Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
There is something about seeing Ryan Reynolds on screen that always makes me feel like whatever I'm about to watch will be bearable on some level. He started out his acting career playing a series of smart alecks. After a series of supporting roles and one-off guest shots in film and television in both this country and his native Canada, Reynolds landed a leading role on the weirdly addictive sitcom "Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place." It wasn't long after that that he landed the title role in VAN WILDER, a part that would in many ways define his career for years to come for good and bad. He also made a name for himself playing against type, with genre works like BLADE: TRINITY, the remake of THE AMITYVILLE HORROR, SMOKIN' ACES, and a nasty turn in last year's criminally underrated ADVENTURELAND. But he remembers where his bread was buttered first, so he never strays too far from comedy, with roles in WAITING…, the wonderfully romantic DEFINITELY, MAYBE, and the biggest hit of his career, THE PROPOSAL, opposite his pal Sandra Bullock. Last year was a busy one for Reynolds, since he also played Wade Wilson/Deadpool in X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE (a role he promises he will return to) and in the little-seen-but-worth-checking-out PAPER MAN, in which he plays, you guessed it, a superhero (sort of).
As an actor, Reynolds has topped himself, however, with his latest role (the only film he has set for release in 2010) in the Sundance hit BURIED, directed by Spain's Rodrigo Cortes. Everything you've heard about the film is true--every frame of BURIED is set inside a crude wooden coffin. And Reynolds' Paul Conroy is the only actor in the film (if you don't count the many voices he hears on his dying cell phone. I'm not someone with claustrophobia, but BURIED still had me squirming and longing to get out of the theater and into some fresh air as soon as it was over.
Reynolds and Cortes both came to Chicago for a post-screening Q&A of BURIED, and we had a chance to talk a couple hours before the movie started about their remarkable achievement. Naturally, we got a little into GREEN LANTERN (which he had just finished shooting when we spoke) and a few other projects Reynolds has lined up in his immediate future. The pair have a great chemistry together and riff off each other in the way comedy teams used to do it. And if you haven't seen the film and plan on doing so, you may want to hold off reading this interview. I don't think there are any spoilers, but they do spoil the illusion that the film works so hard to achieve. Enjoy tall and handsome Ryan Reynolds and equally handsome, but not quite as tall Rodrigo Cortes…
Capone: Hi, how are you?
Rodrigo Cortes: Nice to meet you.
Capone: Hey Ryan, great to meet you.
Ryan Reynolds: Great to meet you, bud.
Capone: Lionsgate asked me my thoughts after I saw BURIED, and without even thinking, I just said “This movie made me so tense I almost vomited.” And then they are like “Okay, is that the one you want to submit?” I’m like “You know what, if you guys use that in your ads, I will have even more respect for you." That's exactly how I felt.
RR: Yeah, exactly. That's good.
Capone: Let’s just start with the script--where did it come from? How did it come to you? How did it come to you?
RR: [to Rodrigo] It started at your house.
RC: At my house? [Laughs] No, I didn’t write it, but it was around Hollywood for a year as part of the black list, a list of great scripts that are impossible to shoot, and thank God, because this way I could read it. When I read it, I saw that it was positively impossible to do, so it attracted my attention from the very first moment. It was not enough, so I saw from that very first moment a big film in there. I really trusted what I felt when I read it, so of course I thought of him, because I saw THE NINES three years ago and I saw an amazing actor able to…
RR: THE NINES is a movie I did that he and my mom saw.
Capone: I saw it on DVD.
RC: If you didn't, you should.
RR: Sure, yeah.
Capone: I’ve been watching you, I’m not embarrassed to say, since "Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place."
RR: Thank you.
RC: Yeah and I saw someone with a perfect sense of timing. He’s a performer and I needed that, because when you are doing a movie with just three elements, you need a high control of nuance, so you need Mozart here, and I sent him the script. It was a long shot, and I knew he was going to say “No,” but everything in this movie has been against common sense. So from here, he can’t go on…
Capone: So you said “No” and then?
[Everyone Laughs]
RR: That’s not true, I didn't say "No." I said “Fuck no.”
[Everyone Laughs]
RR: I had read the script and the script was an amazing novel. That’s what it was to me, just a gripping story that was beautifully composed. It was nuanced. It was everything you would want in a novel, but as a script I thought “This is so impossible to shoot that you just have to have complete and utter faith in your director, and I don’t know this guy.”
Capone: There’s a few people that don’t know Rodrigo.
RR: But believe me, they will. They sure will. So I got what I thought was another script in the mail, and that was actually only slightly longer than the script, but that was Rodrigo’s letter to me to describe exactly how he would shoot this movie and why. In no uncertain terms, it explained first and foremost what I was most worried about, which was that three days into shooting, some asshole was going to show up on set and was going to say, “I paid for this thing and I want you guys to shoot some flashbacks. I want you guys to shoot something above ground. I want to see the people you are talking to. This isn’t working, your little film experiment down here. We are going to go do something else.” He said that would never ever happen while he has a beating heart, and then I just found this letter… I was taken with it, and he flew over. He was nice enough to fly all the way from Spain, and we had lunch and 40 minutes later we were literally making out.
Capone: So was that one of the reasons you wanted to shoot it in Spain? To keep the assholes away? Or did you have crew here that you wanted to use?
RC: Well, we have a certain kind of sand that you cannot find anywhere else.
Capone: It did look like Spanish sand leaking into the coffin, yeah.
RR: Sand made of pure aggravation. I wondered why we couldn’t just shoot the fucking thing in my living room. I was like “Really? Do we have to go… Come on…”
Capone: Were there certain rules that you set down--other than no flashbacks and everything has to be in those walls?
RR: Just no rehearsal for me, that was the only rule.
RC: That was his rule.
Capone: I did read that you wanted to and you said “No.”
RR: It wasn’t even that, I just thought “I’m just going to get in my own way if I start rehearsing this. I’m just going to start thinking, ‘Oh we did that great thing with the thing’ and now let's repeat it.” I just didn’t want any of that to happen, so I figured we’ll just go for it, and I will try to give you everything I got.
RC: Yeah and I thought, “Okay, this is against common sense again, so let’s do it.” So it made sense that he didn’t want to rehearse, so we simply decided toæ Hey, I truly trust him and I said, “Okay, you don’t want to rehearse? You have reasons, and I can see that in your eyes, so let's jump together from this 18th floor.” My rule was “Never leave the box.” That was my rule. “Never leave the box!”
Capone: I did notice, because about halfway through I started to pay attention to where the camera was, and you don’t repeat a lot of angles, you are getting at him from every direction. Was that something else you wanted to do? Like we don’t have two or three standard locations.
RR: I’ve got to say something about that, because that was the thing that I was most impressed by, particularly in his letter and how I felt that sense of inspiration in that letter, and it was a feat of engineering more that even directing. It felt like a feat of architecture. This was something that I had never been privy to before, so I just remember shooting it and seeing seven different coffins and wondering why the hell we needed seven different coffins, and I realized that that question would be answered by someone who is way above my pay grade.
Capone: Why did you need seven different coffins?
RC: Because we needed some impossible shots. We needed different coffins so we could achieve certain impossible shots. For instance, if we wanted to do a circle around the actor--which is of course impossible inside a box--we decided to design and build a box with collapsible walls we could take out and place while the camera is going in this circle, so everything you see is there, but before you realize you are in the other angle you see the right wall behind the actor, but you don’t know how it happened, and it’s happening in real time. There was another one that was maybe longer than five meters long--I’m sorry, I don’t know the translation in feet. Or even we could do very violent handheld shots or crane shots inside the box. One of the rules was “Okay, at the beginning you can think, if I choose randomly a picture from minute two and another one from minute 52, they are going to be more or less the same, because you have guy in a box, how different can it be?” I wanted every picture to be totally totally different. I wanted the movie to reinvent itself every eight to ten minutes, so it evolved in narrative and stylistic terms. But it shouldn’t be fireworks, but I still have ways of making the audience feel what I want them to feel, so I used every tool. Instead of limiting me because of the location, I didn’t think about the location; I just thought on the story itself and the emotions I wanted the audience to feel as if it happened in a giant planet in a galaxy or in New York City.
Capone: Well there are fireworks. When you lose your shit, those are the fireworks.
RR: The action scene in the coffin.
Capone: Speaking of which, I didn’t want to ask about that scene where you turn your body completely around. I haven’t been telling anyone about it, but that’s the thing that I want to tell people about the most. Was that as painful as it looked?
RR: The only time I really did it was that time, and I had no idea if I could do it again, and we didn’t rehearse it, so I had no idea. But I had heard that our DP who is a tall guy, had accomplished this difficult feat in preproduction, so that’s all I knew, so I knew someone had done it.
RC: We did it, but he’s taller.
RR: Yeah, so I just went for it. I think the hardest part is that, and for every scene in this movie, is that I’m lighting myself, so I’m doing all of these things and trying to think of all of these things and another problem I encountered that I was wasn’t prepared fro was that I kept passing out, because I was hyperventilating so much, and when you are hyperventilating and you are faking it, you actually just get way too much oxygen to your brain and sort of drift away. So all of these things were happening while I’m trying to turn myself around in the box and keep light on myself so he can see and burn my… The shot is so long that the Zippo is just red-hot, and I’m trying to not drop it and just hold onto it despite the smell of burning flesh.
Capone: So you didn't have a stunt Zippo that you can hold onto longer?
RR: [to Rodrigo] There are stunt Zippo's? [laughs] But yeah, it was tough. It was not unlike childbirth. I felt like I was crowning the whole time and then just popped out of there. It was a really intense experience, but when I got through it, it was hard to not jump for joy. I had to stay in the scene and keep going, but I couldn’t believe it.
Capone: After how many days did you really start to feel it?
RR: It was a short shoot and we hit the ground running. The first day I lost my voice, so everyday subsequently I had to wake up and scream into a towel until my voice would go again, then I would sound the same, but yeah it did sort of deteriorate pretty quickly.
[Everyone Laughs]
RR: I lost a lot of weight. I was kind of a wreck.
Capone: Did you lose any sleep?
RR: Oh, there was no sleep. I’m never a fan of actors romanticizing their process, it’s always just arrogance masquerading as an anecdote, but it was tough. I’ve got to say that I took it home with me every night, and sleep was actually the biggest enemy for me, because I didn’t sleep one night that whole movie. I think I probably got about eight hours of sleep throughout the whole film and that was through the use of any kind of over-the-counter sleep aide I could find, but it was really tough. It was tough to just come home and really be normal. I would actually pace around the apartment waiting for the sun to come up, so we could go back, and I could cross another day of this hellish journey off the list.
Capone: The film popped up on everyone’s radar at Sundance.
RR: It actually fit fine into my schedule. I didn’t have anything going on at the time. I knew I was going to be doing GREEN LANTERN, and it was just before I had to really start prepping that, so as soon as I finished this I went into five months of gymnastics and all of these other weird things to get ready for the movie, but it fit perfectly but then my recollection of the movie is tough, because it just feels like a big fever dream. Looking back, I’m like “What happened?”
Capone: Are there any claustrophobic films that you are a big fans of? I think this is pretty much as tight as you could possibly go. I wrote down a list other movies, but I look at the titles, and I say, "No, these had bigger tight spaces or went outside the tight space."
RR: Do you know some films that were quite claustrophobic?
Capone: Yeah, more recently you have THE DESCENT or even this one coming out on Friday, DEVIL, which is all in an elevator. Or you get like DAS BOOT or the film called LEBANON that was shot entirely inside a very small tank.
RC: You cannot go further, actually, than we did.
RR: The sequel is going to be arthroscopic. They are going to get that camera in me.
RC: That's right, that sounds great. You will direct it this time. But when you start to analyze all of these references, like LIFEBOAT from Hitchcock or PHONE BOOTH or you name it, well you feel really alone, because you have no reference. Even when you study LIFEBOAT, you see that there are nine actors, so can you be with these two over here or these two over here. You can have reaction shots, the sky changes, the sea changes, the light changes, you can be here, there, very far, very close. With that film, you think, “Hitch, you did it the easy way. That way everybody can do.”
[Everyone Laughs]
RR: Oh man…
RC: So you feel so alone, because those minimalistic movies that you have marveled at since you were a child, and for good reason…
RR: I think you just called Hitchcock lazy. I just want you to know that you did that.
RC: Hey, everybody can do it that way. Here, you have actor and you have the limit three inches from his nose. Those walls are not transparent, I can tell you, so you are literally inside a box. It’s not that he’s inside a box, but the camera is inside the box too. You don’t have many possibilities there. It’s not a party. It’s not the perfect weekend, but that was exactly what attracted me, the possibility of doing something literally impossible.
Capone: Other directors have had elements of their films set in coffins. Tarantino did it in KILL BILL, and THE VANISHING is the first one I remember doing it in a nerve-wracking manner.
RC: And Roger Corman films, and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents…", there’s an episode where the end of it happens in the coffin for two minutes.
Capone: I did not know when I sat down to watch it that it was taking place in Iraq, and there are certainly people who have drawn the parallels between being trapped in the sand literally and figuratively. Was there any of that going on in your head?
RR: For me, this was never a polemic on the war or any of that stuff, you actually described it best. I will actually defer to you.
RC: Above all, this is a high-tension thriller, but at the same time these small-premise stories have a very powerful allegory and metaphoric level, so when you read a Richard Matheson story like DUEL, for instance, you have a truck, you have a car, you have nothing else, but it resounds inside of you. It’s not on the nose, but you are seeing a lot of things and you are feeling a lot of thing. So here you have a guy alone fighting what? Fighting the real world, fighting bureaucracy. It can happen here, there, with different ideologies and governments. I know I said it wrong, but…
RR: You did actually get that one right; everything else has been wrong.
RC: Perfect, but there’s something really powerful that you can feel so empathetic about, because you are inside his head, inside his heart, and you have tried to change your cell phone company and you have spent 40 minutes just pressing “1” or pressing "2" because you cannot speak with a human being.
Capone: The allegory is bad customer service.
RC: Right. And a guy man thousands of miles away from him, he can’t make a decision just looking at his Excel program and pressing a key not concerned with the real responsibilities of that.
RR: And “How can we push this problem to somebody else and make it somebody else’s problem,” which is something that Paul goes through as well.
RC: You want one person committed with you.
RR: Yeah and I also love the idea that it explores this notion of communication and that we are all connected some how and that this is not serving this guy at all, in fact the thing that’s kill Paul Conroy isn’t the terrorists, it isn’t a coffin, it isn’t a limited air supply, it’s bureaucracy that’s literally killing this guy. I think that’s what twists the screws in us when we watch it, because it’s something that you think is kind of preventable, and we all have that gut reaction when we are watching the character, we think “What would I do?” “What would I do if I was in that position?”
The human condition is such that we empathize and you have to empathize with Paul, and I think my favorite thing about the character and that Rodrigo allowed us to put in after the fact a little bit, was the fact that Paul is not necessarily the nicest guy in the world, because he's faulty, he makes mistakes, he fucks up, and because of that, it draws you in. you think “He’s real.” He’s not putting Mother Teresa in there, you are putting this guy who you might want to punch out some day at a bar, but let’s get him up to the surface, so we can have that opportunity, you know, because we want to see him live.
Capone: When you were walking through the script, did you kind of punch holes in the script looking for logic flaws and ask yourself, “Is that what a person would do?”
RR: Not really.
Capone: Anyone you thought Paul might call that he didn’t?
RR: We had a little bit of that. It was usually to do with an emotion more so than anything. I think there’s one piece in the script where I recount again the tank fighting. I asked Rodrigo if we could take it out and I thought he was just going to say “Absolutely not.” He just grabbed his pen and put a big cross in the middle of my script, and he just cut it out like that. But for anything, it was just that you want a truthful moment. There’s no right or wrong. Like who he calls, to me, is almost inconsequential. There’s no right or wrong for any of that stuff, it’s really just “Do I believe that?” “Is it honest?” That’s all I cared about.
Capone: Real quick before they shut me down here, where are you with GREEN LANTERN? Are you done shooting?
RR: Yeah, yeah I’m finished shooting it now. We just finished a month ago.
Capone: I was at Comic Con, and you were there and you were still shooting. I know you’ve lined up a few things. You have R.I.P.D., I just read, and then I don’t know if DEADPOOL is still in your future, and the comedy with Bradley Cooper that doesn’t have a title yet that I just started reading about. What is the progression for you?
RR: A lot of those movies are… With the Internet and the way it is, things became real before they are real at all, but actually all of those movies are in development. Some of them don’t even have a script, so it’s just something I’m just really interested in and if it comes out the right way for not just me, but the other parties involved, great. The next movie I’m doing is called THE CHANGE-UP, and the one after that I’m definitely doing is called SAFE HOUSE. Then after that I’m not really sure. But GREEN LANTERN is in the can, and they are all hammering away on it to get it out. It’s funny how there’s never enough time. Even though we have nine months of post, there’s just never enough time.
Capone: You're going to be in Austin soon, right?
RR: Yep, for Fantastic Fest.
Capone: I’ll probably see you there.
RR: I’m really looking forward to it. I read the site all of the time, so I know exactly who you are.
Capone: Thanks. It’s going to be a good crowd tonight. They are just going to eat it up.
RC: We will try to bury them all.
[Everyone Laughs]
Capone: All right, well we will see you in a few hours then. Thanks.
RR: Yep. See you then.
-- Capone
capone@aintitcool.com
Follow Me On Twitter
