CraveOnline: As a director, are zooms back because you can shoot things in the “documentary” style?
Gary Fleder: Did zooms ever go away?
I think they did for a while.
Yeah, I think that the lexicon of film in the last 10 years, thanks to guys like Paul Greengrass and Pete Berg, and frankly reality television, I think that people are not afraid to use these active zooms. Tarantino did it, although I think his reference is more like Sergio Leone style. Yeah, I think what’s great is that you can really give the audience a feeling of immediacy and also the actors can be more improvisational in how they’re moving in the scene. The camera can find them rather than them have to hit a mark. The camera can find them and correct. There’s probably a fair amount of zooms in the film but I think it’s part of the lexicon.
Yes, it is a style that’s developed over the last 10 years. Do you prefer it to elegant cranes and dollies?
Well, if you look at the movie again, you’ll see that some scenes are very classically filmed, very classic mise-en-scene sort of 1940s, ‘50s filmmaking. Very static camera, very strong compositions. Like the scenes with Jason Statham and his daughter on the dock, very classic style. Then other scenes are very modern. Even my last movie, The Express, I did a sports movie and it went from very, very classical style filmmaking, very proscenium style compositional strength to the scenes that were very handheld and rough and tumble and very verite.
I like to mix it up. I think audiences can now acclimate pretty quickly. Audiences are amazing how we can, in a single movie, go from different style to different style of film. If you look again at Homefront from the beginning you’ll see that it goes from a very edgy modern style favored by people like Paul Greengrass and Michael Mann to stuff that’s very classical in style. I can do both. I’m a fan of both and I think the cool thing is you can do both things in the same movie.
Was it in the script that James Franco would bend Winona Ryder over the car?
It was. It was actually in the book, although it wasn’t a car. I think it was in the men’s room of this cafe so it was a little more sordid in the book than in the film. No, that was actually in the book. In fact, the script that I read, the original draft, that wasn’t in there and I said to Sly, “You know there’s this great thing in the book where Gator treats the Sheryl character like a piece of meat. What’s great about that is that you immediately know that relationship. You immediately know that he’s just using her. It’s really overt in that very first moment.” So we reinstated it and Franco liked it too because it was indicative of his character with her.
And was Winona game for it?
Yeah, she was totally game. She didn’t complain. I think she likes James. That was a little snippet. We obviously shot that scene from several different angles and they never complained. Clearly it was fine for them.
You really make us worry about that kitten.
[Laughs] I’m a PETA member so if you notice there’s no violence towards the kitty in this movie. I’m one of those guys, I’m a softie when it comes to animals, dogs and kitty cats. There’ll be no animals either fictitiously or really harmed in the making of my films.
Sure, but there’s the famous book Save the Cat, so we wonder if you’re playing off that.
I won’t give you a spoiler but I’m a fan of not hurting animals.
