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The Upside of Joan Allen Joan Allen and Mike Binder on "The Upside of Anger" Written by [ Lee Shoquist ] SPOILER ALERT: CRITICAL PLOT DEVELOPMENT REVEALED MB: I’ll tell you an interesting thing about that exact moment you’re asking about, and Joan, I don’t even think you know this. We shot the body in the well. We built this body that was very realistic. And the scene wasn’t powerful because you’d go to Joan’s face and then you’d go down to the dead body, and it becomes about the dead body. When we took the body out and I stayed on Joan’s face, it became about Joan, and Joan told you everything on her face. It took so long for me to get to that point. People would say, ‘Do you have to show the body?’ ‘I’ve got to show the body! I don’t care!’ I had all these great speeches about how important the body was. And then as soon as the body came out it became about Joan, and you realized what she had done—that she had told the whole story with her face. JA: Oh. Yeah, we were still up there on Halsted! Yes! LS: Do you still keep in contact with all of those guys? JA: I do. I haven’t done theater for a really long time—like fifteen years—but I come back and I see people and stuff, yeah. I’m coming back for the benefit on April 9 or something. LS: But you don’t live in Chicago anymore, obviously. JA: I’ve lived in New York since, like, 1983. LS: We still think of you as a Chicagoan, though. JA: A lot of people do! They say, ‘You don’t live in Chicago?’ I go, ‘Not for twenty years!’ I love it. My mom- my hometown is about eighty miles away. I love Chicago. LS: So what’s this project the two of you have going next? MB: I’m just writing it now, so I don’t really want to… There’s nothing of me in it, so it’s really fun. LS: The ‘Untitled Binder/Allen Project.’ Is that important- does it make the project richer if you have Joan in your mind when you’re doing the actual writing, or you visualize, or you have an actual photo of the person close by? MB: Oh, it’s absolutely my whole way of doing it now. I just wrote a movie for Javier Bardem. I wrote it just for him. It just makes it so real for me and the actors appreciate it, I think. It works for me, rather than writing in a vacuum. LS: Kevin Costner must have been in your mind here as well. He’s underrated and over-criticized as an actor, I think. MB: Absolutely. And Ben Affleck too! These good-looking guys, they’re easy to beat up, you know? And he’s a great guy. The vile things that people write about these guys just blow my mind. It’s as if they came over and beat up their kids or something. You just want to go, ‘What did he ever do to you?’ LS: But does it really matter to you anyway what we say as press? Joan, do you read your notices in The New York Times on opening weekends? JA: I haven’t read anything. I happened to be on a plane and The Wall Street Journal was there so I read the review. MB: They did a cartoon of you! JA: My lawyer said, ‘You should get that. So I have USA Today, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal just sitting to be mailed to my mom. I don’t really- I get a vibe from other people. MB: I read them! And I silently plot my revenge! LS: You won’t have to this time. [ 1 ][ 2 ] Written by [ Lee Shoquist ] [ Home ] |
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