I think I had the title at the very outset and to me it was like this idea that in the film, for me, there’s a central metaphor – a visual metaphor – is when Leland is looking at his fish tank. He looks at it with his left eye and then the right eye and this idea that there’s this division. He tries seeing a different image but the brain puts it together and allows you to see what’s really there and allows you to function and navigate through the world. I just felt like, ideologically, people need sort of a combination of two things, as well. You need to know when to put a wall up and to say, “The pain out there, the suffering out there is not mine. I’m going to keep myself safe.” You also have to know when to reach out and when to feel compassion and when to show apathy and sympathy. For most people it’s as easy and natural as the process of looking at things. You just know instinctually when to keep yourself safe and when to reach out and connect. But Leland, as a character, has both of those abilities but they are in extremes. It’s either one or the other. He’s either left eye or right eye. He’s either feeling absolutely nothing and has that wall up so high that nothing is getting out and nothing’s getting in. There’s no emotional connection to the world. Or he’s feeling everything. He’s feeling all the sadness that he’s perceiving is in the world, and it overwhelms him. So he kind of has the inability to unite the states, those two states.
Are you Leland at all?
(Laughing) It’s a really personal character and I have to say like at this point, I’m as much Leland as Ryan [Gosling] is, you know? We still talk about Leland as if he were our little brother. I think he meant something really personal to each of us. Ryan gave as much to that character as I did because I had the easy job of writing stuff on the page, but he had to actually give a body to it. I think that process demands that personal connection. I think we both feel like he’s our little brother and want to protect him.
You credit your actors, especially Ryan, with bringing these characters alive, but they credit you with writing such specific characters. You let them flesh out the backstory behind these people. What was that process like?
Really good. To me, it was really, really helpful particularly with a character like Allen [Chris Klein] or like Becky [Jena Malone] who weren’t essential to Leland. Whereas Leland has this voiceover so you can get into his head a little bit, but with Allen and Becky there are a lot of things happening earlier in the film that are really going to influence their decisions and their decision-making growth. So to be able to able to sit down with Chris and Jena – I did this with Ryan, too – and really talk about where this character is coming from, the things that happened before the film starts, to give them books, to give Ryan “The Stranger” by Albert Camus and “Catcher in the Rye,” which he actually hadn’t read, and to kind of use books and music as a way to get into talking about the character - I think that really helped them, too. To be able to put on a CD, like Jena can put on The Pixies CD and it just helps her get access into her character. It was really great to be able to have a lot of lead time to be able to talk and talk and talk about who these people were.
Did anything your actors came up with in creating a backstory surprise you?
Let’s see. I think a lot of, as far as literally what happened in their lives, that was stuff that I gave them. What I was [the most surprised about] was how Ryan found physical manifestations for this unusual world view that his character had. Little things that sometimes I honestly didn’t even know where they were coming from until now in this interview process. It’s great to sit next to him and hear him talk about like the lip trick that he does. He kind of swallows his bottom lip. His idea
was that Leland didn’t want to show the world his emotions. He doesn’t want to show them his smile or his frown – and that’s all Ryan.
When you finally got behind the camera and you’ve got this terrific cast, did you ever think you were over your head?
No. I think because things were happening so quickly, once a movie gets going you don’t have time to feel that way. I’d also had about a year of working with Kevin as a producer so that by the time it came around to rehearsing and shooting and stuff, I felt pretty comfortable with him. And I certainly didn’t the first time I was around him (laughing). I was nervous as f*ck. By the time we got around to shooting, I felt like he was really there to support me and was really going to help me. I felt like that level of comfort that I had with him sort of translated to the other actors as well. They looked around and thought, “He’s okay telling Kevin to do it one more time, so I guess he has some idea of what he was doing.”
PAGE 4: Matthew Hoge on Research, Reactions, and Reviews
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