Marc Forster

Yes and no. I wanted to try to get away from it a little bit in this film. I wanted to make it very clear when the film begins that you’re not actually in reality. The film doesn’t play in reality and we establish that in the beginning and there are clues throughout the film that what you’re seeing is not reality so at the ending the audience doesn’t feel tricked. I felt that if we based it all on the ending; it would be not that interesting.

Not necessarily. I’m always fascinated with alternate realities and perception. I feel like we all perceive life so differently. We are overwhelmed sometimes with images and information all day long that our perception constantly shifts. These things have just always fascinated me because two people can see the same action, perceive it completely different and tell a completely different story. I’ve always been fascinated by perception.

I finished it in around February 2005.

No, I finished shooting the film in January 2004 and then we were working on the editing until the summer of 2004. Then I did all of the campaigning and press for Neverland so I didn’t do anything for three months. Then I started to finish the sound mix for Stay in late 2004. We made the decision very early that didn’t want to release Stay and Neverland at the same time so we weren’t in a rush. Then right after I finished Stay I went to Chicago to direct Stranger than Fiction.

The Believer.

Yeah, he’s really special and incredible.

The wonderful thing is he’s very intense and mature, but also very light and comedic and playful. He has really both sides to him and that’s very refreshing. He doesn’t take himself too seriously, but on the other hand he has the maturity and depth of someone much older. It’s really wonderful.

I didn’t really expect that when I decided to make Stay that it would be an award film necessarily. I did it purely because I thought it would challenge me in a whole different way. I think ultimately to make a strong picture not set in reality is a challenge. To make something like Stay was the hardest thing ever because you’re constantly doing instinctual directing. You never really can rationally direct the movie because you’re constantly you have to figure out what’s right or what might work. Ultimately it’s all a reflection of myself so that was really challenging as well.

It was important to me to give constant clues. The film is also about identity. Since the first scene where Ewan McGregor and Ryan Gosling meet we were shooting both sides to establish that the two of them are the same person. Eventually you have all these clues throughout even with the clothing they wear. Then you see how Ryan perceives all the twins and triplets because his vision is double and triple. I just tried to layer these kinds of clues. There are tons of them in there.

I think there will be two camps with this particular film. There will be people who will hate the film and say it’s a waste of time. There will be people who will embrace it, love it and look at it more than once. For those people it will be fascinating to have these different layers.

No, films like this divide people. People in general who love a film might not see it twice in the cinema, but they might see it later on again.

It’s basically about an IRS agent who has a narrator in his head who tells him he’s going to die. Now he’s trying to track down the narrator to stop his own death.

Mortality is something we all are ultimately going to face. It’s something which is a root of a lot of our fears so if you’re not afraid of death, it helps you to have less fear in life. Often we celebrate birth, but I think in our Western world we have lost our death right. I think it’s important to confront ourselves and deal with it.

Stranger Than Fiction is a comedy.

It’s hilarious. Will Ferrell is in it.

I love comedy. Comedy is the hardest anyways.

The thing is he wasn’t a pedophile. I researched a lot and if you speak to any historian they will say that the whole rumor of him being a pedophile came much later in the century. It came about because he took photographs of some of the children at a lake when they were swimming naked. But he himself never acted on pedophilia. None of the children accused him of pedophilia or nobody else. I think it would’ve come out or would’ve been a scandal at the time and it never really did. I think the pedophiles themselves tried to claim him one of their own.

I wouldn’t have made a movie about him if I had known he was a pedophile or even been suspected of being a pedophile. But every expert, every historian, the families, everybody truthfully says he was asexual. He never really touched his wife. He never really touched people in general. He never really enjoyed sex or liked sex. He was a complete asexual man.

I’ll probably do it next year sometime.

It probably will be all unknowns.

Because to a certain degree you have to play the film in Farsi because it’s set in Afghanistan in the 70’s and you need to have the film in its original language.

No, but to be honest, it’s hard to read a lot because I’m constantly working on different projects. I read the book of The Kite Runner and I loved that. When they offered it to me, I thought it would be really interesting to do.

I practice a lot of yoga and meditation and I just enjoy what I do. Storytelling is everything I do. I think one only loses the ground if you start to lose yourself. That mainly happens when you become very tangled with all the people and be very social and really don’t spend too much time with yourself anymore.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck