Director Ridley Scott says his new film, The Martian, is much more realistic than his other, classic space dramas.
“The fantasy of space,” he said, “which is now also a reality, is a marvellous platform and a form of theatre. Honestly, almost anything goes. But, if anything goes whether you do a play, a book or a film, you’ve got to actually make your own rule book and stick within the confines of the rules you make. So, if I’m doing space fantasy like Alien or Prometheus, I’ve got to draw up the sidelines of the rule book and stick within them. It’s still a fantasy because it’s never going to happen. (The Martian) is a lot easier because, actually, you can lean very heavily on the science in the book. This was a much more realistic movie.”
That realism stems from source novel by Andy Weir, a self-professed science geek who worked to ensure that the story of Mark Watney, an astronaut who survives after being left for dead on Mars, felt genuine.
“The basic structure of the Mars program in the book is very similar to a plan called Mars Direct, though I made changes here and there,” he said, in a Q&A on the Penguin Random House website. “It’s the most likely way that we will have our first Mars mission in real life. All the facts about Mars are accurate, as well as the physics of space travel the story presents. I even calculated the various orbital paths involved in the story, which required me to write my own software to track constant-thrust trajectories.”
As research the actors met with representatives from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the European Space Agency.
“I got to go to the JPL in Pasadena and meet with all the robotics guys and see the Curiosity Rover and do virtual reality to be on Mars and see what that would be like,” said Jessica Chastain, who plays the commander of the Mars mission. “Then I went to Houston and met with Tracy Caldwell Dyson, who’s an astronaut and talked to her.”
The cast says filming the zero gravity and space walk scenes involved careful planning and wirework to make them look authentic. “It’s choreographed to within an inch of its life and we’re just along for the ride,” said Chastain. “It feels very much like a dance and there is choreography to it,” adds Kate Mara, “but, once you do it, you really do feel like a little kid.”
The former House of Cards star says Scott was enthusiastic about shooting those scenes. “Maybe he was just faking it really well (but he) seemed just as excited as we did when were doing the scenes floating through the air.”
Matt Damon, who demonstrated another technique to achieve the look of weightlessness on screen at The Martian TIFF press conference — standing on one leg while slowly waving his hands through the air — said that,“one of the things that is fun about making movies and (also) totally, totally ridiculous is that we are grownups doing this.”
Canadian horror — and I don’t mean when a Zamboni breaks down just before your ice time, but the kind of scary movies we make — tends to go against the grain. Movies like Ginger Snaps, Cannibal Girls and the squirmy body terror of David Cronenberg bring fresh points of view to established mythologies to breathe new life into old genres.
In 2008 director Bruce McDonald did just that with the bio-terror freakout, Pontypool. The story of a God Bug that turns people into zombies barely gives us a glimpse of the walking dead, instead replacing the gore with brain matter, making it one of the smartest undead movies in years.
He’s genre-bending again, this time in Hellions, a home invasion survival tale with a demonic twist. McDonald says Canadian filmmakers mess with traditional formulas for two reasons. The first is practical.
“The script, when I first read it, read easily like a 40-day shoot, $5-million movie,” he says. “But then you get the news that you only have 20 days and less money. There’s no choice but to subvert and say, ‘We have to now begin with this established premise and show a world we kind of know, but subtly we have to make some different kinds of choices.’
“Hellions was much more of an action picture, in a sense, but you need time to make action. A sequence will work much better in 25 shots than in three shots. That’s the practical nature of handmade Canadian cinema. We don’t have the big machine but we do have some smart people and we know how to do it. That does create a spin on things. You’re outside the gates of Hollywood and when the parents are away the kids will play.”
The second reason? “Canadians are naturally mischievous and like to f— with people,” he laughs.
McDonald’s extensive resume includes Canadian classics like Hard Core Logo and Highway 61, but it’s not heavily weighted to horror, even though he says Oct. 31 gave him his “Mr. Entertainment Gene.”
“I have loved Halloween more than any other holiday since I was young,” he says. “I think it was my first theatre. My first way into this entertainment world I love so much. I wasn’t Catholic so I didn’t get to the ceremonies of the Catholic Church and the robes and the incense and the priests and visions of hell. For a little Protestant kid from the suburbs, Halloween was the best.”
What would you do if Robert De Niro cut short your conversation with a quick, “I’m not doing this, darling,” and exited? If you’re Radio Times journalist Emma Brockes you write about it and watch your article go viral.
As unpleasant as the encounter may have been — he objected to the “negative inference” of her questions, she called him condescending — it did exactly what it was meant to do, generate buzz for De Niro’s upcoming film The Intern.
Who won? I’ll give the edge to Brockes who, when faced with a bad situation, turned De Niro’s lemons into lemonade and earned just as much press as the touchy actor.
De Niro took some blowback for his behaviour. Daily Mail columnist Piers Morgan wrote, “If I’d been her, I’d have slapped him ’round his smug little chops,” adding the Goodfellas star is “renowned as the rudest, most difficult and frankly obnoxious star to interview, possibly in the history of planet Earth.”
I think Morgan overstates his case. De Niro isn’t the worst — anyone who has ever done a movie junket knows Tommy Lee Jones is the crankiest, most soul destroying interview ever — he’s just a reticent interview, who, according to director Nancy Myers, doesn’t want “to expose himself all the time.”
De Niro isn’t alone in the chat-and-dash sweepstakes. Robert Downey Jr. and Quentin Tarantino bolted on Krishnan Guru-Murthy with the Avengers: Age of Ultron actor later calling the Channel 4 news presenter a “syphilitic parasite.” Robert Pattinson, Naomi Campbell and Russell Crowe have also done runners on the press.
So why submit to promotional interviews at all? Contractual obligation has much to do with it, but beyond that, they’re good for the movie. Daniel Radcliffe, star of Harry Potter, Horns and the upcoming Victor Frankenstein, once told me no matter how famous the actor, anyone who doesn’t get out and pump their film up to the press is making a huge mistake.
As a result everyone does them and while it’s easy to look at De Niro or Downey as spoiled brats, I’m surprised walkouts don’t happen more often.
It must get brutally dull answering the same questions over and over, particularly when they are of the “Of all your leading ladies who was the best kisser?” variety.
How bad can it get in the interview suites?
Once a talking head proudly told me she wrote new lyrics for Beyoncé’s hit song Survivor… “My name’s Beyoncé/ I’m in Goldmember/ You’re watching blah blah on blah blah blah…” and asked the superstar to sing them as a promo for her television station. If I were Beyoncé I would have exited stage left without a song on my lips.
I remember one “reporter” asking George Lucas “whether Dark Vader was a good guy or a bad guy.” If I were Lucas I would have hitched a Millennium Falcon ride out of there.
Recently I heard Tom Cruise try and answer the question, “What kind of stunt would you do to impress a girl?” If I were Cruise I would have grabbed the side of the nearest plane and jetted out of there.
As for De Niro, Brockes graciously says she has sympathy for him “because nobody wants to be there for these choreographed junket interviews.”
De Niro wasn’t quite as kind, but at least he called her “darling” and not “syphilitic parasite.”
No less an authority than Variety called War Room filmmakers Alex and Stephen Kendrick the “Steven Spielbergs of Christian cinema.” Modestly budgeted religious dramas Fireproof, Courageous and War Room, which recently unseated Straight Outta Compton to take the top of the U.S. box office and now opens in Canada this week, have connected with an audience who feels underserved by traditional Hollywood fare.
“Christians like a well told story,” says Alex on the line from his native Georgia. “What we don’t like is when our saviour’s name is abused or taken in vain or our morals trashed so that keeps us away from many movies. It’s amazing to me that if Hollywood knew how many movies we stayed away from on purpose because of some of the offensive aspects they would change because it means much more money for them.
“We want well told stories and that’s what we want to do. The only difference is that my brothers and I try to make movies that leave the audience with something more than just entertainment or eye candy. We want to leave them with hope and inspiration and a reminder that God is real and he loves them and that he has a plan for their lives. That is what’s most important to us, so I think the audience that is responding to War Room is resonating with that.”
War Room, the story of a woman who learns to solve marital problems through the power of prayer, is the highest grossing faith based film since Heaven Is for Real made almost $100 last year.
“We prayed that it would do something we did not expect. We’re hearing so many reports where the people will stay in the theatres or in the hallways of the theatres and pray after they’ve seen the movie. I’m talking about across racial and denominational lines. It’s been extraordinary.
“From a filmmaker’s standpoint we did not expect this. Our films in the past have been at number four at the box office and have had strong results but nothing like this. We prayed for God to do something extraordinary, and now we’re seeing it happen, part of me says we can’t be surprised at God, I can only be surprised at a movie on a human level doing this well.”
In Black Mass, Dakota Johnson has a high profile role as the steely-but-sweet girlfriend to notorious gangster James “Whitey” Bulger but for much of her life she was simply known as a child of Hollywood, the daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson.
Despite an acting career that stretches back to 1999, the 25-year-old became a sensation just last year when she landed the lead role in one of the most anticipated films of the decade.
She beat out half of young Hollywood to play Anastasia Steele in the fastest selling R-rated title ever, Fifty Shades of Grey. She bared all, physically and emotionally; and became famous enough to have designers create clothes for her and an avalanche of interesting scripts to tumble her way. She’ll soon be seen in a Fifty Shades sequel and a remake of the legendary Italian horror film Suspiria.
This week she stars opposite her 21 Jump Street co-star Johnny Depp — they appeared in the 2012 film — as Lindsey Cyr, mother of Bulger’s son and the only person in South Boston who would stand up to the infamous killer.
Cyr is still alive but Johnson didn’t think it was a good idea to meet with her.
“It would have been if my goal had been to be extremely accurate but my goal was to bring out a different side of Jimmy. We talked about meeting her but we decided that it would have added a bunch of components. You wouldn’t see them. You wouldn’t see the stories she was telling because it wasn’t part of our story.”
Instead she studied footage of the former diner waitress and lawyer’s assistant.
“I did as much research as was available to me,” she says, “but the majority of the footage I found on her was pretty recent and it was her looking back on her time with Jimmy Bulger.
“Obviously the time that we see them together (in the film) is when she is quite young. A lot of that came from working it out with (director) Scott Cooper and Johnny.”
In her most intense scene she stares down and out-manoeuvres the controlling gangster after personal tragedy strikes the couple.
“There was a very heavy atmosphere on set but because Johnny was really not himself, he was a completely different person and because I’m not a mother and have never experienced anything as profoundly devastating as losing a child, I think we both completely slipped away from ourselves. That allowed us to create the scene the way it was.”
On acting: Edgerton portrays former FBI agent as a ‘bad dude’
Joel Edgerton didn’t meet the inspiration for his character in Black Mass, former FBI agent John Connolly.
“He’s alive and with us, albeit in federal prison and a little hard to reach,” said the Australian actor. The real-life Connolly was convicted of racketeering and obstruction of justice charges stemming from his relationship with gangster James “Whitey” Bulger.
“His version of events doesn’t line up with our version…. I felt like it was a little unfair to go and visit him in federal prison and say, ‘You stay in here while I’m over here making you look like a bad dude.’ It felt like it wasn’t a very genuine thing to do.”
Black Mass sees Johnny Depp playing Jimmy ‘Whitey’ Bulger, a crime lord-turned-FBI-informant who ruled South Boston and was also the inspiration for Jack Nicholson’s character in The Departed.
Bulger was a community minded cold-blooded killer. He loved his neighbourhood, kids, cats and choking people to death with his bare hands.
Depp says “a responsibility to history and truth to some degree” was very important to him going into the project.
“When you’re playing someone who exists or existed,” he says, “there’s a tremendous kind of amount of responsibility, at least for me, no matter whether they’re deemed good or bad or whatever. You have a responsibility to that person.”
The fifty-two year old actor’s performance is already earning early Oscar buzz for the chilling authenticity he brings to a man described in the film as “ripened psychopath.”
Director Scott Cooper says, “I don’t think people come to narrative features for the facts, or for truth. I think you go to documentaries for that. What you do come to narrative features for is psychological truth, emotion and deep humanity. I did not want to make a film strictly about criminals who happened to be humans. I wanted to make a film about humans who happened to be criminals.”
Like many underworld figures, Bulger created his own mythology based on his exploits, making it difficult for co-screenwriter Mark Mallouk and Cooper to discern what was true and what wasn’t.
“Jimmy Bulger had his version of the truth which was different from (accomplice) Stephen Flemmi’s,” said the director, “that was different from (henchman) Kevin Weeks and (hitman) John Martorano. I had to determine what was the story I was going to tell… and tell it as accurately as I could from a very emotional place.”
It’s a hard-edged tale to be sure, fuelled by Bulger’s violent and grim behaviour, but Depp found it best not to judge the character.
“I don’t think any of us wake up in the morning and say, ‘I’m so evil. I’m so horrible,’” Depp said. “I approached James Bulger as a human being, who’s multi-faceted and did have a side to him that was human and loving.”
Depp’s performance and the work of his co-stars Dakota Johnson and Joel Edgerton among others, ensure that Black Mass is a complex study of human behaviour, but hopefully, according to Mallouk, not a glamorous one.
“None of wanted anyone walking out of the theatre to go, ‘I want to be Whitey Bulger,’” said Mallouk. “You feel that way after Scarface or Goodfellas or after The Godfather, and I love those movies, but there is a responsibility to not do that here. It feels more like Donnie Brasco. We did not want to create more fuel for the Whitey Bulger myth.”
Cooper says his responsibility as a filmmaker and storyteller was with “the victim’s families because Jimmy Bulger and the men we chronicle in this film left a deep emotional scar on the city of Boston that is still very fresh and widely felt.
“I care what they think about the film and I hope I didn’t trivialize these events.”
In real life Bulger, now eighty-six years old and serving two life terms plus five years at a penitentiary in Florida, was convicted of racketeering, money laundering, extortion, weapons charges and was found to have been involved in 11 murders.
“You talk about six degrees of Kevin Bacon,” says Cooper. “In South Boston or Boston in general it’s two degrees of Whitey Bulger. Everybody had a story and everybody knew him.”
In the 1950s, author Robert Schnakenberg’s father was the letter carrier who delivered jazz legend Louis Armstrong’s mail. “Louis would say, ‘Hi Mr. Mailman’ and sometimes Louis and his wife would invite my dad in for coffee. That is sort of my claim to fame.”
It also began a career Schnakenberg says involves “lurking around the edges of famous people.” The author of more than a dozen books, including The Encyclopedia Shatnerica and Christopher Walken A-to-Z, Schnakenberg’s latest is The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray, a weighty tome analyzing the life and career of everybody’s favourite Ghostbuster.
“They’re more history books than puff pieces about celebrities,” he says on the line from his Brooklyn home. “I wanted to approach them from a quasi or mock academic perspective and treat them as if they were historic artifacts rather than just pop culture icons.”
Murray was a perfect subject for the pop historian. “I had done two previous A-to-Zs and was looking around for a third person to round out the trilogy. I had visions of a three volume slip case edition in my head.”
Murray fit the criteria. “Who has a long career? Who has left a paper trail of interviews and profiles? Who has an off-camera persona that is just as interesting as what they do onscreen? It just clicked last year. He reached a point of saturation with all these viral videos going around that (the publisher) said, ‘Let’s do the book now.’”
The volume provides an overview of Murray’s long and varied time in the public eye. From critical appreciations of his films, to interesting trivia, The Big Bad Book of Bill Murray spans decades of fascinating behaviour.
“His career provides a lot of entry points for people who want to get into him,” says Schnakenberg. “If you came of age in the ’70s, the way that I did, you remember the Saturday Night Live version of Bill Murray. If you were 13 in 1984 you probably think of him as Ghostbusters Bill Murray. If you were a proto-hipster in the ’90s your image is probably the guy in all the Wes Anderson movies. Now people know him as the dishevelled guy who crashes people’s parties.”
The point is, for almost forty years Bill Murray has been a constant in our lives. “Bill Murray never had to come back because he never went away,” says the author. “He was always cool; just cool in different forms over the years.”
The backstage room at the TIFF Bell Lightbox’s press conference area is a beehive of activity.
“Is George here yet?”
“Is that Johnny vaping in the corner?”
It’s a place where no last names are necessary and the star wattage is blinding. Actors, directors, publicists and gofers mingle while air kisses, handshakes and Hollywood hugs are exchanged.
This year the Toronto International Film Festival is mounting 11 press conferences featuring everyone from Matt Damon and Sandra Bullock to George Clooney and Keith Richards.
I’m hosting four of them — Demolition, The Martian, Our Brand is Crisis and Black Mass — with, as MGM used to brag, “More stars than are in the heavens.”
Despite the buzzy nature of the events, backstage is a casually chaotic place where actors get caught up with one another before taking the stage.
Matt Damon made the rounds, glad-handing with his The Martian cast mates, many of whom he hadn’t met because he spent 90 per cent of his of screen time alone, stranded on Mars.
The business of the press conferences happens on stage. Moderating these things provides a fascinating glimpse into both sides of the publicity machine.
Ideally the press conferences are a reciprocal event: Reporters ask questions to actors and filmmakers they might not otherwise have access to, and in return the stars get publicity for their films. It’s a pretty simple but often unpredictable transaction.
Gone are the days of the legendary “journalist” who asked all her questions in rhyme, but for every sensible inquiry about the movie, there is inevitably another off-the-wall query that leaves panel lists either annoyed or scratching their heads.
At the Our Brand is Crisis conference someone asked Bullock about her character’s grown-out roots. The Oscar winner replied as best she could and when she finished, Clooney chimed in, “Aren’t you glad you asked that question?”
Later she shut down a silly query regarding how she keeps her bum as toned as it is in the film. “It’s so sad that you just want to talk about the butt,” she said, before tersely adding that leg lifts are the secret to posterior pertness.
Not that the attendees are the only ones to pull a gaffe or two. During the Demolition conference, I asked Chris Cooper a long, rambling question about his character. He seemed genuinely perplexed, and you know what? I was, too. Sometimes you can overthink these things.
Later at The Martian presser, there were 13 people on the stage, everyone from Michael Pena to Damon, Scott, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Jessica Chastain, and in the shuffle I made the horrifying mistake of forgetting to ask the great Sean Bean a question and didn’t realize it until we were out of time.
Who doesn’t acknowledge Lord Eddard Stark?
Me, idiotically. Next year I promise to go to him first and frequently.
Like millions of people I remember exactly what I was doing the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001.
When the first plane hit the World Trade Center I was walking down Bloor Street in Toronto, on my way to the InterContinental hotel to do a day of Toronto International Film Festival coverage.
I didn’t register anything unusual in the air until I got to the hotel. People on the street may have been walking and talking a bit faster, acting a bit more animated than usual, but not so that I noticed.
Entering the hotel was a different story. The halls were eerily silent.
What was usually a cheery beehive of activity with camera crews, stressed publicists and actors roaming around, was now quiet, still.
At 9 a.m. I walked into our makeshift interview suite on the third floor just as the second plane hit. My crew were sitting around the television. Sobs from the rooms next to ours broke the stunned silence.
What the hell was going on?
What was going on was a change in all our lives; a new era where the unthinkable became possible.
It was a confusing day. With no details we, like many others, pressed on with the business at hand.
David Lynch came and went, smoking American Spirits and chatting about his film Mulholland Drive.
A handful of others walked the halls, unsure of what else to do, keeping previously scheduled interview slots.
When I mentioned to New York actress Adrienne Shelly that I couldn’t reach my girlfriend, who was living in Manhattan, she loaned me her cellphone.
“For some reason it seems to get through,” she said.
It did, and after a quick call to make sure she was safe, the full impact of what had just happened sunk in. Sometimes the small stuff, the personal things — like the anxious voice at the other end of the line — help you understand the magnitude of a grim situation.
We cancelled the rest of the day but I stayed put, talking to my hotel neighbours, most of whom were Americans, many from New York.
There were hugs, tears and bafflement in equal measure. TIFF elected to cancel many of the day’s events and tone down the glitz for the rest of the festival.
But the show would go on and in that moment art won over terror.
What we began to hear were stories from New York filmmakers who, with all flights cancelled to and from the city, were loading cans of film into their cars and driving to the festival.
It wasn’t about vanity and it wasn’t about ego.
It was about filmmakers, the storytellers of our times, the people who document our lives, not being silenced.
The rest of the festival was a sombre affair but there was a steeliness uncommon at the usually glitzy event. We gathered, watched films, communicated and healed, sending a message that the uncertainty of the times would not prevent us from expressing ourselves, from sharing stories.
Fourteen years later I think back to those days and realize that terror didn’t win on 9/11.
As long as we don’t allow ourselves to go silent, as long as we breathe life into our stories and experiences on film and elsewhere, we won’t and can’t live in fear.
