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Sympathy For Delicious

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : A newly paralyzed DJ gets more than he bargained for when he seeks out the world of faith healing.

Opened April 29, 2011 (Limited 4/29)

Runtime:1 hr. 36 min.

 

Press conference with Christopher Thornton, Mark Ruffalo, Orlando Bloom, Laura Linney.

 

(Q): Why did you want to make "Sympathy for Delicious"?

(Christopher Thornton) : I was struggling to make my way as an actor, and then I had an accident (sustained two fractured vertebrae in a rock climbing fall). I was only starting to get a couple of jobs again after being in the wheel chair which were great to get and sorely needed. And I realized very quickly that roles for someone in a chair were so limited, really small. There wasn’t a lot, and I wanted to try to do something more substantial. And I had been writing a little bit already, and I decided to try to write something. That’s really where it started for me.

When I’d first gotten injured, I had done to some of these healing services, like you see at the beginning of the movie. And they were really bizarre, crazy, weird experiences — and they stayed with me. That came back to my head for whatever reason when I was looking for something to write. It was a great place to start a story.

So I kind of fleshed it out, and stumbled upon the idea of making the guy in the chair the healer. I pitched that to Mark [Ruffalo] — Mark and I were roommates at the time — and he really responded to it and said that that was the one I should work on. So I fleshed out the rest of it and wrote a draft. [Mark Ruffalo] can tell you how long the draft was. And he really liked that, and asked if he could direct it, and I said, "Sure." And that’s kind of how it started.

(Mark Ruffalo) : He handed me a 197 page draft with cheated margins, which was really 250 pages. From top to bottom, it was filled with writing. I saw something really inventive and original in those 197 pages wildly original.

And I loved the premise already that he started with, about a guy in a chair who has the gift to heal. And I’d been directing a lot of theater up at that point. And I lived downtown at the edge of a big homeless population. I fed the homeless. I worked at a guitar store and a rock’n’roll bar, so I had a very good idea of those people.

And I was there alongside him when he was going to the faith healings and doing all that stuff. I thought that as disparate as all these elements are and as ambitious a task this is to undertake, I think with my sensibilities, I understand this world that he’s trying to create. And so I asked him, "Would you give me a shot at directing this?" And he said, "Yes."

It was actually a gift to me. It was at my bachelor party when I asked him, so I knew he couldn’t turn me down. And then it was 10 years of him writing and developing.

(Christopher Thornton): I would give him a draft, and Mark would give me a ton of notes, and I would give him another draft. It went that way for a long time.

(Mark Ruffalo) : Lebanese loan sharks, mortgage thieves, movie stars, falling in, falling out — we’ve been through the gamut in those 10 years.

(Orlando Bloom) : I was just a huge fan of Mark’s, like everyone else in the room. I sat down with Mark, and I was really just a huge fan of his, as a director. And he came over to the house, and I wasn’t sure if I was auditioning him or he was auditioning me or what was going on.

I just said, "I’d love to work with you. I’d love to be a part of this film." And I felt very grateful for the experience. I feel like the opportunity for this character set me off into a whole new interesting direction. Thank you, Mark.

(Laura Linney) : And for me, it was very, very easy. I will do anything in the world for Mark Ruffalo. He knows that. There are few people on the planet that you feel or at least I feel so safe around, and someone whom I want to help any way I can and with anything. So he called and asked, and I said, "Of course." And then I read the script and I was like, "Oh, fun!"

(Mark Ruffalo) : And I said, "Don’t you want to read it first?" And she said, "No, I’m doing it."

(Laura Linney) : And then I read it, and I said, "Oh, this looks like fun." And we had a great time.

(Mark Ruffalo) : And she directed me. In the big scene when Father Joe loses his temper at the humbled Dean O’Dwyer. It was a big deal.

(Orlando Bloom) : And she coached me.

(Mark Ruffalo): She basically directed the whole movie.

(Q) : Mark, you said in a recent interview that you did about 800 auditions before you got a job as an actor. Can you talk about that?

(Mark Ruffalo): I think we should round it up to a grand 1,000 now. Back then, actors actually had a lot of auditions for television shows, walk-ons, commercials. The number is probably more like 400. Every year, the total on the Internet goes up 100, but I went on many, many auditions before I ever booked a job.

(Christopher Thornton) : You booked a couple of things though.

(Mark Ruffalo) : A Clearasil commercial.

(Christopher Thornton) : You did a pilot that didn’t get picked up. You had great skin then.

(Mark Ruffalo) : I had terrible skin. I had acne, and they give me a Clearasil commercial.

(Q) : How did the "Sympathy for Delicious" script evolve through those rewrites over 10 years? And what did any of the actors do to their characters that was different from how the character was originally conceived?

(Christopher Thornton) : Really, all of the actors contributed so much, because one of the things that we had a problem with because of the schedule and timing, a lot of the parts of the script weren’t in the best of shape when we started shooting. We wanted to stop for three weeks or so, and fix certain things that were not quite there yet.

(Mark Ruffalo) : We had to cut quite a bit out of it because of scheduling and production. We didn’t have the money to do big parts of the movie.

(Christopher Thornton) : It was a shock. They basically said, "You have to cut 10, 12 pages out of the script." And it was only a 100-page script at the time. And you can’t just snip it out. If you do that, you have to figure out other ways to make certain things happen. And we really didn’t have time to do it. So it was kind of a mad scramble.

So to answer the question: everybody, all of them. There are huge chunks of dialogue that Laura and Orlando and Juliette Lewis all came up with on their own, just sort of riffing off of what might have already been there or, in some cases, was a whole new direction. So everybody brought a lot to the table, which is why we were so lucky that we got the cast that we got, because in lesser hands, it would’ve been a real disaster, I think, in certain places.

(Q) : Orlando, did Juliette Lewis give you any tips on how to be a lead singer in a rock band, since she’s the lead singer of a rock band in real life?

(Orlando Bloom) : Of course she was wonderful, but she would be horrified to think anyone thought that our band in the movie was anything like her band. I just want to clarify that. She was great.

We went through singing for the movie with Omar Rodriguez Lopez from the Mars Volta and that was amazing. And when we were rehearsing in L.A. We had a little studio where we were rehearsing, she was just really great at band motivation and telling me a few pointers on the swagger.

(Q) : Mark, can you talk about your choice to have the Bee Gees song "I Started a Joke" play over the end credits in "Sympathy for Delicious"?

(Mark Ruffalo) : Honestly, that was in the very first draft of the script that I read. So that was Chris Thornton who wrote that. At one point, we heard what it was going to cost to use that song. I think it was $500,000 for 30 seconds, or something very, very expensive.

And so I tried to imagine the movie without the song, which was very hard for me to do at that point. I like the song because we create our realities, in a way. And Dean certainly creates his reality of not only being in the chair, but how he deals with that after that is a creation of his own actions, deeds, thoughts, paths, whatever.

And the change that he makes is such a beautiful one, and kind of a simple one, too. It didn’t require that much work from him, in a strange way. I like that "I started a joke, but the joke is on me." It’s a nice turn.

And all the sturm and drang of our lives are a little bit like that, I think. So I fell in love with that. That song started to really mean something to me.

So we dragged someone from the Bee Gees’ crowd to a screening of "Sympathy for Delicious", and they saw it and said, "We’ll give you the song for $5,000." It was a sweet deal.When did you write it the script?

(Christopher Thornton) : It was so long ago. You know, you write a song title into a script, and you have no idea if it’s going to get taken seriously or if it will ever happen, just because you put it on a page. For some reason, I heard that song right around the time I was finishing up that first draft.

And it was just one of those things. It just felt like the right thing to do, because of the lyrics, like Mark just said. And his voice, Robin Gibb’s ... is so angelic, and it’s almost too sweet in a way. It’s almost saccharine, but in a good way. And after the darkness of the movie, for so many reasons, it just felt right.

So I said, "What the hell, we’re never get the song for the movie." And I just typed it in there. And it stuck. And Mark liked it, and he stayed with it, and it actually worked out. But when I wrote it in there, I didn’t have any idea it would actually be in the movie. There were actually other titles that were written into the movie that we couldn’t get at all, so that one worked out.

(Q) : A lot of the characters in this movie are very unsympathetic. Did you try to do anything with your character that would humanize them?

(Orlando Bloom) : I tried not to humanize my character.

(Mark Ruffalo): A big problem setting the movie up was, Is this Dean a likable character? There’s a certain syntax when you see someone in a wheelchair, you just immediately create a story for that person. And there’s an immediate amount of sympathy that you give that person, most people, just be being in a chair. And I always knew visually that that would play. Or I hoped it would. But people don’t really get that by reading it, necessarily.

And then the other thing was I tried to pull out a lot of moments of him by himself, because he’s in so much pain that in his interactions with human beings, he’s so afraid, that there’s this big mask on him. And so if we didn’t see him in these moments by himself, it would be much harder to connect to him. I was looking for moments where I could carve out by himself.

And for the other people, ambition is something that makes people do bad things. And our culture is set up where we’re a completely awards-based culture. Getting the money, getting the fame. Those are the things that people celebrate. I think when you see these people behaving in the way that they do, you know that they’re caught in that particular cycle. We all understand what that looks like and how it behaves around us, so making him more human in a weird way, and making him more fallible, in a way, made him more sympathetic. And humor.

(Christopher Thornton) : When I was writing, I didn’t worry about being too unsympathetic, just as long as they were empathetic, as long as everybody would understand why people were doing what they were doing. That’s the only thing I worried about …

My feeling was it just had to be truthful. Like Mark was saying, he’s just in a real difficult moment in his life when his injury is very recent. It’s not only something, of course, I could remember, it is bad. You are self-obsessed at that time. It is all about you.

And again, there’s a lot of anger. It’s a dark, dark place to be. And I just said, "If that’s what this story is about, I have to take that seriously. I have to make that truthful." So you have to stop worrying about him being likable, because he’s not going to be. It’s just not possible. So I didn’t really worry about it. I just said, "As long as it’s real." And then the ending will hopefully redeem him.

(Orlando Bloom) : I just really embraced the inner demon of character. Some of the greatest bands that I listened to growing up were from the north of England, whether it be the Beatles or the Stones, but specifically for this role, it was like the Gallagher brothers from Oasis and Iain Brown from the Stone Roses. They have this attitude like, "We are the best band in the world. If you don’t know it, you should know it."

And so I thought that would play really well for this character, and would help bring some truth to this character, because that’s truthful to them — even when it’s showing them sh*t for the camera. I watched them (Liam Gallagher, Noel Gallagher) and Iain Brown in interviews, particularly Liam Gallagher. So I asked Mark, "Look, do you mind if I do this?"

And he was a little apprehensive, to be honest. He was like, "No, I want this." But he came around. It really helped; the accent, the dialect really helped me to create the truth, because some of the dialogue was quite outlandish.

(Laura Linney) : character was so much fun. And for me, it was really all about the hair. It was all about the hair piece. When we figured out that hair piece, I was like, "Oh, I know what to do now." And it re-aligned me differently.

(Orlando Bloom) : Yeah, I really wanted to grab that hair.

(Mark Ruffalo) : Run your fingers though that hair.

(Laura Linney) : And there’s something fantastic about someone who’s just that really hungry all the time. She’s a rabidly hungry person. So it was fun to just sort of devour.

(Q) : How did you go about selecting the locations in "Sympathy for Delicious"?

(Mark Ruffalo) : We were really poor. And I knew if we could cut some of the set moves out of the movie, I could take about $200,000 out of [the budget for] transportation and put it back into the movie, on the screen. And so a big part of my job was to put everything at two locations.

I found an abandoned warehouse under the Sixth Street Bridge in downtown L.A. where a lot of homeless people used to live. They’ve shooed them out, but when I was a young actor living down there, that was really skid row. And I just happened to find this great warehouse. It was an abandoned warehouse, but people were using it for filming.

And so I built most of my sets inside that warehouse, which was a hundred yards from skid row. And so we had kind of a mini cinemaceta there. And when we went on location, I think we went to only three different locations from there. We’re one of the last examples of a small budget actually helping a film instead of destroying it.

(Q) : Chris, did you think that it was the right moment to write "Sympathy for Delicious"? Did you worry about the story being controversial?

(Christopher Thornton) : I think everybody would agree with this, but when you write a script, you’re not planning to take 10 years to shoot it. So the timing of it, it was going to happen whenever we could make it happen. There was really no way to plan anything like that. 

I can’t really say that I did. It seemed to be the storyline to go when I was working on that first draft. For whatever reason at the time, I didn’t want to just limit it to skid row and not go beyond the exploitation of this gift and where it would take him. For some reason, I just wanted to just blow it out, for better or for worse.

And it just clicked. I wasn’t trying to be controversial or anything like that. It just seemed like the right choice to make in the story.

(Q) : Mark and Chris, did you always envision that Mark would not only direct "Sympathy for Delicious" but also act in it? Mark, what were the challenges of directing yourself?

(Christopher Thornton) : He didn’t want to be in it. He said to me, "I either want to play this part with somebody else directing or I want to direct this and not be in this at all." That was the first thing he said: "I can’t do both."

(Mark Ruffalo) : Basically, there was a foreign sales company when we were raising the money. And they said to me, "OK, you’re a first-time director, which is a negative, but you’re also a name as an actor, which is a positive. So if you act and direct in the movie, then you’ll be at zero. You’ll cancel yourself out."

So it was a veiled blackmail saying, "You won’t have a movie unless you’ll say you’ll be in it." My idea was that I was just going to trick everybody, that I would get everyone in the movie, and then I would step out, and I’d put another actor in that part.

And the day that I went in to do that, we had a schedule change, the movie got pushed a bit, and I found out that I had lost two of my other lead actors. And so when it came out of my mouth, the producer was like, "Just stop right there. If you’re not in the movie at this moment, then we don’t have a movie." And it was just too much to replace those parts and also try to replace myself.

I have another great story, part of that. I was running around back and forth in the production office, and Laura had just flown in. And she pulled me aside and said, "Ruffie, do you know what you’re doing?" And I said, "Yeah, of course I do."

And she said, "Not directing. Acting. Have you been able to work on this part?" And I said , "No, I haven’t had time." And she said, "Why don’t you come over this weekend, and we’ll go over all the scenes together?," which is what my friend Laura did for me … I didn’t want to act and direct, but that’s what I did. I had a master class with Laura Linney as my acting coach.

(Q) : Mark, what can you say about working with Larry Kramer, the screenwriter for the Ned Weeks biopic "The Normal Heart"? Can you compare and contrast working with him to working with Chris Thornton?

(Mark Ruffalo): I haven’t really started working with Larry yet. I just know him. And from what little I know of Larry, it would be very hard to ask him to lose 12 pages. I can’t really draw a comparison because I haven’t really worked with him yet. Have you seen the Broadway version of "The Normal Heart"?

(Q) : Mark, how has getting an Oscar nomination and being cast as the Incredible Hulk changed things for you?

(Mark Ruffalo) : Has it changed anything? When I’m watching a trailer, and it says, "Academy Award-nominated actor Mark Ruffalo," that’s new. I’ve always not been that. It certainly hasn’t changed the parts that I’m getting yet.

I remember asking Michelle Williams, "Has it changed anything?" And she’s like, "No." I think maybe in the past, an Oscar nomination was something that was held more dearly by the people who give out parts and pay salaries and things like that. And there’s probably some modicum of difference. I just haven’t felt much of it.

(Q) : Orlando, in your most recent movies such as "Sympathy for Delicious" and "The Good Doctor have been independent films in which you’ve been playing characters that aren’t very likable or sympathetic. It’s a departure from earlier in your career, when you played heroic characters in big-budget studio movies. Why have you decided to change the kinds of characters and films that you’re doing?

(Orlando Bloom) : I just really wanted to have the opportunity to shift a perception that had been created, although not necessarily a bad perception. Having worked on huge movies for the majority of the first half of my career and for a couple of big trilogies, I was just yearning for a different kind of experience in filmmaking.

I’d talked about the opportunity of working with Mark. I really wanted the opportunity to work with him, because Mark as an actor, he’s phenomenal. As a director, there’s a certain kind of shorthand. He just knew when any of us were in the pocket, in terms of the process. And that was wonderful to have somebody who was so in tune and so understanding of the anxieties that can come up when you’re trying to be a performer.

And with "The Good Doctor," I just read the script, it terrified me, and I put it down. I thought, "I can’t do that. I don’t even know where to start." And then I was I was kind of talked into it by my producing partner Sharon Miller.

And I talked about it to Mark as well at one point. And I talked to people who were important in my life about what I would do with it and if it was a good idea. It was just an opportunity to do something completely different and flip a perception completely on its head.

And to have a rock star and then this weird, introverted, controlled sociopath of a doctor, for me, I wanted to expand my range, I guess, and to show there’s more than just a pirate. I’m really here to talk about Mark’s movie, but it’s a very dark, twisted and interesting character. There are some surprises, I think.

As much as "Sympathy for Delicious" is about fame and the pursuit of fame, it’s also about exploitation. How do you think your characters perceived their responsibility and/or blame for their involvement in the exploitation that takes place in this story?

(Christopher Thornton) : My character, I don’t think, thought twice about it until he was in jail for it, and then was forced to think about it. But as I was saying earlier, from the beginning of the film, he’s in such a bleak place in his life, and he gets so frustrated by what happens to him, he’s completely throwing caution to the wind. He’s embracing the exploitation of it, not even calling it that.

He feels owed at that point. He feels like he deserves to get something out of this. He just throws caution to the wind and goes wholeheartedly down that road, not caring at all what the negative possibilities are. And then, of course, he pays a really serious price for that. And then he has to seriously face it when he’s alone in a jail cell.

I think he became self-aware because of how he turned out. I think he was really numb to what was going on all the way through it, because of what instigated him to do it: this deep pain, this horrible bleak place that he was. It was a reaction. He wasn’t thinking about it: "Am I guilty? Am I responsible? Is there something wrong with this choice?"

He never asked those questions. He wasn’t self-aware at all at that point. And then it’s like getting a bucket of cold water thrown on him is what happens to him when he goes to jail. And then yes, he does regret it, and it call kind of comes to him. I think he even says to Mark’s character, "What was I thinking?

(Mark Ruffalo) : The road to hell is paved with good intentions. There’s a meditation on capitalism and the culture that puts success and money above many, many other qualities in people. And it’s kind of like "anything goes" to get there.

Even the people who have not-for-profits and they’re doing good work for people, they still have to sell something. They still have to sell a tax break, a tax exemption, a plaque on a wall, a plaque on a building, a plaque on a chair. Father Joe still has to sell something in order to feed the homeless. He has to show some results.

Can charity really exist in an environment like that, even for a priest who is doing most essential work, which is feeding people who don’t have food? It’s still a commodity in a strange way. Like I said, the road to hell s paved with good intentions. It’s probably the easiest way to answer that question.

(Orlando Bloom) : And I think the road to hell is also paved with ego, greed and hunger. With The Stain, when Ariel dies, I think it’s a profound change for him as a human being and as a character in the movie. I think in the end, when he’s in the courthouse, I think that’s when it’s very clear that he feels the responsibility of what’s happened throughout the course of the movie.

(Laura Linney): Takes no responsibility whatsoever. She capitalizes on it. She’s the great justifier. And she believes her own spin. I think she loves her own spin. I think she gets off on her own spin.

(Q) : Mark, can you talk about the choices you have to make as a director when for example, you want 12 pages cut out of the script?

(Mark Ruffalo) : You make a movie three times: You make it in the script. You make it when you shoot it. You make it when you edit it.

You’re remaking it each time. But at some point, the movie takes a life of its own and demands its own things. And as a director, you hope to tune your story in such a way that it begins to guide you. And the way to service the material when you’re making a film is to keep deducting down to the essential, which is a story.

So if I know that I have 12 pages that don’t need to be in there, then it’s my job and my responsibility, because I made a commitment to telling the story. To go to the writer and say, "I need 12 pages out of here, and these are the reasons why I need it." 

And whether it’s Thomas Jefferson or Christopher Thornton or William Shakespeare, that’s the commitment that you make to the process.

(Q ) : Mark, as an actor, do you now feel more confident to do rewrites of scripts?

(Mark Ruffalo) : It’s not my job as an actor, really. If I’m invited to do it, then I’m happy to do it. I’ve done enough development now that I can approach material outside of being an actor.

Acting is a very insular, myopic job. On a movie, you’re really focused on one character’s journey through a story. And when you move into directing or being a producer when you’re starting to deal with the whole structure of a piece, then that’s another job.

I’m happy to do my job as an actor when I’m acting. If I can add anything to that and contribute to a piece in that way, it’s in completely in support of the story.

(Q) : Chris and Mark, do you plan to collaborate with each other on another project again?

(Christopher Thornton) : We want to. We’ll probably do something at some point.

(Mark Ruffalo) : We will.

(Q) : Orlando and Laura, do you want to become directors? And if so, would you also want to be an actor in the first thing that you direct?

(Orlando Bloom) : I’m still learning to be a better actor. I’ve got quite a long road to go there. But I think it’s very inspirational seeing Mark work.

(Laura Linney) : I don’t want to be a director. A lot of people have asked and tried to nudge me in that direction. And for some reason, I’m so satisfied with the whole area of acting, but I love to coach. I love to teach. So I love doing that. But you know, never say never. Who knows in the future? But at the moment, no.

(Mark Ruffalo): You would be an amazing director.

(Q) : Mark, do you plan to direct a movie again?

(Mark Ruffalo) : Honestly, it’s all I really wanted to do after I finished shooting and working on the movie. I really wasn’t savoring going back into acting. Oddly enough, comes a lot easier to me than acting. I don’t know if it’s any good, but it does feel a lot easier, and I really enjoyed it. So I’m hoping that I’m afforded the opportunity to do it, to keep going.

(Q) : Orlando, Laura and Chris, can you talk about working a director who’s also an actor? How is it different from working with a director who’s never been an actor?

(Orlando Bloom) : It was amazing. It was like a bit of a shorthand. It was a sensitivity to the process of an actor, being directed by an actor. He really understood the process. It was immediate …

Actors have moments. Sometimes, even before the take, they’re ready to go. Or right after the take, they’re still going, and there’s a moment. And Mark could make sure that we were rolling, and he caught those moments where he would continue rolling, and he would continue with the moment afterward. And he knew when we were in the pocket, as it were, and the direction was immediate. That was fantastic.

(Laura Linney) : Most directors — I would say 99 percent of then, in the theater as well as in film — just do not speak actor. They are not fluent in speaking actor. They just aren’t. It’s not their fault; they’re just not trained the way that we’re trained.

So there’s always that moment when a director will come to you, say whatever it is they say, and you have to re-translate it in your mind. A lot of people get themselves into trouble because they don’t do that step. A director will come to them and say something that, to them, seems ridiculous. And it’s not ridiculous. They’re just not speaking your language.

Take a moment. Take a deep breath. Re-translate it in your mind, figure out what it is they want me to do. And then how do I do that? For the two of us, who have known each other for a while, he could just look at me a certain way, and I’m like, Got it.

(Mark Ruffalo) : Literally, I’d just say two things and she’d say, "Uh-huh."

(Christopher Thornton) : On a movie like this, it’s really all about the characters. There really isn’t much else to it. It’s these people behaving the way that they do, which creates the plot. So when it’s so character-driven, it’s great to have someone like Mark, because he’s such a good actor himself, and he has such amazing instincts, he’s able to give you exactly what you need.

(Orlando Bloom) : You really felt like you were in it together, you know? I remember there was a scene before we went on stage with Chris, and I had to scream at Dean about getting out on stage, because I’m [his] front man, and I end up on stage last, and they all start cheering for Dean.

And I really felt like I was in it with Mark, and we were kind of like walking around, "How would I do this?," figuring it out together and stuff. It really felt like a team and somebody really had my back.

(Christopher Thornton) : He’s also not hidden behind the monitor. Usually, he’s right there, crunched down, balled up next to the camera. He really seems with you, and that’s really nice to have.

(Laura Linney) : And most directors are scared of actors. They don’t want to be. They don’t need to be, but they are.

(Mark Ruffalo) : I’m scared of producers.

(Laura Linney) : Yeah! When you have a director who knows exactly how you work and what you’re doing, you’re just more comfortable.

(Mark Ruffalo): With this cast, mostly what I was doing was catching their magic. I was chasing their magic. I knew I wanted to shoot it that way. I knew I wanted to shoot a movie camera, because in 23 days, you don’t have time to work a scene. So you go with the magic happening with a great cast like this.

So I would just honestly wait, create a space for them to be great in, and wait for them to find it. And most of my work had to do with all the tertiary elements of filmmaking. I really wasn’t worried about the actors. I was working with framing, lighting, properties, what the picture’s going to look like all of those outside elements. I was very, very secure with my cast, which is a blessing.

The concert scenes in "Sympathy for Delicious" are very authentic looking and are literally spiritual experiences for some of the concertgoers in the movie. Did any of you have any concerts that you experienced in real life that changed you or were sublime for you, and may have inspired how you acted in or directed those concert scenes?

(Christopher Thornton): I remember seeing Bruce Springsteen in 1984, and it blew my mind. I don’t know if it found its way in the film, but that was a great show. Maybe subconsciously, I have no idea.

(Mark Ruffalo) : I saw a very small, intimate gig of the Flaming Lips. It was a "Clouds Taste Metallic" show on a little tiny stage that was only about a foot high. And it was so raw, and they were so connected to their audience. I knew that was a quality that I liked.

When I thought of our band, I thought that was a quality I liked: that really raw feeling, which is hard to capture on film, because you’re playing with playback usually, and it’s overly produced. This was years ago, but it was about the same time that Chris Thornton had given me the script.

(Christopher Thornton) : Yeah. The Flaming Lips were kind of one of the loose inspirations.

(Mark Ruffalo) : Yeah. I even reached out to them to do the music for the movie, but they were too busy. But I knew that was the feeling I wanted to have from the music: this kind of raw, rough and holy. This "rough and holy" theme sort of came out of that. It was this communal experience, very powerful, but very rough and raw.

(Christopher Thornton) : I also remember when U2 did a concert and Bono dressed up as a devil. He was in this gold suit with horns. It was a long time ago. I remember that having some influence. It was so decadent and so ridiculous and so over-the-top. That swam around a little bit too, back when we were doing a first draft of this.

 

End.