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Rabbit Hole

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : Eight months after the accidental death of their 4-year-old son, Howie (Aaron Eckhart) and Becca (Nicole Kidman) are trying to overcome their grief. He wants to hold on to everything that reminds him of Danny, while she would rather sell their home and make a fresh start. Cracks begin to appear in the relationship as Howie bonds with a member of his therapy group and Becca reaches out to a teenage boy with telling facial scars.

Opens December 17, 2010 (Limited) Expands 12/25/10 Wide Release 1/14/11)

Runtime:1 hr. 31 min.

Press Conference with David Lindsay-Abaire, Sandra Oh,Aaron Eckhart, Nicole Kidman, John Cameron Mitchell, & Miles Teller

(Q) Nicole , This Project probably wouldn't have happened if it weren't for your involment. Can you talk about what struck you about this story, made you option it and get it going as film?

(Nicole Kidman): I think just I immediately connected with the subject matter, obviously. It was interesting to me from the review and then when I actually read the play the character, the whole story I thought was so available. I could just immediately just jump in and feel. We were saying, John [Cameron Mitchell] and I did an interview yesterday, that this whole film, we didn't approach it from an analytical point of view. We did it from a sort of visceral place and that's sort of what it's been.
 
(Q): This is a lot about the process of grief and dealing with grief, and I thought you guys could talk about what you learned about that process and maybe if there were any experiences that you had that you were able to connect this to that made it easier for you as actors or in terms of translating it as a director, how you dealt with the process of grief and analyzing the experience of dealing with coming out of it.
 
(John Cameron Mitchell): I lost a brother when I was a teenager, he was the same age as the character in this film, and at the time there wasn’t a lot of grief counseling, processing therapy that was really part of the culture. We had religion and it was about moving on and letting go before you were really ready to, so it was books and it was stories that helped me through that. I realized when I read David’s adaptation of his own play that it was some unfinished business for me to think about what had happened to me and maybe work through some stuff while working on this beautiful piece.

It was really wonderful to work with these virtuoso actors because as they did their scenes I felt like I was in the scenes with them and feeling all the things they were feeling from behind camera, and it allowed me to release some stuff. Of course that’s the point of work like this, that’s the point of art. The Greeks always told us to safely, vicariously live something so you don’t have to, or you’re ready to when it happens to you. So this was a very important experience for me.
 
(Aaron Eckhart): I’ve never had any serious loss in my life yet, so I just had to empathize and just did research. It’s all in the script really, the script is so beautifully written, and just hanging on to Nicole that takes you through it.
 
(Nicole Kidman): I think for me, it's something that I've always wanted to explore. I've explored it in other films in different ways. I explored it in a film called 'Birth' which was in a whole different way. So I feel like it's territory that I would even explore again because it's so much a part of our journey, what we love, what we lose, the fear of that. And those emotions are so palpable and so powerful that I'm just drawn to exploring them and expressing them. But I think that with this film it's very much about a family as well and it's about how a family works through it together, about how you can help people and how in some ways  you're just so isolated.

I think that's what Howie and Becca are, completely isolated, and yet they are reaching out and they don't know how to connect. I find that so touching and it was something that was beautifully, beautifully rendered in the screenplay. It's a very difficult place to exist in, but also the words came easily and the emotions. Actually, a lot of it was how to keep them in because they were available I think to all of us and all the actors in the film. A lot of it is restraint because as actors those areas are mined quite a lot. We're asked to mine those things often and a lot of it is up to the editing and to the director about how you modulate it.
 
(Q): One of the things I loved about this movie is the idea that one can find comfort through faith and science, which I don’t think we’ve really seen before. I’m wondering if that idea really resonated with anybody?
 
(David Lindsay-Abaire): It certainly resonates with me. I probably share my main character’s world view. I’m a bit cynical and pragmatic and I personally have difficulty finding comfort through organized religion. For a character like Becca, more than religion she can’t find solace in her family or in support groups or in psychology or in psychotherapy. And so in trying to figure out where is this character going to find any kind of comfort, and I did want her to find comfort because whether she says so or not it’s the thing that she’s seeking, science just seemed literally the most logical place to find it.

And yet, the thing that she finds in this scientific theory is a big hippy-dippy and odd, and so I liked that it sort of had this ethereal quality to it as well that you couldn’t quite pin down and grasp, and it still had qualities of something you might find in religion even though it’s based in science and fact.
 
(John Cameron Mitchell): I was really into comic books around the time that I was dealing with my brother and I liked the fantasy of somehow a heroic death giving meaning to the death. I was a big superhero fan; I loved the Legion of Superheroes, which was an alternate reality. I love that thing of in the same space is another reality, that’s how they would describe it. But the way David described it I’d never thought of it, which was this line that Miles has which is “If space is infinite everything is possible.”

It’s not like an alternate reality it’s actually in the same reality in the same universe. If it’s infinite, eventually we’re here having a press conference and I’m saying something slightly different. Eventually a hundred monkeys will write “Hamlet,” if there’s enough time somewhere in the universe. It’s actually science; it’s not science-fiction, if you think of infinity. And there’s some kind of optimism in that, I don’t know why.

(Q): Nicole, did you attend any counseling situations with Aaron, like , going under the rader? Was that something that you tried?

(Nicole Kidman): We both had different experiences. I tried to and I was told, 'Unless you've actually lost a child or a loved one you're not to come into the room.' I completely respected that because they said, 'It's just too raw and it's too dangerous and it's a very sacred place and we can't let you in to observe.' I'm glad that they didn't now, when I look back because the way that the emotions came to me in the character were through just my own, the way that I vibrate and the rawness of loving my children.

I was able to leap there very quickly. I was amazed at how deep that well is and how available it is. It's probably as David [Lindsay-Abaire] said, that he wrote about this thing that terrifies him the most and as an actor I played the thing that terrifies me the most. Aaron has a different story.
 
(Aaron Eckhart): I did attend one of those, it was a grief counseling group like we had in the film, and like Nicole said, it was raw. People had just lost their child the day before, two days, three days, a week before, and there was a lot of emotion in it. I gave my story in the character and all that stuff, which was interesting. I only went once and that was it; I didn’t feel like I needed to go back. I thought it was a little unethical and somehow duplicitous.
 
(Q): Can you talk anout how being a parent helped you play this role?

(Nicole Kidman): I mean it's one of those that for me I could go right back into the place that we existed in so quickly. So that it means that the strengths of that love, I mean it's profound. I think from the minute that you have a child or the minute that I've experienced taking care of a child, being the caretaker of a little one, the power of that and the responsibility of that and so therefore the fear of the loss of that child is extraordinary.

I still can't even watch some of the scenes because they affect me so deeply and I've never had that with a film. I've seen this film because I'm a producer a number of times. I probably won't see the film again, if that makes any sense. I watch two scenes and I'm like, 'Ugghhh,' because it still affects me so deeply. So I think that's the power of parenting and playing this role.

(Q): How did you end up picking John Cameron Mitchell to direct the movie? Since you’re the producer I’m sure you had a lot of input. He’s one of the greatest directors of the past 10 years. Di you see that movie beforehand?

(Nicole Kidman): Yeah, and I just think that I work by my gut and Per Saari, he and I optioned the material and we worked on the script with David, when we heard that John had worked on the script we were like, 'Wow,' that he was really interested in it I thought, 'How unusual because of what he'd done and that he was interested in it.' That's what piqued my interest. Then I spoke to him on the phone and I just really liked him. I mean, it's that quick.

We shared things, but we didn't have any extremely deep conversation. I just liked him and I've made most of my career decisions based on very quick, spontaneous things. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And I like bold directors. I like directors that go against the norm in a way, and I thought mixed with this material and his heart, which he has a big heart, was a good combo.
 
(Q): In the film your characters are dealing with this traumatic event, and I think there’s something very recognizable in that that everyone can relate to as far as when people who are close to each other experience something traumatic it almost feels like you’re encased in glass and kind of walking on eggshells.

It always feels like a spontaneous reaction and here it’s being replicated for a movie. How was it you were able to build that sort of relationship where you’re two people fractured by a very traumatic event and kind of walking on eggshells around each other?
 
(Aaron Eckhart): Again, I’d have to go back to the writer first of all, and the director. John created an atmosphere of trust on the set, first of all. I think Nicole said it really is the restraint of having feelings and not being able to say them or knowing how you say them or doubting any relationship you’ve had, questioning your love, questioning god, questioning life, doubting yourself, hearing everything you’re saying as if it’s being said by somebody else; that kind of stuff. Not being able to touch a partner that you’ve been best friends with for 20 years or 10 years, 15 years. So all five senses then have to be revisited and reintroduced into your life, and I think for me in terms or approaching this role was how do I touch my wife?

How do I talk to her? How do we survive this? It was all in the script really; you didn’t really have to go any further than that. It was only just really playing it. And then John, having gone through this before and being such a good actor himself and being very sensitive to this sort of stuff really guided us and shepherded us through this. He would whisper in our ears adjustments and that sort of thing. And then for me watching the other actors and watching Nicole approach her craft as an actor was extraordinary. The attention to detail, the adjustments that she would make were insane and very challenging and very true. So it was pretty easy.
 
(Q): What Australian traditions from Christmas do you bring to America with you, what are your plans for the holiday?

(Nicole Kidman): Well, in Australia it's very warm in the summer, but I'm just sort of because when you're doing something like this, for a film like this particularly being released at Christmas you have to do a lot of work. So I'm just looking forward to being home. I'm not a very good cook. So we'll be buying a turkey already cooked, and my parents are coming over which is nice. My sister is having her fifth child. So she will not be traveling.

(Q) : Do you live in New York?

(Nicole Kidman): No. We live in Tennessee. Nashville.
 
(Q): Do you feel that your character is wishing for her husband to have an emotional outburst even more than she wanted to be going to Counseling and talking about the tragedy?

(Nicole Kidman): That I needed to have an emotional outburst? He did? No. I mean it's eight months down the road. This is something that answers the other question about how we prepared to play the role, we rehearsed. We talked. Part of the preparation that I do as an actor is that I create from birth through now, which is sort of like my homework, of where we met, how we got married, all of those things, what happened to my father because you never see  my father, just all the details of the performance.

Then you come to the rehearsal period and then you do scenes and then you sort of slowly layer the performance. So, no, I don't think it's an emotional outburst. I'm not saying that didn't happen in the period of eight months prior that you don't see. That's what I find very beautiful about this film, that this is not about five days after. This isn't the day of the loss. This is eight months. This is life.

This is how do you stay alive, how do you choose life when you feel like everything to live for has been taken away. How do you then live? That's the subtlety of the film. How do you live with someone that you used to have moments of great joy with and a normal life with when suddenly you've been completely destroyed. That's why I wanted to make the film because there are so many people in the world existing in those places. I've certainly been in a place of extreme depression and pain where choosing life everyday is a choice, if that makes sense.
 
 
(Q): Miles, your scenes with Nicole were her therapy so could you talk about that a little bit?
 
(Miles Teller): Yeah. First of all, they’re very intimidating. But I think you just have to put yourself in the place that you took a child away from somebody. Freak accident or not, that’s part of their life that you stripped away. And not wanting to steal any of that, that pain and that grief that she’s going through, just really wanting to be in that space and to acknowledge and to accept and all the thoughts that come along with that you’ve taken this woman’s love, her child, away from her and she’s never going to get it back and you can’t give it to her back.

All you can do is sit on a bench and talk about all these things that really, when you’re talking about the weather it’s not about the weather kind of thing. So for me there’s so much there to work with, and when you’re just sitting on a park bench and it’s a beautiful park and there are all these things going on, it was just wonderful to play off of. Just the fact that we were both opened up and it was direct the whole time there was a nice floating feeling to it and nothing was pressed. John would whisper things to me in between for adjustments and there was a lot to work off of.
 
(Q): Do you guys have anything lined up?
 
(Aaron Eckhart): This movie’s coming out the 17th and then I have a movie called “Battle: Los Angeles” about aliens that’s coming out in March, if you really want to know.
 
(Nicole Kidman: I'm going to do a film based on Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway and their torrid love affair, marriage. That's with Phil Kaufman and I start that next year.
 
(Sandra Oh): I work on a tv show. I’m going to go back to work on Monday.
 
(Miles Teller): I’m going to be in “Footloose.”
 
(Q): John, did you approach this differently? You have such a stage background.
 
(John Cameron Mitchell): With this kind of piece, because so many of the scenes are quite emotionally singular, you don’t want to over-rehearse. We had a couple of days when we could talk a little bit about the background, let Aaron and Nicole be in the same space so they can get used to each other’s body language as a couple. Nicole and Miles having a little bit of time just to be in the same space, but not really go into the scenes. We did a lot work, David and I, to kind of do little tiny adjustments with dialog. He of course had been working on this for so many years, I added a little different objectivity to maybe what could be visual as opposed to verbal. But with these kind of professionals most of the work happens on set.

I told them I’d fire them if they did any heavy acting in rehearsal, let’s just set where the cameras will be, and we shot every rehearsal so we didn’t lose that lightening in a bottle, which sometimes can happen in the first take. You get to know what the actors need very quickly, they tell you what they need, you know when to shut up and let them self correct in a way or come up with a variation in the next take. Other people will ask when they need help. Sometimes my favorite thing to ask Nicole was “Do you need me right now?” and she’d think about it and sometimes it would be “Let’s just keep rolling.” With Miles it was getting to know him, and him being less experienced was in some ways kind of exciting because he wanted me to talk to him more and we had a good time.
 
(Q): I’m wondering what your take on your character was.
 
(Sandra Oh): I really love my character a lot. I think Gaby’s a great counterpoint to seeing the beginning of loss and then the continuation of loss. My personal feeling and how I was playing it is loss doesn’t go away, it just is. And I feel in some ways the expectation that one can put on yourself, and I think society has that after the loss of anything, it can be your goldfish or your child or your job, something, that somehow people are supposed to get over it. And I just don’t agree with that, and I feel what I was trying to do with Gaby is that as she’s further down the line and as she sees Howie she represents where you can go, which you in a very, very individual way set up certain skills, set up certain things that you need.

She needs this group. She hasn’t failed in any kind of way; she needs this group. Perhaps his has caused a certain amount of stress with her husband, and that’s a whole other off-screen story, but that’s what she needs. And again, the idea of loss, what I would like is that I think it is scary when Becca and Howie hear how someone is still grieving after eight years, but I think that happens and it is scary. But eight years down the line you’ll find a way to manage and you’ll find a way to be able to be open to another person and compassionate to another person.
 
(John Cameron Mitchell): The loss doesn’t go away. It changes shape, it diffuses into different parts of your life, and Dianne Wiest’s character, when she gives that speech about it being this brick in your pocket that you forget about and I think grateful for. It sounds strange but grief is a replacement for a person sometimes, and you’re sometimes grateful for the weight that no longer exists as a person’s weight. And it becomes a companion that you can forget about, you can hate, you can also be oddly grateful for, and that’s a way of thinking about it that I’ve never seen put so beautifully as when David wrote that.
 
(Q): Miles, you really kind of jumped into the deep end because you work with Nicole doing these really dramatic scenes. What was going through your head when you got the role and you were making the movie?
 
(Miles Teller): I had the callback with John and worked through all the park scenes, and that was great, and then I got a call from my manager saying “You’re down to the final two or three. I think Nicole’s going to flyer over, you’re going to do a reading, you’re going to do a session with her,” and I was like “That’s crazy.” They said “You’re going to get a call later tonight,” and then I never got a call that night so I just assumed that it didn’t happen. I was like that’s okay, I was shooting a short film in Brooklyn with a couple of my NYU buddies, and then I got a call that morning, John actually called me personally, he’s like “Hey Miles, how are you doing?” I was like “I’m good, John,” I had my notepad because I thought he was going to give me notes for adjustments for when Nicole’s here. He goes “Okay, just calling you because I want to personally offer you the role of Jason.”

I was like “Yeah, that’s awesome. Thank you John.” Called my mom ecstatic, and then we had like a luncheon with myself, John, the DP, and Nicole, and I was just kind of like observing, just watching everybody do their thing and go about business, talking about screen shots and all this stuff. And then it got to the day that we were actually shooting the scenes. The first day on set actually for me was the scene in the kitchen when I come in when Aaron just goes off on me, and I’d never met Aaron before in my life and I guess John had told Aaron to scare the crap out of me, which he does.

Aaron can be very intense. It was an out of body experience, absolutely. I felt like I was just hovering above the scene and watching Aaron act and just being a fan of Aaron and Nicole. And I was like, that’s not a good place to be in as a character. And then as we started working through it, and with the bench scenes with Nicole I really felt like we started having more conversations off camera, because we shot the scenes in sequence so I wasn’t hanging around on set. Nicole and I hadn’t really had that many conversations up to that point so it was really interesting exploring a scene as I’m exploring through the character but also just through my own body the desensitizing I was going through as an actor coming into this new world.
 
(John Cameron Mitchell): Another person might have choked. He had such a sense of self that was kind of surprising for someone who had never done a feature. Going toe to toe with these great actors everything can drain out of your head, but making sure we were calm, we had plenty of time, even if we didn’t pretending like we did, reminding an actor that every take might be useful, might be just for one line. Never feel bad about your last take if everything didn’t go perfectly. You’re in a safe place and I will never move on unless we have it. And sometimes it took a lot of takes to get everything we needed with no airplane over us, because we were near La Guardia.
 
(Miles Teller): And just the fact that we had two cameras shooting at the same time, so I never felt like there was a camera right in my face. We didn’t have to stop for long times for relighting or changing the camera angle, so I was really just able to sit there in between the scenes even when we’re not saying anything to each other because we’re setting up or whatever, it was just a great space to work in.
 
(Q): When you're shooting such dark material what's the atomosphere off camera? Is there joking or are you trying to maintain that level of emotion at all times?

(Nicole Kidman): Well, with someone like Miles [Teller] I purposely didn't have any conversations. I didn't want to rehearse the scenes. John and I talked about it and you sort of want to keep the tension and the way in which we were relating which was through some nervousness and those things. That's good for the performance, and I think that I probably stay a little bit in character for the whole film. I'm kind of half aware and half not aware. For this sort of film it's not like you have to be called by the name of the character, but certainly something, there's the presence of the character at all times.

Aaron and I would talk, but a lot of our conversations were about our lives. That was good because there was an intimacy to the conversations that I probably wouldn't have had with him if we weren't in a deeply intimate film together. That'll always remain secret. We had a lot of interns and stuff on the film which is nice because you have people that just absolutely want to be around that are new to filmmaking and so they have an enormous amount of enthusiasm and energy and curiosity. That's a good energy.
 
(John Cameron Mitchell): I always feel when I’m doing something intense I want comedy. Aaron and I could have oddly a lot of laughs between scenes. For me I needed that because as a director you sort of internalize all the scenes but you don’t have the release of actually saying the lines. So after their giant scene about “You’ve erased the video,” I had to go into the garden, lie on the grass, and just conduct all of that energy into the ground, literally to get it out. I remember talking to Todd Haynes and he was like “I’m really jealous of actors because they can relieve themselves of the emotions and release, and the director never gets to do that. Maybe when an audience is watching it for the first time you get to do that, but that’s the great grace of performing is you can release.
 
(John Cameron Mitchell): You work so hard to get it close to you that it’s a shame to give it away, and so you want to keep it pretty close to you. It’s interesting what Nicole said because you do end up talking about things within the parameters of the film. If you play a sexy romantic part you usually dwell on that and all the ladies on the set like you and stuff, and if you’re playing a psycho killer everybody hates you on the set. It’s usually because those are things that you dwell upon, so I remember Nicole and I would talk about marriage and family and kids and all that sort of stuff, which helped a lot. But we did have some laughs.

Because we lived in this house together for I don’t know how many weeks Nicole would often be in the kitchen chuckling it up with everybody and ordering everybody around. You’re a producer; that’s what producer’s do. The crew was very sensitive, everybody was there for the right reasons and put their heart and soul into it. I felt like it was a pretty light set for what was going on. I think the great thing about this movie was the crew understood that when we needed the time that they were there with us. They knew it was going to happen that day and we didn’t have to fight them. It was a very respectful, reverent set, I thought, which really helped a lot.
 
(Nicole Kidman): We had a great AD. And we had a lot of interns on the film didn’t we, which is nice because you have people that are new to filmmaking so they have an enormous amount of enthusiasm and energy and curiosity. It’s a good energy.
 
(Aaron Eckhart): We also lived in a little neighborhood, a beautiful bay. We took walks around. Nicole one time was in her pajamas walking around the neighborhood.
 
KIDMAN: [laughs] Not my pajamas. My Ugg boots. And the other thing is that when you have the writer on the set you can be very nervous because the idea of not pleasing him holds…it's like, 'David is here!' But he was so supportive and encouraging and he came to some initial rehearsals as well. I'm always asking questions of the writer. I just love it because they have the key. They usually have the key.
 
(Q): David, I wonder if you want to speak to the fact that you adapted your own Pulitzer Prize winning play for the screen?
 
(David Lindsay-Abaire): He said Pulitzer; I don’t know if you heard that. I was going to wear it today but I thought it might be a little much. I saw it as a challenge of course, but also as a great opportunity because I had lived with these characters for so long, and what the play had in its back pocket that most plays don’t is a fairly involved off-stage life. And so the things like Howie’s potential affair is only hinted at in the play. The play is just five people in a house. It’s just the family members and the boy comes into their lives, and that’s it.

And so they talk about the support group, they talk about that scene in the supermarket, again, the affair is only hinted at. We hear about the sister’s bar fight; in the movie we actually get that call in the middle of the night and her sister has to go bail her out. So for me it was a great opportunity to go to all of those places that I know in my head and meet all of those people and find out who Gaby is and find out how that relationship starts to grow, and that relationship became one of the backbones of the plot. And again, it’s not in the play, and so it was just exciting to me to reinvent and revisit these characters and the story and try and tell it in a completely different way without losing what I thought was important to the story.
 
(Q): Miles, what was your audition like for your high school performance of “Footloose” compared to what you had to do for this?
 
(Miles Teller): In high school I auditioned for that because my best friend was like “Let’s all audition for this musical,” we just got a young, very vibrant, beautiful drama teacher, did the audition, learned that I could sing a little bit, and then he got Ren and I got Willard, and that was great because he gave me a ride home everyday anyway so it was convenient. And then for the one now I went in for Ren and she said “Can you do a Southern accent?” I said “Absolutely. I’m from Florida,” which people don’t think is Southern; it is. It’s a very Southern community where I’m from anyway. And I went in the first audition and she said “Can you do a Southern accent?” I said “Yes, I can do a Southern accent,” and then from there I was the only person that they ever read for Willard, and I tested I think with like three or four other Rens.
 
(John Cameron Mitchell): What was the dance audition?
 
(Miles Teller): I can dance a little bit. The character goes from absolutely being petrified of dancing to being efficient, and so I actually had to hold back. If you have rhythm it’s hard to not dance on rhythm; that’s hard.
 
(Q): I think you did an extraordinary thing here especially considering that you had the toughest job?

(Nicole Kidman): I don't know if it was the toughest job, but in terms of, she's in so much pain and so unable to let it out and trying desperately to move on and cannot move on. So that's why she lashes out at herself and then hurts other people and then there's regret. I mean it's so complicated, each little [aspect] and that's why I wanted to make it a really sort of detailed performance. So, I hope that.
 
(Q) Well, it's important

{Nicole Kidman): Thank you, yeah. I think it's important and I hope that it makes people feel not so alone. That's the point of it.

End.