Mike photographs you amazingly, but how did you feel when you saw A.J. Edwards’ black and white cinematography of you in The Better Angels?
You know, it’s funny. I always feel like I’m not watching myself, so I don’t much think about me. I do think about the character and the performance, but usually if a movie’s working well, you get swept up in the story and you stop seeing individual parts of it. You don’t think about the cinematography or a mistake in performance. You’re swept away by the general world. I think that’s how you know a movie is working is that you stop thinking about the individual parts. Certainly with both movies and the premieres the other day, I was not thinking about the parts. I was swept away.
You’re very good with children in both films. Is that something you connect with?
Oh my gosh, that’s right. All the things you are connecting, Fred, it’s amazing. Yes, I remember Susan Sarandon telling me once, “If there’s a kid in the scene or an animal, it’s great to interact with kids and animals because they are the best actors because they don’t act.” It’s really true. When you get around Braydon [Denney] who played young Lincoln in the film, has had no training and he’s totally effortless and totally inspiring because he’s just present and in the moment and reacting to things. That’s really beautiful.
Had you ever done a maypole dance before?
No, that was my first maypole dance. I didn’t know it. I was learning it for the first time. There’s a particular way in which you have to weave in and out of each other.
This isn’t a spoiler for Lincoln’s mother, but was The Better Angels your first death scene?
Wait, let me think.
Not in anything I’ve seen.
No, it was my first death scene. How’d I do, Fred? Was it convincing?
Yes, and it wasn’t overly dramatic. Very subtle. You could tell life was extinguishing. How did you feel about performing that scene and connecting with your mortality?
It was intense. I remember reading a lot about milk sickness and what actually happens in the body. Milk sickness was really common at that time and it was a weed, a type of weed that the cattle would eat that was poisonous. Then humans would drink the milk from the cattle and they’d end up very ill. I remember reading about the bleeding out through the lungs and the collapsing of the lungs and all these painful things that would happen.
I thought okay, what does that actually feel like inside as you’re lying on a bed and you’re feeling parts of your body do things that they’ve never done before, and how simultaneously terrifying and also sort of electrifying it would be to realize that you’re on your last breaths really? There’s something thrilling and horrific about it at the same time, the moment of expiration. So I think that’s what I was feeling then, this idea of having the sudden realization that you are on your last breaths and what that must feel like. Whew, Fred, this is intense stuff.
Now I feel weird going from something that intense to something maybe silly, but you seem to have backed off on Twitter in the last year. Was that a conscious move?
You know, I really like Twitter but when I think about some friends of mine, they seem really well suited to Twitter. Twitter fits their personality and I don’t know if Twitter fits my personality as much. I feel like I want to live my life in real time and I worry if I’m on Twitter too much, I’m not in the present moment. I’m thinking about how I can turn the present moment into a clever, funny or insightful tweet? That’s fine every once in a while when something pops up in your head and you’re like oh, that’s a perfect little gem for Twitter. But I didn’t want to get into a space where I was trying to capture the moment on Instagram or Twitter to share instead of living in that moment myself.
It’s dangerous to confuse sharing with being alive, that somehow sharing a picture is more important than the experience itself. I want to be in the experience. I was just having lunch with some friends and we were toasting the movie, and somebody was holding the phone and shooting the toast as it was happening. I was like, “Really? Are you really in the toast? Are you really enjoying that moment with your friends if you’re shooting the toast?” You’re one layer removed so I don’t want to be one layer removed from life. I want to be in life.
You would sometimes tweet something really deep like about how people hurt you, and I would worry that something was really wrong. Then you’d tweet about the Fly Girls.
Well, Twitter’s sort of like that, right? It’s in what moment it catches you. Somebody else accused me of being a bit too confessional on Twitter but nobody knows who or what you’re talking about so I feel like it’s okay to make yourself vulnerable. You can talk in general about pain or loss or humiliation because nobody knows the specifics. Maybe I’m wrong about that. Sometimes I get a little overwhelmed by Twitter. I feel like I’m not even using it right because I can’t keep up with all the things, but I’m going to get back into it, Fred, for you.
Thank you. I’ve been thinking for years about why Another Earth still connects with me. I think it’s because it’s about grief and I find that really healthy to explore. Do you think there’s something to that?
Yes. I think everybody deals with loss. I think that’s one of the fundamentals of being alive, that at some time you will lose something profoundly important to you. I think it’s one of those universal topics like love that everybody wants to read stories or watch stories about because we’re all trying to make sense of it. Grief is probably the thing we talk about less. We talk about love more or guilt more or anger more or lust, but loss and grief is hard. Both of these films are really about that.
Is The Keeping Room a chance for you to have more of an action role?
It is. There’s a lot of horseback riding in that movie, a lot of wood chopping, gun shooting. You’ve never seen a movie like this with girls before, I will tell you that. I’m very excited to see what you think of that one. There was a lot of blood, sweat, tears and guts put into that movie.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
