Review: TAKE THIS WALTZ Is a Remarkable, Offbeat Love Story

Magnolia Pictures

In "Take This Waltz," Margot (Michelle Williams) has a good life. She’s happily married to Lou (Seth Rogen), the successful author of a chicken cookbook, and they’re living comfortably. If you were a fly on the wall in their home, you’d assume this young couple was so passionate for each other that their young romance would last ‘till death do them part. But something soon seems off with Margot. She’s empty inside.

Coming home from a business trip, she meets Daniel (Luke Kirby), a passionate painter who makes ends meet as a rickshaw driver. Margot and Daniel immediately hit it off, transcending into an unconventional friendship farther than she and Lou could ever reach. She starts to fall for Daniel, but fights — hard — to resist the temptation of getting physically and mentally involved with another man. As the days go by, the temptation gets harder and the emptiness grows. “Take This Waltz” is a remarkable, offbeat love story about how not all perfect romances have a fairy tale beginning or end.

"Take This Waltz" asks questions and challenges true love. Can someone be happily married and fall deeply in love for someone else? Will it be easy? Margot and Lou’s relationship seem so perfect. Throughout the film, they show their undying love by telling each other horrifically cute things like, “I just bought a new melon baller and I’d like to gouge out your eyeballs with it,” followed quickly by, “I love you so much.” When the heart wants something else, this tactic doesn’t work anymore.

Also Check Out: Q&A: Michelle Williams Doesn’t Want You to Settle

Michelle Williams as the lead no longer has anything to prove. She’s one of the few who broke away from teen idol typecasting (does anyone actually remember her anymore from “Dawson’s Creek”?) to become one of the most prolific working actors currently working. That said, the staggering performances in this movie are from Seth Rogen and Sarah Silverman. They both come from a background of filthy comedy and take their stab at, for once, being taken seriously. And they both do this without flaw. Silverman plays Geraldine, a recovering alcoholic who bides her time by taking exercise swimming courses with the elderly at a local YMCA. Lou is a kind-hearted man who sees the big picture on marriage — it might be a slow burn at times, but it’s supposed to last a lifetime. It’s exciting to know how far of a range these two actors have.

"Take This Waltz" is an unconventional look at the new and wondrous feeling of falling in love. It’s not always easy, especially in Margot’s case, but writer and director Sarah Polley has made it look beautiful. In the end, this film is all about Polley and what this promising director is capable of. We congratulate her for showing romance in a new and daring way.

This article was written on MTV’s NextMovie.com

Review: LOLA VERSUS Puts the Fun in Dysfunctional Love

Fox Searchlight

Remember when you were 10, and you thought by 22 you’d be married, with a big house (that has a white picket fence) and two perfect children? Maybe a dog and a cat to complete the family? But when you hit 30, you may start to realize that all those dreams won’t necessarily come true. Welcome to the suck, sucker.

"Lola Versus" is the story of a girl who didn’t get everything she wanted, at the time she wanted it — and how she deals with that. Greta Gerwig is Lola, who’s fixing to marry the man of her dreams, Luke (played by future RoboCop and current Detective Stephen Holder on AMC’s “The Killing,” Joel Kinnaman). Things are going well for Lola. She’s about to finish school, the wedding planning is coming along nicely … and then kerplunk, Luke calls off the engagement just three weeks before the wedding.

Also Check Out: 5 Questions With “Lola Versus” Star and Writer Zoe Lister-Jones

Like anyone who’s just had their childhood dreams shattered, Lola reluctantly embarks on a journey of self-discovery through a series of unfortunate events. It’s Lola versus the world.

Fox Searchlight

Instead of filling the movie with romantic cliches that almost never work in the real world (Carrie Bradshaw would never take Mr. Big back after what he put her through, amirite?), we get an honest and hilariously awkward story about being an adult while at the same time learning to be an adult. It’s coming-of-age story about a woman who’s too old to be coming of age. And in a strange and charming way, it all works.

"Lola Versus" stars the new queen of independent cinema, Greta Gerwig. The ’90s had Parker Posey; we have Gerwig, who’s appeared in "LOL," "Nights and Weekends" and "Greenberg" (for which she earned an Indie Spirit Award nomination). In her films, we get to watch her characters go through all the relationship woes and life oopsies that all of us can relate to in one way or another and think, "Thank God I am not alone."

Lola has a lot of love to give, but she just doesn’t know where to put it. Gerwig knows how to play this damsel in distress, making awkward look endearing. But when it’s time for Lola to pull out those identifiable moments of loneliness, Gerwig bangs you over the head like a bag of hammers. (As a bonus, Bill Pullman plays Lola’s free-living father and, as always, rules.)

Also Check Out: Interview with “Lola Versus” Star Greta Gerwig

"Lola Versus" marks the second writing collaboration between real-life couple Zoe Lister-Jones (who almost steals the movie as Lola’s potty-mouthed best friend, Alice) and Daryl Wein (who directed the film). There’s no doubt this film is a thank you card to the hell that these two once put each other through. Hopeless romantics will recognize many of the things we’ve experienced during an unwanted breakup: the power-eating, the sex with strangers and friends, and yes, the not showering or underwear-changing for days.

These are real people in real situations using real dialogue. “Lola Versus” is what happens when you shake life up a little bit and let it fall out of your hands.

Q&A: Writer-Producer Oren Peli on the Controversy Over 'Chernobyl Diaries'

When writer-producer Oren Peli is talking about the thing he loves most — horror movies — he’s like a child opening gifts on Christmas Day. His eyes light up, and it’s obvious this is something he’d be more than happy to talk about all day long.

You probably know about Peli’s feature film debut “Paranormal Activity,” which he wrote and directed; last we heard, it made a bajillion dollars and got two sequels (and counting!). Peli wrote and produced the new horror movie "Chernobyl Diaries," about six tourists who get stranded in a city called Pripyat, one of the cities in Chernobyl that were affected in the nuclear explosion in 1986. Peli sat down with us to talk about how the film’s dialogue was improvised, why he didn’t direct the film himself and how he tried to approach the sensitive subject matter.

You’ve written a film based on an original idea, and “Chernobyl Diaries” is an idea based on a real catastrophe. Which do you find more challenging?
Well, everything has their own challenge. The real challenge here was a blessing and a curse. We felt like the Chernobyl incident, in its abandoned state, the people really do go over to do tours there, [so] it was already kind of like a great foundation for the story. But at the same time you want to do it justice — you’re not just creating a fictional place, you have to re-create a location. It was very important for us and for the director [Bradley Parker] that visually (and [with] the story) we get as many of the details right. The movie is obviously fictional. We’re not trying to say it’s a documentary. We wanted it to have a very realistic and plausible foundation. So that definitely makes it very challenging.

Warner Bros.

What steps did you take when writing to keep it entertaining while being mindful of the real and awful things that happened?
We don’t think that [the film] needs to be taken seriously — it’s just a horror movie, and we’re hoping people will see it as nothing more than that. There are definitely scenes we could have gone a lot further, and there are different directions we could have gone to as far as the marketing and the film itself that we decided not to go. We’re very happy what we end up with. I think most people see it for what it is.

I’ve seen a few people very vocal, but a very small minority have problems with the movie or with the concept — in many cases they haven’t even seen the movie. I think that if you find the subject matter insensitive, nobody is going to force you to see it. We actually had people from a children of Chernobyl charity who saw a cut of the movie and were very impressed with the way we recreated Pripyat because they are very familiar with it and they didn’t think we were insensitive at all. In fact, they were very happy because [the film] raises awareness for Chernobyl which — to some degree some of us still remember it, but for the new generation that’s not familiar with it at all, it’s not being talked about again. They’re actually very excited people are talking about it again and it’s back in the consciousness of people.

With “Chernobyl Diaries” you’re taking a big chance with a first-time director. What was it about Brad Parker that led you to believe he was going to create the vision you had when you were writing this?
It was definitely a little scary, because when we met Brad the first time we were blown away by how smart he was and how he was on the same page as us as far as our approach to bringing the movie to life. We had extreme confidence in his ability technically because he’s been a commercial director and second unit director for many years. He’s done just about anything [a director] can do except direct a feature.

Also Check Out: Next Factor: “Chernobyl Diaries” Star Jesse McCartney

You’ve written and directed your own material, and the first thing you directed was a huge hit. Why did you decided to pass the torch as far as directing goes?
When it came to this particular project, I was having dinner with a friend of mine [“Chernobyl Diaries” producer Brian Witten] and I said, “You know what would be a really scary horror movie? If a group of people went to Chernobyl and they got stuck there and all of this crazy stuff happens.” And he was like, “Aww! This is awesome, we should do it!” And I said, “No no no, I wasn’t talking about doing it — I just thought it could be a cool idea.” He kept saying we had to do it and I kept saying, “I can’t commit to directing anything right now, leave me alone!” [laughs] And he just wouldn’t drop it, and he said, “Look, you don’t have to direct it. We’ll get another director. You won’t have to do anything. I’ll do all of the producing — just write the basic story and we’ll take it from there.”

He finally talked me into it, and I ended up being more involved than I thought I would be. I feel I wouldn’t have been able to commit to directing it, and I became much more involved as a producer than I thought I would be. Brian did take a lot of the burden of being a producer off of me, so between him and Brad directing, I was still was able to become an integral part of the process.

Warner Bros.

Talk about the location where the movie takes place — it felt like a character in the film.
Basically the reason why the movie exists is because of Pripyat, so we knew we had to set it up appropriately for the story and also when you’re there re-creating it, so you really get the sense of being alone in an abandoned and forgotten town. A lot of it had to do with setting it up. The character of Uri [played by Dimitri Diatchenko] was really important as the guide who takes you there and the way the characters think, “Oh this is just a fun trip,” and once they’re there they are taken aback by the gravity of the situation. It kind of hits them and stops being fun. You can see them really not knowing how to feel about it. Then the movie changes. There’s a lot of things we had to do to set up the set; a lot of it was in the sound design — we stripped away the sound of a city full of life. There’s no source of sound at all except maybe the wind and your own footsteps.

Without giving anything away, the things that we do see in the movie, that was all practical effects, right?
It was a combination of both.

How do you balance using CGI and using practical effects?
That’s one of the reasons why we were so lucky to have Brad. With his background of being a visual supervisor, he knew what kind of things we needed to depend on practical effects for. In many cases, more than you realize, when it comes to the set, it’s a combination of practical effects and visual effects. I’ll give you an example: The Ferris wheel, we only built the bottom quarter of it. Everything else, when the camera pans up or when you see it in the background, is extended digitally. Brad would always know in advance, “We only need to build this,” or “We only need to do this kind of makeup effect.” He had the ability to make those kind of decisions and it all worked amazingly well.

Also Check Out: Horror = Tragedy + Time in “Chernobyl Diaries” Trailer

I read in the press notes that there was a lot of improvising. When you’ve written a full script and the actors are improvising, how do you keep a steady flow of where the script needs to go?
What we had originally was a treatment which was basically the whole story without any dialogue. So it would say, “Paul goes to Chris, ‘Let’s go over there.’” It wasn’t exact dialogue. And then we gave it to the actors after they were brought on board, and then we brought in two more writers [Shane and Carey Van Dyke] to flesh out the dialogue … Then once we had the full script with the dialogue, we gave it to the actors and said, “Okay, this is the script, but you don’t have to really stick to it. This is the general idea.”

… In other cases, there were some complex scenes that we’d have all the actors get together during rehearsal — sometimes it was even during auditions — [and] we would let them totally improvise the entire scene and we would have the video camera recording and would later be like, wow, this particular take or moment felt very natural and super authentic, and what we would do was actually transcribe the actual dialogue they came up with and put it into the script. So then the script would have dialogue that was their own improvisation. They would then read it back and it was their own voice, versus a writer forcing words into their mouth. So I think that’s why a lot of the dialogue in the movie feels very authentic.

Source: MTV’s NextMovie.com

MORGAN SPURLOCK INTERVIEW: THE DIRECTOR TALKS HIS COMIC-CON DOCUMENTARY

A few weeks ago we spoke to Morgan Spurlock for his latest documentary, ‘Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope’, a film that captures the heart of Comic-Con culture and its diehard attendees. To get this film made, Spurlock was backed by four of today’s biggest pop culture geeks: Stan Lee, Joss Whedon (‘The Avengers‘), Harry Knowles (of Ain’t It Cool News), and Thomas Tull (executive producer of ‘The Dark Knight Rises‘).

This really proved that Spurlock’s not just a filmmaker, but also a fan determined to make an intriguing film for the people who love and understand geek-culture. You don’t need to know a thing about Comic-Con to be captivated by this new documentary.

So do you feel like a robot yet?

I feel like a robot every time I do these things. I mean, I enjoy it – if you don’t find a way to enjoy it you’ll go crazy. The worst part is when you’re in an interview with someone and you start talking about something and you go “wait, did I already talk about this in this interview?” I’m sure there are interviews where I told the same story twice.

Do you try to change it up and mess with the journalists at all?

[Laughs] I talk in French accents…

Alright, let’s jump into this. So the first thing I noticed when watching the film, there’s lack of you physically in the film.

And you said “thank goodness! [Spurlock] finally read the blog posts!” [laughs]

Haha, so talk about why you wanted to stay out of this film.

Because I finally wanted to make a movie people would like. [Laughs] No, when we first got the idea for the film … what makes Comic-Con a success, what makes movies and video games a success, everything Comic-Con represents is successful because of the fans. I am a fan, I’m truly a fan, but I didn’t want to make a movie of movie coming into Comic-Con. I have no purpose except to make the movie. I wanted it to be people who are coming to Comic-Con with a real sense of purpose and a goal. Holly Conrad, “This is my last masquerade. I’m going on a suicide mission to launch my career.” Skip Harvey and Eric Henson want to break into this business and this is their chance to show their portfolio. It might be the only shot they have. Chuck Rozanski’s story, you know, there’s real stakes. These are people who have real goals and I wanted to tell the story of Comic-Con from this diverse group of goals. I wanted it to be people who represent different worlds of Comic-Con but show the broadness of it, the different people that are there. I wanted to make sure the film humanized geek culture, an examination and celebration of what it meant to be a geek.

One of my favorite things about films is when they really pull out my emotions. When James Darling proposes to his girlfriend, I started crying.

Yeah, it’s beautiful. I’ve seen that scene probably a 150 times and I start welling up every time.

When I was watching it, I thought “I want to be in love now!”

“I want to be in love and I want to be at Comic-Con!” [Laughs]

I want to talk about the people in the film. I’m sure you looked at a lot.

About two thousand submissions.

So the people you did end up using for the film, what about them specifically stood out to where you knew they would make an interesting subject?

Yeah, it’s a gamble. You don’t always know. You call them on the phone.  We interview them while I’m talking to them. This is after we get their initial videos. We put out a casting call through Ain’t It Cool News, through different Comic-Con websites, through comic book stores, and we ended up with somewhere close to two thousand submissions. First we separate them into genre of characters – who are they and what do they represent – and then from those we start cutting them down. The very first person that we selected was Holly. So here’s people that are cosplayers and costume makers.

With that, we look through all of them and here’s Holly’s video as she’s in the garage, working with friends, making this costume, here’s why she’s doing it, here’s why it matters to her. And I was like, “Her story is amazing.” There’s a richness to the story she told, and I sent it to Stan, Joss, Thomas Tull and Harry and asked what they thought; they all watched [her video] and said “she’s perfect.” So we used her almost as a litmus test for us as to what everybody else would be for the film – how passionate they are, what does it really mean to them, do they really have anything at stake, what are their goals.  We started using that to cut down. It was hard. We followed 10 people total and a few didn’t make it in the film. There was a husband and wife from Columbia who had created a comic book company. They mortgaged their house to launch this company and they were running out of money. Her Visa came and his Visa never showed up. She was able to fly to Comic Con, so we followed her but she’s not the one who’s passionate about it. He was the driving force of this company … the narrative arc just didn’t work. You have to put things in that have a create a real flow of a film and it’s tough making those hard choices.

Being the filmmaker, what’s your process if something completely derails and goes into a completely different direction than what you at least thought it was going to go?

If you’re in a situation where things go in completely different direction usually, the biggest thing to do is we are going to stay with our subject, no matter what that is. So if something went not the way we expected it to, some sort of interaction, some sort of achievement, as long as you stay on them, like you said, the film draws out emotion. It is an emotional medium. And if you can stay with someone where things didn’t work out the way you wanted, you can still get something to some sort of emotional climax, or at least some sort of emotional closure. Even if it didn’t work out the way you anticipated, it can still work. Sh*t goes off the rails all the time, that’s what happens with documentaries.

When I was shooting ‘Super Size Me,’ I spoke to a couple of filmmakers, one of them was Eugene Jarecki, asking for advice. They said, “Let me tell you something, if the movie you end up with is the exact same movie you envisioned from the beginning, then you didn’t listen to anyone along the way.” And that’s what happens – this is an organic process. You have to go with the flow of the tide, otherwise you’re going to make a movie that’s very narrow in its vision. Things blow up and don’t work you’re like, “Well, that didn’t work. Day Two.”

I feel like, as a documentary filmmaker, one of your biggest responsibilities is to gain trust from your subjects and especial with Comic-Con and geek culture. To some people it’s a very sensitive subject. You know, for the people in the film, that’s their life.

That’s right – it’s their life, passion, and livelihood.

How do you, as a filmmaker, gain trust where they know you’re taking this very serious and not making fun?

I think with other films, if it’s films that I’m in, it takes me spending a lot of time with them, talking through the process. Usually if it’s a film I’m in, we spend a lot of time together before we even start shooting, just so there can be some sort of comfort level. With this film, we were lucky because I got to at least ride on on the coattails of respect, with Stan Lee, Joss Whedon, Thomas Tull and Harry Knowles. By having them involved, like I have said before it’s like a geek dream team – people who have already earned so much respect from people. I think if I would have went to Comic-Con alone, without them, I don’t think the movie would have happened. With them it brought a lot of old guard, new guard credibility to the movie.

‘Comic-Con, Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope’ is in theaters and available on-demand now.

Source: Screen Crush

WonderCon 2012: Aliens, Abe Lincoln & 'Amazing Spider-Man' Hit Anaheim

Watch out, San Diego Comic-Con. Your brother WonderCon has a new home, and apparently, some renewed movie and star power.

Moving south this year from San Francisco to Anaheim, WonderCon unspoiled its most impressive movie slate yet, playing host to summer 2012 blockbusters like “The Amazing Spider-Man,” ”Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” “Snow White and the Huntsman,”  ”Battleship” and ”Prometheus,” plus a host of other comic and genre-friendly fare looking to build buzz among fanboys and girls.

The rain-filled three-day convention attracted its fair share of celebs, too, with Charlize Theron, Kristen Stewart, Emma Stone, Michael Fassbender, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill all presumably making the short drive down from Los Angeles.

The highlights:

"Prometheus." This was the panel of all panels to attend on Saturday. Director Ridley Scott, making his highly anticipated return to sci-fi, was joined by red-hot stars Charlize Theron (also on hand for “Snow White”) and Michael Fassbender. Before screening the stunning new trailer, Scott discussed a possible sequel: “If we’re lucky, maybe there’ll be a second part to all of this.” He followed that up, saying, ”The film does leave you with some big, ongoing questions.”

Scott also discussed why he shot the film entirely in 3-D; his background in filmmaking comes from visuals and he finds using CGI and computer animation helpful to progressing his creative process. “What I learned from this film, the more you animate digitally … [the more] you can do anything want … The challenge is “how original you’re going to be.”“

A crowd member asked Scott if it was difficult to return to a genre he built his life on early in his career. The answer: not at all. ”We’re damn lucky to be doing the profession that we do,” he said. ”I am relieved I’m still allowed to do it.”

Getty Images

"The Amazing Spider-Man." Director Marc Webb, producer Matthew Tolmach and star Emma Stone discussed differentiating this reboot from the previous trilogy, saying there will be more of a focus on Peter Parker’s family. “I wanted to create a world that felt emotionally and physically grounded,” Webb said.

Webb brought a five-minute clip from “Spider-Man,” which had some unrendered effects (you can see the wires and green screen), but that didn’t affect the crowd’s warm response. There have been many naysayers regarding Spidey’s reboot, but it’s becoming obvious Webb and his team are beyond passionate about this project. This new footage (coming to interwebs soon?) will no doubt swing a lot of doubting heads the other way.

"Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter." A hilarious video from Tim Burton, a producer on the film, introduced the panel for this genre masher, before  Seth Grahame-Smith (author and screenplay co-writer), Timur Bekmambetov (director) and Benjamin Walker (star) took the stage and introduced a meaty action clip. 

When talking about Lincoln, Walker said he wanted to play someone who is “strong” and “makes compassionate decisions.” Plus, he just wanted to “cut some heads off.” Bekmambetov discussed the feature adaptation process, saying they wanted to “keep the tone and fun of book,” but also wanted to bring something new and fresh for the book’s fans, revealing that there is a central villain that was added for the film version.

"Battleship." Director Peter Berg and stars Brooklyn Decker and Alexander Skarsgård joined the WonderCon game to talk about this unlikely “adaptation.” 

"Frankly, it doesn’t lend itself as the most logical thing to adapt into a film," said Berg, who brought a new trailer and two clips — the first introducing Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch), brother to Skarsgård’s Stone, who clearly has his eyes on Decker’s character (and why shouldn’t he?), and the second giving us a nice juicy look at the movie’s alien life forms, which appear to be ape-like E.T.s in full metal jackets.

Getty Images

"Snow White and the Huntsman." Director Rubert Sanders was joined by stars Charlize Theron and Kristen Stewart (who went at it a bit at last year’s San Diego Comic-Con) for a look at this dark take on the classic fairytale, unveiling a five-minute clip full of knights shattering to pieces, mythical creatures and dwarfs.

When asked about her stunts, Stewart admitted she hurts herself a lot, and had a fear of riding horses because she shattered her wrists riding as a kid. Theron, meanwhile, won first f-bomb-dropping honors at the convention, when describing her character, Queen Ravenna: “Everyone has an idea of her, and there’s something nice about f**king with that idea.” When someone in the audience asked her how she played evil so well, Theron brought the house down: ”That’s because I’m a bitch … Picasso had his blue period, this is my bitch period.”

"Resident Evil: Regeneration." Writer/Director Paul W.S. Anderson took the stage to show a new teaser, which is a lot like the first one we saw back in January. ”We wanted to make it the biggest and best ‘Resident Evil,’” he exclaimed. “It’s an epic movie.”

Anderson’s partner-in-crime (and life) Milla Jovovich joined soon after, and proved yet again that she loves herself a Con, screaming “MORTAL KOMBAT!!!” into the mic upon her arrival. Someone from the audience brought up the fact that she’s the first female action hero to do five films in the same franchise. This note pumped up Jovovich as she talked about her character in the series, and how even though she’s a complete badass, she still cannot get used to the world that’s been overrun by zombies. A sequence of action-packed clips followed.

"Looper." This panel was another anticipated showcase, mostly because we haven’t seen a thing about Rian Johnson’s time travel movie. That changed with the presentation of the incredible first trailer, featuring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a time-leaping assassin contracted to take out an older version of himself (Bruce Willis).

The film is very noir-heavy and Johnson has made Gordon-Levitt almost unrecognizable by giving him a prosthetic nose. Johnson and Gordon-Levitt talked about their relationship (they first worked together on Johnson’s first film, “Brick”) and it’s very clear they have built a solid friendship. Gordon-Levitt had profuse praise for the future legacy of his director, saying “They [moviegoers] will talk about him just as much as they do Chris [Nolan] and Steven [Spielberg].” We hope so.

Source: MTV Next Movie

Q&A: 'Descendants' Author Kaui Hart Hemmings on Writing as a Man

"The Descendants" author Kaui Hart Hemmings wants you to know she was just being silly when she tweeted about “The Artist” cast and crew at the Academy Awards, a tweet the Huffington Post dramatized as an “insult.”

Hemmings is currently promoting the Blu-ray/DVD release of “The Descendants,” the Academy Award-winning movie starring George Clooney and cowritten and directed by Alexander Payne. We talked to her on the phone last week, and aside from the Twitter gossip, Hemmings discussed her involvement during the making of the film, why it was important to have this story told from a male perspective and what people should take from her first novel.

When you were writing the book, when did you know it was finished?
You know, I don’t ever think I knew it was finished. I guess it’s like that with anything, you sort of feel it. I gave it to my husband and my agent and they thought it was in good shape, so that was that. At some point you just need to declare it the end because you can always look back and see a different change or little edits here and there.

Fox

I find that it interesting that you wrote “The Descendants” from a male perspective. Will you elaborate on what made you want to go that route?
It made the most sense for him to tell the story. I didn’t want to do it from a child’s perspective or a teenager’s. He was a character who I thought had most at stake in this situation and had the most to lose. He just seemed like the most interesting person to tell the story.

With it being your first novel, obviously it’s like your baby. It must have taken a lot of trust to put it in the hands of someone else to make it into a feature film. What was it about [screenwriters] Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, who got your blessing to write the film into a feature?
I actually didn’t work with them. By the time I was involved with it in any way, it was Alexander Payne [who] wrote it — he started from scratch. Anything he did I automatically trusted because it’s Alexander Payne. I never really thought of the book as my baby, it’s just a book. I was happy to hand [the book] over to him and help him if he needed it. I was curious and excited to see what he would do.

I read that you had a lot of input on the making of the film. How much were you involved, and what part of the process did you spend most of your time on?
I was involved whenever they wanted me to be there. They wanted to see Hawaii, and so I showed them locations. They asked what a certain person would wear, and I would give them some ideas on that. They asked about music, they asked about casting and the homes and what would be in those homes. Every single detail I was consulted on … it was a huge range.

Also Check Out: Watch 4 Clips from “The Descendants”

So after someone reads the book or sees the film, is there something specific you’d like for them to take away from it?
You know, no. [laughs] I guess I never wrote for someone to take something specific away. I think people will take different things from it … and that is satisfying to me. I think this film speaks to such a variety of people, from young to old, rich to poor. Each person [should] define their own way into it, and upon leaving, bring their own things out.

I read an article in the Huffington Post regarding your infamous Oscar tweet about “The Artist” [which read, “The Artist people were in line in front of me and now I smell like cigarettes and entitlement”]. I’d love to hear your side of the story, because I’m pretty sure you were just goofing around.
That’s funny, yeah. There is no side of the story — it was a tweet. [laughs] Twitter is like, you sort of take on a persona. It was pure joke, pure one-liner punchline, and I happened to be behind the people in “The Artist” as they were getting into their limo and they were all smoking. It could have been a completely different joke if the cast of, I don’t know, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” were in front of me. It was just a funny tweet.

Source: NextMovie