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Jack Goes Boating

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Q&A with Amy Ryan at the Museum of the Moving Image.

As she looking back her career including her new film, "Jack Goes Boating."

 

(Q): You were a student at the Fame school, the High School of Performing Arts.

(Amy Ryan): Yeah, PS Fame. I went to the High School of Performing Arts, which is now called La Guardia, for three years and studied theater there.

(Q): And what got you into that? I can’t imagine being in a life where you are always looking for the next job and dealing with constant rejection and failure along the way to success. How did you decide you wanted to go into this?

(Amy Ryan): Well I didn’t know about the constant rejection at the age of 11 in my backyard making plays in the neighborhood. I didn’t know about the movie at the time but my mother had heard of the school and had suggested to me, because I had shown an interest at an early age and gone to a theater camp and pretty much annoyed my family imitating and such, being a pain in the ass, so she said “You need to go focus this energy.” She’s the one that brought my attention to the school.

(Q): So you were primarily in theater for the first part of your career?

(Amy Ryan): I started in theater and I’m very grateful for that because I would have acquired bad habits I think had I gone straight to California. And I only started in theater because that was the first job I got. Had I gotten a tv movie of the week I would have gone woo hoo! I didn’t know any better so I was really appreciative that my first job was a Neil Simon play.

(Q): Which play was it?

(Amy Ryan): It was “Biloxi Blues” and I toured the country for nine months a month out of high school.

(Q): “A Streetcar Named Desire,” of course you got a Tony nomination for that, but you said it was an incredibly important play for you. Can you talk about the influence of that play?

(Amy Ryan): I love that play; it’s pretty obvious why. It’s I think the greatest American play. And I carried that play around in my back pocket for eight years just saying “One day I want to play Stella, I want to play Stella.” And then I had met Patricia Clarkson, we were doing an Arthur Miller play and I said “Have you ever thought about playing Blanche?” And her eyes lit up and together for eight years we tried to track the rights, but they were always tied up in London. Eventually it was truly just happenstance that [Gary Hines? 04:49] acquired the rights to do it down at the Kennedy Center, and Patricia and I did a production there, and then a year later I did it on Broadway with the late Natasha Richardson.

(Q): Were there actresses either on screen or in theater that you admired a lot and watched? Role models or inspirations?

(Amy Ryan): Well my biggest influences as a kid were Carol Burnett and “The Muppet Show.” I really mean that. My mother always said, because the beginning part of my career really up until “The Office” was always these heavy dramas. I was always crying; my friends call me Crying Ryan. But she said “Your career always surprised me. I thought for sure you’d be in comedy.” I think once I went to school and learned a thing or two about a thing or two and that comedy’s actually harder I was just drawn to drama and I was drawn to teachers that said study life. As you take the train in just study life; if you don’t know their story just make it up. I was really just drawn to real life.

(Q): We did a discussion with Michael Caine and he told a number of stories about observing people and making notes and filing away things that he would use later on. Were you consciously doing that?

(Amy Ryan): Yeah I’ve used a lot of my friends and family along the way. None for “Gone Baby Gone.” But yeah, I can’t help but absorb that stuff. Just the way someone holds their head up. If I can the self out of myself when I’m working it’s easier for me and I’m less self conscious along the way. So if I can think of someone else, whether it is a stranger or someone very familiar, it really helps. 

(Q): Your first role that drew the attention of a big audience was “The Wire.” You were a fan I guess of “The Wire” before you were cast in it right? Were you just watching it the first season? Because you entered it the second season.

(Amy Ryan): That’s correct. I watched it in the first season, I was a huge fan, and then was cast for the second season. My first day on set I had a scene with Lance Reddick, Lt. Daniels, and I was completely sky high with my lines. I was so flummoxed being in his presence. He’s so steely on that show, such strength, and in life he’s really goofy, and I couldn’t marry the two; it just threw me.

(Q): It must be weird to all of a sudden be in the world of the show you had watched and you’ve entered into that.

(Amy Ryan): It’s very off-putting, but it quickly fades.

(Q) : Can you talk a little bit about being such an important character? Because she is a moral compass for the audience and the show is so complicated over the five seasons.

(Amy Ryan): One thing I love about David’s writing and the characters he’s created for “The Wire” is not one character’s truly the good guy or the bad guy. Even though Bea’s has the most morals of any character on that show perhaps, the first time you meet her she’s really not good at her job. She’s a poor police officer yet she’s doing her rounds wearing headphones. She’s not listening to the radio, she knows it’s a dead-end job, she’s completely checked out. It’s not until she’s kind of forced into this investigation later on that she gains this confidence and therefore also gains pride in her work for the first time. And then as the seasons went on she became this love interest for McNulty, who is just the worst man any woman could ever get. But she gets him on the straight and narrow.

(Q): I think this episode was written by Dennis Lehane.

(Amy Ryan): That’s right, Dennis Lehane, who wrote the book for “Gone Baby Gone.”

(Q): I’m sure you’ve been asked this a lot, but does the experience of working on “The Wire,” and I’m one of the people who believe it’s one of the greatest dramatic series that’s ever been on television.

(Amy Ryan): I agree with you and I’m very proud of it. They teach “The Wire” at Harvard and Tulane. It’s definitely beyond entertainment; I feel like it’s a social study really of our cities.

(Q): What was it like being in and out of the show? This character would come in as needed and then disappear for a long time.

(Amy Ryan): David had a formula where every five episodes someone died, whether they were a passerby or a beloved character. And we showed an episode in season two down in New Orleans at the Essence Music Festival for a screening audience who were getting a first look, and a very beloved lead character died and the reaction was so astounding. I’ve never experienced this; they were stomping their feet and screaming at the screen “No, no.” And they were pissed off at us afterwards. They wanted us to go reshoot it; they wanted that character back. But the beauty of David’s writing is story comes first, no matter what. It doesn’t matter what act or what character has the most hits on the webpage, he doesn’t write that way.

(Q): He comes from a journalism background, from a nonfiction background. What was it like in terms of the work of the actor on that series in terms of preparation and research?

(Amy Ryan): Exactly. You can ask anything of him, he’s the oracle. He’s deeply intelligent and he just cares so deeply about that city. He always said too, he goes “No actor will ever be famous for my show. You won’t ever have a spinoff career or anything like that that maybe typical tv can do for other actors. But I promise you; you’ll have work.”

(Q): It did lead to some work for you, right?

(Amy Ryan): There was a chance I was going to be on for the remaining four years every day, and at the end of the second year David said it’s not going to work out that way but we’ll have you peppered in for the last three years, and I was deeply disappointed because I was having such a great time. But then that led the way for just being available for other jobs, so had he not done that I wouldn’t have gotten to do “Streetcar,”  I wouldn’t have gotten to do “Gone Baby Gone.” So change is good.

(Q): That’s obviously such a pivotal role for your career but how did “Gone Baby Gone” come about? The next question is I guess when did you read the book or the script for the first time and see the character you were going to play?

(Amy Ryan): My agent, Jason Gutman, I just started working with him for a few months at that time and I was going out to LA to try to get a tv series. The first script he sent me was “Gone Baby Gone,” and apparently Ben Affleck already had an actress in mind and the casting director said it probably won’t happen, but he kept pushing to get me in. Then after that first meeting he had asked where was I from Boston, what town was I from? And I said oh I’m from Queens. And he came around the table and he hugged me and kissed the top of my head and said “Great. I want you to do this.”

(Q): I heard that you did a lot of work on the accent and voice.

(Amy Ryan): I spent summers in Vermont as a kid and that Boston accent was nearby, although not obviously local to Vermont. So I had the gist of it down and I also think it is this similar attitude that Queens can have, lower-class, working-class Queens. And then when I got to Boston I never left the woman in the movie who plays my friend, Jill Quigg, who’s not an actor, she actually broke through security on set one day and asked Ben for a part not that nicely. And I never left her side just to hear her voice, and also just hanging out with the teamsters.

(Q): What was your response to the character? It’s certainly not an instantly sympathetic character, to say the least.

(Amy Ryan): I relished it. I loved it; I loved her. She’s a despicable human being but I know enough not to judge a character I’m playing. I don’t have to condone them outside my life but if I judge them I’ll be sunk. So it’s starting to ask questions: well how did she get to this situation? Did she have the same mother that I became in the movie? So I throw a lot of compassion at it first and the stuff that I can’t figure out I just get out of its way. Dennis wrote it for a reason and that’s what needs to be said. And then just that language, it’s obviously very salty but it’s also very colorful. She has a great imagination and that’s so rare. It seems very much her weapon; she knows she gets a rise.

(Q): Do you remember shooting that scene [from “Gone Baby Gone”]? I wonder what it was like to shoot in a car like that.

(Amy Ryan): Yeah, we did about eight loops around the block with a bunch of local kids, as seen in the movie there, yelling out. In between the car getting back around to the starting point we would run lines again. Actually, I owe a lot to Casey in that because we were playing around in between and we started improvising a little bit. And actually that moment where I tease Michelle Monaghan that you’re dating a faggot there was just a real playfulness, and he said “You should do that in the scene.” I said “No, no, no, I shouldn’t. I should stick to the script.” He said “Do it.” I said “Let me ask Ben first.” He said “No. Don’t worry about it.”

(Q): You’ve worked with a number of first-time directors. What was it like working with Ben Affleck on this film?

(Amy Ryan): Ben said straight up, he said “It may turn out I don’t know how to direct. It may turn out I’m going to get in trouble for casting my brother. But I do know one thing; I know Boston and I’m so tired of seeing Boston depicted in film so exaggerated.” It felt conspiratorial. I knew I had this great part that a lot of people wanted and there was a danger obviously to get it wrong, and then the stakes for him for very high, so there was a real camaraderie to stick together. And then also that character, I feel like each director, if it’s theater or film, there’s always one character that they love more than any other one. And I’ve been on the other side of that, where the director is more inspired to rip apart that character and get in there deeper, and clearly Ben had that with this character.

(Q): It’s so clear that’s what people responded to. And we all know what happened to the film and the response to your performance, but did you have a sense that that was going to happen while you were making it?

(Amy Ryan): Oh absolutely not. That’s like the furthest thing from my mind at that time. Once that had happened and the Oscars it’s just a snowball, it’s something different. But there when you’re working and it’s hot and it’s summer, you’re a month in Boston, you just weren’t thinking about that.

(Q): And what are the things you latched onto about that character?

(Amy Ryan): I think she’s actually really smart. She’s got street smarts; she knows how that game is played. But it’s true; I don’t think people change drastically. Maybe the pendulum swings really far but it always settles back at maybe a two or three degree difference. So by the end of this film I know a lot of people were really angry at me or the character and couldn’t understand. They wanted the child to go to Casey so badly, they wanted it to go to Morgan Freeman so badly, but kidnapping is wrong, even if it is Morgan Freeman who gets the baby at the end. It’s still wrong. And not to say that Helene is the answer but I hope people would ask the bigger question. How do we help our communities, because clearly this is a cycle that needs to be broken.

(Q): Can you tell us a little bit about the response? What it’s like to be in that position of an Oscar nomination and all that attention? Obviously it had a major impact on your career.

(Amy Ryan): It changed my career, it did, and I’m very grateful for it. It brought better writers and better directors to my agent’s desk for me, and that’s a gift I will never take for granted. And then the actual event itself was just pure madness. It’s kind of mind boggling and it’s good that it ends. I was staying at the Four Seasons Hotel for a good chunk of time in LA that Miramax very generously paid for and it was Cinderella’s life. “Good morning, Miss Ryan. Welcome back, Miss Ryan. We’re rooting for you, Miss Ryan. Would you like some tea, Miss Ryan?”

I didn’t win. The next day we’re going back home to the airport and I’m looking at my sheet and the car’s not there, I’m afraid to miss the flight, and I’m looking, looking, looking, and the valet came over and he says “Oh let me help.” I said “Great, thanks, here.” He goes “Okay, what’s your car number?” He goes “And what’s your name?” And I had just a ting, just crushed. There’s Brad Bird getting in a car with his Oscar; Tilda Swinton’s still drinking champagne somewhere else. But I was so grateful for that moment because I said “That’s right. ‘What’s your name?’ Go home, go to your family, go to what you know. Go back to New York City because this is all temporary. This doesn’t really matter.”

(Q): You seem to like unpredictability. With different performances you seem to make surprising or unexpected choices. And then also in your career. The next clip we’re going to see is with “The Office.” Did you have an idea in mind about that?

(Amy Ryan): Right after “Gone Baby Gone” the majority of the scripts I got was she’s a drug addicted mother of three. She’s a drug addicted mother of two. So we said if we can make angle turn, and by that it was a comedy and wearing a skirt and lipstick. And then “The Office” came around, another show I was a big fan of. So I jumped at the chance to join the show.

(Q): what is it like working on a sitcom like that? “The Office” has so many great comedians on the cast I imagine there’s a lot of improvisation.

(Amy Ryan): The show is actually heavily scripted and they really make you stick to that script at least three takes in. And then everyone – it’s kind of an unspoken rule – just waits for Steve to throw down the first improv, and then it loosens up. He’s such a generous, lovely man; it’s not that he controls such a tight ship but they just know he’s going to take it to the best place. So we wait for scene.

(Q): So in that scene were there moments of improv?

(Amy Ryan): No, that was actually all scripted.

(Q): In preparing to play Holly what was your idea. She’s the perfect match for Steve.

(Amy Ryan): Yeah, there’s a lid for every pot. Again, it was kind of a jarring situation because you walk into that set and it’s smaller than it looks. I was actually very nervous because years ago I had worked on a sitcom and it was a terrible experience and I just convinced myself I’m just not fun and I should go home and do more plays, and that’s what I did. It was nerve wracking. But I think slowly, the more and more they were writing more preposterous scenes for her that actually loosened me up.

(Q): It’s shot in a way that of course looks very spontaneous and documentary-style. Is that actually true in terms of what it feels like on the set?

(Amy Ryan): There are two cameramen and they have the camera up on their shoulders. It’s all blocked out but they will walk and move with you and they have a bit of freedom. They do a bit of improvising themselves; if they see something interesting, suddenly someone is reacting they’ll quick flip and turn to capture that. But they’re very much a part of the cast.

(Q): Since you’ve done a fair amount of television and film can you talk about the difference in terms of your process?

(Amy Ryan): I don’t think my process changes from theater to film or tv, except that it depends on the rehearsal you get. Obviously, you get more in theater – up to four week – and in film it’s very rare to get rehearsal, television as well. Television you’ll just cover more pages in a day, up to maybe seven or eight pages, where in film you’ll do three in a day.

(Q): So how much time does it take to shoot an episode? Over how many days?

(Amy Ryan): On “The Office” I believe they work about seven working days with weekends off.

(Q): We’re going to look at a scene from “Changeling.” I’m such a fan of Clint Eastwood as a director.

(Amy Ryan): No actor ever gets to meet Clint in an audition process. You go on videotape with the casting director and he’ll cast you off that tape. So the first time I met Clint was they knocked on the trailer door and said “They’re ready for you on set.” We were shooting on location in Downtown Los Angeles and I walked the block and a half, and your heart’s pounding, and I had my head down and I only picked it up because I was about to bump into someone, and it was Clint Eastwood. He’s just iconic and the challenge there is how do you meet the person not the personality or what you think that person is like. But he’s actually so warm and funny and I think he understands his stature so he brings you in straight away.

(Q): You’re also of course working with another larger than life person there with Angelina Jolie. 

(Amy Ryan): I gasped when I saw her in person; a very small but audible gasp. She really is that luminescent. She is stunning. And I found her very approachable. With someone of that stature I usually wait for their invite, but she was very open and she spoke a lot about her family and her charity work and I thought well yeah, that’s the person that can travel the world. There are two different things. There are those megastars that have so much going on around them they just shut down and they surround themselves with assistants and their Blackberrys, and then there are the ones who actually know how to say hello and have manners, and she’s that.

(Q): He’s actually directed more films than Scorsese has directed at this point. Somebody who started making films in the ‘50s, in the classic days of the studio system and there’s something different about working with a director who’s sort of rooted in a very old fashioned style of filmmaking.

(Amy Ryan): His style of filmmaking he’s only similar to Sidney Lumet in that in my experience you get maybe one take and you rarely get rehearsal in that. They shoot so fast. It didn’t happen to me but I have friends who have worked with Clint Eastwood and I called and said what should I expect and they said “Be ready. Sometimes for your rehearsal for the cameras Clint has in the past said ‘Great, moving on,’ and he’s filmed the rehearsal. So you really need to be on your toes and really well prepared.” He’s very soft spoken and he really doesn’t say much.

(Q): Does he leave you to find a lot of the things?

(Amy Ryan): Yeah, I think he trusts the actors he cast. I asked Angelina, I said “Well surely you must have had loads of meetings with him,” and she said “No. I told him I wanted to wear a wig and he said ‘Alright, we’ll arrange a screen test and you see what you like best.’” He just has that trust.

(Q): Did you pick the wig or the hair?

(Amy Ryan): That film was shot very close to the Oscars and I didn’t want to cut my hair. It was a bit of vanity. I said to the hair department what will we do? And she said because it’s a period piece women have short hair, there will be a bob, but the longer haired women will have it up. And mine was something in between so the woman said oh well why don’t we make you like you had a naturally curly head of hair and if you were out you would have lovely finger waves of the period. I said great, so I go to the hair and makeup trailer in the morning and my hair was to here, but by the time I shot it had turned into an ‘80s party perm. I do regret that. It’s there forever.

(Q): Did Lumet and Eastwood end at five o’clock?

(Amy Ryan): Yeah. I never had lunch working on “Changeling.” I was sent home everyday before lunch. But Sidney’s different – we’re talking about “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” – Sidney rehearses every film like a play for two weeks and maps out space and there’s tape on the floor and there’s furniture to represent what’s going to be on the day, and then you do a run-through at the end of it. His thinking behind it is we shoot so fast and out of order that when you get to that emotional scene you’ll know what it feels like, what’s right, because we’ve already gone through it and it all added up. So Philip Seymour Hoffman adopted that for “Jack Goes Boating” because he’s also wearing two hats in this film.

(Q): And that much be very rare on a film to have that, was it a few weeks of rehearsal?

(Amy Ryan): Two weeks. Same on “Jack Goes Boating.”

(Q): “Green Zone” is a whole different style of filmmaking and a really interesting story because it’s obviously based on truth, on a thinly veiled account of the “New York Times.” Can you talk about that? It’s very specific; it’s not a general anti-war film.

(Amy Ryan): We started shooting “Green Zone” at the end of the Bush administration and all the characters in the film are obviously thinly veiled references to real-life people. Then when we went back for reshoots, I think it was six, seven months later, we were on the eve of the election, and we realized when we started the film there was a lot of finger pointing and preaching to the converted, but once we realized okay Obama’s coming in, now what? And it very much had to have that tone I think of okay well we’re in it; now what do we do with this mess and how do we best clean it up? It was just interesting in terms of working on a film and a script and how that had shifted with the times. I’d never been involved with anything so current.

(Q): And then how do you deal with the fact that the film sort of does and doesn’t directly make a link?

(Amy Ryan): Yeah I played a reporter, Lawrie Dayne, and many times I worked for the “Wall Street Journal,” then I worked for the “New York Times.” In truth there were many reporters that got it wrong, and she was the most famous to get it wrong. Actually this one tiny thing; I saw a photograph of her and she had this chain around her neck and clipped to it was one of those disk drives, and I took that, that was my little wink and nod. So that’s the only thing and other than that you just say this has to be a representation of all the press that got it wrong.

(Q): What was it like being in a film that had combat scenes and war action?

AR: I’ve never been in a war situation but it does get your heart pumping, even the fake situation. All the guys in Matt Damon’s unit were actual soldiers, some who were going back for their second or third tours once we were finished filming. You just had to look over at them to be snapped out of this Hollywood reality and say my god; this is their life. It was upsetting; it was deeply upsetting.

(Q): Is that a tough scene to play because so much is going on?

(Amy Ryan): Paul Greengrass works with a lot of improvising. We’ll read the scene in the morning and he’ll then go away and rewrite it and once you get into an actual scene he asks you to improvise. I don’t really want to improvise about WMDs. It’s one thing to improvise when the subject is love, it’s universal, everyone knows what that is, but to improvise a character’s profession that they’ve been at for 15 years and as an actor you’ve been at for four weeks is not an easy task.

And Matt had been working on the script with Paul for a long time so he was quite better schooled at it than I was. I admitted to Paul Greengrass at the end where he said “That’s was great.” And I said “You didn’t catch that? I only repeated what Matt said louder.” That was my way because I was swimming for facts and dates so I would just repeat what Matt said, that was my way of improvising.

(Q): Was there anything that you did to make yourself feel comfortable playing a journalist?

(Amy Ryan): On that film we had so many advisors and a few were journalists who were in Iraq at the time and writing about the war before it broke out. So it was incredible just to turn to them at any moment and you can just say is this pad right? Every little detail I could turn to someone. And Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who wrote the book, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” which our script is loosely based or inspired by, he was there as well.

(Q): There was a time when a number of movies were coming out that dealt with the war that were not doing as well as studios had hoped for until I guess “The Hurt Locker,” which didn’t even make a lot of money. What was your feeling on that?

(Amy Ryan): I thought for sure they would go see Matt Damon be an action hero, but no one wants to see this subject matter and I don’t really understand why, but there you have it.

(Q): What made you want to do this aside from the fact that you are working with one of the greatest directors in the world with a terrific script, with a starring role? Aside from that.

(Amy Ryan): I’ve known Philip from New York. We’ve done a couple of movies together, “Capote,” and “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” and we also did “An Evening of One Act Plays” years and years ago, and he is who he is. I think he’s the greatest actor of a generation. The script is beautiful, there are four richly drawn characters, and it was shot and set in New York City. It’s a beautiful love story.

(Q): It’s a wonderful piece of directing too. What made him decide on this?

(Amy Ryan): John Ortiz, who also stars in the film, happens to be Phil’s best friend. The both founded the LABryinth Theater Company and John is a real instigator in the best sense. So they were sitting around talking about it one day and he said “You should direct it.” And Phil went “No, no, no, no, no.” But he had planted that seed and suddenly Phil just couldn’t get it out of his head. He said he started dreaming about it and, because it had started as a play, he started envisioning it cinematically and he couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was really just John simply demanding he do it is how it came about.

(Q): I was to ask you a little bit about what else you’re doing. I know you’ve shot episodes of “In Treatment.”

(Amy Ryan): Yeah, the third season of “In Treatment” I play Gabriel Byrne’s new therapist, which will air this fall. And then I’m going to go back to “The Office.”

End.