The Marshall and the Movies project is now a teenager! 13 years ago tonight, I sat down at a screening of Julie & Julia and internalized Julie Powell’s own impetus to self-publish: “I could write a blog. I have thoughts.”
I feel as if I say this each year when this date on the calendar rolls around and forces me into self-reflection, but it’s truly wild to see all that’s come from an acted-upon errant impulse. It’s gone further and longer than I could have imagined (none of which would be possible with your time, attention, and support, of course). With each passing year, new doors open and exciting paths emerge.
In year 13, it’s been really heartening and exciting to see how my personal (and often private) passion has created connections both virtual and real. My first trip to the Venice Film Festival resulted in my feeling like a part of a true critical community for the first time, and that sense of belonging emboldened and empowered me to further forge those valuable connections. The direct connection fostered by moving my non-professionally commissioned writing to a newsletter format has also made me feel like I’m an even more ingrained part of your lives. After all, you are welcoming me into a space where my words sit alongside some of the most personal and intimate communication you do. I don’t take that responsibility lightly. I hope I have earned it.
I know I did not quite live up to the lofty schedule and ambitions I set for myself when I launched this Substack a year ago today. I tend to be my harshest critic, but for those of you who signed up expecting more regular content for your dollars, I do sincerely apologize if you feel you did not receive your money’s worth. The best is yet to come, both in consistency and quality. Join the fun if you don’t already subscribe!
This particular milestone is an emotional one for me as it coincides with my upcoming 30th birthday. I had no idea what the finish line, or even this stage of the race, would look like when I started this writing about film thing at 16. (I couldn’t!) But sometimes I just have to stop myself to acknowledge how wild and wonderful it is that I am a professional film critic living and working in New York City. It’s better than a dream. It’s reality, and I get to share it with all of you.
If I can pinpoint anything that’s shifted recently in my writing, it’s that I’ve had the tremendous good fortune to interview some really extraordinary film artists. I have to pinch myself that I no longer just talk about movies but can often times talk with them by their proxy representation. These generous artisans have taught me so much about what goes into production, elevating my understanding beyond mere production. I think — I hope — it shows.
So rather than pontificate (at least, any more than I already have here) as if I am the source of light, I wanted to do something different. Let me make it explicit that if I’m shining, it’s because I’m reflecting the light of others. Here are 10 of my favorite takeaways from interviews over the years and what they’ve taught me about what goes into making a film.
John Crowley, director of Brooklyn, corrected my presumption that actors see their careers as a linear trajectory like a corporate worker. From Movie Mezzanine in 2015:
Whether by coincidence or by choice, you’ve worked with a number of actors right before they really hit it big: Cillian Murphy in Intermission, Andrew Garfield in Boy A, and now Saoirse Ronan and Emory Cohen in Brooklyn. How do you navigate your role as the director with these actors on the cusp at a pivotal point in their careers?
You have to keep in mind, when I’m working with them it never feels like they’re on the cusp of anything. All they’re doing is this role, and that’s the key to it. They never take on the role with the view to getting somewhere else career-wise. That’s what’s exceptional about those performances: You get an actor with nothing to lose than to go for broke with the role.
In each case, they’re all very difficult parts to cast—each took a while. Saoirse was different; [she] was the first piece of casting I did when I became attached the film, and she was the best choice—[…]the most obvious choice. She was the right age and of that generation that could carry it.
Emory took a while to cast, but when we were casting Boy A, it was equally hard to find Andrew. We saw a lot of actors for that role, and he put himself on tape because he was shooting a film in L.A. at the time. That was very similar to what Emory did, putting himself on tape for us. In each instance, we went, “There’s our guy, there’s no question that’s him.”
That was the end of quite a long process, but it takes a bit of time to convince other people. Not now, obviously, because they go onto bigger and better things in their career trajectory! But it’s very exciting to find a young actor who’s just ready to do the work and catapult themselves only because of the work, not because of a career strategy.
The late, great Lynn Shelton — who I talked to about what tragically became her last film, Sword of Trust — taught me that finding the process that works for you takes trial-and-error, effort, and being unafraid to fail. You’re never too old to start or figure it out, and everything you’ve done can play some part in honing your craft. From Slant Magazine in 2019:
You’ve described your writing process as being “upside-down,” where the script develops alongside the characters. How did you develop this writing style?
I never went to traditional film school. I had this long, circuitous route to get to what I’m doing. I started as a theater actor, then I went to photography and started doing experimental work, but everything as a solo artist. The most important work of the film, making the process of the acting, is obstructed at every turn by the process of making it. You’re out of order. In theater, you at least get to play a story from beginning to end and feel it out. You’re at scene 35 on the first day and like, “What’s happened before this? Where am I emotionally?” And then you’ve got to do it 40 times with the camera in different positions and act like nobody else is there. The whole thing is so hard, unless you’re Meryl Streep! But if you’re not working with Meryl Streep, what do you do as a director? I need real people on screen.
My second feature, My Effortless Brilliance, was a total experiment. I came up with these characters in my head and tried to cast them from a pretty small pool of actors. They were nothing like the characters. I realized, “What if you did it the other way? What if you had a person you wanted to work with…” That was where I started with that idea, and all I cared about was to make it feel like a documentary. I wanted you to turn the TV on and be like, “What am I watching? Am I in these people’s lives?” And people have said they’ve had that experience where they’ll turn it on in the middle of Showtime and have no idea what they’re watching but that it feels like a documentary. Which is like, “Yes! That’s what I meant.”
And then I honed it with Humpday. Once I knew I could work in that way, I upped the stakes. I’ll bring in a few lights. I had said, “No lights! Me and another camera operator with tiny cameras, a boom op, that’s it.” I eliminated the crew. But that was where I came up with that initial impulse, to make it feel really real. If the character fits the actor like a glove because it’s half them or three-quarters them and they’ve developed it with me…I want real humans.
Kantemir Balagov, Russian director of Beanpole, showed me how artists think about their own growth like anyone else. While critics look for consistency, they often seek change. From Slant Magazine in 2020:
You’ve frequently referred back to the advice of your mentor Alexander Sokurov. Now that you’ve made two films of your own, are there any areas where you’ve gone your own way or found your own wisdom?
As an auteur, I want to be independent. But as a human being, I feel a connection with him. I really appreciate it.
In recent interviews, you’ve said that you feel like you’re still searching for your style. What does the end result of that search look like for you? A single, identifiable aesthetic or a more intangible voice?
It’s hard to describe. It’s you who will decide.
Don’t put that pressure on me!
I was so curious, I asked Sokurov when I was studying what’s the difference between stagnation and an author’s signature. He said to me that you should find it on your own, I don’t have the answer for you.
I get the sense that artists tend to look for stories that inspire you, and you all don’t think of necessarily envision a linear career path in the same way that journalists do. Scorsese, for example, makes so many different kinds of films, but you can always tell that he made them.
That’s why I was curious about the difference between style and stagnation. I really admire many contemporary directors, but so many of their works are stagnant. I’m afraid of that. I’m afraid that my third film will be a sign of stagnation.
Odessa Young, a true rising star who goes toe-to-toe with the titanic screen presence of Elisabeth Moss in Shirley, explained to me how actors can learn from each other. While plenty of forces in art and life pit them against one another, collaboration can breed an openness to evolving one’s own understanding of their form. From Slant Magazine in 2020:
You’ve said that you learn by osmosis rather than through formal training. What did you take away from working with Elisabeth, Michael, Logan, or any actor in Shirley?
Each of them has very different backgrounds, upbringings, philosophies, and methods—whatever you want to call it. With Lizzie, because she was going back and forth doing all these jobs at once, I remember asking her one day, “How do you do it?” And she just said, “I dunno, you just do it.” And that was a nice thing to hear because, yeah, you do just do it. It doesn’t matter what happens, you just have to trust yourself to get through it and do it.
As for Michael, he’s had a lot of training. He really came in approaching the project like a play, being very meticulous with rehearsal. I remember him mentioning that he would rehearse the dinner table scene by himself around his living room table, laying it all out like it was going to be in the movie. He would rehearse and put imaginary people at each chair. It was the first time that I’d ever seen such a theatrical process on film, and it was really inspiring because you watch it in the film and he’s so pitch-perfect. He doesn’t drop a beat. His performance is so tight and sleek. You can see the work that he’s put in, but it’s not overbearing. It feels natural, so lived in. To see something like that and the process of it made me want to work harder and take it seriously because you can get comfortable with your intuition. Intuition can get you far, but it can only get you so far. At some point, you have to start putting some blood, sweat, and tears into it. Watching Michael work through his process, it’s like, “Oh, that shit does work!” You can really use that training, and it was a joy to watch.
Vicky Krieps, star of Phantom Thread and the more recent Bergman Island, elucidated plainly the kind of transference between actor and character for which critics so often like to play armchair psychologist. It was moving to hear that laid out in such vivid terms. From Slant Magazine in 2021:
It strikes me that you as a person went on the same journey that your character does in Bergman Island. Things can start out sad, but the very act of telling your own story can empower your sense of selfhood. Did you feel that interplay?
I think Chris and making the movie rubbed off on me a lot, in ways I cannot even say. And the character became the character also because of what I was going through. In the beginning, I read Chris as a mother and an artist, too, this balance that’s almost impossible. You try to find it, and so many movies now are telling this story. But then, doing it, I realize it’s more about letting go. You have your fears, you have your expectations, and you have this feeling of missing and longing which we all have. At some point, you just have to let go and say, “Well, this is me. This is my weakness.” Chris, I think, lets go and accepts that she will never write a story the way that [her husband] does. She will never sit down and have her structure or her way of how it works. But she will then just sit down, close her eyes, and tell the story.
And as Chris was letting go, as an actress I was letting go of the idea of the actress I have to be at this time in my life. I did Phantom Thread before, and that was very hard because it become a huge [success]. Now that I’ve done this movie, who’s Vicky the actress? [More importantly], who’s Vicky the person? Everyone was asking me, “What is the next movie you’re doing now? Who’s the actress you’re going to become?” It was really difficult because I suddenly had all these references in my head as people were comparing me to all these famous people. “You remind me of this person,” or “You should really be in this and this movie.” My head was full of this, and my self was nowhere. And I had to let go of this stress and say, “Well, I just do the next thing that feels natural, which is just do another French arthouse movie,” which is maybe what I would have done before Phantom Thread. That was very important for me.
Franz Rogowski, a German actor whose tour-de-force performance in Great Freedom confirms he’s one of our most exciting working thespians, gave such fascinating insights into the limits of the put-on “method acting” that actors love to brag about in press. His makes for a well-adjusted philosophy about what acting can and cannot do. From Slant Magazine in 2022:
Something I’ve noticed in your interviews is that you’re quick to note that you cannot truly know in Great Freedom what it’s like to be a prisoner, or with Transit to be a refugee. Is that part of your process: reminding yourself that you can rely on certain artistic tools to approximate or substitute for an experience but never fully replicate it?
I’m not sure if it’s the method or recipe that I will always follow, but it’s true that I have a tendency to understand a character’s inner life like an apartment. I can live in this apartment, I can use the tools, I can cook some nice food and sleep in this bed, but it’s not really my furniture! [laughs] I would never try to put my stuff into this apartment; I would never try to change my way of living because of this person’s life. Often, I find it a bit disturbing when I see actors pretending that they know how it feels like to be, I don’t know, a traumatized Jew in a concentration camp. I think the reality of our characters, in my case, are often more defined by the fact that it’s cold or that you’re looking for your son. You have very concrete physical needs and an emotional drama that you’re trapped in. But I have a tendency not to play professions or to try to embody history because I think it leads to misunderstanding. It’s better to listen to people that really know. And when it comes to creating fiction, I think I prefer that.
Josh O’Connor, who is quickly becoming one of my favorite young working actors, has one of the most sophisticated approaches to physicality. It’s something we often notice only at its most extremes, but O’Connor has mastered how to enact it on smaller scales. I was fascinated by the fact that I could pick up on his bodily contortions and their connection to his character in a mild-mannered domestic drama like Hope Gap, and he was kind enough to break down his approach. From Slant Magazine in 2020:
I’m always so impressed by how you adjust your body for roles, be it slowly relieving the tension and violence of Johnny in God’s Own Country, the humorous stiffness of Mr. Elton in Emma, or speaking through your teeth as Prince Charles on The Crown. How do you approach this physicality when you don’t have the luxury of a movement coach?
A lot of that I do on my own anyway. The revelation from The Crown that I discovered was that there’s such a thing as a movement coach. It’s going to be hard to turn back now because Polly Bennett, who I worked with on The Crown, is exquisite and brilliant. All the detail on God’s Own Country was me and Francis Lee, the film’s director.
The biggest thing to do with anything dealing with physicality is making sure it comes from a place that isn’t just an aesthetic decision. For instance, Prince Charles is a person who’s lived most of his life as an isolated, lonely child. I was looking at footage of Prince Charles and [saw] how he has his arms constantly in his pockets, locked in. I didn’t want to just copy that, which might be fine, because when you see someone just mimicking something, it looks like you’re mimicking something rather than inhabiting. Rather than do that, I wanted to find the reason for why he might be closed off.
With Hope Gap, what I found so challenging was that, in some ways, you have free range. But I didn’t want to make anything too drastic or make Jamie into a caricature. What I wanted was this sense that he removed himself from that tension, and he had a different life in London. This was bringing him back to the child he formerly was. I didn’t have as much help with the costume in terms of how he might be. My process has remained the same throughout, movement director or not. It’s trying to find real life reasons for how people move around spaces and how they inhabit the world. Again, it’s all from notes I’ve written in my sketchbook somewhere.
I even noticed in Hope Gap that it seems like Jamie’s a little more slouched over or checked out, and his face tends to scrunch up a bit when he comes home.
It’s interesting—we shot a bit more of me in London from the original screenplay. When we were shooting it, we spent a lot more time playing him out in that world. There was a clearer line between how he exists in the space in London with his friends and how he existed with his family. Those are things that can be lost in an edit.
Daniels, the wunderkind directing duo behind the smash sensation Everything Everywhere All At Once, make films that feel like they fly in the face of over-explanation. It was great to ask two expert filmmakers about their consciousness of how cinephile culture, particularly as it manifests online, loves to pick films apart — and if that’s how they wanted their films to be analyzed. Art is never produced in a vacuum, and often times, its creators are well aware of the world into which their work is released. From Slant Magazine in 2022:
Is there a right or optimal way to experience the film? I’ve seen it twice now, and I think it works better to just feel your way through. But knowing how current cinephile culture reacts to multiverse storytelling, people may try to “solve” the movie. There’s probably already an “ending explained” video for this on YouTube already…
DS: I don’t react well to movies needing to be solved, or the idea that a perfect movie is one that’s air-tight and didn’t have any continuity errors. It’s like, “What? No, who cares?” That’s how you make a good car engine! A couple of people have given us a compliment that made me feel really good where they’re like, “The movie got harder and harder to keep up with, but it was a fun challenge.” It made the audience just give up and feel their way through it. We’re so proud of the second half of this movie and the fact that we made an accessible movie that hopefully makes that experience a little easier than an art film where you have to just, square one, give yourself over to it. There’s no right interpretation, but the optimal way to experience it is when Evelyn gives up, you kind of have to as well.
DK: You’re right, this movie is 100% a response to the over-intellectualizing of film consumption. It’s all about, how am I going to review this later. Even when you’re watching the movie, you’re like, “Oh, we’re at the bottom of the second act now, I can feel it!” You don’t have the language for it, but we’ve seen so many movies that you just have this like internal clock and you know exactly where you are in the movie. This film was meant to just destroy all that. It smacks you in the face for even trying. It’s like, don’t try! Stop! Give up, let go! I think the people who really struggle with this movie or can’t connect with this movie are the people who never want to let go. Which I think is fine, that’s their right.
I find acting the toughest thing to write about. How do you put into words what can only be felt? It was Terence Davies, the poetically inclined British director behind the recent release Benediction, who helped give expression to the fascinating contradictions of performance. It’s easy to discern when something is right yet all but impossible to force it through any kind of systematic approach. From Slant Magazine in 2022:
Terence, you’ve noted that Siegfried was somewhat of a passive figure in his own life. Given that so much of what audiences know from contemporary acting is based around the idea of a character’s active pursuit of what they want, what challenges did Siegfried’s nature present in dramatizing him?
It’s not so much of a challenge because I don’t see acting like that. I can remember when On the Waterfront came out, and it was a revelation. We’d never seen that kind of acting before. It came out in the same year as Young at Heart, another film I fell in love with because I fell in love with Doris Day, would you believe? What’s happened with the so-called method, it’s ossified into mannerism. That’s all you get now. That’s not interesting. I’ve said to everyone on every film, “I don’t want you to act. I want you to feel it.” Because then it’s true. What film does, it exposes insincerity. It just does, and you cannot get away with it. So I said to everyone on this film, and all the others, “Don’t act, just be.” That’s much more difficult because, in a way, it’s more amorphous. But when it’s right, the light goes on, and you see the arrow hitting the bullseye. Of all forms of acting, acting for film is the most difficult, it really is.
How did you develop that muscle to know what’s right?
I’ve never known. I wish I did know, but that’s part of the magic of making it. Again, it’s like music. Why do you go on a two-hour journey with Bruckner as I do, because it’s my greatest love, when I couldn’t sit through Wagner for five minutes? I don’t know why! I just get a feeling in my stomach and think, “That’s it.” Vague as that, I’m afraid.
Speaking of acting challenges, one that has only grown in prominence with time is the phenomenon of acting in front of green-screens. Acting always requires some component of empathy and imagination, but having so little direct stimuli as guidance requires flexing an entirely different kind of muscle. Oscar-winner Eddie Redmayne, who I talked to for the rather forgettable film The Aeronauts, gave me a fascinating glimpse into the specialized technique it demands. From Slant Magazine in 2019:
Between The Aeronauts and the Fantastic Beasts series, you’ve been doing quite a bit of acting in synthetic spaces.
[laughs]
That’s not a value judgment! How do you go about using your imagination to bring the surroundings to life in your head while maintaining the same specificity as if you were there?
I try and do a load of research, so even if it’s on Fantastic Beasts, it’s talking to the animators, going and looking at drawings and set designs. Trying to do all of that early so it’s not in your imagination. The other process I tried to learn from Dan Fogler, who’s in Fantastic Beasts and very free. He’ll try lots of different things, and I watched him on the first film and thought he was brilliant. It’s a mixture of doing your research, then throwing it away and trying things.
Has it gotten easier over time? Like a muscle that has to be trained and toned?
Yeah, it definitely does. For example, with Pickett [a small plant creature his character keeps as a pet] on Fantastic Beasts, I was so concerned with talking to something that’s not there and make it feel real. I would over[act]. [Reenacts staring intently at the creature on his hand] You never normally look at people when you talk to them. You can have a conversation with Pinkett on your hand and not really look at him.
Thanks for your attention, on this post and anytime.
Onward, outward.
Inward.
Upward.
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall