Posts Tagged ‘Kevin Durand’

‘Cosmopolis’ cast returns to where it all began By Richard Crouse Metro Canada June 5, 2012

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.”

When art imitates life in Citizen Gangster By Richard Crouse May 10, 2012 Metro World News

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.”