Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a pretty good interview I conducted with director Terry George last week. It’s a tad late, his film RESERVATION ROAD having hit this weekend, but in my defense I’ve had to coordinate a last minute international trip. I found Terry George to be a very open person, a laid back guy that was happy to talk about his film and his life. I enjoyed the chat and hope you will, too. We began by talking about Mark Ruffalo, who I met in Belgrade on the set of THE BROTHERS BLOOM. We were talking about Serbia when I turned on the recorder. Enjoy!
Quint: They are just years out of a revolution and you can still see blown out communist buildings around the city.
Terry George: Sure. Actually I was just at the Sarajevo Film Festival, which is one of the greatest in the world just with the sense of the place and all, but you do get a notion of like the whole Serb macho… the guys with the skinhead hair and the thick necks and all of that stuff. It’s like it’s still scary, but Mark [Ruffalo] seemed to have a good time on it.
Quint: It’s a great script and Rian Johnson, the director, is like… I often get asked “So who’s the new up and comer… Who’s the next one?” and he’s the only one that I’ve been able to point out and I’m 100% sure that he can make it. He did BRICK, I don’t know if you ever saw that…
Terry George: Oh it’s great, yeah. I did, yeah.Well good for him and Mark… Mark works all the time. He’s in Brazil at the moment, doing BLINDLESS with Fernando Meirelles and I think he gets back this week, because his wife is pregnant and do to give birth any day now, so there you go. Thanks for seeing the movie.
Quint: Definitely and he was great in the movie, too.
Terry George: I think it’s the best thing he’s done, and I’m biased, but I think in terms of the challenge of the role and what he brought to it, you know?
Quint: It’s such a delicate role, because you are humanizing somebody who… if the humanization of that character doesn’t work, then the whole movie doesn’t work.
Terry George: Right, you’re humanizing a despicable act and then trying to put it in the context of what is happening to a flawed human being whose instincts are to run away from his problems, and he just did great. The stuff with the kid and all was just so real.
Quint: You said yesterday that Joaquin [Phoenix] brought you the script, or did he bring you the book?
Terry George: The script. Nick Wexler, who is the producer of WE OWN THE NIGHT had the rights to the book and had the script for about a year, so Nick has worked with Joaquin several times and gave it to him. Then Joaquin and I have been friends since LADDER 49 and we were just seeing if there was anything we could do or whatever and he gave me the script and then I read the book, so that was kind of the process.
Quint: The script, at that point, was written by the author?
Terry George: John Burnham Schwartz had written the script and stuck closer to the book than I eventually did. I changed Mark’s character quite a bit in that in the book he’s a drunk and he’s an abusive father. He’s much darker and therefore it becomes a sort of black and white story and I needed the grayness of the whole thing for what I was going after.
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Then some plot stuff that I felt in the book didn’t quite work or it worked in the book fine, but when you come to do a movie, audiences are much more immediate and therefore you don’t have that luxury of people creating scenarios in their head or putting the book down and picking it up again, so movie audiences are killer on plot. If you have a plot device that’s weak, then you’re in trouble and so those were the basic changes I had to make and a lot of tone… There are scenes that didn’t exist in the book that are key, like the argument on the porch, the confrontation on the road between Joaquin and Mark’s characters where they meet at Reservation Rd. and all of those elements that you really need. I mean, the book is told, kind of cerebrally, through three characters and Ruth really doesn’t speak, but they are separate memories of an event and they don’t really need till the end and in the movie you need them to be interwoven and pass each other by or it doesn’t work, you know?
Quint: So when you came on board and did a rewrite, did you do it yourself?
Terry George: As soon as I came on board with Joaquin, Jennifer Connelly was reading it at the same time and she wanted to do it and Joaquin and I were persuading Mark to do it, because the character from the book is not a very appealing character for an actor to take on board, but I told him what I was trying to do, so we were in preproduction almost the moment I said “Yes, I’m doing it.” Focus jumped in and it’s Random House Films, their new film division, and it’s their first venture into filmmaking, so the financing, as small as it was, came together immediately, so once we were in preproduction I basically had to just keep writing as fast as I could and I didn’t have the time for that collaborative process or the back and forth it would have taken. I just had to say “This is what it is.”
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So yeah, I just took that and was continually writing. There wasn’t like a draft and then another, there was an evolution right up through the movie.
Quint: You were saying yesterday that you were writing while you were shooting.
Terry George: Yeah and that tends to happen on everything, because shit happens, you know? You run out of days… it rains… or the tone of something doesn’t work or you find a character that is working that you pump up or whatever, so its kind of the curse of the writer-director as well in that you literally have anxieties when you go home at night that you should be at the typewriter all the time, you know?
Quint: Has the author seen the movie yet?
Terry George: Oh yeah. And he liked it a lot and was very supportive of it and it’s great for him, Random House had reprinted like 100,000 copies of his book and so he’s happy with that. (laughs)
Quint: Yeah, sometimes you can get the authors that fight any changes, like Stephen King on THE SHINING.
Terry George: Yeah, you are taking their baby and I mean it took him six years to write the book and then a couple of years with the script he had and then suddenly I breeze in and in three months I change everything and so no, he’s been pretty good on it.
Quint: It sounds like the cast just came together and you didn’t have to go to a bunch of different people for each roles.
Terry George: No, I didn’t, not at all. The three principles were cast immediately. Mira [Sorvino]… I talked to a number of actresses who all wanted to play it and it was a role that a lot of people wanted to play, but I quickly came to the conclusion that she was the one for it, because she’s so intelligent and yet she can play the girl next door. She has that sexiness and that working class sort of look, even though she’s from an acting dynasty. And Elle Fanning… One take at an audition and I knew. She is a genius actor. She has that acting talent that will be with her all of her life and she will be the next generation’s Meryl Streep or something like that and Eddie Alderson had worked a lot in television and soap operas and so the casting was not a problem in the slightest.
Quint: What about Joaquin’s son, the one that is hit?
Terry George: That was a lesser role and we had a lot of people in for it, but… god, what’s his name? Jesus, this is terrible… It’ll come back to me in a minute… (it’s Sean Curley) he just fell right into that. You are trying to get a baseball kid and a kid that’s into music and all of that, so it’s sort of a class in it’s own thing. The main thing we had with him was he couldn’t play an instrument, so we had to have him practice a lot of the cello stuff. Antoni Corone, who plays the cop, had worked with Joaquin on WE OWN THE NIGHT and said he was really great and there’s a softness and a naturalness or realism about him where you never feel it’s an actor grabbing on to the “I’m going to solve this case” or anything, you know?
Quint: He’s just a working cop.
Terry George: He’s a working cop, feeling for ‘em and doing his best, but faced up with the reality that they’re probably not going to get this guy as he says “Unless he walks in here and gives himself up, there’s not much chance…” So I felt that I’ve always been lucky with cast, but on this one, for me, I don’t think there was a flaw. Other people might think so, but I can’t look at something and say “I wish I had of cast somebody else.”
Quint: I’ve have a big crush on Jennifer Connelly since I was a kid, so it’s always good to see her pop up.
Terry George: She’s an amazing actor. The scene in the kitchen, when she realizes about the peanut jar and then on the porch and… She just… there’s a humanity there that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck. At least it does mine.
Quint: Was Joaquin always wanting to play the father?
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Terry George: Yeah, but I actually thought when I read it that first night that he gave it to me, I thought he wanted to play Dwight, because it more resembles the characters you’re used to… the darker, really torn kind of…
Quint: Tortured souls type…
Terry George: Tortured soul… dubious characters and so I said to him the next day, I was talking like it was Dwight and he was like “No no no, it’s Ethan I’m interested in.” And then when I thought about that, I said “Okay, that’s even better, because that’s a departure from what he is used to playing and…
Quint: And he’s talented enough, so you know he can pull it off.
Terry George: Yeah, of course and the sort of nuance of how he does it with the kind of buttoned up college professor with the mundane life and the perfect family and he just has that sensibility. He managed to pull that off, the beard, the hair, the glasses, the whole look of it and even his walk, you know?
Quint: Did you guys have a lot of time to rehearse?
Terry George: No. We talked a lot, when I got the chance, about the scenes themsevles and I tried to take the actors individually to their different houses and just walk around with them and get the feel of what was going on and then when we would get there on the day, we would sort of move around the scene and block it out a bit, but not really rehearse, because I prefer to see what happens in those first few takes, when you say “action” and it generally tends to be what you are after anyway, particularly with actors of this caliber, you just go “Poof.”
Quint: So you think that if you over rehearsed or did it too much then you would lose…
Terry George: I don’t know. Some people really think that it fine tunes the acting and the performance in the scene. I tend to find that when I have tried it, you end up fixing stuff and starting to alter stuff out of your own in built fear of the fear itself. Then you start losing faith with the scene and panic can set it. I much prefer talking about having an idea and using the energy of the actual filming itself to get it going.
Quint: And that can translate, definitely.
Terry George: There’s a couple of the scenes that are… the porch scene and some of the fight stuff at the end is a one take thing. I’m getting some stuff for safety, but I’m going with that first take, because the energy that’s there is just so compelling.
Quint: Again last night you were saying how you guys all kind of built up that final confrontation to be a monster, so did you shoot that at the end of the shoot?
Terry George: Yeah, it was the last thing we shot and put it off and talked about putting it off and then finally gave it a night and a half of a next night to just factor it in as a possibility. Then the movie itself, almost, once we started to do it, the emotions were unleashed and they just poured out there and it became a game with the camera man, like “Don’t fuck the focus up here, because if you do we’re in deep shit…” By the time we got to the end of that scene, Joaquin’s hand was almost broken and Mark was in bits and I wasn’t feeling great either, but it was all over in a couple of hours. I think shooting it at the end and feeding into the energy of the whole story itself really worked for it.
Quint: Definitely and at that point I think all of the actors also had been living with their characters for so long that…
Terry George: Yeah. If it was a Hollywood movie, there would have been hours and days of coverage of a foot slipping and all of the rest, but I wanted it to have the reality that all of the rest of the movie had, so it’s just this thing that’s out in the semi darkness, when you’re really not sure what’s going on, but you know these two men are really fighting, as they were. Thank God it worked, because if it hadn’t, we would have been on the beach in Malibu with little bits of trees on stands trying to fake that stuff again, but it worked out I think.
Quint: Cool. What do you have after this? Do you have anything lined up?
Terry George: There’s a couple of things. I’m involved in the development of a big project called EDWIN SALT, that Tom Cruise is strongly considering. It’s a spy thriller and then there’s a book I have the rights to, base on the life of a UN diplomat called Sergio Vera De milo who was the UN diplomat who was killed in Baghdad at the first Al Qaeda bomb and he was actually the sort of Bobby Kennedy of the UN. He was involved in pretty much every conflict in the last 30 years and he’s an amazing, sort of handsome, macho Brazilian character, so I’m really interested in that as a vehicle for telling the story of the ordinary people who work for the UN, so that’s kind of like a passion project.
Quint: It seems to be a reoccurring theme in your work that you would really like to see these bigger stories, but through a very human lens.
Terry George: The Sergio one is interesting in that I always try to look for somebody who can become the eyes and ears of the audience. I’m not sure that Sergio could be, because he is such a charismatic macho, yet hugely intelligent character, but I have to find others to walk through with him, but it’s definitely a way of enlightening people to the whole notion of peace making and what these diplomats and genuine UN people are trying to do, because I think it’s an organization that’s really cured a lot and yet is used as a scapegoat for the inability of the West or us to intervene… not the inability, but the UN becomes the blame hound for all of our faults and it’s a deeply political story, so I’m very interested in that.
Quint: Sounds very cool and I think that’s about it.
Terry George: Thanks a lot. I like the website a lot, thanks and say “hi” to Harry.
That’s it. Hope you guys liked it. I’m trying to fit in as much review and interview catch-up as I can before I leave for Budapest on Tuesday. Any Hungarian readers out there with some pointers for an ignorant American tourist to the country? Drop me an email. I have a couple of days to explore Budapest, so any advice will be welcome. Now I’m going to try to finally write up JUNO, CONTROL, BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD and prepare my interview with the Spierig Brothers… and I have to call it an early night to prepare for another interview in the morning. Busy busy busy. Keep an eye out! -Quint quint@aintitcool.com
