Q: Your films always offer an intense confrontation with significant historical figures: Rosa Luxemburg, Hildegard von Bingen, the Ensslin sisters. What excited you about Hannah Arendt?

MVT: The question of how to make a film about a woman who thinks. How to watch a woman whose main action is thinking. Of course I was also afraid I wouldn’t do her justice. This made the cinematic portrayal far more difficult than, for example, with Rosa Luxemburg. Both women were highly intelligent and unique individuals, both were gifted in their capacity for love and friendship, and both were provocative thinkers and speakers. Hannah Arendt’s life was not as dramatic as that of Rosa Luxemburg—but it was important and moving.

To find out more about her, I not only read her books and letters but also tried to find people who had known her. Through these many conversations, I gradually discovered what I wanted to say about her, and which time in her life would best serve my intentions. Sometimes I was actually quite afraid of her.

She would suddenly appear so abrasive and arrogant. Only after the famous conversation with Günter Gaus did I finally become convinced that Arendt was truly a charming, witty and pleasant person. After watching them together, I understood what Gaus meant when he said later in an interview that she was the kind of woman for whom you instantly fell.

Q: Working on the script with American screenwriter Pam Katz. You decided to focus the film on the four years around the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial.

We wanted to tell Hannah Arendt’s story without reducing the importance of her life and work, but also without resorting to the all too sprawling structure of a typical biopic. After Rosenstrasse and The Other Woman, Hannah Arendt is my third collaboration with Pam Katz. We were therefore able to write the script in a sort of “ping-pong” technique, continuously discussing the work via email, telephone, and in person in New York, Paris and Germany. Our first question was: what should we choose to show of Arendt’s life? Her love affair with Martin Heidegger (which many probably expected)? Her escape from Germany? Her years in Paris or her years in New York? After wrestling with all of these possibilities, it finally became clear that focusing on the four years where she reported on and wrote about Eichmann was the best way to portray both the woman and her work. The confrontation between Arendt and Eichmann allowed us to not only illuminate the radical contrast between these two protagonists, but also to gain a deeper understanding of the dark times of 20th-century Europe.

Arendt famously declared that “No one has the right to obey.” With her staunch refusal to obey anything other than her own knowledge and beliefs, she could not be more different than Eichmann. His duty, as he himself insisted, was to be faithful to his oath to obey the orders of his superiors. In this blind allegiance, Eichmann surrendered one of the main characteristics that distinguishes human beings from all other species: the ability to think for himself. The film shows Arendt as a political theorist and independent thinker set against her precise opposite: the submissive bureaucrat who does not think at all, and instead chooses to be an enthusiastic
subordinate.

Capturing Eichmann’s “not-thinking” character through the black-and-white archival footage from the trial.

You can only show the true “banality of evil” by observing the real Eichmann. An actor can only distort the
image, he could never sharpen it. As a viewer, one might admire the actor’s brilliance but they would inevitably fail to comprehend Eichmann’s mediocrity. He was a man who was unable to formulate a single grammatically correct sentence. One could tell from the way he spoke that he was unable to think in any significant way about what he was doing.

There is only one scene with Barbara Sukowa that takes place in the actual courtroom; and there, because it had to be an actor, you only see Eichmann’s back. We filmed all the other courtroom scenes in the pressroom, where the trial was actually shown on several monitors. This was a way of being able to use the real Eichmann, via the archival footage, in all the important moments. But we had also come to believe that since Hannah Arendt was a heavy smoker, she would have spent more time in the pressroom than in the courtroom. That way, she could follow the trial and smoke at the same time. Many of the other journalists also watched the trial on the TV screens and filed reports at the same time. By the way, long after writing this sequence, we were finally able to speak
with Arendt’s niece, Edna Brocke, who was with her in Jerusalem at the time. She confirmed that her aunt had indeed spent most of her time in the pressroom because she was allowed to smoke there!

Hannah Arendt would not be a von Trotta film if we failed to see Hannah Arendt as a woman, lover and friend.

The film is also about her life in New York, her friends, her love for Martin Heidegger—even if we were convinced that Heinrich Blücher is was a far more important figure in her life. She called Heinrich her “four walls,” meaning her “one true home.” Heidegger was Hannah Arendt’s first love, and she remained connected to him despite his affiliation with the Nazis.

At the very beginning of my research, Lotte Köhler, Arendt’s only remaining living friend, gave me the book of published correspondence between Heidegger and Arendt. But she made sure to let me know that Arendt had kept all his letters in her bedside drawer.

In a flashback, we show Arendt meeting him during a visit to Germany. This meeting actually took place, although just several weeks before their encounter, she had written a letter to her friend and mentor, Karl
Jaspers, in which she called Heidegger a murderer. Arendt’s niece said that her aunt explained her ongoing relationship with Heidegger by insisting that “some things are stronger than a human being.”

Barbara Sukowa as Hannah Arendt

I saw Barbara Sukowa in the role of Hannah Arendt right from the very beginning, and fortunately managed to overcome any initial resistance to casting her. I would not have made this film without Barbara. I needed an actress that I could watch while she was thinking. Barbara was the only one who could be relied upon to meet this difficult challenge.

Barbara Sukowa’s eight-minute speech at the end of the film, a challenge of holding the audience’s attention for so long.

Many felt that a film about Hannah Arendt should actually start with a speech. But we begin with a conversation between girlfriends talking about their husbands. We wanted the final speech to be the moment where the audience finally understands the conclusions her thinking has brought to light. Only after one has watched her as she gleaned her insights about Eichmann’s character, and seen how she was so brutally and often unfairly attacked for them, are you then willing to listen to her for so long. By then, one has fallen in love with her, as well as her way of thinking. Barbara’s performance is both so intelligent, and so emotional, it takes your breath away. We have moved gradually towards this moment, slowly giving the audience the opportunity to understand the building blocks of Arendt’s complex thoughts and to comprehend what she meant by the banality of evil. The speech is both the intellectual and the
emotional climax of the entire film.

Female Crew: Coincidence or conscious decision?

The co-writer Pam Katz, the producer Bettina Brokemper, the cinematographer Caroline Champetier, the editor Bettina Böhler. I didn’t plan it that way—it just happened. But then again perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence. Hannah Arendt was the opposite of a feminist and Hannah Arendt is also not a typical “woman’s film.” It is a film made by highly dedicated and professional people committed to telling a story that does justice to her life.

Karl Jaspers, Hannah Arendt’s teacher and friend, said, “the venture into the public realm is only possible when there is trust in people.” Each one of your films is such a venture. How does this apply to Hannah Arendt?

In the spirit of Hannah Arendt, trusting the audience to move through ignorance and amazement to the desire to understand, and ultimately to arrive at such an understanding.

The Bangkok-set crime drama centers on Gosling, who plays an American living in Thailand, who is forced to avenge the murder of his brother.

Returning to Cannes

I learned the hard way very early on not to take anything for granted in this business. When they selected the new film for competition I was very happy. Of Course, it speaks to your vanity and your geo. We are talking about Cannes. It’s one of the few places in the world where film is nearly celebrated as an art form.

Then there is the very strong signal it sends to the market. So I’m thrilled to be back. Cannes isn’t just fun, it’s a lot of fun. I hope this film surprises people, On thing to remember is when everyone thinks you are going to go right, make sure you go straight, backward or left. Remember that the greatest pleasure in sex is the mystery. And it’s the same with art.

Working Again with Ryan Gosling

We are very similar. We say we must have been twins separated at birth. But then there’s the question of who is the good and who is the bad twin? But as an actor, he is fearless—he is willing to go anywhere if it works for the character. He is incredibly talented in terms of craft. He can say a thousand words without saying anything. When you have such a powerhouse, why wouldn’t you want to use it?

Origins of Movie

Right after making Valhalla Rising, I signed a two-picture deal with Wild Bunch and Gaumont. I went to Bangkok to prepare what was originally conceived as a a fight movie. Then got sidetracked: I was supposed to direct The Dying of the Light, from a script by Paul Schrader with Harrison Ford, but, well, it’s Hollywood, and it fell apart. By then, I had spent so much time trying to make a movie in LA that I thought I needed to get something off the ground. And that was Drive.

Changing Concepts

But I continued to work on the script of Only God Forgives, and the film continued to change in the process. It began as a normal fight movie, but it developed into the idea of creating your own world—sort of a dream world next to reality. It’s a bit like Drive. That led to shooting the whole film at night, to create this sort of dream feel.

Shooting in Chronological Order

I shoot all my films in chronological order—I am not interested in what is. I am more interested in what is not. And to find out what is not, I have to go on this journey of making the movie from start to finish.

The only time I had to compromise a bit on this was with Drive, because it was not financially possible. I had to shoot the action together at the end. But Only God Forgives is very much about the journey.

I make films like a pornographer. I shoot what excites me.

Graphic Violence

I don’t really know. I don’t know so much if is violence per se. But I believe art itself is an act of violence—there is a very violent element to the act of performance. It’s like sex and penetration, pushing yourself onto an audience. The act of violence that I continue to project, I don’t quite understand them. Maybe it is like anything in art that it’s a lot about desperation. It’s like giving birth—always dangerous and always mysterious.

Spiritual Crime Movie

Some of the themes came from things that happened when we were in Bangkok. My youngest daughter, she has a gift, she can see spirits and ghosts. We were staying in our apartment in Bangkok, and she couldn’t sleep. She was only two. Every night she would wake and point to the same corner and scream NO, like four or five times a night, But if Was in L.A. and just called reception and said there’s a ghost in my room, they would lock me up. I called our Thai production manager and half an hour later he arrived with a shaman. That kind of experience, of the spiritual world living so close to the real world, being so accepted, really cemented the sensibility of our movie.

Hearing About the Story?

I remember when the story was on the news, but I did not pay much attention to it. However, when I read the article, I thought it seemed like a movie: It was unbelievable, and had young, pretty kids being bad in a glamorous world. I think their quotes really struck me. How they didn’t seem to think they had done anything that wrong, and how they were mostly interested in the fame the robberies had brought them. The whole story seemed to say so much about our times and growing up with Facebook and Twitter.

From Story to Screenplay

I read the transcripts from the Vanity Fair journalist and police reports. I also met some of the kids to try to understand as much as I could, Then, I thought about when I was that age and the things we did, and tried to relate to them. For example, I thought about being in a group of friends and the stupid things you do when you’re that age, and how you want to fit in.

The Parents

I watched the mother of one of the real girls on a reality TV show, and I based her personality on what I watched.

Do You Blame the Kids?

I tried to be empathetic and not judgmental. I didn’t want to say what they were doing was O.K., but I want the audience to make up their own opinion. I never like to tell the audience how to feel. But the film does show how culture can affect kids who don’t have strong values from their families.

TV-Reality Shows

I was thinking about how these kids must be affected by all of that, How reality TV seems so normal now to all of them having grown up with it. The idea of no privacy has become the norm. I am not sure what the public opinion of these kids is: I think they are fascinating to people how far they took things. We al like looking at tabloids sometimes, and these kids are the extreme of that.

Film’s Style

Stylistically, the new film is different from the previous one. The shots are shorter, the narrative more straightforward, because they fit the story. The material always dictates how I make a film. Moreover, after my last film, Somewhere, I was in the mood to do something faster.

But there are long shots, such as this one of the house seen from above, with the two kids going in and out, from rooms to rooms. Shooting from across the hill was an idea of Harris Savides, the director of cinematography. I love that shot and I am happy that Harris pushed for it, as we were trying to find different ways to show the robberies. Harris brought so much to my films, he supported me and helped me make them.

Shooting in Real Celebs Houses

The house of Paris Hilton was the only real house we shot in. For the others, we made our own version of the houses. But I have to admit that it was exciting to shoot in one of the real places in Hollywood Hills, and to see Paris’ private world, and her closets…

Emma Watson

I decided to mix a professional and experienced actress like Emma Watson, who plays Nicki, because I thought she would be great, with newcomers.

Young Performers

I always like working with kids that are just strating, because they’re full of enthusiasm and freshness. I loved that they were really 16 and 17 years old. I tried to make them comfortable to try and experiment with things. I also had them hang out together as a group as much as possible before shooting, to bond and really seem like a group.

Moral Fable

For me, The Bling Ring is more like a cautionary tale.

Sofia Coppola’s Filmography:

The Virgin Suicides (1999), Directors Fortnight; Cannes Film Fest

Lost in Translation (2003), Venice Film Fest Premiere
Winner of the Original Screenplay Oscar and the Cesar Award for Best Foreign Film

Marie Antoinette (2006), Cannes Film Fest (Competition)

Somewhere (2010), Venice Film Fest, Winner of Golden Lion

The Bling Ring (2013), Cannes Film Fest, Opening Film of Certain Regard.

“We” is the trio who created Jesse and Celine in a remarkable, ongoing cinematic collaboration: writer/director Linklater and writers/actors Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke. Linklater wrote the original, semi-autobiographical script (with Kim Krizan); Delpy and Hawke, who portray Celine and Jesse, helped Linklater deconstruct and revise the script, leavening the first film with their own dialogue contributions and character insights. Since then, the three have regrouped—every seven or eight years or so—to co-write and create the second and third films in the series.

“We’ve just kind of riffed together,” says Hawke, “almost a little bit like a band, and Julie and I play certain instruments in this band and Rick is the lead singer and he calls us up every so often and asks us to play together.”

Did they anticipate all along that their original indie effort would someday follow on these characters as they evolved through life and love? “Of course not—you couldn’t plan for such things,” says Linklater. “You never know what’s going to go on creatively between people on a movie. It just so happens we had a really special experience back in ’94. We were just three people who felt like they still had something to express via these characters.”

“I don’t think anybody could have imagined it,” agrees Hawke. “But I knew when the first film was over that I wanted to work with them again. It somehow accidentally came together three times in a row. Every time I look back on it I don’t really know how it happened. I don’t think we’d all return to each other if we didn’t have a tremendous amount of love for the whole project.”

“We all go our separate ways” concurs Delpy. “but it’s there in the back of our minds for months and years—and we think and think and think, and next thing you know we’re writing together again.”

Long term relationship

The alchemy that intermittently, unexpectedly brings Linklater, Hawke and Delpy together kicks off a writing process described as “mysterious” (by Hawke), “ego-less” (by Delpy), and “mesmeric” (by producer Sara Woodhatch). After BEFORE
SUNSET, says Linklater, “Everyone wanted to know—when’s the third one? What happens?”

Six years of percolation later, the trio was again ready to bring Celine and Jesse back to life.

Hawke: “The way it works is: we run into each other for some reason and we end up talking and then we debate for a few years about how it would be that these characters would come in contact with each other again. And then an outline appears…”

Delpy: “…and we start taking notes, and Ethan will send us a scene, and then I will send them a monologue about losing the person you love, dying or whatever, and it may or may not ever end up in the film…”

Linklater: “… but it didn’t totally come together until we got to Greece. We spent seven weeks, very, very intensive weeks writing, workshopping, really demanding a lot of each other.”

Hawke: “People love the idea that Julie writes Celine and I write Jessie and Rick edits it or something. And that would make sense, but the truth is there’s no part of this script that Julie or I or Rick hasn’t had our hands in. Rick has a rule that if anybody doesn’t like something, it’s out and that gives us a feeling of relaxation and confidence.”
Delpy: “I often write for Ethan and Ethan for me, and you know, we all work for each other and with each other. We try to let go of any ego, because otherwise the work would suffer from it.”

Writers in paradise

Once the writing process on BEFORE MIDNIGHT was truly afoot, with an outline and Greek setting decided on, producers Christos V. Konstantakopoulos (Take Shelter, Attenberg, Somebody Up There Likes Me) and Woodhatch assembled the writers (along with fortunate spouses and children) to hash out the final script. “We wanted to create the best creative environment for them to write in—a bubble, just a fabulously idyllic setting with no outside diversions. We set them up at Costa Navarino, the gorgeous resort in Messinia where the hotel scenes in the film were shot. To watch the creative dynamism is mesmerizing—it’s like they have invisible elastic bands between them. They audition funny parts and sad parts for each other to see if they work, and it’s so compelling.”

Timeless Greece

The camera may be trained squarely on Celine and Jesse, but when it breaks away to take in the surroundings, Greece itself—beautiful, troubled, ancient, modern—becomes a character in the film. “There was just something about Greece,” says Linklater. “We find Jesse and Celine in a sort of paradise: they’re together, he’s
writing books, she’s an environmentalist, they have children—I mean so much of what they probably wanted to have happen in their lives has come to pass, and yet here they are on this idyllic summer vacation, and all is not perfect, it never is.”

“There’s no more moving place to be in Europe than Greece right now,” says Hawke, “Because it’s both intensely ancient and it’s very present as a modern force. It’s in the news every day. But romantic love is timeless—love is always new and it’s always been done before. Everybody’s doing it. Kids are falling in love—you know, there’s a new set of before sunrises every day. It’s a well-worn path and it’s infinitely interesting to us, to humans. Eros is a very mysterious god, because he’s both the youngest and the oldest. Greece conjures up a longing for some meaning in life, which I think is valuable as a metaphor to the film.”

Says Delpy, “It made memorizing the lines and shooting those scenes a little less painful because we were in the most amazing place I’ve ever been—this ancient place where western civilization basically started, you know?”

<strong>Filming on home turf

For producers Linklater, Konstantakopoulos and Woodhatch, and the mostly Greek crew, Greece was more a magnificent production opportunity than a metaphor. Producer Sara Woodhatch, a Londoner who produces with Castle Rock Entertainment (and longtime veteran of romantic-comedy productions) joined forces with Konstantakopoulos and his Faliro House Productions to pull together a lean but top-notch shoot.
“Rick, Christos and I did a very fast location scout and found the writer’s retreat, which actually was the home of Patrick Leigh Fermor, a great travel writer and intrepid, swashbuckling guy. There’s a lot of character in that house.” The people in the dinner party scene resonate with Greek cinema too: “Walter Lassally, who plays Patrick, the host, was the Oscar-winning director of photography on Zorba the Greek and countless other films. This is his acting debut age 85.

Xenia Kalogeropoulou, who plays Patrick’s companion, is the Greek equivalent of Sophia Loren; she’s an icon who was persuaded by Athina Tsangari (Co-producer) to come out of retirement for us, because she felt so close to her monologue about her husband. All the actors in the dinner party are the cream of Greek film and theater.”

The crew, including director of photography Christos Voudouris, was nearly all Greek; exceptions were the sound department, led by Colin Nicolson, who was familiar with the technical challenges of the earlier films’ walking-and-talking lengthy takes, and editor Sandra Adair, who cut all three films in the series and other Linklater projects. “We wanted lighting and camera people who really knew that incredible Greek light,” recalls Woodhatch. “There was a kind of gameness, a really high energy and talent in the Greek crew. We shot it in fifteen days. Eight and a half pages of dialogue the first day. We just had an amazing team. Even with the economic worries there’s a renaissance in Greek film going on—it’s like a bolt of lightning hit their ground and the result is incredibly fertile creativity.”
Romantic love part 3

Whether meandering through the streets of Messinia, Vienna, or Paris, the films are never travelogues—the focus always returns to Celine and Jesse and their trajectories.

“Life beats you up,” says Hawke. “It’s very telling that this movie starts with the unseen casualty of the last movie—Henry, Jesse’s son, who has now grown up separated from his father. Sure we’re all rooting for Jesse to stay in Paris when he finds Celine again, but now, after all these years, we see that there are consequences. It’s a nice accidental accomplishment that time does a lot of the work for us. We’re older, we’re deepening, our characters are deepening. There’s a certain kind of confidence that Jesse has in the first movie that only young men have. That’s lost its charm for Celine.”

“Okay,” says Delpy, “When you do follow the person you love, what happens? It’s not going to be that idealized, rosy-glass romantic love. There’s no perfect relationship—when I see people that are too perfect together, there’s something really weird. When I see people arguing and having issues and stuff, I’m like, Yeah this is a real couple, I believe it.”

Says Hawke, “The earlier films are so much about romantic projection, the way we fantasize who somebody might be for us. It seemed that if we were going to make a third film we simply had to say what happens behind the curtain. What happens when the clothes come off? And that seems to be a very necessary movie for us to make at this point in our lives in our forties. It’s where the rubber meets the road as a human being. You’re in the midpoint of your life and it’s like there’s a certain feeling of, “Is that all there is?” And there’s a certain feeling of gratitude that can slip in and a certain disappointment, and they’re kind of at war with each other. We’re interested in that gray area.”

“We love both characters, and we didn’t want victims,” says Delpy. “Victims aren’t much fun to watch.”

Hard work of looking like you’re not working hard

“People ask if some of the dialogue is improvised,” says Linklater, “But every word is scripted. It’s a testament to Ethan and Julie at the top of their game if the audience thinks they’re making it up as they go along. An enormous amount of work goes into the script and the conception and we work really, really hard to come up with dialogue that feels natural and authentic, that flows the way real conversation flows. There’s this magical place we get to where I’m directing and they’re acting and I have a movie to make and they have a ton of dialogue to memorize, and they finally know it so well that they can kind of forget it isn’t real.”

Long—very long—uncut takes, framing Celine and Jesse in conversation as they walk or drive through village and countryside, are signature stylistic elements that immerse the viewer in the moment-to-moment of their relationship.

“It’s actually torture,” says Delpy of the marathon takes. “Sometimes we cry. It’s so much easier to do a big dramatic scene like the fight in the hotel than to look relaxed and unself-conscious with the camera going and going.”

“They’re a blast,” says Hawke of the challenging takes, “But it’s so much work. That opening car shot is 14 minutes long and we tell the whole story. People wonder how we do that kind of thing in all the movies and, sad to say, it’s just we rehearse and rehearse until blood’s coming out of our ears. When you do it, if you do it right, it seems effortless and that’s the goal. Rick is an athlete—practice, practice, practice. We write the thing and write the thing and one day Rick says “alright, the writers have been fired and I want to take the actors out in the car.” With a very long take the magic isn’t in editing—the magic is on the day. It’s a lot of pressure. I love it.”

Present past future
While all three of the Jesse and Celine films are so vividly in the moment—the second film actually unfolds in real time, and the first and third condense brief hours-long time spans—the concept of time swirls through the entire decades-long enterprise. Past, future, aging, memory—there’s even a time-machine riff that figures in at the first meeting in 1995 and the latest confrontation in the present. It’s one of many subtle grace notes that wend through the trajectory.

“The notion of time is our major subject,” says Linklater. “Jumping forward to a new stage in life, backward in memory; Jesse’s a novelist, he does these little digressive, retrospective flights of imagination through his books, and Celine is more firmly in the present.”

Linklater cites François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series of films starring Jean-Pierre Léaud (The Four Hundred Blows, Love at Twenty, Stolen Kisses, Bed and Board etc.) as an inspiration to follow characters through life’s progress.

Delpy loves evolving with her character Celine through time: “The film is so much about time passing, but that’s not a depressing thing—they’re as alive in their forties as they were in their twenties. Sometimes I read a screenplay in a Hollywood film and it’s like, the woman past forty, she’s angry, bitter, and I think why are you describing those women? I don’t know any women like that!”

Un-Rom-un-Com
BEFORE MIDNIGHT ventures deeper into character drama and transcends the expectations of any genre. “A lot of times when you see married life,” notes Hawke, “It’s either some kind of cornball, whitewash thing where everybody’s okay, or it’s heavy drama, alcohol and stress, they secretly hate each other and it’s either too white or too black. What’s fun about this as a romance is that neither gender wins or loses—most romances seem to have either a female agenda, where the guys are all dopes, or a masculine idea of what romantic love is supposed to look like, with Eva
Mendes crawling across the floor in a bikini. What’s so wonderful about these movies is they’re kind of genderless. Julie’s voice and her artistry are so powerful in the film. I guess what I’m trying to say is it’s fun to make a romantic movie that I’m not ashamed to ask my male friends to go see.”

Before Next Time?
None of the filmmaking principals are coy about whether the story of Celine and Jesse will wind on, because they seem sincerely not to know the answer. For one thing: “It’s grueling,” says Hawke. “They don’t come easy and they always are worth it. It’s difficult to write a movie as incredibly personal to three people, and the style of acting that Rick is going after is a little merciless because if it’s ever noticeable that you’re acting you’ve ruined the whole project.”

Delpy too feels some dread: “It’s not that we don’t want to see each other or something, it’s really because of how hard it is. It’s like, you forget after nine years the pain, so it takes that long to forget the pain to go back through it.”

“The audience feels like they know these people, and we start to feel we could let people down and invariably we will,” says Hawke. “Each time we go further on down this path with these characters, people feel like they get to know them even better. So it’s possible to betray that. It’s so difficult for Rick, Julie and I to continue the story without the betraying our audience’s interest and at the same time remaining absolutely authentic and truthful to who they are.”

As the linchpin who may or may not call the collaboration back to life once more, Richard Linklater sees wide-open possibilities: “We’ll just drift away from Jesse and Celine for now, let them keep talking, and then we’ll see. We’ll go out on an uncertain note… some people leave the movie and say, this is it, they’ve got irreconcilable differences here, and I give them less than a year. And then other people might think, you know they’re going to make it, they’re going to stick it out through thick and thin. Who knows?”

By asking—and then answering—the diabolically simple question, What could go wrong?, both “The Hangover” and “The Hangover Part II” not only shattered boundaries and box office records, entertaining millions around the globe, but made an indelible mark on pop culture. Mr. Chow’s deranged catch phrases still ring from the most unlikely mouths, and fans from Baltimore to Bosnia sidle up daily to the front desk at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas to crack themselves up by requesting “the Hangover suite” or quoting Alan’s clueless query, “Is this the real Caesar’s palace?”

What they thought happened in Vegas was only the half of it, which they are about to discover in ways that the filmmakers believe should surprise audiences as much as it surprises the guys. “There’s a lot of action and comedy, a heist, a road trip, and an element of mystery, too, as we touch on certain things that weren’t explored before but were always part of the undercurrent of the two previous films,” Phillips continues. “It brings everything together and wraps it up with an ending that follows its own logic.”

Screenwriter Craig Mazin, who first collaborated with Phillips on the script for “The Hangover Part II,” recounts how they reached back to the two prior outings to prime that logic. “We uncovered a chain of unfinished business that arcs through all three movies for a final story that doesn’t just end on its own, but ends all three. Something happened in the beginning, although few caught its significance, and that thing is going to come back to haunt the guys and start them down a path of what will be, in many ways, their most difficult and challenging journey of all.”

Designed more as a quest than the forensic investigations that went before, “The Hangover Part III” shakes up the morning-after structure of its predecessors while still delivering plenty of laugh-out-loud and what-the-hell moments to keep moviegoers on the edge of their seats.

Rather than memory loss, the final chapter hinges on clarity, and things coming into full focus. It’s not about a specific hangover this time but harkens back to the original—that mother-of-all hangovers, triggered by Alan, which set all of this into motion six years ago in ways they couldn’t imagine.

Bradley Cooper, returning as high school English teacher and unofficial pack leader Phil, says, “There are little story points we maybe glanced by in the original that become pivotal pieces in the larger whole. Speaking as a fan, myself, watching these movies, the best part—and certainly the funniest—is putting it all together.”

Part III does not shy away from the dark side, either, the better to give its humor a sharper edge, Phillips feels. “With us it always starts with darkness, because that heightens the comedy. Plus, it just gets more interesting and more real as we bring them into darker places and amp up the tension. It’s essentially a fish-out-of-water story for these guys who don’t belong in the situation they’ve been thrown into, so the fun is in watching them struggle and trip their way through it.”

“Todd is our captain. We just follow him into battle,” says Ed Helms, reprising his role as the perpetually panicked dentist, Stu. “At this point, it’s safe to say these characters have been to hell and back…but in a good way. There are some scars. Stu, literally, has one from a regrettable tattoo, not to mention a tooth he’ll never get back. But I love these stories and these guys and I was excited to read the script for ‘The Hangover Part III,’ to see what was in store for them. I kept turning pages and thinking, ‘No way, are you kidding me? Where did that come from?’”

Similarly, audiences know these characters well enough now to follow them into any situation and trust that they will somehow prevail. Or have a phenomenally good time trying. “Bottom line: the amount of funny that comes out of these movies is unbelievable,” attests Ken Jeong, returning as bad-luck charm Chow. “And this one answers all the questions. You want to know what happened to Chow? You’ll get that answer, real quick, and in spectacular fashion.”

At the same time, part of what makes “The Hangover Part III” a satisfying conclusion to all the madness is how it copes with the one member of the group who has, thus far, eluded anything resembling growth or self-awareness. Who has ostensibly, throughout all the trauma and drama and near-death experiences, never learned anything and never changed.

In other words…”This one is Alan’s story,” says Phillips.

“It’s kind of bittersweet knowing that, after this, I won’t be able to play Alan ever again. It was a nice run, though,” Zach Galifianakis remarks, considering the persona that has earned a worldwide following and made a significant impact on his own life and career.

Knowing that “people come to these movies not to be enlightened, but to laugh and be entertained,” Mazin adds, “I think we laugh more when we care, and Todd and I care very much about these characters so we wanted to finish this in a meaningful way, and that meant dealing with Alan.”

Consequently, “The Hangover Part III” nudges Alan onto an inner journey he desperately needs, that runs parallel to the story’s main action. “I hate to suggest he grows up because I don’t know how possible that would be, but something definitely starts to change in him, at a cellular level,” offers Dan Goldberg, Phillips’ longtime producing partner.

“This allowed us to mine comedy from the deeper aspects of the characters,” Goldberg continues. “We couldn’t rely on the same things that worked before, either in character or story. Alan has given us a lot of laughs, and this movie is no exception, but there comes a time when you think, he can’t go on like this. What if he was your friend? One element that comes across so well in these movies is that no matter how insane things get, the friendship feels real. You believe these guys truly care about each other. So the question eventually becomes, how could they allow one of their own to continue on such a self-destructive path?”

Phillips concurs, emphasizing that the Wolfpack dynamic has always been key. “From the beginning, I think these movies work because of the characters and the casting. If we had, say, three Alans, apart from that being impossible, it would be tapping the same vein. These actors are not only funny in their own right, but each one comes from such a different place, comedically, that it makes for an extraordinary chemistry.

“When you watch a movie, you usually identify with a certain character,” he further notes. “I think a lot of people see things through Stu’s eyes, because he’s the one who seems most normal. Confident audience members see through Phil’s eyes and some people, if they’re completely unhinged, see things through Alan’s eyes, but ultimately it’s the group they’re responding to, and that’s a real testament to the actors. Beyond the comedy, beyond the plot, no matter where they wake up or whatever harebrained heist they have to accomplish to get out of trouble, I think people are just happy to get back together with these guys and go along for one last ride.”

“An Indian director making a film about a Pakistani man. That’s not an easy thing to do,” says novelist and co-screenwriter Mohsin Hamid of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the new film from Mira Nair, based on Hamid’s acclaimed novel of the same name.

Nair made her first visit to Pakistan in 2005. “As a child growing up in modern India, there was a wall between these countries that could never be crossed. It was 7 years ago, when I was invited to show my films in Pakistan, that I had the chance to go to the land where my father spent his youth, before the partition of India and Pakistan. To discover the country, the culture, the people—it all seemed terribly familiar. I was immediately inspired to make a contemporary film about Pakistan, especially in this day and age when the perceived schism between Islamists and the Western World becomes more pronounced each day.”

“The joy of this film,” Nair notes, “is that it reveals Pakistan in a way that one never sees it in the newspapers; with its extraordinary refinement, the searing poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, its heartstopping Sufi music and ancient culture that is confident in fashion, painting and performance. This world is fluidly juxtaposed with the energy of New York, the ruthlessness of corporate America and through our hero Changez’s love for the elegant, artistic Erica, a portrait of Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by Changez’s own family back in
Lahore.”

Nair continues, “Over the last few years, we have seen many films about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but always told from the American point of view. In our story, the encounter between the characters of Changez and Bobby mirrors the mutual suspicion with which America and Pakistan (or the Muslim world) look at one another. We learn that as a result of America’s war on terror, Changez experiences a seismic shift in his own attitude, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and maybe even love,” the director says. “But other forms of fundamentalism are revealed along the way, including the kind practiced by Changez’s former employer, Underwood Samson. Their model for global expansion is, “Focus on the Fundamentals.” From the title of the film, and from the increasingly tense atmosphere arising between Changez and his American listener, the expectation is that Changez is moving towards the revelation that he has gone, however ‘reluctantly,’ all the way over to the dark side of extremism. But is this really the case? The remarkable aspect of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is that it is a true dialogue about identity and perception, and issues around the divided self in the era of globalization.”

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is Mira Nair’s most ambitious project yet. It is a compelling film, thought provoking, moving and sensual. Shot in five cities on three continents with a truly international cast and crew of Hollywood, Pakistani and Indian stars, led by Riz Ahmed, Kate Hudson, Om Puri, Shabana Azmi, Liev Schreiber, and Kiefer Sutherland, the film depicts two very different worlds coming together through dialogue.

“The book is an elegant mind game,” Nair explains. “It was about how we, East and West, see each other. I felt I intimately knew the worlds in the book, as both an insider and an outsider.” The sense of nothing being completely what it seems permeates every aspect of Nair’s film, from the characters’ divided selves, to the shooting locations, which see Atlanta standing in for New York, and Delhi substituting for Lahore and Istanbul.

“Two men meet, have a conversation. A clock is ticking. A man’s life hangs in the balance. You don’t know what will happen—who will live and who will die. The pace and the rhythm of the film are full of suspense, but I am a person who is full of an appetite for life and beauty and fun and family and fashion. In my films, you get taken on that ride, too,” the director says.

“The Reluctant Fundamentalist is an exercise in personal healing and reconnection,” she explains. “There are elements of my own family and me that have felt impacted by the events of the past decade. The film is an attempt, among other things, to knit the pieces back together. Not by denying the tensions that have appeared, but by illustrating the ways in which we can navigate them and be human despite them.” Nair, the mother of a 21 year-old son, hopes to reach young people around the world with this film. “It’s for them, so hopefully they can be strong and recognize their journey in Changez.”

Nair’s long-time producing partner, Lydia Dean Pilcher, said some financiers early on wondered if the film would feel relevant by the time it finished, due to the volatile political landscape in which the story lives. Pilcher notes, “Unless world peace is imminent, the significance of these themes will never recede, and indeed is why the novel now widely appears on high school and college course curriculums all over the world.”

Hamid adds, “What this film gives you is a human being with whom to empathize and with whom to relate on a human level. We haven’t seen a character like Changez on film, or certainly not many of them. Moving things out of the theory, out of the hot-blooded political debate and into the emotional, human dimension is something the film does, and hopefully does well enough to disarm or surprise the audience.”

Together, the men partnered to develop the story into an illustrated graphic novel known in the industry as an “ashcan,” written by ARVID NELSON, illustrated by ANDRÉE WALLIN and art directed by Kosinski, Levine and Radical Studios art director JEREMY BERGER. This would allow them to demonstrate to investors the direction in which they wanted to go with the property.

Kosinski reveals story elements of his graphic novel: “It’s an action-adventure set in the year 2077 after a massive war has left Earth uninhabited and in ruins. The story centers on Jack, a drone repairman who is an integral part of a larger mission. A wonderful mystery, unbeknownst to him, will be the key element to saving what is left of humanity.

”What the director focused upon was the brutal honesty of the story. He adds: “There is a difference between those who ignore the truth and put their blinders on and the people who decide to take the truth head on—regardless of how hard it is to face what it means.”

Kosinski admits that this science-fiction saga was one he’d long been interested in telling. Growing up, he was enamored with such films as The Omega Man, Blade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey, books including “Hyperion” and TV shows like The Twilight Zone.

The filmmaker admits that he loved the juxtaposition of a rugged backdrop against the stylish results of imagined future technology. He says: “I have always liked the 1970s sci-fi art by Chris Foss, Peter Elson and Chris Moore and knew that with VFX technology as advanced as it is today, I could combine CGI work and real landscapes seamlessly and create something unique.”

Levine and Berger were inspired by this young director’s vision, and Levine recalls his first reaction to the property: “When I read Joe’s story, I found it to be compelling, original and motivating of human nature and character. Oblivion is a great action-adventure, but at its core is that one character you are rooting for, and that is what makes for a great movie.”

Organically, this illustrated novel became a pitch for the film itself. There was overwhelming support from fans at 2010’s Comic-Con International in San Diego, at which Kosinski was also presenting footage for TRON: Legacy.

Indeed, 30,000 copies of the graphic novel were distributed at the convention from the Radical Studio booth. Recalls Levine: “There was a line of 1,000 people at Comic-Con waiting for Joe to autograph a copy of the Oblivion ashcan. Along with the story, we created a memorable logo and illustrations that got a response from the get-go. It was a feat to take the leap and make this story into a screenplay. It’s an intellectual approach to a high-concept story with great set pieces. No one has seen anything like it before.”

Shortly after the team tested the waters with the property at Comic-Con, Universal Pictures came on board to develop the project with Kosinski, Radical Studios and Chernin Entertainment, and an Oblivion screenplay was in the works. Peter Chernin, the veteran producer who successfully rebooted a storied franchise with his 2011 blockbuster Rise of the Planet of the Apes, brought the lessons learned on that film—one that became the foremost contemporary model of combining heartfelt emotion with exciting, intelligent, speculative fiction.

Chernin explains Oblivion’s draw: “Oblivion’s story connects with people because, though it is an action film, its essence is a movie about a guy trying to discover his humanity. That’s the core, and that is why it is ultimately so satisfying.”

For the feature, Kosinski and Levine were joined by fellow producers Dylan Clark, who had produced Rise of the Planet of the Apes alongside Chernin, and Duncan Henderson, known for maneuvering epic set pieces in films as varied as Master and Commander: The Far
Side of the World and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. With a shooting screenplay by Karl Gajdusek and Michael deBruyn, the filmmakers were finally equipped to begin the massive task that would become the Oblivion production.

Conceptual Design

Clark reflects upon the design and undertaking: “Oblivion had this great visual world that Joe presented. It was something that happened to Earth, but it didn’t look dusty and dreary and dark. It looked vibrant, had a lot of colors and it felt unique. That’s what got us: the conceptual design of this was something we’ve never seen before.”

As his story takes place during the latter part of this century, Kosinski knew he needed a top design team to create a world that was most assuredly futuristic, but believable 60-plus years from current day.

He brought on the key players he had worked with on TRON: Legacy to illustrate his version of this post-apocalyptic world. Henderson knew that his director would be up for the massive challenge, reflecting: “Joe’s a great storyteller.

One of the things that intrigued me to want to do this picture was his original story. It lets an audience follow along in a way where you think you know something and then you discover it doesn’t quite make sense.

The secrets just keep revealing themselves, like you’re peeling back an onion. You discover the story as you go; you get filled in with more facts and get a new picture. It’s one fantastic reveal after another.”

Derek Cianfrance: It’s about legacy— what we’re born with and what we pass on. It’s about the choices we make and how those choices echo throughout generations. It’s a classic tale of the sins of the father being visited upon the son.

Q: Does this picture relate to your previous films?DC: It does, in that I am drawn to tell stories about families. My first film, Brother Tied, was about brothers. Blue Valentine was about husbands and wives. Pines is about fathers and sons. A theme that runs through Blue and Pines is the nature of masculine identity, reinvention or transformation of the self for a man over a period of time.

I feel that the cinema is a place where secrets are told. It’s a place where we can travel to intimate places, to homes and bedrooms, and can witness private moments that reflect our own lives. Whereas Blue looked at this intimacy – a singular relationship – under a microscope, I wanted a larger palette and a larger scope for Pines.

This movie tells three linear stories: a motorcycle stunt rider turns to a life of crime to support his newborn son, an ambitious rookie cop takes on a corrupt police department rather than confront his own demons, and two troubled teenage boys confront the mysteries of their past by battling each other.

Q: Going in sequence, how did Luke’s [played by Ryan Gosling] story take shape?

DC: Well, a number of years ago when Ryan Gosling and I were preparing Blue Valentine, it came up that there was this fantasy Ryan always had – robbing a bank, on a motorcycle, and then making a very specific getaway. I said, “You’ve got to be kidding me, I’m writing that movie right now.” He said, “I’m in!” We had both imagined it in an identical way. That was one of several moments when I knew Ryan and I were meant to make more than one film together.

Q: What did the concept evolve into, for his character?

DC: Luke is a guy who has this dark and mysterious past. He’s seen and done a lot, and had a lot happen to him. He’s damaged, wounded— a person who is kind of covered, not necessarily in scars, but in these tattoos that are signs of the pain he has experienced. This comes across in the one on his face; he’s marked by that and he lives with it. He’s like a big cat in a small cage. This is the kind of guy that 1960s girl groups like the Shangri-Las used to sing about. He’s a bit of a walking contradiction – wounded and scarred on the inside, but with a wall of armor on the outside; the muscles, the hair…Ryan and I talked about how Luke gets lost in his own self-mythologizing.

Luke performs in a traveling motorcycle show, bringing his pain from town to town, from girl to girl, from heartache to heartache. The show comes back to this place he’d been a year earlier, Schenectady, NY, and he finds that a woman he’d had a fling with there, Romina [played by Eva Mendes], has had a baby. The moment he sees the baby, the moment the baby sees him, changes the course of his life forever. Here’s a guy who is clearly tainted, and he sees this thing that he created, this thing that is pure and that has no hate, no cynicism, no marks; he doesn’t even feel like he can hold the baby because it’s so clean. And in that moment his life suddenly has purpose, it has meaning. While he has no real skills to be a father, he becomes a force of love – and that is a dangerous force.

Romina is torn. She loves this guy. But she knows he’s unsafe and so she must choose between security and love, between her son and his father.

Q: Luke’s story is not yet concluded when we meet Avery (Bradley Cooper).

DC: That’s right; I have always loved Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and how the movie managed that amazing hand-off from Janet Leigh to Tony Perkins as the protagonist. I wanted to do something similar.

I also wanted to show real consequences to the characters’ actions, especially once guns come into the story. There is a glorified gun culture in movies and in this country; I wanted to explore the effect, the aftermath.

Q: How does Avery get to the point where we meet him, and then afterwards?

DC: This is a guy who, since childhood, has had the ability to see and find his way. He’s been the high road example, known and renowned for his best traits: a good fellow, popular, fair, honest, truthful, strong, high IQ. Avery has been born into this small city’s royalty, being the son of a powerful judge [played by Harris Yulin]. Everyone in his life – his dad, his college sweetheart [played by Rose Byrne] who he’s married – assumes that Avery will follow in his father’s footsteps. Only Avery wants to be his own man. Against his father’s wishes, he has dropped out of law school to build himself from the ground up. Nobody understands why he would resist the silver spoon. So when we first meet Avery, he is a 28-year-old rookie cop…

…and, on duty, he makes a mistake. That creates a toxic shame in him, one which he can’t speak about. He is now in a state of being wrong for the first time and is painfully aware of his guilt. Meanwhile, the world considers him a hero and so he feels like even more of a sham, and inadequate.

This inner conflict creates a gulf in Avery’s relationship with his wife and young child, and also puts him at odds with growing corruption at work. So he must choose: battle against the demons inside him, or go to battle against people in real life? He decides to bury his own problems and focus on problems in the world. So he goes out and he does good things. But to not heal the wounds inside himself and to try to fix everything else around him is a tragic flaw, one which will haunt him.

Q: These are two very different characters. How about the actors playing them?

DC: They are both much more than actors in this film, they are true collaborators. Ryan and Bradley both have tremendous instincts for character and story and dialogue, and they are both brave enough to go to the vulnerable places I needed them to go to up on the screen. They each do a lot of research and go the distance for you.

Ryan has this incredible presence and charisma on-screen and in real life. He’s inherently interesting and cinematic, but he also makes everyone around him better. I have learned so much from him, and feel incredibly fortunate each time I collaborate with him. Now we have more of a shorthand, and can get at what we want even faster.

When I met Bradley, I saw that he had the same kind of charisma that Ryan has. But the thing that sold me on Bradley more than anything else was how hard he worked. After meeting with him a couple of times I went back to the script and reworked the character, because I knew Bradley could go deeper than I originally had in mind.

I think the reason Pines works is because Ryan and Bradley are not only movie stars and great actors, but also compelling human beings. Each brings a different energy to the movie, creating a balance and also a dichotomy.

Q: What is the significance of the imagery of the trees, and why exactly are they pines?

DC: Let’s start with the title – the Iroquois translation of Schenectady is “the place beyond the pines.” Schenectady is where my wife grew up. So I have been going up there for a decade visiting her family, and it’s such an interesting place. There are different tribes in a contemporary city. It has a rich history and it’s definitely in the midst of the economic struggle. My co-writer, Ben Coccio, who grew up there, describes it as a smaller version of Detroit. Ben came up with the title of the movie, and I loved it because it has a literal meaning – there is a clearing that characters visit on-screen – and other, more metaphorical meanings; it’s where you can find your demons, or your destiny, or both.

We shot the film in Schenectady for 47 days, which was a long time given our budget. Because of my training in documentary film, it was important to me to shoot in real places – I felt strongly that it could only be made in Schenectady – and to surround the actors with real people as much as possible to give the film that sense of place and truth. So we shot in live locations: a functioning police station with Schenectady police officers, a working hospital with nurses and patients in the next room, an active fair with 500 people who we were counting on not to look into the camera lens, real banks with real bank tellers and bank managers who had been robbed before, and a high school with actual students. This was all to lend authenticity to the moments we were capturing. I asked everyone everywhere – cops, bank tellers, doctors, judges – to make sure that the scenes we were doing were true. And if I was told that they weren’t, then I would rewrite scenes on the spot until we were being honest.

Q: Aside from Schenectady itself, where did your inspiration come for this story?

DC: It started with Abel Gance. In film school, I saw his Napoleon, which plays out on three screens at once. So I became obsessed with the idea of making a triptych film. I had been a student with Stan Brakhage and Phil Solomon, who rooted me in aesthetics and formalism. However, Phil used to always tell me, “Form must illuminate content.” I thought I could make the three screens sing, but I didn’t know the song. So I kept marinating on the idea of three until I had a story with purpose.

In 2007, a few months before the birth of my second son, the film finally came to me. I had been thinking a lot about being a father and becoming one again and the responsibility that came with it, what I was going to pass down to my new boy.

That got me to thinking about the fire I felt inside me, which had been with me for as long as I could remember. It helped me to do many things. But it was also, many times, a destructive and painful force. It shapes who you become, but you have to take control of it. I knew that my father also had this fire in him, and his father as well…I started wondering how many generations back it went. I began to wish that my new boy would be born without this fire. I didn’t want to give him all of my pain and mistakes; I wanted him to have his own path.

I had also been reading just about everything that Jack London wrote, and I was taken with the idea of legacy and the calling-back of ancestors – which happens in The Call of the Wild. You want your bloodline to survive, to be better than you. I thought about how time does things to people and their families. I felt I now had a story to tell.

Q: Did you start writing the script at that time?

DC: Not until I went out to find somebody to write with, because I simply cannot write alone; I’m a filmmaker because I like working with others. If I wanted to create alone, I would be a painter.

I was introduced to Ben Coccio, who made this great underappreciated movie Zero Day. We met at The Donut Pub in NYC and he told me he was from Schenectady. We hit it off: we had read the same books, watched the same films growing up – GoodFellas is a favorite – and we had read the same books. Ben latched on to the idea of Pines; he just lit up. I went off to keep trying to make Blue Valentine, and he started writing.

Blue took a while longer, and Ben kept writing. I’d give notes on Pines and every so often we would work on it together. The first draft was over 160 pages. Ben would always reference Giant, and his script was definitely ambitious. When Ben and I started writing together at length, we spent a lot of time refining the script.

Q: What was the involvement of the third credited screenwriter, Darius Marder?

DC: About four months before we started filming Pines, my good friend Darius got involved. His documentary feature Loot was all about fathers and sons, men who were haunted by their past; I knew he had a handle on those themes. He and I have kids in the same school – there’s more of a connection with fathers and sons – and we would drop our kids off in the morning and write all day until we had to go pick them up. The story and the characters continued to jell. This movie was so big it did take all three writers to get it together. By the time of filming, we’d hit 37 drafts.

Again, as with Blue, I considered all of the actors in the film to be true collaborators. That could also mean being additional writers; I was always urging them to go off-script and make it fresh, make it alive, make it true.

Q: This had a bigger cast than Blue Valentine. Did that affect your direction of the actors?

DC: Not really. There was complete commitment from our actors. There were no fancy hotels in Schenectady, and we couldn’t afford big trailers. Our preparation and shooting schedules required incredible amounts of time and energy, and we were filming in places with bee hives and mosquito infestations. I never heard a complaint.

I had a dream cast, and I am eternally indebted to them. To think that Ray Liotta is actually in one of my movies, after seeing GoodFellas dozens of times in the movie theater when I was a teenager…

Q: What was the rehearsal process like? Was there extensive improvisation, like on Blue Valentine?

DC: Yes. To me, process is everything. The experience of making a film is what’s important. I love shooting, I love working with actors. I love being surprised, I love making discoveries. I love it when things break, when they don’t go as planned.

On Blue, we were dealing with love as a theme, which is universal; everyone knows what it feels like to be in love. So the points of reference for the actors were inside themselves. On Pines, not everyone has robbed a bank; not everyone has been a cop or know people who have been or are. So there was a lot more research to be done.

Q: What kind of research?

DC: Ben Mendelsohn [who plays Luke’s friend Robin] and I met with this guy who had robbed a half-dozen banks in Schenectady –

Q: How did you get ahold of him?

DC: Ben and I wanted to get an accurate perspective. So we asked the police in Schenectady if they could make an introduction. All of a sudden, they showed up at my office with a guy who was fresh out of prison and open with us about everything. I remember him saying, “The one thing movies get wrong is, bank robberies are messy in real life but in movies they are always perfect.” So we also went to local banks and talked with people there, some of whom had been through robberies. I’d ask, “Tell me how it happened with you.” Our guy from prison had done these robberies but…well, the word the people used was “nicely,” so he’d served less time.

Q: So the police department cooperated a lot with the production?

DC: Yes. Bradley Cooper, Ray Liotta, and the actors playing Avery’s fellow cops spent time with the real officers in Schenectady. They did ride-alongs and then went into households where calls had come in from, and got invited over for family feasts. One thing we changed in the script as a result was Avery being the only cop in his police car; in Schenectady, they don’t ride with partners.

Bradley wore the chain of St. Michael, the patron saint of the police. He learned about holding a gun, about protocol, about why police offers chew gum – it’s to keep calm, they call it their “Prozac.” He and I talked to a police officer who had been shot in the line of duty and had also killed someone in the line of duty – which, he told us, was harder to get over. He’s still not over it.

It was total and complete immersion so that we could learn everything we needed. We were open to throwing anything away if it wasn’t true. We tried to make everyone who helped us proud.

Q: What about those actors who weren’t playing cops or robbers?

DC: It was the same process. For instance, Rose Byrne spent time with divorced wives of cops and then she spent days playing house with Bradley Cooper – days, mind you, when we weren’t shooting. When an actor of Rose’s caliber commits herself like this, it is a true gift. Same for Bruce Greenwood [who plays opposite Cooper as investigating D.A. Bill Killcullen], who shadowed the Schenectady D.A. for a week.

Q: What did Eva Mendes bring to the film, and to the role of Romina?

DC: I met Eva right after I did Blue Valentine. I had always been a fan of her work, especially in James Gray’s We Own the Night. She has such a magnetic screen presence, and has often ended up in gratuitous roles as the sex object – although I liked how slyly she played with that in The Other Guys. When Pines was coming together, I met with a number of actresses but I kept thinking about Eva. I had a hunch that, given the chance, she could knock this role out of the park.

Eva came to see me with no make-up on; she still looked beautiful, but it meant so much to me that she was trying not to. Instead of having her audition, I asked her to take me for a ride around Los Angeles and show me the places where she grew up. Sitting in the passenger’s seat of her car, I saw the deep, thoughtful, warm, generous, unpredictable person inside Eva. She opened up about herself, her life, her past. I offered her the role.

She and Ryan had known each other a little before we shot, which added a tangible dimension to Luke and Romina’s relationship on-screen.

The first scene we shot with Eva was the sex scene in the trailer with Ryan. I know she was terrified to do it because she was trembling, but she is brave; she embraced her fear and confronted it and bared her soul. The small crew that day was left speechless and inspired by her bravery – which continued every day with her.

Q: Can you talk about the action scenes, and how everyone approached those?

DC: One thing Blue was noted for was its frank sexuality. On Pines, I wanted to approach the action scenes in the same way. They had to feel like they were happening in the real world, like the rest of the movie.

This meant that Ryan Gosling had to learn how to ride a motorcycle. The most complicated scene was where Luke goes into a bank, robs it, leaves the bank, escapes on his motorcycle, and drives at tremendously fast speeds through a busy intersection amidst lots of other cars while being pursued by a cop. All of this happens in a single take, no place to do a “Texas switch.” So Ryan had to become very proficient on the bike. He trained with Rick Miller, one of the great Hollywood stunt men, six hours a day for two months. His prowess took our breath away. In order to get that scene completed, Ryan did 22 takes. Every time, he almost got hit.

For other scenes, it had to be stunt men. I was blessed with a great team of stunt drivers led by Brian Smyj. I felt they were excited to be a part of Pines because normally they would risk their lives doing a stunt for a massive movie and then see their death-defying feat reduced to 14 frames in the final product. I didn’t want to cut within the action scenes. My points of reference were Cops and World’s Wildest Police Videos. The stunt team was up for all that, but I will never forget the feeling in my stomach watching Rick Miller lay down his bike at 65 miles per hour for a shot. Those stunt guys and gals are true warriors.

Q: Can you contextualize the third story, set 15 years after the earlier ones?

DC: In a way, the first two acts of this movie serve as prologue to the third. It’s in the third part of the film where legacy, what the movie is about, comes up.

Luke’s son Jason [played by Dane DeHaan] is a kid who has grown up in a warm home. He has a good mother, a good stepfather, a lot of love in his house. But there’s something missing from his life and he knows it. He has been lied to and protected from a truth, and that mystery won’t let him go. He’s heroic because he searches for that truth even if it will destroy him.

Avery’s son AJ [played by Emory Cohen] is a kid who seemingly has a lot: born into money, he has his mother’s love and attention. What he doesn’t have – and hasn’t had – is his father present in his life.

So both of these boys are missing a father, and they each deal with it in different ways. AJ doesn’t really have a connection with his father; he’s hurt by that, and everything he does is a scream for attention from his dad. He puts up barriers to act as if he is not hurting. AJ is a tragic character. He’s this over-privileged kid who is popular but is filled with self-loathing and self-hatred. He has a lot of the qualities of his father.

Q: How hard was it to cast these two roles?

DC: I auditioned over 500 kids. Picking up from where Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper leave off in the movie is a mighty task. Very late in the casting process, I found Dane DeHaan and Emory Cohen. Working with them was thrilling because they are both so good and so fresh.

Just as Ryan and Bradley are opposing dualities, so too are the boys. I remember the first audition I had with Dane and Emory opposite each other, this discussion of their favorite actor was. It turned into a fight, Dane insisting on James Dean or Al Pacino and Emory insisting on Marlon Brando or Robert De Niro. I figured that this conflict could carry over into the movie; once we got on the set, I’d just let that dynamic go!

Q: You spent over a decade trying to make Blue Valentine, but it must have been easier getting the financing for this film.

DC: During the 12 years on the bench waiting to make Blue, I prepared for other projects or opportunities. Because Blue had some level of success, I was able to put Pines together rather quickly.

The crew over at Sidney Kimmel Entertainment responded to the script. From my first meeting with them, it was clear that they were passionate about seeing the best version of the film. I am thankful to them because they gave me a lot of trust, space and time to make the film the way I wanted. They also pushed me to go further where and when I needed to while establishing the right boundaries, which I feel are important for a filmmaker like me. Those let me know where the edge is, so I can play close to the edge and not fall off. Without that, I might go on forever and get lost.

My producers – Jamie Patricof, Lynette Howell, and Alex Orlovsky – are exactly what I want out of producers. We did Blue together, and I hope to make every movie with them. They were the first people to read the Pines script besides Ryan. They challenge me. They aren’t pushovers. When they have to, they defend me. They make the crazy dreams in my head come true.

Q: So the production went smoothly?

DC: With one huge exception: Hurricane Irene struck and Schenectady had its biggest floods in 500 years. The night before she hit, I moved my family out of the house where we were staying. The next morning the house was under 15 feet of water.

We had to cancel production because our equipment trucks were submerged. When I found out that we had two days’ worth of filmed footage on one of the trucks, I was beside myself – I’ve had film negative lost before. The camera department, led by first AC Ludovic Littee, took a canoe out to the truck and rescued our footage. We were back filming the next day.

Q: Who else was on your crew, and what did they bring to the project creatively?

DC: Our production designer Inbal Weinberg and her team made every room of every house fully functional, even if we weren’t going to be shooting in those rooms. Since we were shooting in so many live locations, I needed the actors to continue living in the real world. Inbal did Blue with me, and I love working with her because she never hesitates to disagree with me and fight for her ideas. I love her spirit and her taste. She has a way of going into places and making them iconic without being quirky.

The costumer was Erin Benach, also from Blue, who creates such iconic clothes for people to wear in-character. Even more importantly, she collaborates with the actors to find the clothes that will help them to discover their characters. I completely trust her.

Q: You hadn’t worked with this cinematographer before. What made you pick him?

DC: I had already met with a number of DPs, and then Sean Bobbitt told me a lot about his process and how he prefers using handheld cameras and natural lighting, and his theories on camera movement. To me, he has such a strong sense of composition and I wanted Pines to be like flipping through the pages of a storybook. I found out Sean had been a war photographer, so I sensed he would help us all be fearless and he did.

Q: When on the shoot was that a factor?

DC: We knew the first scene of this film should be an epic shot, taking us, like a dream, from the space of Luke’s trailer through a working fairground and into a circus tent where he and other riders would begin riding a motorcycle in a steel-cage “globe of death” – upside down. Sean wanted to go inside of that globe. So he suited up protectively and we started shooting, did the whole 5-minutes-long tracking shot and then he went in the center of the globe. I’m watching the monitor, it’s beautiful, but then I hear a crash and the monitor goes fuzzy.

I look over at the globe and I see Sean on the bottom of a pile of three motorcycles. The paramedics run in and everyone’s asking if he’s OK. Sean was – angry he didn’t get the shot! He gets up and says, “Let’s do it again!” I say, “Sean, don’t do it again.” He says, “I’m doing it again. We must get this shot and go to the center of it.” So we went back to the start point, filmed from the trailer all the way into the center of the globe of death, and again at the same exact moment the monitor goes static. I look up to again find Sean under motorcycles. This time he was even more shaken up and even angrier at himself for not getting the shot. We cancelled the shoot for that night.

Around 3:00 AM, Sean woke up in his hotel room and didn’t know what country he was in. We took him to the emergency room and it turns out he had a concussion. But the next night we did it all again, and I prevailed upon him not go inside, which wasn’t easy. That night we got the shot you see in the film.

Q: What were the challenges in post-production?

DC: I hate editing, and editing this movie was a beast. There was a lot of story to get through, characters to explore. The only thing that made it bearable is the fact that two of my closest friends edited Pines; I’ve been working with Jim Helton for about 20 years and Ron Patane for about 10. They’ve edited as a team several times before.

Our first rough cut, after six months, ran three-and-one-half hours. Overall it took us nine months to fully edit the film – seven days a week and sixteen hours a day.

Q: Was there discussion of intercutting the three sections, cross-cutting among them?

DC: No. That had come up early on, at the script stage. Other people would then bring it up again when I was looking for financing. But I never considered it. This is a story about lineage, so it needed to be linear. I always wanted an audience to experience the movie that way. There’s not the security of a flashback or a shift to lessen the impact when things happen to the characters.

Q: Was the score an easier part of the post-production process?

DC: Yes. The single greatest concert I ever went to was Mr. Bungle in Denver in 1991. I remember [the band’s member and founder] Mike Patton, wearing a bondage mask and horse blinders, licking the head of a bald bouncer. I always felt his music was so cinematic, and for films I made in high school, I’d always put his music on.

Mike read the Pines script. His brother is a police officer so it was like fate…and, a dream come true for me to get to work with him. He understood the haunted qualities of the story.

Q: Are those qualities what you hope an audience takes away from the film, or, something else?

DC: One response that meant a lot to me came from a well-respected and powerful man who shall remain nameless. After seeing Pines, he cancelled his business dinner scheduled for that night. Then he called his ex-wife and asked her, “I know it’s your night tonight, but could I come pick him up?” He drove across town, picked up his teenage son, brought his boy home, and they spent time together.

I’m not a message filmmaker. I want people to be entertained, to be absorbed by the story, and to take what they will into their own lives.

Niccol observes that science fiction offers a subtle way to deliver a message to an audience. “It’s almost easier to say something about today by going into a future period,” he notes. “It’s a Trojan Horse of sorts. The audience is thinking that if it’s about the future it has nothing to do with them and then you slip an idea to them.”

Niccol agreed to direct the film, as well as to write the screenplay based on Meyer’s novel. “Obviously I was aware of the popularity of Twilight,” he says. “But I simply wanted to do justice to the book and its fans. Any pressure I felt was more creative than commercial. The idea of catching lightning in a bottle twice is a little much to expect. On the other hand, I wouldn’t bet against Stephenie.”

Having been through the adaptation process several times before, Meyer came to the table with strong opinions about what the

final script should look like. “Any adaptation is 95 percent compromise and 5 percent frustration,” she says. “I believe that everyone on the creative side of filmmaking wants the best result they can get. We want the best because we care about how the story’s told, not who our market is and how we position this at the box office.”

The first major challenge was turning a 600-plus-page book into a 120-page script. “That’s a challenge for any filmmaker, especially when you have an author whose books are so beloved,” says Wechsler. “But the whole process went fairly quickly and we got a script that we really believe in.”

It was, by all accounts a satisfying and productive collaboration. “Stephenie definitely has her opinions, but she doesn’t impose them,” Niccol says. “She’s very savvy. She cares, but she’s not precious about her ideas. She’ll accept changes that seem quite sweeping without any kind of handwringing. Some elements and characters had to be sacrificed. I love soccer, but there’s a soccer game in the book that I knew was never going to make it into the movie. You have time for that kind of digression in a novel, but not in a film.”

“Working with Andrew was a lot of fun,” Meyer says. “He is so much more visual than I am. I really like to delve into the words and how people interact. Andrew concentrated on the physical world. He brought in elements that take it to a level I hadn’t envisioned. There were things he came up with that made me kick myself a little bit because I liked them so much better than what I’d done.”
For example, in the novel, the Souls use human weapons, turning the earthlings’ guns and explosives against them. “Alien beings are usually depicted as the enemy,” says Niccol. “We thought, what if the aliens are more humane than humans? With Stephenie’s blessing, I used that idea and replaced the guns with a futuristic spray called Peace that gently immobilizes its target.”

The final script for The Host still contains a compelling romance, according to Niccol, but it also encompasses a good deal more for audiences to think over. “I like that at its core it still is a love story, but it does have these broader themes,” he says. “We’re dealing with the survival of humanity. We’re also asking if a species that actually heals the planet has a place on Earth. These are themes that are far more profound than any in Stephenie’s previous work. It’s hard to say what each person will take from it, but I do hope it entertains and gives them something to chew over.”

The popular author also enjoys exploring the idea of love, but in this case, not just romantic love. “There’s maternal love, which is such a big part of my life,” says Meyer. “There’s love of community and the people you belong with. I asked myself, what happens when you love someone and that makes you a traitor to your people?
Love makes you do things you wouldn’t do otherwise. It creates conflict and disorder.”

As the story began to take shape, it rooted itself in the desert she was travelling though. “I kept thinking about the things we take for granted: that we can see, how we can walk around, how we taste and hear.”

As Meyer expanded on her original concept, she began constructing a more serious, deeper story than she had in any of her previous novels. “The Twilight books are about romantic love and the way it makes you feel at 17 or 18,” she notes. “There’s nothing else in the world. You would do anything and be anything for love. That’s a fun place to visit as a fantasy.

“The Host is about finding balance in life,” she continues. “Certainly there’s romance, but it is a much more grown-up and realistic story, aside from the science-fiction elements.”

But the sci-fi elements do set the stage for the story in The Host. “The world has been invaded Body Snatcher-style,” explains Meyer. “These new entities, who call themselves the Souls, are a very peaceful, harmonious, homogenous group. They fix many of the problems of our world. There’s no more hunger, no more disease or fear or violence. No one lies or cheats or steals. The idea that a stranger might harm you doesn’t even exist anymore.”

The handful of humans who have not been taken over by the Souls are understandably unable to see the beauty in a utopia in which most of their loved ones are gone. “They’ve lost everything, including the people most important to them,” Meyer says. “But this story is told
from the perspective of Wanda, one of the aliens, which is rarely the way it has been approached before.”
The Host was published in 2008 and spent 26 weeks at No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list and 36 weeks on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list.

Producer Nick Wechsler recalls getting a call from Meyer’s agent asking if he was interested in putting together a film based the material. “I’m an avid sci-fi fan, so I jumped at the chance to read it. The theme, the characters and the conceit of the book leaped out at me. What I didn’t understand was why a best-selling book by Stephenie Meyer hadn’t already been bought.”
What he discovered was that conventional wisdom in the film

industry dictated that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to make a realistic film in which two characters shared one body. “It never seemed like a huge challenge to me or to Nick,” says Meyer. “We figured all we needed was a really fantastic actress.”

Based on Wechsler’s history of making acclaimed adaptations of other novels, including Requiem for a Dream, The Time Traveler’s Wife and The Road, Meyer believed he could be counted on to make the best possible movie version of the book. “Just look at his track record,” she says. “He finds books that he loves and translates them as meticulously as he can to the screen. He was a dream to work with because he wanted the same things I wanted.”

Wechsler approached Steve and Paula Mae Schwartz of Chockstone Pictures to partner with Meyer and him as the film’s producers. “When Steve, Paula Mae and I do a project together, we develop it with our own money,” he says. “That gives us more creative control, which was extremely appealing to Stephenie. We agreed that we would treat this property with care and make an epic adventure, not just a popcorn movie.”

The Schwartzes were excited by The Host’s delicate balance of romance and speculative fiction. “There’s a human element to this story that we felt we don’t often see in sci-fi,” says Paula Mae Schwartz. “The relationship between Melanie and Wanda explores love and jealousy and the difficulty of change. Forced to share a body, each one gains something from the other and ultimately becomes a better version of herself.”

When the producers began the process of selecting a screenwriter and a director, Wechsler asked Meyer about her favorite science fiction movies. “I told him that my number one is Gattaca,” she says. “I love that it’s not about gadgets and lasers and fighting robots. It’s about humanity, not how cool a space ship can be designed in CGI. We are transported into a world other than our own, but one that we can imagine ourselves in because of the performances and the story.”

As it happened, Wechsler has a longstanding relationship with Andrew Niccol, Gattaca’s writer and director. “Stephenie liked the rhythm of the way the characters spoke and the style in which Gattaca is directed,” he says. “I love Andrew’s taste and his vision.”