MATTHEW HOGE: Ryan [Gosling] has the harder job. I have the easy job of putting it on paper, and writing a character who's eccentric and has a sort of unusual world view. Ryan has to embody that, and we talked quite a bit about it, and tried to find ways in. I gave him books I thought were really valid, like “The Stranger” by Albert Camus, “Catcher in the Rye,” obviously. Books that are sort of important to this character that we could reference as a shorthand. We talked quite a bit about it, rehearsed quite a bit, but I really have to say if that character comes off as believable and a real person, that's Ryan. That's Ryan using all of the tools he has as an actor to change himself physically and to find certain physical manifestations for an unusual character with sort of an off-center world view. I mean, he changed his posture, he changed his body type, how he looked, he changed his voice, facial expressions, and just things that grounded these ideas that I had of him as a real person. It's a real credit to him as an actor.
Kevin, how did you develop similarities between you and Ryan Gosling?
KEVIN SPACEY: Well, the thing that I did was I watched a lot of Ryan's dailies. I wasn't on the set that much when
I wasn't working because I just thought it was better to let Matt not have me over his shoulder. But I did watch a lot of Ryan's dailies because I knew he was doing things that were characteristic of things you might pick up from your father. I thought that if I could pull some of those characteristics into my performance - just little, small physical things – that I think that they both are remarkably similar. Obviously my character's world view is a bit cynical, and he's completely out of touch with his own emotional life. And obviously he's been a horribly absent father who's made choices that have been, I think, hugely detrimental. And I think it goes to the sum of the reasoning behind how the character Ryan plays ends up the way he does. I think that was, to me, the most interesting journey about playing the role and about producing the film, was that it does try to humanize things that we don't understand. As Matt says, it's so much easier to say that, oh, these kids, they're neo-Nazis, and they listen to bad rock music and they're on drugs and it's not my kid, it's not your kid, it's those kids over there and we don't want to know about them. I think in terms of the layering of these characters does provoke questions about that, and challenge the way we view events that we read about all the time and are horrified by. But do we ever go beyond that initial horror or do we go, “Oh, it's horrible,” and then go on to the next news story. Whenever you sort of spend the time, and we did, there are some pretty remarkable documentaries about kids that had done similar events.
Did you worry about whether the audience would like this character?
KEVIN SPACEY: There are times in certain roles where you can find a level of humor or a level of performance, but I'm not terribly worried about whether people like a character or not. I think that sometimes a movie is supposed to provoke, and sometimes there are people like this, obviously some of them are in our families. He would send him tickets to go lots of places and see the world, but he wouldn't go with him to see the world, wouldn't share his world with him, and there are absent parents. There are people who have children who shouldn't have them, but I don't set out worrying whether a character's going to be liked or not. In this case, it worked.
What did you think about Ryan sucking in his lip?
MATTHEW HOGE: That's Ryan. How he described it was that…as an actor embodying that role he can't invite people in. Actors have certain tricks and can say, “Come on, like me. I want you to like me,” and it would be completely false. That character would be unbelievable, and Ryan used that. He was trying to find other ways of physical manifestations of the idiosyncrasies of the character. How he described that to me was that Leland didn't want to give the world his expression, he didn't want to give them a frown, he didn't want to give them a smile, so he just takes the bottom lip away because he doesn't want people to be getting any insight into his emotional life. I had never seen it as specifically childlike, but he did give it to the younger versions of Leland. He sat
around and kind of talked about, “These are the things that I'm doing with my face.” And the things that Kevin picked up on as well for his scenes. I think it's just such a neat way to look at a character to see where he comes from, where he was at five and twelve and sixteen. I think Ryan did a great job of inspiring the younger actors to get that and make the guy feel real.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
Interviews with Chris Klein & Jena Malone / Ryan Gosling
"The United States of Leland" Photos
"The United States of Leland" Credits and Websites
