Julianne Moore Discusses a Few of Her Recent Directors: “…The thing that makes a great director for me is someone who is knowledgeable about what they're trying to communicate and both [Joe Roth and Alfonso Cuaron] are that way.
I was so grateful to Joe, number one, for choosing this project which was something that I had wanted to do for so long and thought that it was sitting there. So for choosing it, for getting Sam in it, and then for knowing every single day exactly what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it. He would say, 'This is the scene. I'm starting here then I'm going to shoot this and shoot this and this is how the camera is going to move.' He always had a plan. He always had a vision and as an actor I really need that. I really, really need someone who's got that kind of assurance and he had it. Alfonso [Cuaron] had it as well.
The question that I get a lot is, 'Isn't it exhausting when you have to do something emotional?' No. It's exhausting when you have to do something at all and you have a really rotten director. That's exhausting. Then you go home and you go, 'What am I going to do?' But every day with Joe on this we all loved it. We loved going to work. We loved the people around us. It was a real pleasure.”
Julianne Moore on the Housing Project Used in the Film: Rumor had it that a lot of people who lived in the housing project shown in the movie wanted to be in the film. Moore confirmed that was true. “Yeah, I think that people did. It's exciting and people like movies and movies in their neighborhoods and stuff. It was so interesting to be there because this is a project that people are being moved out of, as with a lot of projects, because people have determined that they are unsafe, not great places to live.
One of the things that we saw when I was there on a scout with Joe, there are these houses, sort of three story brick houses with really, really wide sidewalks next to them, incredibly wide and you just think, 'Oh, these are for people to walk on.' While we were there a cop car pulled up, drove next to the building, about a foot and a half away from the building, passing people's living room windows, parked in front of the door of one of the units and knocked on the door with the billy club and walked in. Now if you are working class, middle class, wealthy, you're not going to live in an environment where people can walk up to your house with a billy club like that. They certainly can't park their car in front of your front door. And yet we have built housing where the people in the housing are that vulnerable. I mean, it was really shocking and really kind of an interesting thing to see. And you see what happens in the movie – you see the rage of the community when they react. I mean, they shut them down and do this kind of stuff. They do it because they can and everyone knows that they shouldn't. Everyone does it anyway.”
According to Moore, the use of real tenants from the housing project and other locals as extras didn’t add any tension to the set - even during the staged riot scenes. “Surprisingly, I think that everyone does know the difference between reality and fiction. I mean, the funny thing is that you're telling a story and when the camera is not rolling people are making a lot of jokes. So you're making a lot of jokes and people are talking and doing whatever, but I don't know. It's like everyone knows what's going on and there is an awareness. Everyone knows that this is always possible, but you also know that when you're not doing it that this isn't happening, that you are pretending.”
