The cast of the new Garry Marshall film, New Year’s Eve, had a great time making the movie, but haven’t always had the best time on December 31st.
Josh Duhamel says the key to enjoying the night is keeping “expectations low” and leaving by 10:30 p.m.
Hector Elonzo, who has appeared in all 17 of Marshall’s films, agrees.
“Expectations low, definitely,” he says. “I did have one lousy New Years, because I expected something from it.” He tells a story about being a musician “in the days of rocks and caves, before they knew the world was round.”
His jazz quartet scored a show — “New Year’s Eve was the big gig,” he says, “that’s when you made $50!” — to discover the audience didn’t go for their New York brand of cool jazz. “They were like an oil painting looking at us. That was a big let down for us”
“When I stopped wanting my New Year’s Eve to be perfect is when it started working out right,” chimes in Hillary Swank, who plays the producer of the Times Square New Year’s Eve show in the all-star film. “When I was young I was always looking for the best party to ring in the New Year, and I always ended up in a car saying, (sadly) ‘Happy New Year.’”
“I got to kiss the girl I really liked, and then she turned around and kissed seven other people,” says director Garry Marshall. “Not a good night.”
But not all his end of the year experiences have been bad. In the early ’60s he met his wife Barbara at a New Year’s Eve party, and the two are still married. In fact she has a cameo in the movie playing a nurse.
Abigail Breslin may have an Oscar nomination under her belt, but that doesn’t mean she can do whatever she wants on New Years.
“My parents are cool,” says the 15-year-old actress, “they let me do things.” But would they let her behave like her on-screen character and go to the biggest New Year’s party on earth?
“I was saying the other day in an interview, ‘I’m not really sure my mom would let me do New Year’s Eve in Times Square.’
And she was like, ‘You’re right. I wouldn’t.’ So I don’t think that’s going to be happening any time soon.”
“It has just been a very, very intense year,” says screenwriter Abi Morgan. In addition to the release of Shame this week, her name also appears on the scripts for the new Meryl Streep film The Iron Lady and six episodes of the British television series The Hour.
“I just keep my head down and write,” she says. “The hardest thing for a writer is if you don’t have anyone with a deadline waiting for you. It’s someone saying, ‘Deliver. I’m interested. I want to see what you’ve got.’ I think I’m a natural people pleaser so I like going, ‘Yes, I’m coming.’ It appeals to that part of me.
“I don’t have writer’s block as such. I certainly can write rubbish. I think your b******t barometer has to go up when you write every day because you have to stop and think, ‘Is this working? Is it good?’ You have to stop yourself from using the same rhythm or the same bad stage directions.
“So you know I have to shake up my writing quite a lot.”
Shake up, indeed. The Iron Lady is a portrait of hard line British PM Maggie Thatcher, The Hour a 1950s set newsroom drama, while Shame is a modern day look at sex addiction and the role the Internet plays in comodifying pornography.
“We didn’t set out to write a film about sex addiction,” she says of her collaboration with director Steve McQueen. “Our starting point was how the Internet can draw you in.”
She calls Shame star Michael Fassbender “the most brilliant choice” to play Brandon, a sex dependent New Yorker, because “he’s so fearless.”
The film wasn’t originally written with Fassbender in mind, but after the second draft director McQueen suggested the actor. The two had worked together in the festival hit Hunger, and Morgan says, “Steve and him have such an incredible relationship.”
The apple, as they say, doesn’t fall far from the tree. Not only has Kiefer Sutherland followed the famous footsteps of his parents, Donald Sutherland and Shirley Douglas, into the acting biz but he seems to have also inherited some of the fire of his grandfather.
When I compliment Sutherland on his glasses, a pair of retro-looking heavy frames, his passion flares.
“In the 30’s Roosevelt made a deal between Moscot and the federal government,” he says. “Anybody who needed glasses during the great depression got these glasses for free. They made millions of them. So anyone who says there was never a National Healthcare in the States is a liar. That was the first national healthcare program where they provided glasses for free for the entire country.”
Echoes of his grandfather, Tommy Douglas the father of Canadian health care, hang in the air.
He’s equally passionate when he speaks of his admiration for his latest director, Lars Von Trier, the controversial filmmaker behind Melancholia.
“I have a great affection for Lars,” he says. “I’ve done eighty some odd films. I’ve done one hundred and ninety eight episodes of 24, which is the equivalent of another 100 movies and this was the most unique experience I’ve had as an actor.”
Von Trier, the outspoken Danish director broke down the way his actors were used to working, doing away with lengthy rehearsals and traditional blocking.
Sutherland explains how, on his first day of shooting, Von Trier threw him and co-star into a complicated scene. “He walks Charlotte Gainsbourg and I to a door. He says, ‘OK this is the room. I want you to play this scene on the other side of this door. We’re all set and ready to go, and you just go do it. ‘
When Sutherland objected Von trier told him to, “Stop talking.”
“We went and did the scene and he deconstructed everything I’ve learned as a technical actor,” he says. “John Hurt has my favorite line in the entire movie. He’s dancing and I’m walking with all the drinks for the table. As I walk by he says, ‘I have no idea what I’m doing!’ We all felt like that. I don’t know what I’m doing either! And that’s exactly how Lars wanted it. That was the spirit of it.
“It’s something that I will carry with me for the rest of my career.”
“One thing I am drawn to unconsciously is the hero myth,” says director George Miller.
Looking over his resumé it’s easy to see what he means. His creations, like Mad Max, who ruled a dystopian Australian landscape from the driver’s seat of a Ford Falcon XB Coupe and Babe, the king of the barnyard, are agents of change in their own worlds.
In his new film, Happy Feet Two, the follow up to the Oscar winning dancing penguin musical of 2006, you’ll have to look closely to see his heroes, because they are the smallest creatures in the movie.
They are Bill and Will (Matt Damon and Brad Pitt), two bug-eyed characters who can only be described as existential shrimps. Actually, they’re krill – a minute marine crustacean.
“Happy Feet Two is not a saga,” he says. “It’s not the hero myth, except from the point of Will the Krill. From his point of view the world is epic because they are so tiny. He goes off on a classic hero myth, going out, looking into the unknown, confronting great dangers and bringing a boon back to his world.
“Because the film takes place in a truncated time period it was important to make it epic from some point of view. From the krill’s point of view it’s a very big world — universe — out there. We saw them like space explorers wanting to go out beyond their world.”
The krill may leave their flock — the “krillions” of krill they live with — to go on a journey, but Miller says the point of the story has more to do with family than heroes.
“They begin by being torn apart in some way,” he says, “and it is only in the coming together that they are able to solve the problem.”
For Miller, Happy Feet Two was a bit of a family affair, but not intentionally. He says he turned to his daughter to write the lyrics of the show-stopping tune Eric’s Opera because he was desperate.
“We had three very well-known writers who have written musicals in Australia to try and write some lyrics and it just wasn’t working,” he says. “It was over elaborate so I called her and said, ‘Can we just sit down together and work through it.’ In two hours she had it, but it was more out of desperation than wanting specifically to work with my daughter.”
I’m tempted to borrow a phrase from MGM to describe the star-studded reception before the first-look screening of J. Edgar on Monday night in midtown Manhattan.
The studio boasted having “more stars than there are in the heavens,” but this wasn’t an MGM party, it was a Warner Bros soirée to celebrate their latest Oscar hopeful, a biopic about the controversial and enigmatic J. Edgar Hoover, who spent five decades as director of the FBI.
To my left 60 Minutes reporter Steve Croft worked the room. In another corner Alan Cummings chatted quietly to friends. David Byrne mixed and mingled and Tower Heist co-star Judd Hirsch snacked on sashimi from the sushi bar.
Behind the food stations framed posters of some of the biggest stars from movie history looked down on the party goers.
They are keepsakes from the Warner Bros legacy; a reminder that the company has making movies for almost as long as there have been movies to make.
Then a real life reminder of that legacy walked into the room. Clint Eastwood, J. Edgar’s director, quietly slipped into the party. Well, as quietly as one of the most iconic movie faces of all time can slip into a room. With him was Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer (“Not Arm and Hammer, but Armie Hammer,” Eastwood jokes) producer Brian Grazier and Oscar winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black.
The weight shifts in the room, as though Clint’s star power has a gravitational pull all its own. At eighty-one he’s more weathered than when he made Dirty Harry a household name, but it is impossible to look a him and not have memories of “Go ahead, make my day…” or the Man with No Name character awakened, and everyone at the party feels it.
Inside the screening room he introduces his J. Edgar actors and creative team. After a long list of names he pauses and says, “that takes my memory as far as it will go.” Holding for the laugh, he continues, “I’ve always been curious about J. Edgar Hoover… and I still am.”
That’s it. Like his characters he’s a man of few words. Or maybe it was the hour. It was only eight o’clock but as someone sitting behind me joked, “He only works from nine to five.”
I guess when you’re a legend you can set your own hours.
The transplanted Scandinavian heartthrob, best known as Eric, True Blood’s sexiest vampire, lives in Los Angeles, but pines for his childhood home.
“I miss my family,” the 6’4 actor says. “They’re all in Stockholm. My parents are divorced but they both live in Stockholm. I have six siblings and they all live in Stockholm. Huge extended family… we’re all very close. So it is tough being that far away.”
Life in his new home has been an adjustment. “It’s been difficult,” he says. “I’ve been there on and off for seven years now. I like California. I like Californians. The weather is great, however, I do miss the seasons. When you’ve been there for a while you realize they do have seasons in California, but the changes aren’t as dramatic as they are in Scandinavia.
“In Sweden you really feel how it changes, and there’s something about that I love. In a weird way you feel how time is moving forward. Sometimes in California I wake up and I don’t know if it is February or June. In Sweden it is so brutal; nature, how it dies and then the rebirth. That kind of cycle. I do miss it. But the grass is always greener because when I’m in Sweden for a winter and it is five months of darkness I’m like, ‘Oh man! Where’s the sun? I wish I was in California.’ So I’m always complaining I guess.”
Weather aside, he doesn’t have that much to complain about these days. True Blood continues to take a bit out of the ratings and his new film, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia — he plays Kirsten Dunst’s husband in this dark end-of-the-world drama — won an award at Cannes. But more than that, shooting the film reunited him with his much-missed family.
“Lars shoots all his movies in Sweden,” says Skarsgård. That meant he got to see his family —“On weekends I had rental cars and I drove up to Stockholm to see my mom and siblings.”— and work with “one of my best friends”— his father, the celebrated Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård.
“I’m at an age now where we’re buddies,” says the thirty-five-year-old Skarsgård. “I have a great deal of respect for him as a human being and as an actor so it was just lovely.”
Tree of Life director Terrence Malick has had an enormous impact on actor Martin Sheen’s life.
“He’s one of the great, great people,” says Sheen, “and one of the most mysterious, wonderful characters.”
Professionally, the director gave Sheen the role that broke him out of the episodic television grind and made him a movie star. As Kit Carruthers in Badlands, Sheen won raves and was set upon a career path that would see him star in Apocalypse Now and win a collection of Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild awards for playing President Bartlet on The West Wing.
Personally, however, Malick’s influence has been even more profound. A formerly lapsed Catholic, Sheen’s faith was restored after meaningful discussions with Malick 30 years ago.
The pair has stayed in touch despite Malick’s notoriously reclusive lifestyle.
“He is the most shy person I have ever met in my life,” says Sheen.
“He was living in Paris years ago and we got reacquainted in 1981. One day we were walking down the street and somebody recognized me and he kept going. I lost him totally! I said, ‘Hey, how are you guys?’ and boom, he was gone.
“He lives in Texas with his wife, who is the love of his life. They grew up together and went to school together but it took two wives in between to get back to that. I adore him.”
The two old friends still engage in deep conversations, says Sheen, and it’s possible that indirectly their tête-à-têtes helped the actor get into his latest film, The Way.
“We talk about family,” Sheen says.
“We talk about spirituality. We talk about the mystery of life.”
All topics covered in the new film.
Directed by his son Emilio Estevez, it gives Sheen his first chance to carry a film since the days of Apocalypse Now.
Describing the movie as a story about “loss, recovery and healing, with some laughs along the way,” Sheen hands in a touching performance as Tom, a man struggling to deal with the death of his son.
What begins as a physical trek on the El camino de Santiago from France to Spain turns into a spiritual pilgrimage as Tom re-examines and rediscovers his faith.
Sheen is out tub-thumping the film to the press, but there is one person he surely won’t be deliberating it with — his friend Malick.
The names Ren and Ariel are touchstones for a generation. In the teen classic Footloose, big city boy Ren (Kevin Bacon) romanced Ariel (Lori Singer) and brought the boogie back to the small town of Bomont, Georgia.
Despite bad reviews, the story of teen rebellion and two-stepping struck a chord with audiences who made it one of the biggest hits of 1984.
Director Craig Brewer knew his new big-screen version had to tread carefully, reinventing the characters without losing what made them popular in the first place.
“I think all of my cast members were able to occupy the characters without there being any sort of mimicry or impersonation of the original,”?he says.
The project had been in development for some time, with big names like Zac Efron attached, but Brewer decided to go a different way.
“If you went in a time machine and sat with me in 1984 when I was 13 and went and saw Footloose, right before the screening happened if you would have asked me, ‘What do you think of Kevin Bacon?’ I would have said, ‘Who?’ That movie made that guy. He was already a talented actor, he just needed a movie to break him into the pop scene.
“You want to see someone new come into town, you want to have that same bit of mystery surround them so I resisted having Ren McCormack being played by a ‘movie star’ because then you get all the baggage of their other movies tied into this one,” he says.
Kenny Wormald, a choreographer and dancer, won the role after a recommendation from Justin Timberlake, who spotted his innate talent when Kenny was a backup dancer for the singer.
For Ariel, Brewer cast the more established Julianne Hough, best known as a Dancing with the Stars champion.
After her initial audition Brewer was relieved.
“I knew I had Ariel. I was excited because I had just seen the birth of a new actress who was really good and really brave,” she said.
Hugh Jackman must be the envy of his drama school’s graduating class. Between the opening of Real Steel this weekend and the end of 2013 he’ll star in six films ranging from The Wolverine’s high octane action and the high notes of Les Misérables to the high comedy of Movie 43.
It seems apt that he’ll also soon be starring in The Greatest Showman on Earth because he can do it all — in between action movies he can out-sing-and-dance anyone on the circuit — but it wasn’t always that way.
“When I started acting I was the dunce of the class,” he says.
Success in school, he says, came because of his work ethic, a trait he picked up from his father.
“He never took one day off in his life,” he says. “Now, he had five kids he was bringing up on his own. If anyone deserved a day off it was my old man, but he never did. I learned that from him.
“There’s always that feeling of, ‘I have to work harder than everybody else. I’m not born Phillip Seymour Hoffman. I’ve got to just work harder and I’m prepared to do it.”
Being the youngest of five children also contributed to his outlook. “I always wanted to do stuff and not be left out,” he says, but adds, “I was quite a fearful kid, which I hated.
“I’ve always had a fear of fear. It’s a weird to think back now but drama school, it is a pressure kind of situation. People get kicked out of drama school. You are constantly being judged on how you are doing, are you progressing, are you not.
“Almost everyday you had to get up and do a monologue. Sing a song. Do it in front of everybody.
“I noticed I was always first. I never wanted to sit there waiting.
“I’m not saying that out of courage. It was too uncomfortable to sit, stewing. I don’t think I’ve told anyone else that.”
Later, fear of unemployment pushed him to expand his talents.
“When I came out of drama school I was like, ‘I’m going to do anything I can just to keep working.’ In drama school you do Shakespeare to movement to circus skills to singing all in one morning. I know a lot of people hated it but I reveled in it. I loved it. It’s weird how it evolved.”
The cast of the new Garry Marshall film, New Year’s Eve, had a great time making the movie, but haven’t always had the best time on December 31st.
