Here’s a question: How many years do you have to spend watching actors through a camera before you realize maybe that’s what you were meant to be doing all along? If you’re Jay Duplass, you might also wonder why your brother Mark didn’t let you in on how fun and freeing it can be a little sooner. But no matter. At a time in life when most actors are rushing the director’s chair, the elder Duplass brother is running in the opposite direction on Transparent, and killing it. It’s the second time he missed the obvious. Fourteen years ago, surveying the wreckage of 27 failed projects and desperate of ever becoming a filmmaker, he was ready to chuck it for grad school. That’s when he finally discovered the crucial ingredient to building one of the most successful creative careers in the business. Someone should really tell him these things up front.
Here’s a question: How many years do you have to spend watching actors through a camera before you realize maybe that’s what you were meant to be doing all along? If you’re Jay Duplass, you might also wonder why your brother Mark didn’t let you in on how fun and freeing it can be a little sooner. But no matter. At a time in life when most actors are rushing the director’s chair, the elder Duplass brother is running in the opposite direction on Transparent, and killing it. It’s the second time he missed the obvious. Fourteen years ago, surveying the wreckage of 27 failed projects and desperate of ever becoming a filmmaker, he was ready to chuck it for grad school. That’s when he finally discovered the crucial ingredient to building one of the most successful creative careers in the business. Someone should really tell him these things up front.
If you’ve always thought of Hollywood as a competitive, jealousy-ridden place where success is watched, compared and envied, Mike White is not here to disillusion you. And his latest film suggests the world inside your own head might not be so different. Few writers understand our inner dialogs better, and that can be embarrassing. Not to mention touching, depressing and yes, funny. We talk to one of the business’s most talented screenwriters (and directors, and actors) about why he feels more alive the further he gets from it, and his “uncool” struggle with the siren call of ambition. But if the result is work like Chuck & Buck, School of Rock, Year of the Dog, Enlightened, Beatriz at Dinner, and Brad’s Status, can ambition be so bad? Throughout his career, White has worked to create an alternate kind of story and protagonist. “It makes me feel like I’m not completely crazy.” Us, too. Thanks, Mike.
If you’ve always thought of Hollywood as a competitive, jealousy-ridden place where success is watched, compared and envied, Mike White is not here to disillusion you. And his latest film suggests the world inside your own head might not be so different. Few writers understand our inner dialogs better, and that can be embarrassing. Not to mention touching, depressing and yes, funny. We talk to one of the business’s most talented screenwriters (and directors, and actors) about why he feels more alive the further he gets from it, and his “uncool” struggle with the siren call of ambition. But if the result is work like Chuck & Buck, School of Rock, Year of the Dog, Enlightened, Beatriz at Dinner, and Brad’s Status, can ambition be so bad? Throughout his career, White has worked to create an alternate kind of story and protagonist. “It makes me feel like I’m not completely crazy.” Us, too. Thanks, Mike.
If you’ve always thought of Hollywood as a competitive, jealousy-ridden place where success is watched, compared and envied, Mike White is not here to disillusion you. And his latest film suggests the world inside your own head might not be so different. Few writers understand our inner dialogs better, and that can be embarrassing. Not to mention touching, depressing and yes, funny. We talk to one of the business’s most talented screenwriters (and directors, and actors) about why he feels more alive the further he gets from it, and his “uncool” struggle with the siren call of ambition. But if the result is work like Chuck & Buck, School of Rock, Year of the Dog, Enlightened, Beatriz at Dinner, and Brad’s Status, can ambition be so bad? Throughout his career, White has worked to create an alternate kind of story and protagonist. “It makes me feel like I’m not completely crazy.” Us, too. Thanks, Mike.
It’s ironic Holly Hunter won an Oscar for The Piano, in which she did her own playing. If she’d had the chops she wanted, we’d never have seen her in that movie, Raising Arizona, Broadcast News or so many others that made us swear she was born to act. Fortunately, she found acting almost as sacred and transportive as music, her original dream. Working with a string of the best directors in the business right out of the gate helped – and led to some later-career disillusionment. But Hunter’s not as ambitious for her career as she is for her characters and what they can tell us about each other. An actor’s actor talks about empathy, and how she makes us feel things we never see on screen in The Big Sick and Strange Weather. She also shares what it’s like having Bill Hurt call bullshit on you, and why she will not be having the stuffed crab, thank you.
It’s ironic Holly Hunter won an Oscar for The Piano, in which she did her own playing. If she’d had the chops she wanted, we’d never have seen her in that movie, Raising Arizona, Broadcast News or so many others that made us swear she was born to act. Fortunately, she found acting almost as sacred and transportive as music, her original dream. Working with a string of the best directors in the business right out of the gate helped – and led to some later-career disillusionment. But Hunter’s not as ambitious for her career as she is for her characters and what they can tell us about each other. An actor’s actor talks about empathy, and how she makes us feel things we never see on screen in The Big Sick and Strange Weather. She also shares what it’s like having Bill Hurt call bullshit on you, and why she will not be having the stuffed crab, thank you.
It’s ironic Holly Hunter won an Oscar for The Piano, in which she did her own playing. If she’d had the chops she wanted, we’d never have seen her in that movie, Raising Arizona, Broadcast News or so many others that made us swear she was born to act. Fortunately, she found acting almost as sacred and transportive as music, her original dream. Working with a string of the best directors in the business right out of the gate helped – and led to some later-career disillusionment. But Hunter’s not as ambitious for her career as she is for her characters and what they can tell us about each other. An actor’s actor talks about empathy, and how she makes us feel things we never see on screen in The Big Sick and Strange Weather. She also shares what it’s like having Bill Hurt call bullshit on you, and why she will not be having the stuffed crab, thank you.
