Marc Forster: A Consummate Pro

By: Sean Axmaker

Tuesday January 18, 2005

Marc Forster transformed the emotionally raw "Monster's Ball" into one of the best American films of 2001 and directed Halle Berry to her Oscar. Entertainment Weekly predicts that his latest film, "Finding Neverland," may bring Johnny Depp his elusive Oscar.
Marc Forster, the Swiss born, NYU Film School trained director, has only made a handful of films, but his reputation with actors and producers is that of a consummate pro. He transformed the emotionally raw "Monster's Ball" into one of the best American films of 2001 and directed Halle Berry to her Oscar. Entertainment Weekly predicts that his latest film, "Finding Neverland," may bring Johnny Depp his elusive Oscar. The story of real life play wright James M. Barrie and how his friendship with the sons of a young widow inspired him to write the play "Peter Pan," the film (which co-stars Kate Winslet, Julie Christie, and Dustin Hoffman) was just celebrated by the National Board of Review as the Best Film of the Year.

Forster sat down to talk about "Neverland," working with Johnny Depp and Billy Bob Thornton, and how a school kid from Switzerland landed at NYU.



Sean Axmaker: At the beginning of the film, the introduction reads "Inspire d by true events." How much is based on historical James Barrie and how much is fictionalized?

Marc Forster: We took an incredible license historically. A lot of the facts are totally incorrect. For me the main issue was to capture the spirit of how he was inspired to write the story, I wasn't really that interested in trying to make a bio-picture. The root of the picture was the inspiration, and in dealing with the inspiration, I felt inspired to change the entire historical facts. (laughs) When he met the family, he met the kids first in the park, by themselves, and then met Sylvia Llewelyn Davies and her husband, who was still alive at the time, at a very formal dinner party in London. He befriended them all and the husband then died from cancer of the jaw and James actually paid many of the doctor bills. Even though they came from a very well known family, they didn't have much money. When the husband passed away he got closer to Sylvia.

There were also originally five kids instead of four. The fifth kid, though, was never part of the inspiration for "Peter Pan" because the fifth kid was just born when he started writing the first draft. That's why we cut him out. The daughter of the fifth kid is the only relative of the Davies family still living and she met Barrie. She came to the set, she's actually in the movie, because I thought she was so lovely and great. When James goes t o see Peter at the party after the premiere of "Peter Pan" and says "How did you like it?" and Peter says "Oh, it was magical," and James says "Thank you, Peter," she is the one who turns around and says "He's Peter Pan." She's actually the only living relative. Sylvia Davies was her grandmother. So she came to the set one day and showed me this ring that Barrie bought for her grandmother as an engagement ring, it was an incredible, beautiful dia mond, and she died before he ever was able to give it to her. But he was truly in love with her and then, obviously, adopted the children.

The defining relationships in the movie are not between James and the women in his life, but between James and the four boys.

Barrie had this child within him, which was at the time, or historically. There's this debate going on which you may be aware of: was he a pedophile or was he not a pedophile? All the historians say he wasn't and the kids he adopted say he wasn't and I asked the granddaughter and she said he wasn't.

Everyone says he was asexual and he had a very asexual relationship with his first wife. The two of them had this very distant relationship, and later on with Sylvia as well he just was very removed. And I think it comes from the mother, because who teaches a man to be a man? It's often the mother. James lost his brother very young and was always fighting for the attention and love of his mother because the brother was the favorite child. Once the brother died, the mother was bedridden and he pretended to be the brother and he would enter his mother's room dressed up in his brother's clothes. When he reached the age when his brother died, which I think was 14, he stopped growing, and he stayed at the exact same height that his brother was then he died. He was a very short man, he was only 5'2" or 5'3".

Johnny Depp is not a short man.

Another historical inaccuracy. We probably should have digitally shrunk him. (laughs)

Was Johnny Depp you first choice?

Yeah. I was always thinking, "Who can play this part?" Johnny, apart from having the dramatic skills, he has this child within him which is still alive. And he's one of the few actors who didn't make the choices to become a movie star. He made choices out of passion and love for the material. That's the beauty of him. He has this childlike quality about him and he loves to play, and he's such a creative actor. He always brings so much creativity to it that's it's just beautiful to work with him. When he casts the fishing rod in the park with the tennis ball attached to it and the dog runs after, that was his idea. He came up and said "What do you think? I'm going to the park with the dog and I'm throwing this fishing rod with a ball attached," and I loved it.

Is it true that this was his first film since taking a year off to raise his child?

Yes, that's true.

It seems appropriate that his first film back is about a man who become s a father to these four children.

I think that is one of the reasons he was inspired by it, because I think he wanted to make a film that connected him to his kids.

He's a father figure to the boys, but he's also a big brother to them. He plays with them. He doesn't try to be an authority figure to them. The moment he meets them, it's like he wants to become one of them.

Yes, that's very true. He doesn't treat them necessarily as children either, he treats them as equals. He doesn't talk down to them. It was also like that off set. I tried to create that atmosphere on camera and off camera, that we were like this family having this journey together and having fun. I think Johnny was a big advocate of that and so was Kate, so the kids were seduced into that. I think they enjoyed it very much. On the last day o f shooting they were very, very upset that it was ending and Freddie [Highmore], who plays Peter, was crying and it broke my heart because he didn't want Johnny to leave and he didn't want Kate to leave or me to leave, They were all hugging and crying because we became this family.

The credits list this as being based on a play, which I understand you changed significantly. What kind of research did you do while revising it?

I did another draft with the screenwriter [David Magee], but when I read the script it was already changed significantly from the play. The plays serves as a springboard. A lot of the fantasy isn't that strong in the play and it's more limiting.

Given that you did play with the historical facts, would you say that the portrait of the man himself, a childlike man who is aloof with women but very close with children, do you find that an honest portrayal of the J.M. Barrie you found in your research?

Johnny and I tried to create the image of him, distanced from the world but close to children, pretty close to J.M. Barrie's real nature. Even though Johnny didn't look like him, even though some of the historical facts aren't correct, we portrayed the character like the real person. Also Julie Christie's character as Madame du Maurier, also Kate's character, all the characters. We gave it to the granddaughter, who was the only person who actually knew all these people, and she felt that Barrie was captured very well in that sense. What was important to me were the characteristics of the character, that we try our best to capture the spirit of it that would lead us to the spirit of capturing his inspiration.

How did you work with Johnny Depp to create the character on screen? Obviously he brought a lot of his own ideas to the character, like the tennis ball. It sounds like he was very much in tune with the character from the beginning.

Yes, very much, he understood it. We talked at the beginning and I said, "There are two ways to make a movie about this man. There is the biographical way, where we really become a stickler to what happened in reality and who this man was and go into the dark side and the light side of his life and the questions people raise, and there is the inspirational part of it, the power of storytelling," which we both were interested. People, if they like the movie, can read up on him and read about who he really was, which is way more interesting, I think, than seeing it onscreen. So we decided very early on, this is what we would like to do and focus on.

The sawdust and tinsel fantasy sequences were charming. It's like we se e the fantasy world the way he imagines it, and he imagines it as a make-believe conbstruct. Like Tim Burton made out of cardboard.

I wanted to keep the fantasy sequences very simple because -- and Tim Burton is brilliant -- but you can get really, really out there and I thought that wouldn't be right. The way he was dealing with the children, there should be some childish simplicity to them and just make them like cardboard, very rudimentary, slightly kitsch, slightly charming, but just make them as simple as possible. It's a tricky thing because if you're dealing with a fantasy sequence, it's so easy for a filmmaker to show off, to go to all these amazing visual places, but I felt that the simpler I keep it, the more impact it would have.

It also reflects the idea that Barrie's own imagination reflects the th eater, where he's from.

Yes, that's the idea, to make them theatrical as well and have a parallel to see into the theatrical world.

In the scenes where Barrie is with the children, it's like they are cre ating their own theater and the sets are created in the mind, but Peter can 't key into it. Every time to cut back to Peter's perspective, all you see is the real world, not the theater of the mind. But it's like James is a di rector in these scenes. Do you find some kinship with him?

Yeah. I mean, ultimately, we're all directors because we all are on a journey and we all direct our own life because we are the lead actor in our own film, in our own theatrical piece, so I feel often kinships that. It's funny because I feel that we all create and direct every day of our life and make choices who we want to be and we can always change that if we decide to. It's one of the reasons I think I was attracted to the script and the story, what I like about it apart from what it says, is there was this man trying to desperately communicate his imagination to someone who wouldn't believe in it and couldn't see it, and I think ultimately you as a storyteller try to communicate to other people what's in your head and how you see things. Some people you can't convince and some people you do. Some people go along with it and some people say "This is bullshit. I am bored. What are doing?" (laughs) So, there is some sort of parallel going on.

Entertainment Weekly had Johnny Depp on the cover in October with the q uestion "Is this his Oscar movie?" Which is an appropriate question, since you directed Halle Berry to her Oscar in "Monster's Ball." It seems that yo u are getting a reputation as an actor's director.

It's a nice reputation. I'm glad they feel that way. I didn't set out t o make a movie to win awards or anything like that, it always comes from pa ssion, and when I see the Entertainment Weekly cover, "Is it Johnny Depp's Oscar movie," it immediately makes me nervous. "Oh my god, people have expe ctations!" And I keep thinking this should be low key, people should discov er the movie and if it happens, it happens, but I always get nervous when p eople have high expectations and walk out of the movie saying "It wasn't re ally Oscar worthy." If they can see it without reading anything or without knowing anything, it would be better.

I wasn't thinking about it in terms of audience, I was thinking of other actors. You've effectively made 2 films before this, and you were able to get a cast that includes Kate Winslet, Dustin Hoffman, and Julie Christie.

It was really a miracle how it all happened. I had to pinch myself, because I was thinking how I was working with these icons of cinema, Julie Christie and Dustin Hoffman. Who can ever forget Julie Christie's close-up in "Doctor Zhivago," these eyes that look. Or who can forget "The Graduate" or "Kramer vs. Kramer" or any of Dustin Hoffman's great works? And you work with these two people and they do what I tell them to do and I say "What's happening here?" It's all very abstract. (laughs)

I heard an interview with Julie Christie a few years ago, where she talked about being afflicted by short term memory loss, which made it difficult to memorize lines in movies. I had noticed that in those years her roles had very little dialogue, but here she seems to have no such trouble with dialogue.

I heard that too and when I met with her the first time I didn't want to bring it up. I remember seeing the headline of some trashy English newspaper: "Julie Christie - Memory Loss!" I thought "Oh my god," then I met her and I just fell in love with her as a person and I couldn't bring it up. So then we went through the script together and it was fine and then on the first day of acting she knew her lines.

There are certain actors like Johnny or Kate or Billy Bob Thornton who doesn't even read the script. He reads the script once and then he comes in the morning to the set and he doesn't know what you are doing. So he says "What are we doing today?" and I say "This is the scene and this is what we're doing, this how I see the scene and this and this and this," and he looks at the page and says "Okay. okay. okay." He comes to set and he knows every line. It's like a photographic memory. So he just comes and he just knows it.

With Julie Christie, I wouldn't call her a take one kind of actress. It's interesting. Dustin Hoffman comes from a similar school, and older actors that I've worked with, Peter Boyle as well, in that age range of 60 years old or so, they all seem to start to bliss and take between 7 and 14. And Kate and Johnny, it was very early, like take 3 or 4, you're done, you've got it. [Christie and Hoffman] take that time and grow into it. So she might not get the dialogue totally right until take 3 or 4, but it's not that she forgets it, she's always very close, and you just point it out to her if you want her to say something different, or sometimes she says something that works better than what's in the script, because it feels more natural or more in the moment. But I never had a problem with her. And I was relieved, to say the least.

Where did you start your filmmaking career? How did you get started?

I finished high school in Switzerland and I read that NYU was a great film school, so I applied to NYU and got in. My parents couldn't afford it at the time, so I wrote letters to all the rich people in Switzerland I knew, and there were a lot of them. I wrote about 30 letters and the first person I called responded positively and said he would pay the first year of film school and if I had talent he would continuously pay for the rest of my education. So I went to New York and he paid for my first year and that went well and so he kept on paying. When I graduated I stayed in New York and did 2 documentaries for European TV, just to get work, and after that I started writing and did a little film called "Loungers." A friend of mine owned to play and it was a sort of experimental film. It was never released anywhere because there's a lot of music in it. There's all this on camera singing -- Tom Jones, Gary Glitter, Englebert Humperdink, that kind of lounge music -- and they never cleared the music rights. Very experimental and out there and we shot it in about 10 days. Really my first film was "Everything Put Together," which had a script that I wrote with a friend, and a structure, and we shot it on digital video, on a VX-1000, in the summer of 1999 in 2 weeks for a hundred grand. Radha Mitchell was the lead and that's how that relationship started.

How did you put that project together? You basically had a film no one had seen and a couple of European TV documentaries. Was it European financed?

No, it was basically the script, which I gave to Radha. She had just done "High Art" and she had a little bit of heat and she was sick and tired of waiting for films to happen, so I said "Let's just do it in the summer, let's just pick up a video camera and shoot it," and she said "Okay." We basically went looking for a private investor and I found one person who liked the shorts I made at school and gave us $100,000 and we started shooting 3 weeks later. We did it really quick and then sent a rough cut to Sundance, got in, and that's how it got seen.

["Everything Put Together," which is available on DVD, is the story of a young mother -- played by Radha Mitchell -- who spirals into depression after her baby dies of SIDS and her friends all turn away from her.] It's got a very gothic horror feel to it, but it's all in her mind. In her loneliness and depression she imagines a "Rosemary's Baby" conspiracy around her.

I used to say that we were doing a psychological horror film, but nothing is happening. It's always building up to something and ultimately nothing happens, but I felt that sometimes in life we have these psychological breaks.

It's a very chilling movie. By the end, I felt really angry and upset that this woman had been abandoned by everyone who said they were her friends. At the time she needed them, they left her alone as if her grief was going to infect them like a disease.

It's interesting because a lot of people have said "Oh, people wouldn't really act like that," but it's all based on fact. Catherine Lloyd Burns, who wrote the script, went through that experience. It's very autobiographical. And I did more research and in big cities like Seattle or New York or LA it happens less, but it's a very interesting white, middle class, suburbia phenomenon. In LA when a director is very hot, people love them, and when they're cold they just turn their back. The same with actors or actresses, or if people suddenly have a terminal illness, sometimes their friends can't deal with it and they just walk away. That phenomenon seems to exist in our society more than people want to acknowledge.

The husband doesn't abandon her so much as he simply retreats from everything and she's left alone. Their house is huge and empty and sterile, there's nothing there for her.

We shot it with this video camera with all natural light.

You can see it in the picture. It really gave the rooms a different quality, but it also made them feel spooky because you are so used to theatrical lighting.

And I love movies like "Don't Look Now" and "Rosemary's Baby." There's a different kind of horror to it that you don't see in movies today and I thought we should experiment with it.

And that led to "Monster's Ball." That looks like it must have been a rough movie to make. I don't know if that's necessarily true, but what you see on the screen is so rough.

To be honest, we had the best time. We had so much laughter, it was so fun. Billy Bob is a riot, he is so funny. He's making one joke after another. "I'm the only hillbilly on the set. I have an Australian son, a father from Brooklyn, and a Swiss director." He was just joking constantly. Halle, at the same time, is in the closet listening to music to focus because Billy Bob is cracking one joke after the next. On the DVD, if you go to the supplements, there is a bathroom scene between Billy Bob and Heath Ledger where they fight and he's doing Karl, his "Sling Blade" character. He's amazing. He's joking, joking, joking, and then he can go into the character like that. It's phenomenal.

Is the reason that these producers hired you, based on "Everything Put Together," that this was another film where people don't communicate in any meaningful way" They are cold and distant until, of course, Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton, in their misery, turn to each other.

Yeah, it's definitely one of the reasons. Another reason, I think, was because I was a foreigner, and I wouldn't have any prejudices on the racial issues. I wouldn't have a chip on my shoulder or try to make a statement. I'd just try to be observational. I think that was one of the reasons. And because of "Everything Put Together," of not expressing your emotion. I know how to do that very well because I come from a country where nobody says "I love you." (laughs) Everybody is like an emotional retard. You don't show emotions, you don't show happiness or sadness, it's just always very even, all very neutral. Just like Switzerland. So for me it was an awakening living here, how people say "I love you" and hug each other or have any physical contact. It was a very beautiful, positive thing I learned here in the US.

I've heard people say that "Finding Neverland" was a big change of pace for you, and to some extent it is a lighter film, but on the other hand your other films are about people being abandoned and dealing with death, and here James befriends these boys who are still dealing with the death of their father and their mother's illness, James is in a loveless marriage, and they escape in their fantasies. Those fantasies become very healing. And in "Monster's Ball" their relationship is a healing thing. So I think that in some ways, you are making the same kind of observations about people and relationships.

I'm glad you saw that. A lot of people say "This film is so different," and I think actually it isn't. It isn't that different because it deals with the same subject matter: death, divorce, emotional death between a man and his wife. The central connection between all the films is the reoccurrence of death and actually in "Stay" [the story of a college professor who tries to stop a student from committing suicide, which Forster recently finished shooting] it's again going back to death. (laughs) I don't know why I'm drawn to it, but it has a certain parallel, just in a different setting. The fantasy gives it a digestible, more approachable setting for the topics that run underneath.

It's interesting, my father and my brother died, very close to each other, three months apart, and I never really dealt with it. I wasn't hyper-religious and suddenly I was overwhelmed with these two people who are so close to me. Suddenly my father, who emotionally was so detached, now felt very close emotionally, and he was dead. It was an interesting emotional experience, having feelings that someone is close even though he's dead.

Has your success in making films with such dark themes surprised you?

The interesting thing is every time you start a journey, you don't know how it's going to end up, if it's going to end up in a positive way or a negative way, or if people are going to like it. I read an interview with Steven Soderberg where he said "You should always try to take the risk," that you can fail. And I feel the same. As long as I enjoy storytelling, I will keep telling them and see what happens.