By chasing after a PG13 rating, Mockingjay Part 1 has lost much of the moral ambiguity that made the books so interesting.
[Read more…] about Mockingjay Part 1: too many hovercrafts, not enough Finnick
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Eddie Redmayne on Stephen Hawking and shooting out of order
In The Theory of Everything, Eddie Redmayne (My Week with Marilyn and Les Misérables) gives an impressively detailed performance as cosmologist Stephen Hawking. The biopic chronicles several decades in Hawking’s life – and his relationship with his wife Jane (Felicity Jones) – from his time as a Physics Ph.D. student at Cambridge, where they met and he was diagnosed with motor neuron disease (ALS), up until the the publication of his best-selling book, A Brief History of Time, decades later, when he was wheelchair-bound.
Redmayne’s performance very precisely charts the decline in Hawking’s physique, while still finding a way to express deep emotion, even when he’s only able to move his eyebrows almost imperceptibly. I sat down with Redmayne to talk about how he prepared for the role, how he kept track of all the physical complexities and found a way to stay in the moment — all while shooting out of order.
The Seventh Row (TSR): Throughout the film, you have to show this very precise decline in Hawking’s physical mobility. Did you shoot in order? And even if you did, how did you track that?
Eddie Redmayne (ER): I wish we shot in order. It was something that I dreamt of and that James [Marsh], the director, sweetly tried to pursue. It became completely financially unviable. But he warned me of that very early.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘I wish we shot in order. It was something that I dreamt of.’ – Eddie Redmayne” quote=”I wish we shot in order. It was something that I dreamt of.”]
I spent four months going to a motor neuron clinic in London, a neurology clinic, and with a doctor called Dr Katie Sidle and a nurse called Jan Clarke. She would have the clinic each week, and people suffering from motor neuron disease would come in. At the end of their session, she’d say, “Look, there’s an actor here playing Stephen Hawking, would you be interested in meeting?” More often than not, they were incredibly generous. Often, they’d be with their families, so you’d get a sense of their lives and the emotional complications of the disease but also the physical [ones].
The extraordinary thing was seeing how different it is in different people. With motor neuron, you have these upper neurons and lower neurons. When the lower neurons go, there’s a sort of wilting, like a softness. When the upper neurons go, it’s a rigidity, like a kind of plasticity. ALS is a mix of those two things, but which part of you has what is different for every person.
Because there’s only documentary material of Stephen from the early ‘80s, when he’s wheelchair bound, what I did was find as much photography as I could, and then take that to Dr Sidle who, by looking at it, would go “OK, so in that wedding photo, when Stephen’s leaning into Jane, like here, you can see that this finger is wilting, so that would be lower neuron, and that probably went around so and so…”
There’s a great YouTube video of Stephen in zero gravity. You see him for the first time out of the chair, moving in the air. You can see there what is rigid and what is soft. Through these photos, with the help of this doctor, I charted what the decline was, [and I] took that back to the writer, Anthony [McCarten], who wove that specific decline into the film.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘I worked with a choreographer. She helped find that physicality in my body.’ – Eddie Redmayne” quote=”I worked with a choreographer. She helped find that physicality in my body.”]
Then, I worked with a choreographer, an amazing dancer called Alex Reynolds, who did World War Z, the film — the zombies in that, she helped. She’s an amazing dancer, and she helped find that physicality in my body. Other than that, it was an iPad with Hawking on documentary, in front of a mirror, learning to use muscles that I hadn’t done before. I wish there was a more glamorous way, but it was just quite a slow burn, but quite rigorous.
7R: If you’re shooting out of order, how do you keep track of the physicality for each age you’re depicting in the film?
ER: James Marsh, the director, gave me time, like four months. I tried to look at it almost like putting on a play.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘I tried to look at it almost like putting on a play.’ – Eddie Redmayne” quote=”I tried to look at it almost like putting on a play.”]
When you meet Stephen, the disease is so secondary to him. He has no interest in it. It’s a thing he was given when he was 21. He doesn’t enjoy seeing doctors. He’s someone that lives forward. Similarly, I wanted to make sure that this wasn’t a film about a disease, that the disease, that the physicality, would be secondary, so that when I was playing opposite Felicity, or Charlie Cox, or Maxine, that you were just playing the human element of the story.
[clickToTweet tweet=”I wanted to make sure this wasn’t a film about a disease, that the physicality would be secondary,” quote=”I wanted to make sure this wasn’t a film about a disease, that the physicality would be secondary,”]
I try to do all the work early, so that it was so embedded that when you would arrive on set, you would just do what we [as actors] do, which is just listen. But I ended up charting, as well — all the vocal [and] physical things. Because in one day, in our first day of filming, we started with that scene there [points at poster], so, healthy, and at lunchtime, I was on two walking sticks, and in the afternoon, [I was] in the third chair. So I had to be able to find a way of jumping in quickly.
7R: By the time you get to the point where there’s not much movement, the scenes are still deeply emotional. How do you do that, when some of your tools that you’re most used to using as an actor, just the subtleties of facial expressions, are, to some degree, limited because of the character’s mobility restrictions?
ER: What’s interesting is that the mobility restrictions sound passive, but actually it was reactive. The most exhausting part of the filming process was at the most physically immobile, because you’re not just sitting inactively. You’re pulling in. All of these muscles [points to face] are sort of tense. You’re activating muscles that you don’t normally use — things like breath, how quickly you’re breathing, how quickly you’re blinking [become very important]. So actually it becomes much more…
Because the camera is so close, all of that energy is coming out to here. On film, you’re always taught, when you’re starting out, do nothing — the camera sees. But if you actually take any of those shots, when he’s at his most immobile, you’ll see that it’s more physically extreme: more is happening than you’ll ever normally see on screen.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘When he’s at his most immobile, you’ll see that it’s more physically extreme.’ -Redmayne” quote=”When he’s at his most immobile, you’ll see that it’s more physically extreme.”]
It looks sort of still, but actually, it’s the most…What it took me was really looking at Stephen in documentary, and in the mirror, and having, I suppose, the confidence to go, “No, you’ve got to go further here.” It’s not about pulling back. It’s about pushing forward.
7R: When you’re playing a role where it’s so inherently physical, does that change how you approach it? Does that get into an outside-in approach? To what degree does the performance of the physicality become the performance of the identity?
ER: Oh, wow, that’s a good question. I didn’t go to drama school, and really, I wish I could say I had a process — I don’t know whether drama school gives you a process or not, but it’s been a neurosis of mine that it does. So each job I take, I just try to fit myself to whatever that is. That’s something to do with circumstance and the time you have to prep. All I knew on this one was that I needed time, and James was generous enough to give me that.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘I don’t know whether drama school gives you a process, but it’s a neurosis of mine that it does.'” quote=”I don’t know whether drama school gives you a process, but it’s a neurosis of mine that it does.”]
I wish it was as linear as that, as outside-in or inside-out; it was a bit of everything at the same time. It was doing all the ALS research, whilst doing the astronomy research, whilst at the same time reading all of Jane’s books, meeting Jane, meeting people that knew Stephen, meeting Stephen’s kids, trying to get an emotional sense of him, and then, finally, meeting Stephen. I’ve never been able to have something, or to work out a method, that is as specific as that. For me, it’s always about, like, throwing all these different bits of clay at a wall and, generally, trying to then, sort of, mould them together.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘It’s like throwing all these different bits of clay at a wall and trying to mould them together.'” quote=”It’s like throwing all these different bits of clay at a wall and trying to mould them together.”]
The interesting thing about theatre is you go, and you have those four or five weeks, and it’s the director who will create the process. Of course, actors have their own process within that, but they all get “this is how I’m working” [from the director]. If it’s Max Stafford-Clark, you’re working with intentions, each line: “What are you doing to that person? How are you affecting them?” Versus other directors, Michael Grandage, who I worked with, wants you to get up very early, so that you use all your instincts, and you save those instincts.
[clickToTweet tweet=”‘The interesting thing about theatre is it’s the director who will create the process.'” quote=”The interesting thing about theatre is it’s the director who will create the process.”]
But on the screen, actors will often come in at the last minute – some actors will come in for two days. Time is valuable and expensive, and so the [director] will fit to how an actor works. It’s a real shift. You have to be one of those really strong, powerful directors to be able to really place your process on it.
[clickToTweet tweet=”In film, ‘actors often come in at the last minute, so the director will fit to how an actor works.'” quote=”In film, actors often come in at the last minute, so the director will fit to how an actor works.”]
Director Damien Chazelle talks jazz and Whiplash
Director Damien Chazelle discusses Whiplash, jazz drumming, the bubble of big band jazz, and his approach to depicting jazz on screen.
[Read more…] about Director Damien Chazelle talks jazz and Whiplash
Radcliffe and Kazan charm in The F Word or What If friends fall in love in this Toronto-set film
Starring Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan as a pair of Torontonian friends, Michael Dowse’s film The F Word (or What If, as its known stateside) asks, what happens when you meet someone you really connect with, and want to hold onto, when dating isn’t an option?
[Read more…] about Radcliffe and Kazan charm in The F Word or What If friends fall in love in this Toronto-set filmLife Itself: After a life at the movies, Roger Ebert lives on in the movie of his life
In Steve James’s documentary Life Itself, we discover the story of Roger Ebert with enormously, who championed the movies as an empathy machine.
If you enjoy this review of Life Itself, a documentary about Roger Ebert, you may enjoy our book about documentary filmmaking.
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I grew up watching Siskel and Ebert and The Movies. It was a weekly ritual in my house, helping us decide what to see that weekend. The show struck something deep, and inspired me to start writing film reviews at a very young age: I was in grade 6 and I started my own magazine. It was through their television show that Siskel and Ebert became the world’s most powerful and influential film critics.
Ebert had been working at the Chicago Sun Times part time while he pursued a PhD in English, when its film critic retired, and he was appointed his successor. At the time, critics were often interchangeable: at the Chicago Tribune, they wrote under the nom de plume “Mae Tinee” (matinee). Of course, he was one of the people that changed all that, following in the footsteps of Pauline Kael: unfortunately, the debt he owes her, including the degree to which he was influenced by her, is not handled well in the film.
On their show, Siskel and Ebert championed work by unknown directors, launching the careers of filmmakers like Errol Morris and Martin Scorsese. The profound effect that Ebert’s encouragement had on these filmmakers is felt in the brief interviews with them: Scorsese nigh well breaks down remembering the tribute to him the pair held at the Toronto International Film Festival, which helped him to get back to work after being depressed. He also recalls the generosity and intelligence, which Ebert would give even his unfavourable reviews. Ironically, while Siskel and Ebert popularized and democratized film criticism with their show – and their trademark thumbs up/thumbs down rating system – they also perpetuated the false notion that films are simply either good or bad. The constraints of television prevented a more complex reading.
It’s with such contradictions and nuances that Steve James’s film tells the story of Ebert’s life and work. Ebert was at once firmly a man of the people – he remained loyal to The Chicago Sun Times, the working-class newspaper which gave him his start – and yet also cocky, arrogant, and pompous. He was professionally mature and socially immature: he went through a series of bad romantic choices before he finally met his wife, Chaz Ebert, at age fifty, who had a profound effect on his life and personality. He was a control freak and an alcoholic. And he had a love-hate relationship with his television sparring partner, Gene Siskel: they argued with bitter hatred and petulance, but they also, eventually, grew to share a deep respect for each other. As Siskel would say, “he was an asshole, but he was my asshole”.
“Life Itself” is the kind of film that reminds you why you love the movies and writing about movies. There’s a wonderful romanticism with which Ebert describes his initiation into the world of print media, helped along by the brassy, nostalgic, jazz age score. As a child, he delivered papers in his neighbourhood, and by the time he was fifteen, he had a byline in the newspaper. He got to keep his name in linotype, and he took to putting it to a stamp pad and stamping his name on everything. He recalls, “My parents eventually had to take it away from me. Everything was ‘by Roger Ebert.’” In college, at UIUC he ran the Daily student newspaper, where he spent the majority of his time. At every step, you get the sense of the thrill that seeing his name in print gave him, of reaching his readers, especially late in life, when his writer’s voice became his only voice. Because the film understands so well what it’s like to be a critic, the film will strike the deepest chord with us critics. But it’s as much a film about love, friendship, alcoholism, growth, family, death, and a life-long love affair with the movies.
In his Hollywood Star acceptance speech, which opens the film, Ebert describes movies as an empathy-generating machine. Throughout the film, you get the sense that they worked their magic on Ebert himself. The pompous self-assured guy that was the first film critic to win a Pullitzer was not the same man that would later marry a black woman, growing kinder and softer with age. The man who had no qualms about putting down the “Three Amigos” on the Johnny Carson show, while sitting next to Chevy Chase, is not the same man who would be the first in line at Sundance for an 8AM screening, on the last day, of a film by the then unknown filmmaker Ramin Bahrani who had personally emailed him to tell him about it. And it was Ebert’s evolving relationships with Chaz and Siskel that shaped him most, which James captures through interviews with Chaz and Siskel’s widow, as well as other professional colleagues.
Siskel passed away young from a brain tumour, and he kept it quiet while it was happening, something that devastated Ebert: he never got to say goodbye. Afterward, Ebert vowed that if he should ever become very sick, he wouldn’t keep it a secret, from his family or friends, and in the end, he shared it with his readers, too. It’s for this reason that Ebert encouraged James to capture all the excruciating details of his illness that are usually left behind closed doors: the painful process of suction, the exhaustion of rehab, and all the time in the hospital. James also captures Chaz’s worries and grief, getting raw emotion rather than after-school special tear-jerking. It’s impossible to hear her talk about the end of her husband’s life, and everything he meant to her, without choking up, but the film is never manipulative.
The film is at its least successful and interesting when it’s filling in obligatory biographical details, like Ebert writing the screenplay for “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,” but it’s clear, by the end, that these need to be there to give a complete portrait of the man. In his book, “Life, Itself,” Ebert writes, “I was born inside the movie of my life…I don’t remember how I got into the movie, but it continues to entertain me.” Roger Ebert spent his life at the movies. Now, he’ll live on in a movie we can keep revisiting. It’s a loving tribute, which shows Ebert as he really was, the good and the bad, and above all, a man whose love of movies was infectious.
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Sam Mendes delivers a lucid, dark, and funny King Lear for NTLive
In Sam Mendes’ almost flawless production of King Lear at the National Theatre, broadcasted live to cinemas worldwide through NTLive, Lear (the phenomenal Simon Russell Beale) is a megalomaniac slowly losing his mind. He suffers from dementia and is prone to violent, childlike outbursts of anger. He moves jerkily, shuffling from one side of the stage to the other.
Even before he divides his kingdom, and before he mistakes a banana for toasted cheese, he’s a man in decline, desperately trying to keep it together. His daughters’ betrayal only catalyzes his downfall. The tragedy is heightened because he’s both a prisoner of his own decaying mind and the agent of his own destruction: by spurning and banishing his one loving daughter while bestowing lands on his conniving ones, it’s only a matter of time before they discard him. You almost root for his comeuppance – he created the monsters that spurn him, after all – until it all becomes too heartbreaking, too real.
When we first meet Lear, he’s an emotionally stunted menace dressed in military garb. His daughters are seated next to their husbands in a line at a long table while his knights line the periphery of the room. Speaking into a microphone from his desk facing his daughters, Lear demands that they publicly proclaim their love and affection for him. Could he have chosen a less personal method to ask for their love? Can anything they might say be sincere and not mere flattery when a performance is required?
This is a brilliantly economic piece of staging, a microcosm of Mendes’s general approach to staging his production: at once, we see both how detached Lear is, and how all the characters are related to one another. The camera pulls back to give us a sense of the space, but gets close enough to see the actors’ faces without making the performances feel too big.
The conspicuous empty seat next to Cordelia (Olivia Vinall) is a clear reminder that she has no other man in her life: she may refuse to flatter her father obsequiously like her sisters, but there’s sincerity in her actions. It’s telling, too, that before the King’s loyal servant Kent departs in banishment, and before the fool follows his master, they both take the time to embrace only Cordelia with deep affection.
The two unfaithful sisters, Goneril and Regan, are never interchangeable. Kate Fleetwood plays Goneril as buttoned-up and prim, dressed in fine clothing and a confining choker of pearls. She plays her father’s game, flattering him disingenuously, yet she’s not all bad, having previously chosen a virtuous husband. When she turns her father out of her home, it’s not merely an act of cruelty: she’s justifiably fed up that he’s brought his rowdy party of 100 knights to wreak havoc in her home.
Goneril is also easily swayed by her sister, Regan (Anna Maxwell Martin), who is already lost to depravity when the play begins. Martin’s Regan is a sexual tease, all hips, cleavage, and elongated words, yet a coldness lurks beneath: she knows how to use seduction to manipulate but she doesn’t get lost in it. She flirts openly and girlishly with her father, who marks his approval for her false words of praise with a slap on the tuchus.
Meanwhile, the Gloucester clan are amidst their own family squabble, soon to be intertwined with Lear’s. The Earl of Gloucester opens the play by saying rather horrible and bitchy things, unapologetically, about his bastard son of a whore, Edmund (a fine, funny, and deliciously evil Sam Troughton). Gloucester’s heartlessness makes it easy to get behind Edmund’s plot, which Mendes milks for all its comedic potential.
When Edmund persuades his father that his virtuous brother Edgar (Tom Brooke, Corporal Nym in “Henry V”) is after his head, he hilariously fakes a wound that he claims was his brother’s doing. As he melodramatically and pathetically cries “Look, sir, I bleed!” the entire cinema audience burst out in laughter. By the time he has the choice between the wicked and widowed Regan and the falling Goneril, his predicament still lightens the mood, effectively. It’s much needed comic relief in this otherwise very dark play, and Edmund’s mischief nicely parallels Goneril and Regan’s plot: their fathers have both incited their own downfall through bad parenting.
But what happens to both patriarchs proves no laughing matter: Gloucester’s end is gory and Lear’s is devastating. When Regan’s husband tortures Gloucester as a prelude to gouging out his eyes, Regan watches with glee. When she turns out her aging father into a stormy night with nowhere to go, it’s just as chilling. The storm is vividly realised, between the darkened lights and the sound of downpour and thunder. And it’s Regan’s rejection that sends Lear speedily into madness.
In a fit of confusion that night, he undresses inappropriately before brutally killing his beloved fool. The next time we see him, he’s in the fool’s feathered hat, a hospital gown, and has a detached IV line in his hand: he’s escaped a hospital and he’s muttering nonsense. And yet, even as he sees things that aren’t there, he’s also at his most affable, his most vulnerable, and his most clever: he’s picked up some of the fool’s wit and wisdom from his cap.
It’s in the last act that the production really packs its punch. Beale has transformed from a shuffling man of power to a cowering man with none, lacking control over his fate and his body. When he reunites with a loving Cordelia, he’s already been brutally institutionalized. Before long, they become captives of his corrupted daughters, resigned to death or worse. Bound and seated, they embrace cheek-to-cheek in tears, and it’s devastating.
As the death count increases, the bodies pile up on stage: something is rotting in the state of England. Stripped of his power, his home, his daughters’ love, and his sanity, Lear is a sorry sight to behold: a frail man who’s lost everything, who craves nothing but his daughters’ affection. Lear’s head fills the cinema screen as he, stunned and broken, mutters “Never, Never, Never, Never, Never,” unaware he’s been repeating himself: the close-up adds intensity and keeps us in the moment.
This is an impressively lucid production, not just because all the characters are distinguishable, and all the subplots clear, already a rare feat, but because it’s chillingly emotionally resonant throughout. It helps that it stars one of the greatest working Shakespearean actors, Simon Russell Beale, who brought a similar complex and intelligent vulnerability to Falstaff in the “Henry IV” films for The Hollow Crown. It’s also thoughtfully adapted to a modern setting with a fairly simple, stark set: it’s not the elaborate modern re-imagining of a Nicholas Hytner Shakespeare revival, but the visceral emotions are really the focus of Mendes’s production.
A couple of things don’t quite work: it’s never really clear why Kent is so loyal to Lear throughout despite how he’s been hurt, and Edgar slips in and out of madness at the snap of a finger. But the production succeeds in making even the cruel, like Lear, and evil, like Edmund, sympathetic: they’re hurting and that feeds their bad behaviour. Thank goodness those of us not in London had a chance to see it from the best seats in the house without ever having to leave the continent.