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Features
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Reynolds and Three Writer-Directors
Forget about that Van Wilder sequel. Actor Ryan Reynolds prefers to continue banking on the talents of auteurs such as John August, Dennis Lee and Adam Brooks.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007 at 1:30 PM
By Ryan Reynolds
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Theo Wargo/WireImage.com
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Pitching The Nines to the MTV TRL crowd. Seriously.
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Ryan Reynolds got his start as a child actor on Canadian television, and then, straddling the new millennium, spent the better part of four seasons making small swatches of ABC’s Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place bearable. It’s no great stretch, then, for him to play a TV writer-creator… well, it wouldn’t be, really, except in just about any other project than The Nines.
The feature directorial debut of writer John August, The Nines is a labyrinthine, Hollywood-set, very loosely autobiographical tale of creativity, collapse and emotional and spiritual responsibility. It features three actors (Reynolds, Hope Davis and Melissa McCarthy) playing three parts apiece in three different stories, roles that sort of overlap but, apart from their place within discrete narratives, may or may not have something to do with one another. Reynolds is the front-and-center star, playing a self-destructive actor, a videogame designer/family man and the aforementioned small screen multi-hyphenate.
“It’s really a difficult movie to logline,” concedes Reynolds during a recent interview with FilmStew, sporting a beard that he characterizes as his own personal salute to lethargy. “Most people want to kind of grab onto what they think is the hook, which is that you play three different people in one movie. And [that’s] not really a hook, it’s actually part of the story.”
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Barry King/WireImage.com
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Screenwriter turned director John August
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“It’s not done in this indulgent, vain kind of way,” he insists. “But most people kind of grab onto that. Even my parents say, ‘Ooh, that’s the one where you play three different people, I can’t wait to see that!’ My mother’s like Marge Simpson. It’s a difficult thing to explain; I usually just say it’s three separate stories that interlock in mysterious ways.”
Released at the end of August in snuff-like fashion by Newmarket Films (for a month-long run in respectively two, two, five and three theaters), the movie had no chance to flourish at the box office, raking in a paltry $54,019. But, truth be told, The Nines — a self-described labor of love shot in three weeks — isn’t a film that was ever going to break out and become a bonafide commercial hit. It’s too cryptic and arty, off-the-beaten-path.
Perhaps surprisingly then comes word that Reynolds’ agent highly recommended the screenplay. “I think for him it’s a calculated risk. I mean, it’s a movie that deals with subject matter that I think is exciting to him and anyone else who would have read it,” suggests Reynolds. “Anytime you can find something that you can get behind that unorthodox — that hasn’t really been seen before, but you’re still really able to stretch yourself and dive into wholeheartedly — I think that’s kind of unusual these days.”
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Jamie McCarthy/WireImage.com
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Definitely, Maybe co-star Rachel Weisz
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“It’s difficult to find a script and a director in particular that can really pull something really fantastic off,” he adds. “I particularly believe that actors are as good as their director. It’s their medium; theater might be our medium, but this one’s theirs through and through.”
Besides, says Reynolds, commercial viability isn’t part of the equation when it comes to assessing what films to tackle. “I don’t have a lot of $150 million box office gross movies in my wake, so it’s not like it’s the first thing I think about,” says Reynolds. “I also don’t think that’s any way to survive in this industry.”
“There are certainly guys out there that are those 20/20 guys, you know — $20 million, 20 percent gross guys that maybe have it down to a science, what things they’re in,” he muses. “But I never really think that way, I just love the material. And [The Nines] was something I felt that I could do something with.”
“It was one of those really tough movies, because it’s three distinct characters, and to find a way to do three distinct characters that doesn’t feel really indulgent was the trick. In fact, it wasn’t finding the differences in the characters that was hard, it was finding the similarities that I was looking for. I felt kind of like — not to be so esoteric about it — but this is a story about the puppet and the puppeteer being one in the same.”
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Gregg DeGuire/WireImage.com
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Fireflies co-star Julia Roberts
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Ah, yes, which brings us back to the unique challenges of playing a TV writer. The Nines’ second segment centers around the production of a half-hour episode of a Project Greenlight-type show tracking the creative progress of a network television drama making its way through pilot season. Having already shot the opener, series creator Gavin (Reynolds) faces some tough post-production hurdles and challenges from development executive Susan (Davis) about the suitability of his best friend and lead actress (McCarthy, playing a same-named iteration of herself).
It’s this portion of the film that relates most directly to August’s own life, and the self-professed near-breakdown he suffered while trying to shepherd a show he’d created for The WB onto the air. “The biggest thing for me was being really careful about part two,” admits Reynolds. “I think that’s more of a challenge for him than it is for me, because I’m not portraying him in the sweetest light. I mean, if you’ve met John, he’s an excellent human being, but he’s really showing his ambition and his hubris in that piece. I’d have a really tough time watching that if that were me being played on the screen.”
“When I started, I sort of baby-stepped it and checked it out to see if he was OK with me going this far with it,” continues Reynolds. “And he was not just OK, he was very happy with it. It was really liberating, but it was the one I’d given the least amount of thought to as well because I was so overwhelmed.”
Good-natured surrender seems to be a common theme for Reynolds. Given that he experienced early success in comedies, and has been widely praised for his quick wit and excellent timing, he could be forgiven for taking the easy genre paycheck, which he hasn’t done (and he was, in fact, offered a lot of money for a sequel to National Lampoon’s Van Wilder).
Similarly, having gotten incredibly buff for 2004’s Blade: Trinity, there was a time when Reynolds could have segued solely into a handful of block-headed action pics. Still, that wasn’t ever part of his style. “Well, I mean I can’t do the movies where I’m just intermittingly clenching my jaw muscles and shooting people,” he says. “There’s got to be something — if it’s funny, then that’s kind of cool, or if it’s very real and it taps into something for me, that’s great too. But I don’t think I want to go see those movies, let alone be in them.”
| Instead, Reynolds, with the help of his agents, keeps mixing it up. In addition to The Nines, other films on tap for him early next year include a drama with Julia Roberts written and directed by Dennis Lee and Adam Brooks’ romantic comedy Definitely, Maybe. “It has a great cast,” says Reynolds of the latter. “It’s got Kevin Kline and Rachel Weisz, Abigail Breslin and Isla Fisher, Derek Luke. I kind of liken it to a love letter to broken families.”
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“It’s about a guy who’s explaining his impending divorce to his daughter, and she asks how I met her mom,” he explains. “I say, ‘Come on, what do you think, I’m going to tell you the story of how I met mom and I’m going to fall back in love with her? It doesn’t work that way, I’m sorry.’”
“And she says, ‘I need to know.’ So I say ‘OK, I’ll tell you what, I had three great loves in my life. I’m going to tell you the story of these three loves, but I’m going to change all the names and you have to guess which one is your mom.’ So we go all the way back to ’92, that’s when the story begins, and it goes to 2008. And it’s sort of really sweet, sort of a comedy but more romance and several romantic who-done-it kind of things.”
| “Then I have another movie called Fireflies in the Garden which I love,” Reynolds continues. “It’s a story about a family broken apart by the death of the matriarch, her mother, who’s played by Julia Roberts. That kind of echoes some stuff with my own childhood and growing up. I mean, who doesn’t have a fucked up family?”
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Here Reynolds pauses. “So, I think that’s probably a little bit more broadly appealing than I like to believe,” he says, tongue only slightly in cheek, “but I’m really excited about that one as well.”
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