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Juno Films releases The Same Storm at Quad Cinema on October 14th, 2022. NYC MOVIE GURU: The Same Storm deals with a wide range of human emotions. Which emotions were challenging to capture for you? Peter Hedges: I don't know if I was setting up to portray emotions, but what I was interested in was trying to imagine a multitude of situations that people where finding themselves in, situations where they couldn't connect and couldn't reach each other, and simple connections that would be, normally, in real life, if would could be together, not even a big event. There would be no drama, but suddenly it would become dramatic. So, falling in love, saying goodbye, helping your kid---all of these things took on whole new levels of complication. All I really hope to do is to put something on the page that would earn me the privilege of getting to work with the kind of actors that I got to work with. If we could find a way with our technology to make it so that they could interact with each other---at that point, the only films that I wash hearing about being made were where one actor might film themselves and then the other actor films themselves and they're imagining each other's performance, and then they cut to together and you think that they're talking to each other. But, in this instance, we were able to employ through this amazing company called Straight-Up Technology which allows us to let the other actors interact. So, what I was chasing was not necessarily every emotion, but to create a safe enough space for the actors of my dreams to be able to go anywhere and everywhere in a believable way. The hardest thing was trying to get something on the page that would persuade them to come try this unusual experiment. That was probably the hardest. I would say, in a sincere effort to answer your question more directly, there are a few scenes in the movie with intense, raw, heart-ripped-open emotion. What was challenging about those scenes wass that when we were finished filming, instead of a wind-down, cool-down that you would have in a traditional film where you can actually interact and speak with the actor and thank them personally or the crew might applaud after a scene---which has happened during many of my films because the work is such a staggering level and everyone has such respect--in this instance, when we were finished shooting a scene, I turned off my computer and they would turn off theirs. It was hard to not have that transition from the pretend world of emotions to the real world that we inhabit most of the time. I developed strategies: I would call actors the minute we finished the scene and tried to convey my gratitude and my aw. The other thing that happened which was challenging was that we would shoot the scene and we were always shooting from every angle because every device was being recorded in any scene. But you couldn't know for sure if it was all recorded, if the sound level was maintained or a picture was interrupted in a significant way. So, where on a traditional film you would normally say, "Hey, you got it! Let's move on.", I would say, "You got it! That was stunning! Now you need to do it a couple more times because we have to make sure that we have it for techical reasons." That was a challenging, too, because you're like, "Why should an actor have to keep doing the scene that they've just landed in any imaginable way?" Well, we had to because we just weren't sure if we could get back together again. But in every instance, every actor was like, "Okay, you got it. I'll do it." Ultimately, anything that was difficult for me was harder for them, so I'm just in awe. I'm in genuine awe in each and every one of them. NYC MOVIE GURU: Which fictional characters do you think could help the characters in The Same Storm to emotionally heal? PH: That's awesome. When I had the great honor of working on About a Boy, I got to swim around Nick Hornby's prose for the year-and-a-half that I worked on that film. Then the Weitz brothers came in, took what I had done, reinvented it and took it to a whole other level. Part of why I was drawn to About a Boy as a project was that it came to me at a time when I really didn't want to adapt anyone else's work. I said, "No" before I even read the book, and then they came back and I said, "Tell me what it's about." When I read About a Boy, it was a book I wish I had written. I wish I had executed it. I love Nick Hornby's writing. I love his humanity. I would say I had written, in answer to your question, three moms in my filmmaking life. Joy in Pieces of April, Bonnie Grape in What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, Polly in Ben is Back. They're three mothers who would go to hell and back for their kid. I think that they would have a lot to say to Cindy Lamson, Rosemary DeWitt's character in The Same Storm in the scene where she's the mom whose kid is struggling with home learning during quarantine. Maybe they wouldn't be able to help her, but they would definitely identify and relate. I think that April Burns from Pieces of April would have a lot to say to Mary Louise Parker's character, Roxy, in the scene with Roxy's mom played by Elaine May in The Same Storm. Those are two characters who, I think, are estranged and misunderstood by their parents. I'm sure that there are other examples, but those are the first that come to mind. Interviews Menu Alphabetical Menu Chronological Menu ______________________________________________________ |
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