Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a really interesting chat recently conducted with Mr. Mark Romanek about his film NEVER LET ME GO, a science fiction flick you’d never guess is a science fiction film just by looking at it. Our three leads are clones, raised in a private boarding school essentially as vessels for spare parts as needed. The main focus is a love triangle between Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield, not the whiz bang of most science fiction. It’s a great character piece with some amazing performances, the kind of film that marks the beginning of the awards season and the riskier, less homogenized films. Romanek was very open about his process and towards the end of the interview he goes in-depth on just what went down with The Wolfman that forced him to leave the project. Hope you guys enjoy the chat!
Mark Romanek: Hi, nice to meet you.
Quint: Nice to meet you. I’m Eric, “Quint” on Ain’t It Cool.
Mark Romanek: Oh, Quint? Okay, I never knew your real name. Great. You’re famous.
Quint: No, you’re famous. I’m just a nerd that likes movies. Congratulations on the movie, I really fell for it.
Mark Romanek: I’m so glad.
Quint: It’s great. The first thing that struck me is I saw the movie and I saw the young version of Carey Mulligan’s character and I was immediately like “How the fuck did he clone Carey Mulligan?” So I think the most important question is if you have the Carey Mulligan cloning capabilities, can you make me one?
Mark Romanek: Make you a clone! (Laughs) I think I would have to get permission.
Quint: I don’t want to be creepy about it. A 25 year old version would be ideal.
Mark Romanek: Oh okay, well that’s still a little creepy, but I’ll ask her. She’s probably going to just want one of her around. (laughs) Except when she has to do all of the press junkets, maybe that would be helpful.
Quint: Seriously, I met her briefly last year and she’s a sweetheart and she’s so good onscreen. I loved her in An Education…
Mark Romanek: So did we. We loved her so much we cast her in the film.
Quint: What a great coup for you, because even before all of the Oscar buzz, because I know she must have been in demand even before she was nominated…
Mark Romanek: We got her pretty fast because we were having trouble finding a perfect Kathy and Peter Rice who was running Searchlight at the time saw AN EDUCATION at Sundance and midway through the movie he texted me and said “Hire the genius Mulligan!” He knew this was a big pressing thing. We were actually going to have to shut down the film if we couldn’t find the right actress because we had a very fixed start date because we needed to shoot all of the childrens’ stuff during half term in London, so school would be out and we would have access to these kids we needed. So, we were bumping up against the start date, so “hire the genius Mulligan.” I asked him, I said “Why was it such a terse email?” He said, “Because I was still in the movie.” He hadn’t even gotten to the end of the film and he went “This is her.”
Quint: And Christ, the end of that movie is where she pulls out all of the stops.
Mark Romanek: Right, and he was already blown away.
Quint: That’s awesome.
Mark Romanek: We knew of her, but there were two reasons why we didn’t audition her in advance of that. One is she was in New York doing a play and she just wasn’t available to audition and also before AN EDUCATION, we didn’t think we could get the movie financed with her, because nobody… She wasn’t “finance bankable.” Quote unquote.
Quint: Yeah, that’s always a weird game isn’t it? Where names turn into figures and those figures are what dictate whether the movie gets made or not.
Mark Romanek: On that point, that’s what’s so great about Searchlight, that they didn’t need a “bankable star,” they needed the right actress. That’s their mantra is “Cast the person that’s going to be great” and that’s really rare.
Quint: Yeah, and you’d think more affixed structures like that, even the studios or sub-divisions of studios, you would think that they would be more into the business of creating a star. Carey obviously has star potential and I think if she’s not already there, she’s well on her way.
Mark Romanek: Yeah, I think she’s pretty much there.
Quint: So many people now, they just want the top five actors, the top five actress, and if you can’t get those, then…
Mark Romanek: They’re just looking for insurance.
Quint: To cover their ass.
Mark Romanek: There’s no such thing… I mean sometimes there is I guess.
Quint: Can you talk a little bit about finding the rest of the cast? The movie lives or dies based on your three leads. If those three leads don’t work, then all of the effort and time you put into the gorgeous look of the film or the pacing. If you can’t get the right chemistry, even the great screenplay and everything that’s already there will just be kind of rendered okay.
Mark Romanek: Yeah and then you’ve got to do the kids, too. We had to do it twice. We not only had to do it twice, we had to do it twice and they had to look tremendously like these unbelievably unique older actors. We weren’t going to cast anyone until we cast Kathy. When we got Carey for Kathy, we got a phone call from Keira Knightley’s agent calling us saying, “Have you cast Ruth yet?” We said “No, why?” She said, “Well, because Keira would be very interested in playing that role now that Carey has been cast, because she’s so keen to work with Carey.” We were like “Oh my God…” That’s a good phone call.
Quint: Ruth is a fascinating character, but the movie is obviously not told from her perspective, you know what I mean? She’s not the lead I would expect Knightley to want a lead role.
Mark Romanek: No, but it’s got a really good… Her character’s arc as they say is pretty complete, to make a bad pun, but I think she relished the notion of playing an antagonist and playing something that was by nature going to be have to be deglamorized. And working with Carey. She wanted to work with Carey. So then we had those two and I always wanted to cast Andrew (Garfield), because I had seen BOY A and his performance in that film is as astonishing as Carey’s was in AN EDUCATION, it just wasn’t as widely seen. When I saw BOY A it was like the first time I saw Pacino or something. I think the first time I saw Pacino was maybe like SERPICO or something and I went “Holy crap, that guy is a fucking movie star.” I felt that way about Andrew. We met a lot of really great young actors, but he was at the front of my mind like “Until someone comes along that’s better than Andrew, Andrew’s got the role.” And then he did these great auditions. A lot of auditions are like “That’s pretty good. I could do it. I could see him in that.” And then there’s like “Oh my God, that’s the guy.” Those are the great auditions.
Quint: Again, that’s another really difficult part because he has to be a little slow, a lot child-like in the role, but he can’t be ridiculous. You have to see why Carey loves him. You have to see why he’s in the middle of this love triangle between two beautiful women.
Mark Romanek: That’s exactly right. There has to be something that a perceptive young woman would say, “That’s the interesting boy. That’s the sensitive boy.” He has to have a charisma, but kind of an oblique low-key charisma, so yeah he was perfect.
Quint: What’s the saying is “never work with children or animals.” How did you go about getting such great performances out of the kids? The young cast is incredible in the movie.
Mark Romanek: You know what? I didn’t get great performances out of anybody. I cast gifted people who were professional and if I was in any way helpful to them it was in organizing a rehearsal process that was fruitful and creating a lot of space and freedom in the shooting process and maybe immersing them in a world that felt complete so they had something to work with there. There’s very little direction on the set, like notes or adjustments, because we were all on the same page from a two week rehearsal process. A lot of the rehearsal the emphasis wasn’t on the meaning of the scenes or your character. We talked around that a little bit, but it was mostly them spending time with each other, so they formed a quick bond that you would might find in a boarding school sort of circumstance. We also did some acting exercises where the older actors played all of the scenes from the first act and I had the younger actors observe this, so it was kind of like I killed two birds in that the older actors developed a little sense memory of having played those scenes and the younger actors got to observe what an older, more experienced, actor might do with those scenes. Then I had to mix and match, like Carey played a scene with young Charlie, or Kiera play a scene with young Izzy [Meikle-Small] who plays Kathy as a child. They also went to the location and rehearsed scenes and they also just played. They played hide and go seek and Frisbee and Sardines and stuff on the location, so again they had a sense memory of being at Hailsham. Those kinds of things.
Quint: That’s really smart, actually. I think that’s really cool.
Mark Romanek: Well it’s fun, too. So yeah, there was nobody that benefited from any brilliant bit of direction on the set from me, they are all too good. It’s true though, I’m not being falsely humble.
Quint: Whatever you did worked, so keep doing it.
Mark Romanek: Well, you cast great people that are going to do their homework and are really good. Then you try to create a context where they can shine and you stay out of their way. It’s pretty intense and we had a lot of fun making the movie, because we all felt lucky to be doing it, but you know it was intense stuff and you just want to let them concentrate really.
Quint: One of my favorite aspects of the movie is the fact that it’s a science fiction movie, but you could never tell. You approach it in the same way you would approach any story from that time period.
Mark Romanek: Yeah, it’s the context that’s Sci-Fi, but it’s not made manifest very much on the screen.
Quint: Yeah and that’s what I think gives the movie such an interesting identity and makes it different from everything that’s come before. So, what are you knocking around now? What are you going to move onto next? Do you know?
Mark Romanek: I’m not sure; there are quite a few things that are kind of good. I wrote a screenplay of my own, not that that’s good, but I mean I wrote a screenplay of my own that I’m trying to do and I have some really great interest from some amazing actors, so I have to kind of see if we can work out that schedule and maybe try to do it in winter, but then there are a ton of other things. Some of them I can’t talk about because I’m not officially attached, but I’ve made these two very controlled bleak movies, I think it would be fun to do something with a totally different energy. When I did my videos, I tried to make them be all over the place and I’m anxious for my movie work to be a little more all over the place now.
Quint: Not to delve into what you are doing, but is there something on the broader scope that you would like to try your hand at? Something crazy like a superhero movie?
Mark Romanek: You know, I’m not so into those to be honest. I don’t mind going to watch them, but it’s not my first… I don’t have a deep affinity for those stories, I don’t know why. I never read a lot of comic books as a kid. I was really into movies and I was into art films when I was a kid, really. I was never like a B movie guy. I liked some of that stuff, but I was always into Fellini and Bergman and Welles and Hitchcock and Herzog and Ashby and Kubrick. I was into the A guys. And not that I can’t enjoy schlockier stuff or kind of low-brow stuff… Not to sound like a snob, it’s just what I got excited by. So I was never a comic book kid. I think I read Archie when I was a little kid.
Quint: Yeah, that barely counts. (Laughs)
Mark Romanek: I never was reading the guys in capes, I was reading like CASPER and ARCHIE. (Laughs) But I’d like to do a film on a bigger, more ambitious scale. I tried to do something with THE WOLFMAN, but that was just a big mistake for me. (laughs)
Quint: I would have loved to of seen what you did with that. The result…
Mark Romanek: It was never going to happen.
Quint: The problem with the movie that we ended up with is that Joe Johnston didn’t really have much time to create his own identity and so it was kind of like this hodgepodge of what you had already set up and his own take on it. It makes this movie that’s trying to be two or three different things.
Mark Romanek: It was a producer driven project. It was not a director driven project. I tried to make it be a director driven project or have it be a director driven project, but it was never going to be that. I should say an actor-director driven project. Benicio and I wanted to do a certain kind of film and when we ran that up the flagpole nobody saluted. So, it was best to bow out because they knew what they wanted and it was better for them to have a filmmaker that was going to be more collaborative, I guess, toward that end. I saw it in the film. Some of the design remained and some of the locations I picked, but that’s about it, though.
Quint: Yeah?
Mark Romanek: Some of the cast. Some of it they recast when I left. Some of them they kept.
Quint: I’m thinking specifically in your vision you wanted a lot more practical stuff, that’s why you brought on Rick Baker, right?
Mark Romanek: Well, I wanted it to be simpler, more practical and more character-driven, more emotional, more archetypal and mythic and what they really wanted… And by the way, I want to make it really clear actually and this is a good place to do it, because I don’t talk about it that much, I don’t have any bitterness attached to it. I was actually supported fairly well, there were just a lot of problems about… There was the strike, for starters, which got it off on a really bad foot and then the film was dramatically under-budgeted. People say “Oh, he couldn’t figure how to make a movie for a hundred million dollars,” well you know what? If you are 30 or 40 or 45 million dollars shy of what you need that’s on the page and there’s a strike and you can’t change anything (in the script), what the fuck do you do? That’s a problem. It’s very easy for people that actually don’t make films to say “Oh, he couldn’t figure it out for a hundred million dollars.” You know, when we are three weeks away from shooting, we can’t change the script, and it’s clear that we are 30 or 40 million dollars light, what do you do? On top of that, no one could agree on what the tone of the film should be and no one wanted to unanimously support Benny and my’s version of it and Tony Hopkins’ (version), too. And so it seemed better to let them find a filmmaker that was more suited to their goals. And they are good guys, they are nice guys. I don’t think they are like evil bad guys, they just wanted to make a certain kind of film. That’s what they believed in and that’s really true. I would work with any of those guys again, it just didn’t work out. Sometimes you just can’t get on the same page, which is fine. I have no regrets about it. It was a very traumatic decision to leave that film because I worked on it for almost a year, but I don’t regret leaving because it was the right decision, but it was a hard decision.
Quint: At that point you had only had one feature under your belt, right?
Mark Romanek: Yeah.
Quint: So much of the business is a power play, the ability to have leverage and the ability to be bankable. Obviously people are flipping for this movie, NEVER LET ME GO… I guess the question is when do you think you are going to have enough built up to be able to…
Mark Romanek: I don’t know. I’ll know when I do if I’m lucky enough to get there, but I don’t want to make a big ambitious film again until I have the leverage that a Chris Nolan has or a Fincher has or someone, because there’s no pleasant outcome unless it’s that sort of circumstance.
Quint: Yeah, and you are powerless to do something about it, but it would have been on you if you had kept with WOLFMAN and it just hadn’t worked and your vision wasn’t on screen, people would have laid the blame on you.
Mark Romanek: I’m the one that’s going to get blamed or praised and so directors usually feel like “Well, then I should be the one making the salient decisions about what it’s going to be.” The only thing a director wants is to be supported. They want his idea of the movie to be believed in and then they want people there to support and facilitate them to do the job they were hired to do. It’s like what an actor probably wants from a director, they just want to be made to feel confident, to do their most daring work, and to be supported where they need it and left alone when they need it. That’s all a director wants from a producer, but when there’s that much money involved there’s a lot of fear and I didn’t feel like my idea of it was believed in at the end of the day.
Quint: Cool, well thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me, man, it’s a pleasure to finally see you face to face.
Mark Romanek: Sure, but I don’t want to end on such a kind of negative thing about like “THE WOLFMAN didn’t work out.” That’s a bleak ending. Can we come up with a better and happier ending? (laughs)
Quint: (laughs) A “happier ending.” Look, now you’ve got the studio notes coming in. “The ending’s a little bit too dour.”
Mark Romanek: It’s up to you. You’re right, that’s an irony.
Quint: No, no… We were on the track to talk about the bigger scope movie that you were more interested in doing.
Mark Romanek: Oh yeah, I don’t know what that would be.
Quint: Something that’s different from what you were.
Mark Romanek: There’s a project out there I love called CHILD 44 which isn’t maybe quite on the scale of like a big superhero movie, but it’s a brilliant conception of… There’s a great script too by Richard Price. It’s about a serial killer in Stalinist Russia. Everyone is paranoid and everyone is corrupt and the state doesn’t even want to acknowledge that these things go on and it’s a brilliant context for the procedural and the world could be so moody and interesting.
Quint: It sounds like you could tap a little bit into like THE THIRD MAN type feel.
Mark Romanek: Yeah, exactly. That’s a bigger scale project that I find really interesting.
Quint: That doesn’t sound much lighter, though…
[Both Laugh]
Mark Romanek: Yeah, it isn’t. (laughs) It’s not very light, but it could be cool.
Quint: It sounds really neat.
Mark Romanek: Anyway, I don’t mean to direct your interview. (Laughs)
Quint: That’s totally fine.
Mark Romanek: What have you seen at the festival that you have loved?
Quint: Have you seen RUBBER, yet?
Mark Romanek: RUBBER? I haven’t even heard of it.
Quint: It’s a French director who is actually a musician, Mr. Oizo. He’s a musician, but he directed this feature about a killer tire and you think, “What’s that going to be?” On the surface it’s about a killer tire, but the whole broad message of the movie is that things just happen for no reason. Everything happens in life. I think you might like it, because the opening of the movie is just this car driving through the desert hitting these chairs that are just randomly placed and hitting them and then out of the trunk comes a sheriff. He pops open the trunk for whatever reason, he gets out and grabs a glass of milk or something from the driver, walks up to the camera and starts addressing the audience.
Mark Romanek: Fuck, that sounds cool.
Quint: It’s awesome and he starts listing off things like “Why did the aliens come to our planet in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS? No reason.” No reason essentially dominates everything in life. It’s essentially what chance is, the odd chance that something will happen and we find out he’s addressing this group of people behind a red velvet rope, standing in the middle of the desert all by themselves behind a rope and they turn around and put binoculars to their faces and they become the Greek chorus watching this movie about this abandoned tire that gains sentient life and starts rolling around and discovers it can kill people.
Mark Romanek: Is it great?
Quint: It’s awesome. It’s fantastic.
Mark Romanek: Because that could be horrendously terrible or amazing.
Quint: It absolutely could not work at all and it also could be the kind of movie where you go “Oh funny it’s a killer tire that can psychokinetically blow peoples’ heads up or whatever. It’s like that could be a fun short, but because of that Greek Chorus thing, there’s this subplot about the people actually observing this movie that’s going on and commenting on it. It’s great.
Mark Romanek: Interesting. You’ve got to love stuff that just isn’t connected to any trend.
Quint: Oh, it’s totally its own thing man. I’ve never seen anything like it.
Mark Romanek: Those are the best things. That sounds amazing. It going to have a distributor here?
Quint: It’s getting so much buzz. I don’t know if anyone has picked it up yet, but I’m sure it will be.
Mark Romanek: Is there a print here, still in Austin?
Quint: Yeah.
Mark Romanek: I wonder if I could see it. Maybe Harry could hook it up or you could hook it up. Wow, that sounds cool. It’s in French? It’s a French film or is it a French guy?
Quint: It’s a French director, but I think it’s all in English.
Mark Romanek: Wow, that sounds cool.
Quint: There is a French lady. The tire falls in love with the French lady that’s driving cross country, but it works.
Mark Romanek: God, that sounds genius.
Quint: I think you would really dig it. It’s one of my favorite movies I’ve seen this year. But yeah we are getting the signal to wrap it up.
Mark Romanek: Good to finally meet you. I’m glad you liked the film.
I like this interview very much and I hope you guys did, too. Keep an eye out! Monday brings another epic chat with a legendary film actor and my next contribution to the AICN Legends column! Stay tuned! -Quint quint@aintitcool.com Follow Me On Twitter
