Quendrith Johnson

• View
• Edit

by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent

When Michael Keaton “was frozen” in a scene for the newly released Birdman, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, according to Edward Norton, who appeared with him at an AFI conversation on 11/8, “you could see he was having trouble.”

“I mean, I don’t know if this story is apocryphal,” Norton offered, “but there’s this story I heard (from a director), that when Greta Garbo was in Queen Christina (dir. Rouben Mamoulian) she was paralyzed in a scene. It’s the scene where she is on the boat, leaving her homeland, and Greta Garbo said she didn’t know what to do. The story goes that the director said ‘Just stare at the wall. And think about what you had for breakfast.’”

“It goes back to Eisenstein, he said the audience would hang their emotions on it.”

Norton was the counterpoint to the extreme American hardscrabble realism of Michael Keaton. “I came from a family of seven, actually a family of nine, my mother lost two children, two died. We had one car, no money to go see movies. I mostly watched movies on TV.”

“For me, when a 67-year-old lady outside a Safeway tells me what she really thinks of a movie I’m in, that’s really gratifying,” he said. 

And in that scene Norton refers to, Keaton said “hey, I didn’t know I wasn’t prepared for that scene until I was already in it. I don’t know why, I knew it was coming up.”

“Sometimes (as an actor) you have to find it, you know it’s in there. You hope you find it. I found something else!”

Birdman, which also stars Emma Stone as his daughter, is a showpiece for Michael Keaton. From the mercurial director of Biutiful (Javier Bardem), Birdman pits Norton against Keaton, but “it was like a head-on collision, making this movie, because you lived through it and afterward, you go ‘wow, this happened, that happened.”

Birdman was released in Oct. and should net some award nods for all. Writer Stacey Wilson moderated this conversation so well, she was seamless, hands down the best.

Paul Thomas Anderson a/k/a PTA Forces Us to Watch MONDO HOLLYWOOD Uncut

Because he has four kids with Maya Rudolph, Paul Thomas Anderson, known affectionately as PTA, can’t really be a sadist, can he?

After a force-watch of the banned-in-France 1965-1967 film MONDO HOLLYWOOD directed by Robert Carl Cohen, you wonder though.

MONDO is so wretchedly inappropriate as to be art, then so arty as to be legend, and encompasses Baba Ram Dass acid-sessions in Topanga Canyon to a runaway heir decamped in Malibu with a monkey to Rotary Club sexist quasi-Fascists to the famed Gypsy Boots who was a Rousseau-like noble savage living under the Hollywood sign as a caveman to star arrival footage of Queen Elizabeth (Taylor) and King Richard (Burton) to psychedelic montages designed to trigger seizures, the entirety of which clocks in well over two hours.

This was followed by a meandering Q & A hosted by PTA with director Robert Carl Cohen, who at 85, was more interested in talking about why he moved to Boulder, and how he beat bladder cancer, which actually turned into performance art with Cohen admitting “I don’t know why someone so famous would want to interview me.”

“Did you see his film about the mines (There Will Be Blood)? It was so real, I mean I once worked in a mercury mine. Cinnabar is the ore for mercury."

"And his new film Inherent Vice (set in 1970’s)? I said how could this kid (at the time) have made a film so true to the period?”

The cult film director concluded with, “I mean, I got banned for Mondo in France, but I never showed a drug session… In his film, nine out of 10 scenes show people smoking pot!”

The Hollywood Kids Are All Right (AFI Young Hollywood Roundtable)

Upcoming Hollywood is A-Okay, especially 17-year-old Joey King (a/k/a “China Girl" from Oz the Great and Powerful), that’s the takeaway from The Young Hollywood Roundtable at AFI Fest presented by AUDI. 

Joining Joey, the Roundtable discussion included Logan Lerman (Noah), Jena Malone (Hunger Games), and Jenny Slate (Obvious Child) in what became a strangely meaningful moment when moderator Amy Kaufman from the Los Angeles Times whipped out a fan letter dated from 1998 to Jena, who had by then starred as a child in Bastard Out of Carolina, Contact (Jodie Foster), and Step Mom (Julia Roberts).

While it sounds weird, when the Boston-born reporter begged Jena to “read it out loud," it was actually an incredibly moving moment. Kaufman had seen Malone in Step Mom and asked for help in becoming an actress. 

“Hashtag What?,” to coin a phrase by Joey King.

Although Jena Malone played a strident killer aimed at Jennifer Lawrence in the Hunger Games, and MAY possibly be the next (and first) female Robin ever cast in the role with the new Batman vs Superman movie from Marvel, Jena was not only humbled by the tribute but did read it aloud.

Then Malone added, “Julia Roberts turned 30 on the set (of Step Mom). She took us all out. She is an incredible person.”

Logan Lerman, who played Mel Gibson’s son in The Patriot when he was a kid, equated being a child actor with set dressing. “You know, they bring out the kid. That was me.” Now he just leaped from Noah with Russell Crowe to a wider role in FURY with Brad Pitt. “We all wanted a really immersive experience on that film,” he recounted. Immersive, how? “Punched Brad Pitt in the face. He said to! Brad is the nicest guy (read: no ego), so laid back.”

But wait, there’s more. Next Jenny Slate, whose big screen mainstream debut in Obvious Child has blown back the critics, turns out to have gone to high school with Amy Kaufman. And is cautioned when she describes herself as a “random dork” back then. “Actually she was the Valedictorian,” Kaufman corrects.

Joey King rounded out the discussion with her own advice for young actors: “Be A BOSS. Own it. Own the role, own the awkwardness.” 

The Big Kids of Hollywood Are All Right Too (AFI’s Indie Contenders Panel)

Yes, that is the goddess known as Tilda Swinton, with the stiffened egg-white blonde hair, making folded birdie-wing motions and floating early out of the Indie Contenders Panel while mouthing ‘Gotta fly.’

This was just one of the inimitable moments captured when Swinton, Kristen Stewart, Michelle Monaghan, Bill Hader, Marion Cotillard, Jake Gyllenhaal, and directors Damien Chazelle (Whiplash), and J.C. Chandor (A Most Violent Year, Margin Call) got together for a chat with Scott Feinberg of The Hollywood Reporter.

Here are some highlights from the meeting of independent minds:

Kristen Stewart, in her usual no-holds-barred style, said she will commit to a project "based on one line of dialogue, or one person in the film... And I'll make a bad movie" if she likes one of the above.

“To really understand independent film before it had a capital ‘I,’ you must seek out the work of Derek Jarman,” Swinton implored. “Experimental films. Art films… I mean independent films as opposed to co-dependent films.”

Marion Cotillard, the award-winning etherealist from France, "doesn't make decisions" about roles "they choose me, the characters." As in, "a role has to be life or death for me."

Bill Hader (Skeleton Twins) basically summed up his climb in Hollywood from driver for the famous to famous himself as "don't be an asshole" when you're famous.

Risktaking Jake Gyllenhaal admitted if he finds something way out of his arena of experience or emotion, he “will reach for it.” But on a practical level, "Learn your lines.That's it. Know your lines."

“I worked with Jake on Source Code, I know he has this speed reading thing,” Michelle Monaghan confirmed. “We were like throwing lines back and forth (fast).”

J.C. Chandor, who took a literal dog’s age to get his feature Margin Call made, said “I tell my friends ‘make a two minute short film, just make it.’ Because it all works toward making films.”

And Damien, the boy wonder from Harvard whose Whiplash is a darling at AFI right now, basically left the room reeling by standing his ground in this starry patch.

Next - Mark Wahlberg premieres The Gambler at AFI Fest presented by AUDI.

Stay sharp, more to come, including the Technicolor Keynote…

# # #