Daily Archives: March 23, 2011

Last Wednesday, Jodie Foster‘s “The Beaver” premiered at South by Southwest, launching a thousand cheap Freudian double-entendre jokes — and finally turning a film that’s been obscured by hype and controversy into one that’s been seen by an audience. Mel Gibson stars as Walter Black, whose crippling depression finds what seems like some relief when he begins wearing — and speaking through — a beaver hand puppet. The joke premise turns into a serious look at depression and our quick-fix mentality. Speaking with Foster the next day, the star and director explained that after all the excitement over Kyle Killen’s script and all the news furor over star Mel Gibson’s personal life, it was good to finally have the film play to an audience — up to a point.

“It’s nerve-wracking, too,” she said. “The first time a real audience sees your film is the first time you say goodbye to your baby that just walked away from you. Now it lives in other people’s homes and other people’s ideas and other people’s minds. It’s a bittersweet experience, nerve-wracking. It’s been a long process for this film, and that’s why I say personal movies like this take a long time and they take a lot of scalpel-like precision to finally have the voice that you were hoping for. This film — even though the original script is amazing and such an incredible voice — has taken quite a turn since then.”

And while it’s normally a challenge to separate “artist” and “art,” that’s even harder with “The Beaver,” with Gibson playing Walter Black — and with Gibson not appearing at SXSW and instead having an appointment with the El Segundo, Calif., police department to plead no contest to battery charges. I asked Foster: In our tabloid-driven day and age, how hard is it to say to the audience, “Just watch the movie”?

“I can’t control where people’s minds have been. I can’t,” she said. “Look, the movie exists, and it will exist on DVD. It’s its own little body: It has its own little way of walking and talking, and it can defend itself. I believe he has given such a tremendous performance, and I’ll always be grateful for that, for what he brought to the process. I can’t imagine anybody else playing the character who would’ve brought that richness and the drama and the struggle — really, honestly, the struggle that is his life — who would have brought that to the character. I can’t control how people perceive the film.”

Foster acts in the film alongside Gibson and Anton Yelchin — but, I asked, how much of a challenge was it finding the right puppet to play the title role? She laughed. “The best thing that we ever did was sit out and go, ‘OK, here’s 10 different possibilities on the spectrum. This looks like a real beaver that you would find in the pond … and this is a sock.’ In between the totally abstract and the completely real animal thing, there’s all these other options: You could go for a CGI beaver with eyes that turn around and look at people and hands that move. What we really wanted in terms of the visual style of the film (was) we wanted people to know, this is Walter speaking, and this is just a prop, just a tool. Do not invest all this reality into it. But then, little by little, as it becomes more and more real to Walter and as it starts impacting him more and more, in a weird way the puppet does start to become more and more real.”

–From my article at The Rundown

Playing Mel Gibson‘s son in “The Beaver,” Anton Yelchin gave a unique insight into exactly how long the film’s been in the works: When he first saw the script, it was going to be for an entirely different star and director. “I first got the script when I was on ‘Terminator: Salvation,’” he said. “It was Steve Carell and Jay Roach. Then it disappeared forever — it disappeared for a year or so. Then it resurfaced and it was Jodie and Mel. At that point, it was a real film, and I read it, I had a meeting with Jodie where she sat down and spoke to me, and then I had a reading with her. That was a pretty simple, short process.”

Less simple? Acting alongside his director, Jodie Foster. “On this film, I knew she was acting in it, but she was always the director,” he said. “It’s probably weirder for her than it is for me. I felt very comfortable with it. I felt lucky to be acting with her, and then more so to be directed by her. I think she’s brilliant, and I’ve always had so much respect for her. One thing is to act with her — which is an honor in itself — and then to be able to have this woman who’s created so many fascinating characters — so many great, great characters, has such an acute eye for emotional detail — to have her sit down with you is so great.”

Working with Gibson was also a highlight for Yelchin, and he hopes people will be able to separate his co-star’s performance from his problems offscreen. “People seem to have a pretty positive reaction; people seem to enjoy it for the most part,” he said. “It was really nice to see them reacting and, I think, appreciating Mel’s performance — it’s really, really great. It’s so good and really honest and moving. For me, I walked out of there hoping that people would really see what a great performance it is, because at the end of the day, that’s what you should expect from an actor; that’s what the job is, is to create fascinating, multilayered characters that are interesting to watch and are captivating. He certainly does that. He goes beyond just doing that. I think that’s all that’s really important at the end of the day.”

Yelchin is bracing himself for the upcoming “Star Trek” sequel, where he’ll be returning as Ensign Chekov, but he’s also glad that audiences will get to see him play dramatic parts in “The Beaver” and the indie romance “Like Crazy” before that hits the multiplex: “I love being able to have all sorts of characters and give every character as many dimensions as possible, but it’s great when you get characters that are so multilayered and you get to go back to something lighter. It’s more fun — everything’s fun, but a little lighter. It’ll be fun to do that, to go back to doing that.”

For his part, Yelchin appreciated the emotional journey he had to go on in making “The Beaver,” even if that involved going some dark places in his mind. “I think definitely in order to play those scenes with as much honesty as you can, you have to go to those places. I think that’s why, when people get upset with actors for being intense, it’s like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ It’s an intense job. People spend most of their lives trying to avoid painful things and pain that they feel and avoid darkness that they feel and try and be happy. Actors have to willingly bring that up and access that to then put it into characters. It’s just a weird job, really: We all bury things. I think it’s our job to uncover those things in ourselves and apply them, see how we can relate.”

–From my article at The Rundown