Tag Archives: Brit Marling

With her one-two punch of “Another Earth” and “Sound of My Voice,” actress-writer Brit Marling had a delightful Sundance, with both the films she co-wrote playing the fest — and both being picked up for distribution. “Another Earth” casts Marling as Rhoda, a would-be scientist whose life is shattered when she drunkenly crashes into a car — and kills the mother and child composer John Burroughs (William Mapother) was driving home — after she’s distracted by the sudden appearance of a duplicate, planet earth hanging in the sky. Four years later, she finds John — and the alternate earth hovers in the sky as a tantalizing suggestion that somewhere, somehow, he could still have a family and she could still have a future.

Mixing science fiction and indie drama, “Another Earth” is a striking debut — for both Marling and director/co-writer Mike Cahill — and a welcome respite from summertime theaters full of talking robots and singing children. We spoke with Marling in Los Angeles:

In material like ‘Another Earth,’ when you’re writing and performing it, what’s the line between science fiction and magical realism? Where do you say math ends and metaphor begins?

Marling: I’ll tell you — I’ll see if this answers your question; if not, I’ll try again. I feel like in America there’s this weird thing where movies … in fantasy they’re completely fantastical or they’re completely real, and rarely are the two braided together. I feel like it’s because we don’t believe in the possibility for magic in ordinary life. When you read ‘Love in the Time of Cholera,’ that’s really grounded in reality — and magical, extraordinary things happen. A lot of Latin American writers and a lot of Japanese writers, they’re all writing about things that are grounded in a kind of realism — the mundane, the ordinary — but extraordinary things are happening. Kieslowski’s movies: ‘Double Life of Veronique,’ ‘Red …’ — I don’t know why, traditionally speaking, American storytelling doesn’t come up with that. I don’t know if it’s because we come from this pioneering origin where everything’s very practical and it’s all about the Western and shoot and destroy. Things that come from here seem to be decidedly fantastic or decidedly real, and I think Mike and Zal (Batmangli, director of ‘Sound of My Voice’) and I are all interested more in the braid of the two: The possibility that you and I are sitting here doing this interview, and then we’re suddenly levitating. It is of the ordinary, this extraordinary stuff.

The film jumps from parallel planets hanging in the sky to Rhoda and John playing Wii boxing. So how do you blend big ideas with human moments? Is it a deliberate switch, or is it process where they accrue?

Marling: Accrued big ideas: I love what you’re saying, because how do you go back and forth? Literally, it was in the same scene, they’re looking out the telescope at a duplicate planet in the sky … and then they go into the other room and play a video game. I remember when William first read the script, he was like, ‘How are we going to pull this off in terms of authenticity? How are we going to go from one moment to the next?’ I think that the truth is that life is like that. We turn on the television, we hear about some catastrophic war or the way in which people, terrible things are happening all over or impossible things that are happening, then we go and get on our laptop and start surfing the web and looking at image blogs. There is some truth to that being the way that we are, which is we’re constantly going back and forth between things that are these epic things, and then the micro details of our life, things that very clearly are happening — global warming — but refuse to deal with on a daily basis as we go to the gas pump and put the gas in so we can go to the grocery store. There’s this real separation in how we live our lives, I think. That’s in the movie, too. It’s bizarre that they aren’t always dealing with this catastrophic thing that’s in the night sky, but it’s also bizarre that we aren’t all addressing global warming. Isn’t that weird?

There was the infamous line about your work that you weren’t reading the scripts of movies you wanted to make, so you figured you would write them.

Marling: (Laughing) That sounds so bossy.

What movies do you like?

Marling: I sound so awful when you say that like that; it’s so tricky these days. What kind of movies do I like? I love ‘Red,’ I love ‘Twelve Monkeys,’ I loved ‘The Princess Bride’ growing up — I love the romance of that movie and the humor in it. More recently, I loved ‘Reprise,’ I loved ‘Edge of Heaven,’ I loved ‘Elegy,’ I loved ‘I am Love,’ I loved so many. ‘There Will Be Blood,’ Schnabel’s film ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.’ There’s so many great movies being made, it’s overwhelming. I think what I meant to say — and I may have said it callously and not been thinking very clearly — as an actress auditioning for things and you’ve never done anything before, the stories that I had access to that I could audition for were not very substantive. The only choice that I had was to try to do these things and eventually get to a place where you have a bit more –

Is it the thing of ‘Act like you have the job you want?‘

Marling: Yes, act like you have the job you want until you one day get it. I thought it would be easier to learn writing so that I could have some longevity as an actress. The truth is even when you get to a place where you can start to read all the great scripts and the great stories that are being made, it’s so competitive. There aren’t that many parts for women. I feel like it takes a long time to get good at being an actor, and I thought I probably won’t get any good until I’m 40. It’d be good to learn to write now so that maybe by then I’ll be able to write things well for that age and play them.

Are you terrified that you’re going to become the blonde, Silverlake, M. Night Shyamalan, that you’re going to be the person who does the trick endings from ‘The Twilight Zone’ and that’s what people will think of you when you want to be funny or do a period piece? Your star is rising, but are you worried about too much trajectory being predetermined even on launch?

Marling: I don’t think so, because I’m always trying to take on things that I haven’t done before. A thing that Zal and I are writing now, the story’s so different from both of these stories and the character’s so different from any of the girls I’ve played before. The things that I read that I get inspired to do, I get inspired because you feel this thing in your stomach like, ‘I’m so attracted to this because I’ve never been here before.’ It’s a foreign continent; I want to go explore that. I want to do it in all different ways and genres. I love comedy and I would love to do an action movie. It’s not, to me, about genres or budgets or who’s making it or why — to me, it’s: Does the story get at something in you? Does it stir that thing in you where you’re like, ‘Yes, I want to dive into the research of this and I want to go there …’ Everything about it? You revel in the discovery and uncovering of something about who that person is. I don’t know that I’ll ever be in danger of being in one trajectory … because I’d probably kick myself off of it pretty quickly.

You’ve been doing the festival circuit for a while, and you’re still doing screenings with Q&As. Is this something where it’s the equivalent of touring crappy pubs with your punk rock band and you enjoy sleeping in a van, or can you not wait to wave goodbye to that? Are there good and bad parts of working a film this intimately, at this level?

Marling: I’ve never thought of it that way. Every day I wake up and I think, ‘This is impossible and too good to be true.’ The people from (distributor Fox) Searchlight that were working on this movie, they’re so talented, they’re so committed. They believe in this movie and they have such great ideas for how to bring it into the world. The trailer they made — it’s a hard movie to pitch. Mike and I tried pitching it all the time; it’s hard. They made this trailer that somehow tells you everything you need to know but also holds back, leaves a lot to mystery. It braids with the epic conceit and the micro drama, and everything they do has that level of thoughtfulness. The same thing with this regional tour, the same thing with the way the film is unfolding and how they plan to release it. It’s all been so deeply thought out, and they have a wealth of experience in having movies like this reach as wide an audience as they could possibly reach. Most days I wake up and feel like I never even had the capacity to dream this. It’s impossible.

–From my article at The Hitlist