Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
When I first met Elizabeth Banks a few years back, behind the main stage at San Diego Comic-Con after she sat on a panel for Kevin Smith's ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO, she did two things I'll never forget. She introduced me to her co-star Traci Lords, and she gave me permission to called her "Banks," which is what everyone called her during the panel. Beyond that, I recall her being one of the nicest people I'd talked to up to that point in my interviewing history, and I'd always looked forward to speaking with her again for longer than 10 minutes. Patience has paid off.
I've always thought that Banks was not only a ridiculously beautiful woman but one of the funniest and most diverse in film and on TV. On top of that, she's got a great laugh, and she's given a steady string of solid performances in recent years that has made her one of the most sought after actresses working today. I distinctly remember noticing her for the first time in WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER (her on-screen debut), and she's gone on to star in nearly all of the films from the men and women who made MTV's "The State," including THE BAXTER and ROLE MODELS. She's played Betty Brant in all three SPIDER-MAN movies, Jeff Bridges' wife in SEABISCUIT, and the insatiable Beth in THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN. The woman stole my heart in the romantic-comedy SLITHER (that's a joke, by the way, but Banks is awesome in this film), looked great in an elf costume in FRED CLAUS, made Ryan Reynolds one lucky S.O.B. as one of his love interests in DEFINITELY, MAYBE, and gave Laura Bush a heart and depth I'm not sure he actually possesses in Oliver Stone's W.
And Banks seems to dig TV as well, having made quite a splash as a semi-regular on both "Scrubs" and currently on "30 Rock" as Alec Baldwin's conservative-broadcast-journalist-romantic-interest Avery Jessup. And her one-off appearance on "Modern Family" last season was fantastic (she's hoping for a return visit soon). Her latest film is something of a change of pace for Banks. She plays Laura Brennan, Russell Crowe's wife who may or my not be wrongfully incarcerated, in the new Paul Haggis film THE NEXT THREE DAYS. Now I know what you're thinking: Elizabeth Banks is a women-in-prison movie? Aw yeah! Unfortunately Haggis & Co. didn't go that route. Instead, this is a combination high-drama/prison-breakout film, in which Crowe plots to spring his wife when the judicial system fails him. What Crowe and Banks achieve quite convincingly is the portrait of a crumbling marriage in the face of her life sentence, and Banks' character may be deliberately trying to push her husband away so that he can get on with his life, but Crowe has other plans. Please enjoy my talk with Elizabeth Banks, which includes a few tidbits about what's coming up for her on "30 Rock" and a few of her upcoming film projects, including MY IDIOT BROTHER, MAN ON A LEDGE, and her directing debut.
Elizabeth Banks: What’s up, Steve?
Capone: Hi, how are you?
EB: I’m great. How are you doing? We've talked before, right?
Capone: Right. A couple years ago at Comic-Con a couple of years ago, right after the ZACK AND MIRI panel. We were backstage.
EB: Sure. I remember that.
Capone: I checked the interview, and you did give me permission to call you “Banks” at the time.
EB: You’re still welcome to, it’s fine.
Capone: Deal. So, I didn't really know that much about THE NEXT THREE DAYS walking into it. The first part of the film is more of this serious family drama, with an investigative story thing thrown in, but it’s all kind of in the realm of believability, and then suddenly it becomes THE GREAT ESCAPE.
EB: Or THE FUGITIVE.
Capone: Right, so what did you think of the split-personality nature of the story?
EB: You know, for me I feel like the whole thrust of the movie, the whole journey of the movie, would not have been as satisfying if we didn’t focus on the character in the first two acts. You are going on a ride with this couple, and we wanted to make the ride as thrilling as possible. We definitely wanted there to be a FUGITIVE action element to the second and third acts of the movie, but you are not going to buy that this guy is going to go to such great lengths unless you have spent some time with this couple and with him as a human being and really get invested in him. So to me, that was sort of the brilliance of the whole piece, that [writer-director] Paul [Haggis] was going to make a character study and then wrap it up in an action movie.
Capone: Those scenes in the prison with you and Russell Crowe sort of get increasingly more painful to watch. You can literally see the marriage falling apart with each new scene. Tell me about shooting those scenes, and did you shoot those particular scenes in order?
EB: We did actually for the most part shoot them in order, which is of course very helpful. We also shot them at the actual Allegany County Jail, where my character is incarcerated, so that sense of place was so with us and so helpful to me in terms of getting in character. That journey for me was all about what was going on with this woman behind bars and how isolated this couple was becoming from each other and also the isolation from her son and this sense of feeling like at some point she was going to have to say to this man, “You need to go find another woman to mother our child. For you and for the kid.”
I think the reason those scenes get more and more sort of sad and intense is that you see me, I know for me I was building a wall. I was putting up obstacles, so that he would let me go, because I really felt like the more he stayed invested, the harder it was for me to go back into that cell everyday. So it was almost like, you are hurting me more by forcing me into what I felt like was a fantasy, which was that this wasn’t going to be my life. It was like, “No, you’re not living in reality,” and that’s where having spent time in the prison and sitting with inmates and being locked in a cell and wearing the prison-issue clothes really helped me be as focused as I was on that point, which was “I am living through something that you really cannot imagine until you are in there,” and “You get to go home to our son everyday and make his lunch and walk him to school, and I’m never going to be able to do that. We are not connected and we are not a family anymore, and you need to let me go.” And the minute I’ve sort of come up with all of that as a coping mechanism, he breaks me out.
[Both Laugh]
Capone: She does have that weird hesitancy about going with them at first, right?
EB: Oh, she is so angry because, think about it, it was all about her son. It’s all about the risk that he’s taking that, to me, just sounds completely insane. It’s like “He already doesn’t have a mother, now you are putting both of us at risk, and not only are we both going to go to jail if we are caught, but we will probably be shot on sight, so we are going to end up dead. That’s the legacy that we are leaving for our son.” I thought about this in terms of how men and women make decisions, right? It’s like he’s all bravery and bravado and machismo, and he’s going to get me out of there and get me back and give no thought to the consequences, and for a woman, I think, it’s all about that kid. It’s all about “Is this the best thing for our child? Probably not. As much as you want our motherless child to have his own mother back and to have me in your life again, is it worth the risk?” So I think that’s what she’s so angry about, and then ultimately she has no choice in the matter. Once we are running, we have to succeed because it’s definitely jail and it could be death.
Capone: You mentioned before about being in the prison clothes and being in that location, did you give much thought to maybe some of the new friends that Laura might be making behind bars?
EB: For sure, yeah. I had a couple of people specifically in mind the whole time, women that I met that were in there. One who was on her third tour who had three children on the outside and this other very interesting woman. I just found her fascinating; she just had this really intense energy while she was in there. I don’t know, I just connected with it. I specifically connected with two of the women with whom I sat down with and I thought “Okay, I could probably get through this if these were the two women that I hung out with.” [Laughs]
Part of the problem with those prisons is that--well, it's a huge problem--we’ve got a lot of people locked up who actually need social services and not jail, but we don’t provide social services, we just lock them up because they don’t know what else to do with them. So a lot of drug and alcohol abusers are in there, a lot of domestic abuse, a lot of parole violators and women who are prostitutes. I asked these women how many of them had children on the outside. I was sitting with a group of about 40 inmates, and every hand went up. These are women who are living in very difficult situations already, and then they go to jail, and that situation is even worse. I’ve read the statistics on the children of incarcerated men, and there’s a little bit of study on children of incarcerated women and, it’s not good.
Capone: I would imagine it would be worse for kids with their moms in jail.
EB: Yeah, although they tend to actually end up with a grandmother or an aunt, someone who is not as close to the criminal system. Do you know what I mean? Where it might actually be okay, but it’s all bad, none of it’s good.
Capone: I’ve got to admit, I kept waiting for you to bust out the corn rows.
EB: [Laughs] I think that would be really cliché. I saw a lot of women with braids. It is something that they do to pass the time in prison, for sure. There is a reason that stereotype exists; it’s a very easy way for women to pass the time.
Capone: And for the men, too. It’s interesting, that scene at the beginning where you get into the fight with your brother-in-law's girlfriend. Is that who she is?
EB: It is a little confusing who that woman is, isn’t it? Yeah, she is going to be part of our family basically.
Capone: But it’s interesting, because that scene stood out to me, because it shows that you character has this temper, and it adds to this feeling that maybe you did commit this crime. Do you think it was important that the audience not be sure about your character's guilt or innocence?
EB: I absolutely thought so. We wanted to plant doubt. I wanted to play a woman with a little fire in her belly who you believed could have committed murder, and I think it’s really important to the mystery of the whole film. It’s that question that lingers over everything and I think that really adds to the audience’s enjoyment of the movie, frankly. And we also sort of played the movie like it didn’t matter whether she did or not, because it wouldn’t have changed John’s actions. It wouldn’t have changed her life, because she would have been in prison no matter what, either wrongly accused or rightly accused, but she was in there. In terms of him, he was never going to believe that she did it no matter what. And even if she did do it, we did all agree that she’s a good person who something bad happened to.
So whether that something bad came out of a moment in her life where chaos ruled and something got out of control--that happens. That happens to people all the time. Bad things happen to good people. So whether it came from that, or whether it went down the way she said it did which was “No, this wasn’t my fault. Someone else did this.” You know, either way, she’s in prison for the rest of her life and has to figure out what she’s atoning for.
Capone: Wow. Tell me a little bit just about working with Paul Haggis, because he’s only made three movies, but they all seem to…
EB: [Laughs] They’re all pretty good.
Capone: And they have all certainly struck critical nerves with a lot of people. But this is the first film he's directed that he’s gotten into some of the action that he’s written before, but never really directed.
EB: Well, he’s very confident and he’s very sure. He has a very sure hand. You know, I think people forget that he directed a lot of television. He’s very collaborative and he gets the best people. If you get Russell Crowe, you’re in very good hands. There’s a reason why that guy has an Oscar and makes lots of money, because when you turn the camera on and you say “Okay, action” and you need him to drive a stunt car or you need him to throw himself out a window, it’s all going to happen exactly how you need it to happen. So it was great. There was no doubt to anybody that he couldn’t do it.
Capone: And how is he as an actors' director?
EB: He’s very good with actors. You know what? He admits that he’s not always going to have the right answer, which I really appreciate from a director. He understands that his job is… Look, actors love to be lead. We want to be serving someone’s vision, and that’s because ultimately this is not our medium. So, he gets to go and control our performance and control the editing and the pacing and everything. Ultimately, we just want to work for somebody that we trust is going to present to the world the best version that we presented to him and that the whole thing’s going to make sense and it’s going to come out and be a good product. With Paul, you believe all of that. He’s a great captain. You trust that he’s going to make a great product and you trust that he’s going to use the best takes and all of that. So ultimately then his job is just communicating the vision, so that you can give him what he wants, and he’s a very good communicator and he also can admit “I don’t exactly know what to say to do what I want, so let’s just keep trying.” [laughs] And he’s very good about talking through the things that aren’t working, as well as the things that are working.
Capone: This role for you, I can’t really think of anything that you have done before that’s even kind of close to this. Do you strive not to repeat yourself, or is that just dumb luck that it hasn't really happened yet?
EB: I wouldn’t say I specifically strive not to repeat myself, but I would say that I am very conscious of creating distinct characters. I want to honor every character in the right way. This woman is very specific. Her circumstances are very specific. They are not the same as the book store worker in THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN, who has a whole other set of very specific circumstances, and Avery Jessup on "30 Rock" has a whole other very specific set of circumstances. So I’m just as an actor who understands that my job to just create a unique character that the audience hopefully recognizes in some way and can relate to, and that’s all I’m doing and I approach comedy and drama the exact same way in that regard.
Capone: I remember you told me that when we met before, that you play all of your comedy straight.
EB: Absolutely. If you spend too much time trying to make people laugh, it’s tough. [Laughs] I just try, and it’s all got to just come from character. The funniest stuff is when you fail miserably, and failure is always funny. We like to laugh at other people. I do and I think most of my friends do. So a lot of what I’m doing is just getting up there and trying not to fail and then when I do fail, that’s when the funny happens.
Capone: You’ve done so much TV in the last few years that it’s actually possible that people might know you as much, if not more, from some of the stuff that you have done on TV.
EB: Yeah, really I’ve only acted on three shows, but I’ve ended up getting dragged into a ton of episodes. [Laughs]
Capone: Yeah, well that’s what I mean.
EB: Really, two of the shows have just impregnated me--both "Scrubs" and "30 Rock" have both impregnated me, so that just means that I get to hang out longer and then you know "Modern Family" was just a little gift, because I’m very close with Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and we were hanging out with the director of "Modern Family," and I said “Wouldn’t it be funny if I was his boozy crazy friend?” Two weeks later he was like “I wrote it, now come and do it.”
Capone: That’s a great episode.
EB: Yeah, I hope Sal comes back. I think Sal’s in rehab and I’m hoping that Cam and Mitch have to go pick her up and bring her home to stay with them for a little bit.
Capone: Obviously, Avery just appeared in the most recent "30 Rock," what do you like about playing her? What appeals to you about her the most?
EB: The most appealing thing about playing Avery Jessup is going to work with Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin, for sure.
Capone: Are there any hints you can give us about what’s happening with her in the near future.
EB: She is definitely pregnant. I put on the pregnancy belly the other day. There's a baby coming. [laughs]
Capone: I was going to ask you, I was just recently showing someone WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER again, which I haven’t seen for a few years, and boy that movie really holds up. Of course, your barbecue sauce scene is one of the funniest things in the film. How did you initially hook up with those guys from "The State" and Paul Rudd?
EB: I really does hold up, you're right. You know, I honestly just auditioned. That’s all it is. I went to an audition, it was one of my first. It was basically my first movie job, and I met David Wain during the audition process, and I actually auditioned for Marguerite Moreau’s role, and they thought I was too pretty. I think they didn’t really know what to do with that other role. They just wanted someone who was going to, I don’t know, sort of play with Paul Rudd and be the sort of like really pretty girl that is sort of unattainable except for like the hot guy. [laughs] And yeah, I literally just auditioned and I met them and I’ve worked with them over the years. David Wain is still one of my very closest friends.
Capone: Right, I saw you in at least one of his "Wainy Day" episodes.
EB: I think I’m the only person that’s in two. Actually I might be in three. I think Shelly is in three of them. Yeah, I am actually. I’m in three of them.
Capone: Go it. So it was announced recently that they are starting from scratch on the SPIDER-MAN series. Were you a little bummed out you don’t get to come back with those people?
EB: I was bummed out, because I know that Betty Brant was becoming a bigger presence in the fourth installment that we ended up not making.
Capone: Well she did in the comic books, that’s for sure.
EB: Yeah, I was bummed out, because I sort of felt like “Oh come on, I waited three movies to actually have something really juicy to do, and all indicators were pointing to Betty coming into her own in the fourth installment.” But you know… Look… Oh well… Life goes on. [laughs]
Capone: That’s true. Before I let you go, let's talk about some of the things you do have coming up. I remember the last time I spoke with Paul Rudd, he mentioned MY IDIOT BROTHER. Tell me who you play in that one.
EB: I play one of Paul’s sisters. I play a very neurotic New York magazine writer, who is struggling to be promoted up the corporate ladder, and he gets in our way. YThat movie is really, really fun. It’s basically about this guy who comes into the lives of all of his sisters. He gets thrown in jail on a drug conviction, and when he comes out of jail, his girlfriend has moved in with another guy and stolen his dog and kicked him out of the house, and so he subsequently comes to live with each of his sisters--he has three of them--and ruins all of our lives. It’s sort of like that movie WHAT ABOUT BOB? You think he’s ruining your life, but he’s actually solving all of your problems. So that’s kind of what it’s like.
Capone: That’s got a great cast, too.
EB: An amazing cast. And even in the small roles, we had Hugh Dancy and Steve Coogan, and we had just amazing people…Rashida Jones…
Capone: Sure and then you made a film called THE DETAILS. Is that also shot?
EB: Yeah, THE DETAILS with Toby Maguire and Laura Linney, I shot that movie actually right before I made THE NEXT THREE DAYS and I’m hoping it comes out in early 2011.
Capone: Okay and I’ve been reading a lot about this MAN ON A LEDGE film, which seems like a huge part for you.
EB: Oh yeah, MAN ON A LEDGE. Sam Worthington is out on the ledge tonight actually.
Capone: And you play… I don’t even know what to call that job where you try to talk someone off the ledge…
EB: Yes, I’m a negotiator, an NYPD negotiator.
Capone: And there’s some sort of twist?
EB: Yes, he’s not on the ledge to jump, he’s a diversion for some other crazy shit that’s going on.
Capone: There was one more thing that looked like it was a series of shorts, like comedy shorts of some sorts.
EB: Yes.
Capone: What is that exactly?
EB: So the Farrelly Brothers are making a movie called MOVIE 43, which is a collection of short stories in the vein of KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE. So it’s a bunch of comedy shorts, also like PARIS JE T'AIME or NEW YORK, I LOVE YOU, all connected essentially by the fact that they are all in the vein of a Farrelly Brothers’ comedy. Some really outrageous shit happens in these shorts. And they asked me to act in one and I said “I will absolutely act in one, but I’d also like to direct one.” They were kind enough to indulge me, and I’m very happy with the project. I think everyone is really happy with the project. I have an amazing performance from Chloe Moretz, who I think is just incredible, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Jimmy Bennett and my short is called "Middle School Date." Every short is a different director. I think Pete directed two of them ultimately, one with Halle Berry and one with Hugh Jackman and Kate Winslet Brett Ratner directed one. Griffin Dunne directed one. I directed one. I think I might be the only woman who directed one. I’m fairly certain I am, actually.
Capone: How do you think you did as a director?
EB: Pete Farrelly came into the editing room and he said, which I think is the best compliment a director can get, “You’ve accomplished exactly what you set out to accomplish.” Which I did, and it’s funny and it says something and I’m really happy about it.
Capone: Can't wait to see it. Elizabeth, thank you so much for talking. Good luck with this and all of the other things that you’ve got coming up.
EB: Thanks so much.
Capone: Take care.
EB: You too. Bye-bye.
-- Capone
capone@aintitcool.com
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