Last year Robert Pattinson, Paul Giamatti and homegrown stars Emily Hampshire, Sarah Gadon and Kevin Durand gathered in Toronto to shoot Cosmopolis, a dark drama for director David Cronenberg.
On Monday the cast reunited with their director for a press conference I hosted at a downtown Toronto hotel in advance of the movie opening in theatres on Friday.
The tone of the conference was light, and the camaraderie of the cast obvious. Here are some of the highlights:
“I don’t know what I was more excited about,” said Hampshire, “having David bend over me and show Robert how to get a prostate exam, or Rob bending over me and getting one.”
“You don’t have to choose,” quipped Cronenberg.
Cronenberg also offered up some tongue-in-cheek advice for filmmakers. “I use a little Apple program called iDirector. A little green light goes on if it is OK, or a red light if you need to do another take. It’s pretty straightforward. You can all use it.”
Later the director commented on why he wanted his actors to speak the lines of the script exactly as written. “I don’t want the actors to be screenwriters,” he said, “they’re not designed for that.”
“There were no rewrites,” Pattinson chimes in.
“Normally that is the first thing you think about as an actor. And you are so used to just changing it the whole time, on every single movie, that with this, once you suddenly got to the idea that you are not changing anything, the script is fine, it’s you that are the problem, at least you knew one thing.”
Pattinson has a tour-de-force scene at the end of the film, a 22-page two-hander opposite Oscar nominee Paul Giamatti. The Sideways star took a quick break from shooting Rock of Ages in Miami to appear in Cosmopolis.
“Fortunately the other movie wasn’t terribly demanding on me,” Giamatti joked. “It was a musical that I was doing and I didn’t have to sing or dance. I just had to show up and crack jokes.”
“I was panicked about it,” he says of his quick turnaround in Toronto.
“This thing was intimidating. The length and the language. So I bothered everyone on the other movie to read this thing with me. Fortunately Malin Ackerman made a great Rob Pattinson.
“She was fantastic. I was very disappointed when actually I got here and it was Rob.”
Marc-André Grondin has a confession to make. Despite playing a professional hockey player in Goon, he has spent more time on skis than skates.
“I started acting when I was three so I was never able to be on a team, and that’s why I suck at skating,” says the Montréal-born actor. “In high school I didn’t really do many sports but I was a ski instructor for a year.”Although he says, “I don’t come from a family who does sports,” he inherited a love of hockey from his grandmother.
“The only person in my family who religiously watched hockey, every single game, was my mom’s mom, who looked like Queen Elizabeth,” he says. “She was super smooth. I never heard her scream or anything. At seven o’clock we’d be in the kitchen and she’d get up and go to the living room to watch hockey. She knew all the names. I actually started watching hockey with her.”
He also played street hockey with the kids on his block—“I was a goalie,” he says. “I’m born in ‘84 so when I was young the big, big star was Patrick Roy. I had my Patrick Roy jersey and my cheap Canadian Tire Patrick Roy mask and had a baseball glove…”—and “at some point I wanted to be on a hockey team like all my friends, and I told my mom and she said, ‘Well, you can, but you have to choose between the two. You can’t do both. It’s too demanding.’ I chose to continue acting, which I think was a good decision.”
He has been in the public eye steadily after making his debut as a toddler in a Minute Maid orange juice commercial but leads a normal life in Montréal.
“I’ve never had a glamorous life,” he says. “People think it is glamorous because they see one day out of the year when there is a red carpet and pictures and they think you are always living a glamorous life, especially when you’re working in Paris. (Where he just finished shooting an adaptation of Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs.) It seems so glamorous but it is actually a dirty city… dirtier than Montréal. A beautiful city, but dirty.”
One regret of his Goon experience was missing the premier at the theatre that stands where the iconic Montréal Forum once played host to 24 Stanley Cup championships.
“Obviously I was really bummed I couldn’t be there, especially because all my friends were all in town. Yeah, it sucked but it’s part of the game. But at least I had a good reason. I was working. It’s not like I was in jail.”
Usually he plays dramatic parts like his best known role, Zac, a young gay man dealing with homophobia in 1960s and 1970s Quebec in the film C.R.A.Z.Y. “I’ve never liked the fact that people think I’m some kind of dark, dramatic character as a person; that I read poetry before I go to bed and shit like that. I am so not like that.”
Goon offered the chance to show his comedic side, and he hopes now people know “that I’m not as serious. Especially on twitter, because I always tweet ridiculous stuff.”“It’s fun, and I loved doing Goon because of that. I loved, when we premiered it at TIFF, how people were comfortable with me. Friendly. When you do a dark dramatic movie people don’t talk to you at all. You’re by yourself all night.”
Hugh Dancy, right, plays Mortimer Granville, a handsome doctor in 1880s England who cures women of ‘hysteria.’
Actor Hugh Dancy says the pitch for his new movie, Hysteria, was remarkably simple.
“All I got was essentially the tagline,” he says, “The Invention of the Vibrator.”
“I had some awareness of the premise,” he says, “so it wasn’t a complete revelation to me, but what I liked was the tone the movie struck between broad comedy and something much sweeter.”
He plays Mortimer Granville, a young, handsome doctor in 1880’s England, whose specialty is treating women with a medical condition known as hysteria.
Called the “plague of our times,” the now-discredited condition was a catchall to encompass all manner of female infirmities, including insomnia, nervousness, sexual desire, shortness of breath and even “a tendency to cause trouble.”
The condition was treated with… ahem… manual stimulation performed by doctors like Granville, until patients achieved “paroxysm.” “They thought they were shifting the uterus,” he says.
“That basic fact, which is the source of all the comedy and the fun thing in the movie,” Dancy says, “is the one thing that was absolutely accurate.”
Dancy, who has been married to actress Claire Danes since 2009, downplays the shooting of the awkward scenes, even though the doctor’s ‘magic-finger’ treatments provide some of the movie’s most memorable moments.
“We had some very accomplished and very game actresses come in and hoist themselves up onto an operating table and then we shot what you see in the movie.”
But the story doesn’t completely centre around the unorthodox medical treatment. As the actor says, it’s a “witches’ brew” of ideas, including romantic comedy, some social commentary on women’s rights and a history on the tool that revolutionized sexuality. “Any one of them on their own would make for a far less interesting movie,” says the actor, who will next be heard in the animated Dorothy of Oz, co-starring Lea Michele and Patrick Stewart.
“Obviously there are plenty of interesting movies to be made around the subject of women’s rights, but if the bits of this movie that address that had been extrapolated into a whole movie, I don’t think it would have added up to much.”
Canadian actor Luke Kirby, left, stars alongside Tom Wilkinson in The Samaritan.
While working on his new film The Samaritan, actor Luke Kirby found a novel way to shake off the heaviness of the day’s shooting.
“I found the experience of playing Ethan a bit heavy,” he says. “No matter what you tell yourself, it has some sort of impact on you. You sort of have to mark the time you’re there and mark the time that you’re out in some way. Whatever it is. Like going to McDonald’s for breakfast. Which is what it was for me because we were doing night shoots. That was how I stepped out.”
Kirby plays a vengeful con man eager to learn the ropes from his criminal father’s former partner. That man, Foley, is played by one of Kirby’s idols, Samuel L. Jackson.
“He is so iconic and embedded in my memory from when I was becoming a fan of film,” Kirby says. “He shows up in all these movies. He’s there in Do the Right Thing. He’s there in Jurassic Park. Pulp Fiction. All these films that were coming out around that time, so I look up to him a great deal in that regard.
“It was a little bit nerve-wracking to meet him, but he is such a hard worker and so ready to work and such a nice man and so playful, that very quickly it became a partnership of trying to shed light on whoever these characters are.”
But shedding light on a character who exists in the moral shadows was difficult for Kirby.
“I was sort of left a bit troubled by the character of Ethan,” he says. “He’s a bit disturbing and I couldn’t really grasp what his motives were because his actions are so questionable. I think that is what really pulled me in. It made my brain feel all tricky so I wanted to get in there and figure out what was wrong with this kid.”
The Samaritan is a puzzle, a complex story of eight million dollars, ex-cons, con games and murder all wedged between layers of lies and double-crosses.
“I was impressed with how (director David Weaver) was able to make a film that was tonally and visually very dark and yet not have it weighted down or become heavy.
“You don’t want to give away the game,” Kirby continues. “That was sort of the dance of it. I’m glad it comes across.”
Kevin Durand left, says that he and co-star Scott Speedman had a relationship similar to their characters.
On the set of Edwin Boyd: Citizen Gangster art imitated life.
The story of legendary Canadian bank robbers Edwin Boyd and Lenny Jackson is ripe with daring stick-ups, jailbreaks and gunfights, but despite a criminal partnership that made both men household names they weren’t close.
“On a personal level I don’t think there was a whole lot of love there,” says Kevin Durand, who plays Jackson in the film.
“They dealt with things in a different way. Lenny and Edwin had very different ways of approaching their job.”
Durand and co-star Scott Speedman, who plays Boyd, manifested that aloofness to create their characters on the Sault Ste. Marie set.
“We definitely had respect for one another and we liked each other but we didn’t go out of our way to hang out together,” Durand says.
“It was interesting in the way it panned out because I ended up spending a lot of time with Val and Wille, (Joseph Cross and Brendan Fletcher). Those were my guys and we literally became the gang. It was incredible because we were holed up in the north, in the cold, in our little hotel rooms and we became this little tribe of … I want to say thieves but we didn’t go thieving, but it felt very real.”
The story may have come to life for Durand on set, but he was unaware of the Boyd Gang’s exploits before he read the script. “I was really taken aback at how famous they were to another generation,” he says. “My Uncle Tom filled me in at a discussion at a family dinner. He knew all about it and was really excited about me playing Lenny.”
His uncle vividly remembered the gang’s early fifties heyday. “My uncle said, ‘My God, we were so terrified. I remember hiding in my bedroom hoping that the Boyd Gang wasn’t going to come in my window and rob me and kill me.’”
Lenny and Edwin may have been bad guys, but that’s not exactly how Durand sees them.
“The thing about these guys, like most bad guys, is that they are human and they are a product of their environment and their time,” he says. “You see them in the movie with their loved ones and you see the poetry of their lives.”
I meet Mark Ruffalo at a mid-town Toronto hotel to chat about The Avengers not realizing it represented a coming home of sorts for the actor. As we talked about playing the dual role of David Banner and his rage-a-holic alter ego The Hulk I mention one of his first television acting gigs, a guest spot on Due South shot in Hogtown.
“I stayed at this hotel before it was revamped,” he says. “It was pretty low-end back then.”
Judging by the fancy-shmancy Lobster Grilled Cheese on the room service menu the hotel is in better shape these days, and so is Ruffalo’s career. The Oscar nominated actor is about to enjoy his biggest box office stint ever, despite having recently moved his family away from what he calls “the machinery” of Hollywood.
“Sometimes roles reflect where you are in your life,” he says. “This came along and I tried to come up with every reason why I shouldn’t do it, but I was still interested in it.”
He saw a parallel between himself and the character.
“I ran away like Banner. I have this beast that’s inside me that is celebrity and fame.
And this thing I have been on the run from has a tremendous amount of power, which if it is used right could actually have a positive effect in the world. And reach an audience.”
That means making more of the kind of movies Ruffalo specializes in — indie dramas with real characters and situations. In the meantime, however, he has a blockbuster to promote, which involves the drudgery of answering the same questions over and over again.
“The big one,” he says, “which I think has been asked the most is ‘Which superhero power would you have?’ Basically you have a choice between flying and being invisible. Then Scarlett added teleporting, which I thought was a cool one. Now mine is to be able to turn into anything I wanted at any given moment. I could be a river. I could be a cheeseburger with a beautiful girl eating me.”
He doesn’t care much for having to answer those kinds of questions, but would jump at the chance to revisit the Hulk.
“Let’s do Planet Hulk! He won’t let Banner have his body back! There’s this huge existential fight going on. It’s not The Hulk versus the World, it’s the Hulk versus Banner and Banner versus the Hulk inside himself.”
Hard Core Logo is as beloved a movie as this country has ever produced. Bruce McDonald’s 1996 punk rock road trip movie illustrates the better-to-burn-out-than-to-fade-away ethos in memorable style. It played at Cannes, made Hugh Dillon a film star and gave Canadian punk band Billy Talent their name.
So why did McDonald take almost fifteen years to make Hard Core Logo 2?
“It’s a hard question to answer because there isn’t a lot of logic to it,” he says. “It was more, ‘Wow, we had fun making the first one. Let’s go back for the fun of it.’ Then it was actually just getting around to doing the work. That’s the long time aspect of it, getting the energy to actually do the work.”
Fate also played a role.
“Timing is a sort of series of triggers where the world seems to offer up elements,” he says. “When I met Care (Failure, Die Mannequin lead singer and star of HCL2), I thought she seems to be a female version of Hard Core Logo. Meeting her added this curveball to the world. If we go back there what are we going to do? And suddenly she helped answer that question.”
The new film doesn’t pick up where the last one so notoriously left off—number one’s closing moments are as shocking as they memorable–but instead riffs off the spirit of the original, literally. Care Failure is a punk rock singer who may be possessed by the spirit of Joe Dick, the character Dillon played in the original.
“If you had to genre-ize it,” McDonald says, “it would be a personal-doc-rockumenatry-ghost-story. When you are dealing with ghosts and spirits suddenly you’re kind of opening a door to bigger questions—spooky questions, mortality questions.”
Hard Core Logo 2 has a much different feel than the original, but McDonald hopes fans will follow along.
“There are echoes of the past but it was not a direct aim at the past,” he says. “I was wifeless and childless and now there’s a big change. I think a lot of people who were fans of the first movie are different now as well. Your current state of being is reflected in the things you are interested in and the stories you are telling.”
In the end McDonald hopes the movie provides “good laughs, awesome music and that little reminder that life is beautiful.”
At six-feet, two-inches with all-American good looks (even though he was born in Vancouver), Alexander Ludwig doesn’t look like a super villain. But to fans of The Hunger Games he is the baddest baddie of them all, Cato, the brute from District 2.
“He was born and raised a killer and that’s all he knew how to do,” says the 20-year-old actor.
“But he’s not your everyday villain. There’s a lot more substance and depth to this guy. You can tell he’s had a tortured life.”
Trained as a killer, Cato has spent his whole life preparing for his turn in The Hunger Games, a kind of murderous reality show.
“I’m playing the most feared guy in the arena so I didn’t know how I was going to be received by everyone else in the cast,” he says of his co-stars Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson. “I was cautious about it, but everyone was amazing.”
One thing is for sure; he made an impression on one stunt man.
“I hit a stunt guy across the face with the butt end of a rubber bat when I was filming,” he says, “but once you do that you have keep going because they’re going to kick your ass if you don’t. ‘What are you doing? That was the perfect sell because you actually hit me.’ I felt so bad.”
He says that despite the movie’s dark subject matter and the odd bruised stunt man, the mood on set was light.
“It is important to have contrast when the material is so dark. There’s all this tense energy and right after they yell, ‘Cut’ you can breathe.”
He’s also breathing a little easier now the movie is done and fans have embraced him.
“I have been so, so happy about the way I have been received because it could go either way,” he says.
“Everyone’s been very excited to see me and meet me. No one has said, ‘Screw you, Cato!’ I hope it stays like this. Everyone likes being liked and I chose this role knowing that it could go the other way.”
“I’m just riding this crazy experience. You really can’t think about it because you don’t know what to expect. Every day is a new experience.
I walked out of my hotel room this morning and there were fans outside. I can’t believe this is happening to me. It’s wild.”
SIDEBAR: “Everyone’s been very excited to see me and meet me. No one has said, ‘Screw you, Cato!’ I hope it stays like this. Everyone likes being liked and I chose this role knowing that it could go the other way.” Actor Alexander Ludwig, on playing the evil Cato in The Hunger Games.
SIDEBAR: How did Seann William Scott like filming just north of home?
“I expected it to be like Minnesota, but the girls were hotter in Winnipeg,” he says. “They dress better and they’re a little more hip. I was confused. Minnesota is just below. How’d they get so hip? I think they just eat better. They’re not stuffing cheese curds down their throats.”
Seann William Scott is best known for playing Steve ‘Stifmeister’ Stifler in the American Pie series of movies. The character was a hard partying lug-head, who, according to the direct-to-DVD sequel Band Camp, became a porno director.
His specialty in films like Road Trip, Dude, Where’s My Car? and The Dukes of Hazzard is playing hapless stoners and lug-heads so it may surprise you that his DVD player is currently hosting La Vie en Rose. That’s right, the life story of singer Édith Piaf.
“That may be my favourite movie of all time,” he says.
I tell him I once interviewed the movie’s star Marion Cotillard.
“Is she hot?” he asks. “I have such a huge crush on her. She’s got a boyfriend though. I went on the computer and looked up who she’s dating. A serious boyfriend for a long time. Sucks.”
That’s the Seann William Scott audiences know and love. As an actor he usually finds the unexpected angle on a joke, and knows how to reel the viewer in.
We have a laugh before moving on to talk about his new film Goon. He plays a hockey enforcer even though he didn’t grow up with the sport. “I’m more of a fan now,” he says. “When I grew up in Minnesota I played baseball, football and basketball. So in the wintertime that’s what I played, which is odd, because it’s Minnesota. All my friends played hockey and I was always envious because all the girls liked the hockey players. Nobody came to the basketball games.”
“Since the movie I have a greater appreciation of it now because it is so intense. I love hockey now. I think the relationship between the players is way cool.
“The guys are just closer and there is a sense of humour about it. Maybe it’s a more manly sport than basketball … I’m sure a lot of basketball players won’t appreciate that.”
Last year Robert Pattinson, Paul Giamatti and homegrown stars Emily Hampshire, Sarah Gadon and Kevin Durand gathered in Toronto to shoot Cosmopolis, a dark drama for director David Cronenberg.
