![]() ![]() In general, our line producer, Chris Warner, and the people at Blumhouse would tell me what I had to work with, and I would tell them what I needed. Once you get on set, and you say, ‘I need an extra take,’ or, ‘We need to redo this,’ you end up battling every day against the limitations. ![]() Here are the scenes,’ and they did the budget for me. I don’t know the difference between $500,000 and $50 million in terms of a budget. I just said, ‘Here’s what I’m doing.’ Sometimes friends would ask how much I thought this movie would cost. Novak: I didn’t know budgets either, which is helpful. I don’t know how much you had to make this. Obviously, when you’re doing a first feature like this, you will not have a lot of budget to play with. Thompson: Blumhouse produced this, and they have a knack for doing a lot with not much money. I really wanted the movie to feel like a blend of tones, not just in the writing but within the cast. Louanne Stephens was on Friday Night Lights, Issa Rae is such a powerhouse, and Ashton Kutcher is such a surprise if you’ve seen him in other things. Smith-Cameron has been on Succession for the whole run, and that’s such a New York show. Novak: It’s such an eclectic cast in terms of the actors’ backgrounds. Some of the cast I know you already had relationships with such as Ashton Kutcher. All of the characters have something to do and have a purpose. Thompson: Something that struck me with Vengeance is that every character, big or small, whenever they’re in a scene, they’re there for a clear reason. I get plenty as an actor, and you play the bad guy, or you play the fool, but this movie really respects all its characters, even if they’re getting laughs or they have a point of view that seems a little out there. Unfortunately, it’s rare with a lot of scripts. Everyone was meant to be a three-dimensional person with a viewpoint that the person could put their heart behind. I think people were attracted to Vengeance’s themes and the fact that these are characters where no one was the butt of the joke. Cynically, I think actors scan a script and think, ‘Do I have any big monologues that I can chew on?’ I think really good actors at least read the script, and that definitely helped. ![]() I think I was lucky because the way I write, especially in this story with so many different people with opinions, there were a lot of monologues. You’ve been around for several years and have these relationships, but how did you get that cast together? I mean, Jordan Peele is the best example ever. I’m a big believer that real life has a lot of comedy in it and that comedy people shouldn’t lose their sense of humor when they do other things. Is that too jokey, or, on philosophical lines, is that too heady for the moment? Because the actors made them realistic, they ended up in the cut. It was the comedy lines that were on the line. Which one am I thinking of? Schindler’s List.’ People were like, ‘I don’t know,’ but I was like, ‘No, trust me.’ That’s sort of the green M&M in the rock star’s rider. The question is, ‘Can you get away with that and still make it believable and not take you out of it?’ There’s one joke in particular that I told everyone, and they were like, ‘I don’t know if this is going to work,’ so I said, ‘I’m going to make that work.’ That was the joke where one of the characters says to me, ‘You look like a guy from a Liam Neeson movie. The great lines are always the ones that are right on the line.
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