很喜歡看電影幕後花絮, 電影需要很強的創造力, 完全是從無到有; 從一個idea, 到結合錢財人力物力, 需要很強的想像力, 與很強的行政執行力, 很羨幕電影從業人員, 所以也很愛看幕後花絮; 這是答應自己要當成功課整理出來.
Writer: It’s called about a boy, but I suppose there are probably two boys, really. The original idea was that I thought of this guy who invents a child, so that he can meet single mothers. So he invents a child and goes to a single-parent group. That was the initial germ of idea.
Director: It’s based on a book called, appropriately, About a boy, by Nick Hornby. Which came out in England about seven years ago, and was a huge hit there and did very well here. He kind of addresses man’s fate – especially 30-something-man’s fate- in the modern world.
Hugh Grant: I love Nick Hornby. He gets London life so right and is so funny about it. Particularly male bachelor single London life, which I know extremely well. So I thought “This is right up my alley.”(這是我拿手的) And you know, on top of that, it’s actually quite moving, and I’ve never really done “moving”.
Writer: I suppose the kind of comedy that I’m drawn to, I don’t want it to be purely farcical and I want it rooted in something(言之有物). And I think, after High Fidelity (another book), I wanted to try and push that a little bit harder, the idea that you could write a comedy which includes people having a hard time.
Directors: When we firstly read the book, a lot of scenes felt like they were from a classic comedy, so a lot of stuff we kept, but the last third of the movie is an invention of ours that we worked out and then worked on with Hugh Grant, our real partner in terms of someone to bounce our writing off and get ideas from. So we knew that when we started shooting we were on the same page. (有共識)
We wanted to make something in the vein of older filmmakers we like, like Billy Wilder, who’s a tremendous influence on our doing this movie, just because of the mixture of cynicism and hope at the same time.
We harassed (蹂躪) the producers, Jane Rosenthal and Robert De Niro, endlessly.
I think at first Jane didn’t get why the American Pie directors should direct this movie I mean, It’s a comedy, but on the surface it’s a really different kind of comedy. Hugh was equally horrified as was Nick Hornby.
(註: 美國派, 一部低級搞笑片, 同樣出自本片導演的作品; 最初製片, 原著作者, 以及休葛蘭都不解為何找此片導演?…).
Writer: I think, probably like a lot of people of my generation, I did think “Oh, my god.” Partly because I’d never seen American Pie.
Hugh Grant: I adore American Pie, I really did, but I thought “That’s completely wrong.” Our film’s funny, but not as determinedly lowbrow-funny (低俗搞笑) as American Pie. But then you meet them, and they’re these learned, scholarly, intelligent guys.
Nicholas (劇中那位小男生):
One thinks of an idea and the other says “Let’s try that,” and then they get double the ideas. And, well, it helped, because then if they think something’s a bit not very good, then, they’ll say, and the other one might say “Well, we can try it.”
And they don’t seem to really shout at each other at all and argue. Well, if they did, nobody ever sees them doing it.
Hugh Grant: I think, of all the American filmmakers I’ve ever met, the most erudite. Shockingly erudite. The bastards read books on the set – I’ve never seen that. While the set’s being lit, they’re reading tomes about the decline of the British Empire.
Directors: Sometimes you catch us holding them upside down. That’s embarrassing.
Hugh Grant: They just happen to have six-year-old sense of humors, and I think it’s a very good combination for this material. Nick Hornby is also a clever man with childish sense of humor in a way, and it epitomizes the film.
Directors: Hugh wanted to play the character that we wanted him to play. Actually, Hugh is every bit as withdrawn and morally suspect as the character he plays, I’m not sure he’d deny it.
He’s much less like the kind of bumptious, lovable, snuffling guy that you see in Four wedding and a Funeral or Notting Hill (妳是我今生新娘), so I think he was ready to play a character who is a little closer to the bone.
Hugh Grant: I like any strong story set in Britain, really. I find the older I get, the more I want to work here- for all kinds of reasons. And I thought if offered the possibility of breaking my mold a little bit. I’d sort of just done it, to a certain extent, in Bridget Jones’ Diary (BJ單身日記), you know going bastards. And in this, I thought to go shallow and trendy would be novel for me.
Rachel weisz: He is a very focused and very serious about what he does. He is a very committed serious actor. And he has great chemistry with women. He was wonderful to play opposite.
Toni : He’s constantly honing how he’s gonna deliver lines and rewriting stuff as well, just so that it’s perfect and kind of just right.
Hugh Grant: It’s a habit I’ve developed over…well, always, really, but it’s got worse over the last few films, which is to try new stuff, when the camera’s rolling. It’s just part of trying to reinvent it, sort of making it up again as you go along.
Nicholas: He was good to work with, actually, yeah. He’s hard to keep up with sometimes because he improvises (即興演出) quite a lot. He suddenly adds on a bit to the scene or changes stuff around. That’s quite hard sometimes, but you get used to that, I think I learned quite a lot of that over the three months.
Directors: For me, at least, it gets a little boring. Unless there’s a bit of improvisation in the film. We like to go up to an actor and say “Why don’t you try this?” or “Try to improvise like this.”
One cool thing about Nicholas (劇中小男生) is he was totally game for it. Even when we were auditioning him, if we went off-book, he would respond as the character, that’s a huge help.
They needed to click in a very eccentric way. You didn’t want them to be too palsy with each other. So, gosh, how did they work with each other? I’m not sure they did. Hugh is frightened of children and they’re frightened of Hugh.
Hugh Grant: Yeah, I don’t know…I mean, kids acting…I’ve never really done it before. I didn’t know what to expect. I am not a natural kid-person, you know. But we just took great trouble to find a kid that wouldn’t annoy me.
Hugh Grant: Nicholas is a freak. He’s so focused and grown-up, and know his lines and has immaculate instincts. Which is lovely. It’s not something you always find in a grown-up actors.
Rachel: I felt like I learned a lot from working with him, because he hadn’t learned all the acting tricks that grownups do. He’s just a pure, instinctive performer, so there’s nothing better than that.
Toni :I love working with kids because I think that they have what every actor wants, which is an ability to be in the moment. They haven’t developed this brick wall of neuroses that most actors find so difficult to jump over. So it’s nice to be around that kind of sense of freedom in terms of acting.
Hugh Grant: I think Weitz brothers (本片導演, 一對兄弟), comedy is their first instinct, and I’m a tart for a laugh and I now find that Toni Collette is, too. (Toni, 劇中那個神經兮兮的母親).
So everyone’s sort of pulling in that direction. I just hope we don’t pull too far and things are as sad and resonant as it should be.
Dirctors: The whole movie is a balancing act between humor and pathos, and if you go too far in one direction, you lose your balance completely.
Hugh Grant: You’re absolutely on a knife edge. It’s not “Man falls into room, takes his trousers down, slips on a banana skin, farts…” which are all hilarious, by the way, and that’s my favorite kind of comedy. No, but it’s light delicate stuff. And if you’re on that knife edge of tone, it can freak you out.
Writer: I think that idea that you can switch from rather depressed empathy to laughter is an attractive one for a cinema audience, because contemprorary films, especially tend to take very much one tone. We’ve not become very good at switching moods like that, and I think it would be a terrible thing to lose from the cinema.
Toni: It’s not a candy-coated comedy. It deals with really serious subject matters quite gracefully. It creates really poignant and moving moments and a lot of depth. Which I think makes you appreciate the humor of it even more.
Hugh Grant: I think all good comedy’s based in sadness in a funny kind of way. It you’ve got that core, the funniest is usually funnier. In this film, there’s a lot of sadness, particularly in the boy’s life, and the comedy plays all the stronger against that.
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