Last week, I got a chance to take part in a college conference call with Richard Kelly, the director of The Box, and Cameron Diaz and James Marsden, the two stars of the film. You can read my terribly nerdy review of the film here.
Q: I was wondering if any of you guys had read the short story or seen the “Twilight Zone” episode, which this movie is based on.
James Marsden: Uh, embarrassingly, I never read the short story. Not out of laziness, but because we wanted to focus on our version of what we were doing. But I did see the “Twilight Zone” episode, which… Richard, where are we with that whole mentioning the “Twilight Zone” episode?
Richard Kelly: I’m under the impression that I’m not allowed to mention those words. Legally. But the short story was something that I read when I was young, and it had a huge impression on me, obviously. And I optioned it from Richard Matheson [the original author] and I spent many years trying to figure out how to expand it into a feature film, and here we are. So it was a long journey to get here. The concept of the story was something I felt left a strong, strong footprint in my mind, so to speak.
Cameron Diaz: I agree, my answer’s the same as Jimmy’s [James Marsden’s]. I didn’t read the short story because it was something that I wanted to sort of have in order to focus on our script and how Richard expanded on that concept.
Q: (to Cameron Diaz) What was your initial reaction when you first read the script?
CD: Well, I was a huge fan of Richard from Donnie Darko and Southland Tales and I just really wanted to work with him. So when I read the script I felt it was very authentic to the stories he tells. There was this existential quandary and I just knew that Richard would tell the story uniquely, as he does, and I wanted just to be a part of that.
Q: And How much of your own personality would you say that you put into the character? How much of you goes into who you’re playing?
CD: Well, all I have is me. (Laughs) You know, and I think James would agree that you try to understand what other people are going through, even if you haven’t gone through it yourself. You just try to get to feeling what you think it would feel like to be in that position, but you never really know. So as much as you want to feel that you’re being somebody else, you’re only working from your own toolbox and experience. So I would like to think that it’s nothing of me in there, but really I can only contribute with what I have.
JM: For me, you wouldn’t be responding to the material and the story and the character if there wasn’t a part of you in that. So there’s always going to be a piece of you that is going to be inherent in you’re performance, or in my performance, anyway.
Q: (to Richard Kelly) How is this 1970’s set film relevant to our society today?
RK: Well I think this film kind of puts in the crosshairs the idea of the nuclear family. In our film, it’s a married couple, under the age of 40 with a single child, they have a lifestyle that they really can’t afford, they’re sort of living on credit, they have a mortgage that’s beyond their means, Arthur (Marsden’s character) is driving a car that’s a little too expensive, they have a son in private school and the tuition is a little too much for them to handle. I think, looking at our economic crisis right now, the film, I hope, resonates with the audience of today, despite the fact that it’s set in 1976. It’s because these are things that we can identify with. We can see and realize that we all are trying to live a better life and to achieve a better life, but a lot of it’s just about these things we strive to possess and this lifestyle that we want to achieve. Hopefully that’s something that resonates with modern audiences.
Q: (to Richard Kelly) How do you select music for your films? Because, obviously, music played a really big role in Donnie Darko and I’m wondering how you selected that and what role music plays in [The Box].
RK: Well, It comes from an emotional place. In The Box, we obviously have the score done by Win Butler and Régine Chassagne [both of Arcade Fire] and Owen Pallett [of Final Fantasy]. It’s kind of an emotional strings, and brass, and percussion in the spirit of Bernard Hermann. The pop music in The Box is much more source music in the sense that there’s kind of a wedding rehearsal dinner sequence towards the middle of the film that we were very specific about trying to pick songs that were kind of Southern in quality, because the movie takes place in Virginia, and has a Southern rock believability, but also were very iconic bands. We were lucky enough to get, you know, Grateful Dead, Wilson Pickett, Scott Walker, The Marshall Tucker Band and all these bands that flow together. The biggest pop music moment in the film, I think is a Derek and the Dominoes song called “Bell Bottom Blues”. I actually heard it on the radio while driving to set, and I remember I called Cameron up and I said “Download this some from iTunes,” you know “download ‘Bell Bottom Blues’ and memorize the lyrics, because I’m going to have you listening to it on the dance floor and it’s going to be this big romantic moment between you and James, and we’re going to try and get the song.” So it was kind of like an act of faith; you just feel in your gut that this song is the right one. We ended up getting [“Bell Bottom Blues”], of course, luckily.
Q: The story was written in the 1970’s, but this story sounds so much like today. I wonder why you set it in ’76 instead of the present.
RK: Well, speaking from my point of view, it became a huge decision, or a necessary decision to set it in the ‘70’s because the concept of someone you don’t know, which is inherent to the premise, doesn’t really exist anymore. With modern social networking sites, and Google satellite maps and all the surveillance technology that we have today, I realize that if I set it in present day, I was going to have to write that scene where Norma [Diaz’s character] sits down and, you know, Googles the name ‘Arlington Stewart’ [played by Frank Langella in the film]. She’d be sitting in front of her laptop for half the movie. It just didn’t feel as resonant. Obviously the themes are resonant to the present day, but the execution of the story only held on to its plausibility by maintaining the 1970’s era in which it was written. At the end of the day, it’s kind of an old fashioned concept, and there’s something a bit more frightening, or people felt more vulnerable, in the 1970’s because they didn’t have all these technologies that allowed us to spy on eachother.
Q: This movie poses a big moral question about our human nature. In your opinion, do you think that the majority of people would push this button, given the opportunity?
JM: I think that they’d, um… Probably.
CD: In today’s society, I think they we’re proving that we’re pushing the button more than ever by taking out credit cards and mortgages and dumping stuff into the ocean. Doing all these things that we don’t think we are going to have to be responsible for, but ultimately it does have an effect. We do have to suffer the consequences of that. The economy is doing so now based on all the buttons that were pushed over the last few years. I think it’s very relevant. I think it’s obvious that people do put forth the idea of having monetary over any other wealth. Especially in our culture and society.
Q: What would you say is one of the funniest things that happened on set?
JM: I remember laying in bed, having a heart to heart thing with Cameron and then getting up and vomiting in the bathroom. I washed my mouth out with soap, and then coming back and asking if it was OK if we finished the scene and Cameron being really gracious and sweet and saying it’s totally fine… They were able to fix my green face in post.
CD: If there was anything in particular that we got to laugh about, it would probably be the day that we got to have water dumped on us. You know, hundreds of gallons of water, maybe thousands of gallons. That was the day we were, as you would say, tickled because it was just so much fun.
RK: I remember when we did that, the first take (we did two takes) we dumped hundreds of gallons of water on them. It was so much water that it literally knocked Cameron off the bed. And obviously Cameron’s like, an amazing athlete, so this was not a problem for her.
CD: My hair was standing straight up, remember?
RK: That’s right, she jumped up and her hair was sticking up in the most crazy direction.
CD: I looked like I was an alien.
RK: But we did a second take and your hair looked perfect, so it all worked out.
CD: You know what’s really funny is that we’re laughing about it now.
JM: That wasn’t the first take! Richard, remember when you pulled that practical joke, when you dumped ten thousand gallons of cat urine on us? That was the most fun!
RK: I know, I know.
JM: You got us!
CD: You got us!
Q: The story in the movie is obviously a little more complex than the original short story. So I’m just wondering how did you go about elaborating on the original premise and what kind of inspiration you had.
RK: Well, the short story was almost like a great set up for Act I of a movie. There was one line in the short story that just sent my mind racing and it was when they asked whom Mr. Steward worked for, and he said, “I can assure you that the organization is large and international in scope.” That, to me, was fascinating because I had all these questions I wanted to know. Who does Mr. Steward work for? Why did they build the button unit? What are there intentions? Why are they approaching married couples? What’s the point of it all? What’s the agenda at work? And I thought those were such amazing questions and I wanted to explore all those answers in Act II and Act III and make it a story of redemption. We were able to spend a lot of time to just get it right and figure out what Act II and Act III were going to be.