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shaking my two ocs in the scifi story like dolls. they should kiss.
#the thing id want to do with them in a story is have some way for the “proof of relationship” to not be them kissing#just because neither of them are like. theyre not gonna do that. overwhelming emotion isnt going to provoke that#its not that they cant kiss. its that it would be a process. it would be fumbling and very adorable and probably not great#but it would be sweet which is crucial#i sorta want it to be zayvia - who is unbelievably oblivious - at some point just asking jalen point blank whats happening#like hey dude. i have to check something with you real quick. and i will accept whatever answer you give me w/o question#but you gotta answer okay. please? okay. so like. are we a thing? is there a thing going on?#and its because its gotten to the point that zayvia's had to reflect and has gone 'oh no im down bad??? HOW'#my friend in the lord you hallucinated this man coming to save you during The Time. from that moment you were FUCKED#god actually ive had an epiphany i want that to be an audience fakeout too. thatd be wild#just means the zayvia+andrea sequence comes before the jalen+petra sequence. keep em guessing#zayvia's been such a reliable character in the narrative that this lapse in credibility meeeeeans something#largely because zayvia is consistently honest. if theyre lying its omissions. its not fabrications#so zayvia fully imagining the arrival of jalen into the situation? man.#i can just imagine a cinematographer or whatever having a lot of fun with the framing and shot choice to reinforce it#and then THEY HAPPEN AGAIN! THE SECOND TIME! but its slightly different! aaaa#anyway i love these two theyre very messy. they should kiss
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i am a lore head and i won't even apologize for it i was writting essays in my friends dms on the wholeeee thing until Um techno's passing where i lost any and all motivation to tap in (he was my favorite). idk it was so special i can atest that the reason it was sooo build up was because it worked in a way you could both take things at face value (as in, dream looking for the disc using his minecraft abilities being translated to him having those abilities in-character) and also imaginate stuff (such as burning george's house and/or the pogtopia arc could both be dramatized and downplayed). IDK IT WAS SO FUCKING SPECIAL
i do agree that q's lore being of incredible visual quality and cinematographic helped create this sense of greatness but it lacked so much succint stuff. you couldn't do anything but strong lore beats with that kind of lore, so a mixture of normal rp-ing and big lore cinematographics would've been good, but he missed the equlibrium and made a lot of people very annoying in how they reacted to the "writting" of the dsmp (like, remember those people saying that certain characters should have certain endings for how their characters had done, while the ccs were just having fun? yeah the change between dnd kind of rping to the fake idea of this being a fully scripted and narratively consistent arcs was q lolol). ANYWAY IDKKK lots of thoughts about everything always
sidenote on "is this lore" "is this canon" i also hatedddd that so much everything is canon lore. nothing is canon lore. lore doesnt even mean what you think it means 😭 you really mean plot.
YESSSS LIKE THESE PEOPLE WERE OUT THERE CHECKING EVERYTHING ANF CATEGORIZINFG EVERYTHIGN JESUS CHRIST THAT FAKE NATION YOU LOVE ROSE UP TO MAKE A DRUG MONOPOLY AND MAKE CDREAM'S LIFE HELL NOTHING MORE !!🌟
like people forgot really quickly that this used to be a mishmash of breaking bad and hamilton roleplay 😭 and most of the ccs are not actors or writers but they clearly had a lot of fun with it and again the relatively unserious medium of streaming made a lot of those moments actually more epic becuase it was serious but also not. i love your persepctive on this! its kinda funny you mention the dream irl abilities a little bit because i remember a few months ago friday got slammed for that here by an insane lorehead who was very much of the Everything Must Have A Reason crowd even though that was WAYY before any actual substantative plot HAPPENED.
i agree with the balance aspect and even though a lot more interactions between LN characters happened on other peoples streams (and was relatively more chill), i think the emphasis on these huge lore streams was a detriment to the story it was trying to tell whatever that was. i was confused more than sad that slime fucking died because as a casual dsmp viewer i only tapped into the big streams and nothing about the way slime was intro'd or integrated into the story through those streams really captured me the way someone might be swept into like crimeboys for example. it just wasnt the same. and also on the point of obsessive viewers FUCK michael i wish sapnap killed his ass
#🌟.txt#i have huge respect for loreheads i either engage with media OBSESSIVELY or not at all and in this case i fell more towards the cgeorge#side of things LOL. good for me cause he hardly ever did it i guess. but i did vaguely know what was happening with discduo etc#most of the time. im sorry to hear that about technos passing. i feel like he was an essential part to dsmp for a lot of reasons :(#ask.txt
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ITSAY Rewatch Anatomy of a Scene All the Things You Said: an ode to writing
In which we first experience the magic that is a free and open conversation between Teh and Oh Aew.
I Told Sunset About You, Episode 1 Director: Boss Naruebet Kuno Writers: Boss Naruebet Kuno, Goy Arachaporn Pokinpakorn, Kate Karakade Norasethaporn, Junior Naron Cherdsoongnern Cinematographers: Tang Tawanwad Wanavit, Lin Rinrada Pornsombutsatien Score: Vichaya Vatanasapt Cast: Billkin Putthipong Assaratanakul and PP Krit Amnuaydechkorn
Do you still take the boat home, to your resort?Mmm, when I was in 11th grade, I got my own place in the city. But I got bad grades, Mom took it back. So, I still take the boat with the wind hitting my face like before. And…how about you? Is Hokkian Mee still a best seller?Yeah. Still have rice vermicelli that you loved.Why didn't you ever say hi to me?I didn’t know what to talk about. And you didn’t say hi to me as well, asshole!I did but you never replied!Talking through Mod doesn’t count! So, if I didn’t say anything to you first, you wouldn't say anything to me, would you?Actually, I thought about it. But I just didn’t hit send.I was wrong too back then. I did say some hurtful things to you.You’re not wrong at all. I was…I was selfish. I'm sorry too. Let's go eat Hokkian Mee at my place sometime. What are you thinking? Are you alright?If we are to become friends again, I can do it. But being as close as we were, I don’t know about that. Remember that time, you said someone like me would quit eventually, honestly, I was very sad about that. You know, I put a lot of pressure on myself. I pushed myself to be the Drama Club President, and I got it. I tried to put lots of photos on my Instagram because I wanted to show you that I didn't quit like you said I would. But when I saw you becoming better and better, I got jealous.Alright, I get it. Just do whatever you feel like doing. We don’t have to be best friends now…You got 3 months left. Do your best on the admission exam! You can do it.You got in already, I’ll find my way in!
Imagine if that one friend of yours is now standing here right in front of you, what would you say to him? How’s your exam going? We haven’t talked for so long. If I could choose, I wouldn’t want it to be this way. I hope you get in. Good luck.
In all the discourse surrounding I Told Sunset About You, there is usually, rightfully, a lot of praise for the cinematography, the music and the acting, but I don't think the script has gotten its due. ITSAY is such a simple story that it's easy to overlook the deftness of the writing, the words they put in the characters' mouths. But lest we forget, ITSAY is a tale about translation and communication. Those words that Teh and Oh Aew say, and the words they leave unsaid, are the emotional underpinnings of the story. The writing reaches its absolute pinnacle in episode 3 (in the hammock, on the beach, at Promthep Cape) but this scene in episode 1 was the first indication to me that ITSAY was going to be something special.
Conversations, REAL conversations between Teh and Oh Aew are always so beautiful to watch, and as somebody who reads sub files for fun, equally beautiful to read. They talk to each other like real teenage boys; the language is frill-free and to-the-point, but there's a depth of feeling and understanding in the things they say to each other that shows even from the start how much they are to each other. They don't talk to their other friends like this. They don't talk to their families like this. The 'voice' of their conversations, the pattern and rhythm of the writing in them is so...true. Take for example Oh Aew's little monologue in the middle of the scene here. He's telling Teh 'you hurt me and I'm not quite over it' but in words that will make Teh understand clearly how much his words back then stung and how deep they went. It's not flowery, it's not poetic, it's not clever or witty, it's blunt, impactful language that sounds like something a teenaged boy, even one as sensitive and mature as Oh Aew, would actually say.
As for the things unsaid...Teh's face is a soliloquy in this scene. Billkin's eyes and the way he works his jaw take you on a whole entire journey between the words on the page and around the script. 'We don't have to be best friends now' HURT him to say, because that's the thing he wants more than anything. As he's saying it the tears in his eyes make a total liar of him. And Oh Aew knows that, knows his words have hurt Teh, but at this point it's Teh or him and he's chosen himself.
#itsayrewatch#itsay#i told sunset about you#anatomy of a scene series#on art#translate my love with your heart
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Richard Armitage interviews Harlan Coben for the Win audiobook (released 18/03/21)
Full transcript under cut
RA: Hi, I’m Richard Armitage. I played Adam Price in the Netflix series The Stranger, which was adapted from Harlan Coben’s novel of the same name. With me is the man himself, Harlan Coben, number one New York Times bestseller, the author of over thirty novels, including the one you’ve just listened to. I’m delighted to be talking to Harlan about his book, Win.
Okay Harlan, thanks for taking the time to chat about your audiobook and thanks for sending me a copy of the book. Um, it was so nice I ended up wrapping it up and giving it to my brother for Christmas.
HC: *laugh* You’re supposed to read it first, but okay, thanks Richard.
RA: No, I got the electronic version so uh, so I’ve had a good read. Congratulations, a great story. Brilliant, brilliant central character. I mean the first question I’m gonna ask is – because people listening to this have just been listening to the audiobook – are you, um, a big audiobook listener yourself?
HC: I – I go through stages, um, because my mind wanders, I sometimes have trouble focusing. But when I’m in a car, um, that’s most of the time that I’m- that I really love to use the audiobooks because it does make the ride just fly by. However, I’ve set up my life that I don’t have to commute to work every day, so I don’t have it steadily – it’s usually when I’m doing a nice long ride, I get a really good audiobook and time just flies by.
RA: And have you- have you got any favourite audiobooks that you’ve listened to recently, or any podcasts or what is it that floats your boat?
HC: You know, it’s funny. I still remember when I was a working man, way back when, when audiobooks were really first starting out and we had them on cassette tapes, I listened to the entire Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, um, it was about thirty hours long, going back and forth to work for almost a month. And I still have memories of that experience, and it’s probably, well god, it’s probably 1990 I did that, 1989, something like that.
RA: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean I’ve got a- I’ve got a few journeys up and back from Manchester this year, we’re about to start working on Stay Close, so I’ll happily – I’m happy to take any recommendations of any good books, so maybe I’ll listen to Bonfire of the Vanitites.
HC: Well I tell ya, a lot of people – first of all, it’s a brilliant book, it’s maybe a bit dated, but I doubt that, um. I think Richard, I get more people telling me to listen to any book that you read.
RA: *laugh*
HC: I said, “Hey, I spend a lot of time with this guy, I’m about to do my second television show that stars Richard Armitage. No one I think has starred in two shows that I’ve done ever, so I get a lot of him anyway.” *laugh*
RA: You don’t need my voice in your head when you’re driving, that’s – that’s torture.
HC: That’s right, I’ll be hearing notes on, on scripts in my head if I hear you going. For those who don’t know who are listening, y’know, Richard starred in The Stranger, um, and now is going to be starring in Stay Close, uh, based off two of my novels which I’m sure you can get on audiobook.
RA: And on that note, what um, you’ve had so many adaptations now that have moved from page to screen – what is it like when you go through that process? When you’re – ‘cause you’re very hands on in the way that you kind of collaborate with not just the actors, but with the producers and y’know, the writers. I mean, you’re – you’re writing it yourself. Um, what is it like through, through that whole process, from starting to developing to seeing it kind of realised on screen?
HC: I think the key for me is not to be slavishly devoted to the novel. I think that’s a mistake that a lot of people who are trying to make an adaptation make. So, I go into it, ‘what is the best TV series we can make?’, if it’s true to the book, great. If it’s not true to the book, also great. Um, so I move my stories to various countries, we’ve changed characters around, we’ve changed motivations. Because they’re two very different mediums – a book is a book, and a TV series is a TV series. They should not be the same. One is a visual medium, one is not. Even, even um, audiobooks are slightly different um, than what you read. And they should be. Um, y’know, there’s a performance involved.
Also, because I’ve spent most of my life alone in a room coming up with writing a book, um, where I am just everything – I’m writer, director, actor, key grip. I don’t even know what a key grip is, but I’m that. Um, it’s really nice to collaborate. So um, you’ve worked with me, I hope you agree – I like to collaborate, I like to hear the opinions of other people and um, I really enjoy that aspect of it. I look at it like I’m – like I get to be captain of a World Cup football team, rather than being a tennis player where I’m standing there on my own, which is what happens with a novel.
RA: Yeah, and actually it’s the same when I get to narrate an audiobook, like you say – you get to be director, you get to be the cinematographer to an extent ‘cause you’re setting the scene, but one thing that I’ve – I really appreciated about working with you was having read your, your books and sometimes you’ll pass by a character that is useful to the, to the narrative that you’re telling, but when that comes to developed for TV or film you’ll take a bit more time to investigate that character, and you’re very open to treading those paths, which makes for a very kind of dense narrative with the screenwriter.
HC: Well that’s what I think we’re trying to do. If you think about The Stranger, um, y’know in the book the Stranger is a sort of nerdy teenage male.
RA: Mm-hmm.
HC: And that just – we even tried out some people, and that just didn’t work. And it was really my idea – and I don’t say it in a bragging way, I say it as a way to show how open we all are – to change the character from being male to being female. And once I saw Hannah John-Kamen do it, then I pictured her in a room with you in that first great scene in the bar, um, or at the club when she tells you the big secret, it just worked. Um, you have to be willing to, to sort of stretch your imagination all over again and re-think your story. Which is also fun.
RA: Yeah, and also I suppose because y’know, as much as we love a faithful adaptation of a novel, um what you don’t wanna do is just deliver the novel in screenplay. You want to, for everyone that has read it it’s a new and exciting surprise, and for everyone that hasn’t it’s, y’know, it’s gonna be the same. So, um, it’s nice to kind of have a, to have your audience ready for people who have read a lot of your work, and there were, y’know, a guaranteed audience of people that had, had looked at The Stranger but what you gave them was something really surprising.
HC: Yeah, it was a lot of fun. A lot of fun. And Stay Close, there’s a change in the ending to that which will hopefully shock everybody but especially the people who have already read the book, who will smugly think they know exactly what’s going on.
RA: *laugh* And me, probably. I haven’t read it yet. Um, so when you’re writing – I’m gonna double up on this question now, so when you’re writing, do you write in silence? Do you have any music playing in the background or are you – do you have like a, a kind of sacred writing space?
HC: Um, my routine is not to have a routine. Uh I, I do whatever works until it stops working and then I change up. It’s like I’m riding a horse really fast, and then the horse dies so I gotta find a new horse. So most writers will tell you ‘yes, I use this space, I do it at this time’. Um in the days before Covid, I would go to different coffee shops all the time, I would try out different… any place. Y’know, my favourite example is the end of – when I was writing The Stranger, um with about three weeks left to finish it, I had to take an Uber for the first time. This was a number of years ago. I had to take an Uber in New York City, and I felt really guilty about spending the money on an Uber and trying to justify it, so I was sitting in the back of the Uber and I was writing down notes, and I start writing really well. So for three weeks, I took Ubers wherever I went just so I could finish the book *laugh*
RA: ‘Cause that was the magic formula.
HC: Yeah, that worked! Then that stops working and then I have to find the new, a new place. So my routine is not to have a routine. If you’re trying to write out there, the key to anything is ‘does it make me write more?’ – if the answer is yes, it’s good. If the answer is no, it’s bad. It really is that simple.
RA: I’m gonna make a note of that for when I start writing myself. Um, do you – do you speak any of your characters out loud, your dialogue or your prose passages, do you say it out loud?
HC: The very last stage um, of editing. Okay first of all, no writer gets it right the first time. I know a million writers, I don’t know any writer who doesn’t re-write and re-write a lot. Well, I know one but he’s the guy none of us wanna hang out with, you know what I mean?
RA: *laugh*
HC: So um, the last stage that I do, and it’s usually after I’ve done all the editing with my editor and everything like that, we’re ready to go. I will sit in a room and I read the entire novel out loud to myself. Um, because what happens is, it’s a little bit like a musical score. Where you can – if you read it out loud, I can detect false notes that I may have missed along the way. Um, I can hear them. So the last step is that. I rarely y’know, I’m not – I’m not crazy, I’m not sitting there maybe talking out loud to myself, I’m maybe testing out lines by doing that, and I do that a lot when I’m helping with the screenplays on our shows. But um, for the most part that’s how I do it.
RA: So, in that case, would you ever narrate one of your own audiobooks?
HC: I did narrate one, uh, many years ago called Promise Me. What had happened is we had - my Myron Bolitar series we did seven with the same reader and he retired. I hadn’t written um, I didn’t write Myron for about five or six years it was. And so they said, ‘hey, why don’t you do it?’ which was a huge mistake in many ways. One, I’m not a professional. But two, the people who were fans of Myron Bolitar liked the first guy, and it felt to them liked they had tuned into their favourite TV show and every actor had changed.
RA: *laugh*
HC: It’s really difficult to re-do or start a series, uh, when people know the- the old reader. So um, I also figure- it was also, Richard you know this of course, so for people who don’t know, it’s a lot of work. I’m a guy from New Jersey. I speak very quickly, which does not go over well in audio. I don’t do voices. I would have to sit with a pillow on my stomach because uh, my stomach would sometimes grumble and that would be picked up- *laugh*
RA: Oh, yeah!
HC: By the microphone. And it took me um, a week to record it because – and I don’t know if this is still the case – but back then, the abridged version wasn’t just a cut up version of the unabridged, I had to do a whole different reading for it. So um, it was – it was a lot of work. Um, and it’s a skill that I’m not sure I’m best to do.
RA: Yeah, it does take a lot of stamina. I mean what’s interesting is, having gotten to know you, and when I, when I now read your work, I can hear your delivery, I can hear your voice. And there’s humour in the dialogue, and there’s humour in the as well, and I – it’s an instant ‘in’ for me, so I – ‘cause, ‘cause often I read and I speak aloud when I’m reading alone in the dark, I say things out loud but I think people approach it differently. But I definitely hear your voice in, in these characters. And I think particularly in Windsor Horne Lockwood.
HC: That’s so interesting because Win, I think of my heroes that I’ve had, Win is probably the least like me. I mean um, when you think about Adam-
RA: *laughing* You have to say that! You have to say that because he’s such a badly behaved person, isn’t he?
HC: *laughing* Yeah! ‘Cause I usually like to think of myself as more of like Adam in The Stranger, who you played, or some of the other characters that – the ‘I’m a father or four’ or those kind of guys. What I love about getting into Win of course is that Win is something of an anti-hero. Um, he sort of says and does things that are not necessarily prudent or appropriate, and he can get away with that. Um, so I really loved – I loved getting in his head, it was really an interesting experience. But on the surface anyway, he’s probably the least like me of any uh, main character that I’ve ever written.
RA: Yeah, I mean I- I relate to that totally. It’s a little bit like- it’s probably a side of you, you daren’t investigate, but- but when you get the chance to do it in a fiction um, you can tap into those things that we’re not allowed to do or say in your, in your regular day. But um, where did that character spring from? What was the seed that germinated into his story do you think?
HC: Rarely is this the case, but um, Win is actually – y’know, he’s the sidekick in my Myron Bolitar series but um, when I first created him I based him off my best friend in college roommate, who has a name equally obnoxious as Windsor Horne Lockwood the Third-
RA: *laugh*
HC: Very good looking, blonde guy who used to say before he would go out to parties when we were in college, he would look in the mirror and say, “It must suck to be ugly”. And so I took him and I tweaked him and made him more dangerous, uh and that’s how I, I kind of came up with Win.
RA: And does this person know that you’ve based this character on him?
HC: Oh yes! In fact, some people know who he is, he uses it. He’s still a-
RA: Oh, really?
HC: Owner of all these fancy golf clubs, he’s president of one of the most famous golf clubs, um, in the world right now. He looks the part. In fact, he one time came to one of my books signings years ago and um, he’s sitting in the back, and I tell people the story of how I created Win, and I say, “I’m not gonna tell you who, but Win is actually in this room right now”. It took the crowd about four seconds to figure out who he was, and he had a longer line to sign books that I did *laugh*
RA: Amazing. I mean I have to say, it’s- you, you start reading the story and thinking, ‘I don’t know if I’m gonna like this guy’ but he really grows on you, warts and all. I wonder how many people are gonna go into Saks on Fifth Avenue and go looking for the vault.
HC: *laugh* Yeah, no, I made that up. But there is place in Saks-
RA: I know, so brilliant!
HC: -but the rest of it is completely made up, this involves an app that you’ll read about when you- hopefully when you, when you read book. But yeah, it was fun to do an anti-hero where he makes decisions and does things that you don’t like, and yet you still wanna hang around with him. I always think the key to a fascinating character is not um, that he’s likeable necessarily, but that you wanna spend time with him. Not that he’s a nice guy, but if you were at a bar and you could sit with somebody and have a conversation with them and learn about their life, would this be a person you’d wanna do that with? And that’s sort of the test whenever I do a character. And Win, I think, passes that with flying colours. There are people who love Win and wanna be just like him and there are people who loathe him! But everybody, or I hope many people, are fascinated by him and his life.
RA: Well, also you’ve given him such an incredible kind of tool kit, like a skill set. I mean, I think everybody would look at that character and wish they could do the things he does, maybe not in the way that he does them, but I mean he’s- he’s exactly the kind of character that you’d hone in on, certainly from an acting point of view. I look at that and if I was, y’know, like fifteen years younger, I’d be leaping on that character to play. Which is, it means – it means he’s sort of relatable or aspirational in a kind of anti-hero way.
HC: I’ve heard this a lot, and I think it’s one of the most flattering things that I hear from my actor friends – I think everybody would want to play Win. I mean, I think the- it’s an interesting challenge, um, for a lot of actors. More so than even Myron Bolitar who is my lead series character. Um, everybody kind of wants to play win and kind of wonders who would play Win. Uh, and I take that as a – as a compliment.
RA: Are we gonna see more of him? Is he ge- are you writing more stories for him?
HC: My guess is the answer’s yes. I plan each book as it comes, so I never know until I’ve started. Is it gonna be a stand alone? Is it going to be a Myron Bolitar? Is it gonna be a young adult? Mickey Bolitar is now going to be a Win, and I don’t know until I – each book, y’know when I finish a book, I’m like a boxer who’s just gone fifteen rounds and can’t even lift my, my arms anymore, I gave it everything I had, I can’t even imagine fighting again or writing another novel. So I don’t know is the answer. Probably? I do wanna see Win again, separately or at least back with Myron, so I do think we will see Win again. But the book I’m writing right now is a sequel to The Boy From the Woods, which is the book that came out in 2020, so that’s what I’m writing now. Will I return to Win? Maybe. Maybe. We’ll see how- we’ll also see how people react. Not that I would work necessarily off of commercial interest, but it people really love this book, y’know, we don’t live in vacuum, that would probably somewhat influence what I do.
RA: Right. I mean, because so many of your- your books are being developed and being snapped up to be turned into film or television – I mean, Myron Bolitar is, is a recurring series waiting to happen, and then you’ve got your spin off of Win – I, I- I wonder if, y’know when your first ever, uh novel, did you write with kind of cinema television in your head? Is that something that as modern storytellers we can even avoid? Um, did you ever dream that these would ever turn into sort of film and TV?
HC: Well, everybody dreams, but there’s sort of two answers to it. The first answer is when I’m writing a book, I never ever, ever, not for one second do I think ‘Ooh, this would make a really good movie’ or ‘Ooh, this would make a really good TV series’ because that’s the kiss of death for a book. It really is. It’s, it’s- it’s just a disastrous thought, and if you’re out there writing really don’t try it, because it’s, it’s a big mistake. At the same time, to be realistic and honest, I grew up watching TV. Who didn’t? That’s my – I mean this is what we grew up with. To pretend you’re only influences – y’know you ask a writer ‘What’s your influences?’ “Oh, Shakespeare and Proust and Yeats” – come on. You watched TV growing up. And so that’s an influence on how you tell a story. To deny that is silly. So writers today do think in terms of cinema more just because they grew up with it. Where writers of a different generation did not, so they wouldn’t have that influence.
RA: Yeah, I mean I- I think this all the time – it’s impossible to even de-program your brain not to imagine scenarios in terms of cinema. I mean I- I often think about sort of Victorian novelists that didn’t have y’know TV, and their trying to describe something that they’ve never seen or experienced. And we have references for so many things – I mean it’s almost impossible not to, we’re- we are and will always be influenced by one or the other, especially in the written word. But I- I find that it means that you can kind of uh, put aside the investigation and just get on with the storytelling. And maybe go even a little bit further. It’s like instant access. Y’know, I know exactly the world that you’re talking about when you’re y’know at the beginning of Win, but- but y’know at the same time I felt there was something very Agatha Christie like about the um, the backstory of uh, of this book, I really liked the fact that there was a historic event that was really informing what was happening right now.
HC: Well, y’know when I start a book, there’s- I’m always- I have a bunch of ideas and I’m trying to think which ones are going to go in the story, and it ends up being several. So for example, in this book, I wanted – I’ve always wanted to do an art heist. Y’know, like the Gardner Museum Heist, where they still haven’t found the paintings that were stolen, the Vermeers and the Picassos that were stolen in that particular – I can’t remember if it’s Picasso now, I know it was a Vermeer – um, stolen in that- that, heist in Boston years ago, I wanted to write a book about 60’s radicals – the Weather Underground and what would happen to people who were involved in that so many years later. I also wanted to write something about a kind of Patty Hearst-type character who was a famous kidnapping here in the 70s. So those were like three of the things that I wanted to like – to delve into. And I ended up delving into all three *laugh* which sometimes happens.
Oh, and the last one I wanted to do – I always wanted to do um, a hoarder that was actually someone famous. There was actually um, something of a case of this in New York City where somebody died who was living in a top floor of an Upper West Side building, and it ended up being the missing son – not really missing, but had just kind of gone off the rails – of a very famous American war hero. And so, I took all of these aspects, which would seem to make three or four different novels, and I make it into one novel if I can. It’s not that different from – again, I’m referencing um, um – The Stranger y’know, because you’re here and provably a number of the people listening to us have seen The Stranger on Netflix, but it’s the same thing with The Stranger a little bit, where I had a lot of ideas for secrets that could be revealed by the Stranger, and each one could have been a separate novel. And instead, the challenge is put them all in one story and find a way to hook them together.
RA: Yeah. I mean, it’s rich in a way that when I- I’m reading it and the producer head in me is saying ‘gosh, this is gonna be a great TV show’ ‘cause you know, you’ve got the present day, you’ve got the near-past and the um, the heist story, which uh, is kind of crying out for – you just want more of it, which is brilliant in a book. When you’re – you’re leaving the reader wanting to know more and wanting to, to know more about that family and what happens to them. It’s – it’s the perfect recipe, really.
HC: And so much of it does come from your life in ways that you don’t expect – right now, maybe a lot of people are watching this uh, the Aaron Sorkin movie about the Chicago Trials from the 70s, Abbie Hoffman, who is played by uh, I think Sacha Baron Cohen played him in, in the movie. When I was in college at Amherst, Abbie Hoffman was on the run, um, but he still showed up one day at our college and gave a speech, then disappeared again. And boy, that stuck in my head always. Man, I’d love to write a character that’s kind of like Abbie Hoffman. ‘Cause he had that charisma even then, y’know on stage he was funny as heck, I must have been eighteen or nineteen um, when I – when I heard him speak. And so that – I never consciously back then, I didn’t think that, but every once in a while those experiences come to head and you wanna write about it.
RA: Mm-hmm. You’ve been writing for quite a few years now-
HC: *Laugh*
RA: -you’re – I don’t know if you can even remember what it was like when you first stated your very first book. Um, and some people have said that books are like children in a way, you sort of rear them and then the more you do, the more familiar you are with that process. But would you – I mean, it’s difficult for you to answer this, but would you say you have a favourite book that you’ve written?
HC: I don’t have a favourite book that I’ve written. Um, this – this sounds self-serving, but it’s usually the book, the most recent book, that I like the best. Um, it’s a little bit like – and the way I try to explain this is – maybe you wrote a paper, an essay when you were in college which you thought was brilliant. You remember that moment in school and you wrote a paper and you thought it was brilliant and you find it now and you re-read it and you go, ‘wow, this wasn’t good after all’. It’s not that it’s not very good, it’s just that you have sort of moved on and you’re not that sort of person and so you see all the flaws. So in the older books, which I don’t re-read, I see all of the flaws. I always think, y’know even if you think of yourself, what you thought ten or fifteen years ago – you sort of go ‘ugh, what did I know back then, I’m so much smarter now’. So the same thing a little bit with books, where I think I’m learning more and the current book is better. One of the interesting experiences of working on these adaptation is having to go back and read a book – in some cases we’re doing one, the next one I think uh comes out in France for example, is Gone for Good, which I think was released in 2002! Or 2003. So I wrote it twenty years ago. And to have to go back and read it now, I’m always kind of cringing at some of the stuff-
RA: Mm-hmm.
HC: -some of the stuff I’m kind of thrilled with, like ‘wow, that’s an interesting twist. You don’t have that kind of ending anymore’ and some of it I’m like, ‘wow, why’d you go there?’ so it’s an interesting experience.
RA: Yeah, I feel the same. I very – I, uh, very early on in my career I would watch my work back in quite a lot of detail, thinking ‘I’m gonna learn something’ and then as I got older it was – it was almost unbearable to just do that. And I actually haven’t been able to do that, but it’s because when you’re – when you’re first starting out you throw everything you’ve got into that first breakout role that you do, and then your realise that you’re always in danger of repeating yourself and you think – ‘gosh, people are gonna suss me out that I’m only capable of doing one or two things’, but you live in hope that you can, y’know, find that one thing that you can completely reinvent. Y’know I still hope for that.
HC: I still think that everyone who I’ve ever met who is successful at what they do has imposter syndrome. If you don’t um, you’re prob- you have a false bravado and you’re in trouble. I always say, “only bad writers think they’re good”. The rest of us really suffer with that, and really questioning and always think we’re gonna be sussed out. And I can tell you, um, Stephen King sent me a book not that long ago because he’d nicely put my name in it and wanted my reaction. But even Steve, after all his success and whatever else, he still worries about the reaction, that he’s as good as he used to be, that people will still like it, he’s – I know him. He still worries about it. And when you stop, that’s when you’re in trouble I think as an artist, when you’re starting to doubt what it- when you don’t have the doubts, you start having an overconfidence that you sort of got this. It’s a little bit like my golf game, frankly.
RA: *laugh*
HC: There’s moment’s when I’m about to swing, y’know, I’m gonna be okay and then you get out there and you stink all over again. So-
RA: Yep
HC: -you’re constantly trying to get better and so I imagine it must be difficult to look at your old roles and you – you’re kinda cringing, right? You see all the mistakes you’re making. You see through you so to speak, right?
RA: Yep. Absolutely.
HC: And then someone will come up to you, right, and they’ll say, “Oh, my favourite thing you ever did was-“ and then they’ll list something you did twenty years ago, and you want them to pay attention to what you’re doing now *laugh*
RA: Yep. Yep. Seeing through you is, is one of the things that is quite haunting because I do, I see through me. I can’t shake myself off, if you know what I mean.
HC: Well, you are very cool, you don’t watch any of it until it’s all over. Uh, that’s correct right? You never watched any of our rushes or I remember trying to tell you that you’re doing great and all that-
RA: No, I watched, I watched the first shot-
HC: -and you had not seen any of it and I watch you every day when you’re on set working on our shows and I’ll comment if I see something or whatever, to either you directly or the director, uh, and most of the time I’m – I’m complimenting you, but you don’t – you don’t know either, because you’re not watching, you’re not getting lost in that.
RA: Yeah, I don’t like to watch or be somebody that studies myself to much, I don’t think that’s my job. I think my job is to be inside the character looking out, rather than the other way around. I leave that to the experts like you and the director.
HC: Also, I think it’s- I think if you start worrying about what – you’re right – and also you don’t have the distance. This is always an issue when I – I first start watching the cuts of the first episodes, and I read the book while I’m editing it, while I try to take time between my writing it and then seeing it, I have to sort of put myself in the position of being somebody who knows nothing about this, and doesn’t come in knowing the story already that I’ve already read or seen a thousand time. How do I keep it fresh in my head when I’m trying to be objective and watching it so we can make edits. Uh, both on the screen or on the page.
RA: Mm-hmm. What draws you to crime/thriller? What – I mean is that – I, I can’t often imagine you writing a romantic novel, but what is it that draws you to this particular genre?
HC: Well, y’know to me it’s uh, not really a genre. It’s more like – it’s a form. It’s more like saying it’s a haiku or a sonata.
RA: Mm-hmm.
HC: And within that form I can, and hopefully have, done everything. Um, I think The Stranger for example is more a story about family, uh, and the secrets we try to hide, rather than it is about who killed who – y’know, the mystery angle of it.
RA: Yeah.
HC: One of my most, uh well-known books, my first bestseller, was a book called Tell No One which was made into a French film starring François Cluze, and that’s really a love story, it’s about a man who’s madly in love with his wife and eight years earlier, she was murdered. And then eight years passed, he gets an email, he clicks the hyperlink, he sees a webcam and his dead wife walks by, still alive., And the pursuit, the wanting to get back, the hope for full redemption is really what drives the story more than ‘who killed who’.
RA: Mmm-hmm.
HC: So different stories do different things. But the great thing about the form of crime fiction is that it compels me to tell a story. I’m not getting lost in the beauty of my own genius, my own kind of navel-gazing. I have to continue to tell a story and entertain you. So any of the themes that I wanna tell, any of the things I wanna discuss, has to be slave to that story. And I think that’s probably a rich tradition. If you think about Dumas really, wasn’t that all crime fiction? Even Shakespeare is mostly crime fiction.
RA: Yeah.
HC: Most great stories, if I ask you to name a favourite novel that’s over a hundred years old, Dostoevsky, whoever, you will find that there’s almost always a crime in it. There’s almost always a crime story.
RA: I mean it’s one of the things that I get very excited about, um, I mean obviously I haven’t read your entire canon but I – there’s a signature, or a theme that you love to play on which is this idea that – that um, the people you know aren’t telling you everything about themselves, or that there’s something to hide and that in our modern world, with technology, we have this sort of ability to – to sort of lead multiple lives of truths or lies. And it’s something which I think we immediately recognise. ‘Cause I think we – we’re living that, that reality, and it’s a theme that I really enjoy about your writing.
HC: Well, first of all, thanks. Second, um, there’s a lot of things we’ve heard about the human condition. One of my favourites about the human condition that I used to write, is that we all believe that we are uniquely complex and no one knows the inside of us. And yet we think we read everybody else pretty well. We all think we are uniquely complex and the person across from us, we can kind of figure out. They’re not quite like us. Um, and that’s something I love to play with when I write. Because you’ve gotta remember that everybody is uniquely complex and on a humanity level, and on an empathy level, I raise my kids and I’m always teaching them that every person you see, the richest, the poorest, the happiest, the saddest – everybody has hopes and dreams. Just think that, when you see a stranger on the street, when you’re going to interact with somebody, when you’re getting angry at somebody, whatever it is – just remember, they have hope and dreams. Um, small little thought, but it helps me create a character as well.
RA: There’s also a- a kind of very strong level of self-deception involved, which I think can be quite surprising. Because you always read a character and go, ‘I’m not like that’ or ‘I would never do that’ and then if you really think about it, we – there’s a truth we tell ourselves about ourselves which isn’t always honest.
HC: Well, exactly. It’s really come to fruition in the world the last few years, where I kind of joked that I’ve been working too hard on making my villains sympathetic, the villains in today’s world don’t seem to be very – very complex at all.
RA: *laugh*
HC: But for the most part, people don’t think they’re bad guys. Even the bad guys don’t think they’re bad guys.
RA: Yeah.
HC: They have some way of, of justifying. It’s one of the great things about human beings, or one of the most prevailing thing about a human being, is we all have the ability to self-rationalise, to self-justify. Um, and so I’ve always tried with my villains, and I hope that I did it in everything that we’ve done together, to try to make even the villain – you may not like the villain, but you get them. I don’t really write books – I don’t write books where the serial killer is hacking up people for no reason, that doesn’t really interest me. I prefer the crimes where you can say, ‘Yeah, I wouldn’t have done it maybe, but I can see why that happened. I can see if I was put in that position, um, where I may have done something similar’. That to me is a much more interesting villain than somebody who’s just cruel and evil.
RA: Yeah. Um, final question actually, is – I mean, as a listener/reader yourself – are there any other authors whose books you love and just go back – I mean, you’ve mentioned Stephen King, um I’m with you on that one – but are there any other authors who really kind of inspire you and, and y’know, like a little guilty pleasure reading for yourself and not for work?
HC: Yeah, well the problem always is that I start listing authors, and then someone will say, ‘well, what about so-and-so who’s a friend of mine’, and then I say ‘oh shoot, I forgot – I forgot that one’.
RA: *laugh*
HC: Y’know I saw recently that it’s the eleventh anniversary of the death of Robert B. Parker, who wrote the Spencer novels, if by any chance you haven’t found the Spencer novels, and I don’t know how popular they are overseas – they’re fantastic, wonderful detective series. Um, so that’s one guy I would go back in time and try to find for audio. But I actually like Philip Roth a lot on audio, even though he doesn’t do crime fiction. I’m a big Michael Connelly fan and I like Lee Child, um and Laura Lippman. Y’know, I could sit here just naming um, people all day. I’m always curious also – who is reading – who does it because of the reader and who does it because of the writer. I know there’s a number of people who will listen to anything you read, Richard, because it’s you. Um, which is really quite nice, but it’s interesting the combination of the audio reader. I have Steven Weber, he’s been reading most of my novels, though I’ve had a female lead – a woman named January LaVoy who’s fantastic – and I think Weber captures my voice. He sounds a little bit like me, we both have a similar background, similar sense of humour, so part of it with the audio is also the match you end up making.
RA: Yeah. It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because I certainly find I don’t often get to read something which is purely my choice, I have a stack of things that are work-related, or that I’m about to record. So I don’t think I’ve – I’ve chosen a book recently which is just been- I don’t know how I would pick something, it’s usually a recommendation, so I’ll certainly have a look at the Spencer novels, they sound – they sound brilliant.
HC: Yeah, and they’re fun – there was a TV series in America for a while called ‘Spencer for Hire’ – this is s or going back to the, I guess the 70s or 80s I think. Um, those were not great, but the novels themselves were sort of – Raymond Chandler to Robert B. Parker to the guys who are working now. So he’s a huge – he was a tremendous influence on most of your favourite crime writers. I said in his obituary eleven years ago, I said, “90% of writers admit that Robert B. Parker was an influence and 10% lie about it”. So um, if you can find Robert B. Parker Spencer novels that would be a good clue for everybody out there.
RA: Brilliant. Well, that just about wraps it up. And uh, thanks for talking to me. I really enjoyed the book and no doubt it will be another best-seller and fingers crossed it ends up as a TV series.
HC: Well, thanks Richard, and I look forward to seeing you work on uh, Stay Close. I know that uh, Armitage Army out there *laugh* that – your, your loud uh supporters and fans who just adore you are going to go gaga cause you get to play somebody quite different from Adam in The Stranger. Um, it’s-
RA: Yeah. Looking forward to it.
HC: Yeah, it’ll be a lot of fun. Thanks very much.
#this was actually more interesting that I thought it would be#sorry the audio ain't great I had to compress it a lot#it is longgg#richard armitage#harlan coben#win
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J.J. Jamieson Interview
A writer, producer and former network executive, J.J. Jamieson, has produced movies for Hallmark Channel, including all three Graceland movies (Christmas at Graceland, Wedding at Graceland and Christmas at Graceland: Home for the Holidays), and is now working with Bounce TV, writing both their 2019 original, Greyson Family Christmas, and this year’s Marry Me This Christmas, starring Brandon Jay McLaren and Gabrielle Graham.
Ahead of Marry Me This Christmas’ December 6th debut on Bounce (also available On Demand in Canada on December 8th), Jamieson was kind enough to take the time to talk from his Santa Monica home about what makes Christmas moviemaking special, and how Bounce’s latest holiday entry came together despite a global pandemic.
Q: How did you get involved in moviemaking?
A: I’m originally from Princeton, N.J. and way back in the late 1800s (laughs), I joined NBC as a page and eventually became an assistant in the movies and miniseries department, as that just happened to be where there was an opening, and then stayed there for the better part of a decade, eventually becoming a creative executive.
When I left NBC, I moved out here [to California], because show business is what I felt like I should be doing, and this is where show business is. I became a producer and worked for a variety of different companies, and sometimes for myself, and because movies and miniseries were what I knew, I occasionally worked on TV movies including—much to the horror of my children—one called Spring Break Shark Attack (laughs). You gotta pay the bills, right?
But, whatever you’re doing, my goal as a producer is to always to do the best with what you’re handed. Sometimes that turns out better than others, but the work is always the work, and you have to find that something that makes every project special.
A: How do you go from producing Spring Break Shark Attack to Hallmark movies?
Q: A friend of mine, Michael Larkin, a very accomplished creative producer, was working with Hallmark and said they needed a producer, someone to be the network’s eyes and ears on the ground, for a movie (Wedding of Dreams), and he couldn’t do it, so he said if they were really desperate, they could hire me (laughs).
Hallmark makes so many movies a year, their executives can’t be on set for the, usually, six weeks it takes to make them—three to prep, three to film—and then the edit, so they need someone on set to make sure everything is in alignment with the aesthetics of Hallmark.
…So, I did one movie with them, and then three more movies after that.
Q: What’s different about working on a Hallmark movie?
A: I’ve worked on a lot of different types of TV shows and movies, and have never been involved in anything else where there’s this fantastic love of the genre. People just love these movies.
I was shooting something in Tennessee, and struck up a conversation with this cop who was just sitting in his car, blocking the street while we were shooting outside, and he asked what we were filming, and when I said it was a Hallmark movie, his response was, ‘Oh, I love Hallmark movies,’ and I was thinking, ‘Really? You do?’
But he was serious. He was a fan. I think there are just a wide variety of people that these movies appeal to. Much broader than most imagine.
I think there’s comfort in the fact that when you sit down to watch, you know what you’re going to get. You’re going to get a happy ending, you know it’s all going to work out, and ‘What’s wrong with that?,’ as my niece, who is also a fan, said to me once.
When I think about why Hallmark movies are so popular, I think of a conversation I had once with a friend of my wife’s, an MBA, a very accomplished woman, and she watches these movies. When I asked her, ‘What is it about Hallmark movies that you find so enrapturing, when there’s usually so little conflict?’ She said to me: I don’t need conflict. I’ve got enough stress with the kids, stress with my ex-husband, stress at the office…I don’t need more stress. I want to sit down and watch something devoid of stress that feels good for the soul.
I think that’s the key, and I think it’s what Hallmark has tapped into, and the competition to emulate that is just fanatical, particularly with the Christmas movies.
Q: What do you think of the explosion of Christmas movies across the dial?
A: People want to be in this game. When every other cable channel’s ratings were falling, Hallmark was the only one going up. They were doing something right. They had tapped into something. Which I think is why Lifetime wants to do the same thing. I don’t think they have quite captured it, yet, but there’s also Netflix, doing it in a little bit of a different way. And then all these other channels, too, what, a dozen now? More? Producing their own [holiday] movies.
I’m shocked there’s not a saturation in the market, actually, because they keep on trying to spin that same wheel, but the appetite is obviously there, and I think there’s room, especially when you’re trying to do something a little bit different.
Q: How did you go from producing, to writing and producing, or in the case of Marry Me This Christmas, just writing? Are you a producer who writes, or a writer who also happens to produce?
A: It’s really a very different skill set, writers tend to be more introverted, more comfortable in front of a computer screen, because that’s mostly what writing is, just you in front of your computer, creating a world. Producing is more a job of management, making sure everyone shares the same vision of what the network wants.
To be a producer, is to be a generalist, and I guess I’m a generalist. I’m not a musician, but I can have a conversation with a composer and know enough to talk about what elements of a score I think a scene needs. I’m not a director, but know enough to see a scene and say, ‘Let’s try one that’s less big,’ or whatever. I’m not a cinematographer, but I can see where we might want to try a few more lights, so we don’t lose the actor in a scene.
Being a producer is an incredibly humbling job. One of my favorite parts of being on set is the first day. It always reminds me why I came out to Hollywood to do this. You’re surrounded by a team of experts, all of whom are brilliant at their specific job—the hair stylists, the makeup artists, lighting, sound…Every single one of them knows more about their jobs than I ever will, and you feel humbled by that. It makes one appreciative of the collaborative aspect of this art form. It’s nobody’s movie. It’s not the writers, or the producer’s, or the executives’, or even the director’s or actors’—every movie is a product of everyone who worked on it, and it’s all our movie.
I had a good friend who went from being a creative producer to being a line producer (NOTE: a line producer’s role is usually to manage the budget and act as an on-set human resources department; someone who puts out the inevitable fires that come up during filming), and I asked him, ‘But don’t you miss the creative side?’ And he said to me, ‘It’s all filmmaking. We’re all filmmakers and it’s all essential.’ I thought that was a lovely sentiment, and a testament to the overall teamwork nature of filmmaking. The people signing the checks in accounting are just as important as anyone else, because you can’t make the movie without them.
So, to finally answer your question, I think I’m more of a producer that also writes. A producer who spent enough time working with writers to get story ideas made, so that the idea of writing things myself began to feel realistic. And, so far, my record of giving my ideas to other writers, versus just me writing my ideas myself, has a pretty good percentage of getting things into production. The way I look at it, at least this way I have no one to blame but myself if something doesn’t work.
Q: How did you get involved with Bounce TV? And, for those like me who didn’t know Bounce even existed until last year, can you share a little about the network?
A: Sure, and you’re definitely not alone. Bounce is a sizeable basic cable and broadcast network, based in Atlanta. They’re in 94 million homes. They’re not in all markets yet, but that’s part of their mission, to increase their penetration and increase awareness.
I got involved because a good friend of mine that’s a talented producer and former Turner executive, David Hudson, moved from Santa Monica to Atlanta to oversee original programming for Bounce. His background is more in unscripted programming, so when Bounce decided they wanted more TV movies, he reached out to me and the first thing he said was that he needed a holiday picture for that same year.
Greyson Family Christmas was originally Greyson Family Thanksgiving. He gave me the premise—a family lives next door to each other, one more conservative, one more liberal, and the daughter brings home her white boyfriend for the holidays—and he needed a script. Given that it was so specific, I thought it would be easier if I just wrote it, which I did, and then worked as a producer on set during the shoot in Baton Rouge.
Q: Greyson Family Christmas ended up being one of my personal favorite movies of last season, and one thing I liked is that it was a little bit different. It wasn’t just a broad comedy or a straightforward holiday rom-com with little conflict.
A: Thank you, and we did try to make it about more than silliness. We wanted it to be light and fun, but also to say a little something about some of the very real things we wanted to address about race and family.
And we got so incredibly lucky with our cast, who were just amazing. Part of the trick of making a movie that has a lower budget, is doing what you can afford to do, and doing it well. Not stretching beyond what that budget allows. And we were very aware of that during production. With that incredibly short schedule—we shot Greyson in 12 days—and tight budget, you have to be.
Look, I know you can’t please everyone with these movies. I mean, some people hate Dickens and Hemingway—and I’m not saying Greyson is that, but I was really pleased with how the movie turned out, and think we had a great group working on it to make that happen.
We didn’t have a ton of money for publicity beyond the promos that aired on Bounce—no billboards, or things like that—but the cast was great at promoting Greyson on social media, and even with the tight timeline and everything else, it ended up being the highest-rated original movie in the history of the network.
Whenever you make a movie, you try to make it the best you can, and how it performs is really out of your hands in a lot of ways, but it sure is nice when you haven’t let down your network, and it was doubly important for me, given my friendship and fondness for David Hudson, who my kids all call Uncle David.
Greyson Family Christmas will be re-airing this December, so I really hope even more people get a chance to discover it, because it really was a labor of love for me, and the network and, really, everyone involved.
[NOTE: Bounce currently has encore airings of Greyson Family Christmas scheduled for December 6th, 11th, 18th and 24th.]
A: The latest Bounce original holiday movie, Marry Me This Christmas, debuts on December 6th, which you also wrote. Tell us a little about the movie, and the process of filming it during a global pandemic.
Q: I didn’t produce this one, mostly due to COVID, [which is also why] it was shot in Canada.
Tonally we were trying to go for something more like a dramedy—some comedy, but some real bit of business going on in the story.
I actually wrote this one a couple of years ago, not as a Christmas movie originally, and the whole idea is born out of the one joke at the end at the end of the first act, where she comes in to the pastor and says, ‘I know we haven’t known each other long, but you’ve become really important to me, and this may sound crazy, but I really want you to marry me,’ and this guy who has had a huge crush on her is all excited and says ‘Yes, yes,’ and her response is, ‘Great, my fiancé will be thrilled.’
That’s the joke, and it’s silly. It’s a dad joke, really, but the whole movie was built out from there, and as silly as that idea is, we wanted to explore what would really happen if this young pastor fell in love with someone engaged to someone else. To try to make believable, and be about something.
Q: Was that inherent element of faith something that came from you, or a direction from the network?
A: This was all my own. I was raised Catholic, and grew up going to church every Sunday. My sons then went to Catholic School, so religion has kind of hung over my life like the cloud of dirt over Pigpen. (laughs) I mean, if I wasn’t going to hell before, I probably am for that line, right? (laughs, again)
Anyway, I really was interested in this notion of trying to be a good person playing against the other qualities of our human nature. Sometimes our hearts are drawn to do certain things—not bad or evil, just being human beings, not little boxes of saintliness. To me, the essence of the story was putting that around this character whose actual job it was to be a good guy, but on the other hand he’s also a man, wrestling with the nature of love, and finally coming around to a greater sense of understanding than he had at the beginning.
We are all supposed to act with a sense of service and self-sacrifice, but on the other hand, we’re not utterly devoid of self. To be a human, even a human in service of God or goodness, doesn’t mean you’re also not supposed to fall in love with that same, almost religious, fervor, which is what I hope he realizes at the end. And it’s all a lot more ambitious than that ‘ha, ha’ dad joke of the premise.
I hope this movie is for everyone, not just people of faith. That’s why I put in there that the best friend is an atheist. That a pastor and someone who doesn’t believe can still be friends. That [the non-believer] is still this supportive friend, and a good guy.
I was also very deliberate in that I didn’t want our pastor to pray for God’s help and receive it in a [direct] way. There’s a scene in the chapel with the Bible, and I wanted it to be very clear that you’re not going to just get the answer to your problems [divinely], you have to figure out those sorts of matters yourself.
Q: How did the pandemic effect production?
A: Well, COVID has trimmed the number of original productions at Bounce in 2020. The plan is to increase our original movie production, and that’s been at least temporarily waylaid by all the [fallout] from COVID, but we did want to have at least one new movie for the fourth quarter… and knowing how well last year’s original holiday movie did for them, there was definitely the sentiment of, ‘Let’s do another Christmas movie,’ so it was a conscious and deliberate effort to make that happen, despite the pandemic.
So, I reached out to a friend of a friend, Thomas Michael [of Fella Films], because Canada had lower COVID infections and a rich film community, and he became our partner and producer. There also [had to be] a little extra money for COVID protections, and [filming] took a few extra days just due to safety protocols for the cast and crew. Plus, our cast is entirely Canadian, due to restrictions.
David Hudson and I, working as a consultant for the network, were looking for holiday movies, or rom-coms we could spin into a holiday movie. We were even looking at stories to develop into full scripts, and we just weren’t finding what we’re looking for, so I said, ‘Look, this has been sitting on my shelf, it’s available, and I’m a cheap date.’ (laughs)
Q: Hallmark, in particular, has said casting Black actors in Canada is difficult, was that an issue you experienced?
A: I will say it was a question raised, because that’s not our usual production [location]. And working with Thomas Michael, we moved towards Ontario, because they do have a larger pool of Black Canadian actors, just because they have a larger Black population overall.
After some [research], we all felt very comfortable with the talent pool, and I think we once again got really lucky with our cast. These guys were just all really great. We did a read through, and I was just choked up by how good they all were.
They might not have the same name recognition of some of the actors in Greyson, like Stan Shaw or Robinne Lee, but they’re all working actors. Brandon Jay McLaren, our pastor, is working on the new Turner and Hooch series, and I worked with him on a TV pilot 10 years ago. Gabrielle Graham, our female lead, has been a regular on two Amazon Prime series, [The Expanse and 21 Thunder].
I really hope people will respond to them, because I think they did a great job with the characters.
Q: How did Marry Me This Christmas end up with Megan Follows, best known as Anne of Green Gables, directing?
A: Once we had the determination to do it in Canada, we began looking for a Canadian director, on a pretty tight timeline. Our producer had a [working] relationship with Megan, and she has been directing more and more. We reached out to her and she responded well to the material, and I think got what we wanted to do with it.
She and the cast were terrific. And I think we just got lucky it turned out as well it did, given all the circumstances.
Q: There was talk there might be a Greyson Family Christmas sequel, was that idea a casualty of COVID?
A: Unfortunately, yes. We had a story worked out for a wedding, but with COVID and the difficulty in production, the soonest we’d have been able to get it on the air was spring or summer 2021, and that’s a long time to wait for a sequel. But I like to think of Maya and Trent, and the rest of the Greyson family, living on happily, safely and healthily, nevertheless.
Q: Bounce is a network geared towards an African-American audience, does the fact you’re not Black come up when writing these stories?
A: Definitely. Especially in the first movie, Greyson, which really digs into more sensitive and deeper matters of race, having this white guy from New Jersey writing the movie was a little unusual, as I’ll be the first to admit.
I mean, when you’re telling a story, you are always putting yourself into characters unlike yourself—teenage kids, the 75-year-old grandmother—and trying to do it in a way that resonates and feels authentic. But, yes, I got help from people of color. Particularly for Greyson, where I was on set, the cast was extraordinarily helpful, making changes and making sure the voice was right.
I will say that where the characters in Greyson succeed, in respect to race, I give all the credit to the actors, who inhabited those characters and made them their own, and if anything feels a little off to an audience, I take the blame for those shortcomings.
In that movie, where I was a producer, and in my Hallmark movies too, I made an extra effort to hire and fill out our teams looking beyond the first resumes we received, because if Bounce can’t be supportive of the black filmmaking community, who can? We really did try to hire a crew that was reflective of America’s demographics.
For too long, in this industry primarily driven by white men who have the tendency to hire other white men, that wasn’t the case, so you have to be open to the person who has 7 credits but might not have had the same opportunities, versus someone who has 35 credits, and not just pick the default. To undo that unconscious bias. I’m sure I’ve been guilty of favoring people with longer resumes, instead of saying we need those diverse voices that are more reflective of society at large. It’s something I hope to keep working on, because I think it makes the final product better as a result.
Q: What do you hope viewers take away from Marry Me This Christmas?
A: As a filmmaker there’s always something fun anytime you have an idea in your head and it ends up on screen for other people to see, so I’m just excited for it to air and hope people like it.
Bounce wants to be in that arena, making holiday feel-good movies, but maybe doing something a little bit more. Yes, it’s a rom-com at Christmas, but I think it’s a little bit of an alternative to all those other kinds of movies, and you might get something you don’t expect. A little present under the tree you didn’t realize was there. I hope it brings just a little extra joy for the holiday.
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Prompt for @waylonjenningslittlefield, who requested the boys discovering fanfiction for the first time (it ended up more like Az discovering it, but hope you like it! Thank you!)
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Aziraphale is dithering.
It doesn’t take a lot to get him in a state; dithering is one step up from musing, and one down from fretting, so whatever it is can’t be all bad. Nevertheless, Aziraphale is dithering, and Crowley is about to lose it.
Crowley had been lounging on the couch in the back room for the better part of a busy workday of dissuading customers from actually purchasing any damn books. It’s nice and warm back there, with his ‘bebop’ records playing softly in the background, and the sun falls just right across the couch near midday. Perfect spot for a nap, and Crowley has settled in with just that intent, comfortable to doze until a certain angel woke him for dinner.
That is, until the certain angel wanders in and begin pecking at his ancient computer with a frown. Normally, Crowley doesn’t mind. Except this slow typing is particularly forceful, accompanied by low, disgruntled murmurs ever so often.
The terrible click-clack of the fossil keyboard that is, literally, older than the dinosaur prank, has been keeping him from properly slipping off into oblivion for the past twenty minutes.
Finally, he snaps.
“Alright, out with it.”
Aziraphale startles, wide-eyed behind his ridiculously adorable spectacles, tongue still poking out in concentration. “Out with what?”
“Whatever all…” Crowley flapped a hand, “This ‘s about.”
“My dear, I can’t imagine what you…” the words die on his lips as Crowley peers at him over the rim of his glasses. Fingers twiddle nervously. “You’ll think me silly.”
“I do anyway.��� He rolls his eyes as Aziraphale pouts, “You know I’m messing with you. What’s on your mind?”
“Has there been another John Locke recently?”
It takes a moment for the question to register. “Beg pardon?”
“Two girls came in today and almost purchased a selection of Arthur Conan Doyle – very narrowly avoided selling thank, thank Heavens – and overheard one of them refer to John Locke. I told them, I said, oh, the John Locke is over on the west side, because those are far harder to sell so it would have been much easier to, ah negotiate those – “ Because Aziraphale does not dissuade, nor does he almost threaten, “ – and they just giggled and said wrong John Locke. There’s only been the one, hasn’t there? Oh, dear, I haven’t missed another philosophical revolution, have I?”
Crowley blinks. And he normally doesn’t do that much, so it’s a deliberate action. He blinks again. Then a slow smile spreads across his face, and he can’t help but chuckle.
The pout is edging on a snit.
“You’re making fun of me.”
“M’not, promise. Just…alright, let’s start here. Remember that Adventures of Sherlock Holmes adaption I tried to get you to watch with me a while back? On the BBC?”
It’d been a lovely evening, with an angel tucked into the crook of his arm and three bottles of port in varying stages of emptiness lying about the table. Of course, it had ended with Aziraphale excusing himself to read the actual novels, while Crowley finished up the disastrous series finale. He had a bit of a personal stake in the show, after all. He’d dabbled a bit with the writing of the third season, and had had a much larger hand in the incoherency of the fourth season as well.
Aziraphale’s nose wrinkled; he’d never been fond of cinematographic adaptations. “Mm.”
“Remember how I said there was a lot of, er, romantic subtext with Watson and Holmes?”
Aziraphale nods sagely. “Yes, very true to the original stories. One only has to read The Three Garridebs to see that.”
“Exactly. So people who also see that call that relationship “John-lock”. Y’know, John and Sherlock. Watson and Holmes. ‘S a portmanteau. Supposed to be clever.”
“Oh. I see. Like…” his brow furrowed in though, “Breadgeline?”
“Brangelina,” Crowley corrects. Knew he listened to me sometimes! “Yes, like that. And then people write stories and make art about it. It’s called fanfiction, you can find it for just about any piece of media ever. I worked on the original web design for one of the older sites, almost got commended for it for poor layout design.”
There’s a puzzled look to Aziraphale that’s developed while Crowley explains. “So there are writings based on books already written?”
“Basically. Think of it like…well, Paradise Lost is a fanfiction of the Bible, right? It’s just people loving stories so much they wanna expand on them. Or fix them. Lotsa fixing going on with the Holmes ones.”
“Hm.” Aziraphale has that look, the one of utter concentration that accompanies deciding whether they’ll be seeing the dessert menu tonight, please and thank you. On the one hand, he’s entirely against people bastardizing his beloved books.
On the other hand, he also loves the free will and creativity of humans to write stories, and there are definitely a lot out there that could rival even the most well-known authors, in Crowley’s opinion. “Show me?”
So Crowley heaves a dramatic sigh that he doesn’t really mean and pushes up from the couch, obligingly clacking at the keyboard until he pulls up a red-bannered site and the accompanying Books and Literature tab (for he knows Aziraphale would never go for anything so modern as a movie). He leans back with a dramatic wave of his hand.
“Pick your poison.”
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DVD Review: Shark Bait
Shark Bait collects six schlocky shark movies - Swamp Shark (2011), Ghost Shark (2013), Zombie Shark (2015), Ozark Sharks (2016), Mississippi River Sharks (2017), and Santa Jaws (2018) - along with a bonus alligator flick - Alligator Alley (2013) - for good measure. The fin-tastic DVD set is available now from Mill Creek Entertainment in celebration of Shark Week.
Although Mill Creek presents the features in no discernible order, I opted to view them in chronological order to see if there were any patterns or growth over the seven years spanned. They're all cheesy, but it's interesting to see which of the movies embrace their inherent absurdity, which makes them easier to swallow. Case in point: Sharknado became a cultural phenomenon because it went all-in on the concept.
In viewing all seven of the movies over a short span of time, the formula is apparent. A cast with a couple of celebrities past their prime and a bunch of wooden, inexperienced actors play one-dimensional characters that spout unnatural dialogue (usually with an obligatory Jaws reference) in between animal attacks accomplished with laughable CGI.
Another fascinating fact is that a mere two directors are responsible for all seven movies. Griff Furst (Lake Placid 3) was in the director's chair for Swamp Shark, Ghost Shark, and Alligator Alley, while Misty Talley helmed the other four. I imagine making these movies is good fun, although it likely becomes tedious after a few. But their work was clearly successful enough to warrant repeat hirings, so more power to them.
Swamp Shark is an example of a pre-Sharknado creature feature that takes itself far too seriously. An animal smuggler accidentally releases a rare shark with a virtually impenetrable exoskeleton into a Louisiana river. Despite the swampland being infested with the added threat of alligators, the opportunity for shark vs. gator action is sadly missed. While the shark is predominately created with crummy CGI, a couple of shots admirably utilize a good, old-fashioned rubber head.
Kristy Swanson (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) toplines the film as the person tasked with stopping the flesh-hungry shark before it wreaks havoc at the annual Gator Fest. The cast also includes Robert Davi (The Goonies), D.B. Sweeney (Spawn), and Baseball Hall of Famer Wade Boggs. After years of independent and made-for-television work, Swamp Shark cinematographer Lorenzo Senatore recently shot the new Hellboy.
Ghost Shark is a strong contender for the most entertaining movie in the set. It starts with a practical, fake great white in the prologue until it's killed, after which point it becomes the titular, translucent Ghost Shark. It can materialize in any water, and its appearances become increasingly more outrageous, from the ocean and a swimming pool to water pipes and a slip and slide. I won't give away the most ludicrous highlight, but it's a rare unforgettable moment in a Syfy movie.
Levity is key, which is why the last act becomes more tiresome when it focuses on the why and the how, although I appreciate that its mythology is taken seriously despite the silly premise. Mackenzie Rosman (7th Heaven) stars as a girl with a personal vendetta against the specter. Richard Moll (House) brings surprising nuance to the role of the alcoholic lighthouse keeper with a dark past. Thomas Francis Murphy (The Walking Dead) plays the small town’s sheriff.
Zombie Shark (also known as Shark Island) finds a shark - named Bruce, of course - escaping from the scientific facility in which it was the subject of experimentation. It proceeds to find food on the shore of a nearby, secluded island. The shark spreads its undead virus to other sharks and, eventually, to humans. There's no shortage of voracious fish action, including a first victim that caught me off guard; a rarity in these oft-predictable films.
Cassie Steele (Degrassi: The Next Generation) stars as one of four friends on the quaint island for a getaway, and Jason London (Dazed and Confused) co-stars as the facility's head of security hunting down the shark. Although not a "name" actor, Roger J. Timber provides solid comedic relief as an islander who serves as host to the guests.
Ozark Sharks follows a family's long-weekend trip to an Arkansas cabin that holds a special place in the grandmother's heart, only to find that bull sharks have invaded the nearby lake. This happens while the town is gearing up for a big firework festival. Much like Zombie Shark, the first kill is a welcome surprise, but the film culminates with an unnecessarily melodramatic finale.
Allisyn Ashley Arm (A.P. Bio) stars as the angst-ridden lead who becomes the final girl of sorts. Thomas Francis Murphy is back, this time playing the soothsaying owner of the local bait shop. He owns an arsenal of homemade weaponry that adds a dash of fun to the bland proceedings, including a giant air canon, an oar turned into a high-voltage cattle prod, a double-bladed katana, and a crossbow that shoots dear antlers.
Santa Jaws not only has the best title, but it may very well be the strongest effort in the set. Although it lacks the star power of the other movies, it offers a radical deviation from the creature feature formula; it's a coming-of-age movie. When a dorky teen boy receives a magic pen that turns its drawings into a reality, he uses it on his comic book, Santa Jaws. Soon there's a killer shark with glowing, red eyes, a candy cane horn, and a Santa hat on its dorsal fin targeting his family amidst their Christmas gathering.
The result is something like Jaws meets Krampus by way of Ruby Sparks, if it were produced by the Hallmark Channel. Shark excitement takes a backseat in this one, and there’s a whole lot of unintentional camp present, but the youth-driven approach to the material is a breath of fresh air. With no hackneyed military or science roles, the characters feel more natural and developed.
Though not quite as far a deviation as Santa Jaws, Mississippi River Sharks spices things up a clever meta element. Jason London plays a fictionalized version of himself, the star of the Shark Bite franchise. He's the celebrity guest at a podunk town's fishing competition, and his inflated ego leads him to believe that he's the most qualified person to save the day when sharks start attacking. Unlike his blase role in Zombie Shark, London lights up the screen in this supporting role.
The real hero is Cassie Steele's Tara, but it's Dean J. West (The Hunt) who shines when London is absent. In the comedic role of Tara's friend, Wyatt, he's an overzealous Shark Bite fanboy who relishes the opportunity to live out his favorite movie... even if he doesn't know what he's doing. A brief cameo from Jeremy London (Mallrats) - Jason's twin brother - furthers the meta aspect.
Alligator Alley is included as a bonus film. Thomas Francis Murphy plays another pivotal role, this time as a bayou redneck who brews chemically-enhanced moonshine. He dumps a string of bad batches into the river, mutating the local alligator population to the point where they can shoot spikes from their tails. He has a long-standing family feud with another local Cajun family, with two star-crossed lovers - one played by Jordan Hinson (Eureka) - caught in the middle, but they must band together to stop the gators.
The first half of the film is a bit dull, as you're essentially waiting for all of these annoying characters to get eaten, but the pacing picks up when concept that can only be described as weregators is introduced. The left-field plot point is so preposterous that it makes the film vastly more interesting. And maybe it's because I had just watched six shark movies and water is hard to animate, but the CGI isn't half bad considering the time and budget.
Shark Bait crams all seven films onto two discs. Compression is apparent in every movie (particularly with murky underwater footage, for whatever reason), and of course there are no special features, but it still beats watching them with Syfy's incessant commercial interruptions. Each one clocks in at under 90 minutes, so even the poorly-paced movies - of which there are several - are over before you know it.
Although far from high art, the best films in the collection - Santa Jaws, Ghost Shark, and Mississippi River Sharks - subvert expectations by mixing up the trite formula, and they don't shy away from levity. If you're lamenting the lack of a new Sharknado film this year - the franchise concluded with its sixth installment last year - fill the shark-sized gap in your heart with the Shark Bait collection.
Shark Bait is available now on DVD via Mill Creek Entertainment.
#shark week#sharknado#syfy#jaws#santa jaws#swamp shark#ghost shark#zombie shark#ozark sharks#mississippi river sharks#jason london#article#review#mill creek entertainment#gift#dvd
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Emily Deschanel on Biggest 'Bones' Lessons, Working With David Boreanaz and Returning to TV
June 04, 2019 9:45am PT by Jean Bentley
The actress formerly known as Temperance Brennan is returning to television in TNT's 'Animal Kingdom,' and discusses the evolution of her career with The Hollywood Reporter.
When Emily Deschanel graduated from theater school, she planned to spend her career doing off-Broadway shows and the occasional indie film. The actress, who is best known for the 12 years she spent starring on Fox procedural Bones, chuckled on the phone while remembering those early career goals.
"I remember somebody laughing at me, like, 'OK, if you never want to make any money, then great,'" she told The Hollywood Reporter.
While her earliest credited parts include small roles in not-so-indie films including Cold Mountain, Glory Road and The Alamo, Deschanel's big break came after being cast in Stephen King's ABC miniseries Rose Red. A couple of pilot seasons later and she was the No. 2 on the call sheet for Bones, behind former Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel star David Boreanaz, where she'd spend the next decade-plus of her life.
Two years after her Fox drama ended, Deschanel now finds herself headed back to television in a recurring role on TNT's crime family drama Animal Kingdom. While she spent 12 years playing forensic anthropologist and straight-laced FBI collaborator Temperance Brennan on Bones, she's on the other side of the law as recovering addict Angela on Animal Kingdom.
Deschanel spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about her nearly two decades in Hollywood — including following in the footsteps of her younger sister, Zoey Deschanel (their parents are both in the industry; their father is the Oscar-nominated cinematographer Caleb Deschanel and their mother is Twin Peaks actor Mary Jo Deschanel), working with occasionally difficult co-workers, the Bones lawsuit that has made her wary of signing contracts, and deciding to return to the small screen after a hiatus.
When did you start acting?
When I was growing up I always wanted to be an architect, for whatever reason. I guess it's the perfect blend of art and math and science, which, to me, was really appealing. But then I went to Crossroads for high school and I discovered theater and discovered acting, and I really loved doing it. I think I wouldn't have become an actor if I hadn't gone to the conservatory at Boston University for theater. You get to do four plays a year there, and I think I wouldn't have had the experience to give me the confidence to pursue being an actor after college if I hadn't done something like that. Of course, I look back and wish I'd gone to a liberal arts school and got a more well-rounded education, but there's always time to educate yourself, I guess. I think it was probably the right path for me because it gave me the experience, it gave me the confidence to try and pursue acting. My sister was already [acting]. She was always a natural performer, so she didn't need an external source to tell her she could pursue something.
I just loved theater, I loved to study, I loved Shakespeare. I'm the kid that went to Shakespeare camp three years in a row. Of course when I left school I was like, "I'm going to do Off-Broadway theater only and maybe independent film. And that's all." I remember somebody laughing at me, like, "Okay, if you never want to make any money, then great." It was such a specific thing. I can't say that I had a grand plan of what my career would be. Clearly I had one idea that changed completely, and I've done television for many years.
I moved back to L.A. after a period of time in New York and I finally got representation that sent me out. I had representation in New York but I think I got zero auditions for a whole year, so I was just working in a restaurant there, but it was still fun. A few months in, I think it was six months after moving back, I got this miniseries: Stephen King's Rose Red. Such a big job to get, where I was in Seattle for many months and it was so exciting to me. It was not a main character but it was a character that was in the show a lot. It was so much fun and I quickly loved being a complete sellout. [Laughs] I met one of my best friends, Melanie Lynskey, on that. We're still so close. I love the camaraderie with the actors — I love working on set and being on location too, you get to know people even more because you're kind of stuck in a place far away. I loved it.
Then I did a pilot after that and I did a Law & Order: SVU, so my first several jobs were all in television, and then I did some independent films and small parts in other films.
What was it like when Bones came along? It was probably exciting to book a pilot, but obviously at the time you have no idea that it's going to last more than a decade.
I had zero idea, and that was not my plans for things, either. I had done a couple pilots before and this was towards the end of the pilot season, or the end of their casting of the show, and I got a call to come in and audition for it. I met with Hart Hanson, who created the show; Barry Josephson, the producer; Greg Yaitaines, who was directing it. They laughed at my jokes, so I thought they were really nice people. Especially Hart Hanson loved my stupid jokes, so I'll always remember that.
I remember loving the dialogue between the two characters, really quick witty repartee, and I liked that relationship. I liked that it was a strong female character. When you sign on to do a TV show you have to think about the long term, especially in the beginning when you're doing the pilot, what kind of message you're putting out there for people. Of course this is like the opposite of now what I'm doing — Animal Kingdom is like the worst thing that could ever happen to a person for what you put out there. On Bones it was a different show. Younger people watched it, so you have to think about young girls watching the show and seeing female role models and scientists who are really smart and accomplished in their careers, and are successful.
I thought about all of that and I really responded to the script, and then I met David Boreanaz. He already had the part when I auditioned for it. I remember thinking, Oh, this could last us three years. That would be the longest I could ever in a million years imagine that it could ever last. And then it kept going and going and it was a lot of fun, with some great people. I look back with such fondness.
I [spoke with] a friend recently who was an actor on the show as well, and he was saying, "You seem so might lighter than when you were on the show!" And I'm looking back on it thinking I was so easy-breezy but apparently I was like "I will stress out about every single thing that I could possibly stress out about." It's a lot to be the lead of a television show. It's a lot of responsibility and it's an honor, but you do have to set a tone for a set, and there's pressure to keep the show going and be good. There's all kinds of things that I was probably holding on to that I wasn't realizing, and I look back just remembering all the fun times we had on set with the other actors — like the times in between when they say "cut" and before they say "action" — and of all the conversations we had. I look back thinking I was so easy-breezy but was usually very stressed about everything.
She's also a character who is not very emotional, so you probably also had to tamp down your own feelings more when you were playing her.
Yeah, that's true. I remember the first season doing takes where there was some things that were super upsetting. I remember there was an episode about a girl in foster care and my character was supposed to be in foster care and I was just bawling crying. We couldn't use any of it. I was so upset but my character was so cut off emotionally. I loved, like I was saying, that we had these strong female characters. Hart Hanson, who created it, was a feminist himself and we talked about how my character would never be saved by the male lead until I saved him first. We had things like that, and my favorite thing ever was when I met young girls who said they wanted to become scientists or they were in the process of studying science because of watching the show. That just makes me so happy that we had that kind of impact on people in such a positive way.
What was it like working with David Boreanaz, who had come off of a decade of successful shows with Buffy and Angel? What was it like for you as a relative newcomer to be paired up with someone who can be notoriously prickly sometimes?
No comment. [Laughs.] No, he was very respectful of me. He respected me from the very beginning, and I will always appreciate that. We had a great relationship. I had worked for several years but I'd never been a regular on a TV show before, so it was very new to me. He never tried to tell me what to do, never tried to school me in any way or make me feel like I didn't belong or like I was learning and new. We went to an acting coach, so we basically had therapy every week together which is kind of hilarious, in certain ways, 'cause we would talk about our lives as well in the sessions.
We also had an agreement: We spent more time with each other than we did with our own spouses — with anybody else, really — and we fully acknowledged that we would drive each other crazy. We gave each other permission to walk away at different times, or just say "you're really bothering me right now," or "you're annoying me, I have to get away from you." And we rarely used that because we gave each other permission and we talked about it. It really helped us to get along better in that way, and he always respected me and I love that about him. We would laugh about a million things and he became like a brother and played jokes on me and stuff. For some reason it became a joke that if someone was acting badly, you give them a Diet Coke. I don't drink soda, so if somebody brought me a Diet Coke, I knew it was because he would tell a PA to bring me a Diet Coke as a joke. I didn't do that to him every often. He was more of the mischievous one of the two of us for sure, but we had a lot of good times together.
That sounds like a healthy way to approach that type of relationship.
People have work husbands and work wives at their jobs. I think that's not uncommon, but it takes it to another level playing opposite each other and being married to each other, for sure.
You and David still have a lawsuit pending against Fox for withholding profits from the show. Is there anything you can say about what you learned from that whole experience, and how it has impacted your deals going forward, or even advice to other actors dealing with that issue?
I can't really talk about it because it's still going on. It's not over. I would love to talk about it at some point, but I can't talk about it now. I can talk about it with my friends, but I can't talk to the [press] about it. We can talk in a couple of years. It makes me nervous to sign a contract.
What's your biggest takeaway from your experience on Bones?
Oh, there's so much. I loved playing that character for 12 years. I loved the people I worked with, not just the cast but the crew. I loved telling the stories. I loved all of it. For me, going forward, I just don't want to do the same thing twice. At this point, I have no interest in doing 22 episodes of a television show. I want to play different characters, I'm open to anything — I'm not going to say that I'm not doing television because I'm currently filming television, but I'm not a series regular. That was a plus to me going in. I have flexibility. When you're a guest star you can come and go, and there's no contract, which is great going into my first job after doing Bones. And I don't want to take too much time away from my kids. So that's basically how I see things now, but I'm not anti-television by any means. It really is the golden age of television right now; there's so many amazing things going on, so many stories that are being told, and people doing it so well. I would never write off doing television.
You produced and directed on Bones, is that something you want to do more?
Yeah, all of it. I loved being a producer on Bones. It gives you a say in things, and I really appreciated that. Directing I really loved, and I'm very much interested in doing more of that in my life, but it takes up time. It depends on the time and finding the right project, because you don't want to spend all that time producing or directing something that isn't something you are completely passionate about. It's about finding the right project, and the right timing, with family and everything, I could do that again.
Your character on Animal Kingdom is very different than we've seen you play in the past.
I was really interested in having the conversation about addiction. The character is a recovering heroin addict, and this is a big issue in our country right now. This is a character you're seeing enter the show at rock bottom: She's just come out of prison, she's got nowhere to live, and she's trying to establish herself. This is a character who is sensitive to things, has seen everything in life, has done all kinds of things in her life, like a lot of people who have dealt with addiction have. This is a character who is a survivor. She's trying to find her way in the world and she's doing to do whatever it takes to establish herself to get what she needs, basically.
So she might come across as manipulative. She always has the reasons for doing what she does, but that's like all the characters on the show. They're like criminals, addicts, sociopaths,and she fits in with all that. My character is the best friend of Ellen Barkin's character's daughter so I've known the family for years and years and years, and I see it as an opportunity for myself to get in with the family and see what I can get out of it.
It sounds like there might be a throwdown between Angela and Smurf, Ellen Barkin's character.
Yeah, my character and her character did not like each other. I blame her for her daughter's death, and she blames me, essentially. There's no hiding how we feel about each other. It gets very intense between the two characters for sure. I'm the woman coming in for her territory and I move in to her house. She is not happy about that. I can't say that there's a throw-down fight between us, but it gets intense. Which is always uncomfortable because I love Ellen Barkin so much as a person and as an actor, so I hate the fact that our characters don't get along. But at least we get along off camera!
Animal Kingdom airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on TNT.
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812: The Incredibly Strange Creatures who Stopped Living and became Mixed-Up Zombies
Okay, first off, fuck that title. You know how I write out the full title of Attack of the The Eye Creatures every time I refer to it, out of sheer spite? I'm going to do the opposite here. I'm not even going to type out the full acronym. From here on, this movie is known simply as Mixed-Up Zombies, which would be a perfectly good title for a movie made by somebody better at movies than Ray Dennis Steckler. Apparently the title he originally wanted was even longer, being a riff on the full title of Dr. Strangelove. You can google if you want to know what it was, because I'm not typing that either.
The posters bill MUZ as the First Monster Musical, which is a big fat lie. I'm pretty sure that to qualify as a musical, a movie has to include more than one song-and-dance number that helps to tell the story, in situations where no sane person would be singing and dancing in real life. Horror of Party Beach (which billed itself as the First Horror Monster Musical) is also not a musical, because its songs have nothing to do with the plot and are all performed by the Del-Aires, who are presumably getting paid for it. I Accuse my Parents is closer to being a musical, because the songs do express the status of the relationship between Kitty and Jimmy – but it's still not quite there, because Kitty only sings as part of her job. Mary Poppins is a musical. Singing in the Rain is a musical. Fucking Jeeves is a musical. MUZ is not.
The actual plot of MUZ is somewhat mysterious. I can tell you that this is the movie where Alex the Chimp's creepy robot double wants us to get our tickets here! and the episode in which Mike and the bots keep making transvestite jokes that really didn't need to be made, but I'm not entirely sure what's actually going on in the story. I guess there are these two carnival performers: Carmelita is an exotic dancer luring men into the clutches of her sister Estrella, who turns them into zombie slaves and sends them out to kill people. Why the two of them do this I have no idea. Possibly it has something to do with Estrella seeing the deaths in her tarot cards. If her predictions won't come true on their own, then damn it, she'll make them come true!
This rather vague story is told to us through a character named Jerry, played by writer/director Steckler. He bills himself as Cash Flagg, which is only slightly less stupid of a stage name than Touch Connors. Jerry can't touch Watney Smith on the Hate-O-Meter but he still scores a solid eight out of ten – he's a rat-faced, lecherous man-child who refuses to work because “life is meant to be enjoyed”. I imagine this is what Steckler himself would say whenever his parents asked him when he was going to stop making terrible movies and get a real job. Jerry takes his rich girlfriend Angie to the carnival and then ditches her in order to watch Carmelita's strip show. I think we're supposed to believe that Carmelita hypnotized him into it but nothing in his prior behaviour suggests that this isn't something he would have done anyway. Under Estrella's mind control, he murders a couple of dancers and then almost kills Angie when she obnoxiously twirls her umbrella at him. In the end he is unceremoniously shot by the police, who do that a lot in these movies.
One thing that is unavoidably noticeable in MUZ is that somebody, possibly the costume designer and possibly Steckler himself, has a thing about female body hair. We never see any actual body hair in the movie (even on the men), but the female dancers wear costumes that almost seem designed to make up for the lack! Marge the dancer's outfit consists mainly of black mesh with a few opaque patches where something naughty might show, and the bit that covers her crotch is a black inverted triangle that looks much more like pubes than it does lingerie. I thought this might be my own pervy imagination, but then we see the lead dancer at the girlie show. She also has a black triangle on her groin, with a feathery top to it that makes it look like her pubes come up past her belly button, plus she's wearing that feathery thing around her shoulders that often looks much like armpit hair. I don't know what to make of this. It's really weird.
Another thing that draws the attention is how tediously uninspired the nightclub scenes are. These, as Tom Servo observed, make up a significant portion of the movie, but they're just not very interesting to watch. The comedian has the same repertoire as your divorced uncle at Thanksgiving dinner. Marge and her partner look like they're at their first ballroom dance class and are doing their best to follow the teacher but have no idea what's going on. The girlie shows Jerry attend consist mostly of dancers walking in circles or doing very limited steps in place, and singers who just stand there. It's like we're watching video of a junior high talent show. It's hard to say who's at fault for this... the direction certainly isn't very interesting, but neither is the lighting or the choreography, and the performers are okay-ish at best. I think we're just looking at a paucity of talent across all fronts.
The various nightclub acts are irrelevant, anyway. They're nothing but filler, and the movie uses filler to try to distract us from the fact that we never have any idea why these things are happening. What is it that Estrella and Carmelita are trying to accomplish through their seduce-and-zombify routine? We don't know, because the two of them never talk to each other. The sisters ought to have some kind of symbiotic relationship. Carmelita brings Estrella gullible men to make into zombies, and we'd assume that this must also benefit Carmelita in some way – but how? Is Estrella eliminating competition by killing other dancers who might rise into Carmelita's starring role? If so then Marge, who is a drunk on the verge of losing her job anyway, was not the best victim to illustrate that. If the two of them have some kind of larger plan, like world domination (or at least carnival domination), then we never see any hint of it.
The movie would honestly have been way more interesting if it had actually been about whatever the sisters' evil plan is, but instead, it's about fucking Jerry. I think Jerry's story is supposed to be a tragedy, in that Estrella and Carmelita take this happy young man and completely destroy him, but it's impossible to make that work when Jerry really doesn't start off with anything to lose. He has no job, no ambition, no hobbies... he seems to live as a leech on the ass of his pompadoured, foreigny friend Harold, and his idea of a good time is watching bargain-rate strippers. There are probably plenty of real people much like him, but they're not the people the average movie-goer likes or admires. A tragic hero is a man who loses everything, but Jerry never had anything except for his romance with Angela, and he ruined that all by himself.
Jerry is not only a singularly un-likeable character, he's not even any fun to hate. The rednecks in Giant Spider Invasion were so absolutely awful that it was a good time just watching them scream and get eaten. Jerry is too bland for that, even at his worst. We fundamentally do not care what happens to this asshole, and as a result, his story is not at all compelling.
As dull and unfocused as the movie is, I think it might have an intentional theme. Recall that Jerry doesn't want to get a job – he's a free spirit who wants to do his own thing and enjoy himself. You occasionally hear self-proclaimed free spirits refer to those of us with real jobs as 'zombies'. Maybe this is a story about Jerry finally having to bow to capitalism, which ultimately destroys him. The scene about Jerry's joblessness and the fact that the movie bothers to contrast the semi-squalor in which he lives with Angela's wealthy family is just enough to make me think Steckler could have had some kind of economic point to make. If so, the metaphor is not sufficiently well-developed to really say anything, and we aren't interested enough in Jerry to care in any event.
A lot of MSTies think this movie visually resembles Manos: the Hands of Fate. The two films do share a lack of decent lighting, a warm late 60's/early 70's pallet, and a general 'somebody's last known photograph' feel. But while Manos' cinematographer was a guy named Robert Guidry who had never done the job before and never did it again, MUZ was shot by fucking Vilmos Zsigmond. You've never heard of him, but only because nobody knows the names of cinematographers – him doing MUZ is kind of the equivalent of finding out Hans Zimmer wrote the Haunting Torgo Theme. Fifteen years after MUZ, Zsigmond won an Oscar for cinematography on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and he went on to be nominated three more times, for The Deer Hunter, The River, and The Black Dahlia.
Ray Dennis Steckler also kept making movies, but his have titles like The Thrill Killers and The Sexorcist. Unsurprisingly, these have been nominated for zero Oscars and are too obscure even for the Razzies. I'll see if I can find a couple of them for Episodes that Never Were.
#mst3k#reviews#the incredibly strange creatures who stopped living and became mixed-up zombies#all carnival no magic#60s#everybody do the zombie stomp
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An interview with production designer Norman Garwood (TIME BANDITS, BRAZIL, THE PRINCESS BRIDE)
How do you begin crafting a futuristic look? What questions do you ask yourself?
For me, designing any new world is a combination of reaching into my imagination and also doing very extensive research for reference. There is a huge freedom when designing the future, but it’s also important to create a look that feels unique and unexpected. When I designed BRAZIL (’85) I created an Art Deco view of what the future would look like, as I thought it would be a really interesting aesthetic. And from this premise the film started to take on a style and a spirit if its own. The first month of prep was just researching and getting ideas together. We got wonderful illustrations from comic books from the 1930’s and their version of the future, plus extensive images of inventions and machines from the time. It fitted the narrative of the film perfectly and it was amazing how a “Brazil-esque” style evolved with everything - the design, the clothes, the props. It took on a life of its own.
What are the discussions like with the director and the cinematographer – how much are they involved?
Ideally, the director, cinematographer and designer work in complete collaboration to create the overall look of the film. My most successful experiences on films have always been when we’ve worked very closely together. Director’s usually have very strong ideas about the films they are making, so that relationship usually involves a lot of brainstorming and exchanges of ideas. As a designer you also have to serve the filmmaker from a practical sense - so the sets and locations work for shooting and lighting too. And whilst designing sets, colour becomes increasingly important. A colour palette can help define a story, so you work hand in hand with a cinematographer to bring the narrative to life together. For example, BRAZIL (’85) had a very controlled color scheme of primarily blue, black, gray and white. Terry Gilliam wanted to keep it monochromatic to make a statement about the establishment. I also worked very closely with Roger Pratt, a brilliant cinematographer, when the sets were being conceived because the lighting was so important in that movie. For one set, the padded cell where Jonathan Pryce ends up, Roger and I had talked about lighting it from the bottom and top, even before the set was designed. And the sets themselves often influenced how he wanted to light the scenes, so it was great. We all inspired each other.
How much of creating a futuristic look is about attempting to be accurate versus taking creative liberty to fit the narrative?
I believe you must always serve the narrative first. Your ideas must always have some grounding in reality, so the audience somehow believes what they’re seeing regardless of how crazy something looks, but then you should also let your imagination run wild. So the trick is creating a world that seems authentic while taking enough creative liberty to really engage the audience and tell the story properly. I also think humor should also come into design sometimes. I’ve always had fun creating different worlds, whether it be for TIME BANDITS (’81) or THE PRINCESS BRIDE (’87) or whatever. And we had hysterical fun on BRAZIL (’85). Terry Gilliam has a fantastic sense of humor, as did our wonderful costume designer Jim Acheson who came up with most incredible and hilarious costumes. We bounced ideas off each other constantly, and would all encourage each other to push the boundaries with everything. So even though accuracy and authenticity are very important, you also need to give yourself a certain amount of freedom.
What was going on in the 70s, politically/philosophically/sociologically that affected how they imagined the future? How did that evolve going into the 80s and onward?
During the 70’s in London there was an incredible sense of creativity that certainly inspired me. I had moved down to London from Birmingham after art school in the late 1960’s to take a job as an Assistant Set Designer at ABC television, and there was a real sense of liberation amongst the youth. We were the first generation to really break away from our parents and forge our own paths. Music, art and fashion all felt completely new and rebellious, and everyone got swept up in that energy. Some incredibly progressive films were being made at the time about dystopian futures like A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (’71) 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (’68), and the original ROLLERBALL (’75). Society changed significantly as we headed into the 1980’s and capitalism started taking over, and you started to see that reflected in future films like BLADE RUNNER (’82) and the MAD MAX trilogy. Films always reflect society to some extent. That’s what’s so interesting about filmmaking.
What factors influence the way we, as a society, imagine the future in general?
I think the future has never felt closer than it does right now. We are standing on the precipice of a totally changed world. Technology has completely re-designed the landscape. Driverless cars, robots, automated workplaces, the internet, and computers that fit in the palm of your hands, are no longer just a figment of someone’s wild imagination. It’s reality. Devices designed for films 20 years ago, like that holographic computer swipe-screens that we created for “Lost In Space” are now the norm. I can only imagine that the future will continue to integrate technology into every aspect of modern life. Even designing itself requires a completely different skill set nowadays and relies heavily on computers and animation. I feel lucky I was able to design the simple way - sketching with a pen and paper!
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Hey! I've just read some of your works over here and I was wondering, what do you think about adverbs! (I guess you like using them! but usually they tell you to limit your use of adverbs?). I love your blog and everything you write/draw
Hey there you!
Thank you for your feedbacks and for this ask.
Interesting, okay so... you may have noticed I use a lot of adverbs, but there’s a thin line in my opinion, and I think I walk balancing (not very well, let’s be real) on that thin line. And I guess that may be linked to my first language, Italian, which when spoken - mostly in my city, Rome - could urge you to use a lot of adverbs. (At a very young age you are so overstimulated by all those “practically” or “literally”, your peers, your family and all use, that it becomes like your second language - an adverb only language)
Okay, let’s start with this TED talk...
First thing first: condamning adverbs without knowing why or polarize the rule, the concept, can get you in a position in which writing becomes like a screenplay. And to be honest, I don’t like this aseptic, not interactive, way of writing. It must be said that the majority of books nowadays are like this, in what can I call it? Something along the lines of a cinematographic-sense of writing.
And in my opinion is here that the problem lies: the lack of interactivity. Thinking about it, it’s exactly the interactivity that constitutes the biggest, clearest difference between the language in books and in cinema. A book leaves the reader with the burden and pleasure of imagining a character based on peculiarities, characterized by specific features, while cinema, screenplaying imposes times, sounds and colours.
The rule, the rule that requires you to abolish adverbs, if not abhor them, as far as I know, comes from the “show, don’t tell” concept, but I think that if you can guide the reader in what you are depicting, telling, or whatever, you can practically write whatever you have in mind. Not always adverbs simplify the task, if I remember correctly in a guide about writing “good writing” there was this assumption about how writers tell us, with adverbs, that they can’t express themself clearly, that they can’t get the full picture, the right point. Okay well, in my tiny, little world, this isn’t the truth, or, maybe, I think - as always - that the virtue lies in between (my latin and greek studies). Maybe there are writers that can’t convey you the picture, and they use adverbs to explain it more quickly let’s say it like this. But to say that this is what happens to everyone is an exaggeration, a clear exaggeration: I think many authors write after doing a search. not everyone is Stephen King who writes books in one day, others need more time. Othersmake specific choices, choices based on sound, based on the musicality of the phrase even, not only following a rule that sometimes, to convey something, or due to the specific point of view you chose, the focus you have chosen, can’t work properly!
The big misunderstanding, here I think, is that the “good writing” varies with the reader. I once got a comment, in which amongst a lot of costructive criticism and compliments, there was something that basically was “There were a few long descriptions here and there that I honestly could have done without but that is just me.” - and it was such a perfect comment for me, a positive comment, I loved that story and I loved that comment, because it explains how much your feedback is mediated by what you like, by what you read, and what I write is as much mediated on the same thing, on what I like and on what I read, on the way I think.
Describe and narrate, are something, I think - and my studies around the neuropsychologic level of writing and language can be the reason of this thought -, mediated by culture, by your internal language, by how you experience the world. And I want to drive, as much as I can, the reader in the right atmosphere, and using adverbs isn’t something to crucify: it depends, I think, on what you want to explicit.
Again,I do this for fun, just to play with words, so I’m no judge, or professional, or whatever.
I think the problem lies in how you express what you write, not in the adverbs you use in writing.
I hope I was clear enough, and I’m open to all the criticism :D
Thank you for the ask, and coming to my TED talk!
#lamalefixreplies(?)#the use of adverbs#lamalefixwrites#ted talks by lamalefix#thank you for the ask anon
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Thomas Hudson Is Not Naive & Stupid Like Critics Think.
“You know, I’m not naive as to why people would think it was a bad [career] choice, or why there is a snobbery about it. But I’m also not stupid, and I knew with director and cinematographer we had on board, the film would be in safe hands. And, you know, it does no harm to be in a film that makes half a billion dollars,” Hudson shared.
On His Career: “My career took an upward turn when I was 25 or 26, and I was delighted that it didn’t happen when I was 20. I just don’t know how I would have handled myself. I was never lost in my early twenties, but I was always joking around and had a lot of fun – but if it had all come too soon … You’re just far more in control of yourself in your late twenties– and it’s helpful to have faced a bit of rejection, it gives you a better idea of yourself.”
On Christian Grey: “He’s not the sort of dude I’d get along with. All my mates are easy going and quick to laugh – I wouldn’t imagine myself sat in a pub with him. I don’t think he would be my type, when it comes to choosing mates.”
On Sex Scenes with Savannah Rose: “The sex Scenes? God. They are from from sexy and what you might think they are from what you see on the film. At first they were awkward but who wouldn’t be awkward with like a hundred people around and you’re just staring down at this lovely lady and trying to make her feel comfortable and laugh so she doesn’t panic with me.”
On having no interest in S&M: “It doesn’t float my boat. I’ve always been open-minded and liberal – I’d never judge anyone’s sexual preference. Whatever gets people off is entirely up to them and there’s a million different ways to please yourself, sexually.”
On his rumored romance with his co-star that has his relationship is on the rocks: “We can’t always believe what we read on the internet, can we? I’m happily married and Savannah knows she’s a wonderful girl. They wouldn’t have cast us if there wasn’t some type of chemistry there...whatever that means. Pretending like we love each other is literally our jobs, we get paid to do that and I guess we’re doing a damn good job, huh?”
#❛ — count it ┊ all.#❛ — count it ┊ aesthetic.#❛ — theatrical magician ┊ thomas.#❛ — theatrical magician ┊ headcanon.#❛ — theatrical magician ┊ verse: born to be a star.
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INTERVIEW - NYFA - CRAIG CATON
By Maria Salomia (pics © Sinead Shahrzad)
Craig Caton is a special visual effects artist known for his work on an impressive number of lovable Hollywood blockbusters. He has designed, built and pupeteered some of the most memorable creatures in recent cinema history: the famous raptor(s) in the riveting kitchen scene from Jurassic Park, Slimer from the 1984 Ghostbusters, the penguins from Batman Returns and countless others. Being a part of the motion picture industry for 36 years, he has worked with highly acclaimed directors like Tim Burton, Steven Spielberg and James Cameron and contributed to over 100 films.
He was present at the 76th Venice Film Festival as a special guest and representative of the New York Film Academy, where he teaches 3D Animation and VFX. The 28 Times Cinema participants had the opportunity to attend and actively participate in a workshop he held on Wednesday 4th, during which he managed to shed some light on the wizardry of motion capture, augmented reality and the wonders of digital special effects in general.
I sat down with him to find out more about his background, his impressive career, his extremely diverse skillset and his passion for monster films.
I would like to start at the very beginning: you have mentioned in a previous interview that your career grew from a childhood passion, triggered by seeing the original Planet of the Apes and trying to reproduce that makeup on yourself. Would you say that your career is, in a way, an extension of that child-like playfulness? Do you still approach your work in that manner?
Absolutely, that was all I wanted to do from the fifth grade on, move to Hollywood and make monsters for movies. That was my dream and I realised it. And it’s really fun. If people pay you to make toys and then play with them, you should do it!
What was your first encounter with puppeteering and animatronics? What got you into it?
Ghostbusters was the first one. I got to work on the Slimer ghost and that gave me a taste of mechanics. It took off from there, I went from being a makeup artist to being a sculptor, then to doing the mechanics and in the end that’s what I liked better. When you were doing the mechanics for a puppet you also became its best puppeteer, because you knew how it worked.
It also had something to do with my background, because I used to be an X-ray technologist. So I have a great knowledge of bone and anatomy and that actually worked pretty well for creating puppets.
It’s very interesting that you could take that knowledge and use it to create characters that don’t actually conform to basic human anatomy at all.
That is what I really liked about doing puppets, that you weren’t constrained to the human form any more. I had done so much makeup and effects that were on people that I just wanted to completely move away from that and do real creatures and monsters instead.
How do you create these creatures and monsters? What sort of references do you use, where do you get your inspiration from?
I use as much real world references as I possibly can, especially when it comes to movement. I love to study how birds fly, how fish swim, how centipedes crawl and try to look at the real nuances of those motions, so that I can incorporate them into my puppets. A lot of it comes from nature.
Was any of the projects you have worked on particularly challenging? In the sense that, for example, you had to find new ways of doing something that didn’t have much precedent in the field at that time?
Jurassic Park was the big innovator because Steven Spielberg said: whatever you can do to make the best dinosaurs ever, do it. Without much time or budget constraints. So we pulled out all the stops and just came up with great ways to make dinosaurs! And I’m pretty happy with some of the solutions we came up with. There is a lot of groundbreaking stuff in that movie that people don’t realise.
You have been in the field for 36 years and during that time special effects have evolved considerably. Jurassic Park is especially relevant in this respect, as you didn’t just witness the transformations, but have actually worked on a film that pioneered and propelled a big shift in paradigm. How did you welcome the change? And how did you eventually transition to computer generated visual effects and digital animation?
In the early 80s I had started playing around with computers, mostly to play games. But then the Amoeba computer came out and it had all these amazing 3D graphics and even as a home user you could create dinosaurs and logos and a lot of cool stuff. So I did a logo for my boss, Stan Winston, which was kind of goofy and sad, but he thought I knew everything there was about computers. Of course I didn’t, and I still don’t. But times were changing and he wanted to be able to create these things. So he gave me a lot of money and I bought a bunch of computers and software and set up a lab. And then James Cameron and Stan and another man named Scott Ross joined together and we created a company called Digital Domain. One of the early movies that came out of Digital Domain was Titanic. We were really pushing the envelope on digital stuff back then.
I also created for Cameron the first permanent motion capture stage in Hollywood, and that was my personal contribution to the field.
What sort of relationship would you say there is between a director and a VFX artist? How would you describe a successful creative collaboration?
We all have to remember that we’re trying to create the director’s vision. And some directors like Ron Howard, James Cameron and Steven Spielberg are very visual. They can describe to you right down to the minutous detail what they want, which is great, because as an effects artist that leaves a lot of the mystery out and you can focus on what you have to do. It’s a great liaison to work with directors like that. James Cameron is a very good example because he started out as an effects artist, so he spoke the language, he knew everything about visual effects and he knew what the expectations were.
Whereas directors that aren’t visual will say something that is very vague and keep rejecting the results because they don’t really know what they want. And it becomes very frustrating, not to mention vey expensive.
Would you say that there’s a tendency toward over-reliance on CGI nowadays?
I do. I see a lot of bad filmmaking where they say “let’s fix it in post”. And that little sentence, that’s like hundreds of thousands of dollars right there! My personal philosophy is to try to do as much as you possibly can in the real world and then use the CG tool for what it’s really meant to be. When you can’t do it in the real world, that’s when you go to CG.
To what extent are practical visual effects still being used?
It’s real hit and miss and it depends on the director. You can get someone like Christopher Nolan who doesn’t like CG, so before having to rely on it he will try to do everything practical first. But every type exists, of course there are a lot of directors who go straight for the digital effects.
Can you name one or more films from the past few years that you especially enjoyed?
One of my guilty pleasures is watching the Marvel movies - superheroes are always fun. And of course I like the Batman movies and some of the really out there SF movies like Ready Player One. I’m a popcorn-movie fan, if it’s fun to watch I don’t need something really intellectual, I just want to enjoy it and I also want it to be something that I don’t see everyday. I’d rather watch soap operas about spaceships blowing up than regular ones that portray what happens in real life.
Is this the reason why you chose to work on monster films and in genres that usually represent a departure from reality?
You are really able to stretch your imagination with these projects, but you do need to ground everything in reality, otherwise you loose your audience. There’s actually a fairly simple rule about it that’s called the “double mambo-jumbo rule”: you can have a movie with a lot of science fiction and tech and you can have a movie with lots of cool magic, but when you try to combine them, that’s when things start to fall apart. I think that’s one of the reasons why the remakes of the Star Wars movies, the prequels, were a bit over the top.
You are a self-taught professional, but now you teach at the New York Film Academy. As someone who has a perspective on both formal and non-formal education, what is your take on film schools?
I think that going specifically to a film school like NYFA has an advantage over going to normal universities. Let’s say you decide to take an animation class at a regular university. The other people in the university are either lawyers, businessmen, doctors and social workers and all these other things that don’t really have anything to do with filmmaking. But when you go to a film school, you go to school with directors, cinematographers, screenwriters and actors and actresses and now all of a sudden it’s more than just a school, it’s a network. It’s a great advantage to going to school with people likeminded.
Is there anything that you learned in the beginning of your career that you still apply to this day? Do you pass it on to your students as well?
I used to say: it’s who you know that gets you in the door, but it’s what you know that keeps you there. A strange phenomena is that some young people today think that knowing somebody and using that person to get a job is not fair and they think that it’s cheating - and it’s not! Use everything you can to your advantage. Because once you get there, if you don’t know how to do your job, you’re not going to last for very long.
This was totally by accident, but one of my students used it recently and it worked: when I first came to LA, there was this company called Make Up Effects Labs. I went to them and they didn’t have any work for me, but said that they might have something in a couple of weeks. In the meanwhile I could work for free in the shop, reorganising all the tools and the shelves and the supplies. I did that, and by the end of the week I was the only person who knew where everything was. And all of a sudden, I was indispensable! And one of my students just got an internship at a stop motion company and he was able to repeat that and succeeded!
It might seem like a trivial thing or it might seem beneath you to sweep a floor, but you should never be afraid to roll up your sleeves. Whatever it takes to get that movie made, you should do it.
Is there also something that you have learned from your students?
To talk slower (laughs). 64% of my students are from other countries, from over 122 countries. And for the most part, English is their second language. And if I start rattling off like a machine gun, I’ll loose them. But even more importantly, all of these countries and all of these students bring their unique stories and experiences with them. Yet everybody has the same great core values, everybody just wants to love each other and get along. Our leaders should look at our students. There’s a lot to be learned from young people today.
What are you working on right now?
I have an internal project that I’m actually using students at the NYFA to do. We joined up with NASA who are planning to send a space rover to the moon to explore these giant holes that they discovered. So what we’re doing is creating animation for them to play and help sell the idea to Congress.
If you could create any character/project from scratch and had the means to do it, what would you like to do?
I’m pretty sure it would involve dragons. In a perfect world, it would be a dragon movie directed by Ridley Scott. One of the only things that’s left on my bucket list is to even just meet him. He was so inspirational, when I saw Alien that was my decision point right there: I wanted to come to Hollywood and do stuff like that.
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Interview with Asa Butterfield
Boys by Girls Magazine, SS17.
Even the smallest of things can make colossal waves. A single moment in a movie can make you change the way you see the world or set a new path in your life. An actor has the power to create these moments and characters we can connect with - the power to effect the moods and lives of others, as well as opening up new imaginary worlds all of us can escape into.
At only 18 years old, British actor Asa Butterfield has already starred alongside an impressive list of Hollywood stars, and featured in a superb array of movies. Known to many as Bruno in ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’, the London actor spends a day with us to talk about his latest movie projects and upcoming films this year; including playing one of the leads in Tim Burton’s ‘Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children’. I talk to the talanted actor about the importance of making good decisions, and Asa knows how to make clever choices when it comes to the roles he takes on. Growing up in the world of acting, he talks with passion about the art of film and what it takes to embody the persona of someone else.
Yet, he is simply just a boy; one who likes hanging out with mates or sitting in his bedroom playing computer games - just another player in the game - like the rest of us. Some boys make a lasting impression on you, and Asa’s witty and quirkily peculiar words don’t fail to make a mark. Fully committed to every photo we take, it’s clear that imagination is a key part of how his mind works and he doesn’t hold back. During the day we find him talking to his least favourite walls, crawling on the dirty ground like a lizard, searching for unknown things in his Jedi robe, climbing fences, channelling his inner 4am drunk and running in fields in pyjamas. Obviously. The words ‘quirkily ordinary’, as he describes himself, seem perfectly appropriate.
When you capture someone who a wider audience has an opinion of, it adds a certain pressure to do them justice. During my day with Asa, he created such a chilled environment that the task ahead simply seemed like a light-hearted game. Although the young Brit has transitioned from a child actor to adult roles, he has been able to keep the boy within as well as his vivid imagination. Someone who enjoys living every boy’s fantasy; whether it is shooting lazer guns in zero gravity space on movie sets or sitting at home playing computer games. As he promises to slay some virtual demons in my name, I appreciate having spent the day in the world we created, and am excited to see the waves he will make this year as ‘The Space Between Us’ (19th August) and ‘Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children’ (30th September) hit the big screen, allowing us all to escape for a while.
Do you cry? Yes, when the time calls for it, like when I die in a video game. No, that was a joke, I just want to clarify that, haha. I don’t know what makes me cry, sad shit. I’d say I’m definitely in touch with my emotions and quite emotionally connected, but I think that growing up as a guy you tend to suppress certain emotions for whatever reason. Whether it is to impress people or to show that you’re a tough guy, which a lot of people put on. Although I do cry a lot less than I used too, I used to be such a wimp when I was a kid. Like when you lose your favourite lego brick, that’s devastating. That will bring tears to your eyes.
Who is Asa? I think that’s an interesting question, because I had quite a different upbringing. I’ve had to be more mature and have proper conversations with adults since I was thirteen years old. There is definitely that part of me which is confident and good at talking to people. There is also a part of me, that is quite a quiet person. I’m very content in not saying much and just enjoying whatever situation I am in; playing video games and hanging out with my mates, which are two very opposing sides. The first impression I give people is that I am quite talkative and a sort of funny guy, but in reality I’m totally not. I’m a lot more boring, placid and easy going. I’m very content going with the flow and chillaxing.
You have played such a variety of roles; from Ender Wiggin leading the fight against an alien race in ‘Ender’s Game’, angsty teenager in “Ten Thousand Saints” and a math progidy in “X + Y”. You seem to make good choices. Whenever I’m picking a role I look for characters that are going to be challenging or different to what I have done before, otherwise you’re not really pushing yourself as an actor. For ‘Ender’s Game’, conveying his understanding of the situation they were in, being so ahead of his peers, was a challenge. I loved working with Gavin Hood, the director, to figure out the best way to represent that. Then “X + Y” was probably my most challenging role. Firstly it was a person who was on the autistic spectrum, which was something I didn’t know that much about before the film, so it was an educational experience for me. Everyone on the spectrum are slightly different, so I had to figure out how to portray my character, Nathan - how he would speak and observe the world. For him it was all about mathematical patterns and colour. It was quite demanding physically, because I had to totally change myself in the way I walked. When you take on a role, even if it is subtle changes you adopt, you have to start by stripping back all the things you would naturally do. You need to get rid of all that, so it’s just a blank slate in which you can start to create this new character and the way he speaks and works. It was a really interesting experience.
How did you switch between Asa and Nathan? That’s what is weird, because when you do it for a long time and it’s a character so different from yourself, it is hard to make that switch, and often it’s hard to switch back. The line starts to get blurred, and I started noticing that sometimes in everyday life I’d still be doing things Nathan would do. It leaves a sort of imprint on you. I think all of the characters do. The following movie was ‘Ten Thousand Saints’, which was my chance to do a more mature role.
What was it like to grow up within the world of acting? I think being an actor lets you appreciate other people’s differences more, because you are playing these characters and figuring out why they are troubled, sad or happy. You get quite good at analysing people. I grew up a lot quicker than my peers I think, because I was working in an adult world, showing up for work on time and learning my lines.
This year you’ve got two movies coming out. I do. The first one comes out August 19th and is called ‘The Space Between Us’. This film is about the first boy who was born on Mars. One of the astronauts got pregnant just before their shuttle launched to Mars, and when the story really starts, my character is 16 years old and has lived his entire life on a space station on Mars. He doesn’t really know anything about Earth other than bits of information he has gathered. All he has is a picture of his parents, his mother who died in childbirth and his dad who he is determined to find. He travels back to Earth to live a more normal life and starts the search for his dad. It’s quite tense, because he is on a timer as he can’t survive on Earth for that long. His character was so fun to play, because he is new to Earth and is experiencing everything for the first time. He has never seen a tree before and he has no idea what the social norms are, which makes him quite weird and funny. The cast was really great. Gary Oldman was awesome to work with, he is so good at everything he does. Then ‘Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children’ is out September 30th. This film is based on the first book in a trilogy, and Tim Burton is directing it. It’s a very Tim Burton film, if you know what I mean, very mysterious and has those kind of dark elements to it. It was an amazing shoot, five months long, working with Samuel L. Jackson, Eva Green and Terence Stamp.
The movie has such a strong cast. The cast, the crew and the cinematographer are all great. Everyone involved is really good, so I’m excited to see it. You can’t go wrong really when you’ve got such a good group of people behind it.
What was it like on set with all these amazing people? It is awesome and you do enjoy pretty much everyday you are there, give or take a couple of rainy ones. The notion of being on set with all these really cool people does kind of end up feeling normal, in a weird way. You get into a routine; you wake up at around six o’clock, go to set - it’s pretty much the same routine every day for five months. I have been really lucky to work with some incredible people. You end up learning something from each film you do, watching what they do and how they compose themselves. I’ve had pretty much the best education in acting that I could have hoped for. Would you rather spend three years in drama school, or have a first hand conversation with someone about film history? I’m really happy.
Talk a bit about the role you play. I play a pretty normal guy, probably the most normal in the film. I’m the one the audience will be able to relate to, because he is thrown into this completely wacky world, and is totally taken back by what he believed was real and what actually is real. I go to this home and meet these peculiar children, who I always thought didn’t exist. They all have these slightly odd powers and are kept under the wing of this parent who has the power to change into a bird. They live in a time loop, and there is time travel involved and a lot of fantasy.
Quite a few of your roles have a sci-fi element to it? You know when you’ve got a good script in front of you. So when a good one comes up, regardless of the genre, you know it’s the right choice. I do love fantasy and sci-fi though, as they are the only books I read when I was growing up.
What was it like to work with Tim Burton? Tim is a phenomenal director, and I love the way he works. He has such a clear vision of what he wants the film to look like and the story he wants to tell. You see him on set and he paces a lot, just thinking, thinking, thinking. As Tim works with a lot of the same people over and over again, there is this unique language and understanding. They don’t even have to finish their sentence, because they will just know what the other person wants, and because Tim is chaotic in a way it does make the whole thing really surreal. Everything is moving around, and you’re like “what the hell is going on?” Before you know it, they’ve set up this incredible shot - he is so good.
From all the films you have done, do you have a favourite scene? You do get to do some cool stuff. I think every film I have done I’ve had scenes where I’m thinking, “wow, this is awesome, I love my job!” ‘Ender’s Game’ had a lot of those scenes, as there was a lot of zero gravity harness work. We were up in harnesses with wires pretending to be in zero gravity, flying around this massive warehouse and shooting laser guns. It’s like a boys’ dream! It is still what I dream about, so that was awesome, haha. Stunts are a lot of fun, I like to do my own if I can. There are obviously a lot of stunt men around and a lot of safety people in case things go wrong. You look back at it and watch the film and you’re like “yes” - it feels good.
What are the general challenges and benefits of growing up today? I think this generation is a lot more aware of global and political issues, thanks to the accessibility of the internet and social media, but I also think we are disconnected at the same time. It’s weird, we are more connected, but we are less connected. We spend so much time in front of the screen and we are caught up in our own image I guess. There are a lot of younger people who value the kind of material and less important things, rather than the things that should make you feel more whole as a person, such as family and real social interaction.
What makes you happy? Being around happy people. I’ve got a brilliant family, so when my familiy is happy life is good. Video games make me happy, and food goes without saying. I don’t need much to make me happy; sometimes I am most content in my pyjamas, with some food, watching a movie. I’d love to make a wildlife documentary, to go into the Amazon and spend two weeks filming monkeys. Actually anywhere, just give me some nature and I’ll film the shite out of it, because that’s my thing. I love nature and I love taking pictures. That’s my mojo.
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