The final part of our Rachel Getting Married coverage comes in the form of another roundtable interview, this time with director Jonathan Demme, in which he discusses the casting of the film, the making of documentaries, and "real Demme humor". Enjoy!Do we look acceptable?
Yes. Yes. Yes.
It could be worse.
No it’s good. It’s on the good side.
How was this casting done? How did you find the cast?
Excellent. [laughter] Oh, you mean how did I locate them? I’m sorry. It’s an old family thing. That’s real Demme humor for you in that sense. It’s like you go, “How do you find San Sebastian?” and you go “Darnedest thing dad, I got off the plane and there it was.” Anyway, that’s essentially how it worked at home too.
How did you find Tunde Adebimpe [who played Rachel’s fiancé Sidney]?
Well, just in general, just in general casting of this movie, because Jenny Lumet didn’t trouble herself to write sympathetic characters, in spite of which I fell in love with the script and the characters and eventually the characters and cared so much about them I thought there was a particular need to try and cast excellent actors as always, but this time excellent actors who were unusually likable in order to balance this rooting interest and trying to make people sympathetic. So because this was a very ferociously New York movie that excited me, the need to kind of find fresh, hopefully actors on our low budget in a city that has fantastic theatre, culture, and different kinds of TV and stuff. So we chose casting directors who were theatre-centric more than the usual casting directors and gave them the mandate, “Bring us the actors that you think are fantastic, the ones that you would just put in a movie because they are gifted as actors but also ones that you like a lot too.” And it was funny because in another thing we said “Don’t worry about gender—well, not the groom, because he had to be a man—but some of the other parts, just bring, even if you think there’s nothing for them. If there’s an actor that you love bring him in here, we’ll see if we can find something.” So anyway, Tunde came in actually the same day as Mather [Zickel, who plays Kieran] with a bunch of other actors and Mather and Tunde were the people I liked the most. They were the ones who I didn’t want the chat to end. You know I was like, “I like being here with this guy.” So I had offered the part of Sidney to Paul Thomas Anderson, who is not an actor but is an adorable, enormously likable person, a friend of mine, and he had come to a table read of the script and he was great. And it was funny because Anne was at that table read and when it was over she said, “That guy Paul, he’s good, isn’t he?” and I go “You mean Paul Thomas Anderson?” and she goes, “That was Paul Thomas Anderson!?” It freaked her out! She goes, “Oh my god! I’m so glad I didn’t know that!” I offered the part to Paul and he didn’t want to do it, he was finishing up [There Will] Be Blood, and he didn’t want to take a part in a movie. So anyway, that was a digression, I’m sorry about it. But Tunde had a quality to me of this deep reservoir of serenity; I don’t know quite what to call it, but this inner light coming out of him. And I thought, “There’s a guy who could survive a weekend at the Buchmans and proceed undeterred with his wife,” and that worked for me. Mather has kind of this thing about him where, and I don’t know, but he seems like a guy who has been through a lot and come out the other side and is a member of the “Lucky to be Alive” club; some of the members of that are usually years older, people like Dennis Hopper, people who you’re like “I can’t believe they’re still here!” and they’re really nice now. They listen. So he wound up being that. But that was a boiler plate for casting every single part so that when it came time to put a guest list together for the wedding, I couldn’t go with extras; I wanted to have people that I liked there, or people that I thought I would like if I got to know them. So I’m sorry, that’s a really long answer.
The pacing of the wedding, in the last third, it’s so refreshing in that it allows us to breathe and sometimes it’s just people carrying on. Did you ever get pressure as a director at this point as a director, you know, you have to truncate this but you feel like there’s a special rhythm you’re tapping into?
Oh, the finding the right amount of time to dare to devote to non-story advancement stuff was a huge part. There was a much longer version of the wedding and it was at first hard to cut it down, there were more songs they were dancing to and it was all different and what have you, but—and I’m sure this is truer for some than for others, but what became the extent to which I finally got it to the right place, or an acceptable place, was that there was just so much time that you could wait for the payoff of Debra [Winger as their mother Abby] leaving. Because in earlier versions, and perhaps for some time now, I hope that at that point people were waiting for the rapprochements of confrontation between Kym and Abby that must happen, and to a certain extent it can be suspenseful. And at another point people can lose touch with it and start speaking dialogue with each other, like, “Oh yeah, there was a story going on there.” So I wanted it to feel like Kym could still, in the context of all the stuff that’s going on and the drinking and stuff, this could get bad and they’re ignoring her now. Everyone’s having so much fun and she’s being neglected. So yeah, that was. I also felt that kind of the joy and the band that comes with the music had been earned by the struggle that preceded the wedding and what have you. And I wanted also to kind of, once again, put Kym, the person who mustn’t drink or do drugs, in the context of people getting looser and looser, and I was fascinated by how these people who had been so likable started looking—I started judging everybody, saying “You’re having too much fun!” I hoped that there was a lot going on even though there wasn’t a narrative progression.
What is it about a wedding that makes it such an attraction to make a movie—is it this one moment when this huge microcosm comes together of misfitted parts? Do you have this opportunity to sort of push together things that shouldn’t be together? Is it just that it’s this one sort of crescendo, and then it’s over?
Well, to me, that it’s a wedding doesn’t interest me at all. I mean that’s not a plus. For me, that’s a takeaway. If you tell me a movie’s a wedding, I’ll say “Ooh, I’ve seen it.” But this is a story that Jenny fashioned, and in fact she’s spoken to me and said the movie came from an image of a sister about to be married and stuff, and so she chose that, and I say “Fine.” But it’s arbitrary in a way, it’s a way of getting a family together and forcing families to get into one place, and if the family is haunted enough by the past and if it is unresolved enough, as it is in this case, it can be very interesting to pursue the truth. And I’m not a theatre person per-se, I love to go to a good play, but I am a Chekhov person just as an entertainment seeker. I love Chekhov, and he couldn’t give a shit why people gathered, they could be together for all kinds of things, but they’re together and he lets it rip and that’s what Jenny did here. I love the way in her script Kym comes out of rehab and immediately enters two different communities. One is the family community and the extended family and she is perceived and judged a very particular way and it’s hard for her to enter the family community. It’s hard for her to be there. And there’s another community, strangers, who don’t judge her. And it’s easy for her to be there. You can see who Kym really is, really is; her deepest self is evident there. And it’s with these strangers, now, she tries to bring that same aesthetic that she lives by: she’s trying to be truthful now, and lord knows she’s insensitive and self-centered, but lord knows in coming home—and especially at the rehearsal dinner, when she brings the tell-all 12 step terrific aesthetic to that, it’s disastrous! And as a moviegoer that fascinates me because I find that scene mortifying. I love that scene so much. And even now I’ve seen that scene 20, 30 times; when she gets to “I think she was 12 years old,” I’m like “No! No!” She kills the room. Every single person in that room except for Kieran. And he even gets the humor. She kills it! And by the way, all those speeches except Kym and Emma were all made up in the moment by whoever got up and talked. None of it was scripted. So the next one to get up and talk is Fab Five Freddy. Now, Fab evokes getting stoned an immediately the room is relaxed again. Everybody loves hearing this. He sits down, the next one to come up is my favorite actors, Bocca, he’s the guy who gets up with the wine and chugalugs it and can’t make a coherent statement, and they adore him! And there’s a length of things, [we don’t] let Kym make her speech and then cut to coming home, and it interests me to see. And she didn’t ruin the night. She killed the room but she didn’t ruin the night. And I think in her defense or in the truth of the entire thing, whatever, you know?
Jonathan, to me there were a lot of elements from Ordinary People. Can you compare the mother characters, the Abby character to the Mary Tyler Moore character?
I can compare my reaction. I’ve heard that reference once or twice and that had never occurred to me, and I know that I was very judgmental about Mary Tyler Moore’s character. I think I hated her for her coldness and how oblivious she was to the pain she was causing and therefore it was extraordinarily bold, that was cold, that was stark. Now my reaction to Debra’s Abby is that—I want to put it in the context of what I see onscreen, it’s too strongly filtered with my thoughts about the script—but I’m very moved by Abby. When she says her goodnights [at the wedding] and can’t bear to be hugged like that I feel so bad for her and I realize that even as the other three surviving members of the family—I can see that Rachel has dealt with the tragedy by moving on; and Paul has dealt with the tragedy by just trying to endlessly rekindle the love and make up somehow for the pain and suffering that will never go away; Kym by getting wasted more than she ever has before. And Abby dealt with it by closing up and moving on and going on with this whole simple streamline of life by denying it. And when she drives away and Kym doesn’t have that moment of closure with her in a way it’s frustrating because we as the audience have earned that moment of rapprochement even as Kym has earned it too, and we’re denied it. I sort of feel like by the end of the movie I feel like Paul’s going to be alright, I think there’s very real hope for Kym, and Rachel’s got the strength; Abby’s the one that’s tragic to me. She’s the real tragic person. Debra, by the way, told me, “Jonathan, I know this is supposed to be bad, but I just feel so much for this girl now. I’ve gotta.” And I felt bad for telling her, “No, you mustn’t,” because the point of this is that Abby can charmingly not feel, that’s what’s devastating about it. So she did one [take] and it was beautiful, this outpouring of stuff signaled to Annie [Hathaway], and that’s what we first put in the movie and it was bullshit. And the other one, I know that Debra’s feeling all that stuff inside in those other takes, and I think that’s perceptible too.
It’s interesting because, it has been said, none of the characters were portrayed as particularly sympathetic but through the course of the weekend they all become sympathetic in light of seeing how this tragedy affected each and every one of them and how they’ve had to deal with that.
Well, I know that one of the things that made me really feel very excited at the challenge of making this movie was, like we said before, that they were immediately not likable, all of them. But, I wanted to hear what they had to say, these people, they were talking in ways that felt different from what I’m used to in the movies, and they were smart and they were kind of funny and sometimes their jokes weren’t funny and they were in this edgy freaky situation and I wanted to see what was going to happen. That was what my motivator was: “Well, what’s going to happen here?” and then at a certain point, again, I didn’t find them sympathetic but I found myself invested in them as a reader. I cared now. I didn’t want Kym to ruin the wedding; I didn’t want the wedding to be ruined for Rachel. Poor Paul sitting there, so flawed and all… I really became on their side a lot. Did I respond properly?
Yeah.
But that’s what made me want to do it. And I first—I used to say glibly to myself, “Oh, I’m so lucky I got Jenny Lumet’s first screenplay because she hasn’t learned any of the rules yet.” And she doesn’t know that you’re “supposed” to have a strong linear arc and rooting interests and all the stuff, and stick to your formula and what have you. But in fact I think she’s way ahead of all that stuff.
I was curious about how you have such a varied career, as a director, and you’re able to move around from documentary to feature, from subject to subject. How does that sort of not necessarily encouraged, maybe Howard Hawksian, approach color what you brought to this movie?
Well, I’ll tell you—you say Howard Hawks, so I wanna tell you there’s a filmmaker of that generation whose filmography I used to obsess over. You know that Andrew Sarris bible?
American Cinema?
Yeah. Maybe some of you have, I don’t know, but I used to look at some of the filmographies and see the years and how many years, and George Garmin and I used to do this together and we’d collect three together and be like “What were they doing?” And we didn’t know yet that they were living their life or whatever. But the filmography that obsessed me was Bud Boetticher, a director I love. Have any of you seen his westerns? There’s some wonderful low-budget—have any of you seen any Bud Boetticher movies? And you’d see at least one a year, two a year. And then there’s this giant 15-something-year break and then there’s a documentary on the life of Carlos Arruza, a bullfighter. And I was like, “What, did he go insane? What happened to that man?” And as I have gotten older and I have gotten sucked into documentaries and stuff, I so get it now! The gaps don’t matter, and doing what pulls you to it is what matters. Ad I don’t even know how to answer your question other than to say that the stuff that I’ve done, I’ve always done; I never took a “job” per-se. Everything that I’ve done, I always thought could be a terrific movie if we did it properly, and I started getting interested in documentaries in the late 80’s and just over time have gotten more and more and more into that, and in the past eight or certain amount to years, maybe since Beloved, I’ve gotten less and less into the corporate arena, the big budget arena. The pay is fantastic, and we get to work with Denzel Washington and stuff, but I think you can work with them too if you have the right low-budget script one day, so the point is the allure of that, which I loved and enjoyed and made the most of for a long time, that doesn’t exist for me anymore. I don’t care if I don’t have any script I’ve developing, I’m not interested in reading any scripts—I love that Sydney Lumet called me up and sent me his daughter’s screenplay! I wound up with what I consider to be a beautiful screenplay and I got to make this movie in a style that I as a moviegoer am very responsive to and many of the movies I love are done in this loose way, and I’m thrilled with the way this one’s turned out. And I’m now making a documentary on Bob Marley and we found hundreds of hours of footage that nobody knew existed and I’m going to film with his sons and we’re going to go to Jamaica and we’re going to explain its highly Ethiopian impact on him and Marcus Garvey and the Harlem Renaissance. We’re going to do this amazing thing and there’s no script that can compete with trying to find the vessel for Bob Marley.
I know you used to watch Warner Brothers cartoons—Bugs Bunny was always stag and Daffy Duck would walk into a room and cause havoc. And you know when Kym walks into the room—there are a lot of scenes in this movie where she’s in doorways and I think that’s intentional. Is that something you thought about, you kept putting her in doorways and walking in instead of the scenes where she’s already established?
You know what, the scene how Kym charges in [Rachel’s] room, because she is such a hand grenade and such a pain in the butt—that wasn’t a conscious thing but I love that you saw that and I love that you got that. Because her impact, yeah, she is Daffy Duck!
And you can be Bugs Bunny?
I’m Elmer Fudd!
Earlier you were talking about the fact that, for a while, you’ve been doing documentaries. I think it’s interesting how this film, the way that it’s presented, is very much a home video sort of style—that this is just a documentation of this family’s weekend, rather than it being told as this elaborate story.
If you’ve ever flicking channels and you see any fiction movie I’ve made, stay with it long enough for there to be shots of people talking into the camera when they’re talking to other people. And that’s because the idea of taking that Hitchcock shot—the point of the shot is to put the audience into the shoes of the character. So we were like, “What if instead of having the standard close-up, what if we can pull the audience literally into the shoot so that they know what it’s like to get these lines?” So over time we did that more and more and more and people never commented on it, no one thought it was weird; people, often, if the movies were good, were very invested in the characters and stuff, so we did that and that was what I had really come upon to hold the audience in a movie. For this one, that kind of formal approach both didn’t ring true for me and also bored me. I didn’t want to show up again and and take out the looking-into-the-camera shot and stuff. And Declan Quinn, the camera man—the movie wouldn’t have been done this way if there wasn’t a Declan, who I knew would make it look wonderful in the documentary style. Our idea was “Let’s pull the audience in by making it feel so real, as real as the stuff we see in home movies.” And also Declan and I have done three documentaries. I think Declan’s documentary coverage is more thrilling and interesting, just to me, than any pre-designed stuff. And that’s why we never rehearsed. Never ever rehearsed. We never picked a shot. The actors never knew where the camera was going to be any more than Jimmy Carter knew where it was going to be when we followed him around all over the place. He never knew. So we brought that aesthetic to it. And you have to have actors who can—what were you going to say?
Oh, I’m sorry—I was just going to say you started with Roger Corman, who has made a whole bunch of movies and films. I just wanted to know your opinion right now of all this low budget filmmaking shoot, in terms of films being made for 15/20/30 thousand dollars—documentaries, feature films… I mean, you started that way with Roger; how do you feel about it becoming more affordable now for filmmakers to make films?
Oh, I passionately feel it’s fantastic. I think it’s the most wonderful thing. Almost everything going on in the quote-unquote movie business I think is bad. Fewer people watching on the big screen, more screens showing fewer movies, just more and more formulization of what we get. The one great thing that’s going on now and it’s truly revolutionary, is that—not sure you can make a feature with that, I’ve made a few documentaries with my own money and they look like it, but they get shown on TV and some of them even make it into theaters—to me the cutting edge, in that regard, is YouTube, where there are now filmmakers who make… who knows how young the youngest YouTube filmmaker is. But if you look up JimmyJoeRoach on YouTube and see what he can do in three minutes—and there’s just so much exiting stuff there. So now we live, finally, in a day and age where almost anybody who can get their hands on a camera and then get into a computer for a minute can make a film; and the potential audience is anybody who can get to another computer to look at it. And we’re so close now to having—in fact, this is a thing I saw at the Warner Herzog. They had this huge cinema screen and the images were coming on, they were being transmitted from a computer. So anything you can get on the computer now, in theory, once the delivery systems are working, can be on the big screen! So I just think it’s fantastic, I love it.
All these years after Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, you do this film... could you talk about what it’s like to do a film where you don’t even necessarily have to comment on this great thing [of the presence of racial harmony in the wedding]?
Look, all I can say is we never discussed the race components of the couple or the party. To me, and maybe I’m naïve and whatever and what have you, but it wasn’t pertinent. You know, like I said before, at first Paul Thomas Anderson [who is white] was Tunde. And that’s the kind of world I live in, and none of us marvel at how groovy it is that “Hey look, mixed race!” It’s just—you know. Now, we live in New York, I live in New York, whatever, but I have to tell you something funny because we showed the picture at a Venice film festival a few weeks ago, and, by the way, had a very excellent screening there and a fabulous response from the audience, and I met some journalists there, and a couple people said, “So is this some utopian vision? You have white, black, you have Asian, there even looked like some Muslims or something…” And I said, first of all, “No. That’s the America as I know it. You may not find that in every American city all over the country, but groups like that are assembling everyday.” Second of all, did you watch the Democratic Convention thing? Because I know when we watched we were like “Hey it’s just like our movie!” So now, having said that, I love that that is the racial component of the couple. I’m delighted with that. But I’m pleased and I feel like my intelligence is respected by not having it obligatorily dealt with it in one way or the other. And that’s why I love the line that Carol Jean Louis, who plays the [groom’s] mother, [says] in her improvised speech: “And this is what it looks like in Heaven.” And to me, when I hear her say that, I think she’s saying that it’s when all human beings are together. And I think it’s kind of brilliant that she improvised that. And that’s as close as the movie ever comes to that, and that wasn’t in the script. There was no race indicated in the script anyway. But that had resonance for me. Tim Squires, I’d never worked with him before; all I can tell you is that Tim Squires—even as Declan went in and shot it the way he wanted to shoot it, and essentially the actors acted the way they wanted to, it’s the first time in my life that I’ve had an editor ever show me not just one version of a cut scene; Tim would send me one and I would go, “Oh that worked out pretty good,” and then he’d send me a whole other version with all of the material, sometimes a third version. And in this film I didn’t do what I always do, which is, for due discipline, go back, look through all the outtakes, little nuggets, and get them in there. I didn’t do that. I wanted this to breathe. Even now, I’m enjoying this, but I’m now feeling like—almost like a little fly on the wall.
I just got the DVD of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains.Yeah!
It does say you did work on it.
No, that’s one of those bizarre things... in some of my filmographies is says I directed a film called Famous all over Town which was a book I optioned once. Yeah, no.
This piece concludes our coverage for Rachel Getting Married, which is now in theatres.
No comments:
Post a Comment