Mills is a noted music video director who has worked with Air, Blonde Redhead, Bran Van 3000, Everything But the Girl, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Moby, Yoko Ono, Beth Orton, and Pulp, and made his feature directorial debut with Thumbsucker (2005). McGregor, of course, is one of the preeminent actors of his day, having appeared in such films as Trainspotting (1996), Velvet Goldmine (1998), Little Voice (1998), Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999), Moulin Rouge! (2001), Black Hawk Down (2001), Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002), Big Fish (2003), Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005), Cassandra's Dream (2007), and The Ghost Writer (2010), among many others. I had the chance to speak to them in a roundtable discussion. I have quoted my own questions, and added one more question that another journalist asked precisely as I would have asked it myself.
Jeffrey M. Anderson: You mentioned before that you were able to distance yourself during the shooting, from the actual experience of being with your father. But I'm wondering if there were any times that you did start to think about your father?
Mike Mills: There was one moment in the hospital when the lady says 'you don't need to come in anymore.' And Ewan sweetly asked, 'how is it?' And I cried for, like a second. But mostly it's been fun. I love directing, I love being with everybody. We were all getting along so great, and we were all pretty amped up.
Ewan McGregor: Absolutely. There were times when we could see the chink a little bit. There were some devastating moments, like when Christopher dies. It's devastating for everybody. And there were other moments when Mike would end a scene and cast a glance at the monitor, just to see. When Christopher is told he's got cancer... I was imagining that it couldn't have been any other way than this. The way we'd set it up, it had to be like this. It's representing something that actually happened.
MM: When Christopher dies, Ewan really lost it in a very beautiful way. It was very real. We shot it chronologically, so it was one of the last things we shot. I think Ewan and Christopher had this really cool actor-to-actor thing. He's such a worldly man. He's done everything in the world. It's hard not to admire him. I remember me and Kasper [Tuxen, the cinematographer] standing over the camera. I was bawling and he was bawling, and I see this teardrop hit the camera, and I thought, 'Oh no! Water! That's bad!' And it was Kasper's tears. And that would happen a few times. I'd turn around to say 'great shot' and he was crying.
EM: It was very charged. Emotions were very high, on both the stories. We shot the two stories separately. We shot the first story with Oliver and Hal... we rehearsed for a week and then shot for three weeks. And then Melanie and I rehearsed for a week, and then shot for three weeks. We shot the father and son story first because it happened first. And then you're looking back to that story from the love story, and the height of the emotional content in that first story really informed the second one. Our emotions were all over the place. It was fantastic.
MM: We were all very happy to meet Melane, and get out of the hospital.
JMA: The absence of Christopher Plummer was really noticeable, then.
EM: Well, that was the point for Oliver. He's grieving the loss of his father, and looking back over his life. I've been interested the last few days to realize that all the flashbacks deal with the mother. You were able to work out some of the things or understand some of the father's story because you were with him. But you weren't able to do that with your mother because she'd already passed away. What am I doing talking about this? This is your stuff! (Laughs)
MM: It feels very natural to me. Imagine living through a tornado or a ship sinking, and you take a snapshot. The snapshot is real, but it's utterly different than living through it. So walking around talking about that snapshot is so different for me. I always feel like people are slightly over-weighing it. "It's so personal for you." But Christopher Plummer is not my father. We share some facts and some kind of emotional frequency, but Ewan gets out of a car so much more handsomely than I do. I don't look at Oliver and think, "that's Mike! Looking good!"
Q: You take a chance here in portraying sadness.
MM: To me sadness and humor are related. Humor is my best tool against the sadness I've had in my life. I think I inherited that from my parents. I saw that when I was trying to write in their voice. The darker it got for my dad... and Christopher nailed this. He has the same thing. The more pinched he got as a human, the more he would make a joke to crack it back open again. And my dad did make jokes with the doctor when things were really grave. Sadness is a super-important thing to not be ashamed about and to include in our lives. I think one of the biggest problems with sadness and depression is that there's so much shame around it. Like if you have it, you're a failure, or you're seen or felt as being unattractive.
JMA: Ewan, how easy is it to slip into sadness and back out again?
EM: I don't have issues with carrying moods from work back home, or having to stay in a state all day long, or stay in character. However, with sadness, there is something about that, you can't really do it properly unless you're feeling it. You can't do anything properly as an actor unless you're feeling it, but there's something about sadness where you do have to descend into a sad place and hold onto it. And then what happens is that you break for lunch, and you find yourself coming back up to the surface and having a joke at lunch. And you go back after lunch, and then, "Oh God." But on this... everything was very fluid and easy, because of the way Mike runs the set. When it came time to do those scenes with Christopher at the end, it was just very sad.
[Photo by Danielle Taormina-Keenan]
April 22, 2011
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