ON FILM : Movies for masses is 2 directors’ spin
Posted on Friday, October 3, 2008
TORONTO — This is an odd film festival; a lot of the filmmakers seem all about lowering audience expectations. Ed Harris, the director and star of the throwback Western Appaloosa, keeps insisting that he made his movie strictly to “entertain.” “We wanted it to be accessible,” he says. “Our movie isn’t three hours long like [The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford ],” Harris says. “And the two-hour, 20-minute version I liked didn’t score very well in test screenings... I wanted it to be enjoyable and keep it moving and still take its time when necessary. I’m hoping to do a longer director’s cut for the DVD.” Harris admits that it’s difficult to do a Western these days. Even with a lean $ 20 million budget and stars like Viggo Mortensen and Renee Zellweger (who stepped in after Diane Lane’s window of opportunity closed ), it still took him years to secure financing for the film, based on the Robert B. Parker novel of the same name.
“I read the first couple scenes between Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch... and I just got tickled,” Harris said. “I was laughing, I was smiling. It made me feel good.” He was working with Mortensen on David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence when he began reading Parker’s book, and he hadn’t directed a film since Pollock in 2000. Before he finished it he called his agent to see about securing the movie rights. Then he gave Mortensen a copy of the novel and asked him to consider playing Hitch.
“What really tickled me about Parker was the way the two guys had of saying things,” Harris says. “Probably 85 percent of the dialogue is straight out of the book.” A lot of the jokier material was pared away as Harris adapted, directed, produced and starred in the film. This gives it a coherency that’s missing from a lot of movies. According to Jeremy Irons, who plays an outlaw rancher in the film, Harris imbued Appaloosa with a “purity” absent from movies written “by committee.” “I wanted to make a Western because I like to watch Westerns,” Mortensen said. “But 99 percent of Westerns are horrible.” Still, according to Harris, Appaloosa is just a Western. It might achieve what Mortensen calls “the poetry” of some of the classics of the genre but its purpose is to entertain. Appaloosa isn’t a political allegory, though it would be possible for a thumbsucking columnist to make much of Virgil Cole’s draconian lawgiving in a town under siege. “I just like these characters,” Harris says. “I just wanted to tell their story.” ••• Similarly, Peter Sollett (Raising Victor Vargas ) doesn’t seem to want to make immodest claims for Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, an agreeable romantic comedy that harks back to quiet teen movies like Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything or John Hughes’ Some Kind of Wonderful in which the hero is a sensitive semi-geeky kid. He doesn’t pretend the movie is anything more than a movie about kids for kids.
“To watch them watch Michael [Cera ] was really a revelation, because just to see the degree to which they relate to him was really encouraging,” Sollett says. “[It’s ] just about those young men and their ability to accept and respect a sensitive guy.” While Cera’s persona may represent a break from the typical high school cool kid, Sollett says there were concessions made to the tastes of the target demographic.
“This was my first studio movie, so it was the first time I really tested a film,” Sollett says. “Maybe the best version of the film... bored them.” So the film’s comedy may be a bit broad for more mature audiences, especially an excruciating scene set in a public restroom in Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Station involving Ari Graynor as a drunken, gum-obsessed high school party girl.
“It’s not for you guys,” Sollett says. “It’s for kids.” Sollett sighs, and says of Graynor: “She’s just brilliant. I just want to see her in another movie.” He also seems to credit Cera and co-star Kat Dennings with most of the movie’s best lines.
“He’s a brilliant improvisational comedian,” Sollett says. “Want some examples ? OK, written in the script: ‘So, your friends are all gay, right ? Yeah, they’re all gay.’ “ But, in the movie: ‘So your friends are all gay, right ?’ ‘ Yeah. They’re gay. Gay, every day, all the time. If somebody’s going to get raped in that van tonight, it will be a guy. ’” Sollett admits that some scenes were almost entirely improvised between Cera and Dennings, including a very funny one where she parks his Yugo outside the Waverly Diner in New York’s West Village (almost all of the film was shot on location in New York ):
“As written, they pull up. She says, ‘My dad works right around the corner.’ He says, ‘Oh, really ? Do you want to go in ?’ She’s like ‘Eh, You know what, no, probably not. Let’s just get out of here.’ Crash.
“ In the movie it’s they pull up and he says, ‘Hey, this is a really interesting parking job, because if another car wants to get in between us and the curb, they can pull right in here.’ And then Kat says, ‘Oh yeah, OK, I’ll get closer to the curb, just for you Nick, just because you’re so picky.’ And she crashes the car. He says, ‘We’re close enough to the curb now, we’re right on it.’ “ There are tons of scenes where those guys just invented their thing. Ari Graynor, forget about it. Everything she did in the movie was her own invention.” While false self-effacement is a staple of promotional interviews like this, Sollett seems on the verge of making admissions against his own interest. Nick & Nora is hardly a big-budget affair laden with high box office expectations, but it’s still a far cry from Raising Victor Vargas, which was filmed on 16 mm with a mainly nonprofessional cast. Sollett confesses that he understands when a character in the movie says she loves music too much to work in the music industry.
“Because making movies is the opposite of living in a movie,” he says. “You can’t enjoy the movie because you’re the one putting up a puppet show, so you know what the tricks are. It robs the movie and the movies of their magic in a lot of ways.” He looks around.
“On the other hand, it’s not too bad. We’re in the Four Seasons. You think what I have to say is interesting, or you think somebody else will.”
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