Isn’t that the job, to be able to discuss an issue dramatically without making a message movie?
Ramin Bahrani: Totally, which we didn’t want to do because for me, the emotional journey is the most important. The story is the most important. We all know there’s something very wrong in the world. 85 human beings control the same amount of wealth as 3.5 billion, half the world. This is freaky, weird and doesn’t add up. We know it doesn’t add up. Either you’re in the middle of it or your sister, your brother, your mother, your father, your grandfather. You know someone who’s in this mess now. That’s there anyway. For us to make speeches about it in the film would only bore people. But at the end of the day, it’s a chance to think and reassess and I hope for there to be a conversation in the audience about why they feel so emotional at the end of the film.
There is a level of detail that not everybody knows. Maybe not everybody has a brother or sister or themselves in it, so is it also an opportunity to inform people the extent of this system in an entertaining way?
Ramin Bahrani: I like films that take me to worlds I don’t know and show me things I don’t know about. This was a world I didn’t know about and were things that I didn’t know about and were people that I didn’t know about.
Rick gives a speech that totally outlines how they set up this system in their favor. I hope people listen.
Ramin Bahrani: Whatever that speech is, I’m happy I could cowrite it, but it’s Michael. This speech is Michael. Even the opening scene is three minutes of endless Michael, and I hope a Michael we never saw in a movie. We talked a lot about it. I showed up at his apartment in Red Hook in the summer before we made the film and he had a tan. He’d been at the beach with his family and he was very tan. His hair was no blonde and normal, a little longer. He looked like a god. He looked like he’d flown a chariot out of the sun into Red Hook, Brooklyn. I decided at that moment, my God, this is what he should look like in the film. Actually, I sort of revised how he would talk and changed his costume and everything. I really wanted a different Shannon than we had seen in other films.
Michael Shannon: He wanted to have a big sequence where we go to a nightclub and I start dancing. The screen direction is: Rick Carver, the most incredible dancer the earth has known cutting up the dance floor. So I went to my local dance studio and signed up for a West African Dance class.
Ramin Bahrani: He signed up for Traditional Ethiopian Dance.
Michael Shannon: They said it was the best one. I took one class and it was horrifying. The teacher wouldn’t even look at me. She wouldn’t even try and help me. It was just a lost cause and I was sweating bullets for weeks, like how the hell am I going to do this? Then we get there and Ramin’s like, “I think that scene’s overkill. I don’t think we really need it. We’ll just have a party.”
African dance isn’t what you’d do in a club, is it?
Michael Shannon: No, but I have a kind of sideways way into things.
Ramin Bahrani: It’s true actually though because Michael has his own way of doing everything. For me, he’s in the top five in the world.
Michael Shannon: He means tennis players.
Ramin Bahrani: Actually, I mean table tennis which is what we do instead of talking about the script.
Michael Shannon: It’s me and four other Chinese guys.
Is there another interesting sideways way into Rick that you could share?
Michael Shannon: Well, honestly it really did start with the exterior. We had a fantastic costume designer, Meghan Kasperlik. Man, she was good. She dressed me to the nines, so that was very helpful.
Ramin Bahrani: One of our friends that we spent a lot of time with in Florida, his costume’s a neon green shirt. We were like, this is not going to work in this.
Michael Shannon: No, no, I can’t be dressed like Mr. X. Yeah, that’s what I was going to bring up. The research trip I took to Florida was so powerful, I’ll never forget it. I can’t really talk about it. Honestly, I have to say the script, it’s a hell of a script. Anybody who read that script was like holy shit, that’s a good script.
Ramin Bahrani: I never got money so quickly for a movie. I know a lot of it had to do with Michael and Andrew’s presence but I think that combination of those two things and the script just somehow worked. And I had great co-writers by the way, it wasn’t that I just did it alone. What really was great about that was it allowed the conversation to happen in a scene to scene way because the structure was very solid and strong, so it allowed more freedom on a scene to scene basis. There’s something electric about Michael and Andrew on camera. I think part of that is A, they’re extremely dedicated, both of them. Research, extremely pushing and also they’re a very different style of acting the two of them.
They needed different things and those things didn’t always match one another, which was good because it created a tension just in terms of a philosophy which is great and they have deep respect for one another. There was a tension between methods that worked. I think that really helped the film because as Andrew’s character becomes closer to Michael, almost looking up to him like a father, or as we say in a devil way, still some part of him is wary about it because he knows something is wrong in his soul here. Andrew feels he’s getting corrupt but he’s going along with the ride. I think that really helped sparks fly. It was the most enjoyable for me in editing because there was always something between them.
Michael Shannon: Andrew was very vigilant. He went very far in his preparation for the role. I believe he even went and did some construction, and he stayed in one of those crappy motels.
Ramin Bahrani: He stayed in one of the motels I had been researching in Florida living with families, with John Manning, a really great guy who manages a motel there, where you see middle class families, school busses picking their kids up, plus there’s hoodlums happening and drugs at the same time.
Michael Shannon: And he was very devoted to his sense of who Dennis was and how Dennis would really function in the world. He wouldn’t take any shortcuts just to make things easier. It’s hard when you’re shooting a film like this, you don’t have a lot of time. I was amazed actually considering how short our schedule was, how willing Ramin was to let us explore things.
Ramin Bahrani: I don’t do a lot of coverage. That opening show with Michael is three minutes and there’s no coverage. It goes from a bathroom all the way outside to a car. It’s a very long shot. So when you shoot like that, you can let the actors do different things take to take if they want.
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.
