The good news: Jay Chandrasekhar , founding member of Broken Lizard and frequent helmer of the comedy troupe’s major motion picture outings, including Super Troopers , Beerfest , and the not-technically-Broken Lizard The Babymakers , has landed his biggest studio gig to date! The less exciting news: It’s Yogi Bear 2 . Well now, let’s give this a chance. Deadline reports Chandrasekhar’s hire: “The sequel is being produced by Donald Deline and Karen Rosenfelt. The Eric Brevig-directed 2010 film grossed just over $200 million worldwide.” Remember, it’s a hit property! A good move for Chandrasekhar, in theory. Maybe he can work a little blue comedy into the PG (for “mild rude humor”) franchise. I know every Broken Lizard fan out there would love nothing more than for the guys to keep making Broken Lizard movies, and maybe someday get around to doing Super Troopers 2 , already. But these dudes are indie artists at their core, and sometimes you’ve got to do a Dukes of Hazzard or a Yogi Bear 2 to keep the machine going. (And admittedly, Yogi Bear was more harmless than offensively dumb as these kiddie pics go.) Consider Yogi Bear 2 : Jay Chandrasekhar as Night at the Museum : Tom Lennon and Ben Garant and let’s just keep our fingers crossed that Kevin Heffernan gets a cameo as a goofy Jellystone Park ranger tangling with Dan Aykroyd and Justin Timberlake’s voices, which ought to be enough to keep the BL flame going. [via Deadline ]
I’ll give Ridley Scott this much: Despite leaving us all with a thousand unanswered questions at the end of Prometheus , he’s seemingly packed a multitude of answers into the upcoming Blu-ray, DVD, and 3D Blu home video release. Count down the days — mere days ! — until October 8, when the secrets of Prometheus are yours to devour, with a tantalizing look at the spoilery Blu-ray/DVD trailer. Not even counting spoiler-filled images and between-the-line conclusions hardcore fans can probably draw from this promo video, here are at least five spoilers dropped in the Blu-ray/DVD trailer alone. Let’s start with, oh, a HUGE SPOILER 30 seconds in that help connect the dots for those of you playing along at home who didn’t spend your entire life poring over message boards and spoiler threads to figure out WTF was going on in Prometheus : 1. “In my mind the Engineer sacrificed himself with this virus and created this horrific creature,” says an unidentified person, who presumably has knowledge of the film’s secrets even though duh , we know this already. 2. Production designer Arthur Max answers at least one burning question, kinda, which connects Prometheus directly to Alien : “In the original draft it was LV-426.” Undetermined: At what point that connective tissue was rewritten for the final film, or not, to confuse everyone. [Side note: Concept art of the alien penis snakes! Not a spoiler, but fun.] 3. Scott with the sequel plug: “If we do a sequel to this prequel we’ll find out who this race [The Engineers] was.” We’d better . 4. A glimpse of the alternate beginning, which suggests that the sacrificial Engineer who drank the goo and plummeted to his life-spawning fate was part of a larger organized ritual of some sort. That does make a bit more sense. Also: Ain’t no party like an Engineer party ’cause an Engineer party leads to ultimate destruction for all of humankind! Yeaaah! 5. And hey, an alternate ending! The Engineers came from “paradise,” eh? Fingers crossed for an entire reel of deleted severed-head David nuggets of wisdom. Watch the Blu-ray/DVD tease now and stock up on the essentials because seven hours of special features?? You know where I’ll be on October 9. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
After humming along with this weekend’s a capella comedy Pitch Perfect , you’re going to want to know more about Skylar Astin, the 25-year-old Broadway alum who made his film debut in Hamlet 2 , appeared in Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock , and sings his way into Anna Kendrick ‘s heart this weekend as Jesse, Beca’s adorably movie-obsessed aca-love interest and member of the Bellas’ rival team, The Treble Makers. Movieline put ten questions (more or less) to Astin for a chat about Pitch Perfect , the summer camp vibe on set, his upcoming comedy projects, and — perhaps most importantly — why the ’90s Swedish pop outfit Ace of Base deserves props. Musicals are popular in the age of Glee , and Pitch Perfect also pays homage to the spirit of John Hughes movies and the romantic comedies of the ‘80s and ‘90s, but why do you think it resonates so much? I think in so many ways it follows a formula that works in terms of big ensemble comedies, but there are elements of it that have never been done before. For one, a capella has never completely dominated a movie. There have been elements of it — I know John Michael Higgins had a moment in The Break-Up that was hilarious — but I think that there’s something unique about it that doesn’t go too far in one direction, and it’s just fun. You just enjoy it. There’s something that seems very organic about the comedy and the style. You started out very successfully on Broadway, alongside Jonathan Groff and Lea Michele in Spring Awakening . Were you looking for a project like Pitch Perfect that specifically involved music? It seemed like a healthy transition for me but it was more of a coincidence. I wasn’t only searching for these movies but it did seem to fall into place beautifully. I responded because it’s something that’s close to home but I wasn’t actively searching — but I’m not going to complain about it either. Your first film, which was also a musical, was Hamlet 2 — which featured you singing a song with the best song title. Which one? “Raped in the Face?” [Laughs] That is the most ridiculous song ever. It was quite the auspicious debut, Hamlet 2 , and now you have a few more comedies lined up after Pitch Perfect . What types of projects do you find yourself naturally drawn to? I’m at a place right now where I’m not opposed to anything. I worked on dramas before, I love sinking my teeth into something dramatic or a period piece, but there’s something so fun about doing a comedy. When you go to set and your only job is to make people laugh, there’s an unbelievable energy on set. Nobody’s tiptoeing or walking delicately around the actors. I really love doing it, and putting the puzzle together with the sole purpose of making people have fun and enjoy themselves. On the set of Pitch Perfect you had all of these great singers and performers constantly around you. Did the cast spontaneously erupt in song between takes or anything like that? We had a strict no-singing rule. No, I’m kidding. It was exactly that — I wish I could tell you something even crazier but it was like an all-star theater camp, where you had people you’d recognized from TV and film singing theater songs or pop songs on the radio. We were constantly harmonizing with each other, which got to a weird place after a couple of weeks. But when you’re in this kind of ensemble it really feels like you’re putting on a play. So there is that energy of all of us hanging out together and seeing movies together and singing, and God forbid someone pulls out a guitar — it’s just gonna get crazy. I do feel like the film is a bit unfair to one particular song. That would be Ace of Base’s “The Sign,” which becomes a running gag… Oh my god, 1994! I have the album. Were there any songs that, by the end of the shoot, you were all completely sick of hearing, that you wanted to call a moratorium on? The only song that could be in that category for the sake of pure repetition would probably be the medley that the Bellas do throughout the whole first half of the movie. They keep the same kind of routine just like they do in the movie and during rehearsals there were slight changes in each, but playback-wise it was the same thing. That was definitely the most-played song. But my mom used to work out to those songs in my basement when I was growing up; she used to blast “The Rhythm Is Going To Get You,” “Turn The Beat Around,” “The Sign” — those are songs that have been burned into my memory forever, so I don’t think I could a see them in a negative light. Good! Because “The Sign” demands and deserves a popular revival. I think Anna Camp and Brittany Snow are just the people to do it. Now, Skylar Astin is not your full birth name – what’s the story there? Skylar is my first name and Astin is my middle name, and my real last name is Lipstein. When I was 15 I think my first agent just kind of did it for me. I’m not ashamed, I’m not embarrassed, but she said it was just less specific to one thing and she kind of chopped it off. But forever to my friends I will be Skylar Lipstein. Looking to the future, you’ve got 21 and Over from the writer of The Hangover , and you also have a comedy called Cavemen . Meanwhile, your Pitch Perfect character Jesse is kind of the perfect college boy-romantic love interest. Where do you see yourself heading in, say, five years’ time? He’s definitely sweet as sugar. [Laughs] In five years I just want to be working on things that excite me. I’m open to everything. It could be a 19th century period piece or another awesome comedy with the same crew that did 21 and Over . Or it could be Pitch Perfect 4 ! Who knows? Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
After Cloud Atlas ‘s Fantastic Fest debut I caught up with Lana Wachowski at the Alamo Drafthouse’s Highball, where she and Andy, AKA Wachowski Starship , were beaming and greeting festgoers. (I’m told they were given a tour of the Highball’s private karaoke rooms but didn’t partake in Austin’s favored pastime.) Conversation landed on Michelle Obama, of course (the two best sets of arms in the biz? Michelle Obama and Lana Wachowski), and that’s when Lana dropped a revelation in true Cloud Atlas style: “She went to our high school!” True enough — it happens Chicago’s Whitney M. Young High School turned out the First Lady in ’81, Lana in ’83, and Andy in ’86. Everything is connected, indeed. [ More from Fantastic Fest… ]
Missing mothers, lost wives, abusive and indifferent father substitutes — Looper may be a movie powered by time travel, but its emotional fuel is abandonment. The new film from Brick director Rian Johnson is a clever, clever contraption about trading in your future to feed your present, and the lost boys and regretful men who willingly embrace such a bargain already believe they have nothing to live for or look forward to. Thirty years of kicking around with a lot of cash in your pocket looks like a pretty good bargain when you’re gazing down at it from in front of all that time, but when those last few days are running out, you might not be so ready to go. Looper may not have the bell-ringing resonance of Chris Marker’s La Jetée , one of its touchstones, but it’s a jaunty match-up of genre and character drama that’s far smarter and more finely wrought than almost anything else in the multiplexes. The film’s set a few decades in the future, where technology’s a little better and life in general is worse, at least in the Kansas metropolis in which Joe ( Joseph Gordon-Levitt ) lives. Looper ‘s setting of a midlevel Midwestern city and the ragged, lived-in feeling of its 2044 are a pleasingly off-kilter approach to its sci-fi premise. We don’t know what the government’s like in this year, or what the larger world’s become because it’s not so important to Joe, a young man who’s building up cash reserves and easing his off-hours with drugs until he’s free to move to France. Joe’s a looper, a job he explains with a matter-of-fact lack of curiosity: when time travel is invented a few years from his present, it’s instantly outlawed and used only by organized crime for assassinations. Murders will have become so hard to hide that it’s easier to send targets back to Joe’s era, where they can be neatly offed and disposed of by eager young men like our hero, guys who have accepted their own disposability. Joe’s self-interest is central to both the film’s premise and the way it avoids most of the tougher theoretical questions about time travel, paradoxes, how the technology works and whether people are using it for more ambitious purposes. He doesn’t care. He started out on the streets, and looping has provided him with a nice apartment and enough money to get high and to buy time with his favorite working girl Suzie (Piper Perabo). Like the town in which he lives, Joe’s nowhere near the top of the food chain, and has no interest in climbing. He’s just waiting on his big payout that will come once he closes his loop by killing off his future self — part of the devil’s bargain that all loopers make. Looper is built around our buying Bruce Willis as Joe’s future self, a feat that rests more on a wry impersonation by a prosthetics-aided (and very good) Gordon-Levitt than on the older actor. When the tougher and more world-weary Old Joe is sent back in time to die, he arrives with a mission in mind, but his younger self has no desire to hear it. The scenes in which the two Joes confront each other at a diner are among the film’s best. Youth and experience are unable to relate — even though they’re technically the same person — because their priorities are completely different. It’s an amusing and dishearteningly well-articulated take on how useless it would be to be able to offer your younger self advice when your younger self isn’t ready to hear it. While it’s no looper contract, we do trade in our future for present enjoyment in small ways all the time (by, for instance, taking up smoking or by spending money instead of saving it). Looper offers an even-handed look at both perspectives, even as it sends Old Joe off to make a terrible exchange on behalf of the future and follows younger Joe as he goes on the run and ends up taking shelter on a farm on which a woman named Sara (Emily Blunt) lives with her young son Cid (Pierce Gagnon). After a stylishly noir first half that’s simultaneously futuristic and retro — “20th-century affectation,” Joe’s boss Abe (Jeff Daniels) sneers at his employee’s preference for ties — Looper becomes more thoughtful and a little more jumbled in its second section, as it slows down for Joe to find some human connection for the first time in his adult life. With touches of The Terminator , the aforementioned Marker film and the inspired-by-it 12 Monkeys , a classic episode of The Twilight Zone and more, Looper is aware of its sci-fi legacy, but manages plenty of unique touches all its own. The depiction of Kansas is one, combining future tech and a farming lifestyle unchanged by the advance in time. A sequence in which Joe’s colleague Seth (Paul Dano) meets an unfortunate fate is innovative in its horror. But despite the fleet-footed flash of its storytelling, what’s most impressive about Johnson’s movie is its dark-edged faith in people being able to change despite the path on which they’ve been set. If all we’ll ever be is a product of the circumstances in which we grew up, then time travel’s almost unnecessary — the future’s predetermined. It’s choosing something new that may be as clear a sign as we ever get of a soul. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
After watching this trailer, I think Parker Posey should consider launching some sort of bad-girl management inspiration seminar. Clearly, she’s breaking a lot of corporate cardinal rules in this trailer to Michael Walker’s Price Check — you know, like the one where you’re not supposed to sleep with your employees — but just watch how Eric Mabius, the sad-sack manager in her grocery store pricing and marketing department perks up over the course of this clip as he gets the focus of her manic attention. (The trailer plays after the jump.) The scene of Posey throwing a tantrum in front of her boss by throwing herself on to the floor is a keeper, and reminds me of a few work situations that I’ve witnessed. (At no time did my feet leave the ground.) I also think this trailer handles a rather complex and difficult idea with great economy: the clip manages to show Posey waking Mabius from his financially strapped sleepwalker’s life and then propelling him into chaos, especially on the home front. The scene of his wife smelling his dirty dress shirt says volumes about the pain to come. Check out the rest below. Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
This is a case of life imitating art, or maybe just both going full circle. An Italian man took a cue from the 2002 Steven Spielberg film Catch Me if You Can starring Leonardo DiCaprio and donned a pilot’s uniform, fake identification and gained access to at least one flight in a cockpit. Apparently the age of intense airport security failed to initially discover the faux-pilot, who posed under the pseudonym of “Andrea Sirlo” before being arrested at a bar in Turin Airport. In Catch Me if You Can , DiCaprio played U.S. con-man Frank Abagnale, Jr. who, among many things, flew more than a million miles on over 250 fights to 26 countries in the 1950s after he gained access to a Pan Am uniform and forged a pilot’s license. Abagnale, of course, pulled off the feat at a time when air travel was still in its infancy and security detail at airports during the time were significantly lax compared to today’s post-9/11 era. “I saw that film and I wanted to be like Frank Abagnale,” the Italian man known as “Sirlo” told police, according to The Guardian . Police were first tipped off after a civil aviation lieutenant told police he had met a man who described himself as a captain, but appeared too young to be a pilot. He had apparently created an I.D. with Germany’s Lufthansa Airlines and flew on at least one flight operated by Air Dolomiti from Munich to Turin as a third pilot. Dolomiti is owned by Lufthansa. The suspect created Facebook and Twitter profiles and several photos show him in uniform and sunglasses posing in front of aircraft. Following his arrest Friday, officials found more fake I.D. cards, uniforms, training manuals, and an airport staff parking permit. He’s been charged with “attempting to threaten air security and assuming a false identity.” Lufthansa gave no comment. “Sirlo” is the name of a flight corridor over Turin. [Source: The Guardian ]
Break open the bubbly! Alfred Hitchock’s newly restored silent comedy, Champagne will get be streamed live and exclusively on the visual arts website The Space on Thursday at 7:30 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time (or 3:30 p.m. Eastern time). Champagne (1928) was Hitch’s eighth film as director and tells the story of a playgirl (Betty Balfour) living off the profits of her father’s champagne business, and her father’s plan to get rid of her fiance, who he suspects is a gold-digger. Father knows best! The restoration premiere of Champagne will be accompanied by a specially commissioned new score performed live by British Composers Award winner Mira Calix. and, according to The Space, the film will only be available to watch during the Sept. 27 live stream. In preparation for the premiere, Hitchcock fans can also watch four documentaries about the filmmaker that are available on demand at the site, including Hitchcock at the Picture Palace and Hitchcock’s Pleasure Garden, which is about his directorial debut. The Champagne is being offered as part of The Space’s BFI Beginnings showcase of first or early films by key British filmmakers including Ridley Scott and Ken Russell. Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Even as Iran’s boisterous leader (but not supreme leader) President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in New York for the opening of the U.N. Assembly this week, and already causing some local controversy here staying at a luxury Manhattan hotel, his country is apparently opening a new front in its anti-U.S. proclivities – The Oscars. An Iranian official said his country should boycott the 2013 Academy Awards and not submit a film for Best Foreign-language consideration due to the anti-Islam video Innocence of Muslims which rocketed the Muslim world since its debut on YouTube earlier this month. Iranian cinema has won accolades at festivals around the world for some time now. The government has jailed various filmmakers there, most notably Jafar Panahi ( Crimson Gold ). Last year, fellow Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi won the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language film for A Separation , a first for a filmmaker from that country. But now, Iran’s filmmaking community may be shut out of the Oscars – at least in the foreign-language category – if the country’s head of its government-controlled cinema agency has his way. Javad Shamaghdari said the committee that oversees selection of Iran’s choice for the Oscar category should “avoid” doing so, according to A.P. , which quoted Iran’s semi-official Mehr news agency. The committee had already identified Ye Habbeh Ghand ( A Cube of Sugar ), which centers on a family wedding that turns into a funeral after the groom’s relative dies, to represent Iran’s choice at the Oscars in February. The government still needs to give its consent for the title to move forward. Shamaghdari said the a boycott of the Oscars should take place until the Academy denounces Innocence of Muslims , the once-little noticed video that has resulted in major clashes outside U.S. missions throughout the Islamic world, killing at least 51 people including the U.S. ambassador to Libya. Shamaghdari has in the past pulled Iranian films from festivals worldwide. After Farhadi’s win earlier this year, Iranian officials praised the Academy Award triumph for A Separation , especially since it took the prize over an Israeli film also vying in the category. Some nationalists, however, denounced what they saw as a less than rosy view of Iranian life portrayed in the film, which involves a marriage falling apart. [ Source: A.P. ]
Max Thieriot began his career opposite Twilight ‘s Kristen Stewart (in 2004’s Catch That Kid ), and this week he finds himself romancing Hunger Games ‘ Katniss Everdeen herself, Jennifer Lawrence — albeit against the advice of her mother, the neighborhood, their classmates and, perhaps, insidious forces that linger in secrets and shadows in The House at the End of the Street . In recent years the former child actor has navigated his way toward increasingly interesting projects (Atom Egoyan’s Chloe , Nick Cassavetes’ Yellow , the Toronto entry Disconnect , and the upcoming Bates Motel series on A&E) — and one thing that helped was making a conscious decision to live outside of Hollywood, as Thieriot told Movieline recently. The 23-year-old actor, who made his biggest recent mark starring in Wes Craven’s My Soul To Take , grew up in Northern California (where his family once owned the San Francisco Chronicle) and still lives there. “I always told myself that no matter what happened, how famous I became, I didn’t want to change the person that I am,” Thieriot explains. He spoke about the challenges of revealing just enough information to the audience in House at the End of The Street , if he really is in a genre phase right now, what he’s looking forward to in the Hitchcock-based Bates Motel , and the single best perk of growing up the scion of a newspaper family. You live in Northern California – tell me about the decision to stay there instead of Los Angeles. I moved to L.A. right after I finished high school, for three years, because everybody was telling me it was important to get down there, and then I kind of just decided for myself that I didn’t need to be there to be doing this. I wanted out of some of the chaos that comes with living here and being an actor. And I spend so much time away from home anyways, filming and stuff, that I might as well make home base somewhere I want to be. I grew up swearing that I’d never move to L.A. and yet here I am. L.A.’s fine! But I don’t know, I love Northern California. Jennifer Lawrence describes you as an unconventional actor type – you spend time in your trailer listening to country music, not really concerned with typical showbiz stuff. Do you feel like your approach to the industry is drastically different from the norm? I’d say so. Different from your typical actor, for sure. I don’t know – it’s just the way I was raised. As much as I appreciate acting and enjoy it, and like it, it wasn’t something where I grew up wanting to be a movie star. So when it happened I just took it as it came and always told myself that no matter what happened, how famous I became, whatever, I didn’t want to change the person that I am. That’s one of the reasons I still live in Northern California – it helps me stay grounded and to remember all those things. That must be all the more important given that you started acting so young. Exactly. But I definitely take it seriously. Well, Jen Lawrence also compared you to Paul Newman, so you must. [Laughs] I take it seriously, but at the same time I don’t let it get to me. You’ve got House at the End of the Street coming out but your last mainstream film was horror film, My Soul To Take . Next you’ve got Bates Motel . What’s behind this run of genre fare, and what do you feel like is pulling you toward this material? Honestly, I don’t even know. It’s funny, when I started acting I watched some horror films but I generally didn’t like the acting in them. I’d never thought about doing one, and then I did My Soul to Take and for that was like, well, if I’m going to do a horror film Wes Craven’s the guy to do it with. When this came along, to me it plays so much more as a thriller and not a horror film, and it’s a very different movie for the genre. The character was a character that I wanted to play, as opposed to just getting into this type of film. It’s tricky to talk about because we don’t want to spoil anything, but even as the story goes on the script reveals more and more to the audience. How tricky was that line to walk as a performer, conscious of what information is in the viewer’s mind at any time? It’s definitely hard to play because by the end of the film you hope that the audience goes, ok, and they look back at things that took place, or different expressions, and go, wow – got it! That’s why this happened. That’s why they made that face. It’s a tough line to walk as an actor to try and have that in scenes without giving away something. You know too much. You do. I know too much, but at the same time I want to show them something without having them notice that I’m showing it to them. It’s all about secrets, showing them a secret that they don’t even see until the end. You started your career with Catch That Kid , which was also one of Kristen Stewart’s first films. How did being a child actor influence your later choices? Well, Haley Joel Osment had some and Dakota Fanning had some roles that were very different and extremely challenging, but other than that the norm was these kind of normal sort of roles which to me weren’t that challenging. There wasn’t a whole lot of variety, you know? So once I got to an age where that started to change I made a decision to try and do a little bit of everything to not stay stuck in one category. How old were you when you were first conscious of trying to mix it up? 17 or 18. And since then it seems like I keep doing all this horror thriller genre stuff but that’s just the stuff that’s been in the public’s eye the most, because I’ve done like three movies that are waiting to come out that are all so different. In this Nick Cassavetes film Yellow I have a Southern accent in Oklahoma in the late ‘80s selling drugs and I have all these tattoos, and I put on a bunch of weight and got all buff, and in Foreverland I play a guy who has cystic fibrosis. Disconnect , which was just at Toronto and Venice, I play an internet webcam stripper, so I got buff and lost a bunch of weight and got all shredded for that, the way I felt an internet webcam stripper should look. [Laughs] I’ve really been trying to mix it up a lot since My Soul To Take. And we filmed House at the End of the Street two years ago, and since then I’ve done four movies or something. I only recently considered doing television and this last year I did a pilot for ABC for Roland Emmerich, so I’m open to that now and that’s how this Bates Motel thing came up. Alfred Hitchcock is so iconic in this business and in general and it seemed like a great opportunity to be a part of something that’s a 10 episode show, on A&E, for great producers, with Vera Farmiga and Freddie Highmore who are great actors. And yours is a new role we haven’t seen portrayed before – Norman Bates’ brother. It’s exciting too because as cool and fun and challenging as it is to play a character who’s never been played, it’s also fun to play something like this in such an iconic film now turned into a prequel to a TV show, because he’s unknown. You kind of know what you’re getting with Norma and Norman, but Dylan is this unknown guy thrown into the mix. Yeah, how messed up must that guy be? We know he doesn’t make it to the house later, but what happens in between? But honestly, this has all happened in the past few days, since like Friday. [Laughs] That’s when it all became official. I met with the team via Skype about a week ago, and we talked and all of a sudden the deal was happening. What was it like growing up with your family owning the San Francisco Chronicle, having such a history with institutions like that? It was interesting – I grew up actually hating the fact that my family owned the newspaper, because I was teased a lot at school as being the rich kid whose family owned the newspaper. It was hard because it wasn’t like the Press-Democrat, it was the San Francisco Chronicle. As a kid it seems people used to tease people over anything, and it seems like such a stupid thing to get upset, to get bummed out over something like that, but when you’re little it was like that. So I was happy when we sold the company. Like, great – now people aren’t going to give me shit. But it’s definitely something I appreciate and find to be fascinating, and obviously I’m just born into it, but I look at the history of it all and how it came to be. My great-great-grandfather started the paper in 1865 or something, and when the 1906 earthquake happened he separated himself from the Hearst family who owned the Examiner, and when the earthquake happened he was the only person to release a paper that day. He started it by literally typing it at home and selling it on the street corner. His last name was De Young and he had like four daughters so now there are no more De Youngs that are direct descendants from him… it’s interesting and kind of funny, and my family’s been doing stuff in San Francisco forever. It was also neat as a kid because the company sponsored the local sports teams, like the 49ers. I noticed from your Twitter feed that you’re a bit of a Niners fan. I’m obsessive about the Niners! One of my buddies from Sonoma County just got signed by them this year, so I’m like, yes – now I get to go to some games. That was probably my favorite part as a kid – we sponsored them, and the Giants, and the Golden State Warriors, so we always had company tickets and I took full advantage of that as a kid. There was a petition to get you cast in The Hunger Games as Finnick, which would have been a reunion with Jennifer Lawrence. How far did that actually get? They had specific people and they wouldn’t let others audition, so I didn’t get a chance to audition or anything. You’d think making out with Jen Lawrence for what seems like forever in House at the End of the Street would give you an edge of some sort. You’d think! I can shoot a bow better than anyone in that movie. But I’m over that now. I found a quote you gave in what must have been one of your first interviews, for Catch That Kid , in which you give the following sage advice: “Just be yourself and try not to be too over the top.” Nice. Does that still apply? Yeah! I think that’s still valid. Those are two very important pieces of advice for this industry. [Laughs] Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
