Another Earth debuted at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and on July 22nd it's making its way to theaters for general audiences to discover and take in. At the LA press day for the independent sci-fi drama, William Mapother said the wait hasn't been painful and that he's just anxious for people to get the chance to check it out because he believes the film will connect with audiences.
Directed by Mike Cahill and co-written by Cahill and Brit Marling, Another Earth finds Marling playing Rhoda, a bright young woman who's on her way to a promising future as an astrophysicist after being accepting into MIT. Mapother is John Burroughs, a talented composer with a young son and a pregnant wife. Their worlds collide and are forever changed following a horrific accident on the same night a second Earth - an exact duplicate, down to the same continents and citizens - is discovered. As the film progresses, the lives of Rhoda and John become increasingly interwined and their relationship is both intense and highly complicated.
William Mapother Interview
Do you look for the sort of opportunities a film like this grants you?
William Mapother: "I look for challenges, and one of the things that appealed to me about the movie was the fact that I had never played a character who has an arc like this, who starts off very happy, then he suffers a tragedy, and then the majority of the film is his moving from grief into an acceptance of life and love. I had never played that before. Playing a character with a big, emotional arc like that requires an additional skill to the one required to just play a scene opposite an actor. It requires a bit of planning and guesswork as to where your character should be emotionally in each of those scenes, a sort of calibration of the arc. Liam Neeson did it beautifully in Schindler’s List. But it’s tough because so many other elements have to go into play. You don’t know which scenes are going to be present in the final edit, so your scenes might be removed or there might be some other scenes in-between. You don’t know how that director or the editor are going to treat your scenes. So it’s kind of a fun exercise, because it’s rare to have a character who goes through so much over the course of a film."
Did Brit Marling and Mike Cahill actually want you specifically for this role?
William Mapother: "I was in New York in the summer of 2009, working at the Shakespeare lab, which is put on by the public theater in New York that puts on Shakespeare in the Park. They bring in 12 actors every summer with some of the best classical acting teachers in the country and teach you to play Shakespeare soup to nuts. While I was there, I sent a list of casting directors whom I hadn’t yet met in New York to my representatives and said, 'Would you set up some meetings?' And one of them was in Chelsea, the elevator’s out on a fourth floor walkup, they were sharing the office with someone who’s noisy, loud, dusty, 25 minutes, very suspicious meeting, I come back to L.A., two weeks later a script arrives from their office and said, 'We have shot some footage for this movie, but we can’t find the right actor to play this role. The director’s never made a feature, the lead actress is not in the Screen Actors Guild, she doesn’t have a lot of experience, and there’s almost no money. Do you think William would be interested?' [Laughing] Well, look, unlike most actors, I look for good material like anybody else. So I read the script and I thought, 'I’ve never read a story like this, I’ve never played a character like this.' I saw the footage and it looked fantastic, so I knew Mike and Brit knew what they were doing. And then I met with Mike and Brit, and they were wonderful. I thought, 'Boy, this is kind of a no-brainer.'"
Which scene was the most challenging for you?
William Mapother: "Maybe playing the saw? That is surprisingly difficult. That’s a good question. I don’t know. I’d have to go back and think about it. Every scene presents its own difficulty, sometimes it’s physically challenging, like playing a musical instrument, sometimes it’s emotionally challenging, sometimes there are practical challenges, like being able to put a plate or a glass down at a certain point in the scene so that it motivates something else in the scene. So every scene has its own challenges. It’s part of the fun of it."
Can you really make music with a saw?
William Mapother: "Oh my God, yes. I worked with a woman for an entire day in New York, and where did they get the music that’s played? She’s extraordinary. But it is very, very difficult and it requires an unusual blend, simultaneously of strength and sensitivity, because you have to be strong enough to bend that saw – not just bend it one way, you have to bend that way and then bend the tip kind of back, while with your other hand being sensitive enough to draw the bow that you can feel the vibrations in the saw to get the music out you need. It’s difficult, and you can’t make it louder by pushing harder or going faster; it requires a sensitivity just to get the note itself aside from the quality of the note. It’s extraordinary."
We always enjoy seeing you turn up as a creepy character, like in Lost. Has it been hard to get filmmakers in the industry to let you play a sensitive guy?
William Mapother: "No, actually. I’ve done it in a number of films, but they have been independent films that didn’t get the good fortune that Another Earth has had because, as you guys know, to have a film made with very limited resources like this one, and then to get into the most prestigious category at Sundance, and then have Fox Searchlight buy you, is not a typical outcome for most films. So actually, I’ve done a number of films in which I’ve played characters who are loving fathers and things like that. But we all have busy lives, they end up in the great mass of our video culture."
"To answer your question, you can imagine in this business, filmmaking is a very risky and difficult business and so the people who make movies want to reduce their risk, and how do they do that? They reduce the variables in the equation, and one way to do that is you hire actors for roles you know they can play. So if you get bad weather, your director gets sick, all these things you cannot control, at least one thing you can control, you know that actor can play that role because you’ve done it a number of times before. So in that sense, it is challenging, because to get people to take on risk that they don’t want to take on... A lot of actors do what I do, which is you work in sometimes lower budget films which will give you an opportunity to do things that you wouldn’t have otherwise."
What would you imagine that other William’s are doing in other lifetimes or other realities? Or do you not have to think about that, since as an actor, you played so many different lives?
William Mapother: "Oh, that’s a very good question, and that’s very nice of you. I’m a bit of a science geek, so I enjoy thinking about alternate possibilities and things that we don’t yet know exist. But the idea of another Earth...that specifically hadn’t yet occupied my thoughts. That’s one of the things that appealed to me about the movie. But in terms of what other Williams are doing, I don’t know. The question I guess is, are they leading exactly an alternate life or are they free to branch off at any point? My father and grandfather were attorneys. Maybe an alternate William’s in law school. Maybe an alternate William was sick that day and wasn’t able to meet with the casting director in New York City, and isn’t sitting at this table because he never got the movie. That’s, to me, part of the thrill of the film is because the paths of our lives are so fragile. You go get a coffee, you don’t get a coffee, you decide to go for a run one day, or not to go on a date with somebody else, and your life is changed entirely."
Do you have any favorite films of the sci-fi genre?
William Mapother: "A lot of the films that a lot of people like: 2001 and Trancers. I am drawn within science. My geekiness is drawn to neuroscience and brain science. I love reading books about the conscious mind, the unconscious mind, especially in the last several years. The developments in neuroscience, because of MRI machines, has been extraordinary. My interest in sci-fi films is generally those that are most similar to Another Earth in that they raise possibilities. They don’t necessarily answer questions, they raise questions. They inspire conversation. That’s one of the advantages for this film having been low-budget, is because we couldn’t show a lot, there’s a lot that’s left unshown and unsaid and unsettled. That ambiguity, I think, is some of what attracts the audience to it, because the audience is inspired to have conversations and discussions and to participate creatively in imagining the world. Because what’s not onscreen, if you want to believe in the movie, a lot’s occurring between the audience’s ears. I think that ends up being in the film’s favor."
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Fox Searchlight's Another Earth opens in theaters on July 22, 2011.
