Capturing the Essence of New York in "Heights:" “It plays a character in the movie almost. I think Chris [Terrio] does a great job of showing New York in a way that I think – I don’t know if I should go so far as to say that no one else has ever done or something like that, because I haven’t seen every movie ever made or shot in New York. I think he covered the city in a really original way and I think more importantly in a way that felt very natural, if you’ve ever lived there.
It didn’t feel like some guy who grew up in LA’s take on New York. It was like these great sort of tableaus where one section of the screen, over here you’ve got like this building where it’s just windows, windows, windows, windows. Over here you’ve got this nice open space. It’s images that you feel like you’ve seen if you spend a lot of time in New York. So yeah, he depicted it, for my money, in a really real way.”
The Play vs. the Movie: “I never read the play. I didn’t really feel that it would serve to inform me that greatly about the character. Not that I’m not a curious person and not that I wouldn’t like to just see it anyway, but at the time I felt that I should just stay away from it because I figured it was probably a very different animal. And from what I’ve heard and talked about with the director, it is.
I do this thing sometimes where if I’m auditioning for a movie and I have to go in and read scenes… Let’s say I’ve got two scenes to read. One’s on page 24, the next is on page 65. And the movie is 100+ pages long. Sometimes I’ll get the impulse to not finish reading past that most late scene in the script because, theoretically as your character, you wouldn’t know what happens after that page anyway. Unless you think there’s going to be some secret that’s revealed that the character already knows, then you read on. But sometimes you feel like, ‘You know what? I’m going to stop here because I don’t want extra information to cloud how I react in this scene. I don’t want knowing how this particular relationship plays itself out by the end to cloud how I act in this particular part.’
Maybe that’s a little infantile because ultimately you read the whole script before you do a movie – or at least I do. But sometimes it feels right to omit things. That was how I felt about it. I was just like, ‘You know what? All I should really deal with is what we’re putting on the screen I think.’ And I can talk all I want about the character but I’d rather have it come from what I’ve decided based on this script, than what I’ve decided based on anything else like this or what this was derived from or whatever. That’s the material so I stuck with that.”
Jesse Bradford on His Relationship With Ismail Merchant: “[We were] close enough that I would have considered him not a close friend but a dear friend. The difference only being time spent together. I worked with him years ago on a movie called ‘A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries.’ He was someone who it was very easy for me to look up to and even emulate to some degree, and really just appreciate as a person and a businessman. So to work with him again was just awesome and then it’s just a tragedy…”
Ismail Merchant’s Legacy and “Heights:” “I think his legacy sort of transcends this movie. His legacy is 40 years long so to put it all in the lap of this movie I think is too much. But I know he really loved this movie. I know he was really excited about doing something contemporary and doing something in New York. So I know this movie was really dear to his heart. To whatever degree we can sort of dedicate what we’re doing here today and what we’re doing with the movie to him, I think that’s extremely appropriate.”
One of Jesse Bradford’s Favorite Memories of Ismail Merchant: “We went to the Venice Film Festival for ‘A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries’ and I spent all day chopping potatoes for him. Not a whole day but hours, hours, for this big banquet that we were having that night that he was cooking for. Me and Leelee Sobieski kind of became his food prep bitches and it’s because you don’t mind. You feel like if this is how they get the job down, then I want to be a part of it. We also stuffed envelopes that day…”
