The Cinema Lounge

Indian Visions

Director David Cronenberg on Eastern Promises

By James Shippey, DC Film Society Member

People who meet me for the first time often ask me to name my favorite film. Favorite film? Out of so many? Try favorite director! I usually answer that there is one who is working today, continually challenging audiences with sophisticated stories, an artist's eye, and a penchant for coaching some of the best performances out of some great actors. I am, of course, talking about David Cronenberg. From his early works that made drive-in fare cerebral, to 2005's A History of Violence (which earned an Oscar nomination for William Hurt), to his latest, Eastern Promises.

Casually sitting in the front room of a Ritz-Carlton suite, on a rather inviting Friday afternoon, I am introduced to a man who looks calm, hiding his exhaustion; apparently, even my personal heroes can't avoid airline travel woes that the rest of us have been enduring this year!

James Shippey: First off, allow me to welcome you to DC. It is rare that I can say that to someone I have been following for so long without meeting them until now! You are more than a trooper than I can possibly imagine.
David Cronenberg: Thanks. All of the travel on this project, especially in Russia, was arduous, and it seems to be getting worse and worse this year.

JS: In your personal ties with your films, you are more involved with all aspects of them, including traveling here today. Well, we are here today to talk briefly about your latest film, Eastern Promises, which is coming out in the very near future. To get started, can you speak about working with Viggo Mortensen again. This is the first time you have worked with the same actor sequentially. I'm not aware if you have a troupe of regular actors, though I know you have used some supporting actors previously, just not as high profile as Viggo as the lead.
DC: Sure, the only other time with a leading actor has been with Jeremy Irons, though not back-to-back. But it wasn't from want to trying, though. I have relations with my actors, like Chris Walken and Jimmy Woods, Jeremy and Ralph Finnes. We usually end filming with a promise to try to work together again, and we do mean it. But it's really tricky because of time, money, the right roles, my time, who's available, etc. And it only really worked out this one time! One of the things is, if you find a good actor, you cast a good actor, then, well, I think it's because I am lazy!

JS: [laughs]
DC: Really, there is truth in that, because you are starting work at a high level already. You are already working on very sophisticated stuff, knowing that you don't have to sweat the 'normal stuff' with them; they are so good you don't have to worry. If you are working with actors who aren't so good, even if their technique is good, but they don't quite have the conception of their characters down, or even if they are fighting with you over this, you have to spend more time with them. This is a lot more work for the director. You know it's much more fun when you have a Ferrari in the driveway (no offense to Volkswagen!). It really turned out quite special; we really got along very, very well. He (Viggo) is unusual in that he is a complete actor. A complete artist: people know he also a photographer, a poet, a musician, and he runs a press. He's a complete collaborator: he brings a lot to a movie, more than what just a normal actor would bring. A good collaborator is a wonderful thing to have. Besides that, he's a really great mensch; a really great guy. He's a lot of fun, but serious about his work, just not too serious.

For me, really, he is an untapped resource. Sure, he has done a lot of work, but with his last two films, he's been asked to do things he hasn't been asked to do before. That's my conceit at least. I like to think I have discovered more things in Viggo, and I believe he thinks that, too. Also, you keep feeling like you have unfinished business with an actor like that. You think 'wow, where can we go now?' For example, in Spider, it's a very specific role for Ralph, in which he really doesn't speak much.Yet, he is so good at speaking. So you might now think that Ralph and I are thinking about other projects where Ralph can do other things there. It's the same with Viggo. As it was, he played a real American from the heartland, and he had to do an Indiana accent, then a Philly accent. But now it's something else: he's playing someone from Russia, someone alien to my innate culture, a more complete, exotic creation. And then he had to make it real, even real to Russians. Our goal, as our Russian dialect coach said, "I want people to believe he is Russian. I want my Russian comrades to believe he is Russian. His Russian needs to be perfect. So aside from the normal challenges, we had the challenge of his accent being flawless, being what a Russian's would be, but also the way he moves, his sense of humor, how he approaches women. It was a big challenge and like I said, unfinished business.

JS: I find it interesting--your approach to being so authentic on the Russian component of a story that takes place in London, while most of your work has been in Toronto, in Canada. Was this something odd to you, and was it suggested by the script, the book, or working in London again? Were you committed to working in London again?
DC: I actually challenged my producers to see if they could make it cheaper to film interiors in Canada, as we had done on Spider. Things have shifted, including the Canadian dollar, which has gone sky high -

JS: You aren't kidding! Probably cheaper to film in the US now!
DC: And the British are much more aggressive about tax relief for local film production, for filming in the UK. Technically, Eastern Promises is a Canadian-UK co-production. Viggo is a Dane with a Danish passport; Naomi has an English passport. Even though it did turn out that things are three times more expensive in London over Toronto, it still made sense to film it all in London. So that was it: tax breaks, producing and financing were the main reasons.

Having said that, well, we did very well with Spider. Ralph was very worried that we would lose some of the essential Englishness by filming interiors in Toronto, but when he stepped onto the set, he was convinced. Carol Spier had done a brilliant job, bringing to life England in the 1950's. I am sure we could have done the same thing with Eastern Promises. Still, we had an English crew, who were very excited that we were filming in England. They told us no one still shoots in London now, unless it's a Notting Hill.

JS: The prettier side of London?
DC: Right. They don't shoot in Hackney, they don't shoot in North Harlton, or any of the immigrant sections of town. So we had lots of good vibes from the crew there. Also, the studio we used there, Three Mills, which was an actual, converted mill, was in the East End of London. Shepperton, Pinewood studios, they are in the more fashionable West End, where all of the tourists go. Three Mills had the same gritty feel as the rest of the East End; it's all cobblestone and brick. You could have shot some scenes right in front of there, in fact, I did shoot some inserts there, some close ups. You don't realize that you are on the street because of the same textures are there. There was something to all of that which must have seeped into the film, making it feel more East London.

JS: Were there any other things, perhaps suggested by the script, that you wanted to explore in the visual components? One thing I noticed [in the film], and perhaps I was specifically looking for it more, is that you have many scenes where you frame faces, very closely. Almost like a very different examination of the actor. Was that a conscious choice?
DC: Well everything I do is conscious! I was still using fairly wide lenses, even for the close ups. So with that, you can still see the background with the faces. I am not really isolating the faces. If you use a long lens, which you would normally do for shooting normal portraiture, you are only in focus from here to here [Cronenberg gestures a rough 1 foot cubic zone in the air] while everything in back is soft, very out of focus. I wasn't doing that. I was using lenses that would spread the face, so you would see the context that the character was in. All of the characters are 'in their context'; no one is allowed to float free, as it were, from their context, from their culture, from their cage. That's my rationale here, and it starts intuitively. The rationale comes after the fact. I think it is legit.

JS: Oh, it's your film, sir! You decide what is legit when you make it! Now, you know you have a great body of work, and many people have glommed on with a lot of admiration for you and your work, almost a cult following, really [myself included]. How would you say that Eastern Promises fits into your body of work, or does it?
DC: Well I have no idea! I have no agenda or arc. You probably have a better idea than I, as I am too close to my work. I do know that this has been as passionate of a project as I have ever had. You love it. You have to love it. You end up spending two years of your life with a picture, so you had better love it! Otherwise, what are you doing there? You'll end up doing a bad job. I am sure people will pair it with A History of Violence because it's another mob movie, because of Viggo. That would be legitimate; it would make an interesting double bill, you know? One is America, this one is totally not America. They do raise questions that might make them connect. I have a feeling that is the most obvious thing. Where those two films are in relation to the rest of my stuff, who knows? When people say 'these are the best movies he has ever made', and I have heard that already, that pleases me. At least that means, well, I know there are some people who will always love Scanners more because it scared them when they were 12, but as a filmmaker you like to think you haven't peaked. You still have more to do and more to say that is strong. We really felt we were at the top of our game with these two movies. So did my crew, well, we had an English crew, but my department heads were the usual suspects. We feel we haven't gotten senile yet! So you'll have to let us know when we have! At the moment I think, well, given that movie is a mob movie, there is a certain built-in commerciality, and to that extent, a genre movie. But that's it: I am giving you my best, and I can't really do better than that. That's how it feels to me.

Eastern Promises is scheduled to open September 14.

The Hunting Party: An Interview with Writer-Director Richard Shepard

By Lee Lederer, DC Film Society Member

Richard Shepard is not your run of the mill director. In Scotland, Pa., a film he produced, a naked man sprints past a bemused Christopher Walken in the movie's last sequence. The streaker was Richard Shepard. After his first film The Linguini Incident bombed, Shepard found no one would return his phone calls and he had trouble finding work. He wrote a satirical article about this experience for Filmmaker magazine in which he said his cinematic failure had put him in "movie jail."

Several subsequent projects got Shepard a parole and he really broke free in 2005 with The Matador, a black comedy in which Pierce Brosnan completely reversed his James Bond image by playing a disreputable, yet likeable, hit man.

Shepard's latest film is The Hunting Party, which features Richard Gere, Terrence Howard, and Jesse Eisenberg as three TV journalists who team up for different reasons in an attempt to find and capture a war criminal in Bosnia with a five million dollar bounty on his head. The film is loosely based on a non-fiction Esquire article called "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" about the misadventures of five journalists who tried to find the notorious war criminal Dr. Radovan Karadzic.

In the DC area to publicize his new film, the good natured and talkative director sat down for an interview for the Film Society at the Georgetown Ritz Carlton on August 24th.

Question: How did you get involved in making this film from the original non-fiction Esquire article "What I did on my Summer Vacation"? Did you yourself read the article and say, as did one of the people cited in the article, "This would make a good movie"?
Richard Shepard: I keep joking with the journalists that no one actually said that and they just put that in so the article would get optioned. They said, no, it was really said. As to why I did the film, after The Matador, people were asking what do you want to do next? I love The Third Man [Carol Reed, 1949]. One of the many things I love about it is the post-war environment. So I wanted to do a movie set in a post-war environment. I'm interested in that - society trying to get its act together, the way people react, the black marketeers. Certainly in The Third Man it's very dramatic. So a producer said that we own this article, you should read it. And after reading it, I said "Wow, this is a unique way of telling a very compelling story", because there's such a sardonic sense of humor in these journalists and what they went through. So I immediately loved the article. But I was terrified about it because I am not an expert on Bosnia and I had never adapted a true story. So I convinced them to send me to Bosnia. I went with my wife and we hooked up with two of the original journalists. We went up that mountain, to that little town, drove by the guard in the woods watching us, went to that bar with the animal skulls on the wall, and I got really hooked. And I had been reading a lot. And because I was with these journalists, I was able to meet people from NATO and the UN and the High Commissioner of Bosnia, and people who had quit the Hague, and I saw all this governmental gobbledygook. No one would give me a straight answer as to why this guy (the war criminal) wasn't caught. It just drove me crazy. I thought this is really interesting, this is not just a one level story. There's a lot of stuff going on here. And I said if I will see if I can figure out a way to tell a story that would entertain, that's not confusing to people who don't know anything about the war, but hopefully would get them interested in it in some way, or at least in what's going on. It was tricky for me to figure it out ultimately. But it's one of those nice little situations where I did and someone said "Hey, this is okay and here's the money".

Q: You have already partially answered my next question. Four of the original journalists involved in the article from Esquire make a brief appearance in the film. What kind of a role did they play in helping you with the story?
RS: A lot. I said to them really early on, "I'm going to do a movie about what happened to you, but I'm not going to do your movie. I'm going to create three new characters. Are you okay with that?" And they said, yes, they get it. They understood why you would want to do that. I just wanted that freedom. But they were really helpful and they were great. They hooked me up with people to talk to. A lot of their humor seeped into the characters. A lot of their sardonic way of looking at things. Their experiences as war journalists. All of this stuff was really interesting to me and if they weren't helping me, I know we couldn't have done the movie. I almost wouldn't have wanted to make the movie in that case.

Q: Your movies are character-driven and the lead actors seem cast against type. In Oxygen, the lovely Maura Tierney is a somewhat seedy, alcoholic, adulterous police detective. Pierce Brosnan is the anti-Bond in The Matador--a seedy disheveled unshaven over-the-hill hit man. And now Richard Gere is a seedy, disheveled, unshaven over-the-hill war correspondent in The Hunting Party. What is it about these kind of characters that appeals to you?
RS: In both the characters and the casting also, I always like darker characters. They're more willing to take risks which means maybe there will be more drama. Casting Pierce Brosnan in The Matador was great because you think you know someone and here's another side to them. And I think in terms of Richard Gere, it's the same thing. When I think about his body of work and when he has played dark characters, like in Internal Affairs, he's fantastic, and sometimes he picks softer types of roles, and he's kind of known for romantic comedies even though he has done dramas. And I just thought maybe he will be interested in The Hunting Party role because it's something a little odd. And because he's a likeable actor and such a subtle good actor, you're willing to go with him when he's a scoundrel, and stealing money and getting his friends shot at and all the other crap he gets everyone into. So it's almost an advantage to cast against type a little bit. If you have a sort of shady actor, who is not really easy to like, playing a shady character, I don't know if the audience is going to go with you the whole way.

Q: All of these lead characters suffer significant melt-downs, but they seek and achieve a sort of redemption. Is it your view that hope can win out over experience?
RS: You have to. I'm not a fan of the sappy ending in terms of any movie, but I'm also not a fan of the truly bleak ending either. Because in order to survive life, you almost have to wake up every morning and hope that it's going to be a better day. And I also love my characters and I want them in some way to be happy. It's weird. You kind of want to get them back on their feet. I might drag them through the mud but it would be awful of me to just leave them there in the mud. If that makes any sense.

Q: These characters all do their share of lying to and deceiving people close to them. Do you see that as a general human characteristic or simply a behavior very useful for these characters in a specific cinematic situation?
RS: Well, everybody lies. I'd like to think we don't. Some of us lie less than others, and some of us aren't completely duplicitous, but the fact of the matter is we lie. Even in The Matador, the Greg Kinnear character, who is a really good guy, kind of lies to his wife and doesn't really tell her about what happened in Mexico. So sometimes there are lies that happen with good people too.

Q: And the Kinear character is willing to have somebody assassinated.
RS: Well, for a moment, yes. In The Hunting Party, one of the real journalists told me that in the car ride up the mountain, he was personally so broke that he really wanted to catch this guy. And was almost willing to do anything to achieve that. Because he really was in financial straits. And that set me off thinking about Gere's character because he's just desperate enough to put people's lives in danger in the way that he lies to his friends, he lies to the Howard character saying he has a source, he steals money and they get shot at. He keeps pushing it. He wants people to think they are CIA and that almost gets them killed. He's desperate. And it gives him in a way a motivation. It's not like everything was going great and then he's willing to sell out his friends.

Q: On that topic of motivation, would you say that what finally matters most to the characters in both The Matador and The Hunting Party is loyalty to a friend?
RS: I think they are both movies about friendship. They're also about many other things but the friendship element is hugely important to me. Heterosexual male friendship is not always shown in movies. It might be in a sort of broad sense in buddy films. But friendship is not shown in a real understated sense -- the fact that the Terrence Howard character tears up when Gere gets fired and gets on that plane. Subtle things. You understand that they love each other, they're friends and friendships go through ups and downs. But if you live through something, if you are war correspondents and live through that together, then there is a sense of friendship. And I like exploring that, I like the way men talk with an almost mean sense of humor which is their way of saying that they love each other. They never really could say those words but they can do it in a different way. I think that is interesting. People have said The Matador is a buddy film, and it may be, but it was never my intention. I didn't say I want to make a buddy movie. I wanted to make a movie about friendship in a way. And The Hunting Party didn't come from the fact I wanted to make another friendship movie. But the real reporters are friends. So why make them strangers?

Q: Another motivator apart from the friendship aspect, it seems to me, is professional pride. Despite their personal failings, they have great pride in their work. Thus the detective in Oxygen wants to catch the murderer and save the woman buried alive. The Brosnan character in Matador knows he has a professional commitment to carry out the hits. And both the Gere and Howard journalists in Hunting Party want to stay in Bosnia because that's where the story is. How do you see this mix of motivations?
RS: Without a doubt there is a mix of motivations. Part of what makes The Hunting Party hopefully interesting is that you think there is one motivation, you think that Gere really is after the money, and it's only halfway through the movie that you realize that's there's actually an emotional reason that he's after the war criminal. And I happen to like slowly revealing all of the emotional reasonings behind what's going on in a movie, as opposed to a lot of movies which in the first five minutes, set you up: this is his character and in way the character is almost redeemed in the first five minutes, and then you spend another 80 minutes watching him. I wanted the audience to feel like the Jesse Eisenberg character in the first half of the film, thinking the Gere character is a real jerk. Jesse likes him, but Gere's a jerk. And then, when the Howard character tells Jesse what happened to Gere in the past, I think it's a powerful moment because then you think, there's more to this, there's more than I thought I knew. And everything Gere does after that is more loaded and more understandable in a way. And I think obviously the emotional element is why these actors are ultimately attracted to the roles. Because actors by nature are particularly emotional people and that is how they grab onto their roles. Very early on, even before we started shooting, Terrence Howard said "Simon [the Gere character] is a father figure to me. I love him. Period. I love him. That's how I'm playing it, that I love him." And that's great, that's where he needed to be and he just admitted it. And I like that. I'm so lucky working with these great actors. I don't pay them anything so I've got to figure out why do they keep doing this thing.

Q: In those three films, the protagonists do some things which raise ethical questions--the detective in Oxygen shoots the unarmed murderer. Greg Kennear in Matador assists Brosnan with a killing. And Gere and Howard to some extent do pretend they are CIA agents rather than journalists, which has a price. How do you view the actions of these characters in ethical terms?
RS: I think interesting drama comes when you ask yourself those questions and put yourself in that situation. It's weird. I've had people after seeing The Matador say I can't believe I was kind of rooting for a hit man. It's a weird feeling, you really wanted him to succeed. And here you have these guys in The Hunting Party and hopefully people are feeling the same way, that you want them to succeed, even though what they are doing isn't always so clean. At the same time, going back to The Matador, at one point where the Kinnear character asks Brosnan to help him kill his competition, which Brosnan eventually says he won't do, Kinnear says, "But don't successful people always have blood on their hands?" And eventually Brosnan says I'm not going to do it, I'm not going to ruin you. And in The Hunting Party, when you realize it is not the five million dollars Gere is after but some sort of justice, it almost explains or lets you accept whatever ethical lapses have happened. I hope.

Q: I was wondering if you ever saw Oliver Stone's Salvador?
RS: It's one of my favorite movies.
Q: I ask that because some of your characters remind me of the seedy journalist James Woods played in that film.
RS: I loved Salvador. I loved Under Fire too, which is another film about journalists. I watched all of them. One of the few movies I own on DVD is Salvador. I think it's Oliver Stone's best movie. There's something very real about James Woods in that movie. You feel like you are in El Salvador, and that's one of the reasons I wanted to film The Hunting Party in Sarajevo. And also when I realized Richard Gere wasn't going to be doing this as a vanity project, but letting himself go. Mine is not as gritty a movie as Salvador. It's a different sort of movie, but they are related in some way. There is something seedily glamorous about these guys. I like that.

Q: I like the way the credits were done at the end of The Hunting Party. Was that your doing?
RS: Yes. We had great title designers, but it's very much my doing. Credits always drive me crazy in a way. We want to sit through them and these people's names should be seen, but why do the credits have to be boring. Let's at least make them exciting, if for no other reason that we have to sit through them.

Q: You often have interesting actors playing the smaller roles such as Dylan Baker who plays an unlikeable corporate thug in The Matador and a nasty foul-mouthed CIA agent in The Hunting Party. What are you looking for when casting the smaller roles?

RS: Especially in The Hunting Party I was really lucky in that I was shooting in a country where most [Americans] don't know any of the actors. The guy who played The Fox (the war criminal) is a sit-com actor in Croatia. He's very good. If we had used someone like George from "Seinfeld" as a war criminal, it wouldn't work. But because we don't know the actor I used or his history, it's fresh. Early on in my career, I feel I made some major casting missteps. I didn't know what it was. Somehow some of the smaller parts just didn't work. Little things. I always felt the main actors were fine, but the person with two lines just wasn't great. And I thought, why is that, it should be 100 percent good. In the last few years, it's almost become a focus of mine. Every line, every single thing, every detail, as much as you can, should be as good as it can. Some of it was we had no money. Oxygen was a million dollar movie and we had only 24 days to shoot it, so you can't get everything perfect. But as the budgets increase a little bit, and this and that, if a person has one line, they should be good.

Q: Regarding your next project, are you still involved with a film adaptation of the novel Panic?
RS: I hope to, but we're still working on the script.
Q: If you do, won't this be the first time you would be directing a script you didn't write yourself?
RS: That's right. But I had been doing a little TV where I don't write the script. I did the pilot for "Ugly Betty". I like doing stuff that I don't write too. There's something very liberating about it. First of all, you can be critical about it in a whole different way. You can address it solely as a director as opposed to the director and writer. So I am open to it although I do feel myself very lucky that I can write and direct my own movies and I'd love to keep doing it. TV I also like in its strange way because doing a TV pilot is like a mini-movie. When I did "Ugly Betty", there was no cast when I came on, there was no set, there was no anything. And you are working with the creator of the show, trying to get his vision to the best level it can be, and it is a very creative environment, but it's totally different. It is, at the end of the day, the say of the creator of the show. You're trying to do the best job you can for him. In my movies, at the end of the day it's my say. But that's why TV is great. Because it's only two months. If I was doing it for two years on one thing that wasn't my say, I would be miserable. But for two months, it's fun.

Q: When were you were directing the pilot of "Ugly Betty", did you think it would be the hit it became?
RS: That's a good question. I think no one quite did. I'll tell you the moment I did, or the moment I knew it was going to work if not necessarily become a hit. We fought for America (actress America Ferrera) hard, we all did. There was some resistance to her. And so we get her, and we're doing hair and make-up things, and everyone's nervous, can she have braces, can she have glasses. And she put on those glasses, and she smiled with those braces, and I instantaneously knew this is fantastic.

Q: With the success of The Matador and The Hunting Party"coming out, do you think you are safely out of "movie jail" for good?
RS: Oh, I don't know about that. I'm out of this section of movie jail, but you can be reconvicted in Hollywood, unfortunately. I look at Robert Altman as a career I would like to have. Not necessarily all the downs he had. But ultimately maybe the longevity. Even at the end of his career, when he was making movies that maybe weren't 100 percent commercial, he could get them financed because good actors wanted to keep working with him. So at a certain point, if you get enough good actors, someone's going to give you money. And I think that is a good philosophy. If I make a million dollar movie with Adrien Brody and Maura Tierney (Oxygen), and then work with Pierce and Greg, and now in The Hunting Party with these three guys, that's pretty good. And if I can keep doing that, then hopefully I will be able to keep making movies. But it's a tricky business. I think about this all the time. When you are making a gigantic 150 million movie, say Transformers, it has to work. And if it doesn't work, you are kind of hurt really badly as a director. I think that's why those kind of movies suck. Those films have to make a lot of money. My movies don't have to make a lot of money. Hopefully, they will make people a nice amount of money. But they don't have to make a lot of money. They don't have to get universally great reviews. They just need to be well regarded and liked by the people who like them. In a way, this gives me a little more leeway. If my movie ends up not making 100 million dollars, I'm not looked at as having made a bomb. So that's another way I can maybe keep on going. And also fly a little below the radar. On this movie, I said I want us all to feel like we're making a 1940s Warner Brothers B side of a double feature. I told them that there are other bigger, prestigious pictures, but we are going to be the one that is actually more interesting. So forget the big soft focus A picture. It's the B pictures, the John Hustons, the Sam Fullers, those are the ones you remember and really liked. So that was sort of my philosophy from the beginning of the filming.

The Hunting Party is scheduled to open in the DC area on September 14.

Twenty Minutes with Ben Foster

By Adam Spector, DC Film Society Member

In 1999 I caught Liberty Heights, a sweet coming of age film from Barry Levinson. Co-starring with Joe Mantegna and Adrien Brody was Ben Foster, a complete unknown. Foster was a fresh-faced kid who acquitted himself well. I thought he might have a future in shy, sensitive roles, maybe as a leading man in romantic comedies.

Foster did have a promising future, but far different from what I’d anticipated. Foster has specialized in dark, mysterious, edgy roles. He’s probably best known for his turn as Russell, the talented but creepy art student in HBO’s “Six Feet Under.” Foster has played villains in Hostage and Alpha Dog. His one notable exception of late was Angel in X Men 3: The Last Stand.

Foster’s latest is 3:10 to Yuma, director James Mangold’s (Walk the Line) remake of the 1957 Western. Russell Crowe stars as Ben Wade, a legendary outlaw captured after a robbery. Christian Bale plays Dan Evans, a down-on-his-luck farmer who agrees to bring Wade to a train to the court in Yuma. During the treacherous journey Evans must stay a step ahead of not only Wade but Wade’s gang, which is determined to get their leader back. Peter Fonda portrays a grizzled bounty hunter who has long been on Wade’s trail.

Foster is Charlie Prince, Wade’s ruthless right-hand man who leads the charge to free Wade from the law. Foster glowers with menace as a man who would just as soon kill you as talk to you. He more than holds his own with his accomplished co-stars.

A few weeks ago Foster sat down for a discussion about his new film and his career.

Question: Do you have one question you keep hearing every time?
Ben Foster: “What was it like to work with Russell and did he throw a phone at me?” (Laughs)
Adam Spector: OK, I’ll cross that one off. (Laughs)
BF: Russell was actually incredible to work with. I mean, startlingly so... I did not know how to ride a horse. After reading the script a few times you begin to realize you are going to be on a horse (for) most of the film. So I had to learn... I don’t know if you guys know this, but he (Crowe) has a ranch in Australia. He has a sh-tload of cattle. He’s a horseman for sure, so he would always take me out riding.

Q: After Alpha Dog and Hostage you had three roles where you were cast in a pretty similar role but you played them all pretty differently. He’s (Prince) much more quiet than Mazursky or Krupcheck (Foster’s Alpha Dog and Hostage roles). Was this intentionally different from the previous roles or was it more how you saw this character?
BF: I mean it’s just how I am... You just go on your first instinct, your first impression when you read a script. I forget who said this, it’s a metaphor that makes sense to me. The first time you read a script you have a very light outline of a photograph and you read it a hundred times and ideally it becomes clearer and clearer. But you have to honor that first impression and that first impression was these are men of very few words. Their actions speak louder than their words. And it was finding his (Charlie Princes’s) physicality and what his heart was after. It’s really like getting out of the way so his voice can show up. So if you construct performances they just feel like a piece of poorly made furniture. The drug is making enough room inside for him to show up rather than going the other way and trying to make him.

Q: I want to know if you’re afraid of getting typecast, after the last three movies.
BF: I love those movies, but for me it’s about the script, if it’s got meat on the bone. If there’s a romantic comedy that’s well written, and isn’t just about getting kicked in the balls and falling in swimming pools, it would be something fun to pursue. But I’m not worried about it. I don’t feel that I’ve been the same guy. You know it doesn’t matter what job you have or what actor. If a film is a massive success everybody’s going to refer to that.

AS: One of the things that struck me about Charlie is that he’s devoted to Ben so much that it's beyond just loyalty. It almost seems that Ben is a father figure. At one point Charlie could have had the gang all to himself. Instead he goes back for Ben. Why do you think Charlie cares about Ben as much as he does?
BF: I guess what’s most important is to know that it’s real. I guess I get a bit uncomfortable talking about backstory that doesn’t show up. The same thing with DVD commentary. I love DVD commentary but it leaves a nasty taste in my mouth because it’s not in the film.

AS: Let me switch gears then. In the press notes [producer] Cathy Konrad credits you for bringing a vulnerability to Charlie that wasn’t necessarily on the page. Is that something you were going for or is that something that came out as you were doing it?
BF: If you’re willing to risk your life and everything for one person, one has to have a big space inside, regardless of your actions. So, yeah if we look at the matter that you brought up about father-son figure and I won’t even necessarily say that that’s what Charlie and Ben have... Whatever need there is, there’s a union that’s important.

Q: I read that when you played in Alpha Dog, [director] Nick Cassavetes told you that your character was like a fast car that doesn’t handle well. So if you could sum up Charlie Prince in a similar kind of way...
BF: When I met with Jim, he’d been going through archival photographs for a long time. I was in New Zealand at the time. So I went through any book that I could get, which was surprising how many books on the American West there are in New Zealand. I just was going through as many photographs as possible, just trying to get a feel for it. All of the photographs that I looked at of outlaws, they were really flashy dressers. Fops and dandies ... there was a rock and roll aspect to it which made sense--they were desert pirates. There’s got to be great joy or pleasure in the performance of taking someone’s life. Because every action you have in life, that we live, is with death in mind. Who we’re going to marry, who we’re going to date. If you’re going to stay at this job. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing this.” Everything has to do with mortality. So if mortality is in fact that close to everything that you do every day, and you’re somehow skating by it, it has to feel very empowering. If you’re pursuing that life there has to be a great sense of freedom. So if I was to describe Charlie, the three influences that made sense to me was he’s a glam rock mountain cat matador.

AS: Did Mangold give you much direction for the character? It seems like you put a lot of your own work into it. Did he let you figure it out for yourself?
BF: We were pretty much on the same page. I’m sure it’s like writing an article. You can do certain things, you can pursue a direction and then you can bring it to your editor. And they’re like “Look, we want to do this angle. You’re totally wrong.” He (Mangold) was very encouraging to pursue this frequency. It just felt right. It wasn’t something where you read a script and go “Well, that’s who he is.” It’s looking at the rock and roll aspect of it, which took me to glam, which has kind of a feminine graceful quality that also has a sense of royalty which makes sense for the name Prince, Charlie Prince. He’s the prince beneath the king. And at least in terms of how we learn as children, or as young people how we develop our characters, we look at our environment and we imitate. We imitate sounds and actions and that’s how we become. So if he’s a predator, what are the predators? You have tarantulas, you have rattlesnakes. He seemed like a cat. So I watched a lot of cat documentaries. You study how they move and try to find that internal predator, I suppose. In the script he (Charlie) has two Scofields. When I got my hands on these massive guns, just these massive pieces of metal, he’s like a samurai or a matador. These felt almost to me like swords. Images work for me, pictures. I always have a binder and I take from paintings, photographs. I draw. It’s all kind of a conjuring . These are the rituals that you do to make enough room for these guys to show up. There’s a gravity to images and music so rather than intellectualizing you go “Cats are interesting.” I don’t want to overthink it, but it feels right. And if you’ve listened to these whispers, as psychotic as they may seem at first (laughs) ideally that shows up and you can get out of the way and he can experience through you. Mediumistic channeling, that’s the drug ... when you’re not thinking at all.

Q: How did you get the part? Did they offer it to you? Did you have to audition?
BF: I auditioned. I was in New Zealand. I was back for a day, I was jet lagged, just gotten off a plane, was out of my mind, starving, and I just wanted to go home... I had to get on a plane the next day to New Zealand. And they said “You have to go in today.” I said no. “No, I don’t care. I don’t want to audition. I don’t want to be another person right now. I want to go home, eat barbecue, and sleep, period.” And they said “You have to” and hung up on me. I was an hour late to the meeting, stuck in traffic, just miserable LA traffic. So I got to the meeting, I couldn’t find parking. I was in the worst fucking mood. Just a feral human being. I shouldn’t have been around people. So what I brought into the room, that’s who came in. (Laughs)

Q: Really set you up for the character well.
BF: It worked out ... and the next day I got a phone call before getting on the plane back to New Zealand saying “OK once you’re done in New Zealand you’re going to get on a plane and go to New Mexico.” So it was really about working backwards, finding that exhausted, hungry and horny mindset and, I suppose, decorating or exploring more specific avenues with the other things we talked about.

AS: You mentioned when we started how much Russell Crowe helped you. Both Crowe and Christian Bale, besides being known as movie stars are known for being intense, driven actors. Was that your experience? If so, how did that impact you and the rest of the cast?
BF: I don’t know about the rest of the cast. They seemed to all get along. Christian is lovely. He’s just a lovely guy, a quiet family man. Very focused, very dedicated to what he does. It shows up on screen. He’s one of the finest we have. And Russell has an enormous presence. He’s one of the great actors we have. And that doesn’t just come from being intense. It comes from a great sensitivity and insight and intuition. He’s extraordinary to work with. It makes sense. I mean I understand, man, if somebody’s talking a lot of sh-t on set or making a bunch of noise talking about stupid stuff. I don’t want to hear that. You want a quiet set. You want an environment which allows these people to exist, because they’re not you... It’s not Russell Crowe as a sociopath, it’s Ben Wade. When you have a lot of racket on set, it’s very difficult to allow an authentic exchange to take place. But he (Crowe) was nothing but fantastic with the crew. He doesn’t care who you are or what you do. If you’re dedicated to what you do and you work hard at it, and you’ve got a good attitude, great.

AS: You and Fonda discussed yesterday [at the audience Q&A, see below] how cold and brutal it was during the filming. You said that the elements helped you get into the story. How did that work out? How did those conditions help play into what you did on the set?
BF: Well, pain is a great motivator. It heightens your senses. You become very present... we’re not on a sound stage. We’re not dealing with foam mountains or fake cactus. We’re in it. This is the territory. It’s such a severe landscape. The weather was so fierce that you’re either gonna complain about it or you’re going to absorb it and become part of it. And you have to ask yourself when you’re on the horse and the wind’s blowing... “I’m cold and I want to go back to my room.” Well, that’s not what these guys are doing and you have to honor the people that you’re playing. It’s not about your comfort, it’s about honoring the character. If you’re putting your ego into it then that little gap is what’s gonna make or break a performance. It may be good and well crafted, but it’s not going to sing, it’s not going to wail. And I think the wailing, when it’s beyond logic... just as an audience member, when it’s beyond logic and it hits you and you experience that person as your own. You have to destroy your ego. So weather is quite welcome.

Q: What do you have coming up?
BF: I have a small, cameo thing in 30 Days of Night, which is a vampire flick, which is fun. The director, David Slade, did Hard Candy and I just love him. He’s wonderful, interesting, and bizarre. But I should be going to Belfast, Ireland pretty soon to shoot a film about the IRA called 50 Dead Men Walking. So that should be interesting. Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to do anything more. (Laughs)

3:10 to Yuma: Audience Q&A with Actors Peter Fonda and Ben Foster

By Diane Svenonius, DC Film Society Member

This audience Q&A took place at Landmark's Bethesda Row theater on August 2, following a preview screening for DC Film Society members. The Film Society's director Michael Kyrioglou moderated.

Michael Kyrioglou: Do you consider this a remake of the 1957 3:10 to Yuma [Delmer Daves] with Glenn Ford?
Peter Fonda: No, it’s not based on that movie. James Mangold had read the Elmore Leonard short story and saw its potential. He did a completely different take from the earlier film. There are characters not in the original. All the dynamics in the story are different. The Western is a generic thing; you could say every western is a remake of the same basic story. James Mangold had done Cop Land and used it as a landscape or a blueprint for this film.

MK: [To Fonda] Your character Byron McElroy isn’t in the book. Did you have something you drew from or pulled from your past to play the character?
PF: When we talked about how McElroy gets shot and how he should react to the shot, I did. I said to them “Have you taken lead?” ... because I have taken lead! That’s why he just says “uhh”. If it doesn't hit your vital organs, it stings and then feels numb. It doesn’t hurt right away.

MK: How much collaborative work occured on the film in shaping the characters? Did you stick closely to the script, or did actors and others contribute as the movie was made?
PF: We pretty much stuck to the script. But while we were shooting, someone might come up and say “Look at this angle, see how it looks from here” and Mangold would look at it, he’d use things. He’s smart, he can take ideas and use them.

MK: What made you want to do this movie, was it the book, the script...?
Ben Foster: I had just read the script and I thought “I want to do this”.

MK: We've watched the Western genre come and go.
PF: I’m a major fan of westerns. The Western is America's mythology. The Western is not dead although Hollywood thinks they don't make money. Of course now they’re making westerns in Thailand, with Thais playing cowboys. It’s a good way to tell a story about our past and who we are. You can do science fiction and talk about today through talking about the future, but a western is a replay, a regurgitation of the life of the frontier, the way we began. I could do it over and over again.

Q: Compared to this, The Hired Hand, which you directed as well as acted in, this seems more elegiac. How do you think of them as different from one another?
PF: Elegiac! I’ll have to look that one up! (laughs) We like to say “character-driven acting” versus driven by lots of action. The Hired Hand is completely a character-driven film. It’s like the difference between ... say, The Oxbow Incident, which is all character, no action until of course the very end when the three men are hanged, as opposed to something that is all action, bullets flying everywhere... For me, this is a way of dealing with violence. There is acceptable and unacceptable violence in films. It’s the expected violence that’s acceptable, when Randolph Scott is at one end of the main street and the villain is at the other, you know there’s going to be shooting. Unexpected violence is unacceptable violence. In the Hired Hand, Universal and everyone said “it’s too violent”. It’s a character study, dynamics between a man and his friend and the woman. The female is the central character. In a typical western, the woman is dormant, on the man’s arm. The violence at the end is startling. We had a brilliant script by Alan Sharp. In 3:10 to Yuma, the violence is expected, you know lead’s going to fly. You know that my character must have some history with Ben Wade. I must have tracked him down before, or something. You know violence will happen but don't know when. Charlie Prince comes in and you can see where it’s going.

Q: [to Ben Foster] Your character stuck out more because of the way he was dressed.
BF: We had a fabulous costumer, Arianne Phillips, who worked on Hedwig and the Angry Inch. After going over the photos of outlaws in films and how they dressed, we saw they were like rock stars. In the Gene Autrey museum, we found a white military coat with silver buttons... we decided to pursue the glam rock image. It was a great joy prepping this guy like [David] Bowie.

Q: How close to Yuma was this movie shot?
PF: We shot it outside Santa Fe. We had problems.. I won’t say “issues”, because they were real problems. It snowed on the 4th of July. Drought had been going on in New Mexico for 2½ years and then suddenly there was all this snow. We needed 40 tons of dirt to cover up the snow! It’s true that it can snow in Arizona on the 4th of July. Snow delayed the construction of some buildings, but due to financial pressures, we used that unbuilt set and filmed through it. Jim made something good out of the problem.

Q: Was it cold constantly?
PF: Cold, dust, grit, all the time. There were were riding the horses and it was snowing- it really gave you a feel for the time and the place. I would come to the set dressed in a parka, but Jim’s such a great director we would completely forget the cold in front of the camera. After the scene was over we would look at the people, the crew behind the camera, all bundled up and realize how cold it was.

Q: What is it like to see yourself on film? Do you enjoy it? Cringe? Do you watch yourself?
PF: I’ve directed films, so I can look at a scene and say, “I look good in that shot!” but it doesn’t move the story an inch, so it’s out of there. It’s not a tough thing to look at myself in a scene. Now some films that I’ve made make me cringe, and they last forever!
BF: I don’t care to watch myself. I don’t care for that. It’s like an answering machine ... you say “I don’t sound like that!” You can become self-conscious. Now give me a white jacket and I’m fine!

MK: You’ve done stage, film and TV work. Do you have a preference for one of those worlds over another?
PF: I started with stage training. Theater is an actor’s medium, film is a director’s medium, TV is a writer-producer’s medium. But as an actor you can get your chops up by doing anthology TV shows; it’s a way to practice working for the camera, staying in focus, the dynamics. You try to work as a team to put back the third dimension that’s lost with the one-eyed camera. If you’re successful, the viewer for a second can be in it, involved in what’s going on in the screen as if it were real.

Q: [to Peter Fonda] You’ve directed several films. Do you intend to get back behind the camera again?
PF: I definitely do. I’ve done four, and I want to do four more, that would be something. This was Mangold’s eighth and he’s a few months older than my daughter! Maybe I’d like to write a few films now.

3:10 to Yuma opens in the DC area on September 7.

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