When I do Q&A screenings in Chicago, I never record them because I want the guests to feel like they can say anything and not be on the record (at least not with me; I know sometimes people in the audience record the Q&As, and that's fine by me). But most times, the Q&As go undocumented, which is fine by me…usually. The Q&A that I did a few weeks back with the group behind the Footloose remake--director/co-writer Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow; Black Snake Moan) and stars Kenny Wormald and Julianne Hough--was so much fun and beyond informative that I kind of wish I had a record of it to share with you.
The official, on-the-record interview I did with the three the following morning in a skybox at Wrigley Field was a lot of fun as well, but our time was limited, and we just didn't cove as much ground as we didn't in front of a couple hundred people the night before. For example, we're missing Brewer's great story about his love for the original Footloose being so massive that he hooked up his VCR to a tape deck and pulled the audio--songs, dialogue, everything--right off the movie. At this point, I admitted that I did the same thing (in the same year, 1984) with Purple Rain. And that exchange only happened during their introduction to the wildly entertaining, crowd-pleasing Footloose, which opens this Friday. You'll have my review shortly.
When I entered the skybox at Wrigley, I was met with an array of ballpark snacks and drinks, the game still a good hour from starting back in the very beginning of September. Brewer was partaking in the lovely hot dog bar. Enjoy my conversation with Craig, Kenny, and Julianne, whose blue eyes pierce the soul.
Craig Brewer: Don’t let this hot dog make you think I’m not taking this seriously.
Capone: Well you're here, so you have to have one.
CB: Yeah, I have to. I’ll just think if the movie doesn’t do well, it’s like “I should have eaten that hot dog earlier.”
[Everyone Laughs]
Capone: Are you prepared for the possibility that Footloose could be a popular success, but a critical failure? Will you take that? That's a bit of a reverse from what you're used to.
CB: Yeah, well I mean I’ve only really known polarization myself, and it’s funny, but I went and saw RED STATE the other day, and Kevin Smith was speaking to something and I felt like he was almost speaking directly to me. He was talking about his experience on COP OUT and saying that when people started criticizing it, he just remembered that it was that same thing that people were doing about MALLRATS, and yet people come up to him all of the time, and they talk about how MALLRATS was this seminal movie for them.
So I learned with both HUSTLE & FLOW and BLACK SNAKE MOAN that the best thing you can do is try to make the best movie you can and make it personal to yourself, because the way it’s going to be received is going to be all over the map, and only time will tell. No one universally loved HUSTLE; no one universally loved BLACK SNAKE. I kind of operate in this place where people either love it or hate it. The thing though that I have found with FOOTLOOSE is I’ve rarely found anybody that’s hated it. There’s almost a part of me that’s like, “I kind of think that the movie is undeniably entertaining and moving, and what are you doing watching FOOTLOOSE in the first place if you are expecting like ANNA KARENINA or something like that.” You know what I mean? “Watch a Merchant Ivory movie, and then there’s FOOTLOOSE, what were you thinking?” So I’m very comfortable and confident.
Capone: Forgive me if we cover some of the same ground we covered last night…
Julianne Hough: Sure.
Kenny Wormald: That was rehearsal.
Capone: With the music choices, how did you decide which songs to leave in from the original soundtrack and which ones to redo or somehow tinker with? I could ask the same question about the story, too, I guess.
CB: Well for me, I start every project with a playlist and . So I popped in the soundtrack of FOOTLOOSE and I hadn’t heard it in a long time, and it was a record that was always in rotation at my house when I was growing it. But I then got the movie and realized that there were all of these other songs that were sometimes in the background. There’s that Foreigner song, “Waiting for a Girl Like You.” That song’s in there and then like the Quiet Riot song with “Bang Your Head,” and I thought “You know, there’s probably a way to do this movie where I can have both, I can have new songs, I can produce some new takes on the original songs, but then I can also maybe not even touch the original songs and can they actually work in the context of a modern movie?”
The only unfortunate thing about this project is that I could only know it when I heard it, so there was 20 different hip-hop versions of FOOTLOOSE that were submitted to us. Everybody just assumed, “Well if you are doing a modern take of FOOTLOOSE, then you’ve got to put a drum machine to it, it’s got to have a hip-hop element,” and I didn’t want to really reinvent the wheel on that. I felt that the original FOOTLOOSE, a lot of the songs that were in the movie had a country feel to it, and I felt like with where we were placing it in America that the choice to base it more of like a heartland type of feel with more of a country flare wasn’t going to cheapen it; it would feel appropriate.
And then I know you’re asking about something “What was it about the story.”
Capone: From my memory, there are some sequences that seem almost shot for shot, in particular the scene where Kenny is teaching his friend to dance.
KW: In the school and in front of the lockers as well.
Capone: Yeah, yeah.
CB: I assure you the “shot for shot,” there are only about five. But it’s really telling that people feel that, because they see it and remember it, and it just goes to show you just how iconic those moments are like looking down the lockers and seeing Willard with the headphones and Ren in front of him dancing. People are like, “Oh yeah, that’s from the original” or like even the shot of Kenny getting up on the parallel bar and about to swing, like we made that exactly like the original shot. I was consulting the producer, Craig Zadan, who filmed the original, and I was like “How did they do this?” I would look at the original film and I would say, “I really want to try to get this.”
Another place where it kind of helped was when we would go to do the scene where the cop pulls Ren over, and I remember saying to myself, “We don’t have much time, somebody bring me the original FOOTLOOSE,” and I watched that scene and I counted how many setups were in there, and I said, “They did this scene in four setups in 1984. We're doing this in four setups, so let’s figure out right now what those setups are, because we are not going over those four.” So sometimes the old movie would assist me, but I think the narrative still works today. There were only a few things that I needed to change to really make an audience feel more compassion towards the adults' point of view, and that’s the good thing about timeless stories, I think you can move it into a different time and many people have told me that it’s more relevant than it really was in 1984.
Capone: Beyond the dance rehearsing, was there anything that you guys had to do in particular just to sort of prepare to play these characters in terms of their mindsets? Especially [Julianne's] character, who is emotionally broken when we meet her.
JH: I’m a physical person, so actually changing my hair color, putting freckles on, getting super in shape. I looked tight, like a little 17-year-old girl. My body was super thin and not as curvy, so that just made me feel automatically different and younger and just like Ariel. Then as far as the mindset goes, I actually relate a lot to Ariel, and a lot of people don’t know that about me, because I kind of keep--from when I was 15 years old to about 18 years old--that a little bit private. But there are things that I have gone through… not verbatim to Ariel’s character, but very, very similar and the things that she felt, like wanting the attention and the way she acted out.
That was definitely something that meant something to me, and I've had that conversation with my dad where in the scene with Dennis [Quaid] at the very end before I go to prom where I say, “I just don’t want you to be disappointed in me anymore.” I remember having that conversation with my dad many times. [Laughs] So, it was a lot closer to home than I think people realize.
KW: And a cool part about what we got to experience before we even started shooting was we got to work with Cameron Thor, who's an amazing acting coach. He’s more like a human coach than just acting.
JH: He’s like a therapist almost.
KW: He loves life.
Capone: Like a life coach?
KW: Yeah, but not in way where he’s telling you how to live your life, but he’s such a fan of humans and why they do what they do, and we just had many hours of just sitting down; it wasn’t line reading, it was just like experiencing what these kids are going through, and he’s like, “You know when you get on that bus, how long have you been on that bus? 12 hours? You might have to pee.”
[Everyone Laughs]
KW: Just saying little things like that, it opens you up.
CB: It wasn’t that I was against having an acting coach, but I had never had one on the set, and now I’m sold. It’s funny, we're talking here at Wrigley Field, and they're about to play a game, but all this week these guys have probably been practicing. Well acting is something where you are waiting in between jobs, you're waiting for somebody else to say, “Okay, now you can do this.” So what do you do in the meantime, do you just sit there and not practice your craft? You don’t get to sort of “exercise the vessel.”
And for me, I have a collaborator on every other part of the movie, if there’s going to be an aesthetic look I have Amy Vincent, my DP. If there’s going to be something in terms of the sets, I’ve got John Gary Steele, who's my production designer. But then there’s the actors, and I was like, “Wow, Julianne’s got a scene tomorrow where I’ve got to have her crying all day long. How can we help Julianne in this scene?” So Cameron would work with Julianne, and it wasn’t so much that he was telling her how to act or anything like that that. He would come to me and say, “Here’s the plan that Julianne and I have for this day. She’s going to be listening to some music, just tell people to let her be and leave her alone for a little bit. This is just the process that we have worked out for her to be in this mode.” I now want to have it on all of my movies.
JH: Well for him too, like on those scenes where I had to be a little bit more broken, like what you just said, I used to tell him, “Oh my God, I’m miserable. I haven’t eaten anything yummy,” and I’m like working out, and he’s like “Sweet, don’t do that for the next week before this one scene, because you are miserable.” I’m like “Okay, I got it.” So yeah, he’s not giving us line readings and stuff, it was just more like prepping.
KW: Yeah, he showed us a bunch of clips from different movies, and one in particular he showed us was BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, one look that they shared that said way more than any piece of dialogue could say. He showed me a lot of James Dean footage… It was such a great learning experience, especially for me having it be my first big film role.
Capone: Yeah and we talked about this last night. You have done so many things in your dance career, but to jump head first into being the lead, did you walk into it scared to death, or did you think, “Yeah, I’ve got this. I can do this.”
KW: A little bit of both. I absolutely felt nervous. I got to know Miles [Teller] a little bit before we started shooting, so having a buddy there kind of helped, and with Craig being so warm and welcoming and supportive and wanting me to do good, I felt that right away. And as a dancer you are always taking directions, someone’s telling you exactly where to put your hand and exactly where to put your feet, so I knew with the combination of those things that I would be okay and I loved the script. I loved his version and I loved the elements that I got to do in it, so I was worried and scared, but more excited to go with it and see what would happen, you know?
Capone: You said something last night about the "angry dance" sequence meant so much to you because you never seen a solo dance in a movie. I hadn’t really thought about what that must have meant to you as a dancer.
CB: When was the last solo you saw?
KW: And not just like freestyle solo, like in a group of dancers, but literally in a place, by myself dancing. You don’t see that a lot.
JH: I know, I was like, “I want an angry dance!”
CB: You’re the dancing part of that, but I’m also the filmmaking part of that. It’slike the equivalent of somebody saying like, “Okay, well now you are going to do a light saber battle.” I’m like, “A light saber battle? Alright!” To tackle that must be like big game. So for me, the angry dance was one of the reasons I wanted to do the movie.
Capone: Was there a particular scene that you were thinking, “I need to get this one exactly right or people might get angry"?
KW: I think the speech at the end was kind like that for me.
CB: Yeah.
Capone: In front of the town elders?
CB: I think you nailed it. That was the one that…. I think there were two for me: the speech, and then one scene that audiences love, and I’m so thankful that they love it. You wouldn’t think it’s an important scene, but it’s actually the important scene which is Kenny, Miles, and Ser’Darius [William Blain]--it’s Ren, Willard, and Woody--hanging out in the garage, but it’s the first time that Ren learns that dancing has been banned for minors, and that’s the big thing that everybody is like, “That is such bullshit. You can’t do a movie in 2011 where there’s some town that’s banned dancing.”
Well let me tell you, back in 1984 there wasn’t either. I mean I remember going to see FOOTLOOSE and saying, “This is kind of silly. What town would really do this?” But the way that they had to communicate information and also be funny and fun, so like the audience is beginning to learn like what exactly those laws are and why they were there and yet at the same time they are being entertained. Immediately after that scene, nobody really has an issue with the whole law or ban on dancing; they get it.
KW: And mentioning the church dances, so it’s not like there’s no dancing, period.
CB: It’s a supervision issue, like that’s the big thing. It’s adults saying, “You can’t handle being alone with other teenagers without a parental guardian there to make sure that you don’t do anything that’s inappropriate or that’s going to hurt you or lead to your demise, both spiritually or with life.” That’s something that automatically young adults or teenagers are going to rebel against, yet it’s the one thing as a parent I can see myself doing.
Capone: I feel with your film, the ban feels more protective, whereas in the original, in my mind at least, it felt more spiritual. “We are saving you from burning in hell” versus “We are just saving your lives.”
CB: Yes. That was the perfect way to explain it, because I didn’t want to be critical of the parents to a great extent and I didn’t want to be critical of faith. My family is all from the south, I was raised as a Southern Baptist, my dad was really big into science and astronomy and I mean I’m very much… I believe in evolution, I believe in all of those things, but I also understand the place that faith has in people’s lives and how it’s been in my life. So I didn’t really want to do a movie where the bad guy is the reverend. When I saw the original, I felt something for John Lithgow. I understood where he was coming from.
In our movie, I think by moving the crash up front, immediately people who were fans of the original… For one thing, they go through an interesting shock. They see the wreck, they go “What?” and then you see it hit them and they're like “Oh this is right, this all began with a wreck.” It was never shown in the original movie, but by seeing that--and it’s so shocking and so terrible--I think parents just naturally flinch and they're usually sitting there in the audience with their teenager watching it, and it’s an interesting dynamic that happens between a parent and child watching FOOTLOOSE now. My parents went to see FOOTLOOSE too, but it wasn’t like I was necessarily identifying with the parents the first time through.
Capone: It’s great to meet you. Have fun today.
JH: Thank you so much again. It was fun last night.
