KCET Spring Cinema Series Q&A’s

A heads-up from GITS development assistant Wendy Cohen:

For you L.A. folks — the KCET Cinema Series continues its spring season TONIGHT at 7pm with a screening of the upcoming romantic comedy LE WEEK-END, featuring a Q&A with star Jeff Goldblum following the screening.

For more information, click on More.

The quarterly series is hosted by nationally recognized film expert and Deadline Hollywood columnist Pete Hammond. Passes for the Spring 2014 KCET Cinema Series are now on sale. For reservations call 747.201.5800, download and mail the registration form, or buy your season passes online.

Last week, as part of the series, a special Q&A took place at the Television Academy’s Leonard H. Goldenson Theatre following an advance screening of THE FACE OF LOVE, a gripping romantic thriller which stars Annette Bening as a grieving widow who happens upon a man (Ed Harris) that looks almost exactly like her deceased husband. The two then strike up a relationship as a flood of old feelings come rushing back to her in this emotionally thorny drama about how we cope with loss, live in the moment, and ultimately move forward. Pete Hammond sat down with the film’s director and co-writer Arie Posin to discuss his real-life inspiration for the movie, Hollywood’s lack of regard for older audiences, working with big-name stars Bening and Harris and his unique way of rehearsing scenes with his cast before filming.

You can listen to a full audio recording of the panel on KCET’s website.

Below are some of the highlights from their conversation.

Pete Hammond: This is a film I introduced as for grown-ups, a grown-up love story. You don’t see it much in the movies anymore, with people of a certain age. I think that’s so great, because that’s what Hollywood used to make all the time.

Arie Posin: I couldn’t agree more. And the surprising thing is, even with the script and with these actors, we found it nearly impossible to make the movie.

PH: You couldn’t get financing, in other words.

AP: Every company for sure turned us down once, and a bunch of them turned us down twice. And eventually the movie got financed through some wealthy folks in Texas that have never invested in movies before. And literally one of our producers, Bonnie Curtis, called her uncle John, who’s in Dallas and said, “We need some help,” and uncle John threw a dinner for some of his friends and we convinced them.

PH: It’s the same exact story that I heard in my last series in the fall that I did here with “Dallas Buyers Club.” Tell us about the genesis of this film and how it came into your life, basically.

AP: It’s actually based on something — at least the first act — that had happened to my mom. Some years after my dad had passed away, she came over to see me one day and said, “This funny thing happened to me today. I was in a crosswalk at LACMA and I saw this man coming towards me who looked like a carbon copy of your father.” And I said, “What did you do?” She said, “I was frozen and he was walking towards me with this big smile on his face, and it just felt so good in that moment. It felt like like it used to. And then he blew past me, a car started honking, the light had changed, and I kept going.” That story really moved me and stayed with me, and I started dreaming about it, obsessing about it, and eventually writing about it, and eventually that’s what led to the movie.

PH: Turning it into a husband and wife and that sort of thing.

AP: I was just telling a friend this the other day — I started out thinking that I was making a movie about my mom and her experience, and then very quickly, once she sees the double, it’s not about my mom anymore, because she didn’t follow him, as it happens. And so then it becomes about the characters, and who are these people, and what kind of person does that, and so you go through the journey of writing now about these characters, making them as alive as you can, and then the actors come in and really breathe life into them, and then it’s a movie. And now as I’ve started to do these kinds of screenings and talk about the movie, it’s dawned on me that I was the one who got obsessed with it, and I was the one who thought, “Well, how would I try to find that guy if I wanted to?” Of course, as it’s always the case, I’ve made a movie about myself.

PH: Well, you know, the best filmmaking is personal filmmaking. And I think it’s great that you gave these kinds of roles to these wonderful actors, who — they work all the time — but they don’t get these kinds of roles offered to them. Hollywood’s not interested in these kinds of roles.

AP: That’s true. And also, it’s a love story. What we kept hearing was, “It’s a drama.” That’s a big strike. And if that’s not bad enough, it’s a love story with people who are older than 22.

PH: I was gonna say 40 and be kinder.AP: So that’s what made it challenging. But it was great fun and having actors like this is just… The two of them are just so extraordinary. Even still to me the two of them are so watchable and so compelling. And the thing we lucked into was the chemistry between them, because they had never worked together. That was just fortune. They really like each other and even though they come from two different acting traditions, they were so complementary in how they worked together and how much respect they had for each other.

PH: What I read from them, which was very complementary towards your style, was letting them have the leash, the leeway, to create these characters onscreen.

AP: I have strong ideas about what I want, but I needed their experience and their sense of those characters and for them to be advocates for their characters. So when we would enter a scene, just the three of us in the morning, we would rehearse it like a play. Of course, I had my plan, so if it made sense I was always trying to drive them towards my shot list and everything we prepared, but sometimes we threw it out and they were right.

PH: So that’s unusual. You had actual rehearsal time in front of each scene for them to work it out almost in an improv style with your script.

AP: And sometimes that process would take a little time and some lines would change. But as a director, I feel my job is to be the lie detector. Do I believe this? Is this true? Is it authentic? And that was always our focus.

Here is a trailer for THE FACE OF LOVE:

The Face of Love opens in limited release on Friday. You can buy tickets to the movie here.

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