It was a busy day in our studio yesterday — and an even busier evening outside on the streets of Toronto, where both Peter Farrelly’s I Play Rocky and Chris Rock’s Misty Green played for thrilled audiences in their prime Saturday night slots.
Christopher Rosen was there to watch it all happen, while I was gathering media gossip and watching Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, Tom McCarthy and more luminaries work the room at the annual Sony Pictures Classics dinner.
We compared notes on our busy evenings — Chris is convinced I Play Rocky will win Toronto’s People’s Choice Award, a frequently reliable barometer for a best picture nomination (we don’t need to mention The Life of Chuck) — and reflected on yesterday’s jam-packed day of interviews in our morning livestream. Revisit that one below, and don’t forget to join us tomorrow for our final daily dispatch of the festival, scheduled for 4 p.m. ET on both YouTube and Substack — just before we hop on another livestream to watch the Primetime Emmy Awards together tomorrow night. (Awards season never stops.)
I won’t linger here too much longer — there’s a lot of interviews to do today, and a lot of yesterday’s to share with you before we get there. On with the show!
Josephine: Family Ties
How do you create a warm family environment on the set of a film that’s inspired by the Martin Scorsese classic Taxi Driver?
That’s part of the fascinating balancing act of Sumerian Pictures’ Josephine, in which writer-director Beth de Araujo traces how a young girl (Mason Reeves) witnessing a traumatic event creates fault lines in her loving family — including parents played by Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan. Joined by her cast in our studio, de Araujo explained the Taxi Driver inspiration: “It just felt really honest of someone who doesn’t know what to do when they start to see that this world can be a very dangerous place. You feel these conflicting emotions, or at least I did.”
But building a film around a young star — Reeves is now 10 — requires a lot of safety, support and plenty of affectionate teasing, both on set and in our studio. Remembering how she and movie dad Tatum got mani-pedis as part of their bonding process, Reeves turned to him and reminded him, “You didn’t get any color.” Tatum stubbornly responded, “Yes I did — clear is a color.”
Elsinore: Life in Theater
Andrew Scott has had plenty of experience playing Hamlet on stage, more than 150 shows’ worth, in fact. But he’s never played Hamlet while also playing someone else — a challenge unique to Scott’s new movie, Elsinore. The Blue Moon star plays the late Scottish actor Ian Charleson, who starred in William Shakespeare’s tragedy at the National Theatre for multiple performances before dying from AIDS in early 1990.
“You obviously have a way of doing it yourself,” Scott says. “But Ian’s relationship with death — because he was so ill at the time — was so different to mine. The challenge was to think about how he might have interpreted particular lines, and we really just combed the script to find bits that might have affected him. The play is the greatest play ever about grief and death and what it means to be alive. So there was lots to choose from.”
Written by Stephen Beresford and directed by Simon Stone, Elsinore focuses not just on Charleson’s life on stage, but the relationships he has off it — including with casting director Patsy Pollock, played by Billie Piper.
“It was quite hard for Patsy to talk about the film, understandably,” Piper says of the real-life casting director, who worked on movies like Braveheart and The Hours. “So I actually spoke to a lot of people around her, and then I also spoke to loads of Ian’s friends — and that was hard. It was really emotional as an experience.”
“Because of the Hamlet comparisons, that character is really like Horatio to Hamlet; they were best friends, and so were Ian and Patsy,” Scott says. “She was there right at the very end.”
And it was Patsy, he adds, who pushed Ian to persevere as Hamlet, even as his health failed. “To be able to just go and create something — it’s something that’s said a lot in the film: It’s about the quality of time rather than quantity of time.”
Trash Mountain: Tragicomic
Some of the funniest moments in the comedy Trash Mountain happen around some of the biggest tragedies. Caleb Hearon, who co-wrote the film and based it closely on his own life, plays a Chicago comedian who’s returned to his small Missouri town to help his sister (Zooey Deschanel) deal with the logistics following their father’s death. The siblings hug and cry but also joke in the darkest moments, one of many details Hearon says is taken directly from his own life. “That’s just how my family deals with everything. For better or for worse, we are always poking fun and trying to find the joke too quickly.”
Director Kris Rey says she kept a close eye on the film’s tragicomic tone through every moment of production; Deschanel calls her the “truth master — she will not let something that is not true and genuine end up onscreen.” That includes some characters who are over the top and broad, which Hearon says is also very true to the Missouri he knows. “That’s my favorite thing about being from a place like Missouri — fuck, people are characters. I hope it shines through in the film.”
Wild Horse Nine: A Breakthrough Performance
Chilean actress Mariana di Girolamo has been famous in her home country for a decade, appearing on numerous telenovelas and in films like Pablo Larraín’s 2019 feature Ema. But with Wild Horse Nine, the new movie from Oscar winner Martin McDonagh that marks her English-language debut, she’s about to be exposed to an entirely different audience for the first time.
“It feels amazing to be introduced to North America or the rest of the world with a movie like this with a director like Martin, with such amazing actors and actresses,” di Girolamo says. “I really love this movie. I’ve never read something like this. It’s very unique. And it’s very important for me that Martin chose a Chilean actress to do this character. I think that is very important, and it has a lot of value.”
Set in 1973, just before the Chilean military coup, Wild Horse Nine stars John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell as a pair of CIA agents involved in the planned unrest. Di Girolamo plays Monica, a college student supportive of the democratically elected president, who finds herself in the agents’ orbit.
“My parents were students at that time. They are both artists. A lot of their friends were missing, killed. So it’s a part of our recent story,” says di Girolamo, who was born in 1990, the year Chile regained its democracy. “It’s important to keep talking about this in order to not forget what happened.”
Since its Venice Film Festival premiere, Wild Horse Nine has been discussed as an immediate awards contender, with Malkovich — who won Venice’s best actor award on Saturday — expected to factor heavily in the conversation.
“I was a little bit nervous to work with John Malkovich, you can imagine, but he made it very easy,” di Girolamo says of the star, with whom she shares multiple essential scenes. “Because we know that he’s such a great actor, but he’s also the nicest person. He’s a gentleman.”
In Waves: Power of Animation
Based on a graphic novel that is directly pulled from author AJ Dungo’s own life, In Waves is in some ways a film extremely grounded in reality — and in others, the way only animation can be, is extremely impressionistic, too. “I think animation can do a lot of things, especially when it comes to something poetic,” says director Phuong Mai Nguyen, who went surfing with Dungo to get a sense of the film’s Southern California world and the ocean that’s so important to the characters.
Will Sharpe voices the film’s lead character, AJ, and credits some of the film’s more imaginative, even surreal sequences with capturing a depth of feeling unique to animation. “I think that you could do that in a live-action movie, but it would feel more heavy-handed,” says Sharpe, who has also worked as a writer and director. “[In animation] you can just move between an impressionistic version of storytelling and a more naturalistic version of storytelling quite seamlessly. And I found that quite helpful in this film to get under the skin of the psychology of how these characters are feeling.”
Rapinoe: A Star Gets Her Moment
“I have felt this about my career for a really long time, that the most interesting part of it was not what I was doing on the field.”
For Megan Rapinoe, one of the best American soccer players of all time, to say that is pretty remarkable — who on earth wasn’t captivated watching her score a corner kick goal in the 2019 World Cup? But the documentary Rapinoe, recently picked up for distribution by HBO, makes a pretty great case for exactly that. Director Rebecca Huntt captures Rapinoe and her loved ones in intimate, revealing interviews that explain why Rapinoe was determined to do so much more with her fame than just play her beloved sport. “We live in a country that glorifies sports and that glorifies athletes and celebrities,” Rapinoe continues. “So then it’s like, what are you going to do with that?”
Huntt, whose first documentary, Beba, was a deeply personal self-portrait, wanted a similarly tactile and up-close approach for Rapinoe — whether her subject always realized it or not. “Thank you so much for letting me get those extreme close-ups of you and everyone you love,” Huntt told Rapinoe with a laugh during our conversation. Part of her decision to shoot on 16mm film, Huntt continues, was because of celluloid’s tactile quality — “so we could take the energy of another human being and then be able to transmit it through cinema. That is what this art form is all about.”
Growth of the Soil: Worthy Challenges
They tell you to never work on movies with children or animals, and it’s probably implicit that you shouldn’t do either of those things while shooting in forbidding weather conditions in remote sections of Norway. But that’s the challenge that writer-director Hans Petter Moland and his stars Herbert Nordrum and Asta Kamma August eagerly undertook to make Growth of the Soil, an adaptation of a Norwegian historical epic about a homesteader couple in the early 20th century. The film is Norway’s official submission for this year’s international feature Oscar.
“Everything was so difficult, but I learned a lot,” says Nordrum, who had to learn how to convincingly play a rural farmer and also pull off grueling physical feats like removing the root from a giant tree. “It was very humbling,” he remembers. “I saw the whole crew behind the camera just looking at me, this pathetic actor trying to be some kind of man.”
August, meanwhile, became a master cow wrangler. “The cow recognized my voice because I got told that I needed to speak to the cow,” the actress recalls. “So I spoke to the cow every day for a couple of weeks.”
Closing Night: Theater Women
Like any good cinephiles, Sarah Paulson, Naomi Watts and Cody Fern speak to each other fluently in the language of movie references. Talking about how they established the fractured family dynamic of Closing Night, which Fern co-wrote and directs in his feature debut, inevitably leads to movie quotes from Terms of Endearment and Postcards from the Edge and even an impression of their co-star Dianne Wiest. Please make sure you watch Watts shout the immortal Terms of Endearment line “Give my daughter the shot!”; you won’t regret it.
But Closing Night is more than the sum of its references, starring Paulson as a theater actress warily reconnecting with her family and facing an uncertain future, featuring a dynamite cast and lush visuals pulled straight from some of Hollywood’s great melodramas. After writing the script, Fern tells me, “There was no way I was going to allow somebody else to take this baby away from me. I just had this kind of crazy amount of faith from the beginning. It almost feels like I witnessed the thing unfold and I wasn’t doing anything; it was just happening. I’ll probably need another 10 years to figure it all out.”
Prima Facie: Court Order
Cynthia Erivo has met few challenges she didn’t run directly toward, but even the fearless actress knew she needed a lot of partners to tackle something as large as Prima Facie. “I knew that I had the support to be able to put more people that I needed around me,” she says of starring in the film, director Susanna White’s adaptation of the one-woman play by Suzie Miller. “There was a really wonderful intimacy coordinator, a really lovely therapist to make sure that if I had anything that I needed to spill out, I could spill out. We just have really great people, and I knew that they had created a great team for this as well.”
The story of a lawyer whose life is upended by a sexual assault, Prima Facie includes barnburner courtroom scenes but also quietly devastating ones between Erivo’s Tessa and her boyfriend and eventual perpetrator, Daniel Ings’ Julian. Ings admits he was “terrified by the prospect of creating this character and bringing him to life,” but credits White and Erivo for fostering the environment to make it possible: “At the end of the day, there are no two better people that I could be on set with and go through this process with.”
Comments
Only Ankler All Access subscribers can comment
Already a subscriber?