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Quint has a sit-down with GET LOW director Aaron Schneider and producer Dean Zanuck!
Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I have a few GET LOW interviews for you. Coming up will be Robert Duvall, Bill Murray and Sissy Spacek, but first let’s get my chat with producer Dean Zanuck (son of JAWS producer Richard Zanuck… something I don’t let slip by without notice, of course) and director Aaron Schneider.
GET LOW is a seriously great little movie that had a lot of success at film festivals and opened to some surprisingly good limited release numbers this past weekend. If you’re the type to complain about the paint-by-numbers dreck the studio system turns out every summer then you owe it to yourself to support this little flick, the antithesis of the noisy summer blockbuster.
Driven on tone and character, GET LOW is about a grumpy old hermit (Duvall) who decides to throw himself a funeral party so he can gather everyone together and hear their stories… and tell some of his own. Bill Murray is a sleazy funeral parlor owner, Lucas Black his young, innocent assistant and Spacek is an old flame of Duvall’s.
I loved the flick and I think you would, too.
This interview was fun… imagine, if you will, us sitting outside having this fine little palaver as Bill Murray wanders around chasing grackles. That seriously was what was going on during this interview. At one point, Murray did interrupt and ask us if we were okay. I told him that we were doing great, but wondered if he could protect us from the birds. He responded, “Could I?!?” and kept on his bird stalking.
Sometimes it’s the little things that make life enjoyable, no?
Enjoy the chat!
Quint: Jaws is my favorite movie of all time.
Dean Zanuck: Yeah, mine too. (laughs)
Quint: Did you get to go out there?
Dean Zanuck: We were on Martha’s Vineyard, but I was what, a one or two year old, so I don’t remember much.
Quint: Don’t have any recurring nightmares about sharks?
Dean Zanuck: No, just memories of sitting around the dinner table with my dad and David Brown had just passed… it’s a blur.
Quint: Well, I’ve got to congratulate you guys on the movie. I got to see it last week finally after hearing such good things about it and I really dug it. It’s the kind of movie we don’t get to see anymore. That’s what I loved about it; it felt like something that could have been pulled out of the ‘70s.
Aaron Schneider: Did you see it on the big screen?
Quint: I did.
Aaron Schneider: Good.
Quint: It’s a good big screen movie.
Dean Zanuck: Thank you. For Aaron and I, it’s been a long time coming, but well worth the wait. For me, this is eight or nine years and Aaron five or six years perhaps and we are just thrilled that people are responding to it well and we have had the good fortune of showing it in Toronto and that’s where we sold it to Classics and San Sebastian… Torino where Bob [Duvall] and Bill [Murray] won the Best Actor awards and at this cinematographer’s festival in Poland and Bill showed up and it’s great to see the support that they have shown for this film as well. It’s really just been a wonderful experience for us.
Quint: The movie looks like a million bucks. It’s such a beautiful looking film, from production design, cinematography…
Aaron Schneider: Thank you.
Quint: Sometimes you can see a period movie that looks beautiful, but it just feels fake. Do you know what I mean where you are like “Oh my God, that’s an amazing recreation,” but you are sitting there in the audience thinking that and I found in this movie I was sitting there in the world. I didn’t go “It’s great that they got that old car.”
Aaron Schneider: It’s funny you mention that, because I remember when I was getting ready to shoot my short film, which was a period movie and I went to see THE ALAMO and I was all excited to see it because I was going to see a period movie getting ready to make one of my own. I remember going to see THE ALAMO and panicking, because as I watched it, I’m like “That’s people in wardrobe. That’s a set.” I started panicking, because I didn’t know why it felt wrong.
Quint: Yeah and if you didn’t know why, then maybe that’s going to be what happened to you.
Aaron Schneider: Exactly. So yeah, it’s nice to hear you say that because everybody worked very hard to give it an authentic look.
Dean Zanuck: We had to stretch our limited resources in every which way, but we had a real kick-ass crew, a bunch of Academy nominate players who gravitated to this project and made big sacrifices and took deep cuts and we just sort of bull rushed this 24 day schedule.
Quint: Which is incredible, because the movie doesn’t feel slow, but it has a very deliberate pace to it. It’s entertaining, but it’s also poetic and it doesn’t feel at all rushed. I can’t imagine how you guys shot it in 24 days.
Dean Zanuck: Yeah, I don’t either. At a time we were actually talking about 20 days. Remember those conversations?
Aaron Schneider: I do. Bill didn’t believe me, but we stayed to it.
Dean Zanuck: It was a 23-day schedule. A freak Atlanta snowstorm in March pushed it to 24 days, but you can get a lot done when you’ve got people that are invested.
Aaron Schneider: Yeah, everybody worked really hard.
Quint: I’ve got to imagine coming from the cinematography background that there was also a lot on your shoulders. You can’t come from that background then have a mediocre looking movie. It’s like the effects guys that go up to direct; they can’t suddenly have shitty effects on their movies. I have to imagine that there must have been some pressure there.
Aaron Schneider: Well, I did a lot of television as a cinematographer, which has a very established pace, five pages a day and a certain amount of resources and as a cinematographer wanting to do something unique in television, which is not easy to do, the job’s always “How do I make it look like a feature film on a television budget and schedule?” So that was the plan, to pull from all of those tricks.
Quint: And it worked. It’s a beautiful movie.
Aaron Schneider: Thank you.
Quint: We need to talk a little bit about how you cast it, because putting Bill in that role is inspired, actually. There’s a lot in that part, you have the snake oil salesman, you have a little conman, you’ve got the show man, you got almost the mentor relationship with Lucas Black’s character, but he also got this kind of a yellow streak. Bill is so talented at both drama and comedy, but I imagine for most people he wouldn’t have been the first go to thought for the character.
Aaron Schneider: I was saying earlier, he was always someone we fantasized…
Dean Zanuck: He was on the list, but then there’s such an elusivity about him… to even find him… “Is he even working any more?”
Aaron Schneider: We were having so much trouble finding money, we thought “Bill Murray, that’s a challenge that we don’t need right now.” He just seems like someone nobody ever gets. He’s just so hard to reach.
Dean Zanuck: After experiencing it though, you are right, it looks like a very inspired decision, but I think it was a stroke of a lot of luck and serendipity and a great script and the fact that Bobby was involved and Sissy [Spacek] was involved and the timing… We could work around his Pebble Beach golf tournament (laughs). But it was a strange process. I think that’s how he likes it. (laughs)
Quint: So, how did Robert Duvall get involved then?
Dean Zanuck: I got the script I think in 2001 or 2002 and he was… You don’t really have to think that hard to see Bobby in that role, so I got in touch with his people and he became a fan of the project, but we were at such a nascent stage of practically making this. We had a good script and a good idea and a lot of people saying, “You can’t make this movie. Nobody is making these kind of movies. There’s no foreign value. These are old people. This is a period. This is Americana.” They acknowledged it was a good script, but Bobby hung in there and I’d have to make up a new story as to why we weren’t getting this made. He would say “Jesus, can’t his dad just give him the money?” (laughs) “What’s this kid doing?”
Then Aaron came onboard and Bobby was just like… that was a no-brainer for him. I don’t think you had any qualms to hear that he was interested and then we both decided Sissy was… They had never worked together and we thought she would be ideal. We kind have had ideas for the Quinn role, but like he said we were just trying to scrape up a few bucks to make this movie. We couldn’t think too far out, but we really lucked out. You feel grateful if you work with one of these guys in your career, but to have that hat trick all in one, it’s nice.
Quint: And they play so well off of each other. There’s an interesting dynamic in the movie, because the movie is kind of about two different love triangles. You Sissy’s character, and Felix’s dead girlfriend still very much competing for his affection. Then on the other side I love the touches of Murray’s character obviously having feelings for Sissy.
Aaron Schneider: [To Zanuck] It’s so cool that he got that! You are the first person who… There was a little bit more of that that we shot that didn’t make it in and I had always hoped that there was enough residue for people to…
Quint: Bill totally. There’s a scene where I think he asks her to dinner. Is that a scene that’s in the movie?
Aaron Schneider: To walk her home.
Quint: To walk her home. She denies him and you can see it in his eyes, there’s this sadness in his performance.
Dean Zanuck: You got it.
Aaron Schneider: “I don’t mean to be nosey, but how do you know Mattie?” How does she know him? He’s sort of protective… a little jealous…
Quint: Then he’s also wanting the hermit money, so he’s not chasing him away either. It’s an interesting dynamic, but I just love that character. I think he brings such a lightness to the movie, but not in a cheap way. He’s a very complex guy and that’s what I like about it.
Aaron Schneider: Yeah, he did a great job riding the line between levity and drama. I’m really proud of his performance.
Dean Zanuck: I think he is, too. I think the fact that he’s… He doesn’t get out much to support these films and like I said he was in Poland with us. He was at Toronto and Sundance on crutches…
Aaron Schneider: He’s really been a trooper with helping us promote the film.
Dean Zanuck: And he wants to do more and I think it’s wonderful and we are going to do everything we can for him.
Quint: So what’s next for you guys? What are you moving onto after you finally birth this baby into theaters?
Dean Zanuck: Yeah, this has been a long labor. You know, I’ve got some studio projects and then I’ve got some indie projects. My next one will probably be this indie project called THE VOICE FROM THE STONE, which Hideo Nakata is going to direct.
Aaron Schneider: Who?
Dean Zanuck: Hideo Nakata. He’s a Japanese director. He directed THE RING, the Japanese version that moved over here. It’s kind of THE OTHERS, REBECCA, and WHAT LIES BENEATH. It’s not this kind of horror and that’s coming together pretty nicely.
Quint: He’s good with atmosphere.
Dean Zanuck: Yeah, so that’s that and you have to put in time. With indies I find you must be single minded in purpose. If you’ve got your hands in too many things, it’ll never happen. You really have to just drive these projects every day to get people to pay attention and you are walking a fine line.
It’s Bill Murray in a way because you are cowboying it, you are tying to hold it together… you don’t really have the money or you don’t really have the cast, but each side has to think you do and in this case it really sowed up very nicely at the end, but it’s pretty rough and tumble out there right now.
Aaron Schneider: Especially with private equity.
Quint: What about you, Aaron? Do you have anything coming up?
Aaron Schneider: Yeah, I’ve been kind of like a reading machine. My reps are kind of helping me search. I have a couple of projects that I’m attached to and out to some casts to see what we can put together, you know all the usual stuff that has to happen before a movie gets made.
Quint: And GET LOW 2, obviously.
Aaron Schneider: Yep, GOT LOWER!
Dean Zanuck: No, GET HIGH, that’s the sequel.
Aaron Schneider: He comes back as a ghost and haunts Bill Murray.
Quint: I think there might be a market for that, actually.
Dean Zanuck: So it’s coming out in July. July 30th and Sony’s got a nice plan for it.
Quint: If they are smart, they are going to push it for award at the end.
Dean Zanuck: They are nurturing it along. If the reaction we have had all over the world is any indication, it’s a crowd pleaser, you know? It’s not too dark. It’s not too light. It’s original.
Quint: You have to be able to entertain at the same time or else people aren’t going to be tuned in for the emotional punch.
Dean Zanuck: They know and the sort of obvious performance push for Bobby and I think Bill…
Quint: And Sissy. She destroys me in the movie. I think she is incredible at the end. His character asks so much of her and just the fact that she’s able to have that moment with him a the end of the movie.
Dean Zanuck: Yeah, that was… When Charlie [Mitchell] wrote that line “I wonder if her hair would be white,” we knew it was going to be a killer scene with Bobby and Sissy right there. The fact that it’s still going on and he’s gotten the story out and Sissy’s having to deal with all of this information she never knew. It was just really touching.
Quint: Alright well I think that’s about all I’ve got.
Aaron Schneider: Thanks for your time.
Check back later tonight and tomorrow for my chats with stars Robert Duvall and a two for one with Bill Murray and Sissy Spacek together! Very cool chats if I don’t say so myself… also personal geek high watermarks to have the opportunity to talk to those legends. See you folks then!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
Follow Me On Twitter
Dean Zanuck: We had to stretch our limited resources in every which way, but we had a real kick-ass crew, a bunch of Academy nominate players who gravitated to this project and made big sacrifices and took deep cuts and we just sort of bull rushed this 24 day schedule.
Aaron Schneider: I do. Bill didn’t believe me, but we stayed to it.
Dean Zanuck: It was a 23-day schedule. A freak Atlanta snowstorm in March pushed it to 24 days, but you can get a lot done when you’ve got people that are invested.
Aaron Schneider: Yeah, everybody worked really hard.
Dean Zanuck: He was on the list, but then there’s such an elusivity about him… to even find him… “Is he even working any more?”
Aaron Schneider: We were having so much trouble finding money, we thought “Bill Murray, that’s a challenge that we don’t need right now.” He just seems like someone nobody ever gets. He’s just so hard to reach.
Dean Zanuck: After experiencing it though, you are right, it looks like a very inspired decision, but I think it was a stroke of a lot of luck and serendipity and a great script and the fact that Bobby was involved and Sissy [Spacek] was involved and the timing… We could work around his Pebble Beach golf tournament (laughs). But it was a strange process. I think that’s how he likes it. (laughs)
Then Aaron came onboard and Bobby was just like… that was a no-brainer for him. I don’t think you had any qualms to hear that he was interested and then we both decided Sissy was… They had never worked together and we thought she would be ideal. We kind have had ideas for the Quinn role, but like he said we were just trying to scrape up a few bucks to make this movie. We couldn’t think too far out, but we really lucked out. You feel grateful if you work with one of these guys in your career, but to have that hat trick all in one, it’s nice.
Aaron Schneider: “I don’t mean to be nosey, but how do you know Mattie?” How does she know him? He’s sort of protective… a little jealous…
Dean Zanuck: I think he is, too. I think the fact that he’s… He doesn’t get out much to support these films and like I said he was in Poland with us. He was at Toronto and Sundance on crutches…
Aaron Schneider: He’s really been a trooper with helping us promote the film.
Dean Zanuck: And he wants to do more and I think it’s wonderful and we are going to do everything we can for him.
Aaron Schneider: Who?
Dean Zanuck: Hideo Nakata. He’s a Japanese director. He directed THE RING, the Japanese version that moved over here. It’s kind of THE OTHERS, REBECCA, and WHAT LIES BENEATH. It’s not this kind of horror and that’s coming together pretty nicely.
It’s Bill Murray in a way because you are cowboying it, you are tying to hold it together… you don’t really have the money or you don’t really have the cast, but each side has to think you do and in this case it really sowed up very nicely at the end, but it’s pretty rough and tumble out there right now.
Aaron Schneider: Especially with private equity.
Dean Zanuck: No, GET HIGH, that’s the sequel.
Aaron Schneider: He comes back as a ghost and haunts Bill Murray.
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
Follow Me On Twitter
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+ Expand All
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say hello to Harry for us. GET LOW looks great by the way.
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I really want to see this but the guys made it seem like it was nothing worthy of going to the cinema for. I'll probably go check it out at the local arthouse if it ever comes around. Just saw The girl who played with fire there last night and this was not playing.
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You are single handedly keeping AICN afloat. If you start your own site I'd leave AICN in a heartbeat and so would a ship full of others. Can't wait for the Bill Murray interview.
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...that came up with this one?
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and clinging on to his childhood to y'know, write stuff. I hope he's paying you enough, Quint.
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I just met the other producer Friday here in Vegas.
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gesundheit!
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3,6,9
Damn she fine
Hopin' she can sock it to me
One mo' time
Get low, get low, get low, get low
To the window, to the wall!
Til the sweat drop down my balls!
Til all these bitches crawl!
Til all skeet skeet, motherfucker...
All skeet skeet, got damn!
Til all skeet skeet, motherfucker...
All skeet skeet, got damn!
That's some serious poetry, man...always thought that song deserved a movie... -
Aug 02, 2010 8:01:22 PM CDT
Del toro is making mountains of madness
by crispin_glovers_acid_flashback
http://www.flicks.co.nz/news/del-toro-scales-
the-mountains-of-madness/ -
Welcome to Last Friday.
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I'll probably end up just going home.
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This film has a great cast and an interesting premise. Also, I'll see almost anything with Bill Murray in it (except for Garfield). It's a crime he hasn't yet to get an Oscar.
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It seems that suddenly there is a rush of "get Low" publicity, of images and talk, excitement. See, I live about 30 miles from the town of principle shooting and this movie caused a lot of excitement around here. The shoot was very short but a rapid event, culminating in the burning of an old ruined house (seen in the trailer) just 15 minutes away. My parents even ran into one of the members of the production crew one Saturday at a yardsale, looking for an old house. (The town of the sale was the town of the big final image of the shoot, the burning house and the escaping shadow of a man). What is most exciting though is knowing these places, there potential. I am very proud of where I come from, troubled as the area is. Still, the hardness of the life inspires a variety of lifestyles, of personalities and peoples, and beneath the hardship there is a genuine beauty to the people here. Crawfordville, GA, where the main street scenes are shot, all the office scenes, it in particular is a unique place. It is the poorest town in the poorest county in the state (or at least was a few years back) but has done something unique: it's held out. It might be part of that idiosyncratic pride particular to the South, but it is not a blind kind. The town has worked up a strange reputation as the place to shoot Southern films. Local Bar-B-Que place, Heavy's, has pictures up on the wall next to the register of some of the shoots. (The roadhouse scenes in "Sweet Home Alabama" were shot in the joint; oddly enough, but indicative of that films very very narrow understanding of the South, they had to dress Heavy's down - Heavy has a stuffed cheetah driving a model-T Ford out under the porch, a metal JAWS coming out of the middle of the lake next to the restuarant, and a a traffic signal that blinks in the night to let you know it's there, as the woods in the crooks and cranies of Georgia get might thick. "Sweet Home Alabama" didn't get the place, but I had a feeling that "Get Low" would, the diligence they had in their searches, their involvement with the community, their curiuosity of the place.) Crawfordville has welcomed several movie crews but has fought other types of development: one of the best grassroots campaigns I've ever seen was fought a few years back to keep a big regional landfill otu of the town (they even made these beautiful handpainted billboard-sized signs that people put up in their yards of Taliaferrero County, pronounced "Taliver", seriously, as a tree with its roots in the ground protesting the landfill, of making the area a dumping ground, despite the financial benefits that such a development would have brought to the area). And dadgum if they didn't win it, keep the landfill out, which probably would have turned into primarily a landfill to sate the flow of Atlanta's excess soley. And shortly thereafter they got the interest of the folks making "Get Low." The town was one of the many little towns that the old Atlanta Highway ran through (Interstate 20 runs straightly parallel to it, and it straightly parallel to the railroad). Atlanta safely 60 or so miles away, the towns along the way kept their old courthouses, their broad streets, their hitching posts nailed into the concrete of the sidewalk. There's an old cotton warehouse with great open inside spaces, tin walls that rustle when the wind blows hard that houses one of the most beautiful murals I've ever seen: on the rusting side of the abandoned building, nestled in a crook of the road that bends by the railroad track there is a painting of the Last Supper that runs the whole length of the end wall of the giant one-story building's oblong structure. It sits there rusting, a painted oasis added in the cuppola behind Jesus' head. One of the most unique pieces of art this region has ever produced (we've got people from here in the Smithsonian, the types of the painters the like of which you saw in "Junebug). An old plantation house on the road between Crawfordville and Athens has a whole tree section of a cedar holding up one end of the two story porch, the other Greek revival column lost of paint but still standing, the brother twin to the surrogate across the porch. It is a beautiful strange place down there. And I am so happy that a film with the ambitions of "Get Low" found it. Herzog talks of how we has to go places to film his movies, that he has to find a genuine place in which to set his films due to his belief in the "voodoo of setting": that a place imbues all that takes place in it, that the trees and events of the land surround the action and are therefore palpable to the screen audience. 'Round here we got it in spades. The avenues beneath the trees have a way of speaking to you. The old cemetaries. All the forgotten things that just don't exactly get forgotten.*I also have to admit how great it is to finally understand the title by hearing Duvall speak the line at the end of the trailer: now that's a recitation. After over a year from first hearing the title, we all around here had wondered about it. (The Lil' John lyric and song title were also my first thoughts, and I had trouble getting a vision of a hip-hop South, the Dirty Dirty, out of my head even if I knew this was a period piece. Duvall breathes life into it, and you understand exactly what he means. Thanks guys for letting me ramble. Really exciting about seeing this picture.
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Aug 02, 2010 11:36:53 PM CDT
Alex Billington blackmailed Robert Duvall so Quint could get thi
by liesandpicturesofalsolies
tsk tsk tsk
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Good work all!
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