Director/Producer Stephen Moyer & Star/Producer Anna Paquin talk to The Inside Reel about communication, layers of meaning, instinct, visual elements and movement in regards to their new dramatic film: "A Bit Of Light" from Quiver Distribution.
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Short filmTranscript
00:00 [Music]
00:14 It's all such a mess, isn't it?
00:16 [Music]
00:25 It really will be alright.
00:27 [Music]
00:33 Having someone like Ray, who is as accomplished as he is,
00:38 to be, you know, sort of reaching up towards, you know,
00:41 that's exciting, as opposed to being, you know, the adult on set.
00:49 Yeah.
00:51 Has the direction evolved in terms of, like, obviously your communication,
00:55 obviously, as your relationship has grown with your, you know,
00:58 and having children, has that changed the dynamic as far as how much
01:03 you have to tell Anna when she's being directed, or how much you,
01:07 as an actor, would have wanted, Stephen, to be directed?
01:10 Can you talk about that a little bit?
01:12 That's a really good question, and what I would say is this.
01:15 I have got, I think, because Anna's probably the person that I've directed
01:21 the most, certainly on screen, I think I'm – it's going to sound odd, this –
01:31 I think I'm probably more prepared to question her on set than I would
01:39 in real life, in a funny way.
01:42 But in the right way.
01:43 But in the right way.
01:44 It's like, to try and obviously get to the emotional truth of the moment,
01:48 but to also try and excavate where perhaps we haven't – like, we could get
01:55 to the end of two takes and go, I think we've got it, but I still want
01:59 to keep going, because – just to see if there's something deeper
02:06 or even more opaque.
02:09 Or less obvious.
02:10 Or less obvious.
02:11 It can be – and that process is the – that's the bread and butter of what it is.
02:21 It's the texture of what it is that I love about this.
02:25 And I think as I've got – to the second part of your question,
02:31 which was a really good one, how would one want to be directed as an actor,
02:36 it's to be trusted, right?
02:39 It's for the director to come up to you and go and give you carte blanche.
02:46 And it's never quite carte blanche, because it's within a framework.
02:50 You want freedom within a structure that makes you feel safe.
02:53 Yeah.
02:54 Yeah.
02:55 There's old pictures of my family in Scarborough.
02:57 There's this picture of two couples holding hands in Tweedy clothes.
03:01 And hundreds of fish and chip shops, like actually hundreds.
03:08 I don't feel as angry when I'm with you.
03:11 That's fantastic.
03:13 Most funny.
03:18 You have a way of saying things differently.
03:23 But even with something like this, because this is so multilayered in terms of its meaning,
03:28 its thematics, obviously, you know, I could go into the whole notion of limbo
03:32 and her idea of heaven and hell and water.
03:35 There's all kinds of things.
03:37 But you can't -- and that's all there.
03:40 But then you have to sort of play it grounded.
03:42 Where's the balance in knowing what the meaning is, not giving away the meaning?
03:46 I mean, that is a big part of our process.
03:48 Another great question.
03:50 Part of the process of attacking material, you know, certainly as an actor,
03:56 is that you want to have done all of that homework on your own time
04:01 so that you understand sort of in a more kind of academic sense what those beats mean
04:09 and what it is and what's happening and what the larger overall things are
04:14 that you're telling as a story so that on the day you know all your lines,
04:21 you know where you are in the story, and you can then be free.
04:27 And for me, the more prepared I am, the more free I feel on the day
04:33 because I'm not reaching for that line that I can't quite remember
04:36 or not totally sure what was that scene right before.
04:40 So I kind of let it just sort of rip.
04:45 And she's also always way more prepared than me when it comes to --
04:51 and I'm not talking about directorially, but actor-wise.
04:55 She plays a very different -- she has a very different technique to me
05:01 because I sometimes will not know my pages backwards and forwards
05:08 and upside down and around about.
05:10 Sometimes I am reaching for stuff.
05:12 That's also a function of how my memory works.
05:14 It is. It is. And I've tried to do that, but sometimes I struggle.
05:19 I think I'm getting, funnily enough, over the last couple of years,
05:23 I think I've got better at doing that.
05:28 And if you are in a place where you absolutely know everything
05:33 that your character is going to do, feel, think, and say,
05:37 and everything can be literally left in your trailer before you walk out of it,
05:42 there is a freedom in that that is liberating.
05:46 Yeah, I mean, I think that's why I don't have any friends.
05:51 We don't have a bedroom. We sleep in the front room.
05:54 People are generally horrified by that.
05:56 I don't find that horrifying.
05:58 There's far worse things.
06:00 There is. I don't have a bedroom either.
06:05 Do you have a cigarette, Ellen?
06:07 No, I bloody do not.
06:12 Aren't you frozen, Neil? Worries me that you don't wear a coat.
06:17 I'm never cold, you know that.
06:19 I think that's what you put on something like A Smaller Independent,
06:22 when you're very specific about environments, locations, and everything.
06:25 And this movie is all about environments, about that house.
06:28 It's about that beach. It's about that park.
06:30 It's so key to that.
06:32 But you have to sort of key that into both being instinctive
06:35 and maybe a little bit spontaneous because even the blocking,
06:39 I could see with the movement with you, Anne,
06:41 between you and Ray, you and Luca,
06:44 it is very specific in how it needs to be.
06:47 And you want to probably be free enough to interpret it the way you need to.
06:51 Exactly.
06:53 And you figure out what you need to make the scene work.
06:58 And then depending on the context,
07:01 depending on the scenario and the environment,
07:03 you may or may not have tighter parameters.
07:06 But it's all about creating a play space for me.
07:10 When I was trying to find that perfect playground,
07:16 we were just talking about this this morning.
07:19 I was driving to different playgrounds with my camera.
07:25 Having parents come up to me and go,
07:28 "Excuse me, why are you taking photographs of our children?"
07:31 You were location scouting.
07:33 I'm like location scouting.
07:35 But, you know, interesting, and to your point,
07:39 there's a really interesting piece of blocking
07:44 that my DP was desperately trying to stop me from doing,
07:47 which was when Ray brings Anna into the kitchen.
07:53 And he stands her in the corner and says,
07:57 "What's that boy doing here? What's he doing here?"
08:00 And in the wide, we're looking at this bare white walls
08:06 with the back of a door, the back of a wall,
08:09 the back of another door and the back of another white wall,
08:12 which have got no art on them.
08:14 There's no shelves. There's no anything.
08:17 His house is kind of not complete.
08:19 Like he's not quite complete, Alan, Ray's character.
08:23 And the DP was like, "Can we put something on the walls
08:26 to make it look a bit more..." And I was like, "No, it's white.
08:29 It's blank. He hasn't thought about that."
08:31 There's a couple of screws in the wall, right,
08:34 where he hasn't put something up.
08:37 Or he took down pictures of the dead mother.
08:39 Or he took down pictures of the dead mother.
08:41 It's like...
08:42 - Yeah.
08:43 - And so, yes, thank you for noticing,
08:45 because there are very specific moments
08:47 where I'm trying to make them the centre of attention
08:52 in a blank space, you know.
08:54 And yet in the park, it's full of colour and it's full of life
08:59 and it's full of... and it's green and it's lush
09:03 and all of that colour theory, you know, stuff that one reads about.
09:08 All of those things, you know, that...
09:11 And I also... Peter and I, the DP, talked about this oversaturated colour,
09:15 you know, to make it feel warm and hopeful and alive.
09:19 And yet there's this character there who cannot feel any of that stuff,
09:24 who can't feel alive, who doesn't feel alive,
09:26 who doesn't feel that she needs...
09:28 she should ever be forgiven for her behaviour,
09:31 who goes to this place to punish herself for her previous mistakes, you know.
09:37 So those elements in that house, that little barren...
09:43 that little house, like, in its little row
09:46 and everything that's going on behind the doors, it's...
09:50 I always think about that when I...
09:52 We live in New York and I go down the street sometimes
09:56 and there's all these lovely, beautiful terraced brownstones
09:59 next to each other and I was like, behind every single door,
10:02 there's like a different world.
10:06 SHE LAUGHS
10:07 I'm going to beat you. No, you're not.
10:09 Oh, yes, I will. No, you won't.
10:11 You look like a goldfish chewing out of your mouth.
10:14 Yeah.
10:15 What?
10:16 Do you remember what you did?
10:18 Yes.
10:20 You need to fight for them. Get out there and fight for your kids.
10:24 Because one day, your life will be over and you can't go back and make it better.
10:28 SCREAMING
10:30 MUSIC CONTINUES
10:32 MUSIC CONTINUES
10:34 MUSIC CONTINUES
10:36 MUSIC CONTINUES
10:38 (whooshing)
10:40 [BLANK_AUDIO]