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Beginners

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : Oliver meets the irreverent and unpredictable Anna (Mélanie Laurent) only months after his father Hal (Christopher Plummer) has passed away. This new love floods Oliver with memories of his father who – following 44 years of marriage – came out of the closet at age 75 to live a full, energized, and wonderfully tumultuous gay life.

Opens Friday, June 3, 2011 (Limited 6/3)

Runtime:1 hr. 45 min.

 

Interview with Actor Ewan McGregor

 

(Q) : This had a really unique story. Did you learn anything from it, if so what? And why do you think their marriage lasted so long?
 
(Ewan McGregor): I think their marriage lasted so long because they had a partnership and their marriage absolutely worked on the levels it worked on. Mike talks very fondly about his mum and dad, and in the film you see him looking back on his relationship with his mum mainly, because she wasn’t around I guess to talk to anymore about it. I think it was a functioning marriage in that it worked to the purposes that it was there for.

And Mike talks very fondly about his parents and also about his dad and about his dad after he came out and his dad when he came out. He refers to him as his gay dad. His gay dad was more emotionally available to him and more present in his life maybe than he had been when he was repressing his sexuality.
 
(Q) : Do you think that this whole coming out, the way the film handles it is a statement about what’s going on in our society? I’m noticing more and more, and I actually know a real life situation similar to this in which they were married 30, 40 years, and suddenly he comes out as gay. Is there something wrong with what’s going on in our society in the sense that how can you go through an entire marriage and not know?
 
(Ewan McGregor) : There’s something right in our society now in that people are coming out. And in the film Mike looks back over his father’s history and looks at very specifically at what it might have been like to be a homosexual man in the early 1950s in America, and the pressures that led him into feeling that he had to suppress that. It was considered to be a mental illness, homosexuality, and people were arrested for sitting in a coffee house together, in a gay coffee house together.

People were thrown in the back of police vans and it would ruin your life, the stigma that was attached to it. Well that’s changed so I think the reasons, and they’re very personal for every single individual I think that causes a gay man to not come out and to try and live some idea of society.
 
(Q) : Christopher Plummer has been working for so many years, probably before even any of us were born. What was it like to work with such a legendary actor?
 
(Ewan McGregor): Really, really wonderful, because he’s a fantastic man and a great actor. And although he’s been acting, he tells stories about some of the people he used to work with. He was in Hollywood in the ‘50s and ‘60s and he worked with some incredible people. But he’s a very modern actor; he’s a very contemporary actor.

When we were playing the scenes I didn’t feel I was playing scenes with an older actor who’s giving a great performance, and he really gives a great performance in this film, absolutely fantastic, I felt like I was working with my dad in those scenes. I was Oliver, he was my dad. He was very modern, contemporary actor to work with.

(Q) : We’re always told not to mention “The Sound of Music” because it really pisses him off to talk about that. Did you find yourself having to hold back?
 
(Ewan McGregor): No, because I don’t think of him just from that film. I didn’t come with any kind of judgment or ideas; I try not to do that, and I find him to be the most charming man, a lovely man.
 
(Q) : How much of an input did the director allow you to have in regards to your character? Were you able to bring more to the table than the script actually had there for you or did they just limit you or did you have a focus?
 
(Ewan McGregor) : You always bring more than what’s on the page because the page is just words and you’re a human being, so that’s our job is to do that, and that’s something that we always do. But there was never any pressure from Mike to mike an impersonation of him or to copy him in any way. He wanted the character to be my character, for me to have the freedom to create Oliver as I wanted to, but I did want him to be like Mike.

I wanted him to sound like him and to move like him, although I think if you walked onto our film set if you didn’t know what was going on I don’t think you would look at me and then look at Mike and say “Oh he’s playing him.” It wasn’t like that, but I worked on his voice. I had Mike record all the dialog so I could listen to that and work on his accent and work on his voice, and then I would watch him and try and incorporate some of his physicality into what I was doing.
 
(Q) : This is a very personal story. Did Mike talk about his relationship with his father on a personal level?
 
(Ewan McGregor) : Yeah, absolutely. We talked a lot about his life and his memories of being a child and his mother; we talked a lot about his mother. I’m not really involved in the scenes, because Oliver is the young boy, who’s a brilliant actor, as is the mother, fucking hell, she’s brilliant in the film. I wasn’t in those scenes but it was important to know who Oliver was and where he came from, so we did talk about that a lot, yes we did.

(Q) : How did you and the dog bond? Was he always following after you? Did you have little treats you were hiding?
 
(Ewan McGregor): Both things were happening. There are technical ways you work with animals, and partly that is little treats or actually bits of his food. So you have food and there’s a thing where you feed the dog his little bit of food but you hold the food up in between your eyes and you feed him like that, so when he looks at you he’s looking at where the food came from, up here. He doesn’t look at your hands; otherwise he might follow your hands. And then the other thing is with Cosmo, he’s got an amazing character that dog.

When you’re making a film you have to have two dogs I think for the insurance or something, so there was another dog who looked the same. And Cosmo in fact is a white dog; he doesn’t have any brown, so he had a colorist. There’s an animal colorist LA. Of course there’s an animal colorist in LA. There was another dog who was colored the same way.

He was a sweet dog and everything but he didn’t have nearly the character of Cosmo. So when we were acting with him, and it was very rarely when we did, but when we were acting with him it was like what’s wrong with this? There’s this big void, and it was just that he didn’t have the character that Cosmo has.
 
(Q) : Did you want to take him home with you, or you’re not a dog person?

(Ewan McGregor): I did. My very first idea about the film with Mike was that maybe we could rescue a dog and we could use the dog in the film and then I would keep the dog afterwards, because I really would like to have a dog. But my wife is allergic to dogs and he sheds, Cosmo; he’s a long-haired dog. But I did find a little rescue dog. On the last day of our shoot I found a little dog called Sid, who’s my dog now and really replaced Cosmo.

I do see Cosmo now and again with Sid, but I actually found a real Cosmo replacement. He’s the same size, he’s a poodle mix, but he’s the same size, he’s white, it’s just like having Cosmo around, it’s funny. And he’s also got a very strong character.
 
(Q) : The film also examines marriage, and you’ve been married 16 years. That’s a pretty big accomplishment in Hollywood, when mostly you read more about relationships falling apart than you do about them staying together.
 
(Ewan McGregor): That’s reflective more of the media than the marriages themselves. “Still together!” isn’t quite as big a headline as “They’ve broken up!”
 
(Q) : Well we are what we eat. I’m just curious, when you do a film that really examines marriage, and this really examines it in a very interesting way, in a way we don’t normally see in movies. When you come home at the end of the day, when you talk to your wife, do you sit there and say “I have a great marriage”? Do you ever stop and think about what you’ve accomplished from the work that you do in film?
 
(Ewan McGregor) : I don’t feel like our marriage is an accomplishment. An accomplishment sounds like an effort or something, and I’m just in love with my wife and I was when I met her and I’m in love with her now. I’m very lucky that we found each other. And this film looks at marriage from a different perspective, you’re right, but they still think there was love in their marriage.

I think obviously it was complicated, of course it was, but as Mike says, I’ll tell you this story because he told it in front of journalists so I’m sure he’s happy to tell it. He was two sisters Mike, who don’t appear in the film, he didn’t write them in the script. And they’re older than him, 10 years and seven years older than him, so his parents, his gay father and his straight mother had his sisters, and then seven years later had Mike as an accident. He’s a product of their recreational sex. That’s what he said. I think people imagine that it was a terrible marriage and a terrible struggle, but there we are, they were fooling around.
 
(Q) : How do you feel about gay marriage? Do you support that?
 
(Ewan McGregor) : Yeah, absolutely. I find it difficult to understand why it would even be an issue. I don’t know why we would not support gay marriage. Marriage is the union of two people who are in love with each other, that’s all. I really don’t in my life have any prejudice against people’s sexuality, I never had.
 
(Q) : I think it’s more religion than it is about the union itself. The religious issues, the connotations.
 
(Ewan McGregor) : I don’t know. Religion should be much more about love and less about all of the other stuff that it seems to bring around in the world.
 
(Q) : These motorcycle journeys that you do, what is that all about? Do you have another one coming up?
 
(Ewan McGregor) : No, I haven’t got any plans at the moment. They were just adventures. Me and my friend Charlie decided to do a long motorcycle trip. We’d done lots of other things with motorcycles, and one of my passions is riding bikes and collecting old oily ones that don’t run very well. And it was a thing that we hadn’t done. I read a book written in the ‘70s called “Jupiters Travels,” which is a wonderful travel book written by a journalist called Ted Simon, and it was an inspirational book to read about seeing the world from the back of a motorcycle.

It offers you a great deal of freedom and people are very nice to you when you’re on a bike because they appreciate the vulnerability I think. So it’s a lovely experience to go into some of the more remote parts of the world that you might not otherwise see and see what people are up to there.
 
(Q) : Did you ever have a major breakdown on a bike?
 
(Ewan McGregor) : Yeah, we had our troubles. We road BMWs, which are pretty bulletproof. It’s difficult to break them, but we tried.
 
(Q) : I had a Norton years ago.
 
(Ewan McGregor) : Norton, yeah. I’ve got a nice ’67 Norton. Keanu Reeves was a big Norton man. He loves Nortons.

 

End.