shouldn’t these people have the right to keep their home as much as any others?” “I think Lynn is someone who knows that no matter what, she doesn’t want a home built on someone else’s destruction,” observes Dern. “But she also knows that the only way that Dennis can get out of the hell he has found with Rick Carver is to dig himself out. She will make her decision, but he has to find it in himself.” “Her scenes with Noah (Lomax, who plays Connor) and Andrew are so touching and warm and she ties this family together in a way that’s subtle and beautiful,” says Producer Ashok Amritraj. “But her character also has to make her own important moral decisions.” “Meeting Laura was like meeting an old friend,” recalls Garfield. “I already felt like we were family, just from her generosity of spirit. She’s one of the most giving people I’ve ever spent time with and of course she has an incredible gift as an actor. We had to find a
Andrew Garfield in an eviction scene that mixes actors with non-actors.
(L-R) Actor Noah Lomax as Connor Nash with Andrew Garfield as his dad, Dennis Nash.
(L-R) Laura Dern stars as Lynn Nash mother of Dennis Nash portrayed by Andrew Garfield.
really interesting dynamic, because we are a mother and a son raising a kid together. It’s a very modern family situation and it felt very honest and true.” “This was the first time in my career that I’ve worked with an actor who works as similarly as Andrew does to me,” says Dern. “So that was an amazing gift as we tried to understand these two people and what they go through. We both really loved creating a family bond, and we both had fun with the spirit of exploration and improvisation that Ramin encourages.” “Beyond the intensity and suspense, I wanted this movie to have a real feeling of human life to it,” says Bahrani, “and to do that the actors have to really feel what is happening. The cleanout crew who
move things out, that’s actually what those guys do for a living, and a lot of the homeowners that Andrew evicts are real people. I would never tell Andrew who was real or who was an actor so he never knew what was coming up.” “An amazing casting director helps, like Tracy Kilpatrick down in New Orleans,” explains Bahrani. “She helped me find the sheriff. She had worked with him on a different film, kind of a real sheriff in a ‘cops and robbers’ movie, where he didn’t have much to do; he was just kind of being the sheriff. She felt he had real potential so he came in now for a little bit more complex role, and the guy was just so good. He was so good at improvisation. He was great at taking direction, so that was how to find that real sheriff.” “The other ones, I found on my own,” continues Bahrani. “I really love location scouting. I love finding locations, I love rewriting the script for locations or coming up with new scenes based on locations, and every location I went to for a couple of months, really, before pre-production even had started, I was just making records of all the people I met. Photographing them, talking to them. And then I went back and started to meet them again. You’re in so many different neighborhoods. We met so many people, and that’s kind of how I found them was through months of location work. And you just find the ones you feel have good spark, good faces that could give you a wide demographic, you know. There’s white, there’s African-American, there’s a Vietnamese woman, there’s a Hispanic gentleman. So you get an array to give it a scope and each one had a personality and their own story. You tap into those stories, and you kind of sketch themes out based on who they are.” “Most (of the non-actors) were in their own houses. Not always, but usually it was their own house. And that of course added an emotional resonance to them. A lot of them had been hard hit by Katrina. Either they had lost their home, or their friend, their neighbor, their loved one had lost a home. So they had something to tap into in terms of what did it mean to lose a home. And that just helped in terms of the emotional impact.” Garfield talked about the great lengths Bahrani went to insure that the cast never knew who were actors and who were real people. Garfield had an eviction scene with an elderly gentleman with dementia. Garfield recalls that right before the scene Bahrani leaned over and said to him, “Now you know he has dementia so I’m not sure how this really is going to go.” Garfield claims to have been on edge for the entire scene. “It speaks to the authenticity of the movie that we have so many real-life people in it throughout,” says Amritraj. “It makes what is happening feel that much more real, and when that happens, everything starts to take on a different kind of feeling for the cast and crew.” Production Designer Alex DiGerlando apparently also was into imbuing the locations with realistic and relatable elements for the cast. The Nash family home was the pinnacle of his designs. He invited Garfield and Dern to come in as their characters and help him choose colors, furniture and knick-knacks. “I remember when I walked into that house for the first time, I was just amazed by what Alex had done,” recalls Bahrani. “It was truly as if the Nash family lived in there. Working with Andrew and Laura on the props gave it a mood that felt instantly personal and full of emotion.” ISSUE FOUR 2015
LOUISIANA FILM & VIDEO MAGAZINE
71