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Under discussion:

The Amityville Horror  (1979)

Blithe Spirit  (1945)

Ghost  (1990)

Ghost Dad  (1990)

Ghostbusters  (1984)

It's a Wonderful Life  (1946)

Matinee  (1992)

Poltergeist  (1982)

Poltergeist 2: The Other Side  (1986)

They Live  (1988)

The Uninvited  (1944)

The Warriors  (1979)

13 Ghosts  (1960)

Toy Story  (1995)

The Sixth Sense  (1999)

Goodbye, Dragon Inn  (2003)

Birth  (2004)

Over Her Dead Body  (2008)

Ghost Town  (2008)

If you took one look at the existence of the new movie Ghost Town and dismissed it on account of its familiarity, you’re ignoring the potential of one of the most valuable plot devices available to fiction. Sure, the employment of ghosts in a narrative may also be evidence of laziness, as the device is just as much a convenience as it is a useful tool for storytellers. Not everyone can be Shakespeare, and of course there is a lot of redundancy and (excuse the pun) lifelessness in the majority of movies involving ghosts.

However, ghosts can also be highly representative and/or serve a film on a deeper level than the surface story. To use another pun, ghost movies are not always so transparent. Like zombies, their plot-device sibling, ghosts have a way of signifying greater ideas, subjects and themes, and aren’t always merely about scares and talking-to-thin-air gags. In a conversation with Cinematical’s Erik Davis, Ghost Town director/co-writer David Koepp had this to say about the significance of ghost stories:

Part of the reason they’re so enduring is because, well, first off all they give hope — because if they are ghosts, then it means we don’t die when we die. But also because they work really well in a number of genres. Ya know, in a drama like Ghost, or a horror movie, suspense or comedy in our case — I just think they offer so many dramatic possibilities; to have someone that’s dead, but still around to talk about it really suggests a lot of great situations.

Okay, so that bit of promotional fluff is actually more about the literal dramatic qualities of the ghost device than the figurative and subtextual, but the quote at least jumpstarted my thinking. Initially I had thought about simply outlining how ghosts have been applied to different film genres, but then I fortunately switched my goal to seek out ten specific ghost films (from the seemingly thousands out there) that utilize the device for more meaningful purpose.

Poltergeist (1982) and Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986)

Ghosts = Threat to Middle-Class

In his book Media Culture: Cutural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern, critical theorist Douglas Kellner points to a multitude of ideas represented by the ghosts haunting the Freeling family in Poltergeist. In fact, these ideas are discussed over 11 pages (viewable on Google Book Search), also concern the first sequel, Poltergeist II: The Other Side, and include everything from threats of TV’s hold on children to the disintegration of the 1960s counterculture. Generally, though, Kellner sees the first two Poltergeist movies as being about threats to the middle-class and nuclear family in an era of economic insecurity. The ghosts in Poltergeist, Kellner argues, stand in for working-class and racial “others,” and they signify in their actions the break-up of the family unit and fears of losing one’s home and job. With these representations in mind, it’s not so unnecessary, perhaps, that a remake of Poltergeist is currently in the works.

The Amityville Horror (1979) 

Ghosts = Financial Insecurity

This is merely a companion to the Poltergeist films in terms of its ghosts’ representation, but seeing as it was released prior to the first Poltergeist film and it received its allegorical reading from none other than Stephen King (in an article titled “Why We Crave Horror Movies” published in Playboy, quoted in Kellner’s book), I had to include it. Here is what King had to say about the film: “The movie might as well have been subtitled ‘The Horror of the Shrinking Bank Account’…. The Amityville Horror, beneath its ghost-story exterior, is really a financial demolition derby.”

Ghostbusters (1984) 

Ghosts = Obesity or Scum of Old New York

Although it was meant as a joke, the Volkswagon ad in which a projectionist argues his idea that Ghostbusters is a serious warning about the obesity epidemic facing America isn’t completely ridiculous. The points about blobby figures, Dana’s fridge and the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man are fair evidence for such an argument. But I’m slightly more interested in the “libertarian” reading of the ghosts as representations of old New York, particularly the filthy, near-bankrupt old New York of the decade preceding the film’s release, which was recently proposed by Karina on this very blog. The Ghostbusters as gentrifying force and pre-Giuliani city-sweepers is interesting, though it might have been more clearly conveyed if some ghosts were in Warriors-like gangs and/or peddling porn in Times Square and/or getting kids hooked on “slime” that can be smoked through a pipe. But I do love the idea that the ghosts are a threat to primarily wealthy New Yorkers just as in real-life it was the homeless and other scum clashing with the new money Manhattanites. Karina also sees the ghosts in the film as a sort of reminder of the New York history that goes back further than the financial and criminal problems of the ‘60s and ‘70s: “Ghostbusters plays on an entire city’s anxieties that, as renters, our spaces don’t belong to us, that there’s a history to our homes that we’ll never know, and probably shouldn’t know.”

The Sixth Sense (1999) 

Ghosts = Insignificance

I love facetious readings of movies, both because I think film scholarship is sometimes too serious and because I think such readings can often be taken more seriously than intended. I’ve already pointed to one example with the VW Ghostbusters ad (there’s a whole series of these ads, of which I find the Toy Story one to be the most hilarious and cogent). Now, I present a humorous address of the major plot hole in The Sixth Sense, part of a Cracked.com list, which asks, regarding the unlikelihood of Bruce Willis’ complete obliviousness to his ghostly existence, “What kind of lifestyle was he living before his death that would make him fail to notice that no one could see or hear him?” Implausible, sure, but it’s also representative of insecurities many of us have about our significance in the world. The Sixth Sense is therefore kind of like the antithesis to It’s a Wonderful Life by showcasing the possibility that your life is so meaningless that were you invisible or dead you would experience no difference.

Ghost (1990) 

Ghosts = Love’s Bond

The fact that, in The Sixth Sense, Bruce Willis doesn’t notice his nonexistence even when in the presence of his wife says something about his character’s perception of and role in that marriage. On the other side of the coin, perhaps, is Demi Moore’s character in Ghost. A precursor and inferior film to Jonathan Glazer’s Birth, it deals more slightly with the same themes of faith and knowability as they pertain to love. This earlier film is far less cynical, though, evident in the employment of a literal ghost rather than simply an outlet for the dead (Ghost would be more similar to Birth if we, like Demi Moore’s character, only saw, heard and had to trust Whoopi Goldberg’s psychic character). There’s still a bit of initial skepticism that love’s bond is nothing more than shared secrets and memories (as if the first convincing evidence that Sam is there, the response “ditto,” couldn’t have been overheard by someone outside the relationship), but continued proof of the ghost’s existence turns the device into an allegory for the spiritual bond between lovers. And it’s apparently a strong enough bond to give Molly (Moore) the faith that she’s kissing her dead husband, even if it may look like she’s kissing a con woman (Goldberg).

Over Her Dead Body (2008)

Ghosts = Memories of Ex-Lovers

Now, imagine if in Ghost, Goldberg’s character actually wanted to pursue a relationship with Molly and was unfortunately haunted by Molly’s previous lover. That’s kind of the premise behind this movie, which proves that even lame ghost movies can at least be allegorical. Here, a psychic character (Lake Bell) falls for a veterinarian (Paul Rudd) and must win his love while being literally haunted by his jealous former fiancée (Eva Longoria). Here the ghost represents that memory of an ex-lover (whether a dumper, dumped or deceased) that can torment the mind of either party in a new relationship, making it difficult to move on to or trust a new lover. Of course, Over Her Dead Body wasn’t the first movie to deal with such a theme, and you’d be better off watching something older and better, like Blithe Spirit, but I wanted to reference some bad films on this list, too. Just be glad I didn’t go ahead and include Ghost Dad as an allegory about inheritance.

The Univited (1944)

Ghosts = Lesbians

Continuing a link to the Demi Moore-Whoopi Goldberg kiss (in which Patrick Swazye’s ghost is superimposed over Goldberg to play it safe for the audience), here is a film in which a ghost actually allegorically represents the “spectral presence of lesbianism,” to borrow a phrase from film scholar Patricia White, who writes of this film and others in her look at the correlation between Hollywood ghost movies and lesbian movies in the book Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability. In addition to implying an actual lesbian relationship, which ended with the death of one of the women, the film’s ghost also seems to represent threats of maternal identification and the female Oedipus complex.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003)

Ghosts = Cross-Gendered Spectatorship

The ghostly theater audience members in this Tsai Ming-liang film may represent the death of the moviegoer or of cinema itself, but I also see the transvestite ghost as being representative of cross-gendered identification experienced through film spectatorship.

13 Ghosts (1960)

Ghosts = Communists

Okay, this one is a total stretch, but it works for me because (1) thanks to Joe Dante’s Matinee, I’ve always looked at William Castle films as having a Cold War context and (2) I’m shocked that there aren’t actually any Cold War-era films that more clearly employ ghosts as representatives of a Communist threat. I guess monsters, pod people, witches and aliens were sufficient allegories, but I also think it a missed opportunity to relate ghosts to Karl Marx’s phrase “spectre of Communism.” Anyway, in forcing this film into my wanting of such a Communist allegory, I have only this argument: the goggles used both in the film and (as one of Castle’s many gimmicks) outside the film to detect ghosts could be taken as a sort of fantasy for Americans wishing they had special goggles that could detect any Reds living among them. It’s almost like a counterpart to the goggles that detect capitalistic aliens in They Live, right? No? Well, I tried, and hopefully someone can make a modern ghost story that at least employs ghosts as terrorist allegory.

Under discussion:

The Princess Diaries  (2001)

Brokeback Mountain  (2005)

The Devil Wears Prada  (2006)

Rachel Getting Married  (2008)

Anna Hathaway has come a long way since The Princess Diaries, although speaking to her in person you sort of forget everything she’s done, from Brokeback Mountain to The Devil Wears Prada and now Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, because she still looks like that young girl thrust into the role of suddenly becoming a princess. Although she might look the same, she’s definitely matured in both her acting and how she handles a press room.

Read on to find out about her role as Kym in the movie, why she isn’t entirely satisfied with her previous acting roles, and what she’s doing next.

You were in Venice and now in Toronto, and the film was well received in both places. How was that?

I am not going to lie: two standing ovations at the world’s premier film festivals makes for a very good week [laughs]. I think, I need to stop celebrating with champagne now.

Was this the kind of role you’d been waiting on for awhile?

Meryl Streep said best––as she often does say best––that you do the best work you can from the material that is available. I am so thrilled that this part came my way. This is the kind of role, the reason why I became an actress. And of course I’ve loved the rest of my career and had so much fun working on these roles and had fun exploring other people, but this one, it is not “Oh, it is the one I have been waiting for,” but it is why I became an actor.

And you don’t get roles like this every single time and I don’t expect to get a role like this every single time, but I am happy that I did get it and that apparently I executed it well. And quite frankly, I am proud of my own work in this and I have never ever ever been able to say that to myself about another performance.

Are you happy with your performance in this?

I hope it doesn’t make me sound conceited: I am really satisfied. I worked really hard on this character for a year and to have my intentions represented on screen exactly as I imagined them is overwhelming and I have never had that before.

It is very heart wrenching to watch the movie and the performance, how much did you have to go into those emotions and how you were able really to let yourself be happy?

It is a funny thing, and I am going to sound like such a pretentious actor and please excuse me, but from the second I read the script, it is like Kym and I were locked together and I just knew who she was and how she felt. I didn’t have to torture myself to feel a certain way. It wasn’t about me, it was never about me, it was always about her and she made sense to me.

I think, the hardest thing is sometimes when the script tells you to cry and you don’t feel like the character or feel a certain way and you don’t feel like the character’s earned it.

Kym’s earned everything that she has and the good and the bad and the extremely extremely painful. And so, it always made sense to me that  and she is a dramatic person. She is an emotional person. She is just an incredibly well constructed character and as a result, she never felt like work. And like I said, I never had to beat myself up in order to get her to cry.

Kym seems so far away from the Anne Hathaway we’ve come to know…

I know, doesn’t she?

Is she that far away from where you are?

She is closer than anybody’s ever thought. [laughter]

Is this the first time in your life where you’re not trying to please other people?

Yeah, that is exactly where I am at in my life right now [laughs] actually.

What changed that?

I am sure it has a lot to do with my age and you know, just kind of… But, I have really… For the first time in my life, I am really comfortable in my skin. I think, I was tortured by the… Oh, my god I have just said that and bloggers are going to be like “Anne Hathaway was tortured…”

 [laughter]

So, I’d like to retract that word and just say I was preoccupied with the fact that I was an actress, but I couldn’t call myself an actress to myself. I hadn’t done anything yet to earn that. And there I was out promoting it and people were complimenting me and I couldn’t accept it because it was just not true to me and I’ve all of a sudden now I have done work that I am proud off. I have done something that I believe in. I have done something that I worked really hard at and feel fulfilled by and feel satisfied by.

And there was a clear delineation in my life before I did this movie and afterwards and I felt like after I made it, I could relax because I am just like “at last, I did it, I did it, I did it,” who knows if I will ever be able to do it again and I am sure I will get freaked out about something else, but for this exact moment, I am really really happy. 

And also about Kym as a character, Kym doesn’t have a filter, which I do, I was born with one, so I am never going to be able to change that.

But, Kym is really comfortable going out there and saying, “Look I am true to myself, so if you like me or you don’t, that’s your problem, but I am just me.” And I have never given myself the freedom to do that and I am kind of exploring that for the first time in my life and I am really liking it. 

[laughter]

Did you try to remove that filter?

Well, yes, but I think that has more to do with me being an American than a celebrity. [laughter. boy she laughs a lot.]

Was it hard for you to in a case like The Devil Wears Prada where Meryl Streep got most of the limelight?

No, I’m a team player, what’s good for the movie is good for me and that is my attitude about it. I have long believed and still believe that you cannot cheat your character for the sake of giving a showy performance, which means if the emotional life in your character isn’t there to give a showy performance, you don’t just give one because that’s not going to work for the film. And even if that means sacrificing what you were just talking about, that’s what you have to do, that’s what you sign up for, that’s what it means to tell a story.

Do you mean that you weren’t satisfied with your previous films?

There were things I would have liked to change about all my performances, but Jonathan Demme managed to get something out of me that I was really proud of and wouldn’t change a thing about.

The character Kym smokes very heavily in the film. Did you take up smoking for it, or do you have a smoking habit yourself?

Reformed, reformed, reformed. I will say, it was tough to leave Kym behind when the movie was done and that was a habit that was tough to leave behind.

Where do you go from here?

I turned around and I made the same movie 180 degrees in the opposite direction. I made a movie called Bride Wars with Kate Hudson, which is going to be like the glossiest, most commercial thing you’ve ever seen.

But, it’s fun. I thought it was fun, because in it, I play one of the superlikable girls that I play, but she’s having an identity crisis about being a superlikable girl. [laughs] So, I thought it was kind of interesting.

Are you campaigning this fall? Are you going on the campaign trail?

I am, yeah. I’m going go with the Creative Coalition and then let them use me as they see fit.

Under discussion:

Caged Heat  (1974)

The Silence of the Lambs  (1991)

Stop Making Sense  (1984)

Philadelphia  (1993)

Valkommen Till Festen  (1997)

The Celebration  (1998)

After the Wedding  (2007)

Neil Young: Heart of Gold  (2006)

There Will Be Blood  (2007)

Rachel Getting Married  (2008)

Jonathan Demme has had an extremely successful career ever since directing Caged Heat in 1974. He won the Oscar for Best Director in 1992 with Silence of the Lambs, and helped Tom Hanks act his way to a Best Actor Oscar for Philadelphia. He’s also directed things as varied as a Saturday Night Live episode in 1980, the Talking Heads documentary Stop Making Sense, and Neil Young: Heart of Gold, with a new Young movie on the way in next year’s Trunk Show.

Rachel Getting Married represents another big change for him, as the film was shot completely handheld, features a lot of improvised dialogue, and uses ambient music from musicians actually on the set. It’s about as close to a Dogma film as you can get these days. We sat down with Jonathan in Toronto, and read on to find out what inspirations he drew on for this film, why he wanted to cast director Paul Thomas Anderson as the male lead, and how he came to work with Anne Hathaway.

This film seems to be a big change or a challenge in your career. What was your biggest challenge doing this film, which is completely different for you?

Well, the big challenge and in a way the only challenge that I really felt was the same old challenge, you know, to try to make a good movie, to wind up the movie that worked and kind of delivered on the potential that I perceived in the script to be emotionally strong and also be funny and shed light on different stuff maybe if we got really lucky.

I was cocky about this movie, I trusted Jenny’s script, it moved me so much and I thought it was so fresh and it excited me, because I felt we have the potential here of making a movie that will be absolutely satisfying, justify wherever you watch it, it is watching it and we can get there in a different way. Part of what can be entertaining about this movie can be its very differences. So, there was that.

There was a script, there was Anne and this wonderful cast we put together; Declan Quinn, he is our cinematographer. Declan was a gigantic part of my confidence on this movie because Declan not only does very beautiful lighting and he has a fantastic eye anyway. I worked with him, this is our fourth film together, but the others have all been documentaries. So, I have gotten very used to seeing the beautiful cinematography that Declan does when he shoots reality.

And I thought, Jenny’s script feels so loose and it aspires to being, you are there, things are going to happen. So, I thought, ‘well if Declan is willing to operate this himself, then we can do a film that will hopefully really be terrific to watch and be very very unique,’ and he is going to shoot it like a documentary. We never rehearsed anything ever. We didn’t design shots beforehand. There was no such thing as Anne’s closeup or over Bill’s shoulder, never that.

 The whole point was that even Declan didn’t know shot by shot what was going to happen the next time the actors started acting. And I mean well, I am in my director’s chair in the other room, watching the monitor, the monitors are really good now, they used to be horrible, you get a really good image there.

So, I’d sit there and like wonder what Declan is going to do and it is like “OK action” and then see it.

Declan’s brother if you are familiar with him is Aidan Quinn, the actor. Declan is grown up around acting. He, like me, has tremendous awe for actors. Declan is an extraordinarily gifted storyteller in his own right. He is an amazing man, amazing man. So, when Declan starts wading into those actors and they don’t know if he is going to land on them or not, he is going to come away with something much better than anything we could abstractly plan beforehand, I think.

Can you about how you incorporated the music into this, it is so complicated and it sounds like it is environmental that it is part of the scene as well?

Jenny had it in the script, she had written this to me wonderful startling odd thing and now the wedding party begins and Brazilian samba troupe shows up in the backyard of this [inaudible 16:43] home. And that made me think that you know, let’s make this… Their friends can be  he is a record producer, of course there would be a bunch of musicians there, and of course it is a house that is permeated with love of music. Their father, Paul, is a music business executive and the artists kind of love him, we can hear that during the toast when Donald Harrison speaks to him. So, we will have lots of instruments around.

I was very excited about the idea of… again with this idea of wanting it to be real, wanting it not only to seem real.

I was hoping to try to make everything as real as possible. So, well, they’d really be a bunch of musicians and I house a lot of instruments, let’s go for it. 

And I was very excited about the possibility of doing something that I’d sort of wanted to do for a long time, which is the idea of normally what we do is we shoot the movie and than a composer comes in and there’s a composer’s response to what the actors did. And that music gets made and put on top of the movie.

 But, what if the actors  you flip it and the actors get to respond to the music that we’re hearing when we watch the picture. The music in the moment.

That’s very Dogma.

By the way, I know Dogma’s dead and everything, but I think the idea of dogma, which is also the idea of any documentary, which is you don’t manipulate the reality.

Speaking of Dogma, Rosemarie DeWitt told us that you told the actors to watch After The Wedding. Why did you do that and what did you take away from that film?

After the Wedding? Well, that was the thing about which I have also been told, by the way, is postdogma dogma.

It’s feels like it would be closer to Celebration, right?

Now, that’s Dogma. Celebration, we looked at that by the way, because again I wanted to, because we’re making a movie in America and we’re Americans and stuff like that. I wanted to try to remind us of what it’s like when fiction is done in an aggressively realistic way.

 So, we watched Festen, but the movie the I kept watching, and we had screenings, we got the whole cast together and watched was After the Wedding. We had the key crew people together and watched After the Wedding. Because After the Wedding, that was what my aspiration was, because I love that movie so much. And I get this very real sense that the actors, that real moments were happening, that it was spontaneous, that it seemed… we would argue, “Do you think they really  did that just happen or did they know it was going to happen?” But, whatever it was, it was great. It makes you start feeling, “Gosh, this is real.”

 And the camera in After the Wedding, it didn’t look like it had designed shots, but it felt like the camera was always lucky enough to be in the right place to capture the best perspective on what was going on.

 So, that was my thing. Let’s try as best we can to achieve this sense of freedom and spontaneity on both sides of the camera.

How did you end up casting Anne Hathaway for this? Did you have a particular belief in her acting?

I did always believe in her from day one and I think it is very funny because I think we tend to, anyone who like watches movies or plays and then thinks about it, we someone and we think, “They are really good at that.” And then, they do something different and they are really good at that, “We go ahhh wow! Who would have thought it,” but I think it is actually a logic that if Anne has been like in Princess Diaries, where she showed up as a teenager and I don’t want to belittle, but she showed up as a teenager and she was really obviously very gifted at doing that part, but to me, that leads me to believe that she is going to be gifted doing other parts. And I do think it is very exciting when we see someone do that, but I think it is amusing that it is surprising.

Are you always trying to get something different out of your actors??

Well, you are hoping that they are going reinvent themselves, yes, in the new part, but with Anne, I had a very very simple kind of progression. I saw her first in the Princess Diaries, which by the way I saw it because I had kids that wanted to see it and I saw it at a drive-in in Bridgeton, Maine and a big success, so I was really impressed because of that, so there was that.

 And then, I was at the Golden Globes, I was one of the producers of Adaptation about probably it was… five years ago. And I had this funny director moment where I showed up on the, as everybody does, on the red carpet, walking along and there is Donald Sutherland and there is Charlize Theron and they are all like this… this crowd of celebrity and glamour and what have you, there was this young woman, about 10 yards away, who was moving in a certain kind of way and had this kind of wonderful thing about her and I was taken in. She also looked really pretty to be surface about it, looked really pretty and kind of gorgeous and wonderful and asked them, I asked “Who is… do you know who that is?” He was like “Oh that is Anne Hathaway,” “Ah! The girl from Princess Diaries.” Well, look at that man, she is really got it to put it crudely.

So, when I got, that’s a horrible thing, “she’s got it,” the camera loved it. But, I had that moment, so like the director in me was like “make a note of that, maybe I will be able to capitalize on that someday.”

Maybe, I will be able to one day have a script where she can do something completely different and everything because there was this potential there. So then, when I got Jenny’s script, Anne was the only person I thought of to send the script, but I sent it to her representatives and I hadn’t taken it anywhere for finance, so it was just like kind of like, well there is a script I love and I am wondering if Anne Hathaway would be interested, actually in either of the sisters. I think, both parts are great.

And I heard back that Anne thought the script was really good, was very interested in the character of Kym and was willing to meet me. So, we met and we had a coffee in Greenwich Village for about an hour. And it was clear to me who she was and I thought oh gosh, you can see how keenly intelligent she is, how big hearted she is, how likable she is, which is going to be really important for this really maddening character that you want to like thump all the time. And we talked about it, Anne saw stuff in the script that I hadn’t appreciated enough yet and I got very very excited by the encounter and I know she’d be, longwinded, but that’s it, I knew she was going to be wonderful.

Can you talk about the cultural diversity in this film? I think it’s really important, it struck me like this is the first movie of the Barack Obama, let’s hope, years. Because it had such an ease about the cultural differences and all of that. So, was that in the script or is that something you added?

She wrote this four years ago. We never talked about that. To me, because we certainly wanted this to be the best wedding, to me there’s two things. One is, I like the pictures that I do to reflect the real America as it is today. And I’m a New Yorker and I can’t speak to what it’s like all over the country, but I can tell you that what we see gathered there at the wedding reflects very much what we see on the streets in New York and in workplaces all over our town.

Also, I wanted this to be the best, best, best wedding ever. And to me that meant the best crowd ever. The most exciting crowd, the most stimulating crowd. And that’s, again, what you end up with. I think a kind of a predominantly white crowd is boring. It’s just not  it doesn’t look like that.

 But, there’s an irony too, because it is an interracial marriage. We never talked about that. We never went, “Wow.” Because we all know interracial couples and stuff.

All the other elements: the Indian wedding, the Brazilian dancers…

Well, that’s Jenny Lumet’s fault. But, the thing I wanted to say there just in conclusion, that point that was Tunde Adebimpe who plays Sidney was the second person that I offered the part to. The first person I offered the part two was the American filmmaker who should be in movies because he’s so good looking and fabulous. And that is Paul Thomas Anderson. He came in and read the script at a table read with us. He was working on finishing up There Will Be Blood in New York. He was wonderful. And he passed the likeability test in a big way. I wanted, again because Jenny writes characters without regard to making them likable, and rooting interests and stuff. She tries to makes them real and fascinating and complicated.

We needed not only terrific actors, but I thought people in the audience would like despite their vagaries. So, Paul was adorable as Sidney. I offered him the part and he said, “Jonathan, you’ve got to be kidding me. It was fun to do the table read, but a) I’m shy, and b) I’ve got this little movie I’m trying to finish and stuff.

 So, our casting directors I asked them to please, please, our whole movie was cast from New York. And I asked our casting directors to bring in our most gifted, likable actors.

And Tunde and also Mather Zickle, who plays Kieran, these are guys, they sat down across the table and I just liked them right away.

I liked being with them. I was fascinated by them. They were cute and funny and terrific. So, with Tunde, I was seduced a little bit by the fact that he’s the lead singer of a great cutting edge rock band called “TV On The Radio,” that is really wonderful. That kind of rock and roll allure.

 The other thing was I was excited by the fact that it made for an interracial marriage because that moves me. For me, and I’m the only person I can really go on, this makes it a richer and more meaningful experience, if possible.

 Now, P.S., when I saw the Obama convention, which Anne was at. And then, they did his speech, I don’t know if you all saw it, but 80,000 people. I was like, “Yo! It’s just like our movie!”

So the film got such a great response in Venice and then here in Toronto, why was it rejected from Telluride?

I’m not sure. All I know is that… I think the Sony guys showed it to whoever they showed it to, and they didn’t invite her to come.

Wow. That seems like such an egregious mistake.

Well, thank you. I’ve never been to Telluride, but we’re really happy to be here in Toronto.

I imagine. The audiences seem to be too.