Playwright Turns Blue Collar Roots Into Art

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Monday, 13 June 2011 22:04

Written by Brad Balfour

Though now a Brooklynite, Boston-born-and-bred playwright/screenwriter David Lindsay-Abaire stays close to his working-class roots -- not only with his latest Tony-nominated play, Good People, but throughout the broad swath of his career. Mounted by his Rabbit Hole collaborator, director Daniel Sullivan, for the playwright's longtime artistic home, Manhattan Theatre Club, Good People closed recently after a highly touted run that started on March 3, 2011, at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.

The play garnered multiple award nominations, including Tonys for Best Play and Best Writer. And it garnered a , Best Actress Tony for its lead Frances McDormand.

Starring  McDormand and Tate Donovan, the tragi-comedy details a middle-aged woman, Margie, who remains trapped in her working-class South Boston neighborhood, and old lover, Mike, a doctor who has manage to escape. When they re-engage, various truths and dares come into play with comic but painful results.

From musicals such as High Fidelity to the Pulitzer Award-winning Rabbit Hole, the 41-year-old scribe captures real people in tangled situations, ones that often get further unraveled. And at a recent Tony press event,  Lindsay-Abaire spoke about his career and recent work, this acclaimed play and Rabbit Hole, among others.

Q: What truth was important to you to reveal here?

DL: I'm a Southie, from the neighborhood. Those are the people that I know and love, and respect and grew up with. I've been wanting to write about [them] for a long, long time, but I felt resistant to do it. I felt like I had to mature as a person, as a writer, and I felt like I needed to have a pretty clear point of view about the neighborhood and class.

I felt the economy was doing what it was doing, so if there was a time to write about the neighborhood and a time to write about the myth that anyone in America can accomplish anything if they just worked hard enough, it seemed like now is the time to write about that.

Q: This was gestating for a long time?

DL: Yeah. I also had heard over and over again about British playwrights writing about class. Where are the new American plays about class? Why don't American playwrights write about class?

Q: There's no such thing as class in America.

DL: I guess that's why.

Q: Then you must have loved The Town. It's a movie about class.

DL: Yes, right. I loved The Town. It's great entertainment. But The Town is about Charlestown, which is across the river from South Boston. It's also a bank robber movie, which is fantastic.

A lot of movies, in particular, have been writing about working class Boston and its environs, but they're often about drug addicts and crime bosses and bank robberies. I wanted to write a different kind of story about regular people struggling.

Q: Isn't it tough to make that interesting?

DL: It can be tough, [but] that's my job.

Q: You find a way to do that, to find words that aren't boring, while still dealing with people who are just people.

DL: That's a great compliment, thank you. Without resorting to a bank robbery? I hope the plots are interesting. But I hope I'm also writing about ideas that are engaging and people connect with. And bank robberies are good, too, but I haven't written about that yet.

Q: You have your dark moments in life; what is all this about?

DL: The darkness? Does nobody have darkness in their life? I'm just writing about people. People are dark and complicated. I'm trying to tell the truth; that's all that I do.

Q: And Frances [McDormand] is fantastic in this. Did you write the role with her or anyone in mind?

DL: No, I wrote the role for all the ladies that I grew up with in the neighborhood; those were ladies that I knew. That said, I sent the draft to Dan Sullivan and he said, "Who are we going to cast?"

Frances McDormand came up, and neither of us could think of another actress that could do it. Honestly, she was so perfect. She's incredibly funny and soulful and charismatic, and she has this ability to play two things at once so you don't really know ever if that character is telling the truth or telling a lie, and she's impeccable at doing that.

Q: You worked with Frances and the character evolved from there, or what?

DL: Pretty much the writer's in charge in theater. Of course you're in charge with the director, but no one can change your words. People can give you notes, but you don't have to take them. In Hollywood, you take them and you cash your check and that's your job. It's very different.

Q: What's Dan Sullivan's secret that makes him such a great theater director?

DL: In addition to being a great director, he's the best dramaturge I've ever worked with. The man is like a laser. He knows what's going on in every single scene, what's at stake, what do the characters want, and he gets out of everybody's way. He nudges them toward what needs to happen, and he doesn't get all fancy and put weird visions on top of things.

Q: How different is that from a film director? What is it about him that make him different or special as a theater director versus a film director?

DL: Film is mostly a visual medium and so the director has much more control in terms of painting pictures and painting a performance.

For theater, the director does everything he can and then says, "Out you go," and the actors are in charge of that stage every night.

So you can shape a performance, but every performance in theater is different every night. You can say a line just slightly different, and if your fellow actor's open and in the moment they will respond differently. It's a live event that happens and it's incredibly different.

Q: It's also trust.

DL: Of course it's trust.

Q: But at the end of the day, you really have the last word.

DL: Well, the actors really have the last word.

Q: At least you got to adapt your own Pulitzer Prize winning play, Rabbit Hole, for the screen.

DL: He said Pulitzer; I don't know if you heard that. I was going to wear [the medallion for this interview] but I thought it might be a little much.

I saw it as a challenge, of course, but also as a great opportunity because I had lived with these characters for so long. And what the play had in its back pocket that most plays don't is a fairly involved off-stage life. And so the things like Howie's potential affair is only hinted at in the play.

The play is just five people in a house. It's just the family members and the boy comes into their lives, and that's it. And so they talk about the support group, they talk about that scene in the supermarket, again, the affair is only hinted at.

We hear about the sister's bar fight; in the movie we actually get that call in the middle of the night and her sister has to go bail her out.

It was a great opportunity for me to go to all of those places that I know in my head and meet all of those people and find out who Gaby was and find out how that relationship starts to grow. That relationship became one of the backbones of the plot.

Again, it's not in the play, and so it was exciting to me to reinvent and revisit these characters and the story, and try and tell it in a completely different way without losing what I thought was important to the story.

Q: One thing about this movie was the idea that one can find comfort through faith and science -- did that idea really resonated with anybody?

DL: It certainly resonates with me. I probably share my main character's world view. I'm a bit cynical and pragmatic and I personally have difficulty finding comfort through organized religion.

For a character like Becca [played by Nicole Kidman], more than religion, she can't find solace in her family or in support groups or in psychology or in psychotherapy.

So in trying to figure out where is this character going to find any kind of comfort, science seemed literally the most logical place to find it. And I did want her to find comfort, because whether she says so or not, it's the thing that she's seeking. And yet, the thing that she finds in this scientific theory is a bit hippy-dippy and odd.

So I liked that it sort of had this ethereal quality to it as well, that you couldn't quite pin down and grasp. It still had qualities of something you might find in religion, even though it's based in science and fact.

Q: Are we going to see a big screen adaptation of Good People at some point?

DL: There is a possibility of a big screen adaptation, yes. We've talked about it. It will probably happen at some point.

Q: How do you balance your more commercial projects with these very personal ones? Is it something you consciously strive for or does it just happen that way?

DL: For me, it's not about commercial versus something that's less commercial. It's just about doing things that engage me, that challenge me. I love to do things that I've never done before. Shrek the Musical is certainly something I had never done before.

Before I wrote Rabbit Hole, I had never done a straightforward drama. I had written really absurdist farces. For Good People, I feel like the canvas has expanded a little bit and I'm writing more with a social mind and about current events.

So who knows what I'll do next? But I keep wanting to do different things.

Q: What are some of the obstacles one should look out for in writing their own stuff?

DL: It's the hardest thing you can ever do. I don't know what the source material is. For me the biggest challenge was overcoming people's expectations, and sometimes you just can't battle that.

For Shrek -- and I also worked on High Fidelity -- people walked in with an opinion, and some of it, for Shrek, was "Oh great, another animated movie being turned into a musical. Do we really need this?"

The other side of the coin was, "Oh it's going to be exactly like the movie. The kids are going to love it!" Neither of those expectations is good for the musical.

I want to write a musical that's like a play, where people don't know what it is when they walk in and the story is revealed to them. At the same time, more nuts and bolts, why is it a musical, what makes it sing?

Finding those events is very difficult. But oddly enough that was easier than people's perceptions and expectations.

Mighty Movie Podcast: Djo Tunda Wa Munga on Viva Riva!

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Friday, 10 June 2011 20:41

Written by Daniel Persons

Sex, violence and… gasoline? Yeah, that’s the blend you get when your setting is Kinshasa and limited fuel supplies make the stuff as good as gold. Riva (Patsha Bay Mukuna) knows: He’s just snuck into the Congo with a healthy supply of the stuff and plans to leverage it into a handsome payday. The problems: He’s being pursued by the Angolan crime lord (Hoji Fortuna) he stole the gas from; and he’s fallen hard for the sexy Nora (Manie Malone), who’s already been claimed by the local crime boss.
 
Viva Riva! is the first film out of the Congo to get U.S. distribution, and director Djo Tunda Wa Munga has made it a hell of an intro: an electric noir with graphic violence, a compulsive soundtrack, and no shortage of startling bouts of sex (however you feel about Scarface, you can’t argue that there’s nothing about that film that couldn’t have been improved with a lesbian hook-up between a hooker and the local commander of the military police). It’s a gripping glimpse into a world — and its underworld — we’re still getting to know.

Click on the player to hear my interview with Munga.

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New DVD: Secret life of Gnomeo & Juliet Revealed by Director

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Wednesday, 08 June 2011 18:12

Written by Brad Balfour

Summer is almost upon us, and so is lawn tending, weeding, planting, and all the gardening tasks shift from background to foreground. And garden gnomes, those funny little stone or cement guardians of gardening, stand watch over all this leisure activity. So what a perfect time to release Gnomeo & Juliet on DVD. And that's just what Disney did.

This animated feature tells the tale of two next door neighbors -- Montague and Capulet -- who are at war, and so are their garden gnomes, who come alive in some mystical way, while their human counterparts are thoroughly unaware of this miniature society.

As in the William Shakespeare tragedy, at the center of the violent feud is two children of the belligerent clans, Gnomeo and Juliet, who are in love. Garden gnomes are at war, yes, but tragic consequences -- well, this is Disney and for kids so the ending is not quite the one Big Bill envisioned.

And in this exclusive interview, veteran director Kelly Asbury (Shrek 2, Spirit - Stallion of the Cimarron) tells his tale of the film's creation and all the in-jokes considered.

Q: Why is a Texan making a movie where everybody speaks in British accents?

KA: Well, because the story is set in Stratford-upon-Avon, which is where Shakespeare was born. I wanted these gnomes to work the very soil from which Shakespeare came so I just figured it had to be England -- it was a great place to set the story. And Elton John was doing the music, so that's another English aspect to it.

Of course, we have a pretty multicultural cast. [They're] not just British. There's a little bit of Spanish, and some Tennessee in there with Dolly Parton. Texas has very little to do with it except that I always liked animation and love to tell stories, so that's as far as it goes.

Q: Did you drag out one of those big Complete Shakespeare books and go through it to figure out the references.

KA: That's not exactly how it worked, but it was sort of like that. We did say, "Let's start by thinking of anywhere we can put in a Shakespeare reference of any kind.

Then you screen these movies and workshop them, play around with it, and hopefully strike the balance. [At some point] you realize, "Okay, that's worn out its welcome, let's stop doing that."

We did have fun doing that and tried a lot of different things. Hopefully the ones that ended up in the final film are the ones that get laughs and that people who know about them do notice them. They're for the Shakespeare fans out there.

Q: Casting Patrick Stewart as Shakespeare was one of the funniest inside jokes.

KA: Absolutely. We had a great time and Patrick did, too. He loved that he was getting to do Shakespeare and he improved a lot of his lines. He really brought a lot to that character, and we had fun in the recording sessions having him do it.

Q: Texas is a perfect place to have gnomes in the front yard, back yard or wherever. Did you know somebody that had gnomes?

KA: There were people who had gnomes in my neighborhood. Everybody has someone in their neighborhood who gardens too much, are a little too attentive to their garden.  Gnomes have been around for a long time.

My parents were avid gardeners and they themed our backyard in the Old West. We had wagon wheels and cow heads and lanterns. It was our own little mini Knott's Berry Farm back there. It's in my blood to understand the tacky gardening mentality.

Q: How did you get involved? Did you come up with the idea from the start or did the producers call you?

KA: They called me. Essentially, it had been in development for some time. I had finished Shrek 2 and my friend Baker Bloodworth, who's one of the producers -- I worked with him years ago on Beauty and the Beast -- asked me to be part of this.

I read the script and thought it was fun. So I got some ideas and we were really able to start from scratch. We gathered the right team of people to start all over and pull it together in a way I hope people are entertained by.

But it wasn't my idea. I wish I could claim it was.

Q: Who first said, "Gnomeo?"

KA: I don't know who it was. The original writers were Rob Sprackling and John R. Smith. But I don't know them and never met them, so I don't know how they came up with the idea. For all I know, one day they just said the name gnome and then went, "Hey wait a minute, that rhymes with Rome." I don't know; I really don't.

Q: Did they do the drawings of these characters or were they your invention?

KA: They had done some, but I didn't want to see them. I was allowed to start from scratch and we hired designers. Our principal character designer, Gary Dunn, did a lot of work. It took a lot of trial and error.

It was about a four-and-a-half-year process -- total, from beginning to end -- to get the movie actually made and in theaters.

Q: When you're making gnomes, can you make them look like the people the gnomes represent? Somehow, the character Jason Statham voices looks just like him.

KA: That's an interesting thing that happens in the animation process. We record the actors before we animate the characters. A lot of people think it's the other way around, but it's the actor first.

We videotape their faces while they are talking, so the animator works to the soundtrack and has this reference video to look at and get some ideas about how that actor uses [his/her] face.

Some sort of osmosis takes place, because that character's moving a certain way actually takes on the appearance of the actor, sometimes. This happens in animation; it's quite fascinating. It's why the genie in Aladdin somehow looks like Robin Williams, even though he really doesn't at all.

Q: I swore whoever played the flamingo was channeling Robin Williams...

KA: No, that was Jim Cummings, a really talented voice actor. He's great. Jim improved a lot of his lines as well and helped us come up with the idea of this Cuban flamingo from Miami.

Q: Did you entertain getting Robin Williams for that? He sounds like Williams.

KA: We had tried a lot of different ideas and couldn't quite grasp it. When Jim came in we tried several things, and it was his idea to try the Cuban accent. It worked.

Q: As for Dolly Parton, has she ever done animation?

KA: She has never done one, and it's really great. We had this little gnome that was starting the race, a little gnomette, and she sort of has this country girl look to her.

One of our editors said "Why don't you guys get Dolly Parton for this?" We called up Dolly and Dolly said she'd love to do it. We flew to Nashville and we recorded her in an hour. It was fantastic.

Q: You have a bunch of novices for animation in this film.

KA: To some degree. Hulk Hogan and Ozzy Osbourne were great. Everybody was so professional. It's amazing how they all were able to just jump in the studio and give me exactly what I wanted. It was perfect.

Q: Had the two leads, James McAvoy and Emily Blunt, ever played Romeo and Juliet? Should we get ones that have played it or someone that wanted to play it?

KA: You know, we didn't think like that. We just knew we wanted good voices with texture, and voices that fit the character design [who] were also good actors that we knew of.

James McAvoy and Emily Blunt both did, actually -- separately -- play Romeo and Juliet on their own, but we never had that as criteria. The minute we asked them, they fell in love with the idea and they agreed to do it. They were very happy to do it.

Q: Did they tell you, "Actually, we've played it" or was that a secret?

KA: No, they told us in meeting them. That wasn't a criteria to cast the part, though. No, they just happened to have both played those parts in various times of their career.

Q: At least it wasn't the other way around.

KA: Exactly. Of course in the old Shakespeare days, James could have played Juliet because men played the girls‛ parts. We didn't entertain it, but that's a good idea. Maybe that's my next one.

Q: What do you feel are the signature touches to this film, as there are in Toy Story 3?

KA: For me, the world that we're in: these gardens and those hard ceramic and concrete characters coming to life that are all weathered and weather-beaten. The film is very successful in engulfing the audience in this world beneath these leaves and in the garden.

So that's what I'm most proud of in terms of the setting, and how it's explored and exploited in the story as a story point.

Q: Had it always been in the background of the story that there was this other dimension and they're alternate world characters? It's a parallel universe; they're in the human universe and in their own universe.

Was that always a part of the story? Did you ever think about keeping it completely separate from the human universe?

KA: The whole story of garden gnomes is you put a garden gnome in your garden because it's for good luck. The idea that while these humans turn their back the gnomes garden and make sure the garden looks good.

The blue garden is in rivalry with the red garden and vice versa, so they're also neighbors that don't like each other. The human neighbors don't like each other and neither do their gnomes.

So we did decide we didn't want the humans seeing the gnomes move because I wanted it to be a very realistic world. I wanted the humans to look as real as possible and I wanted the gnomes to look real.

So we said, let's make it one of those stories where when the humans turn their backs, this is the secret world of statues and ornaments. It was as simple as that.

Q: When did you decide you were going to veer from big Bill's core story -- was it always in mind?

KA: The idea has always been there that at some point Gnomeo and Juliet -- one of them or both of them -- meet a statue of William Shakespeare, who tells them "This is a very familiar story and it doesn't end well."

We always wanted that. We decided, what if our third act is about Gnomeo and Juliet taking control of their own destiny and coming up with a new ending for themselves that might surprise the audience?

But without giving it away, that the audience certainly can enjoy but realize okay, they're going to change the ending to the classic story and they're going to figure out a way to do it.

That's been in the works from the very beginning and something we hoped we pulled off.

Q: Some of the most creative film work is being done in animation.

KA: Animation does seem to be on a roll right now. It's because of the movie itself, not the medium. It's not animation versus live action.

Everything comes in waves and maybe we're on a good wave right now. I hope Gnomeo and Juliet rides that wave a little bit.

I can't explain why so many of the recent animated films have been so successful, except that they're good movies. An audience likes to pay money to see a good movie, and that's what all of us should try to make.