The stars come out during the Film Festival

Actors Cage, Blanchett, Rossellini, Del Toro, Washington speak up during annual event

Matchstick Men

The first major press conference of this year's Toronto International Film festival took place yesterday afternoon with none other than a Knight, an Oscar-winning performer, and two of the most promising actors in the business today.
Sir Ridley Scott and Nicolas Cage entertained journalists as they answered questions about their latest movie, Matchstick Men, alongside co-stars Sam Rockwell and Alison Lohman.
"I met Ridley over 15 years ago," said Cage when asked why it took so long for the two to make a film together. "And we always talked about working together, but the right project never came along. Then this dropped on Ridley's lap, and he told me about, and we both knew it was the right time."
The film stars Cage as an obsessive-compulsive con-man who must contend with his precocious teenage daughter (Lohman) and an overtly concerned protégé (Sam Rockwell).
Meanwhile Rockwell, who received accolades last year for playing Chuck Barris in George Clooney's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, working opposite Cage and Scott was a dream come true. "I've always made sure that the roles I choose are challenging, but also fun. And working with Nic was like a rollercoaster, never a dull moment."
And it was Cage who got the final laugh during the conference after his cell-phone interrupted the proceedings. He got good-natured grilling from the press - often chastised for not turning off the ringers - which he took in stride.

Emile

Better known lately as the Magneto in X-Men, Sir Ian McKellen told a packed press conference that he was happy to have made the small Canadian film Emile.
"There's a constant state of high energy. Sometimes when you're on a big movie the energy is just seeping out of the trailer. On this it was just Wham! Wham! Wham! You get to the end of the day and think, 'Wow, we just did 10 pages.' So, if I had to choose between one or the other, I'd probably choose this way, but people have to have breakfast," he said with a wink.
Directed by Carl Bessai, Emile centres on the title character (McKellen) who returns to Canada, the country of his birth, after many years to confront the family he left behind.
Director Carl Bessai explained that he visited McKellen in Vancouver while he was shooting X-Men2, and pitched Emile.
Deborah Kara Unger, who plays Emile's niece Nadia in the film, said her role was challenging. "It was difficult to be angry when you are working with such loveable people. I mean, we all shared a trailer, a third the size of this table. I immediately felt a connection with Monsieur," Unger said, in reference to McKellen. "And it was really hard not to smile more."

Greendale

Canadian superstar singer/songwriter Neil Young explained to journalists at the press conference that the film Greendale, premiering at the festival, is more than just a "music video." "To me a music video is not about telling much of a story, in many instances, music videos are just about selling a product. They're more like a commercial." "And besides," joked Young, "the thing that keeps it from being a music video, thank God, is that I'm not lip-synching in it."
Both an album and a full-length movie which was financed solely by the artist and the producers, L.A. Johnson and Elliot Rabinowitz, Greendale was shot using a $500 underwater Super-8 camera on location near Neil Young's adoptive home in Northern California. In the movie, actors - including Young's wife Pegi - lip-synch to the songs on the album, creating what Young refers to as "a song you can look at".
"There are expressions and there are backgrounds and feelings of relationships between people that you can pick up on film that sometimes are harder to articulate in words," explained Young. "Most everybody here thinks of music adding another dimension to film. For me it's the other way around; I think of film as adding another dimension to music."

I Love Your Work

Actor Adam Goldberg (Friends, Saving Private Ryan) was visibly nervous at the press conference promoting his second directorial effort, I Love Your Work. "What I've learned from first hand experience, but also from reading about celebrities and stalkers, or those who have a pathology or obsessive compulsive disorder, is that these two seemingly disparate kind of characters in fact have a great deal in common. Both are often times narcissistic, paranoid and obsessive."
The film, which stars Giovanni Ribisi, Joshua Jackson, Christina Ricci, and Franka Potente, tells the story of Gary Evans (Ribisi), a celebrity who turns the stalker/star relationship upside down.
"About six years ago, I was reading an innocuous fan letter and the return address was near where I lived. I thought it would be interesting if I just showed up on their doorstep," explained Goldberg on how the idea came to him. "These are the things you don't really tell people."
With Goldberg were Ricci, Ribisi, Potente, and other cast members Jason Lee, Shalom Harlwo and Marissa Coughlan.
"Even when he argues with his wife, he's still speaking to this one person who had a huge effect on his life," explained Ricci. "I thought that was an interesting idea, because I could see in my life how that has been true in the past - there's someone that's had this huge impact, and even though you're arguing with different people, you're still carrying on the same conversation."
"It's becoming an addiction," adds Ribisi. "If you ask a percentage of the population if they want to be famous, they would probably say yes. But, if you asked them why, they wouldn't know. That's a little bit about what the film is about."

Out of Time

Denzel Washington charmed journalists at a press conference promoting his latest movie, Out of Time. Even though other stars Dean Cain, Eva Mendes and Sanaa Lathan were also present to talk about Carl Franklin's film, it was Washington who got the brunt of the questions.
"It gave me tremendous respect for the concentration, and the amount of pain they have to endure from the actors," Washington said when asked about his first experience directing on last year's Antwone Fisher. "Especially from the ones that have directed, and think they know everything."
When asked when he planned to return to directing, Washington, said "I'm not so good at spinning too many plates at one time. Directing almost never happened for him at all. I was so scared, I kept looking for excuses not to do it," he said. During the shoot for John Q here in Toronto, a couple of years ago, studio executives finally cornered him about directing Antwone Fisher. "They actually made me sign a napkin at the bar in the Four Seasons, and made me promise to direct a picture."
"All I wanted to be was a football player. I'm not a moviegoer. I sort of fell into it," he said. "I took an acting class because I thought it would be an easy A. I was wrong."
In Out of the Time Washington plays a respected police officer who finds himself at the centre of a murder investigation.

21 Grams

"I signed on without ever seeing a script. They (Alejandro González Iñárittu and writer Guillermo Arriaga) met me in my trailer on the set of another film and I fell in love with their idea." Actress Naomi Watts smiles when she explains during a press conference how she ended up with the Christina Peck role in Inarittu's new film 21 Grams.
The film tells the story of three people whose live become increasingly entangled and "emotionally charged" over several months. Peck's life is shattered when her husband and two children are fatally injured after being struck by Jack Jordan, played by Benicio Del Toro. Sean Penn rounds out the cast as the mortally ill transplant patient who receives Peck's husband's heart and then falls in love with her.
"The script really grabbed me, much like I think the finished film really grabs a moviegoer" said Del Toro. Added Watts, "the story is so powerful. My character Christina has the most beautiful soul, but still struggles with her good and evil sides."

The Company

Not many Party of Five fans are aware that Canadian actress Neve Campbell was a ballet dancer before becoming an actress. "I started dancing when I was six and stopped because I suffered a lot of injuries," explains Campbell during a press conference promoting Robert Altman's latest film The Company, in which she stars. "I always missed it, and I never felt there was a film that depicted the dance world and represented dancers in the way it should. That's why I wanted to make the film, and that's why I brought it to Bob."
Set behind-the-scenes at the Joffrey Ballet in Chicago, the film centres on a dancer on the verge of being promoted to principle status.
"I stopped dancing when I started the TV series Party of Five, so I had about seven or eight years off," says Campbell, who performs all her own dance sequences. "When I started training for the movie, I was dancing eight and a half hours a day with a coach, and doing Pilates, and working on the choreography."
Altman says that his main objective for the film was not to tell a story, but to capture the dance world after the curtain goes down. "Dance is seen almost two dimensionally, because the audience is here and the dancers are there," he explains. "I wanted to get around behind the dancers."
Malcolm McDowell, who plays Joffrey director and co-founder Gerald Arpino in the film, adds "I had no idea what an artistic director's life entailed, and it's amazing. When I was asked to do this I jumped, because I love telling people what to do. It's great behaving like an emperor in one's little empire, like Gerry does every day. He can just look at a dancer in a particular way and they'll burst into tears."

Saddest Music in the World

When writing the script to his latest film The Saddest Music in the World, Canadian director Guy Maddin always had Isabella Rosselini in mind to play Lady Port-Huntly. But after failing to find a personal connection to get to the famous actress, they simply sent the script and a copy of his film Heart of the World to her agent. They were delighted to hear back that she was onboard.
"I loved the script," Rossellini said during the press conference for the film. "I usually chooses projects based on the script and the director's past work and I seem to do a lot of independent films with first time directors and so I also like to get a sense of the project."
The film, based on an original screenplay by author Kazuo Ishiguro, is set in Winnipeg during the Depression. In an effort to increase business for her brewery, Rossellini's character Port-Huntly announces a competition to find the saddest music in the world. Musicians from all over the world converge on Winnipeg to compete for the prize money. Amidst this excitement, members of the Kent family including failed Broadway producer Chester (Mark McKinney) and his older brother Roderick (Ross McMillan) are caught in an intense rivalry for Lady Port Huntly's prize money.

The Singing Detective

Although it took director Keith Gordon 10 years to bring Dennis Potter's beloved BBC television series The Singing Detective to the big screen, he feels it was all worth it.
"Potter set it [the screenplay] in America, changed the timeframe, changed the musical frame, even the tone of it changed" Gordon said during the press conference for the film. "He spoke about making it a more visceral experience, a more subjective experience and really focusing on a man's journey through his own head...I don't know if anybody could have possibly done that besides Potter."
But after Potter died in 1994, it was up to the filmmakers to come up with a decent adaptation.
The film, which stars Robert Downey Jr., Robin Wright-Penn, Mel Gibson, Adrien Brody and Katie Holmes, centres on a hard-boiled dick novelist (Downey Jr.) hospitalized by a skin disease. During his transition to both physical and emotional wellness his book's characters and real-life relationships meld in hallucinations of scene re-enactments and musical numbers.
"The difficult part is imagining it can happen in a way that is not mutually exclusive to creativity and personal growth," Downey said, "You realize that everything is like everything else. Psoriasis is like alcoholism and anything that's ugly and grotesque...it's fodder for consideration and, hopefully, catharsis."

Veronica Guerin

Actress Cate Blanchett admits that she was terrified portraying the real-life Irish journalist Veronica Guerin in the film of the same name.
"It is a very public medium that I work in," she said during the press conference for Veronica Guerin. "I think you have to be willfully naive in a certain way and pretend she never existed, and no one is ever going to see the film, so then you can take the risks you need to take."
Blanchett prepared for the role by meeting with those close to Guerin, and watching television interviews of the journalist. To her credit, she received a 10-minute standing ovation when the film premiered in Ireland, from an audience filled with Guerin's friends, family and colleagues.
Directed by Joel Schumacher, Veronica Guerin tells the story of the journalist, gunned down in 1996, whose reporting and revelations brought down that country's drug mafia.
"Once you have the clear story, then you have the architecture on which to hang the complexity of the character," said the actress, adding that the story of Veronica Guerin was one that needed to be told. "You make a film that is provoking and hopefully gets people thinking, 'What would I have done in that situation.'"

Publication Date: 2003-09-14
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=3142