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All Upside Joan Allen and Mike Binder on "The Upside of Anger" Written by [ Lee Shoquist ] Joan Allen is chilly. And I’m not talking the icy sense of the word. On this March morning at Chicago’s Ritz-Carlton, air conditioning blowing directly over our breakfast table, she sits before immediately declaring with exuberant theatricality, “I’m coooold… Are you guys hot? I hate the cold.” We stand for an impromptu musical chairs switch. She continues with only half-feigned delicateness, “I’m sorry. Girls are like that!” My objectivity regarding Allen, arguably at the top of her profession and the most dependable character actress turned movie star around, has just gone out the window into Lake Michigan below. She may be cold this morning, but her career couldn’t be hotter than right now, with two brilliant, diametrically opposed star turns in The Upside of Anger and Off the Map. I’m caught staring at Allen, re-seated directly beside me and to my eye, about 6’1” in heels, blonde mane and lithe frame. This morning, she’s stylish, hip and every inch as commanding in person as onscreen in a career performance as Upside’s Terry Wolfmeyer, the jilted suburban Detroit matriarch trying to wrangle four teenaged daughters in the wake of an unfaithful husband’s exit. And oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that her very talented writer, director and co-star, Mike Binder—who has delivered possibly the best film of 2005 thus far—is also at the table. Who can blame me? To be in the room with this level of talent is a heartening example that any industry—or in this case, a writer/director and actress—able to produce The Upside of Anger, a resolutely adult drama with a deep ear for the bitter and sweet, the tragic and romantic, can’t be as creatively bankrupt as we so often muse. Lucky for us. Or at least for me, today. Lee Shoquist: Mike, let’s start with this idea of anger. In society today it’s politically incorrect to hold onto anger. We’re supposed to get over things and put on a happy face. In some ways, the film deals with the benefits of being angry and going through it; experiencing it. Mike Binder: It’s definitely a motivating force if you harness it positively. Joan Allen: I don’t think it’s something you can control that much. Over the weekend this woman saw the film and came up to me afterwards and said, ‘This is my sister’s life. This exactly happened to my sister’s husband—left one day, she had kids. She was so angry for long and the family was starting to lose patience with her. She couldn’t take care of her kids. She was neglecting them. She couldn’t do anything. We were all starting to go, ‘Come on, you’ve got to get over this.’ And then like two or three years later, a guy very much like Denny came into this woman’s life and sort of healed the family because he was kind of like a big, sweet, kind force. MB: I have to say, I’m always perplexed how people react to the movie. I don’t see this woman as that angry. Her heart is broken. She’s been walloped. She lays in bed for a couple of days, but then after that you see her up and about and going and doing. The house is always clean. They cook dinner every night. She’s angry. But I feel like the rap that I sometimes see people write about is that she’s so angry for so long and such a drunk. I think she handles her life very bravely. I think ultimately her anger forced her to make an incredibly wrong-headed decision at the beginning of the story—not to reveal the ending. But I see her as someone who used her rage and kept it and held onto it, but this was a woman who was still very much a mother to these daughters. LS: I guess you’re saying she’s not debilitated by it, but she’s energized by it in a way. It seems to me that she strips away- she says what’s on her mind. She doesn’t hold anything back, whether it’s politically correct or not in the given situation. She’s right there, raw. JA: Totally, yeah. LS: What do you imagine Terry was like in another life, before all of this came down? JA: I think she was doing a lot of stuff with her kids, the mom who was at all the functions and I think she had a very social life. MB: Absolutely. This event transformed this woman. You’re looking at this as one part of a woman’s life. You’re not looking at the whole. This is a chapter in her life. She was probably a pretty incredible mother when they were younger, who worked really hard at her marriage, and her husband cheated on her and it took away the bond of trust. When that bond of trust is gone, then you assume the worst. LS: You said this was one chapter in this woman’s life. But when we look at the screenplay itself, it’s actually a chapter from several very different, interesting women’s lives—five of them. From your perspective as a writer, what are the challenges of creating these multiple women’s perspectives, and making them true? MB: Well, that’s the challenge. The challenge for me as an actor and a writer is that I lead a very boring life! I’ve got a wife and two kids. I’m home for dinner most nights at six o’clock when I’m not shooting. No one wants to see my life, and I don’t even want to see my life in a movie! I like to play sleazy guys. It’s a challenge for me to write a woman character like this and four daughters. I’m writing another one for Joan with two gay women. Or two potentially gay women! I like to go all over the map. I just wrote a piece about a Spanish guy. If I were just going to be writing about me, I wouldn’t do this for a living. LS: Joan’s work in this movie is being called a ‘career performance,’ which is pretty amazing when you think about it considering her resume. Why Joan Allen for this particular role? And you mentioned you’re writing something else for her also? MB: I like Joan! I think she’s one of the greatest living actresses working. I don’t have the home number of many people on this level of talent… JA: That direct line! MB: …so I just abuse it, you know! It’s a confidence thing. I know what she can and will do, and I throw a lot of weight in that direction. LS: Is that the dynamic you guys work under? On the set you feel like all these other director’s things are going on in one realm, but you’ve got Joan over here that you know will deliver because well, she’s Joan Allen? JA: It’s really collaborative. It think we have a great understanding of being able to talk to each other in shorthand, and I can just kind of look at Mike’s face and Mike- especially with the drunkenness and stuff like that; the degree of playing around with that. I would act boldly sometimes and then maybe do a take that was way too much, but then you learn by doing that as much as by trying to hit- sometimes you’ve got to go too far to go, ‘Oh, that was too far.’ Or I’ll be like, ‘That really worked that way.’ LS: Is there some way to know when that is actually happening? When it’s working perfectly? Or do you just know? MB: You just know. The truth is, except for that—a little drunk or a little less—I never really directed Joan. With Joan, you kind of get out of the way. For me, the job of a good director with not just Joan but with all actors is that you cast well, you write well, and then you set them up so they’re comfortable and creative and then you get out of the way. Luckily, she got the script; she got the voice of the script. It was so melded to her and she so wanted to take my words and figure out a way to do it, so it wasn’t that. On the set it was really just, ‘Okay, that’s great. You want to try it again?’ It was that way with Kevin (Costner) too. Kevin walked in two weeks after we were shooting, and the first scene he shot was his first scene, when he comes to the door. Joan and I both looked at each other that first day and said, ‘Okay, he’s got it. He’s in character.’ JA: Yeah, perfect. MB: When I was writing it I was thinking about Denny McClain and I was thinking about Kirk Gibson, and they’re both (Detroit) Tiger heroes. And I just kind of put them together. And the other number I have is Kevin’s! I just happened to have Kevin’s number, we’re friendly and we’ve met a few times. I called him up and said, ‘Joan wants to do this, and you should look at this.’ LS: Is it hard to make a film like this in an American movie landscape that is so opening-weekend driven, skewed toward younger marketing segments? This is a grown-up, adult movie. MB: I’m forty-six-years-old and I’ve been doing this since I was eighteen, and I haven’t really had a lot of major box office success. I think one of the reasons for that is because I don’t really have a sales ethic. I don’t think about what’s hot or what the market buys. I just pretty much keep writing new things and I write a lot. I do what works for me, and I’m hoping sometimes the audience will come around to me. You’re kind of hoping that somewhere or another, you and the audience meet. LS: Joan, you’ve kind of carved out this niche of playing risky things and sometimes you’re able to do them in bigger commercial films like The Contender, and like this film. Where do you think you fit into this business? Who is Joan Allen in the movie industry? Do you look for things like this? How do you find them? JA: Sometimes you have somebody write them for you, which is a godsend—a complete godsend. Some of it is unexplainable. You don’t really have that much control. Hopefully you create a certain amount of work that people seem to respect, and that draws other really talented people to you that you can talk to and have a similar sensibility and can work on something else interesting with them. It kind of builds on itself. Hopefully your reputation is good that you are disciplined, and you know what you are doing and all these things, and it all kind of goes together and hopefully attracts other people that are interested in you. LS: You’ve kind of cornered the market on the sort of wife-as-disposable-extension-who-comes-into-her-own. We could go down the list from Pleasantville to The Ice Storm, or even Nixon and The Crucible. Do you think that’s a conscious thing—that people go to you when they want this? JA: There’s the wife thing, but I didn’t really think of this film as the wife thing. There was so much more to do. I think with the other stuff I would say maybe more of the ‘holding things together.’ They often call me the ‘moral center’ of the piece. And what I loved was that Terry was misbehaving so badly! You’ve got to have some conflict. Otherwise, like Mike said, you’re not going to come to his house and film it, and you’re not going to come to my house, which is really boring. Something has got to be in conflict or wrong, otherwise there is no story. I always think of myself as definitely a character actress. I also think that kind of explains the variety of things that can be seen in a way that isn’t traditionally a Hollywood-glamour thing. MB: She is a character actress, but this piece was designed for her to be a leading woman and carry the film, like The Contender. She carried The Contender. I wanted to show all the tricks, every tool in her box, to be sexy and look great, to be funny and be angry, to be the moral center in an odd way and to be the child. I really consciously thought about how to show every color that I know she’s capable of showing, so that at the end you have a movie and you go, ‘What a performance!’ A lot of people can’t do that. I hate to think of this movie with anyone else but Joan, because what you have is a movie about some cranky woman no one wants to watch. But Joan knows how because she’s a character actress. Because she’s not a leading lady, but she’s a character actress in a leading lady role, she knows how to make these nooks and crannies watchable. LS: You guys seem to have a lot of fun together onscreen. JA: Yeah! MB: She likes to hit me! LS: That scene and also the scene in the supermarket. MB: Yes. We had a fun scene in The Contender that never made the movie that was on the DVD, where we basically improvised the whole scene where we kind of got into a little bit of a fight, and she was having to go and do an interview and I didn’t want her to do it. She’s just one of these people that makes you better in a scene, so inside and so real that she kind of pulls you in. LS: I guess without giving away anything, you alluded earlier to something later in the film and it’s a big scene and big acting moment that produces waves of realization. Joan, as an actor, how do you get to that point? Are there times when that kind of acting just isn’t there when the camera starts rolling? Is there a secret to doing that? JA: I don’t know. That was really a tricky thing—not being able to pull from life experience, per se, to really do it. Mike and I would talk about how horrifying it would be. I’m sure there were some takes that were better and more present than others. But it’s kind of like your job. [ 1 ][ 2 ] Written by [ Lee Shoquist ] [ Home ] |
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