el cine de estreno en Colombia: 09/01/2008

George C. Wolfe (Director), Denise Di Novi (Producer)
and Nicholas Sparks (Novelist) Q&A

QUESTION: Having directed so much in the theater, was that experience helpful in directing your first feature film? Or were they completely different?

GEORGE C. WOLFE: No. Anytime you tell me any kind of story, I think you have to try and locate the intimacy and immediacy and urgency inside of it. So, I don’t view theater, film or whatever as completely totally separate. You try to come up with a visual language which will seduce an audience into watching your story. You then craft, with the actor’s involvement, a moment-to-moment emotional arc so each moment has a vividness, which also engages the audience. So, I don’t really find that difference. The thing about this film is that I’m a control freak; I, too, obsess about every single detail on the planet, whereas in theater there is only so much of that obsession that you can do. It’s a different skill set, but nothing really I find that violently different.

QUESTION: What made you want to make the shift from theater to features?

GEORGE C. WOLFE: When I did Lackawanna Blues for HBO, it was on the second day that I thought, ‘I like this stuff.’ (Laughs) I’ve done straight plays and classical plays. I’ve done a lot of musicals; the scale of doing a musical is comparable to doing a film. And, so, I translated that, and then I would have a sort of film-to-theater dictionary that was constantly going back and forth in my head while I was translating, while I was doing it. But, ultimately, I just think I love working with actors. So, it was just more of the same, just inviting the camera. On the stage, you have to tell an audience where to look in terms of using lights and staging. Here, you have the advantage of the camera, which says, ‘This detail is important. Perceive this. Watch this. Check this out.’ So, in many respects, it was just a fun way to think about it. I didn’t find it that different.

QUESTION: Diane Lane and Richard Gere have become a classic on-screen pair. Did that help in terms of bringing this kind of chemistry to the screen?

GEORGE C. WOLFE: Well, I think that you can direct scenes. You can direct moments. You can direct actions. You can’t direct chemistry. It’s there or it isn’t. And they have it, so in many respects, that’s a really great and wonderful thing. You aren’t fighting against that rhythm. And then it’s just figuring out the rules because when you are younger you think you have rules, but you really don’t. And then as time goes on, as you experience life and you experience loss and obstacles, then your defensives grow. You don’t find yourself singing Some Enchanted Evening across a crowded room. Those words just aren’t going to come out of your mouth because across the crowded room is going to be somebody who is going to mess up, the way I understand the world, so stay away. In many respects, it was about using the chemistry and crafting the first part of the movie, and then denying that that chemistry existed. These characters are living inside of their own obstacles and their own definitions of themselves, which have served them up to that point, but are not going to serve them if they need to go forward. So, in some respects, it became a fun way to think about the movie – how their isolation and not knowing each other – how those forces and the power, if you will, of the Outer Banks with the weather, the ocean, the hurricane and air make them vulnerable to the moment, which then in turn makes them vulnerable to each other. So, it was crafting the moment-to-moment of it, but also crafting a kind of magical veneer that comes from being in a place like the Outer Banks, where you are vulnerable to nature. You are vulnerable to the power of the wind and the sea and the sand.

DENISE DI NOVI: Yeah. From my standpoint, I’d pictured Diane Lane from the first page of the book. I remember saying to [Nicholas Sparks], ‘Diane Lane popped into my mind.’ And, as a producer, it’s very risky to make a movie that relies so heavily on chemistry. There are a lot of times where you think actors are going to have chemistry and they don’t. Richard and Diane have done two movies where they had this great chemistry. They’re great friends. They have a personal chemistry in their friendship. I hit the jackpot in terms of them both wanting to do the movie because I knew it would work with the two of them. It was in my head from the very, very beginning, and I was just relentless about getting them to read the screenplay. They did really want to work together again and they both really connected with the material. But, you know, in the history of movies, there have been maybe ten movie couples that people want to see over and over again out of all the thousands of films that have been made. It doesn’t happen that often. So, as a producer, to have one of those couples in your film is just such a gift, really.

QUESTION: Denise, can you speak specifically to some things about Diane Lane that appealed to you for that character?

DENISE DI NOVI: I am the same as any woman in terms of Diane. All of my girlfriends say this (laughs), and I’m sure all the women here feel the same way— and the men. There are some things so real about Diane. She has got the combination of being larger than life and a movie star, and she’s so beautiful, but you don’t hate her for it. You want her to be your best friend. You still feel like she could, you know, live next door to you and you want to hang out with her. She has that amazing ability to be both larger than life and totally real and accessible. And, also, it’s her style of acting. I’ve always had great admiration for it in that she’s so naturalistic. She has been acting since she was a little, little girl, and it’s so in her DNA to be an actor. She comes from such a deep emotional place that I could just imagine what Diane would do with the emotional journey her character goes through. And I was thrilled with the work she has done.

QUESTION: George, can you talk about how you created the look of the movie?

GEORGE C. WOLFE: I had a great collaborator with Affonso Beato. Once again, I knew nothing about North Carolina, and I went down to the Outer Banks, I fell in love with it. One of the first things I read is that it has this history of all of these incredible shipwrecks and hurricanes happening there. There was this one statement that struck me really powerfully that said, ‘As a result the Outer Banks is a place of extraordinary beautiful and unbelievable devastation.’ I was really drawn toward that because it’s seems so right for what this movie was. And then we found this house, which the ocean was ready to devour at any given moment. I was just drawn by this rugged, fragile beauty that seems to exist out there. So, I wanted to play around with crafting that sense of rugged, fragile beauty throughout the entire movie. And also to play around with the control that Paul and Adrienne have in their own landscapes, and what happens when you take people there who are used to living in very controlled environments where nature has kept on the outside. What happens if you put them in the landscape where nature comes in through the doors and through the windows? There isn’t this divide. And what happens when you take a person and they’re exposed to the scale of God and nature and the universe? What kinds of vulnerabilities come out inside of them. So, each scene was really based on crafting that kind of visual storytelling

DENISE DI NOVI: I have never worked with a director who knew that every painting, every vase, every tiny object in that house was his vision of what should be in that house – and the whole overall conception of the colors and the look. Everybody wants to live in that house or go visit it now after seeing the movie and, unfortunately, it doesn’t exist. The attention to detail and the world that George created was, I think, so, so beautiful.

QUESTION: Nicholas, what was it like for you to see you book adapted for this film?

NICHOLAS SPARKS: This is the third film that I have made with Denise. We did Message in a Bottle and A Walk to Remember together. So, I trust Denise and am not very guarded at all when she has it. Denise understands what I am trying to accomplish, what the emotional journeys of the characters are, and so I am very comfortable leaving it in her hands. She’s wonderful in that she seeks my input – ‘Would you look at the script?’ and things like that. I will certainly do that and throw in my two cents worth, which is probably all it’s worth. I mean she has been doing this a long time. Here is why I love working with Denise. When Denise picked George, this was the perfect choice. I mean, although it’s epic and beautiful and grand when you see these beautiful scenes, it’s a very intimate film. It’s almost play-like. There are two characters. It is largely one setting. And these two characters almost have to interact like a play, and that’s very hard to do. You can’t walk out of having directed a couple of blockbusters in Hollywood and have done this film. I was listening to George explain. He had twenty-five different things he’s trying to keep all balanced that comes from this tremendous base of quality work in theater. For me, when I walked out of the film the first time I saw it, it was just this magnificent, beautiful film. It was reminiscent of Casablanca – the way they really used to act. Because when George was working, he had all of these things going through his head. I don’t know them. But Denise was smart enough to pick George. George knew them. Everything was just the way it should be.

QUESTION: Denise, when did you begin to involve Nicholas?

DENISE DI NOVI: Pretty much every draft in the screenplay, from the very first one, I had Nick read the script, and whatever changes we made, I had to feel confident that they were consistent with the characters in the story that he’s invented. It always has to be true to the essence of the book. The great thing about Nick is that he’s a collaborator. He’s very practical about it. He understands that you do have to change things in order to make it a movie. It’s very painful for some authors. They can’t even read a screenplay or sometimes even see the movie. Nick is not like that. He’s really, really useful and great partner for me and for the
director once they come in to the process.

NICHOLAS SPARKS: It was collaborative also with Richard and Diane. This is one of these very intuitive things that George understands. He works very, very closely with actors. But there’s this real collaborative effort between Denise and George and the actors. They’re trying to accomplish exactly what was in the script, but that’s where that input comes in, but you have to be an actor’s director to pull off a film like this, and that is what George did. And, of course, Denise has done this before with me. It’s perhaps a little easier for us to work together, but George came right in. I thought the film was beautiful. It was spectacular. I loved it.

QUESTION: What went into the discussions about using the letters from the book in the film?

NICHOLAS SPARKS: Using letters in literature, the epistolary form, is particularly effective if you’re doing a third-person novel, which Nights in Rodanthe was. It was really an equal-weighted story between these two wounded people going through this journey together. It’s a very circular story. So, as you’re working through this, you don’t feel a hundred percent always connected. Because you’re kind of splitting as you’re reading. It’s very emotional, this net. Then you throw this letter in and it’s in someone’s voice. And you realize, on an intuitive level, that everything you were thinking that this character would be like, boom, now it’s in his words and it’s exactly what I imagined. It’s hard to do that same thing in film because the letters I can write in my novel are three pages long. You can’t film that for three minutes. (Laughs) Again, that’s where this good sense of the collaboration comes in. How we do we capture this essence? And, ideally, it does the same thing. The advantage that a film would have that a novel doesn’t have, even though I have three pages, he has these images that he can put in there. You can see a tear dropping down the cheek. And, so, used well, they’re great.

QUESTION: Do you have a special connection to writing letters?

NICHOLAS SPARKS: I met my wife on Spring Break on a beach in Florida, which is where some of the roots of this story come from. Afterwards, she went off to her college and I went back to mine, and that’s how we fell in love. I wrote her probably 150-200 letters. This is how we got to know each other. And every anniversary, I write her a letter about the previous year. All of the ups and downs and how they made me feel, and how essentially most of everything that happens reinforces that I made the right choice when I asked her to marry me. No, I’m not speaking for her, but this is how I feel. (Laughs) I’m writing the letter. I think letters are magical. There are still people who do that. I’m one of them. You can have all the email in the world, I’ll still write a letter.

QUESTION: George, what were the benefits for you to have these two actors who have such great chemistry and have worked together before?

GEORGE C. WOLFE: It’s so great when two actors trust each other because then they will go to dark corners with each other. So, that trust was already there from the very beginning, just between Richard and Diane as actors. I think it was fun mining it. A scene, which we ended up filming a bunch of times because of weather, was when they’re fighting and they’re preparing for the hurricane and boarding up the things. We filmed it out in Rodanthe, and we got to a certain point and there was a spark in the energy between them. They were really going at each other. And then, for whatever reason, there was another take we had to do on the scene. So, we found another location because we had moved to another part of the state. We filmed that scene again literally two weeks later, and that same fire, that same spark, was there. A week later, we filmed another sequence of it and that same spark and energy was still there. It was so fascinating to me. It wasn’t just them being very smart, well-crafted film actors. They know which buttons to push inside of each other to ignite this incredible power that exists between them. It can be a nightmare having to do fragments of the same scene four different times in four different locations. And just having that incredible sense of craftsmanship and connection allowed us to do it.

QUESTION: Denise, can you talk about some of the supporting actors, like Scott Glenn?

DENISE DI NOVI: The luxury on this movie is that every actor wanted to work with George. Every actor in America would do anything to work with George. (GEORGE laughs) It was unbelievable the people I heard from because of Lackawanna Blues and because of his stature in the theatre. Actors know who the performance directors are. It was not hard to find people who wanted to play those parts and George obviously is great at casting and had great ideas. The people in the Outer Banks are so amazing and it was important to reflect that in the casting. Nick already knew about them, but George and I discovered the place through the movie, and they’re just amazing people. To find an actor that was believable, that seemed like those people in that isolated place – so salt of the earth and so connected to the environment. It was tough to picture anybody else but Scott Glenn. I’m very proud of the casting of this film. Every single person I think is just perfect. But again, I have to say, they were all lining up, really, to work with George on the movie.

GEORGE C. WOLFE: Scott has this very relaxed, masculine energy. It’s just there. I was very fascinated by this man in the story who has become a different man because of the loss of his wife. [For the character], I just wanted to find that unforced depth and texture so that it’s just there. If you sensed any effort coming out of the performance, it would ruin it. And a good friend of mine, Rosie Perez, was doing Pineapple Express, and I said, tell Scott Glenn I want him to do my movie. So, while Denise was doing the correct talk to the managers and the agents, I was going get a message to him that I want him to do this movie. So, that’s how it all worked out. So, it was nice bringing this wonderful concert of really natural, believable human beings. You’re going to watch human beings instead of watching an actor.

QUESTION: Denise, draws you as a producer to Nicholas Sparks’s books?

DENISE DI NOVI: I haven’t read a book I haven’t loved.

NICHOLAS SPARKS: We will work together again. I can guarantee that many times.

DENISE DI NOVI: I love Nick’s books so much. They speak to me as a woman and in my personal life as much as they do as a film producer. The message in every one of Nick’s books is so important. They’re always about healing and love; how important love is; how important family is; how important children are. They’re not just some of the greatest romances you’ve ever read. One of the things I really admire about this book [Nights in Rodanthe] that speaks to me personally is the children. The relationships between parents and children in the book are so important, and I think it’s why the books resonate so much. Every single book is a best seller, and he continues to sells books because they work on many levels. They also make me feel great in terms of producing them as movies because I feel like I’m helping put something inspirational out there in a time when, as we all know, especially now, we really could some of that.

QUESTION: Nicholas, how did you start as a novelist?

NICHOLAS SPARKS: I wrote my first novel at the age of nineteen. I wrote my second novel at the age of 22. I wrote The Notebook at 28. That was the first one I attempted to get published. The first agent who got my query letter asked for the book. She then signed me on as an agent and pretty much the first publishing house took it after that. There wasn’t a rigorous role through all these things.

QUESTION: You have talked about your connection to Greek tragedy in your storytelling. Can you talk about that?

NICHOLAS SPARKS: When you see Nights in Rodanthe, you see it, or if you read one of my books, you see it. You go through all of the emotions of life. It’s life in a microcosm. That’s what the plays of Sophocles were. They were a journey through all of the emotions of life. That is the basis of them. I just find that much more interesting. This has to feel real. Everything that you see in that film, Nights in Rodanthe – I’ll tell you what, storms hit that place every year. People are isolated all the time. That’s what happened. People fall in love in their forties. People also fall in love quickly. All of these things are very real. In this particular film, you needed someone like George. This was intimate. This had to draw on these characters’ performances. You had to pull everything in, every scene – everything in every scene had to work to move this without crossing over that melodramatic line. And that’s why I couldn’t have been happier with George, and then, of course, Denise. Then they both understood this chemistry thing. They make my job easy. I just get to sit back and go, ‘Wow, that’s great! I love that.’

George C. Wolfe (Director), Denise Di Novi (Producer)

and Nicholas Sparks (Novelist) Q&A

QUESTION: Having directed so much in the theater, was that experience helpful in directing your first feature film? Or were they completely different?

GEORGE C. WOLFE: No. Anytime you tell me any kind of story, I think you have to try and locate the intimacy and immediacy and urgency inside of it. So, I don’t view theater, film or whatever as completely totally separate. You try to come up with a visual language which will seduce an audience into watching your story. You then craft, with the actor’s involvement, a moment-to-moment emotional arc so each moment has a vividness, which also engages the audience. So, I don’t really find that difference. The thing about this film is that I’m a control freak; I, too, obsess about every single detail on the planet, whereas in theater there is only so much of that obsession that you can do. It’s a different skill set, but nothing really I find that violently different.

QUESTION: What made you want to make the shift from theater to features?

GEORGE C. WOLFE: When I did Lackawanna Blues for HBO, it was on the second day that I thought, ‘I like this stuff.’ (Laughs) I’ve done straight plays and classical plays. I’ve done a lot of musicals; the scale of doing a musical is comparable to doing a film. And, so, I translated that, and then I would have a sort of film-to-theater dictionary that was constantly going back and forth in my head while I was translating, while I was doing it. But, ultimately, I just think I love working with actors. So, it was just more of the same, just inviting the camera. On the stage, you have to tell an audience where to look in terms of using lights and staging. Here, you have the advantage of the camera, which says, ‘This detail is important. Perceive this. Watch this. Check this out.’ So, in many respects, it was just a fun way to think about it. I didn’t find it that different.

QUESTION: Diane Lane and Richard Gere have become a classic on-screen pair. Did that help in terms of bringing this kind of chemistry to the screen?

GEORGE C. WOLFE: Well, I think that you can direct scenes. You can direct moments. You can direct actions. You can’t direct chemistry. It’s there or it isn’t. And they have it, so in many respects, that’s a really great and wonderful thing. You aren’t fighting against that rhythm. And then it’s just figuring out the rules because when you are younger you think you have rules, but you really don’t. And then as time goes on, as you experience life and you experience loss and obstacles, then your defensives grow. You don’t find yourself singing Some Enchanted Evening across a crowded room. Those words just aren’t going to come out of your mouth because across the crowded room is going to be somebody who is going to mess up, the way I understand the world, so stay away. In many respects, it was about using the chemistry and crafting the first part of the movie, and then denying that that chemistry existed. These characters are living inside of their own obstacles and their own definitions of themselves, which have served them up to that point, but are not going to serve them if they need to go forward. So, in some respects, it became a fun way to think about the movie – how their isolation and not knowing each other – how those forces and the power, if you will, of the Outer Banks with the weather, the ocean, the hurricane and air make them vulnerable to the moment, which then in turn makes them vulnerable to each other. So, it was crafting the moment-to-moment of it, but also crafting a kind of magical veneer that comes from being in a place like the Outer Banks, where you are vulnerable to nature. You are vulnerable to the power of the wind and the sea and the sand.

DENISE DI NOVI: Yeah. From my standpoint, I’d pictured Diane Lane from the first page of the book. I remember saying to [Nicholas Sparks], ‘Diane Lane popped into my mind.’ And, as a producer, it’s very risky to make a movie that relies so heavily on chemistry. There are a lot of times where you think actors are going to have chemistry and they don’t. Richard and Diane have done two movies where they had this great chemistry. They’re great friends. They have a personal chemistry in their friendship. I hit the jackpot in terms of them both wanting to do the movie because I knew it would work with the two of them. It was in my head from the very, very beginning, and I was just relentless about getting them to read the screenplay. They did really want to work together again and they both really connected with the material. But, you know, in the history of movies, there have been maybe ten movie couples that people want to see over and over again out of all the thousands of films that have been made. It doesn’t happen that often. So, as a producer, to have one of those couples in your film is just such a gift, really.

QUESTION: Denise, can you speak specifically to some things about Diane Lane that appealed to you for that character?

DENISE DI NOVI: I am the same as any woman in terms of Diane. All of my girlfriends say this (laughs), and I’m sure all the women here feel the same way— and the men. There are some things so real about Diane. She has got the combination of being larger than life and a movie star, and she’s so beautiful, but you don’t hate her for it. You want her to be your best friend. You still feel like she could, you know, live next door to you and you want to hang out with her. She has that amazing ability to be both larger than life and totally real and accessible. And, also, it’s her style of acting. I’ve always had great admiration for it in that she’s so naturalistic. She has been acting since she was a little, little girl, and it’s so in her DNA to be an actor. She comes from such a deep emotional place that I could just imagine what Diane would do with the emotional journey her character goes through. And I was thrilled with the work she has done.

QUESTION: George, can you talk about how you created the look of the movie?

GEORGE C. WOLFE: I had a great collaborator with Affonso Beato. Once again, I knew nothing about North Carolina, and I went down to the Outer Banks, I fell in love with it. One of the first things I read is that it has this history of all of these incredible shipwrecks and hurricanes happening there. There was this one statement that struck me really powerfully that said, ‘As a result the Outer Banks is a place of extraordinary beautiful and unbelievable devastation.’ I was really drawn toward that because it’s seems so right for what this movie was. And then we found this house, which the ocean was ready to devour at any given moment. I was just drawn by this rugged, fragile beauty that seems to exist out there. So, I wanted to play around with crafting that sense of rugged, fragile beauty throughout the entire movie. And also to play around with the control that Paul and Adrienne have in their own landscapes, and what happens when you take people there who are used to living in very controlled environments where nature has kept on the outside. What happens if you put them in the landscape where nature comes in through the doors and through the windows? There isn’t this divide. And what happens when you take a person and they’re exposed to the scale of God and nature and the universe? What kinds of vulnerabilities come out inside of them. So, each scene was really based on crafting that kind of visual storytelling

DENISE DI NOVI: I have never worked with a director who knew that every painting, every vase, every tiny object in that house was his vision of what should be in that house – and the whole overall conception of the colors and the look. Everybody wants to live in that house or go visit it now after seeing the movie and, unfortunately, it doesn’t exist. The attention to detail and the world that George created was, I think, so, so beautiful.

QUESTION: Nicholas, what was it like for you to see you book adapted for this film?

NICHOLAS SPARKS: This is the third film that I have made with Denise. We did Message in a Bottle and A Walk to Remember together. So, I trust Denise and am not very guarded at all when she has it. Denise understands what I am trying to accomplish, what the emotional journeys of the characters are, and so I am very comfortable leaving it in her hands. She’s wonderful in that she seeks my input – ‘Would you look at the script?’ and things like that. I will certainly do that and throw in my two cents worth, which is probably all it’s worth. I mean she has been doing this a long time. Here is why I love working with Denise. When Denise picked George, this was the perfect choice. I mean, although it’s epic and beautiful and grand when you see these beautiful scenes, it’s a very intimate film. It’s almost play-like. There are two characters. It is largely one setting. And these two characters almost have to interact like a play, and that’s very hard to do. You can’t walk out of having directed a couple of blockbusters in Hollywood and have done this film. I was listening to George explain. He had twenty-five different things he’s trying to keep all balanced that comes from this tremendous base of quality work in theater. For me, when I walked out of the film the first time I saw it, it was just this magnificent, beautiful film. It was reminiscent of Casablanca – the way they really used to act. Because when George was working, he had all of these things going through his head. I don’t know them. But Denise was smart enough to pick George. George knew them. Everything was just the way it should be.

QUESTION: Denise, when did you begin to involve Nicholas?

DENISE DI NOVI: Pretty much every draft in the screenplay, from the very first one, I had Nick read the script, and whatever changes we made, I had to feel confident that they were consistent with the characters in the story that he’s invented. It always has to be true to the essence of the book. The great thing about Nick is that he’s a collaborator. He’s very practical about it. He understands that you do have to change things in order to make it a movie. It’s very painful for some authors. They can’t even read a screenplay or sometimes even see the movie. Nick is not like that. He’s really, really useful and great partner for me and for the

director once they come in to the process.

NICHOLAS SPARKS: It was collaborative also with Richard and Diane. This is one of these very intuitive things that George understands. He works very, very closely with actors. But there’s this real collaborative effort between Denise and George and the actors. They’re trying to accomplish exactly what was in the script, but that’s where that input comes in, but you have to be an actor’s director to pull off a film like this, and that is what George did. And, of course, Denise has done this before with me. It’s perhaps a little easier for us to work together, but George came right in. I thought the film was beautiful. It was spectacular. I loved it.

QUESTION: What went into the discussions about using the letters from the book in the film?

NICHOLAS SPARKS: Using letters in literature, the epistolary form, is particularly effective if you’re doing a third-person novel, which Nights in Rodanthe was. It was really an equal-weighted story between these two wounded people going through this journey together. It’s a very circular story. So, as you’re working through this, you don’t feel a hundred percent always connected. Because you’re kind of splitting as you’re reading. It’s very emotional, this net. Then you throw this letter in and it’s in someone’s voice. And you realize, on an intuitive level, that everything you were thinking that this character would be like, boom, now it’s in his words and it’s exactly what I imagined. It’s hard to do that same thing in film because the letters I can write in my novel are three pages long. You can’t film that for three minutes. (Laughs) Again, that’s where this good sense of the collaboration comes in. How we do we capture this essence? And, ideally, it does the same thing. The advantage that a film would have that a novel doesn’t have, even though I have three pages, he has these images that he can put in there. You can see a tear dropping down the cheek. And, so, used well, they’re great.

QUESTION: Do you have a special connection to writing letters?

NICHOLAS SPARKS: I met my wife on Spring Break on a beach in Florida, which is where some of the roots of this story come from. Afterwards, she went off to her college and I went back to mine, and that’s how we fell in love. I wrote her probably 150-200 letters. This is how we got to know each other. And every anniversary, I write her a letter about the previous year. All of the ups and downs and how they made me feel, and how essentially most of everything that happens reinforces that I made the right choice when I asked her to marry me. No, I’m not speaking for her, but this is how I feel. (Laughs) I’m writing the letter. I think letters are magical. There are still people who do that. I’m one of them. You can have all the email in the world, I’ll still write a letter.

QUESTION: George, what were the benefits for you to have these two actors who have such great chemistry and have worked together before?

GEORGE C. WOLFE: It’s so great when two actors trust each other because then they will go to dark corners with each other. So, that trust was already there from the very beginning, just between Richard and Diane as actors. I think it was fun mining it. A scene, which we ended up filming a bunch of times because of weather, was when they’re fighting and they’re preparing for the hurricane and boarding up the things. We filmed it out in Rodanthe, and we got to a certain point and there was a spark in the energy between them. They were really going at each other. And then, for whatever reason, there was another take we had to do on the scene. So, we found another location because we had moved to another part of the state. We filmed that scene again literally two weeks later, and that same fire, that same spark, was there. A week later, we filmed another sequence of it and that same spark and energy was still there. It was so fascinating to me. It wasn’t just them being very smart, well-crafted film actors. They know which buttons to push inside of each other to ignite this incredible power that exists between them. It can be a nightmare having to do fragments of the same scene four different times in four different locations. And just having that incredible sense of craftsmanship and connection allowed us to do it.

QUESTION: Denise, can you talk about some of the supporting actors, like Scott Glenn?

DENISE DI NOVI: The luxury on this movie is that every actor wanted to work with George. Every actor in America would do anything to work with George. (GEORGE laughs) It was unbelievable the people I heard from because of Lackawanna Blues and because of his stature in the theatre. Actors know who the performance directors are. It was not hard to find people who wanted to play those parts and George obviously is great at casting and had great ideas. The people in the Outer Banks are so amazing and it was important to reflect that in the casting. Nick already knew about them, but George and I discovered the place through the movie, and they’re just amazing people. To find an actor that was believable, that seemed like those people in that isolated place – so salt of the earth and so connected to the environment. It was tough to picture anybody else but Scott Glenn. I’m very proud of the casting of this film. Every single person I think is just perfect. But again, I have to say, they were all lining up, really, to work with George on the movie.

GEORGE C. WOLFE: Scott has this very relaxed, masculine energy. It’s just there. I was very fascinated by this man in the story who has become a different man because of the loss of his wife. [For the character], I just wanted to find that unforced depth and texture so that it’s just there. If you sensed any effort coming out of the performance, it would ruin it. And a good friend of mine, Rosie Perez, was doing Pineapple Express, and I said, tell Scott Glenn I want him to do my movie. So, while Denise was doing the correct talk to the managers and the agents, I was going get a message to him that I want him to do this movie. So, that’s how it all worked out. So, it was nice bringing this wonderful concert of really natural, believable human beings. You’re going to watch human beings instead of watching an actor.

QUESTION: Denise, draws you as a producer to Nicholas Sparks’s books?

DENISE DI NOVI: I haven’t read a book I haven’t loved.

NICHOLAS SPARKS: We will work together again. I can guarantee that many times.

DENISE DI NOVI: I love Nick’s books so much. They speak to me as a woman and in my personal life as much as they do as a film producer. The message in every one of Nick’s books is so important. They’re always about healing and love; how important love is; how important family is; how important children are. They’re not just some of the greatest romances you’ve ever read. One of the things I really admire about this book [Nights in Rodanthe] that speaks to me personally is the children. The relationships between parents and children in the book are so important, and I think it’s why the books resonate so much. Every single book is a best seller, and he continues to sells books because they work on many levels. They also make me feel great in terms of producing them as movies because I feel like I’m helping put something inspirational out there in a time when, as we all know, especially now, we really could some of that.

QUESTION: Nicholas, how did you start as a novelist?

NICHOLAS SPARKS: I wrote my first novel at the age of nineteen. I wrote my second novel at the age of 22. I wrote The Notebook at 28. That was the first one I attempted to get published. The first agent who got my query letter asked for the book. She then signed me on as an agent and pretty much the first publishing house took it after that. There wasn’t a rigorous role through all these things.

QUESTION: You have talked about your connection to Greek tragedy in your storytelling. Can you talk about that?

NICHOLAS SPARKS: When you see Nights in Rodanthe, you see it, or if you read one of my books, you see it. You go through all of the emotions of life. It’s life in a microcosm. That’s what the plays of Sophocles were. They were a journey through all of the emotions of life. That is the basis of them. I just find that much more interesting. This has to feel real. Everything that you see in that film, Nights in Rodanthe – I’ll tell you what, storms hit that place every year. People are isolated all the time. That’s what happened. People fall in love in their forties. People also fall in love quickly. All of these things are very real. In this particular film, you needed someone like George. This was intimate. This had to draw on these characters’ performances. You had to pull everything in, every scene – everything in every scene had to work to move this without crossing over that melodramatic line. And that’s why I couldn’t have been happier with George, and then, of course, Denise. Then they both understood this chemistry thing. They make my job easy. I just get to sit back and go, ‘Wow, that’s great! I love that.’

el cine de estreno en Colombia

lunes, 29 de septiembre de 2008

Noches de Tormenta

CINE ALEMAN EN EL FESTIVAL DE CINE DE BOGOTA.

“Los Piratas De Edelwise” De Niko Brücher.

“Cuatro Minutos” o “Four Minutes” De Chris Kraus

CINE ALEMAN EN EL FESTIVAL DE CINE DE BOGOTA.

viernes, 26 de septiembre de 2008

Noches de Tormenta (Entrevista Diane lane. Wolfe Di Novi y Nicholas Sparks)

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