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Trespass

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

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Story : Kyle (Nicolas Cage), a fast-talking businessman, has entrusted the mansion’s renovation to his stunning wife, Sarah (Nicole Kidman). But between making those big decisions and keeping tabs on their defiant teenage daughter (Liana Liberato), Sarah often finds herself distracted by a young, handsome worker (Cam Gigandet) at their home. Nothing is what it seems, and it will take a group of cold-blooded criminals led by Elias (Ben Mendelsohn), who have been planning a vicious home invasion for months.

Opens Friday, October 14, 2011

Runtime:1 hr. 30 min.

 

Interview with Director Joel Schumacher

 

?Q?: Could you talk about the collaboration of working with the writer, Karl?
 
?Joel Schumacher) : They never let me meet Karl. Karl had written the script for Irwin Winkler, my producer, and when Irwin offered me the movie, I always like to go back to the original writer, but Irwin, who had paid for that writing, said he didn’t want to go there. So I had to respect his opinion. So Eli Richbourg, who rewrote "Phone Booth," came to visit.

He was living in Paris because he fell in love with a French girl. He came down to Shreveport, Louisiana, and worked with the actors and me and he did the rewrite. But perhaps Karl would have done it also; it's just that I was not allowed access to Karl because my producers did not want that to be so. So I don't know. Perhaps they had had a conflict with Karl; who knows. But I would like to have met him and work with him.
 
(Q) : There's some discussion about the darkly comic aspect of doing this kind of movie, so I wanted to know if you could talk about walking that line between where the laughs are and where the drama is.
 
?Joel Schumacher) : Well the laughs are what makes you laugh, and certainly people don't have to. It's always interesting to me when people talk about let's say "St. Elmo's Fire" and "Lost Boys," that have enormous followings, thank god.  There's a lot of humor; they don't remember that. When people think of "St. Elmo's Fire" they usually think of the characters and whatever the movie emotionally meant to them. "Lost Boys" is really a comedy with heart, but it's really a comedy in many ways.

And I think "Falling Down" is one of the funniest movies I ever made. It's quite tragic and it's certainly social and political and sociological and all the obvious things there, but it's also in the worst moments in the movie it has a lot of dark humor. And so does "8MM," which is one of the darkest subject matters I did. "Phone Booth" has a lot of laughs in it. So I try to put in, like life, in the middle of, your significant other is leaving you and the toilet explodes at the same time, or the roof caves in, or your cat is lost, and suddenly you're in the middle of this human comedy. Maybe I do it for myself, but if people don't want to see it that way that's fine.

I mean I just hope people will go and see it. I try to put a lot of levels in the movie, but I mean I'm happy if people enjoy it on one level, on any level. But I know now we have such a world of people on the internet, on the blogs, all over the world who are really film fans or film critics, whatever they choose to be, and they analyze film a lot now.

Film really doesn't belong to the critics anymore, it really belongs to the world, which is exactly where it should be because we shouldn't be making movies for critics, we should be making movies for the people who go see them. I'd much rather get a great review from Harry Knowles than from "The New Yorker," which I think has a small readership. Also, if Harry Knowles thinks my movie is cool, it's cool.
 
(Q) : Joel, do you think in your professional and worldly experience this movie or the headlines will educate people? Because it seems like people are stupid and they let things happen to them sometimes that could be avoided.
 
?Joel Schumacher) : Well I think that's really, really smart, and I think most of us want to live in a world where we really think if you close your door at night, even if you have a small security system. Well we have to live that way, because you can't live all the time thinking everyone's coming into your home, although it is a primal fear that's with us all the time.

I think one of the biggest primal fears is you wake up in the middle of the night and there are strangers in your bedroom that are not someone you picked up at a bar and can't remember, but that there's an invasion, there's a violation, there's an intrusion, there's a perpetration happening, and you don't know if you're going to live or die at that point. It's a horrific experience, and I think that in some ways it's very healthy to live where there's no fear, but on the other hand I think you have to start thinking about a world right now.

I can only speak to Western culture, but a world right now where there's too many rich and too many poor and the middle is shrinking. I think when there are too many people that are suffering and don't have anything they will want what the haves have, and it's sort of in the history of the world. So I think people maybe unconsciously felt that to some degree. It probably also depends on what neighborhood you live in. But it's also hard to live just with fear all the time. I know people have to now with children. I was born in 1939 and I grew up in Long Island City and it was really we didn't lock our doors. But we were poor; we didn't have anything to steal.

And us kids were street kids, we just did anything we wanted to, and that has changed, as everyone knows, dramatically. So yeah, I think it's a scary time, but I think there are so many other levels to it because if you've seen the film, the haves in this don't really have. I actually always thought of the two families as very similar, which is Nic Cage and Ben Mendelsohn, the great Ben Mendelsohn. They're really families, they're both different families in a sense, and the paternal figures in those families have overreached. They've overreached for the American dream. Whether one's doing it legally or one's doing it illegally is a different story, and I think it's led them to where they are on this particular night.

And so for me there's some social warfare here. There's a class warfare, I should say, and we tried to play that out. The problem with movies, it's like okay we're going to have a guy in a phone booth, and the phone rings and a voice says "If you hang up I'm going to kill you." Alright, that's a great premise, now what are you going to do for the next 90 minutes? And I think that "Trespass" is similar in okay, people break into your house, now what's going to happen?

So I think what Karl had done, which Eli enhanced, is the story that's going on there is really about the people that are in this situation, in this pressure cooker, and who's going to survive and who's not going to survive, and how are they going to survive, and what are the secrets and lies over here, and what are the secrets and lies over here, and what are the cross connections, etcetera, etcetera? So we could hopefully keep you interested.
 
(Q) : It seems like Nic Cage and Nicole Kidman are very different actors in terms of their style. Can you talk about what it's like to have your two leads be very different actors? And also, how has Nicole changed since you worked with her on "Batman"?
 
?Joel Schumacher): This is such an interesting question. Well I've known Nic and Nic since they were teenagers. I met Nicole when she first came over after "Dead Calm," and we've been friends ever since, and I met Nic after "Valley Girl." So even though we're different generations our careers have all had a very similar trajectory, parallel. I did work with Nicole on "Batman Forever," and we've always been social friends, and certainly the period of time that Nicole was married to Tom we were together a lot.

You know, birthday parties, parties, their wedding party. We would run into each other on press tours in Europe, so we were friends and always have been friends and still are. And Nic and I did "8MM" together in 1998. I know them very, very well as friends. They did not know each other. And so we have a shorthand. It's very easy when you've worked with an actor before because you know what their style is, but of course they've grown so much. "Batman Forever" we shot in '94 and it came out in '95, and I hope I've grown as much as they have.

And of course when you're as talented as they are and as smart as they are you keep growing in your craft, you do more, and I think since "Batman Forever" Nicole has really proven herself as a very, very serious actress. And I think Nic, you never know what you're going to get from Nic. He's a very spontaneous actor. Nicole is much more like one of the really fine theater actresses. She's quite precise in planning but then is totally spontaneous when she does it, but every detail of what she's going to do is very important.

De Niro is like this also. So they are very different styles, but very similar professionally. They are never late. Ever. Nicole takes 25 minutes in hair and makeup, which she's so proud of and brags about it all the time and she should; the guys take longer. And they always know their lines, they help the other actors, and Cam and Jordana and Ben and Dash and Liana are not as experienced as Nic and Nic, but they are, as I hope you saw, enormously talented.

And so Nicole and Nic set the bar very high and then the other actors really came up to it. I think it was Stanislavski I think who said the best tool for an actor is the other actor. And so of course the better the other actor is the better your game is. Same as if you're talking to someone who's highly intelligent – Not someone like me, but highly intelligent – you up your game. You try to reach a little higher. So that's what happened.
 
(Q) : Since you work with a lot of big names would you be willing to work with a relative unknown?
 
?Joel Schumacher) : I actually built my career on unknowns, because "D.C. Cab" and "St. Elmo's Fire" and "Lost Boys" and "Flatliners" and "The Client" and "A Time to Kill," and certainly Colin Farrell in all the movies I did with him, I still try to work with newcomers.
 
(Q) : I want to be honest; I've been working as a film critic since I was 15 but I want to bridge the cab between critic and filmmaker and I have some log lines I want to give you. I hope you don't mind.
 
?Joel Schumacher): I don't mind at all. You're pretty good for your first interview. You're not shy. Let me explain that to you very simply. It is actually illegal for me to accept unsolicited material because it protects you and it protects me in the studio. So what you need to do is get a lawyer or an agent and then you submit it to my agent in CAA and I swear in front of all these witnesses I will read it personally and I will write back to you.

But if you just give them to me you have no protection. And the first thing you should do is go home and write it all out, what you're going to send, and then send it to yourself registered mail and then do not open it, because that shows you the date that you actually created this or had it in registered mail. And then I will be more than happy to read it. I promise you; I give you my word.

 (Q) : Since you worked on "Phone Booth," which was mainly one location one of the most important characters in this film is the house.

?Joel Schumacher) : Yes.
 
(Q) : And how you worked with Andrzej is also a director, but how important was it to work with him in terms of getting the look of the house you wanted and also how to make this look larger than life in the film? Because that seemed to be as important as both Nic and Nic.
 
?Joel Schumacher): Crucial. Andrzej and I did "Falling Down" together so we have a shorthand also. The truth is you've just got to get the set big. As you notice, it's not only big, it's not cluttered a lot because we have to run around with cameras and Steadicam and all of that. So yes, that is as you said a very important character. I think it also stands for a house that a lot of people might think of their dream house, and for who, for what?

Suddenly if your whole life is on the line and your family's those things are meaningless. Meaningless. Whenever you see people interviewed who have been in a flood or a fire what they say is "I lost my photographs." They never say "I lost my Louis Vuitton knockoff purse." They say they lost their photographs because your photographs are your life, really. It's a representation of your life.
 
(Q) : You're really good at exposing the humanistic qualities of the dark force. What is the appeal of that to you? It fascinates me the most in this movie and in "Phone Booth" and just how you have what starts out as what might terrify any person but you expose the vulnerabilities behind what's going on. And I just wonder what that appeal is for you.
 
?Joel Schumacher) : Thanks, because I really try to do that. I think I'll always tell stories about flawed people and then put them in a pressure cooker. I think one of the problems in Western culture is there are a lot of things in human nature that are invalidated and other things that are evaluated as good and bad, and the truth is we're all the same. In other words, in order to be great in life you have to experience cowardice. No one's just brave all the time. If you think of what we consider the more noble emotions that we have you have to experience that other.

To be compassionate you must be selfish or else compassion would not be something we admire. If you were just compassionate all the time and we all were then it would not be noble, it would just be the way we are. And I think that there is a dark side to everybody and I think that people are ashamed to admit it, which is sad to me. And I don't think everybody should walk around talking about their dark force, but we all know what it's like to feel depressed, insecure, down, perhaps resentful, perhaps jealous, perhaps would love to have revenge on our minds, and I think we deny that. I think the Judeo-Christian ethic has really kind of created this mantle over everyone that I find that people are constantly telling me they're not who they are.

You know, "I'm not jealous. I don't have a jealous bone in my body." And I would say "You're the one. Because everyone else does." "Money means nothing to me," or "I'm happy for everyone's success," or whatever those are. I call them good citizen responses, because they're what you think your mother would want you to say or your priest or your rabbi or whoever it is, and your children, this is how you'd want them to say. "I'm color blind" is a great one.

First of all, I don't think people of color want you to be color blind. I think you want to accept them as who they are and not pretend that oh we just all look the same. You want to be accepted for who you are, not because no one recognizes who you are. And if you guys disagree with that please tell me. So I think there are little lies that go on all the time. I don't read reviews but someone told me that Roger Ebert, who has been very, very kind to my movies wrote once that I dare to make movies sometimes about people that people don't like. And yeah, that's part of life.

End.