NEW YORK (AP) – In Mike Mills’ “C’mon C’mon,” Joaquin Phoenix plays a New York-based radio journalist who records interviews with real children about their lives throughout the film and asks them questions like, “What does you scared? ” and “What makes you happy?” During filming, Mills scheduled the interviews sporadically, often at the end of a day of shooting. “It was a constant reminder of what being real in front of the camera means to be truly authentic,” says Phoenix. “You just were.” “It changed chemistry completely,” says Mills. “All films should have to do that.” Documentary moments make cameos in “C’mon C’mon”, but the entire film pulsates with something tenderly close to real life. The performances are casual and often improvised. The story of an uncle (Phoenix) forced to raise his sister’s (Woody Norman) 9-year-old son was inspired by Mills’ relationship with his own child, Hopper. “I always tell Hopper that a person is huge,” says Mills, who is married to filmmaker Miranda July. “All the possibilities and contradictions are enormous. A film about people, if you’re lucky, you get something like a splinter. ”The black and white film“ C’mon C’mon ”, which a24 will be releasing in cinemas on Friday, is perhaps the rare film that does a touch better. Since its start at the Telluride and New York film festivals this fall, “C’mon C’mon” has been received as an unusually sweet, frank and genuine film, a shaggy portrait of a deep adult-child bond. In October, Phoenix and Mills gathered on a downtown balcony to discuss the film, which was filmed and continuously edited in January 2021 just before the start of the pandemic. In the meantime, Phoenix became a father. Last year he and Rooney Mara had a boy named River, named after Phoenix’s late brother. “It was like each phase of life came together in a few short months,” says Phoenix, smiling. “Life and death. Welcome to the experience!” When asked if Phoenix began with “Come on, come on”, knowing that fatherhood was imminent, he replies, “I don’t know. Do the math, man” – before he gave in that he knew. But Phoenix, always reluctant to draw straight lines between art and life, warns that this was just an entry point. “When I think about it in relation to my child and my experience , I think ‘Ugh’. It’s his own thing. I don’t want to get into this game, thinking about my life. Was I? Subconsciously I’m sure, “says Phoenix.” I think it’s nice when you get away from it Inspires things in his life, but sometimes it’s a bit gross. “For Mills, the writer and director of Beginners and 20th Century Woman,” the family was a regular reservoir. “Beginners,” with Christopher Plummer, is based on his Father and Annette Bening’s matriarch in “20th Century Woma n “was inspired by his mother. But he’s also hesitant to deal with it too directly. “Family” sounds too normative to him. He sees his topic as “primary relationships”. “I have a feeling that the people who appear very big in your life are your cosmos,” says Mills. “Everything is here. It’s Game of Thrones and Spider-Man and comedy all thrown together. ”“ C’mon C’mon ”may be based on autobiography, but Mills’ collaborative process turned it into something else, a thing of its own. For Norman, 12, Mills’ freedom of filmmaking was new and transformative. “I’ve worked on films that have a lot: ‘It has to be on the script and you can’t change anything,’” says Norman, who speaks of Zoom from his home in London. “If it’s easy, I thought, let my creativity run free. For me the film is very charming in that respect because you can tell that everything is real. ”In the film, Norman’s character Jesse is full of curiosities and eccentrics that go beyond the usual childhood views in the film. Like Jesse, Norman wants to be taken seriously, what he is capable of. “I don’t want to be seen as a child actor,” says Norman. “I want to be seen as an actor who is a child.” Phoenix also started out as a child actor, an experience he fondly thinks back on. He believes he was a completely instinctive actor back then, a mindset he wants to recapture. For Phoenix, it was moving to watch Norman go through something similar in the limitless creative space of “Come on, come on.” “At some point in the end he said without irony, ‘I took this whole picture from you.’ And I think we all agreed, “says Phoenix.” C’mon C’mon “follows a diametrically opposed film for Phoenix in the 2019” Joker “. Mills’ film wasn’t an antidote, says Phoenix, but it slipped into another dynamic acting opposite Norman That need to move things forward, move the scene, ”says Phoenix. “It was very interesting not to direct the scene and listen and react to what someone else is doing.” That also applied to the interviews in the film. They took place across the country – New York, New Orleans, Chicago, Los Angeles – and with a wide range of children. The film is dedicated to one, Devante Bryant, a New Orleans 9-year-old who was later killed in a shootout. Phoenix, who sometimes had a more tortured relationship with interviews, began recording one with his own nephew. He went in, concerned that it would feel intrusive or uncomfortable. But when he asked his nephew how it felt and he replied, “That was amazing. You asked me things you had never asked me before.” “I’ve always had this weird, somewhat contradicting relationship with the idea of an interview and the questions to be recorded, simply because of the nature of it,” says Phoenix. “We come to this pub, but we have another life apart from it. I really have this appreciation for what you do and how difficult it can be and how powerful it can be and how nice it is to start a conversation between people. At best, it is. ”___ Follow AP film writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP Jake Coyle, The Associated Press
[ad_2]
