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Another Earth

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : Following her release from jail, a morose young woman (Brit Marling) seeks out the man (William Mapother) whose life she shattered in a car accident several years earlier.

Opens Friday, July 22, 2011

Runtime:1 hr. 32 min.

 

Interview with Actor William Mapother

 

 
(Q) : I was reading your bio there. I had no idea of all the death of all the entrepreneurial spirit. So you must have really appreciated working on this film given that it's all about entrepreneurial spirit.
 
(William Mapother) : That's funny. It is, it's very entrepreneurial this movie. I enjoy the bootstrap nature. I like working. I'm lucky I like working in all forms, and this film required that and it benefited from it. Dig in, take your shoes off, and plunge your hands in the dirt and get to work, and that's fun.
 
(Q) : Were you interested in the subject matter?
 
(William Mapother) : I do. I can be a bit of a science geek. I tend more towards reading about brain science, neuroscience. I was an English major, so I love discussing possibilities and alternate theories. Aside from the science aspect of it, the philosophical possibilities are so interesting. It's interesting; Brit and Mike and I all went to Catholic universities. I went to Notre Dame. I don't know if that has any relevance. Maybe we all had a little too much philosophy and theology.

(Q) : How's your personality shaped by that experience? Are you a Catholic?
 
(William Mapother) : I would not call myself Catholic anymore, but I went to 16 years of Catholic school; grade school, high school, and college.

(Q) : They beat it right out of you.
 
(William Mapother) : They beat it right out of me. Or they beat it into me and educated it out of me. I don't know; that's an interesting question. The Catholic schools required work, so I think that may have been where the work ethic came from, in answer to your question of how my character may have been shaped. I don't think that necessarily I was encouraged by the nuns and the priest to consider alternate possibilities to the universe. That I don't think as much.
 
(Q) :How did you get into this project?
 
(William Mapother): Summer 2009 I was here in New York for the Shakespeare Lab at the Public Theater. In the Shakespeare Lab they bring in 12 actors every summer, and they bring in some of the best classical acting teachers in the country and they teach the actors about Shakespeare soup to nuts. So for instance, we had eight classes, classes in eight areas, and our acting teacher is the head of NYU Graduate School for Acting, and our text analysis teacher is a Rhodes Scholar in Elizabethan drama.

We had fantastic teachers. So I'm here, I'm not one for missed opportunities, so I made a list of the casting directors in New York and I mark off the ones I've already met over the years, and the few remaining I asked my agent and manager "See if you can set up some meetings while I'm here." So I met with a few and one of the offices I met with was James Calleri and Paul Nelson.

They're in Chelsea, it was a fourth floor walk-up, the elevator was out, it was dusty, it was loud, they were sharing an office with somebody. Very unassuming, 25 minutes, in and out, very friendly. Two weeks later back in LA a script arrives. "Would William be interested in doing this? We have a director who's never made a feature, a lead actress who's not in SAG, and it's like SAG minimum."

And I read the script and I thought this is a really interesting concept, I've never played a character like this, and then I said "I'd like to meet with Mike and Brit." And we did, we met in a deli in Santa Monica and got on like a house on fire. I said "The only requirement I have is that I think my scenes could do with a little bit of work."

So the three of us met at my house for a week and a half and workshopped and rewrote and rehearsed everything, which was a godsend. And I feel, and I think they do, that we really strengthened it, and the other advantage is that when we got to New York and we started shooting we already had a working relationship, we had a bond, we had a comfort, and a lot of people have said they've seen that on screen in my relationship with Brit.
 
(Q) : You're the one really experienced actor with the focus on you. Did that put a responsibility on your shoulders that you liked?
 
(William Mapother): That's a good question. I did like it, I do like taking on responsibility, sometimes too much, but I was aware of that early on and it's something that came up in the previous set of interviews, and that is the actors' contribution. And if you think about filmmaking as an entire spectrum starting with the writer and ending with maybe the marketing department, the actor's contribution is a rather slender band. And people wonder why actors can sometimes be neurotic, it's because you have no power.

You give them all the material and the cinematographer, the director, the editor, boy what they can choose you better hope they like you because they can slice and dice and make you look like a damn fool. And when your face and body are up there on a 30 foot screen. Look, we all know how hard it is for us to – I'm going to speak for myself – find a still photo of yourself that you like. Like how many times do people send photos and you're like "Oh burn it."

Well you're in a theater and it's 24 shots a second, it's your face, it's your body, it's your voice, and it's your craft, the way you earn your living, and it's indelible. It's not like writing a script – I write as well – I can't do another draft, it's done. So generally a wise actor will be very careful about the person to whom he gives that power. But Mike and Brit had already shot footage, so I could see that Mike new what he was doing and Brit was very, very good. So that allayed a lot of my concerns.
 
(Q) : They had shot footage for the film? Or early test footage?
 
(William Mapother): The former. They had shot a lot of the scenes before I came on board. Scenes of Brit sometimes walking, I think in the snow, scenes with her family. They had looked for a while and couldn't find an actor that they wanted for my role.
 
(Q) : Do you think your character could have chosen any other course than his reaction?
 
(William Mapother) : Which reaction specifically?
 
(Q) : I mean the reaction when he finds out that she's sort of betrayed him in the sense that she was the one that killed his family.
 
(William Mapother) : Well that's a good question.
 
(Q) : Did that seem like the inevitable reaction in your mind or in the collective mind?
 
(William Mapother): That's a very good question. I don't think it was inevitable, particularly because the scenes prior to that covered a large period of time, I think six months, and we'd have a couple scenes that covered maybe in January and then a couple scenes in March. In other words, it wasn't as if it was the action was at a conclusion of a sequence tightly timed and filmed in which the action led naturally to that .I think there was some leeway. The character could have forgiven her; he could have reverted into violence at that moment instead of collapsing inward. I mean there are a lot of alternate possibilities.
 
(Q) : I was just speculating myself.
 
(William Mapother): That's a good question. You make the creative choices and it's interesting; sometimes you make them back in Los Angles in your home and they don't feel right on set a month later across the country, and sometimes they still do. And fortunately we were shooting with a very small crew with a digital camera, which meant very little time setting up lights and very little time moving a huge crew around, and that meant more time for takes and for exploring.

A couple times a scene wasn't working; we just said "Let's stop for a second and talk about this," which is unheard of in filmmaking. But that's the advantage of low budget filmmaking is that you have time. I remember when I was working on "Mission: Impossible II," John Woo said "In Hong Kong, not much money and a lot of time. In Hollywood, a lot of money, not much time." Personally I'd prefer not much money a lot of time.
 
(Q) : Your character has this musical background and I wanted to know how you worked with Mike and Brit as far as having this musical background inform what the character's emotional journey was in the film.

(William Mapother): That's a very good question. We left a lot of that up to me. In terms of how that was manifest in his external actions, his external behavior, a lot of that I made decisions on my own and then would discuss with them when we were workshopping and saying "I think his reaction here might require a couple more months." The fact that he was in the arts as opposed to finance for instance suggested that he's perhaps a more sensitive person, and therefore to me that made his level of grief at the beginning a bit more believable.

If he had been someone accustomed to sealing off his feelings and not expressing them it probably would have been more likely that at the beginning of the movie he would have pulled himself out of grief in the four years. And then obviously his returning to music as he does when she comes in and sees him playing is a signifier that he's starting to heal, and then his way of expressing his feelings for her with the song made perfect sense.

I remember somebody telling me an anecdote from Beethoven. A woman came up to him after one of his performances and said "That was beautiful. Can you explain to me what that meant?" And he said "I'm most eloquent in music. If I can't explain it to you in music how can I possible do so in words?"
 
(Q) : I think being a musician though helped to explain how you had this time to wallow in yourself. Because if you had been like you said a stock broker you would have been forced to go back to work.
 
(William Mapother): I would have been forced to get back to work, and I think I would have been less accustomed to – I'm guessing, and this is a horrid generalization so I'll probably get hate mail from stock brokers – but perhaps less accustomed to being in touch with my feelings and allowing my feelings to drive my decisions and behavior.
 
(Q) : You used to teach yourself, is that correct?
 
(William Mapother) : I did, I was what they called an emergency substitute, you can teach up to 30 days at a time, in East LA for the LA Unified School District.
 
(Q) : Do you agree with Professor Burroughs, that you're better off just doing it yourself?
 
(William Mapother) : In some things. I don't want our bridge builders and our surgeons to be learning doing it themselves. I mean quite sincerely there are certain things, but a lot of things I have benefited more from doing them myself. The older I get the more I believe in iterations as opposed to studying, studying, studying, and then finally you're now prepared. Get in there, get your hands dirty, look at it, decide what you did wrong, and get back in there.
 
(Q) : This is a little bit off the topic but could you talk about your company and how that's helping you in the industry?
 
(William Mapother) : So Slated has two sides. We started the company to do one thing and en route we bought another. I'll talk about what we started it for, but a year ago we bought a company that was called B-Side. The venture capitalists had put it up for sale. They had been funding it for several years, and B-Side provided an online platform to host the schedules for film festivals. So you go to a film festival website and there'd be a link that said schedule, and you'd go to another site and it would have all the films, all the data, it would have trailers, and then you could add it to your calendar, you could look at information, you could create a personalized calendar, all that.

So we bought B-Side and we added some features to it, including an iPhone app, things like that, so when you go to a film festival all of the schedule can be accessed through your iPhone, you don't have to carry a big calendar around, and the festival can easily make changes and it gets pushed to everyone's smart phone. And we thought that would help us, not only be a great idea in itself, so we hosted Sundance and a bunch of other festivals, but we also thought it would be a good support for the real reason we started the company, and that is we are creating an online marketplace for film finance.

So in other words we are bringing together filmmakers and financiers that have never been able to find each other. I’m from Louisville, Kentucky and I know there are a lot of people there who have given money to independent films – doctors, lawyers, etcetera – but they don't know a lot of filmmakers. Maybe their friend's son's friend went to NYU and he's looking to raise money. The problem is that typically they have to put in a lot of money, $25-, $50-, $75,000, and they don't have a range of projects to choose from.

In a couple of months we're going to be in beta and you can go to our site, slated.com, and sign up for updates, and you will eventually be able to come to the site and see a series of projects and you will be able to decide which ones you want to invest in, for as little as a thousand dollars, so you'll be able to diversify. So you've got $10,000, you can put it in 10 different movies in a way you can't now because most filmmakers don't want to have to find a thousand different people to put a thousand dollars in; that's too much work. And so you can get what the studios have, which is a portfolio.

They don't know which films are going to hit, so instead of putting $50,000 into one movie, you can spread it across 10 movies and increase your likelihood that you're going to get a hit. And also you'll be able to find films that you really care about, either because you care about the participants, maybe you want to put money in a Charlize Theron movie, or you care about dolphins, or you care about some documentary about the climate. You could support that cause.
 
(Q) : Did you invest in this?
 
(William Mapother) : I did. I'm one of the founders.
 
(Q) : No, but I mean did you invest in this movie?

(William Mapother) : Oh no, no. They didn't need me to because their production company was set. So in answer to your question on independent film, there's a great dearth of capital right now in independent film and there are a lot of people who like investing in movies. So if we could find a way to bring them together we'd be able to provide some capital to the independent film industry. And as opposed to IndieGoGo and Kickstarter, which raise money but they are donations in exchange for film perks – you can visit the set or you get a  hat or a shirt – ours is going to be real investing in film for the equity in debt.

(Q) : You're a well known actor but your cousin's a worldwide actor. Is he helping out your company?

(William Mapother): That's one question I'm not going to answer – I don't mind your asking – only because whenever I answer questions about my cousin it ends up getting spun and misinterpreted. Not by you guys but you'll present exactly what I say and someone else will take out pieces, and it's happened too often. We're very close, he's a great guy, and I've been burned before with things I've said so I'd rather not answer questions about him.
 
(Q) : If this is successful will it change the course of your acting career? How will it affect your acting career?
 
(William Mapother) : This movie?
 
(Q) : Yes, this movie, but also Slated, because suddenly you're a CEO and you have no time for acting. Or you could pick and choose movies that way.
 
(William Mapother) : That's possible too. Maybe I could use it to get my own movies financed. The short answer is I don't know. I really enjoy acting; I'm either very lucky or very smart. I love what I do. I don't like having to look for a role, that's a big pain, but I love actually acting. So it would have to be a very, very big success to keep me from continuing to act.

(Q) : You're in this picture and you were also for a while you were on "Lost." My question is are you expecting a lot of very, very convoluted science-fiction questions from fans? Like fan mail? Do you feel like people are going to look at you like some sort of expert?
 
(William Mapother) : That's a good question. I hope they don't look at me as some sort of an expert.
 
(Q) : You're ready for conventions.
 
(William Mapother) : I'm ready for conventions. You know what's interesting, the sort of questions that I think "Lost" raises are of a different sort than this movie. In other words, "Lost" is figuring out the world of the show, whereas this one seems to raise questions about the world that we know, but I'm happy to entertain both. One of the great things for me about having been on "Lost" is people coming up and feeling so enthusiastic about the show and saying "Oh it provided us so much entertainment," or "It inspired conversations." So I'm looking forward to people coming up and talking to me about this one.
 
(Q) : You seem to end up in all of these procedurals.
 
(William Mapother) : If you're going to do a guest spot on tv they need bodies on those procedural tv shows. You've got to keep working, and that's where a lot of the work is.

(Q) : In the movie there's that push and pull, because she has this knowledge that she's withholding from you and that eventually you know, and it happens later in the film. And I wanted to know if there was ever a point where they were developing it with your character and with her character and possibly there was some awareness before that moment. Because this is an elaborate ruse that she sets up, and I feel like eventually something had to give. She says something but it's also very tense, so was that always the intention to wait that late in the game?

(William Mapother) : That's a very good question. That's something the Mike and Brit and I had conversations about, and part of the fun of film and this film in particular is that it's open to individual interpretation. Mike wondered if John was aware, or had any inkling of Rhoda having been the cause of the accident before she actually confesses to him.

And he thought that he might have conscious or unconscious, and he asked me and my thought it no. Generally, you want your character to be as blindsided as possible. Not all the time, but often you want your character to be thrown off balance. If your question is specifically do we want to delay the revelation, yeah you want to delay it as long as possible because as you said, the audience knows that that moment is coming and you want to make them wait for it. You want to have the audience suffer a bit.
 
(Q) : You explained it. Thank god. I was going to get nervous if you didn't explain it.
 
(William Mapother) : I'm crazy about that kind of stuff. As I said, I write, and when you'll see a movie in which it's supernatural, there's some other worlds, some other aspects to our world that we're not aware of, and they don't explain what the rules are, that kind of stuff drives me crazy. I wanted to audience to understand how John wouldn't have known, and so we found out that in a lot of states minors' identities aren't revealed.
 
(Q) : When you first read the script was that part of the attraction for you that it's taking a more human approach?
 
(William Mapother) : I just want to understand your question. You mean was I attracted to this project because in this movie we don't attack another planet?

(Q) : No. We see the part of the green faced guy walking down the street, but if it's happening right now obviously there will be a more serious investigation or the government attacking another planet. But they didn't do that in the film, obviously. There's a more intelligent approach in this film so was that part of the attraction that you felt?
 
(William Mapother): I think it did. It would not have appealed to me as much if they had had that different approach. It was part of the appeal, and it seems to be more fitting for the characters. What's going on in the outer world obviously, in the big picture, is a mirror in a sense of what's going on with these two people's lives. A discovery, and a mystery, and in that sense it seemed to be more fitting with the theme and overall.

In other words, if our relationship was the same and our Earth was engaging in a strategy of attacking the other one I think it would have thrown the movie off balance. So aside from the fact that I personally think that the approach taken in this movie is a better one, I think that for the movie itself it kept the movie in balance.
 
(Q) : Most of the people who invest in the film industry are interested in the film, but I don't think many people have the finances to finance an independent film. A lot of filmmakers want to make a film but just don't…
 
(William Mapother) : They don’t have the money. And a lot of people are nervous about investing in movies because sometimes there's a fraud risk. And if we can remove the fraud risk…
 
(Q) : You do the due diligence.
 
(William Mapother) : Yeah, exactly. And then it becomes just a performance risk. We can't promise you the movie will make money, but we can try to limit the likelihood that you'll be screwed out of it. And if we can bring together people who want to invest in filmmakers. And another advantage that's going on right now is that the cost of production and post-production have fallen so low, as evidenced by this movie, that you can make good films without having to raise $5 million.

End.