If you missed the excellent ParaNorman in theaters (or saw the similarly macabre and quirky Frankenweenie instead), catch an exclusive clip from the dark, funny, moving, and visually impressive stop-motion animation about a loner kid named Norman whose ability to see dead people first makes him an outcast, then an unlikely hero, when his small town is overrun by zombies. Movieline’s exclusive clip finds Norman (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and his Goonies-esque band of misfits — including school bully Alvin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), sister Courtney (Anna Kendrick), reluctant BFF Neil (Tucker Albrizzi), and Neil’s jock brother Mitch (Casey Affleck, who gets one of the film’s biggest adults-only laugh) — searching the town library for a key piece of information as zombies, and more terrifyingly, parents, run amok outside. Much of what makes ParaNorman one of the best children’s films of 2012 is the writing, which doesn’t condescend to its young audience; this is a movie that knows that being a kid can really suck — especially for victims of bullying, or even just oddballs who stand out from the crowd a little too much. It embraces death as a real tangible fact of life and goes to some terrifying places while moving at a dynamic pace, lightened by a savvy sense of humor, which is what makes ParaNorman the quintessential Tim Burton film that Frankenweenie just quite wasn’t. ParaNorman hits DVD and Blu-ray November 27. Did you catch it in theaters? Let the ParaNorman lovefest unfold in the comments below. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Hollywood veteran Martin Landau earned an Oscar in his first collaboration with Tim Burton , 1994’s Ed Wood , and for Burton’s latest and most personal picture, Frankenweenie , the filmmaker cast his erstwhile Bela Lugosi as the eccentric but inspirational Mr. Rzykruski — the science teacher who nurtures young Victor Frankenstein’s budding talents and encourages him to forge his own path. It’s a fitting role for the 84-year-old Landau, who lit up as he discussed Frankenweenie and his longtime parallel career as an acting coach to the likes of Jack Nicholson, Anjelica Huston, and many more Hollywood greats under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. Tim Burton cast you as Mr. Rzykruski, Victor’s teacher and he’s quite the character: At first imposing and foreboding, he’s revealed to be one of Victor’s only kindred spirits. What did you make of him at first and how did you find his quirks? It’s a fun character, and the thing that amazed me is that I saw an arc and if I could play it on camera I’d play it exactly the same. I did [the voice recording] first and the animators animated after. It was just my voice, but Tim sent me pictures of the character and it looked like me years ago, or Vincent Price and me mixed up, a caricature of me with dark hair and such. I saw him as a loving man, but eccentric as hell and passionate! And also, European – but not specifically from a country. It said that; it said it’s a generic accent. It’s not German, it’s not Russian, it’s not Hungarian, but it’s European. [In Mr. Rzykruski’s voice] So I lowered the voice . The relationship between Victor and Mr. Rzykruski is the best child-adult relationship in the film, and probably the most important one. He’s the one who inspires the kid, with science and the frog! He’s somewhat outlandish and certainly not a diplomat. If you’re a teacher you don’t call your students’ parents stupid. It’s a great line, though. It’s a funny line, and I knew it. But again, the movie is funny, moving, and scary in equal parts and I love that. This is a movie Tim wanted to make three decades ago and couldn’t. He made a short live-action version of it, but the one blessing is that if he had done it then it wouldn’t be in 3-D. But it’s not stuck on 3-D, things coming at you to shock you. You also happen to be a teacher off-screen, having spent many years with the Actors Studio where so many talents passed through over the decades. It was a different time. A lot of my contemporaries have passed away, which is sad, but I still run the Actors Studio on the West Coast with Mark Rydell – [Al] Pacino, [Harvey] Keitel and Ellen Burstyn run the New York Actors Studio so we’re in touch with each other all the time. And I work with a lot of young actors and help them. Why did you first begin teaching? I started teaching when I was in my 20s because Lee Strasberg asked me to, and he didn’t do that with a lot of people. Why do you think he did? At the Actors Studio when I got in, he’d ask for comments and I’d raise my hand and critique the actors succinctly and helpfully, and I think he noticed that. One day he said “I want you to teach – I’ve got a waiting list and I’m going to send some of my people to you.” He sent me off, teaching. Jack Nicholson was my student for three years, and Harry Dean Stanton, Anjelica Huston; a lot of people have studied with me. It’s paying my dues, because as a young actor I benefited from getting in. The year I got into The Actors Studio, Steve McQueen and I were the only two accepted that whole year. Two people, Steve and me. It’s still tough to get in. Lifetime membership. Who was your favorite student? That’s hard – they’re all my kids. I’ve got two daughters and it’s impossible for me to say one of them is a favorite. Fair enough! Was there one actor who surprised you the most over the years? Nicholson did, but he had some problems. He would kind of surround a moment that he didn’t want to embrace. I found that those things were probably the richest part of his talent, which he was avoiding because it was very hurtful. But I wanted him to know that it wasn’t going to hurt him. You can’t perish because of your own feelings, you have to embrace those things as an actor because it’s part of your palette. How did you help him? I had him do a bunch of exercises that would connect his voice, his body, and emotions. A lot of actors lead with their voices and their bodies follow; they’re split, they’re not together. The instrument is not working as a unit. To get them to become good actors… all an audience wants to believe is that what’s going on up there is happening for the first time ever. You don’t want to see the rehearsals, you don’t want to see the work. You want to see two people in conflict or people connecting, but I don’t see a lot of that. There are some movie stars who are considered good actors who put me to sleep. I’m not going to mention their names! You could be talented but if you don’t use that talent well you’re depriving yourself. Craft is about talented people who shut down easily because they’re vulnerable, they’re hypersensitive, where your talent actually short-circuits you. People who are less vulnerable are usually not that interesting. [Laughs] So when your own talent acts as a deterrent, you’ve got to pay attention to that. How do you open that up? How do you create relaxation when you start getting tense because you’re sensitive to a situation? Tension will shut you down. Your sphincters will all close up. Talented actors have problems; it’s like a violin playing a violinist, where the instrument itself shuts the talent down. It’s a matter of managing that, then. Getting the actor to trust his talent and trust his instrument. No one tries to cry. Bad actors try to cry. Good actors try not to cry. How a character hides his feelings tells us who he is. No one shows their feelings except bad actors! No one tries to laugh! If I tell you a racial joke and you laugh, you’re telling me something about yourself – you’re revealing something. A drunk doesn’t try to be drunk; he wants another drink! One of the most studied things is a drunk picking up a full glass of booze [affects drunken mannerism, grabbing an invisible glass]… and bringing it to his mouth. It’s not sloppy. [Slurring] It’s ve-rrry … concentra-aated . Anyway, I never met two people who were alike so I’ve never approach a character as the same character. They’re physiologically different, environmentally different, emotionally different – they’re all different, and that’s what makes it exciting, still, for me. What’s your relationship with Tim like, after years of working together? Well, we kind of understand each other. He doesn’t have to say a whole lot to me. But I’m rarely directed by anybody. I really haven’t been directed by anybody in 30 years. A good director hires good actors and creates a playground, and you play. You come up with stuff that no one could quite envision. I saw this character not only vocally but physically, behaviorally, and to my pleasure what they came up with was exactly as I would have done it if I’d been acting and it wasn’t animation. That thrilled me, because it was like, wow – they caught it from the voice and it’s exactly as I saw it! Because I saw the arc. There was an arc; he gets fired and gives the kid advice, but it’s sad in a certain sense. He doesn’t restrain himself, this guy. Rzykruski seems to understand why his progressive thinking doesn’t fly in the suburbs. He is who he is, and I love that about him. He’s a zealot. He loves science, and the fact that people don’t understand it in the way that they need to upsets him. He sees this kid and he immediately thinks, “This kid’s okay.” He doesn’t know what the kid’s doing, because from the frog’s reaction the kid channels lightning… but Tim loved Frankenstein. He loved Dracula as a kid. This has been festering in him all these years. He never lost this movie, and you think about that – it’s three decades later and this is probably the most Tim Burton film. Edward Scissorhands was as well but he wanted to do that as an animated film and couldn’t, but that was fortuitous in that it introduced him to Johnny Depp, and that became very important to him and to Johnny – and to me too, in a way, because I loved working with Johnny and Tim in Ed Wood . Ed Wood is fantastic. The relationship between you three on that project really jumps off the screen. It’s a fun movie. We had a good time. A great time, actually. Johnny and I hit it off, Tim and I hit it off. You also started out as a cartoonist early in your career. Do you think that had something to do with you and Tim getting on so well? You kind of see things visually, and maybe that’s a little bit of it. Tim and I draw differently; I have a bit of an Art Deco style. Do you still draw? Oh, all the time! I’ve got thousands of what I call doodles, although they’re not doodles. Tim’s seen them. But yes – the visualization is there for me too, in a way. I see the character, and then I work on all of those things into a subjective form. They’re objective, and I make them part of me. We’re all capable of it. Where do you go from here? The next thing I know I’m doing is I’m going to London to do more work for Frankenweenie . I’d like this picture to do well. And the BFI is giving me a lifetime achievement award. How does that feel, to receive an honor like that? Well I’ve got a lot of those now. I keep saying, “I’m not done!” Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Sweeping into Austin to present Fantastic Fest ’s opening night film Frankenweenie in his signature tinted glasses, director Tim Burton extolled the virtues of one of his most favored art forms: Stop-motion animation. “It’s such a beautiful, rarified medium,” said Burton, who returns to many of his roots — stop motion, black and white film, monster movies, macabre kids tales, and his own 1984 short film of the same name, about a boy who brings his beloved dog back from the grave — in the feature-length October release. Speaking to press alongside producer Alison Abbate and voice cast Charlie Tahan, Winona Ryder , and Martin Landau, Burton waxed nostalgic about his long journey with Frankenweenie . It all started in Burbank, Calif., where the filmmaker grew up, in Burton’s own relationship with his childhood pet. “The dog I had had this disease called distemper and was not meant to live for very long,” Burton said, “but ended up living a long time. There was always this specter of death hanging over it, which as a child you don’t always understand, but growing up Frankenstein movies were sort of your introduction to death. That’s why it seemed like such an easy fit, it seemed quite natural.” Years later as a young employee of Disney, Burton channeled that childhood experience into a live-action short starring Barret Oliver, Shelley Duval, and Daniel Stern; the resulting film, a black-and-white cult classic, got him fired from the studio, who insisted it was too scary for children. How did Burton walk that line in the feature-length version of Frankenweenie , a second go-round with Disney? He didn’t. “I remember when we first did the short and they were going, ‘This is too weird,’ and then they showed Pinocchio and kids were running out screaming in the theater,” he recalled. “Disney founded its company on having things that were scary and I think people forget that. To me, this was really safe. I never was worried about it because they’re little puppets, for God’s sake.” Ryder, who starred in Burton’s Beetlejuice , voices hero Vincent Frankenstein’s next door neighbor, a quiet but sympathetic little goth girl named Elsa. The visual resemblance is strong in itself, but Ryder deliberately conjured the spirit of her Beetlejuice character for the part. “I drew on a little bit on my character Lydia from Beetlejuice ,” she explained. “I imagined her as a little girl — and also I imagined what Tim was like at that age, that sort of shy but super creative.” According to Ryder, Burton coached her during the Frankenweenie production in a similar fashion to when they worked together over twenty years ago. “Tim actually used some of the same direction and same words that he used the first time on Beetlejuice , which was just to keep it very real,” said Ryder. As for the Beetlejuice sequel that Burton is developing, don’t expect any updates just yet. “A writer’s writing it,” Burton allowed, “but I just said ‘Surprise me, so I don’t know when it’s coming, if it’s going to be any good, whatever.” Frankenweenie is in theaters October 5. Stay tuned for more from Fantastic Fest! Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
The indomitable bike messenger played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Premium Rush is named Wilee, as in Wile E. Coyote, the less successful half of Looney Tunes’ eternal desert chase duo. A few minutes into the movie, however, it becomes clear he’s more like the Road Runner: Wiry and whippet thin, Wilee darts through Manhattan traffic on his fixed gear bike — chain lock wrapped around his waist — thumbing his nose at the NYPD and evading the dogged pursuit of corrupt detective Bobby Monday ( Michael Shannon ). No Chamois Ass is he. Though Wilee is introduced via a spectacular slow-motion crash set to the sunny opening strains of The Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” he carries himself through most of the film with a cartoonish sense of imperviousness that could be interpreted as a death wish even before he gets entangled with dirty cops and Chinese gangsters. A favorite trick of the film — directed by David Koepp ( Secret Window , Stir of Echoes ) from a screenplay he wrote with John Kamps— has Wilee mentally projecting different paths through tight situations until he susses out the one that doesn’t leave him smeared on the sidewalk. It’s a device that underscores the character’s precarious vulnerability as he jockeys with all of the heavy metal vehicles careening through the streets of New York. This fuels the chase sequences with excitement and a looming sense of consequence. It’s a good thing too, since the bulk of the film consists of one kind of heart-pounding pursuit or another. Premium Rush is a half-entertaining, half-exasperating movie — one that sells you on the notion of New York bike messengers as great fodder for cinema but then doesn’t know how to build a feature around them. It barely has enough forward motion to make it through its 91-minute run time and spins its wheels — pun totally intended — with sequences (like one in an impound lot) that feel like blatant filler. Premium Rush bobs and weaves stylistically using backward jumps in time to fill in plot details and cuts to a Google Maps-style city grid that establishes the locations of the characters — but ultimately there’s only so much you can do on a bike. The movie tends to get muddled and laggy when the characters hop off their two-wheelers to actually talk, because they’re not good at talking. This is the kind of film in which you constantly find yourself thinking that a particular bit of trouble could have been avoided by characters either coming clean about their problems or yelling for help when the bad guys roll their way. Wilee turns out to be a Columbia Law School grad who chooses to ride all day rather than take the bar exam because, he explains in voiceover, “I can’t work in an office.” (The crushing student loans he has to be shouldering apparently aren’t burdening his free spirit.) He’s got a fellow messenger girlfriend named Vanessa (Dania Ramirez) and a professional and romantic rival in the muscular Manny (Wolé Parks), who dares to have gears on his bike. The main action in Premium Rush takes place from around 5pm to 7pm, as Wilee heads uptown to his alma mater to pick up a package from Vanessa’s roommate Nima (Jamie Chung) that Bobby is very anxious to intercept. What’s in the package isn’t worth going into — it’s a means for the film to travel to a number of distinctly New York locations. Premium Rush depicts the city as vibrant and lived-in, from the dive bar where bike messengers gather (to watch an extremely intimate live show by the band Sleigh Bells) to a plant-lined street in the flower district, to the back-room Chinatown gambling den where wry bookies and hoods watch the impulsive Bobby dig himself a deep hole playing pai gow. Shannon has a great time chewing the scenery as the off-the-rails detective, and Gordon-Levitt continues to prove that he’s an intriguingly unconventional action hero, albeit one who comes across as a little smug in this movie. That said, he brings a sweaty substantiality to the scenes of Wilee diving through traffic against a light or hitching a ride on a cab. Like seasoned Manhattan cyclists, Gordon-Levitt rides as if his bike is an extension of his body. While the film’s pop psychologizing about Wilee’s choice of wheels would make even the most devoted of fixie fanatics roll their eyes — he doesn’t want to stop, and he can’t, because he doesn’t believe in brakes — there’s definite romance to be found here in the whirling of spokes, the communing of man and machine, and the crazy freedom of cutting through a dense urban landscape like sleek fish easily navigating the currents of a stream. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Also in Thursday morning’s round up of news briefs, Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock scores a CNN show. For the first time, the Venice Film Festival will screen some of its films via the internet alongside their premieres. And a boxing pic is in the works for a Red Riding Hood actor. London Film Festival to Open with Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie The 56th BFI London Film Festival will open October 10th with Burton’s latest. The European premiere of Frankenweenie , taking place at the Odeon Leicester Square, will screen at 30 screens across the U.K. The festival will also host The Art of Frankenweenie Exhibition from October 17 – 21. Tim Burton, Winona Ryder, Martin Short, Catherine O’Hara, Martin Landau, Producer Allison Abbate and Executive Producer Don Hahn are expected to attend the festival. Around the ‘net… Tony Scott Memoria to Take Place this Weekend A private memorial for the British-born filmmaker who died from an apparent suicide last weekend will take place this weekend. A statement from the director’s spokesperson said: “Tony Scott will be honoured at a private, family-only ceremony this weekend in Los Angeles. The family will announce plans after Labor Day for a gathering to celebrate the life and work of Mr Scott. Details will be forthcoming once they are formalized,” The Guardian reports . Super Size Me Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock Joins CNN Spurlock’s Inside Man series will debut in April 2013 on the network. Along with Anthony Bourdain’s new CNN series, Spurlock’s show will take the viewer to “fascinating corners of American society,” and is expected to air Sunday evenings, Deadline reports . Venice to Screen ‘Horizons’ Films to Stream Worldwide 500 “seats” will be available to viewers via the internet to view the films in the Venice Film Festival’s Horizons section. Each film in the section, which features 10 features and 13 shorts from new and young filmmakers will be available to the limited audience for $5.25 per film and available for 24 hours starting at 9pm Italian time on the day of the film’s screening, Deadline reports . Red Riding Hood Actor Eyes Boxer Pic Shiloh Fernandez will portray the five-time world champion Johnny Tapia in biopic Johnny about the five-time world champion boxer. Eddie Alcazar is directing the indie, written by Bettina Gilois, THR reports .
