Joe Mantegna on Rodrigo Garcia’s “Nine Lives” Script: “What’s great about his writing is it’s all very naturalistic. It seemed like it was almost like he’d taped a real incident where this really happened and said, ‘Okay, now do this…’ There was nothing phony about it.”
Kathy Baker on Shooting “Nine Lives” Scenes in One Continuous Take: “I just loved it. I think we agreed that we just loved it because it was like the theater. We’re both from the theater and it’s so joyous to be able to start a scene, knowing you’re going to go somewhere and get to actually get there. Lots of times you don’t get there until next week or next month or whatever… But by the same token when you do a play, you do it once – the arc. And this was doing the arc over and over and over so that was the hard part. But it was just great.”
Molly Parker on the Ensemble Cast of “Nine Lives:” “There’s still, I think, loads of people that I haven’t met. But certainly one of the really nice things about doing a big ensemble thing, when we saw it at Sundance you sort of get to watch your bit and then when it’s over you see everyone else do this great work and actually enjoy the film.”
Jason Isaacs on the Length of Time to Shoot Each Segment: “Ours took a night, actually. We went through the night into dawn, I think. We only stopped because the sun was coming up. There was a day’s rehearsal. The rehearsals were really more for camera.”
Isaacs had two scenes so his workload was doubled. Laughing, Isaacs said, “A whole two days work. I don’t know how I got myself through it. Traumatic (laughing). Yeah, it was doubled. Lovely double duty. Actually what was great was doing it in the order we did it. I got to see the woman I’d once been in love with and wonder why we didn’t just run off together and then come home and think, ‘What the hell was I thinking? I’ve got a marriage that I need to stick by.’ And I think that’s what the audience feels when they watch it, too.”
Molly Parker on How She Handled “Nine Lives:” “Before we started when I was thinking about it there was this fear. Like, ‘God don’t let us get to 10 minutes and it’s perfect and I blow it.’ Or I fall down the stairs. And actually I thought that almost every take. But then you get it and you just do it. You don’t stop and you keep going, even if it’s not [perfect].
There’s something really nice about it. You have to lose your self-consciousness. You’re not sort of micromanaging every moment and going back, ‘I just want to do that one line again.’ And later when you see it, it’s not a performance that’s been created by an editor of my take here and another line that I did off-camera over there and then him on the next day. Where even if no one else knows it, I know that that’s what it sounds like. It never sounds right to my ear. And this…I know exactly what take that they used.”
Jason Isaacs on How This Style of Filming Affects Actors: “You’re taking the energy off the other actors because you’re all in this dance together. Whereas often when you shoot singles on film, the other actor might not even be there. And if they are, they’re not necessarily present. You’re concentrating on being alive in the scene and hoping the camera is capturing it. And if it’s not, when you get to the end you’ll just do it again.”
William Fichtner on Playing a Character Who’s Deaf: “I just learned to sign for this. The speaking part of it was just finding a way that felt right, of what sort of sound would be there. I actually watched some deaf performers and started to understand this desire to say the words. At first I couldn’t really understand but the more I watched, the more I could start to watch the performer and really start to understand what he was saying - or pretty close to it. What was more important was to have the sign language be correct and I had an amazing teacher that helped me figure this out.”
Amy Brenneman on Memorizing Lots of Lines of Dialogue: “Well that’s the job. People in theatre do it every day. Of course they have weeks and months to rehearse it. But nevertheless, that’s the job. That’s the gig. So if you don’t like to memorize stuff, don’t be an actor.”
