around news. I can understand the issue which is, as papers are losing subscribers and they’re getting less and less outlets - it’s a tricky thing. You’re going to have to sell papers. The problem is, there’s so little reporting anymore. Someone will write a story and it’ll be in 1800 outlets from one person’s story. You’ll have no recourse, it’ll be false and you go, “It’s not true,” and they’ll say, “We’re not saying that, a London tabloid has said it,” and they’re re-printing and re-printing things that aren’t necessarily true. I understand why it happens, but it’s certainly an issue.

END

Interview with director Marc Price and actor Alastair Kirton - 6th October, 2009

Promoting: Colin
Venue: The Horror Room in the Movieum, London
Interview type: One-on-two


ViewLondon (VL): Where did the zombie point-of-view idea come from?

Marc Price (MP): I was always a fan of zombie movies and I thought it would be great to make a zombie movie but I wanted to something that – to me, as a zombie fan – I thought I hadn't seen before. And the idea of doing a movie from the perspective of the zombie gave me so much to play about with, such as the lack of dialogue – I thought it would be interesting to use the language of film to engage an audience rather than a bunch of actors running around saying how they felt, which is how I write dialogue, because I'm just not very good. And I had Alastair very much in mind to play Colin. So it grew from there and then we looked at what locations we had available to us and other actors we wanted to work with who we knew and we based the script on that. And there were a couple of scenes that were kind of over-reaching but I felt that was important as well, because it's a challenge and it's fun.

VL: So, Alastair, were you there right from the beginning? You knew each other before?

Alastair Kirton (AK): Yeah, we'd worked on a couple of short films together. I think I was pretty much in Marc's mind when he first came up with the idea.

MP: No, you were at least fourth or fifth choice (laughs).

AK: (laughs) Thanks, man. Yeah. Dean Gaffney wasn't available. Yeah, Marc pitched the idea to me really early on. He didn't have a script, so he used wooden stirrers and sachets of sugar in a coffee shop to mark out the film and I knew he wanted me to do it when he stopped saying “And then Colin gets hit in the face with a hammer” and started saying “And then you get smacked in the face with a hammer and bundled into a car”, so I was like, “Oh, brilliant, he wants me to play a zombie. That's...terrifying.” But yes, I wanted to get involved and having worked with Marc a couple of times before, I really love the way he approaches things. Just his enthusiasm and joy at film, really. And we had a lot of the same reference points, movie-wise. So when you go into a project like that it's nice to know you're both on the same page and working towards the same goal.

VL: So are you both big zombie fans then? What was your first zombie movie?

MP: Dawn of the Dead was mine. We'd borrowed – of all the films – Ah'm Gonna Git You Sucka. My aunt had taped it for us and on the tape at the end it wound down and there was the end of Ghostbusters and we were like, 'Oh great, Ghostbusters' so we watched the end of Ghostbusters and then that wound down and then something else had finished and Dawn of the Dead was starting, so we missed the title but it was the shot of waking up and all the chaos in the television studios. And I just watched it, thinking 'This is fucking amazing' and then the tape ran out! And I was like 'Argh! What's this movie called?' I was about 11 then. And then, when I was 14, I think Alex Cox had it on Moviedrome and it came on and I recognised the shot straightaway and then it just blew me away. I couldn't believe all that amazing stuff was happening so early in a movie.

VL: Which zombie movies were a big influence on the film?

AK: Well, Day of the Dead was a big influence, in terms of Bub [a named zombie in the film]. Marc said that when he watched Day of the Dead he got really deeply emotionally concerned for that character. So Marc gave me Day of the Dead – I'd seen Dawn and a few other things, but I hadn't seen Day of the Dead – so we watched that and Bub was obviously a big influence. But then we kind of just chatted about what we thought the best way to approach it was. The idea was really to think that he didn't have much vision, he was just a creature very much caught in his own small circle of consciousness and just the way he approached things, the way he picks up objects and plays with them like a child, that was how we approached it.

VL: Tell me about the special effects, because the effects are amazing for such a low-budget film.

MP: In terms of make-up effects, we were really lucky to have someone like Michelle Webb. We put out a sort of casting call to make-up people and we said 'Hey, why don't you come? You're going to have to bring your own equipment because we don't have any money but you have total freedom to create any zombie you like, providing we have the ones that we need for the sequence'. And all the make-up people who came down were fantastic with that, but what Michelle Webb [make-up artist on X-Men: The Last Stand] did that was exceptional was that she'd show us how to apply these make-up effects ourselves and leave her equipment with us and say 'Okay, see you next week – good luck with the week's filming'. And then she'd come back, see what we'd done and say, 'Right, okay, you can do this now...' and she'd help us and teach us more. And where that ends up being a truly amazing thing is you've got someone like Justin Hales (who owns the production company with me, because he knows how to set them up), who's normally a very technically-minded guy, he's now an amazing make-up artist. And that's just through wanting to do something, not wanting to wait around for us to start filming. We were even leading the make-up session at Raindance with him.

AK: I think the other thing that really helped was the fact that, being shown how to do it and you knowing how to capture things and the way to shoot things is that you just worked out the best way to cheat stuff, like the eye gouge and the face being pulled off. It's knowing what you can do with make-up.

MP: And then how to light it and what the camera should be doing to sell it.

VL: Did that all come from trial and error or from Michelle pointing you in the right direction?

MP: It was more a case of what I'd read about film productions in the past. And also the setting I wanted to apply to the movie, how in the stiller moments where there isn't that human influence, the camera's fairly static or smoothly gliding along, but whenever the human is the dominant force we wanted it to have that sense of panic and franticness in the camera. And in the case of the street battle, if the camera was smoothly moving around then you'd see that none of those people are actors and none of them are capable of faking a decent fight (laughs).

VL: How did you decide on Colin as the name of the film?

MP: It's my dad's name. And I thought it was a gentle enough name and then we have him biting someone's face and ripping someone's arm off.

VL: What was the biggest difficulty? I imagine there must have been times when the low budget meant you couldn't quite get something you wanted?

AK: There was one make-up effect that we wanted to do, which was after the street battle, when Colin has a hammer lodged in his head and we tried so hard to get the damn thing to stick. We tried latex, we tried sellotape and I think the last thing we tried was four rubber bands, which were cutting off the circulation to the top of my head. And then we walked out and Marc was like, 'It's on the wrong way round', so we just lost it.

VL: Which scene are you most proud of?

MP: I think the street fight, what with the explosions and the very small amount of people we had there to shoot that scene and how we dealt with that, in terms of framing.

AK: I just enjoyed the slower, more pensive bits, like the bit with the pigeon. Just the little bits, like Colin on his own and being a bit vulnerable, from a distance.

VL: What's your next project, both of you?

MP: We're working together again on something else. It takes place entirely on a Halifax bomber, returning from a mission over Europe. The plane's badly damaged, it's limping home and a creepy creature attacks one of the gunners. But it's not like the monster's killing everyone on the flight, it's only attacking this one guy. It's called Thunderchild, which is the name of the plane and hopefully it's an exercise in tension and it'll be an exciting ride.

END