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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
"Laurel Canyon" director Lisa Cholodenko on casting the "awesome" Frances McDormand, the influence of D.H. Lawrence (whom she hasn't read) and the sexuality of her interviewer.
Mar 7, 2003 | Lisa Cholodenko's second movie takes place in the hippie-historic Laurel Canyon area of Los Angeles, but the filmmaker is firmly from the suburban San Fernando Valley. You can hear it in her "likes," her "totallys" and her "awesome."
"Laurel Canyon" is a movie about seduction and temptation and lust, but at its center it's an intricate character drama about what it means to be emotionally responsible. Frances McDormand plays Jane, a record producer trying to get a hit out of an English band in her home studio. Jane is in her 40s, smokes pot and sleeps with the much younger lead singer of the band (Alessandro Nivola).
Jane's son, Sam (Christian Bale), is an uptight psychiatrist who has rejected Jane's cocktails-in-the-pool California lifestyle for an East Coast education and prim fiancée Alex (Kate Beckinsale). When Sam and Alex move back to California with their twin rolling suitcases, they end up in Jane's house with the band. Piece by piece, Alex finds herself drawn to the band, its music and its libertine frontman. Meanwhile, Sam starts to fall for an Israeli doctor at his hospital (Natascha McElhone).
One of the best things about "Laurel Canyon" is that it just feels right; every piece of it has a rare honesty, from its characters' decisions to the crates and crates of vinyl stacked against the wall at Jane's house. I've never seen a better movie about recording music, and by extension about the often banal process of making art.
I spoke with Cholodenko, who also directed Ally Sheedy in "High Art," another dense, subtle film about seduction, over the phone last week. She was in Colorado, doing press for "Laurel Canyon," while I was in New York, recovering from a blizzard. The director's California mien extended beyond her casual slang, as I found out toward the end of our conversation, when Cholodenko asked me a personal question with all the loose confidence of one of her Left Coast protagonists. It's not that she was being nosy; she was just being open.
Were you interested in the music business before this movie, or was that just where these characters happened to find themselves?
I mean, I think the answer is a little bit of both. I was curious enough to want to spend a few years with the music business because that's what it takes as a writer. So I was interested in how it works and how it doesn't work, and how it's oddly similar to the film business in a way.
What do you mean?
You know, the way that I dramatize it within the film is as these commercial demands that are going on outside. Then there are people on deadline to do something spectacular when all they really want to do something in a different direction or something more personal. Which is reminiscent of something I struggle with as a filmmaker. That said, I think the music-business aspect of this film came less as this overdetermined idea to set a film in that world than out of the character, Jane. As I fleshed her out, this world got created around her. It came from within, rather than from the outside.
Was she modeled on a particular music business figure?
Not really. Because as I discovered later after writing the first draft of it, there really wasn't anybody of her age group, of her generation, any women who were record producers.
What about Ian's band? Is his band modeled on a particular group?
I started writing this in 1998, right around the time that Radiohead's "OK Computer" was all the rage. And I really liked that record, and became aware of bands following in that tradition, like Travis or Coldplay, mid-tempo, balladeering rock-pop music. So in that tradition.
How much did Folk Implosion, the indie rock group that plays Ian's band, bring to the film? Did you learn about band behavior from them?
No, not really. They sort of came in at the last minute and saved my ass. I was really having a hard time casting actors to play a band. It seemed like a recipe for disaster to do that. I think what they helped was for Fran McDormand and Alessandro Nivola to get a general sort of energy, if you will. And while this band isn't modeled on the Folk Implosion, those guys have been in the music business for a long time so there's just a general demeanor ...
They look exactly like a band sitting around a table smoking pot.
Yeah, well, that's exactly what they were supposed to be. They didn't have huge personalities. They just were there making a record. And their frontman is the charisma guy.
