Peter Sarsgaard on how he selects projects: “It depends on what’s going on with me at the time. I pick different roles for different reasons, just like any job. Sometimes I decide to be in a movie because I think the movie is going to be a socially important movie. ‘Shattered Glass,’ I think, was that way for me. Regardless of what you think of ‘Shattered Glass,’ I think the message is still relevant. One of the most fundamental parts of a democracy that we keep forgetting about is the media, because without information you can’t decide how to vote. And if you ain’t got the facts, then how do you know whether to vote for this guy or that guy? Then the whole thing falls apart. That’s why I did that movie, because that story, which on the surface is about this guy who makes up articles, is really about that idea. And that’s an idea I feel very strongly about.
Sometimes I just go, in a more whimsical way, ‘Oh, this might be fun.’ Or sometimes I go, ‘I want to work with this person,’ or this person’s in it or this person wrote it. All different reasons.”
Peter Sarsgaard on why he isn’t in more comedies: “I did ‘Garden State.’ I’m pretty funny in ‘The Dying Gaul’ I have coming up. There’s a little comedy in there. It’s not just me; it’s them - Hollywood. It’s ‘them,’ the big them. If you do enough movies – I’ve done 25 movies now and a lot of them have not been comedies – at a certain point it’s just a process of natural selection.
Also, I can make a drama better if it’s not perfectly written. I know how to do that, to make it better. A comedy – a lot of comedies revolve around a premise. He’s in her body, she’s in his body. If that premise is just f***ed from the beginning, there’s no amount of salvage in saving it. If no one’s written the jokes, I’m not going to particularly come up with them, you know what I mean?”
So how can he save a drama? Sarsgaard said, “Oh, by just making it make sense. I go, ‘Nobody would do that after that happened. Are you kidding me? No.’ And then we figure out what might happen. I feel like my job most of the time is just to go, ‘Wouldn’t happen. How would that happen? Ok, if you want that to happen, then you’ll have to put this in to make that happen.’”
Sarsgaard on applying that process to “The Skeleton Key:” “It’s a process of working together on that type of thing. We certainly had debates about different things. A lot of times you lock horns with a director – not in an argumentative way, but in a way that’s like a Sophoclean dialectic, man. They got their point of view and you got yours, and the third idea is the one that’s the good one. And that happens. It happened on ‘Skeleton Key;’ it happens on a lot of movies.
You see Vince Vaughn get into a movie sometimes where on the page you would be like, ‘No way is that thing going to make it.’ And I’ve read some of them and been like, ‘No way. That can’t possibly work.’ And I really admire an actor like that that can turn a comedy around. (Laughing) I feel like for me I need to have it happening early.”
Peter Sarsgaard on his upcoming film, “Flightplan:” “With that one, it would be very difficult for me to explain it or give it away, because there’s no single thing in it that is the giveaway. It’s a movie that constantly changes. I would have to sit down with you for like half an hour to explain what’s happening.
I play an Air Marshall and Jodie Foster thinks she got onto the plane with her daughter. Her husband has just died. She takes two Klonopin, falls asleep. Wakes up, her daughter’s gone. She really believes she had her daughter on the plane. And I play the Air Marshall who is trying to determine whether or not she’s a woman who is going nuts on an airplane because her husband just died, or if she really did have a daughter on the plane. So it’s like another little bit of an investigator part.”
PAGE 3: Peter Sarsgaard on "Jarhead" and Military Movies
