Amy Brenneman talks about acting for the Steadicam.
In the spirit of Altman Meets Almodóvar, Rodrigo García (
Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her
), son of Colombian novelist Gabriel García Marquez, has come up with a doozy of an ensemble drama,
Nine Lives
. Not only does ***image1***each of its nine segments sketch the outline of a different woman's life story, and not only is each vignette a mere 10 minutes long, but each was shot in a single day-and perhaps most startlingly, each is one single long Steadicam take. SFR was fortunate enough to catch up with a very busy Amy Brenneman, perhaps best known for creating and starring in the CBS series
Judging Amy
; Brenneman also appeared in
Heat
, more than holding her own opposite Robert De Niro, and more recently
Off the Map
, shot right here in our backyard.
SFR: Given your theater and television backgrounds, did you find anything familiar about rehearsing for the single take?
AB:
That was exactly my rehearsal process-when I read the script, I was worried about doing it until I realized: It's a play! You just walk out and do the scene, beginning to end; and once I thought of it that way, it was fine. And rehearsing it was even more fun than being in a play because we worked in 3D. Rodrigo's great about letting the action drive the shot: We'd work to figure out what we wanted to do, and
then
he'd bring in the camera crew, who would just follow us around. At some moments we're practically running and the camera's barely keeping up; ignoring the fact that there's all this movement and activity going on around you really requires a lot of focus.
How many days did you have to work on your take?
One day-we rehearsed it in one day and shot it the next. They weren't even particularly long days; we shot maybe 10 takes-and Rodrigo said that most often, for most of the segments, he'd find himself choosing the fourth or fifth. He really puts the acting first, working in continuity like this, within each little story-and that's very, very rare; usually everything comes before the acting!
***image2***Do you have any insight as to why he's so fascinated with the intersecting lives of female characters?
He's really a bit of a poet in that he's the first one to admit the situations, the lines, the dialogues come to him in their entirety-he never knows what's happened in the life of that character before or afterward; that's why he hires the actor. When Bill [Fichtner] and I were working on our scene, obviously we had thoughts about this couple, why their marriage had ended, and Rodrigo said fine, but don't tell me about it; I don't want to know. It's funny because people keep asking him, "Don't you want to make a movie that's all one long story?" but he told me that really he's itching to make a movie that's a collection of one-minute stories. That's why I say he's a poet-he has that deftness which gets to the heart of a story quickly and then moves on.
Any new projects in the pipeline?
I sort of fell into a movie called
88 Minutes
where I play Al Pacino's sidekick-and I sold a two-hour movie based on
Judging Amy
to CBS to end the stories, because we were cancelled so suddenly. After a break from the television schedule, I might develop something again; after being part of the creative team it's hard to go back, it's just so damn fun.
