At the beginning of my interview with Bryce Dallas Howard she does something I’ve never experienced before in a celebrity sit-down. Curled up on a coach in Toronto’s Park Hyatt Hote,l the four-and-a-half month pregnant star of The Help does something really un-celebrity-like—she offers to hold the microphone I’m using to record our chat.
It’s a small thing, but it goes a long way to creating a portrait of the down-to-earth Golden Globe nominee, who is best known for roles in blockbusters like Spider-Man 3, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse and Terminator Salvation.
Surrounded by celebrity from birth—her father is TV icon Ron Howard—she has observed stardom up close and has strong opinions about fame—her own and those around her.
“It’s weird that we expect celebrities to behave like they’re so entitled,” she says. “I think it’s because a lot of celebrities do, and that’s just absurd.”
This is coming from someone whose godfather is Henry Winkler, who once had Tom Cruise as a babysitter and first acted at age seven as an extra in one of her dad’s movies.
“I’ve always been kind of fascinated by that subject because while I have closely observed celebrity I have always felt apart from it because I was raised outside of Hollywood,” she says. “I’ve always had an interesting relationship with the idea of what a celebrity is.
“Recently, because of reality television, the notion of celebrity and what people are famous for is changing,” she adds.
I mention stars that parlay sex tapes into a showbiz career and she nods.
“I think unfortunately that is defining our time. I’ve never actually had this thought before, but I think it would be interesting to look back in history and see who the most iconic individuals of that time period were and then look at now, and perhaps be a little bit horrified.”
When I ask if fame is important to her personally she is quick to answer.
“No,” she says emphatically. “Not at all. One of the things I feel most grateful for is that I don’t live the life of a famous person. I could not imagine living a life with paparazzi around me, when you feel like your privacy is being intruded. That would be really terrifying to me.”
Rodman Flender says the hardest part of making Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, a movie about his chat show host pal, was detaching himself from their friendship.
“All of us experience terrible disappointments in our lives and careers,” he says. “We all get jobs and lose jobs but very few of us do it on the front page of the New York Times. So as his friend I wanted to be there for him. However, as a filmmaker I wanted to detach myself. That was difficult for me.”
The pair began to document the creation of O’Brien’s live touring show, a two-hour, all-singing, all-dancing way for the host to thank the fans who stood by him as he was unceremoniously sacked as Jay Leno’s replacement on The Tonight Show.
“I wanted to capture the process of putting this tour together,” says Flender, “to capture Conan at this moment in time, at such a crossroads in his career. To see how the tour evolved and the nuts and bolts of the tour in a kind of Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney, ‘Hey let’s put on a show’ kind of way.
“I never wanted it to be a promotional piece for Conan. I just wanted to capture, in the true, old-school direct cinema style, whatever happened.”
In that spirit the movie reveals an unvarnished portrait of the star.
“People have asked me, ‘Is this the real Conan O’Brien?’ Yes. But so is the guy you see on TV every night. What you see in the movie is the real Conan O’Brien without a script.
“And like a real person, he has real feelings and he has moods and he is kind and generous and he gets tired and cranky at the end of a long day and that is what I think it is to be a human being. It’s interesting to me that so many people have thought, ‘Oh wow, it’s such a negative portrait of him,’ but he doesn’t do drugs, he doesn’t abuse anybody.”
O’Brien’s down-to-earth side is evident in the off-stage footage, particularly in his interactions with fans.
“He really wants to be kind to everybody and really show his appreciation to his fans and everyone who has done so much and stuck by him,” says Flender. “But there is a toll that takes. He is a human being after all. He’s not a machine.”
“Once it’s said and done you’re glad it’s out,” says Dan Whitney, better known to comedy fans as Larry the Cable Guy. “You know, it’s another poster I can hang up in the house. So that’s kind of cool.”
Larry is referring to the poster for Pixar’s Cars 2, which prominently features his character, a tow truck named Mater. The friendly breakdown truck has a major role in the new film, accompanying his best friend, the race car Lightening McQueen, to a World Grand Prix race over seas.
It’s a far cry from his other films—Witless Protection or Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector—which were financially successful but critically lambasted. “I have a joke about this movie,” he says about Cars 2, “It’s the only time you’ll ever see me in a movie with the number two after it.”
This car trip started five years ago when he was offered a small role in the original Cars movie playing a character named Zeb.
“John [Lasseter] tells a great story about how he couldn’t find the right voice,” the 48 year-old comedian says. “They’d been through two or three hundred people and finally he said, ‘Go get that Blue Collar CD. Some of those guys I haven’t heard of before.’ I was the first one up and he dropped everything he was doing in the first thirty seconds and said, ‘That’s my tow truck. Get that guy on the phone.’”
The movie introduced his exaggerated Southern drawl to a whole new audience—kids. His Blue Collar Comedy tours, with fellow “redneck” comics Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall and Ron White, made him a star and one of the highest paid stand-ups in the biz but it wasn’t (and still isn’t) a show for the young ones.
“You have to be over 18 to come to my show,” he says. “I like to not include everybody. Look, if you want to go out with your wife and come see a more adult show with a comedian you like already, then you can come to my show. You can also take the kids to another project that I’ve done. I try to keep a good balance like that.
“I’m all about doing stuff for kids, and I tell everybody this. Eddie Murphy went from doing his stage act, which is 100 times dirtier than mine will ever be, to doing nothing but kid’s stuff. So it can be done. It all started when he had kids. Same with me. Before I had kids I never thought I’d do anything like this.”
He’s continuing to make movies with his children in mind—in January he’ll be starring in The Tooth Fairy 2—but it’s only been recently that his kids—Wyatt and Reagan, ages 3 and 4—caught on that dad was one of their favorite movie characters.
“When they were really little they couldn’t figure two and two together,” he says. “They had no idea but they had a little talking tow truck. You’d hit it and it would go, ‘Git-R-Done!’ or ‘My name’s Mater!’ that kind of stuff. Then one time I hit the thing and then I said it after the toy and they started crying. I don’t know if that freaked them out or what it did. Now, they walk around saying, ‘Mater’s my daddy,’ which is kind of cool. I told my little girl the other day, ‘You know you’re the only girl who can say that Mater’s their dad.’”
Each time I interview someone really famous the questions start.
How’s Gwyneth’s skin? How tall is Brad Pitt? I’ve even been asked what George Clooney smells like. But ever since I hosted a Toronto press event with Justin Bieber to publicize his new movie Never Say Never on Tuesday, the question everyone has asked, and it has been dozens of people, is much more basic. “What’s he like?” everyone wants to know.
I won’t presume to be able to answer the question after only spending a few minutes backstage and 30 or so minutes on stage with the pop prodigy, but I have a few observations based on our short time together.
Firstly, he’s a high-energy kid. Backstage he was a bundle of energy. When he wasn’t tweeting or sharing funny You Tube videos with his stylist Ryan, he was chatting and joking around. “I hope you’re a good translator,” he joked to me as we walked to the stage, “because I’m going to do the whole interview in Spanish.” Then he burst into song. “Feliz Navidad…”
Onstage, luckily he stopped the Christmas carols but showed another aspect of his personality. Less than two years ago he was playing to 40 fans at a water park in Poughkeepsie, New York. Now he can sell out Madison Square Gardens in 22 minutes and he hasn’t forgotten the people who got him there—his fans.
“Where are my fans at?” he asked. “There’s a lot of fans [outside]. Can we bring those fans in? I love you guys with the cameras and stuff, but what’s the point if my fans aren’t here?”
Also, he’s as humble and normal as a pop superstar can be. When I asked him when he first felt famous he said, “I still don’t really notice it. I’m still just a regular teenage boy, living his dream and having a lot of fun.” Later I asked about household chores. “I do clean my room, especially when I’m home at my grandma’s house.”
Lastly, I learned he’s still a proud Canadian, with a taste for a particular icy cocktail not served in his new hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. “I miss Tim Hortons,” he said. “I miss Timmy’s! I miss my Ice Cap.”
So what’s my answer to the burning question, “What’s Justin Bieber like?” Well, he’s just like any other high energy, fan-lovin’ Canadian multi-millionaire 16-year-old pop superstar with a taste for chilled coffee.
The Way Back, a new drama from Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World director Peter Weir, is a sprawling epic with a very personal focus. Set against the backdrop of war, inhumanity and an almost insurmountable challenge, it is about that most personal of things, survival.
Based on a controversial memoir written by Slavomir Rawicz, the film begins with Polish solider Janusz (Jim Sturgess) sent to a hellish Siberian gulag in 1941 on trumped up charges. Sentenced to ten years—a term he knows he won’t survive—he and a group of prisoners, including a grizzled American soldier (Ed Harris) and a violent Russian criminal (Colin Farrell) make a break for it. Their goal? Freedom. The obstacle? A 4000 kilometer walk through the harsh terrain of Mongolia, China and Tibet on the way to India and a new life. Along the way they pick up one more traveler, a young girl (Saoirse Ronan) whose camaraderie helps bond the ragtag band of escapees.
“The book was published in 1956 and called The Long Walk by Sławomir Rawicz,” Peter Weir said on a recent stop in Toronto to promote the movie. “There is no question from documents that later appeared after the fall of the Soviet Empire when KGB documents were briefly available, that yes, Rawicz had been in a gulag. But did he go on the walk or not? Question mark.
“So the first thing I said was, ‘I can’t do a true story called The Long Walk, but I can fictionalize it based on, or inspired by the book and based on true events if I can prove the walk actually happened.’ We got that proof and I felt comfortable going around the Rawicz question and not saying it’s his personal story.”
To add detail to his fictionalized tale Weir says he became deeply immersed in the subject.
“I became somewhat obsessed with it I think, even though I was fictionalizing it,” he says. “[I learned] through deep background reading, through accounts of those who had gone through the situation in one form or another, including Polish prisoners and soldiers who had been caught up, rather like my central character. I then interviewed survivors in Moscow and Siberia and in London and I just crammed as much as I could into the screenplay.”
Weir says that while he strove for absolute authenticity in the film, he had to temper the depiction of life in the gulag for the big screen.
“I did restrain myself from what I was finding in research. Obviously in the worst situations there was a commandant who was a sadist and there were, to a degree, worse situations. So I chose something that I felt was reasonably representative of a number of these hundreds of camps and gulags.”
At the heart of the film is Jim Sturgess as Janusz, the determined and kind-hearted leader of the escapees.
“I’d seen Jim Sturgess for the first time in Across the Universe and thought how well cast he was as a young Beatle as it were,” says Weir. “He has that kind of guilelessness and openness that I needed for my character.
“He’s one to watch. In my film firstly,” he laughs, “and in whatever else is coming up for him.”
Tim Burton’s cell phone ring tone is exactly what you would expect from the man who has directed some of the most atmospheric films of the last two decades. In Toronto this week to promote an exhibition of his art and films at the TIFF Bell Lightbox Burton was mid sentence when his cell phone went off. The eerie wail of a Theremin filled the room.
“Sorry,” he says fumbling to mute the phone. “It scares me every time it rings.”
Turns out the visionary director of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetle Juice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands and most recently, the billion dollar grossing Alice in Wonderland, values his time away from technology, specifically his phone.
“I always try to at least spend time, as much as I can everyday, staring out into space; staring out a window,” he says. “I find that sometimes you get the most ideas and the most feelings when you’re not involved in things you have to do everyday; especially these days when technology is such that you can be reached any time. I try and avoid that.”
He may call spacing out an “important part of the day” but don’t call him a loner. On set he looks forward to working with others.
“Part of the joy of making a movie is working with collaborators,” he says. “When I first started in animation class you’d draw all the characters, you’d cut it, you’d do everything, which is great because it gives you a great background. But as you go on part of the joy is working with collaborators. People who surprise you. People who you try and tell them what you are doing and they get it and they add something to it, whether it’s actors or designers or whomever. I’ve really gotten to enjoy that process. It keeps things fresh. You get surprised by people and that is part of the joy of making a film.”
Right now Burton is working on full-length 3-D stop motion remake of his own 1984 short film Frankenweenie, a well loved cult classic about a young boy who uses electricity to revive his recently deceased dog.
“I love stop motion,” he says, “so it is kind of fun to keep with that. The tactile nature of it is something I always like to experience.”
Ironically he’s making the film in conjunction with Walt Disney, the same company who fired him in the mid-80s after he made the original short film, claiming it was too scary for young audiences. The House of Mouse and Burton have since kissed and made up—he made Alice in Wonderland for them—and he says now he’s appreciative of the two years of experience Disney gave him as a young man.
“If I had been there at any other time I wouldn’t have gotten the opportunity to do what I did,” he says, “because they were so directionless as a company. They were trying to move into the modern world but they weren’t quite ready for it yet so I got to try things that were off the track. It was a strange time but I’m always grateful for it because if it had been any other two years on one side or another [of the time he was there] I wouldn’t have gotten that opportunity.”
Now, courtesy of the Bell TIFF Lightbox working in conjunction with the MOMA, we’re getting the chance to see some of the early Disney work as well as 700 of the director’s paintings, drawings, maquettes, puppets, videos and storyboards.
“This is a strange thing,” he says. “I never really went to museums. A wax museum maybe, so the idea of [seeing my work] here was an out of body experience. It’s kind of like, ‘Look at my dirty socks hanging on the wall. Look at my underwear.’ But reconnecting with yourself is very interesting because I would never have looked at any of this stuff ever again and so they kind of forced the issue. It’s strange, which is fine. I don’t mind a strange feeling.”
The Burton exhibit runs at the Bell TIFF Lightbox from Nov. 26, 2010 to April 21, 2011.
“As a young person horror films terrified me,” says Let Me In director Matt Reeve.
“To this day if you were to show me a picture of Linda Blair in her Regan MacNeil getup, and I wasn’t prepared, the hair would stand up on the back of my neck and my blood would run cold. I would have a visceral reaction, so it’s kind of ironic that that’s what I do now. I make genre films, and yet there is something about it that is a very exciting thing to do.”
Audiences and critics were certainly excited by his first film, Cloverfield, a movie one writer called “the closest a film has ever gotten to a roller-coaster ride.” It was a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am reinvention of the “big monster” movie that mixed Godzilla with the immediacy of reality TV. His new film, a remake of Let the Right One In, the Swedish art house hit about a vampire trapped in a 12-year-old body and her bullied neighbour, is less frenetic, but throws a new spin on the vampire tale.
“It is a vampire film in a different tradition,” says Reeves. “That has everything to do with [novelist] John Lindqvist’s story. It is an incredible story in that he takes the vampire genre and uses it as a way to describe the pain of adolescence. It is a strange thing to say, but I found in reading it, and in the Swedish version and in what we tried to do, I actually think that it is a very realistic sort of tale even though it is a vampire tale. This film has a bit of naturalism to it.”
Let Me In, Cloverfield and the films that frightened him as a child, he says, are effective because they are “about something other than what the surface part is. The metaphor they are using is a way to explore a lot of real and frightening things and to explore our own fears and that’s why you can make a movie about a giant monster trashing New York and it’s really not about that at all. That is what makes it challenging and interesting as a filmmaker.”
Early on in the shoot for You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Woody Allen’s latest exploration of love and neurosis, star Josh Brolin told the director he wouldn’t try and play a thinly disguised version of Woody Allen in the movie, like Kenneth Branagh in Celebrity or even Scarlett Johansson in Scoop.
“I know some people have tried to (play the Woody Allen character),” he says. “I don’t understand why. Everybody writes from who they are, but I think because Woody has acted in his films, and is choosing not to act in this film, therefore you are taking his place. I didn’t see it that way.”
The director was fine with that, in fact, he told Brolin to make the role his own. “Then I’d do a take,” says Brolin, “and he’d say, ‘You changed a word. You said cannot. The script says can’t.’ I’d say, ‘You’re not serious are you?’ and he’d say, ‘Yes, you broke the contraction.’ I said, ‘I thought you just said to make the part my own.’ He said, ‘I know. But the script says can’t.’”
Such is life on set with a genius.
Brolin, however, does have what most people would consider the Woody Allen role in the film; the part Woody might have played if he was 30 years younger. As a novelist with writer’s block and a taste for women, the Roy has the bulk of the film’s funny lines and best scenes, but Brolin says he couldn’t play Allen if he tried.
“Woody and I both said, ‘I could never pretend to be you nor could you possibly pretend to be me.’ If there are two more opposite people on this planet it is me and Woody Allen. For various reasons; which is why I think we come together and work together as well as we do, because we have the same sensibilities. We just have different structures.”
Brolin, who has made two films with Allen, says when he watched You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, he wanted to slap Roy. “To me he is pathetic. He’s not the most redeeming character out there. The grass is greener on the other side and he is constantly looking over there for notoriety and fame and all that. It’s a strange character and when he asked me to play it, I was like, ‘Why? Why me?’ But I’m very happy I got to do it.”
You might imagine that horror maestro George A. Romero’s favorite film is The Exorcist. Or maybe Cannibal Holocaust. Or even The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It’s easy to picture the twisted mind behind Night of the Living Dead curled up in his Toronto home with the Saw marathon unspooling on his blood splattered DVD player. Easy to imagine, but far from the reality. Most nights you’ll find him rewatching a classic. Maybe The Brothers Karamazov, Casablanca or Dr. Strangelove. Nary a decapitated head or disembowelment in the bunch! He also loves The Quiet Man, High Noon and King Solomon’s Mines but his all time favorite is an obscure 1951 Michael Powell film called The Tales of Hoffman.
“It’s the movie that made me want to make movies,” he says.
“I was dragged kicking and screaming by an aunt and uncle. I wanted to go see the new Tarzan; the new Lex Barker movie to see how he stacked up against Weissmuller and they said, ‘No! We’re going to see this,’ and I fell in love with it. It’s just beautiful. Completley captivating. It’s all sung. It’s all opera. It’s not like The Red Shoes where there is a story running through it and then Léonide Massine does a ballet at the end. I just fell in love with it from the pop.
“He did it on a low budget. You could see the techniques he was using; he was reversing action, doing overprints, double exposures and it seemed accessible. I think at that age if I had seen Jurassic Park I would have said ‘Forget about it, I don’t know how to do this dinosaur thing’ but I could see how Powell made the film and it was accessible to me. It made me think that maybe someday I could do something like this.”
All these years later Hoffman and other films of that vintage still move him—“I’m a sucker for the old movies I loved as a kid,” he says. “I put them on and I get a tear in my eye when the overture starts.”—but don’t think he’s getting soft. The man known to fans as the “Grandfather of the Zombie” has a new gut wrenching (literally) movie called Survival of the Dead in theatres this weekend.
Like his previous movies it works on a couple of levels. “Goremets” will appreciate his signature style with the blood and guts but wipe away some of the red stuff and the social commentary of his work becomes clear. “I bring the zombies out of the closet when I have something I want to talk about,” he says.
His classic Night of the Living Dead touches on Cold War politics and domestic racism, while others in the Living Dead series shine a light on consumerism, the conflict between science and the military and class conflict. The new one, the sixth in the series, is a lesson in the futility of war. Inserting these ideas into the films is very important to Romero whether audiences get it or not. He says he knows most people are “there either to just take the ride or watch the gore, chuckle at the gore, and don’t care about the other stuff,” but his work has had a profound effect on a couple of generations of filmmakers.
Quentin Tarantino, who says the “A” in George A. Romero stands for “A f**king genius,” cites the director’s fierce independent style as an influence and Romero’s blend of speculative fiction and social comment is particularly apparent in the work of Guillermo del Toro.
When I mention this to Romero he says, “Guillermo is my man! He runs a close second to Michael Powell in my mind.”
At the beginning of my interview with Bryce Dallas Howard she does something I’ve never experienced before in a celebrity sit-down. Curled up on a coach in Toronto’s Park Hyatt Hote,l the four-and-a-half month pregnant star of The Help does something really un-celebrity-like—she offers to hold the microphone I’m using to record our chat.
