Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
I'm actually glad that films whose focal point is the current war in the Middle East are still being made. The fact that most of them aren't making money may be a concern to their distributors, but as someone who watches and is engaged by them, I've found them to be some of the most compelling works of the last five years. The latest entry in this growing genre is writer-director Oren Moverman's THE MESSENGER (co-written by Alessandro Camon), starring Woody Harrelson, Ben Foster, and Samantha Morton in a story about two soldiers who have been assigned the task of death notification to the families of fallen soldiers. Harrelson plays the seasoned veteran of this unenviable task while Foster is a newly returned vet to whom Harrelson is teaching the rules and procedures of death notification.
During the Chicago International Film Festival, I got a chance to sit down with Moverman and Foster to discuss this powerful work that almost demands a discussion about many of the issues brought up during the course of the film. THE MESSENGER is the directing debut from Moverman, who has been known primarily as a screenwriter since his work on the screenplay for JESUS' SON. He also co-wrote with director Todd Haynes the exceptional Bob Dylan-inspired piece I'M NOT THERE and co-wrote with director Ira Sachs the lovely MARRIED LIFE. Moverman has several other screenplays in various stages of production, including what he hopes will be his follow-up as a director, the long-delayed THIS SIDE OF THE LOOKING GLASS.
Ben Foster is an extraordinary and often intense actor who has frightened me on more than one occasion. That's a good thing. He's a wiry man just shy of 30 years old and has already worked on some pretty high-profile and often quite great films and TV shows. I first took note of him as the mopey art student Russell on "Six Feet Under." Since then, he has continued to impress me in both big and small roles in such works as the Polish Brothers NORTHFORK, the Thomas Jane version of THE PUNISHER, opposite Bruce Willis in HOSTAGE, as the terrifying Jake in ALPHA DOG, playing Angel in X-MEN: THE LAST STAND, James Mangold's 3:10 TO YUMA, as The Stranger is 30 DAYS OF NIGHT, and most recently opposite Dennis Quaid in the sci-fi horror film PANDORUM. The guy doesn't seem at home on screen unless his veins are popping out of his neck or forehead, so to watch him dial back his usual persona for THE MESSENGER was something unexpected and impressive--not that he doesn't have a freak-out scene or three in this movie. In person, he's a quiet and reserved man that I think I managed to draw out a few times during the course of our conversation. I actually sincerely enjoyed talked to these two about this wonderful movie that opens in a limited release on November 13 and wider (including Chicago) the following week. Seek this one out.
Capone: Ben, I think somebody tried to put us together in Comic-Con in July for PANDORUM, but at that point my schedule was off the charts.
Ben Foster: It was mad, mad.
Capone: I know, so it didn’t happen. It was for PANDORUM, right? I finally just saw it. In your research for this film, did you kind of put together in your head a profile of the kind of men that are given this assignment?
Oren Moverman: Actually no, because a lot of soldiers get called up to do this, and because it’s a movie, we had to agree on a strategy of how to put these two guys together and actually get them to be doing this as assignment for a certain period of time. A lot of times there’s no time for that, because there’s always that pressure to get the news to the family right away. They could grab someone and say “You! You are the right rank, just go and here’s the speech and here’s what you’ve got to do,” and so the profile of someone who does notifications is the profile of a soldier. It could be any soldier.
Capone: Knowing absolutely nothing about it, it’s not something that’s given to them--and I’m just throwing things out--but like as a punishment or they have to fit a certain criteria or an assignment given to them upon returning home as a way of easing back into society.
OM: No, but to address that, it’s considered a great honor to it.
Capone: I figured it would be, yeah.
OM: It’s not a punishment, but obviously a lot of people we have talked to say it was the toughest thing they have ever had to do, including people who have been to war, say they would rather go to war than go to a family and break their heart like that.
Capone: Is it common, like in the case of Ben’s character, to get that assignment right back from serving? That seems like an interesting way handling anything they might be dealing with themselves when they are coming back from fighting.
OM: I don’t think there’s much thought behind it, to tell you the truth. It’s the military, you get an assignment and you do it. It’s a big bureaucracy also. Don’t forget it’s the biggest branch of the military, so I think that people are chosen to do it if they can, if the timing is right. There’s really no therapeutic plan behind it or anything like that.
Capone: Do they at least try to pair someone, like you do in the film, some one who has been doing it for a while with some one who is relatively new to it?
OM: There are all kinds of combinations and actually, if you look at the last eight years, which is really what the film is portraying, at least emotionally and with these two wars, they have had a lot of experience with these notifications, probably somewhere between 5,200 to 10,000 notifications by now. So they have a lot of experience and they have learned a lot, and so they have changed some of the things, even from the time we made this movie. For example, they try--they can’t always do it--but they try to send a chaplain with the notifier to bring in that element, so that there is more spiritual comforting to a family. They allow the chaplain to touch, at his discretion in a limited way if it’s necessary, if it's needed for comfort. They don’t allow doing it in public at all any more, they are very strict about that. So they are learning and to their credit, mistakes were made and they are trying to correct them, and so the procedure keeps on evolving. They have more hours to do it in a day with an hour earlier and an hour later, so there’s a bigger window of notification.
Capone: Ben, I assume you met people that did this. Did you meet them after they were done with that assignment or while they were still doing it, and did you find a common thread among the people as when they exit that assignment, that they kind of come out of it with a unique feeling?
BF: We met a lot of men and women who were given the difficult and the great honor of knocking on doors and delivering this kind of news. We had, I guess our liaison, the gentleman who was on set every day, a lieutenant colonel who was head of the Causality Notification Office for the entire country for three years. He was our advisor, and we would meet soldiers who did it once or a few times and there is a certain procedure of "Duty Is Duty," and when you bring this subject up, the curtains kind of pull back a bit.
It’s something we have all done. Oren and I keep talking about this, but we can take the military out of this movie in many ways with it being a universal experience that we all have. You don’t have to be just in the military to have this experience and we all deliver this news and we all receive it at some point. If we are honest with ourselves and allow ourselves to grieve, then we can heal and then we can connect again, but it we are hiding behind our grief, we get sick or lose contact, and hopefully this film at least presents in a quiet way these moments when we are brave enough with ourselves and we can celebrate the time that we do have.
Capone: It’s not a film about grieving. And I kind of thought going in that it might be, but it's about the way that people deal with grief in different ways and how it, a lot of times, brings people together.
OM: It’s about getting back to life. It really is about the simple basic things we all know about, but we live in a certain kind of way that we don’t really pay attention too, but they are very basic. It’s love, it’s friendship, it’s the connections that you mentioned that allow you to live with everything that happens in the world, including war, grief, death, problems of any kind, and I think that’s really what’s universal about it, that yes it does take place in a military setting and it has that layer and that commentary that is sort of built into the story, but as Ben said, we all experience these things.
We all experience the bad news or we give it, and I think it’s pretty easy for anyone to tap into it on a human level and try to make a basic human film about these situations and about getting back to life once you have realized there are hurtful and painful things in life and yet you need to go on. “How do you do that?” That’s what the film’s about.
Capone: I know the script has been floating around for a little while, did somebody come to you and say, “Hey, you should direct this” or was that your idea? How did that work exactly?
OM: It wasn’t my idea. We had other directors attached to it before me. I worked on it as a co-writer with Alessandro Camon. We had a really wonderful development process with these three directors [Sydney Pollack, Roger Michel, and Ben Affleck]. Even though losing every single one of them was disappointing, but they all had good reasons and it was never about what the film was. They were all very supportive and still are, except for Sydney, who is supportive from up above, but I think Ben Affleck was flirting with it for awhile as his second film, but he couldn’t really do it.
Then there was a rush to make the movie, because the writer’s strike was happening, and there were more strikes on the horizon back then and Mark Gordon really through Lawrence Inglee, who is our producer. He said, “You should do it. You direct it!” I didn’t jump in at first. I was going to direct another movie somewhere else, and I was trying to think responsibly as a writer thinking “I don’t want a first-time director on this thing, let’s get someone… a great humanist…” I even said that, and through talking about it and really we got on the phone and they all tried to convince me, and I said I would do it if Alessandro gave me his blessing, because I know what it feels like to be the co-writer. I have no complaints about it, but I know how it works. He did give me his blessing and he was fortunately not disappointed by it. He likes the movie, but it was never my idea, nor did I ever try to push anyone to think of me as a director of the movie.
Capone: How would you rate yourself as a director now that you have been through the experience?
OM: I would rate myself as “Ready to learn some more.” [laughs]
BF: I’ve worked with some vets and some first-time directors, and I still laugh when that subject comes up, I haven’t worked with someone as rooted and interested in the human experience than Oren, and his ability to create an environment really at the end of the day is what a director at his finest should be after, creating an environment that allows for some truth to slip between the structure. I have never had an experience like this on a set. It was truly remarkable and by keeping it very simple and honoring these people.
For instance all of the notifications Oren felt that it would be best that Woody and myself wouldn’t meet those [actors] that we were notifying, so we never met until camera was rolling at the door, so he would work with them and we wouldn’t even see them. We weren’t allowed to see each other, not in the makeup trailer, nothing. He would work with our cinematographer Bobby and rough out the move and they would work on that a little bit and then talk to us, Woody and myself and it’s done with so much gentleness and trust and it feels like a high wire act. You can’t fake that. We were in exceptional hands.
Capone: Did you know Steve Buscemi was going to spit in your face?
BF: No, we didn’t talk about…
Capone: There was not even a discussion of it?
BF: With the spitting, I think it was in the script.
OM: It was in and out of the script. [laughs] We actually kept things in and out on purpose sometimes, like the slap, we kept it in and out of the script, and so they didn’t know if there would be a slap or wouldn’t be a slap and we actually worked with the actress. We just kept playing with it. “Playing” might sound wrong, but we kept everything open so that they knew what was in the script, but none of it was supposed to work as it was in the script. Everybody had the freedom to create and because we were shooting 360 degrees, hand held and there was nobody around, I threw everybody off set, so it was just the cinematographer, sound, the focus puller and myself.
We were just moving around and creating these new things and we never cut, so the scene would be over when they finished the scene, so that we played the whole scene in one take time and time again, so basically allowing actors to act, which is something that I’m a big believer of and I think that created a lot of freedom. There were never marks. We never rehearsed anything. There was not one rehearsed scene in the movie, in fact we shot the rehearsals and the nine-minute take between Ben and Samantha in the kitchen is the rehearsal with basically two scenes rolled into one on the day deciding like “Go into the kitchen. Dance together. Make the scene work. Don’t worry about focus, we will find you.”
Capone: Speaking of letting actors act, I saw this film just a couple of days after I saw ZOMBIELAND with Woody. People do not give that guy enough credit for not only his range, but also just his ability to go deep. Granted, he doesn’t take a lot of roles that require it, but when he does, he just nails it, and he certainly nails it in this movie in a way I have never seen him do it before, can you talk about working with him?
OM: Ben was inches from him the whole way.
BF: Woody, as you said, I haven’t seen him…and just being a fan of his and somebody who will go to the movies just to watch him, he goes and he goes hard and he goes deep. He’s one of the most savagely intelligent people I have ever met, and he keeps that hidden, pretty well hidden. His sense of humor is so wicked and constant that it has become, I don’t want to say a shield, but an indicator of depth, and he really spilled on this film and committed on a level that I don’t think he has done before. Working with him was… I know you hear this stuff all of the time about actors liking actors, but this was one of those experiences.
Capone: I don’t think I have ever even seen him cry before.
OM: This was the first time he ever cried for real in a movie.
Capone: Wow, really? That was just me guessing, but it just occurred to me sitting here “I don’t think I have ever seen him cry before.” And in that scene and it comes really suddenly.
OM: Woody has never cried. You know that line "Garbo Talks"? This is "Woody Cries."
[Everyone Laughs]
Capone: That’s what the poster is going to say…
OM: “Woody cries…” It’s the first time he ever cried in a movie for real. It was so organic to the movie. He was concerned about it in the sense that he just wanted to deliver, because he’s not experienced in that particular device, and it wasn’t a device, it was just so natural. He was sitting next to Ben and listening to him, and I think that the crying worked so for him that it just didn’t stop. We would do the scene from another angle on Ben, and Woody would still cry, even though he was off camera. It had a lot to do also with the connection between these two guys, Ben and Woody, from the minute they met just worked so well together and were just so kind to a first-time director and willing to go on this interesting journey for all of us and had a lot to do with experimenting and trying things that are not in the script or are not planned and just really being open to the process and picking up things from the process and making them part of the movie.
It’s what we did everyday, and even though I’m a screenwriter and I’m supposed to protect the words on the page, I wasn’t that worried about them. I knew the script so intimately in all of the different versions that it had, all the different permutations, that I was so comfortable to just let the actors improvise, and I would say at least 30 percent of the movie has improvisation, even though the script was really good, and there were so many good scenes that we could have used, but what they brought to it, once they understood it and once they lived as the character, it was priceless.
Capone: Ben, in a lot of your film roles, I think it’s fair to say that you play a lot of intense young characters, are you more comfortable in that sort of agonizing persona? Sometimes you have got your veins popping out of your head and even in something fun like PANDORUM, you are still just so focused and on edge. Is that a more comfortable place for you as an actor? Are we going to see you in a romantic comedy someday?
BF: You are like the umpteenth person who has asked me this [laughs] and I sincerely say, if you have a script, I would love nothing more than to do a frothy romantic comedy. Unfortunately…
Capone: I’m not necessarily recommending it. I’m just saying…
Oh, can you imagine him in something like that? He'd be great.
BF: I would have so much fun. I don’t consciously seek out anything; it’s when something comes in and it feels right at the time, Who I get to ask questions with for four months is important. Whether it’s two months or four months, you want to be in company that you can ask some nice questions with and that works to lesser or more degrees. In this case, it spoils you when something is this rich and supportive and selfless and everybody saying “What can we do for it?” Working with Samantha [Morton] and Jenna Malone, it just doesn’t get better.
Capone: The scenes with Samantha are some of my favorites, because I don’t know what’s going on there half of the time. I’m not sure what either one of them are thinking. They both kind of know that they are not supposed to be there, but beyond that I am just like “What is going through their heads?” What is the connection, and do we really need to know that?
OM: You know, one of the things we talked about in writing the script early on is creating a relationship that cannot easily be explained and really. Just like in life, we all have at some point experienced a relationship that if we had to sit down and tell our friend “This is what it’s about,” we would not have the words or we would not easily find the words. It was really that relationship, which is “You have your grief. I have my grief.”
And then “I’m connecting with something in your story. I don’t even know your story, but something about the way you are handling it is informing me and I want to be a part of it” and we don’t know what to do with it. The scene in the kitchen is about “We don’t know what to do with this.” They don’t sleep together. They don’t have a fight and they don’t even kiss. They try to connect and ultimately what connects them is a story and when you listen to that story, and one of the things to me that’s really interesting about it, somebody told me about it the other day, that the most fully formed character who’s entire history you know in this movie is Olivia’s husband, because if you think about it, his story is told from beginning to end. What happened to him? He went to war, he did this, and he did that. He came back, he was abusive with his family, he went back, he couldn’t stop, he was dead after the second tour. You have got his entire story and he’s the guy who is not in the movie.
And what we really wanted and the main reason that I decided to shoot that scene in one take with no interruptions, was that I felt it was a rare opportunity to say to an audience “Listen to the widow, just hear her story. There are thousands of them out there. Listen to it. Take your time. Don’t be in a rush, looking for a close up, just watch these people try to connect and listen to a military widow’s story. It's going to be good for you.” You know? They don’t get to tell their stories, so we stopped everything, literally in the movie, and tell the story and we don’t totally articulate what attracts them to each other, but I think at some point we at least get an emotional understanding that it’s probably good for them to make something out of this connection somewhere down the road, and that’s the source of the optimism of the movie at the end.
Capone: It’s a beautifully written scene, but I think in somebody else’s hands other than Samantha’s, I don’t know if it would have worked as well.
OM: That’s the thing, it wasn’t one scene. It was two scenes and we had a shot list of how to break it up and literally that day I walked into the kitchen and it was also a question of time, we didn’t have a lot of time to shoot it, but I saw Samantha and her intensity in getting ready for the scene. I looked at Ben and by then I knew Ben really well and I said to our DP Bobby Bukowski, “You know what? Let’s just shoot the whole thing. Let’s just shoot the whole thing and never stop it. Let’s see what happens.” We shot it and the first take is in the movie, which is the rehearsal. I felt we had it. We did it twice more, but we really had it in the first, and I remember walking out and saying to Samantha “We're done” and she says, “What are you talking about?” I said, “We are done.” She was like “No close ups? No coverage?” I said “Nothing, just go,” and she just hugged me and said, “I love you” and walked away.
BF: She went back to breast fed her child. [laughs]
OM: That's right. To tell you the truth, if it wasn’t Samantha… Ben I had no problem with, I knew he could do it….but watching Samantha, I knew she was able to do it. I don’t know too many actresses who could do it in that way.
Capone: This film also beautifully illustrates the difference between liking a character and understanding a character. Ben, your character is not a very likable guy, for at least the first half of the movie, but the story evolves in a way that you actually take the time to get to know him. Inevitably when you spend time with someone, they are probably going to grow on you, you are going to drop your judgments a little bit, and that’s exactly what happens here.
OM: It was important to do it with a soldier, because I think people have stereotypes about what a soldier is and they tend to think of soldiers in a certain way, and one of the things that the movie does, as you say, is you spend the time getting to know him, and I think that it’s about opening yourselves up to the idea that this person actually has more layers than you think and just give him a chance and see how you feel about him.
Capone: I read somewhere that you shot this on Super 35. For a movie that’s all about these intimate moments, that’s a really late-'60s/early-'70s type of aesthetic, to frame these intimate moments on this giant canvas. Can you tell me a little bit about why you decided to do that?
OM: Yeah, mostly because of the notifications, we wanted to… basically when you shoot Super 35, you have the wide screen. In my mind and this might sound worse than it is, but I thought and said to the DP “Let’s put a coffin around everything we do in this movie.” Super 35 is closer to a coffin than anything else, but also not to be too morbid about it, I think that what I wanted to do with Bobby Bukowski is capture as many moments of bringing people together on screen, and what you can do with Super 35 is you can have four people in close up, where as with regular 35, you basically have a narrower frame and so you need to break it up a little bit more. What I wanted was an organic look to the film, where people can come in and out of the frame, but the frame is really as wide as it could be to capture as many moments, and since so many moments were improvised and so many moments were grabbed in the moment, I wanted to just have the opportunity to grab as much as possible.
Capone: Let me real quick a chance to find out what you guys have coming up. I’ve been seeing THIS SIDE OF THE LOOKING GLASS on your agenda for a while.
OM: It doesn’t go away. There’s a long story behind it, but it’s not a movie that I’m making now, and I don’t know that it will ever get made, but for some reason, because I have been fortunate enough to cast and work with actors that were actually attached to it and I think that through the years… It truly actually is the first screenplay I ever wrote, and I almost got to shoot it and it fell apart a few days before shooting nine years ago and it’s been alive all this time, it’s actually kind of remarkable and I thought the other day after reading the script that Ben is doing now, I was reminded of it and I wanted to read it and I realized that I deleted it. I don’t have any copies of it, so if you can put in your article, if anybody has a copy of THIS SIDE OF THE LOOKING GLASS, I would very much like to read it again, because I hear it’s pretty good.
Capone: I’m sure it’s out there somewhere; it’s got to be.
OM: Actually, I think I know who would have a copy, but in the process of changing computers and stuff like that, it was deleted, so it’s on the internet as says that it’s “In production” and has a cast, including some fake people who have attached themselves I guess to build up their resumes--I’m not even kidding--but in reality I don’t even have a copy of it.
Capone: So that wasn’t the film that you almost directed just before this one?
OM: Yes, it was. It came back to life right as this was being offered to me and I actually had a producer who I disappointed and was very sorry about, who was ready to take me to Berlin to shoot it there, but I couldn’t pass on the opportunity to direct THE MESSENGER.
Capone: Ben, PANDORUM is in the theaters now. They kind of snuck it out into theaters, but I actually think it’s a pretty scary little movie, and I thought Dennis Quaid was really cool in it. What else are you working on or have coming out soon?
BF: Probably next year a film called HERE, which is about a cartographer in Armenia and he picks up an ex-pat Armenian photography, and they have this odd romance road trip through Armenia. Now I’m going back to New Orleans to start shooting a remake of THE MECHANIC, that assassin picture.
Capone: Oh yeah, the Bronson film, right.
BF: It’s with Jason Statham and myself, and we are going to go shoot some guns and do some bad boy stuff and that should be fun.
Capone: Still, nothing but lightweight stuff for you.
[Everyone Laughs]
BF: Hey, if you’ve got a frothy comedy and you find Oren’s script…
[Everybody laughs]
Capone: I spent my summer revisiting, because I hadn’t watched it in a while, "Freaks and Geeks." I had completely forgotten that you were in a couple episodes of that.
BF: What a nice little show that was.
Capone: Speaking of your old TV work, the first time I every heard someone use the word “emo” to describe a person, I didn’t quite understand what they meant, and when they explained it to me, the first person I thought of was Russell from "Six Feet Under." Okay, I get it. I know what that means.
BF: [laughs] I'm glad I came to mind.
Capone: It did. Anyway, those are all of the questions I came armed with, so thank you both very much.
BF: Thank you.
OM: Good stuff, man. It's always great talking to a professional.
Capone: Then allow me to go get one for you.
OM: [laughs] No seriously, though. You can tell the difference.
Capone: Well, thanks. Good luck with this.
-- Capone
capone@aintitcoolmail.com
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