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Did you speak to people who lost their families on 9/11?
Mike Binder: “Adam and I did. We weren’t looking in our research exclusively for that. This is historical fiction and we weren’t looking for a guy who lost three children. We were looking for people who have suffered a loss that they couldn’t get off the couch from several years later. We also really wanted the piece to be about people who lost people in Oklahoma City and Katrina. I wanted it to be kind of more about how we all put the spotlight on a tragedy and then the next tragedy comes up and the spotlight goes to the next one, and these people are still wandering the streets still living in the first one.
We talked to several people. I have to say I’m glad we did due diligence of this because I think, now that we’re showing it to people that this is really close to home to, they’re seeing it as real. I don’t think if we hadn’t done the research we did then and hadn’t really worked through it, I think it would have been sad right now because I think there’s a chance for this movie to have a real healing effect. I know it’s just a movie, but I really do think there’s a side to this movie that is beyond entertainment.”
Don and Jada, can you talk a little about working opposite of each other and what you feel the other brought to the table?
Don Cheadle: “I had a great time working with Jada. We had a very collaborative relationship. The whole process with Adam, Liv, Jada and myself, Mike, it was a very collaborative effort, a real team effort. There wasn’t a day when we showed up on set where we just had a scene and we said, ‘Okay that’s the scene. Let’s go shoot it.’ We would always be talking about the nuances of the scene, the ways to get things out of it and kind of talking about our own relationships. ‘Okay, how does it down at your house? This is how it goes down at my house. How does it go down at your house so I can try to find the best way to realize this relationship?’ I’m on stage 8 and I came in and said, ‘I had this exact argument last night,’ and she said, ‘I did too.’ We just had that same beef at home with our loved ones so it just felt very real. It was real comfortable to work with Jada.”
Jada Pinkett Smith: “It was so easy.”
Which argument in the film was it?
Don Cheadle: “Seeing how I have to go home tonight…”
Mike Binder: “I will say on this level I was lucky that my kids went to kindergarten through fifth grade to the same elementary school that Don’s kids did, so I kind of knew Don for a lot of years. Not as a guy in show business, I just knew him as a father with kids and a wife. To me, the first call was to Jada. I never even met with another actress for the role or wanted another actress. I just love Jada. I think she’s great, but I also know that she’s a wife and a mother and I wanted that real mix. As real as we wanted Adam’s side to be and Liv’s side to be, we wanted these guys there in the morning saying, ‘No, that’s not the way it is. Here’s the way it is.’ They bring a lot as actors to the role, but they also brought a lot, I think, as parents and people in a marriage.”
Jada Pinkett Smith: “Working with Don is just like I don’t know. It was so easy. Mike, there’s a bathroom scene where you said, ‘You guys just go in there and do something,’ and we created that scene on the day. It was just so natural and so easy.”
Mike Binder: “And that’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie, too. I love the interplay between you guys in that scene.”
Jada, did you see your character as being supportive of her husband or needing support from her husband?
Jada Pinkett Smith: “Janeane is very interesting because you’re dealing with a relationship where you have two people who are no longer talking. There is this riff that has been created between the two people, and I think she really needed more of his support and was pretending to be supportive. I think that was the biggest problem in their relationship was that they had lost the sense of honesty and they’ve grown apart. They really didn’t know each other anymore, which is one of the reasons I was really attracted to the movie.
Don Cheadle: “…Mike at one point should have just moved into the guest house because he was over at that house so many times with us, just trying to figure it out. Mike said, ‘I’m not really sure what’s going on with this guy. I’m not really sure what the problem is, but I don’t know if I really want to define it either because you don’t always know.’ It’s just nebulous sometimes. There’s just something that’s not there.
It was frustrating as an actor to try to go into the part. There’s something that’s just not there and it’s designed for there to be something that’s not there, but I don’t know what that not there is. It just took a lot of constant checking in to try to figure out what that was. Ultimately, I think it plays.”
Can you talk about the music used in the film?
Mike Binder: “The music is a big part of the movie for some many reasons, because I feel like he’s hiding in a simpler time in his music. That’s the music I love and we did clear all the music. A lot of these guys know Adam. We went and talked to Eddie Vedder about covering The Who and that was kind of a fun story. We got that. The music is another character in the movie. When I first saw those headsets on Adam with his hair grown out, they feel like such protection. They feel like such a way to hide from the world. We all know these little bugs do it, but these really say go away! It just was the right thing. And then having that iPod and all that music on that iPod, it just really felt like, ‘I can be in the world and I don’t need the world.’ I think that helped because he was listening to that music all the time on the set. He always knew the kind of music we were going to use.”
Page 3: The Look of Reign Over Me, the Jam Session, and Casting Adam Sandler
