This past weekend, TFS contributor Raffi Asdourian and myself attended a press conference for the film Hereafter, which was the closing night film at the New York Film Festival. The film follows three parallel stories about three people who have been impacted by death and their own mortality in some way. In attendance at the press conference was director Clint Eastwood, screenwriter Peter Morgan, and actors Matt Damon, Cécile de France, and Bryce Dallas Howard. We have transcribed the full press conference below, all questions were asked by various members of the press:
[To Clint Eastwood and Peter Morgan] how did this project first come together?
Peter Morgan: I wrote this up a mountain… it’s unlike anything else I’ve ever written. It was the least schematic thing that I’ve ever done. I had read this book about a young woman in her early 30s who had lost her younger sister to cancer, and she… I found the book incredibly moving… and she didn’t want to give up any idea that she might be able to connect again with her sister. And, I should say that she as well as I come from a tradition of irreligious enlightenment, and I don’t have any religious beliefs of life after death, and this woman used a journalistic investigation to try to unpick and see whether she could reconnect with her sister, she just did not want to give up. I was very very moved by this, and I had read a book of the sister’s, the journalist who had died, so I then read this as a companion piece. I was so moved by this, I thought I’d love to do something like this, but I don’t know in which area. I thought I wanted to do it about somebody that’s inarticulate, like a child.
I wrote the script, and then sometime later I changed agents, and then the script, because of one thing or another, had just been in my drawer, and because there are three stories and it’s unconventional, I wanted some feedback. So, to my new agent, I gave him the script and said, “What do you think?” And they gave it to Kathy Kennedy, and I kept waiting for the notes, and Kathy Kennedy give it to Steven Spielberg… and this starts getting more and more ridiculous. And then, Steven Spielberg asks me to fly out, and for an English screenwriter this is a rite of passage, you’re off to meet Spielberg, and he said, “Would you mind if I give it to my friend Clint Eastwood?” Prior to that, I think should say, and I hope he won’t hate me for this, I’m in the boardroom at Dreamworks and the assistant walks in and says, “Mr. Spielberg has taken to having his meetings in the dark.” So all the lights are turned off, and then this voice says “Would you mind if I give it to my friend Clint Eastwood?” The most surreal meeting that I’ve ever been in, in my life. I thought maybe he had had facial surgery or something, but is wasn’t because as the lights became brighter, I saw him. It was a lovely, lovely meeting. It works, it’s more conducive actually. So that’s how we find ourselves here today, it’s more straightforward in my line of experience.
Clint Eastwood: Steven Spielberg called me one day and said, “I have a script I’d love to send over to you,” and I said, “Fine, send it over.” He and I had worked together on a few projects, and I read it, and I liked it. So, I just called him back and said, “I’ll do it.” I didn’t realize I was last on the list. I said, “Yeah, I’ll do it,” and he was going through a minor divorce there with Paramount Pictures of something, so it became a little confusing as to where this would have its life. I have a relation with Warners, so I said, “Let me take it to Warners.” Warners liked it, so here we were.
I liked the script immediately; there were a few little ideas that I had, but I just put those in the back of my head, I thought it was good the way it was, it didn’t need rewrites. I hadn’t shot a picture with that many blue pages in it for a long time, and you either like them or you don’t, but I liked this one. Most religions seem to ponder the afterlife, but I thought this was interesting because it wasn’t really a religious project, it had spirituality about it, but it wasn’t tied in with any particular organized thought. I think everybody whether you believe in the afterlife or the chance of a near death experience and you come back and see something, whether that has happened or not I don’t know, but certainly I think everyone’s thought about it at some point or other in time, and it’s a fantasy, but if there is anything out there, it would be just terrific.
Can you talk about the conception and creation of the tsunami sequence?
Eastwood: Let me just regress a bit. An unusual aspect of the script was taking actual events and placing them into a fictional story. And so, the tsunami of four years ago in the Pacific, and the London bombings of course, I thought that was a unique thing to do. The tsunami was very difficult to do; I kept having fantasies of huge hoses and people, you know, thousands of gallons of water running down the street and what have you, and I figured out how to do that. I figured that would be pretty prohibitive to do that. In the old days, I suppose you’d have done that on the set pieces and then turned a lot of water loose, but with the element now of computer generated elements, you can go ahead and do it, even though water is probably the most difficult thing to do in CGI. I have a fellow named Michael Owens who has worked with me on Letters from Iwo Jima, Flags of Our Fathers, and back as far as Space Cowboys, so he kept very much hip on the technology that has been improving over the years. We went through it, and figured out which shots we would need to do live, and then we did it, but it took a lot of different places. Cécile was in a tank in London for nine hours without getting out too much, then we went to Maui, and then afterwards it was piecing. We had to preplan it in order to piece all of the elements together, with the connective shots and what have you. If you don’t preplan CGI, it’s the most expensive thing in the world, so we had to plan every single shot, and that’s not the way I normally shoot, but in this thing it worked out rather well. We hired a company call Scanline, who did a terrific job.
Cécile, did you have some memories of the sequence you could share?
Cécile de France: Yes, I was very proud to do my own stunts. I was very afraid of the oxygen, but I had already done two films underwater- I don’t know why, but I like them. But this time, because there were a lot of English men around me, I was shy, and I cried one day during the rehearsal, because we did four or five days of rehearsal in the tank, and I was scared. And so I was crying, and a very nice man came up to me and said, “Okay, forget the oxygen, and just hold your breath,” and I said, “Yeah, I can do that! Yeah!” And I did that… and I tried to stay under for a long time, right? I stayed under for a long time.
Of course I remember very good memories because when we were in Hawaii there were the big waves from the ocean, and you’ll remember the little girl, and the little crew got in the water, and Clint just took his shirt off and pants off, and jumped in.
[To Eastwood] It seems there is a theme in your work about the challenge of remaining relevant as one gets older. Do you have any thoughts on that theme, or its presence in your later period films?
Eastwood: (pause) What? (laughs)
Matt Damon: What was the old John Board thing with the cast of Invictus? Whenever someone would ask you a long question, you’d go, “Cut!”
Eastwood: I’d like to think there are different themes in each film, I don’t know for sure if there is an ongoing theme. You know, it’s very subjective, and that’s a very difficult one for me to answer. I think it would be easier for someone else to evaluate than it would be for myself, because I don’t think of it that way. I just think everything to me is spontaneous. Unforgiven is probably an example of a script, I like it right away, but I thought, “This is great, but I’d like to do this when I’m older.”So I stuck it in a drawer for ten years. Other projects had just come to me; Perfect World, whatever, they just sort of fall in, and I have no rhyme or reason. I wish I could give you some sort of psudo-intellectual thing that would be great, and maybe if this were a French cinema class, I’d have to fake something. I’m not really the person to ask on that. If I start evaluating myself, I’d be afraid of not being able to think intelligently about if a project and the various making of it…
Damon: I actually asked a similar question of him on Invictus, but it was about directors as they got older. Why was it that they historically seemed to fall off, and I said “What is that?” I remember asking him, as he’s obviously completely avoided that.
Eastwood: Not so fast…
Damon: And he thought about it for twenty seconds, and he said, “I don’t know. That doesn’t make any sense to me,” because it never did to me either. Presumably, the older we get, the wiser we get, the more knowledge you have about filmmaking, the more different types of films you’ve made… You know, this one, that whole CGI thing, you just plowed into it with utter confidence, and that sequence is incredible. And so, it is kind of mystifying to me that people historically, the great directors too, not all of them but many of them fell off as they got older and it never made sense to me. So, I asked that question to him.
Eastwood: I knew Frank Capra a little bit, I had spent some time with him at June Lakes where he lived in the summer time. He was always so bright, I was like, “Why isn’t this guy still working?” I also knew Bill Wilder a bit, and he stopped working in his sixties, and I thought, “God, that’s amazing. Now, here’s a guy who lived well into his nineties, and didn’t work.” I never could figure that; I kept thinking your best years should be at the point where you’ve absorbed all this knowledge. Now, maybe they just didn’t keep up with the times, or they picked stories and material that just didn’t work, have a few pictures which just didn’t do so well, and then all of a sudden people in the Hollwood scene, its very fickle, and they kind of move. There’s a Portugal director who making films that over a hundred years old, and I plan to do the same thing.
Can you talk about the two young brothers, who are the heart of the film in a way, and what it was like to direct them though such sadness, and what it took to get those performances?
Damon: Well, [Eastwood] cast them, and I remember talking to him during that process. I think we were resigned to the reality that we would probably have non-actors in those roles, because its obviously an eleven or twelve year-old kid we’re looking for… you’re not going to find a Julliard graduate. Clint just loved their faces; I remember talking to him, and he was like, “the faces of these boys are just terrific, and they seem to be from the same neighborhood that these kids are from, and they’re non-actors.” They went and short the first two stories without me, so I would reports about how the boys were doing, but obviously the movie comes down to that scene in the hotel room. There’s a lot made about how few takes Clint does, but he does the number of takes that are required. We both went into that day knowing we’re going to have to get this from these guys, and one really smart thing that Clint did was that he inter-changed the twins, even if he was only going to use one of them. He let them both do the scenes, and I think that took a lot of pressure off both the boys, and it also for that scene allowed us to play them off one another. I’d take one of them aside and get all of this information, like did his brother have a girlfriend… little things, like whose farts were the stinkiest… things that they would think were funny, and then when the camera was on them, Clint and I would start revealing these things, so that we got real reactions from them. Little tricks like that, just to help them, because movie sets can get tense and people can get nervous pretty easily, never on [Clint’s] sets, but that’s all by design. He kind of created an environment for those kids; they wouldn’t know that they really shot a movie, I think they had a really good time, and will probably be surprised when they see the movie.
Eastwood: The interesting thing with child actors, is that they… kids are natural actors. They’re wonderful actors, and most kids are acting all the time- they’re imagining, or out in the yard playing, they’re imaging things happening, and they can get very vivid. But unfortunately, once they’ve been organized into acting, and somebody says, “C’mon” and you’ve got a stage mother sitting there, saying, “No, do it this way,” and I’ve watched many times over the years in other films where a director tried to undo a lot bad habits that had been instilled. So, when I looked at people for this picture, young kids, I picked two that had the least experience; in fact, they had to have no experience. They had never been in film before, they said that had been in some grammar school plays, but I doubted that.
Damon: But they had the faces.
Eastwood: I’m one of those guys who believes that if you cast a film correctly, that’s with professionals or with amateurs, you’re probably eighty percent there. If you cast a film incorrectly, then you’re going to be fighting an uphill battle. With these kids, I just figured I could pull things out of them without them knowing it, better than trying to get somebody organized. We auditioned about three or four sets of twins, identical twins, they looked great, but they were a lot of acting going on. So I said, these guys have the right face, they’re from the right neighborhood. They had certain elements that these kids needed but into their system, so we didn’t need to have to do anything, they didn’t have to get in there and act like something else that they weren’t.
Did you guys doing any research in preparing, where it was talking to people on the religious side, or people on the spiritual side, particularly in connecting with the afterlife? Also, how did working on the film change you in terms of your thoughts on the subject?
Morgan: In terms of the research… I kept meaning to get around to that. I remember when I wrote The Queen, as soon as you type in the words Princess Diana, death, and conspiracy, it’s a very short step to UFOs and dolphins and such, so I must try a little bit, and what I found out there is quite frightening. If you type some of these questions into the internet, you’re very quickly in a community of strange people. So I kept thinking, we’ll get ‘round to that. I did send a couple of emails to a few people who I thought would be really interesting. There was one in particular, and he was just pretty unwilling to meet, which, I’ve never experienced that before. I think maybe the title of the film, or whatever, but he was a physicist that I thought had done some stuff. And then later I thought, I don’t want this film to become a film in which we have the answer… “we’ve got a scoop here; it is, and guess what? This happens.” That’s not what the film is. The film is really a story of inquiry and curiosity, and a feeling of incompleteness, and a feeling of living with mystery. It’s something that unites every one of us; other than the act of being born, the only other act that… none of us know where we are going, and none of us has any idea, and we’re going to do all of it alone.
Eastwood: It raises a lot of questions, but that’s just like Peter was saying, the questions, that’s where it ends. The questions are there, you pose the questions, and then it’s up to the audience to meet you halfway, and think about it in terms of their own lives, and what their own thoughts are, and what experience they might have had. There might be some near-death experiences out there, and it’d be interesting to see what the answers we’re, but they’re going to have to come up with those answers. As far as the technical thing, doing the tsunami, I took all of the amateur footage that had been shot on that particular tsunami as it was happening. We took that and used it as our influences to get us going, but everything else has to be in the imagination of the performer. I don’t know if Cécile talked to anchor people, but I’m sure she… or Bryce… everybody has their way of preparing, and I just allow everybody to do that on their own. If something isn’t working, that’s another thing, but if you have people who do that inner research, they bring that to the table. So, I’m a firm believer in research, but I’m also a firm believer in utilizing the instincts that are within your soul, or your body, or in your stomach, wherever they reside.
Damon: It was a terrific script too, it was really tight. Whenever somebody would ask me about it, I’d said this is a really tight script, and it read like a play in the sense where, sometimes when you do a play, you don’t have to do anything, you explore the material, and every answer you need is there. I’m somebody who does a lot of research on my on normally, and I didn’t feel, as Peter said, I didn’t want to go down the rabbit hole. If I know somebody, someone was recommended to me, like “This guy really is fantastic,” then I would have gone and spoken to him, but it really was all on the page in terms of getting ready. I had to do some forklift training, that was about it.
Eastwood: Very important stuff.
Bryce, can you talk about your role? You’re sort of an anchor in a way, the one person not really caught up in the belief of the beyond.
Bryce Dallas Howard: I spoke with Peter about it, and that was very helpful. The whole process was very gentle and very nurturing, and quite brief actually, Clint shoots very quickly. But, as far as the subject matter, a lot of people in my family actually have this ability, that I never shared that with you guys, but this ability that Matt’s character has, and I think it is very appropriate the way this portrayal is handled in the way it doesn’t answer anything definitively, it just asks these questions. Individuals who have this ability, they also don’t know the source of it, and they don’t know what it means, and it’s something that just comes to them briefly and then leaves just as fast. And so, for me, I was connected to the story that was being told, because in a way it was very personal. And then as far as the character, I know a lot of women like her, a lot of friends who have gone through those kinds of experiences.
Have any of you experienced an otherworldly experience that you can’t explain?
Eastwood: Everybody’s had something…I remember when I was very young, I was thrown off… my dad was taking me into the surf on his shoulders, and I fell off, and I can still remember today, though I was only four or five years old at the time, I still remember the color of the water and everything as I was being washed around in the surf before I popped to the surface again. But, at that age, you don’t think too much, you just kind of going… well you hadn’t learn any obscenities yet, but a lot are running through your mind. And then years later, when I was twenty-one years old, we ditched a plane off the coast of Northern California in the wintertime, and I must say that as I was going into shore, I kept thinking about how I should be thinking about my demise, but all I was thinking about was somebody, because I saw these lights on in the far distance, and I said, “somebody’s in there having a beer, and sitting next to a fireplace, and I just want to be in there.” So I had to make it, and that was the determination, but there was no sense of fate out there, or anything like that. Usually when you have that much of a chance to think, you’re going to be okay.
Matt, it has been reported that you’re going to reunite with Ben Affleck, and that you’re going to be directing it, and I was wondering if there was a part for Clint Eastwood?
Damon: What movie is this? It sounds… no, I haven’t… that’d be a project I’d love to do. No, I think he and Casey were going to write this movie, and I guess he was quoted recently as saying he’d love to have me direct it, but there’s no script yet.
Clint, you’re known for shooting your rehearsals; was it different this time, with using the children? Or also, in shooting the scenes in French?
Eastwood: No, it was, I love to shoot rehearsals because I’m always curious about watching actors the first time they run it across their mind, and the first time it runs, and the thinking it out. Eventually an actor learns all of their lines at home, and they know all of the approaches to a certain sequence, but just to see it run across the first time. So sometimes, I’ll try that, do it without rehearsals, or I’ll tell them to rehearse, but don’t do anything just talk it, just to give them the geographics of the scene. But, I love that spontaneous thing; it doesn’t always happen that way, sometimes you need more time, depending on the performer. For somebody in Bryce’s case, it was better just to go for it right away. Obviously she had a good understanding of where she was going with it, and with Matt and Cécile, the same thing, they’re people that… in this particular film, everybody was ready to go kind of thing, except with the kids, it took a little more effort, but that’s another thing.
You mentioned to challenge of filming the tsunami scene. In terms of the films you’ve done, what was the hardest in production, and what was the easiest, and why?
Eastwood: I don’t know, I was thinking back while you were talking there about doing A Perfect World years ago, where I had a kid actor. But, he was a kid who had great body English and everything, but kids are like animals, they’re good for one take and then that’s it, their attention span they kind of go off into another journey in their head. But, then I had professional actors working with him. Professional actors, they wanted to rehearse and organize the feel in a comfort zone. So that became a big dilemma, of had to do that. I had to shoot, I had to cut the kid mostly by himself at the beginning, because I knew that when we got around to other coverage of the professional actor, the kid was going to be bored with it all. You know, spray from the uvula coming out, and you’re sitting there, and the actor’s going “what?” You have to make adjustments on every project, but in this case, it was no problem. And Cécile does speak English well, so no problem there.
Damon: She does.
Eastwood: …and knows French very well too. Bryce, I don’t know what languages…
Howard: Barely English.
Eastwood: …and Matt?
Damon: Some English.
Eastwood: …so it all just comes together. It’s amazing that it all comes together, I suppose that’s why I’m still doing it. And so, I told Matt, let’s not think too much on this, let’s go and roll with it.
And the easiest film you’ve ever done?
Eastwood: This one was the easiest. Some of the technical stuff wasn’t, but it was easy because the people were all great. It was the best ensemble I’ve ever worked with.
There’s quiet a tonal difference between the first ten minutes of this movie and the rest of it. Can you comment on having that sequence in the trailer, and be the trailer for a moment, and tell people what to expect to see?
Eastwood: Well, I don’t know if I want to go too far into the explanation of what it’s about and what they’ll see, but the trailer, you bring up and interesting point, trailers often want to tell the whole story in a matter of thirty seconds. And so, they try to put a little bit of everything in there, and so you end up with a lot of nothing, really. They had some trailers that accentuated the story, and some that accentuated the tsunami. The problem with accentuating the tsunami is all of a sudden it becomes an action movie, and maybe people will go there with the expectation that maybe they’re going to see a giant two hours of flooding. That might not be the case so much, but if you go into the stuff with the kids and you go into a lot of detail, then maybe they’ll think, “well, this story doesn’t have that much action adventure as much as I’d love to have.”
Damon: It’s a tricky story.
Eastwood: Yeah, it’s a tricky story because this particular screenplay, you have to flush out all the characters, and it’s tough to do. I don’t… it’s tough to market a film like this.
Would you have preferred it without the wave in the trailer?
Damon: Well, I think any marketing department is always going to want to show the scope, right? And it’s an incredible sequence, so I understand you want people to be totally surprised by it, but at the end of the day there in that position where they want people to come see the movie too. I remember with The Informant! I jokingly went on David Letterman and intercut scenes from Transformers into the trailer, trying to get people to go. “Yeah, it’s about a whistleblower, but a lot of sh*t blows up!”
Eastwood: I would have preferred not to show the tsunami, and have it just sprung on everybody, but that’s just not the practicalities of life. You do want people to come in and see it, and hopefully they’ll enjoy it.
Morgan: I just want to jump in on that in a way, because the tsunami almost, not saying disproportionate, but just because of what happened to them, how many lives were lost in the tsunami. When I came to putting in these real-life events, I was actually probably more, being a Dubliner… there were two sets of London bombings, one July 2nd and one July 21st. I might get that wrong, but I know they were a fortnight apart, and I happened to be in Holborn, in Central London, on the second one. What happened was, because of the extent of it, the terrorist bombing on the first [set], the whole of London shut down, I was in the middle of town, in exactly where one of those bombs had gone off, and happened was there was this extraordinary rush. The buses are instructed, when an alarm goes off in Central London transport network, the turn off the key, no matter where they are, just turning a corner, they stop there, open the doors, everybody out of the buses. And these buses in Holborn, there are six or eight buses like empty skyscrapers, and people were just running. I happened to have a destination to get to, and people had collectively decided to run one direction, while I happened to be going to other direction, and when I saw their faces, I thought, “I’ve never seen people in my city so frightened.” And they were removed from their telephones, and I was very conscious of the fact that the tsunamis and these bombings were happening in a short span of time, and we were being presented with the possibility of eminent death. In a metropolitan complex, on our holidays, the idea of us having a natural longevity didn’t seem to be there anymore. It seemed like something would happen, and then you’re gone. That’s why I wrote it. The fact that the tsunami is bigger that the other ones shouldn’t distract, hopefully, viewers from thinking this could happen at any time, and that why I wrote it, the idea of all of us having to confront this issue of what happens and “what will happen if I die?” because I thought that if there was anything I could do the lessen the fear that some of these people have of dying… and that’s one of the things that propelled me to write it.
Hereafter opens wide on October 22nd.
What did you think of Hereafter?