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White Irish Drinkers

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

From the left, Stephen Lang, Karen Allen, Peter Riegert

Story : It’s early autumn of 1975 in Brooklyn and 18 year-old Brian Leary (Nick Thurston) is killing time, pulling off petty crimes with his street tough older brother Danny (Geoff Wigdor), whom he both idolizes and fears. They both live with their parents, Paddy (Stephen Lang), a longshoreman, and his long suffering wife, Margaret (Karen Allen) who puts up with Paddy’s drinking and abusive behavior, especially to her and Danny. Brian works for Whitey (Peter Riegert) at the failing Lafayette movie theater. Owing money to local mobsters, Whitey calls in a favor to an old friend who works with The Rolling Stones. They come up with a deal to have the Stones play at Whitey’s theater for one night only before their gig at Madison Square Garden

Opens March 25, 2011

Runtime:1 hr. 49 min.

 

Interview with Actor Peter Riegert, Actress Karen Allen, Actor Stephen Lang

 

Q) : This is such a great film; what attracted you to it? Was it the name or the script?
 
(Peter Riegert) : Well the name caught my attention for sure. I’m sure I can speak for Karen and Stephen; you don’t say yes to the name of a film. It’s the script pretty much. It certainly wasn’t the salary, so it’s the material.

(Karen Allen) : Two things attracted me. Three things really. The first one was reading the script and just thinking what a beautiful piece of writing it was. And then the second was knowing that Stephen and Peter were going to do it. That made me want to read the script is knowing that the two of them were going to do it. Then I read the script and then I had some conversations on the phone with John Gray. That was it for me.
 
(Stephen Lang) : When I read the script I was a little bit intimidated or fearful of the role just because I wasn’t quite sure that I wanted to access that stuff, or I was capable of accessing, or I was afraid I was capable of accessing. I have two sons, I have two daughters as well, but one of my boys is named Danny. But in any case I thought that in itself is a good reason to do something, when you’re a bit afraid of it I think.

But then also the conversation with John Gray on the phone, even over the phone he came across as totally authentic to me. When I got off the phone I said I trust this guy. I really do trust this guy. And I also am totally on board with Peter and Karen in saying when you hear that Peter and Karen are doing the film also you know you’re among friends. It’s a wonderful support because it’s so good to have perfect prose around you I think.
 
(Peter Riegert) : I think each job is different, but it’s a combination of those things. I knew Stephen was involved, not that the script or John needed to be legitimized, but knowing that Stephen was going to be doing the film, it’s like what Karen said, you’re brain just sets off this is not just a frivolous thing. I would have read it anyway because I read everything and within 10 pages you could tell this guy could write. And then the rest of it was where’s it going, where’s the story going.
 
(Q) : One of the things that I loved about this movie is that there are no simple emotions. There’s no good guy, there’s no bad guy, everybody has their good and has their bad. How exciting is that for you as actors to be able to play? It’s sadly somewhat rare, that level of complexity, especially your character that we can fear and empathize with and feel sorry for. How interesting is it to play all those different levels at the same time?
 
(Stephen Lang) : The word’s come up twice already, authenticity; it’s authentic feeling. I think you can define what you’re talking about, define the quality, the emotional quality of the script by talking about what’s absent a little bit. And to me what this script is absolutely devoid of is sentimentality, and that is so fantastic. I was watching last night and it bears repeated watching, this film, to watch what’s not there.

The scene where Karan comes down and gives the paint box to Nick is a gorgeous scene and it is totally set up to make you cringe, and in 9 out of 10 films it would do that and there would be a tear shed at some point, there would be an embrace at some point, there would be a hand on a cheek, there’d be something. The scene is wonderful. She gives the gift and they communicate but what you kind of think is going to happen, what would happen in the cheap novel or something like that, it never happens at all. She leaves again.
 
(Peter Riegert) : And I think the film is loaded with that.
 
(Stephen Lang) : Absolutely.
 
(Peter Riegert) : There’s a scene where the young girl that Leslie plays sees the paintings for the first time. I think she says “This makes you special.” And she’s got another incredible line which is “If I could do this I’d never stop talking about it.” And I think the hardest thing, certainly in the theater, definitely in the movies or television is how hard it is to get into the audience’s head, because I think what we do is kind of a magic trick in a way, in which the audience does most of the work, sort of what Stephen was saying.

And because we’re not asked to overact and sentimentalize the emotions you, the audience, gets to supply all of the energy to the story. So Karen doesn’t have to do anything except bring the paint and you’ll do all the other work. And I think that’s why John has a real skill for working with actors and storytelling.
 
(Stephen Lang) : I agree with that but I’d also just add to it that it’s characteristic of this world of people that they don’t express even an act of such generosity and goodness and in a way of apology or whatever it is, or something like that. It’s not elaborated on, it’s not touched upon, it’s not referenced.
 
(Peter Riegert) : And it’s the value of what a movie is. In the stage you might be given a speech about the gesture, that’s what I guess I was getting at. The picture of Karen coming down the stairs with those paints, I mean my eyes water up every time I see it. That’s what I’m seeing is my engagement is based on with the consistency of who these people are. What they don’t say.
 
(Karen Allen) : They don’t say a lot.
 
(Peter Riegert) : They don’t say a lot but most people don’t say a lot really.
 
(Q) : On that note, Karen, did you want to be able to explain her sorrow for judging him the way that she did and how proud she was when she saw what he actually was doing down there and apologize for the slap and explain it all.
 
(Karen Allen) : No, I think I kind of understood. When I read the script I kind of got the kind of simplicity and truth and cleanness of the way John had written. It’s like a relief as an actor when you don’t read all of that stuff, because a lot of times when you read script it’ll indicate what emotion should be being expressed and stuff, and that’s always slightly deadly. I think by the time I had worked with John a day or two I just felt like he would guide me if I needed guiding in the direction that he wanted a scene to go.

But we developed a kind of way of working together where I just felt like if I was just as simple and truthful with the scenes as I imagined them and sat with them, because you’re doing a lot of preparation on it. Everything goes so quick and there’s no a lot of time to rehearse, so a lot of times I was just locked in my hotel room trying to get inside the skin of this person in these situations. I would just often bring that to the set and I felt like we were very often on the same page.

Somebody said to me last night, “Oh, it must be such a huge leap for you to play a character like this,” and I thought I kind of grew up in this world. I don’t know where people think I’m from, but I mean this woman is my mom’s generation, I was the age of these boys in the early ‘70s when I was growing up. My family’s been here longer than maybe a generation or two, but this is not a foreign world to me. It’s a world that seems very familiar. I didn’t live in Brooklyn but I lived in world that was not a far cry from this world.
 
(Peter Riegert) : I think John really, his trust of actors is rare because he doesn’t indicate in his screenplays what he wants the actors to do. He writes the scenes and writes the story and looks forward to whatever the actors are going to come up with, which, like Stephen was saying, it is rare. It makes you even braver because there’s so much room to bring yourself to the material. There’s a wonderful little section where your character tells that joke about the Irish meal I think it is, that’s a six pack and a potato.

And I just thought there’s something moving about the effort that he’s putting to communicate with his kid. And it’s not a big deal, it’s not like it’s a scene where this is where the father communicates with the son, it’s just the father’s telling this joke. There’s another scene where he’s telling the joke about the Jewish woman and the specimen, so he’s got a sense of humor, and a sense of humor is a sign of creativity. So in this family is this innate urge, which I think is in all of us, to create, to communicate. The fact that it comes out in the next generation and their son is pretty amazing. But just these little touches that are so rare for us as actors to play.
 
(Q) : What was the set like? You all have established careers and you’ve been in blockbusters and great shows and everything and I was just wondering when you go to a barebones set like this and there’s no money do you just jump in?
 
(Peter Riegert) : Yeah, I think we’ve all done so many small, not small in importance but small in scale, whether it’s off Off Broadway where we started. It’s a myth that we live in this bizarre world of huge trailers and our own chefs and masseuses.
 
(Stephen Lang) : We certainly strive for that.
 
(Peter Riegert) : Yes, I wouldn’t turn it down, but it’s not our world really. And it’s such a hermetically sealed thing. You’re going to work, the stakes are high, you’re working with really good people, you’re in tunnel vision. I mean it wasn’t the worst.
 
(Stephen Lang) : If we were in this room there’d be eight dressing rooms in here, and that’s cool. But the set of course was three blocks away, and so when you get to the set and you maybe do something or get something done it’s a schlep back. And the First AD, who’s also producer on this show, is saying “It would be good if you hung out at the set because we have to be out of here by whatever time we have to be out of here.”

And so you did. I just hung on the set because it’s not like it’s that great a dressing room to go back to. And so you find a place to sit, except that’s not a good place to sit so you take the chair, and then you go over to the other place to sit, and finally you find a corner where you sit there and you go into a little thing and just wait until it’s your turn to do it. And that’s how I worked on the set, and I believe I observed other people working basically in that way as well.
 
(Karen Allen) : There were a couple of things that were challenging. One was where we actually had our little frame things changed from time to time, and sometimes it was in the same room as the production office. So there would be an entire table full of phones that were ringing and people talking on the phone and people copying things on a copy machine.

And sometimes things would slow down in the course of the day and they would have brought me two or three hours early and there was really nothing to do. I couldn’t concentrate to work on the scenes or anything, I couldn’t even get into that space, and there was maybe a chair in my little thing, and there wasn’t even a place to lie down or anything. I would find myself sort of sitting in there, and there wasn’t enough light that you could read. There was really nothing to do.
 
(Stephen Lang) : It was like being in a Sartre play. That’s what I remember.
 
(Karen Allen) : And then when you got to the set it’s like you were trying to find the little spot where you weren’t going to be in the way because they were very, very, very small little spaces. And my funniest set thing was I was in the kitchen a lot, my character was always in the kitchen, and I kept wanting to turn to actually use the real stove, to turn on the stovetop and to turn on the oven in the scenes.

And at one point, the very first time I was there I said “Oh let’s turn on the oven.” There was something about the oven. This was an old, condemned apartment that was empty and I don’t know what was going to happen to it. The first time we turned on the oven the entire apartment filled with the smell of cat poop, and they came to the conclusion that whoever had lived there previously kept the litter box in the oven. So we never turned the oven on again; that was the end of the oven.

(Stephen Lang) : Nick was actually living there, which gave the whole thing a very odd spin. One time in my search to find a place to park myself and everything I went into his room and I said this actually looks like somebody lives here. And there was Nick and I said “Oh, what are you doing?” and he said “I live here.”
 
(Karen Allen) : And the cinematographer was living there too.
 
(Stephen Lang) : A lot of fucking people were living there. It was fucking ridiculous.
 
(Karen Allen): It was freezing; it had no heat either.
 
(Peter Riegert) : Since we’ve done it before you kind of know. You realize early on this is all about doing this work, playing with people you admire, who are the new kids on the block that are showing up. I didn’t know Nick or Jeff or Leslie, and just watching all this new talent, that was kind of exciting. The work is always dominant. It really doesn’t matter. Because when people go to a movie no one leaves thinking “Wow, this was really a well budgeted movie.” They just go and have a good time.
 
(Karen Allen): I think it really enhanced the actual work to know that we were working on such a tight schedule and to have so few distractions, it was really just the character, the writing, the work, and everybody was there and there was a sense of let’s do it.
 
(Peter Riegert) : I just did a cameo, just a day of work for Cameron Crowe on a new movie he’s doing called “We Bought a Zoo,” with Matt Damon, Scarlett Johansson. It was two pages; we had the entire day, 12 hours. Now that’s the luxury of a Hollywood movie. If that were a small movie like ours in terms of budget, if we only had four hours we would have figured out a way to do it in four hours. That’s what’s different about an independent film where you’re limited in the amount of time. Your imagination and energy and creativity is forced to work fast, in a funny kind of way.

(Stephen Lang): And I bet they would agree with me that of working even on the indies we’ve all done this was quite nice. I’ve been in places that were just dreadful, and I’ve done entire films where I’ve said “No, no, I’m not going to use that. I’ll be in my car,” and I used my car as my dressing room. If I wasn’t working I would be in my car, that’s it.

(Peter Riegert) : Because of John’s nature, his leadership as the director and his calmness about getting us together that we’re going to make our day, this is going to be alright, you’re going to get to ask to do it as many times as you need, we’re not going to just shoot and run. I found it very relaxing that he was relaxed.
 
(Karen Allen): I think the real difference for me of this an independent film and other independent films I’ve worked on is we were in really good hands. Sometimes when you do independent films you’re really working with people who don’t know what they’re doing and so you’ve got all of these difficulties to deal with plus you’re working with people who kind of don’t know what their jobs are and are not quite sure how to do their jobs and a director who’s not quite sure how he’s going to shoot a scene. Between Seamus, who shot the film, and Paul Bernard, who was running the show, and John, you just never felt like you were with people who didn’t know what they were doing.
 
(Stephen Lang): This is my sixth show with Paul Bernard and Paul Bernard knows how to run a set. He knows how to get stuff done. He started off as a torpedo, basically, a third AD, then he’s a first, then a producer. He knows how to keep things under control and that was just great.

(Peter Riegert) : And the day is always moving towards the scene. There are 60, 80 people, whatever it is, and everything is about the scene. Nothing really else matters and everything has to be stripped away so that by the time it’s a shot of Karen and Stephen arguing or in a room or whatever they’re doing everything has to be devoted to that; the rest of it’s frivolous. It has to fall away. And we had a very young, inexperienced crew, but because of Paul and a couple of the department heads even they were concentrating on what was important.
 
(Stephen Lang) : That’s part of the nature of this beast also is the youth that’s involved, the learning curve that’s happening there too, and I think that’s cool. It’s just part of it and we expect that as well. Even if we don’t really think about it going in it’s a fact. There are people doing things who are doing them for the first time. Or you’ve got a young PA who has been assigned a corner to keep traffic at bay, to keep New Yorkers from going where they want to go when they want to go there, and this poor 19 year old girl is doing it and it’s fabulous, and it’s like trial by fire.
 
(Peter Riegert) : And because they’re so inexperienced if there’s a scene where the camera is here and I’m talking to somebody here, sometimes some of the crew will just be standing in the background. No one’s told them, they haven’t done this enough to realize that their mere presence in my eyes in completely distracting, even though in their head they’re going “I’m not doing anything.” “Yes, but I’m looking at you. You’ve got to move.” And they look around like “Did I rob somebody?” “No, no, it’s okay; just get out of the way.
 
(Q) : What’s next for all of you?
 
(Stephen Lang) : I’m doing “Terra Nova,” which is a new series for Fox that Spielberg is doing. Sci-fi. I play an intrepid fellow who travels back 85 million years and founds a new colony. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m like battling dinosaurs and quite possibly could be doing it for the next number of years.
 
(Karen Allen) : I’m directing a play called “Moonchildren,” which is Michael Weller’s first play that was done here in New York in I think the early ‘70s. So I’m doing this up at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, which is in Stockbridge, and I’m kind of right starting to cast it now.

(Peter Riegert): I write and direct as well, so I optioned a murder-mystery called “Field of Darkness,” by Cornelia Reed. I’ve written the screenplay and now I’m trying to find enough money to make it.
 
(Q) : And still coming up on “The Good Wife”?

(Peter Riegert) : I only did three and I thought I was going to do more because they always tell you you’re going to do more; that’s how they get you to do three. And I learned in the third episode that my character hired hookers or something as a judge and this became exposed in the courtroom. So I don’t think I’ll be back. But I did six episodes of a show I’d never heard of before called “One Tree Hill,” which has been on the air for like eight years. So this is how old I am; I’m completely unconscious with regards to things going on in the culture. I mean it was shocking; eight years and I didn’t even know it existed. It’s kind of a soap opera for 25 year olds. I guess if I were 25 maybe I’d watch it, but I’d never heard of it.
 
(Q) : It’s like the new “Dawson’s Creek.”
 
(Peter Riegert) : Now here’s the thing that’s really wild; their audience is around two and a half million people. All these niche shows and they don’t need much more than that. The last series I did was 1995, I did a series that John Byrum wrote. We did six episodes and we ere getting 13, 14 million people a week but it wasn’t enough. That’s 15, 16 years ago. So these shows can run forever. And it was great, it was fun, they treated you great. We shot that in Willington, North Carolina.
 
(Q) : Is that coming back again for another season?
 
(Peter Riegert) : They finish March 20, and as I understand these things don’t get decided until three months later. The guy who plays the leading character, James Lafferty, very sweet kid, he’s been on the show since he was 16. So he’s 24 now, that’s eight years, and I think he’s moving to New York and he wants to try and see what he can do more as an actor. All these characters are replaceable, that’s the way the show is built, but it’s a whole other world I was completely oblivious to.
 
(Q) : And the three of you knew each other before coming to this? Had you all worked together in some capacity?
 
(Peter Riegert) : Karen and I did “Animal House” a couple of decades ago. Stephen and I have met just as actors competing for jobs in New York. We’d see each other walking in and out of auditions or at bars where actors hang out and eventually we’d sit and schmooze and go “Did you ever get that job?”

(Karen Allen) : We’d never worked together before but we had wanted to. We were supposed to do a couple of different plays a couple of different times and for some reason or other it didn’t happen.

End.