Robyn Candyce
Offering a unique perspective on a classic genre, “The Lookalike” rewrites the meaning of what it is to be a noir. The extremely fast paced crime thriller begins with a bang when the object of a drug lord, William Spinks’ (John Savage) affection – Sadie (Gillian Jacobs) dies suddenly. Her death puts a major business agreement Spinks had with his friends Bobby and Frank (John Corbett and Steven Bauer) in jeopardy. Luckily for Bobby and Frank, Spinks hasn’t seen Sadie since she was a kid, giving the pair some time to find a lookalike replacement for the young woman.
Written by Michele Gray, directed by Richard Gray and supported by an all-star cast including Justin Long (“Jeepers Creepers”, “The New Girl”), Jerry ‘O’ Connell (“Stand By Me”, “Sliders”) and Scottie Thompson (“NCIS”, “The Blacklist”) among others, the film carries a lot of substance, providing audience members with an unexpected story line and absolutely safety net. Moviehole’s Robyn Candyce caught up with the director as well as actors Steven Bauer and Scottie Thompson for some interviews in New York. Among other things, they talked to her about working with such a talented cast, researching the roles and the intimacy between characters
So in regards to producing the movie you and Michele teamed up with Justin Long and Christian Long, how did that happen?
Richie: So how it happened was that we share a manager and the script just got great coverage, and I think that’s how it found its way to Justin. We don’t live too far away from each other in LA, so we just thought that we would meet up and give it a crack.
So for the actors, how did you become part of this?
Steven: Richie reached out to me somehow, I don’t really remember how he reached me but he did, and the language he used really appealed to me. After I read the script I thought to myself that I could play this role in this film. I’m not someone who likes to be cast as the bad guy, but there are a lot of bad people in this movie, and I’m not the worst. Another thing that appealed to me was the cast. It seemed to me like a really great ensemble was being put together, one full of actors that I appreciate, admire and respect, so I said okay, okay let’s do it.
Scottie: I met with Richie early on in the casting process, and initially met with him about Lacey, than they had me put myself on tape for Mila, and it was so interesting because I thought oh, this makes sense. I had just played a character in a film who suffers from ALS and deals with some similar struggles and issues similar to the ones that Mila is struggling with. So it made sense that she would be the character whose role they would see me in. I also sent a passion letter. I just loved her so much, and I think it’s important to let people know how much you respect the world they have created, and I just thought I wanted to let them know why I related to this particular character. Then we did another round of auditions, and thankfully got the chance to step into this world.
Steven, it felt naughty to like you. It did, but I couldn’t help it. I liked your character.
Steven: Thank you. I don’t like to play a bad person. I really, really do not like to play the bad guy usually because they tend to fall flat and be of the colorless, they are usually black and white, and one level, you know. With this part there were some colors, and Richie let me do my thing.
Scottie it had been mentioned at a previous Q & A that you got to spend some time with someone who had suffered similar symptoms to your character’s in the film. What that like, what was your research process like for this?
Scottie: Yeah, we had a meeting with her for a couple of hours and she was really welcoming in sharing her process and telling her story, because she had recently regained her hearing through an advanced surgery that is more common these days, which is amazing. So she can speak and her voice was suddenly different because of her impediment. I certainly noticed that and I did a bunch of research online, and there are these videos I saw on YouTube of people who regain their hearing for the first time because of this surgery, and of course research on the bone cancer as a whole, and what the process of that is like.
Also, as a child I actually had a speech impediment so I had a retainer and I had to speak in the back of my mouth, and always had my tongue far back to get rid of my lisp, and so I sort of called upon that in terms of conveying a slightly off vocal quality that is different from my regular vocal quality in order to convey that her voice wasn’t quite in your normal sense of when you can hear, how it sounds to you, and over time when you’re deaf you do ten to lose your sense of pronunciation.
The prosthetic leg aspect, we faked it as much as we could, and I hopped around on one leg when I needed to and we shot around it, you know. (4:39)
In a role physically demanding as this one you were bound to get tired. How did you deal with the physical strain that this role had on you?
Scottie: I think for me I came in prepared on the physical fronts and the vocal fronts, so for me a lot of the challenge was the emotional journey that she was on. No one had ever had to particularly pause, but with some of the more emotional I guess you have to get into the proper physical, emotional, spiritual headspace.
How do you break away from that? I’ve been told that actors should find away to put a little piece of themselves in their characters because it makes them more real –
Scottie: I recently suffered an injury on my left leg – the same one that my character has an affliction with – and it gives you a whole new perspective when you look back and go if only I had known that when I was in my headspace with that character. I don’t know, I tend to get pretty close to my characters and we’ll see how that affects me in the long term.
So Steven, Michele said that you got to do your own thing and you added a little bit here and there. She had mentioned that you brought your own sense to – while still staying in the confines – of the character that she had written. What is something of your own that you brought to the character?
Steven: I think I was able to bring a little bit of a sense of humor, and a sense of aloofness because my character is really detached. That was really interesting for me to explore.
Something that was really great about this film was that the intimacy was really raw. It never felt like it had been staged or rehearsed, or that you gave the actors direction on how to interact with each other. Was the between the members of the cast already there or did you work with the cast to get that chemistry there?
Richie: I think that these actors are just so good that – you know when you do an indie film with very little money there’s not a lot of time for preparation with actors of this caliber. They just did a lovely, lovely job. I mean Scottie and Jerry, they just have chemistry on screen that really works, and Justin and Gillian just have chemistry that links up really well. They are more like an opposites attract situation which suits the story, but Jerry and Scottie just seemed to have an immediate romantic connection which was crucial because that’s the whole premise in terms of the opening act, you know because it’s that Jerry will fall in love quickly with Scottie Thompson’s character.
Working opposite Jerry ‘O’ Connell, what’s that like?
Scottie: He’s a really, really nice and genuine person, and he’s super funny. There’s some improve stuff he did, he cracks me up; he just makes everyone feel really comfortable on set. He’s just a good person.
So Gillian Jacobs played Sadie and Lacey, right?
Richie: That’s right, and that’s something that not a lot of people pick up on, but some people do. Its amazing what she had to take on as soon as she arrived. She had to have prosthetic work done on her face so that she could be the same but different. She took on a completely different character for those introduction scenes. It was also a transformation on how she held her body as she moved into Lacey and how she worked – we worked – on her voice. It was fantastic. We always wanted to have the same actress play those roles, but it was quite a scary thing when it came down to deciding to do that because we were wondering if it would take people in and out of the film. But again with the heightened really of the film it ended up being exactly what we wanted.
Steven, what drew you to this pretty amazing and dark script?
Steven: Well the story is unlike most of the stuff I get to read. All of these characters, they have their mission, and its about modern people and modern characters, and I think we live in a world where you can easily find yourself in a situation that becomes desperate. This script is evocative of that, and it really displays how a life can be turned upside down very fast and leave you with very little choices. So when I read the script and I got the call from Richie, I just felt like it was right, like I would like to be a part of this. I knew from the way Richard described it, and how it was written by Michele that it would be a little bit different.
What was it like working with a truly ensemble cast?
Scottie: I did most of my work with Jerry. He’s such a lovely human being and he’s super funny and you know we were all in New Orleans for two months, so it was a lot of time to get to know each other. Everyone is so talented; it was inspiring to be able to work with such a great cast.
The makeup for this was amazing, the design team as a whole was great, however the makeup effects were very, very well done. Who was your make up team, and how did you find him, her or them?
Richie: You know that’s another thing. When your budget is so modest the makeup effects are something that can make you or break you, and those guys were fantastic. You know the quality of the actors, they expect that these elements are just spot on, and it’s the same with the gunfire and the effects crew down in Louisiana are just brilliant. They run so deep now that you can really get such phenomenal people, locals across the board there.
Was it hard getting everyone in to film in Louisiana?
Richie: When you have a modest budget, often what people will do is try to shoot in a very short amount of time, about six to eight weeks. We found over the past couple of years that the less money you have the longer you want to shoot for. It sounds weird, but you don’t have the flexibility with all the huge lights, all the huge crew to be able to move location or shoot 18 hour days because you can’t afford the overtime. So what we do is shoot for longer with less people, and allow ourselves the freedom to not rush anything.
The look of this film was so important, and Thomas Scott Stanton who was one of the first friends I made in America when I came from Australia we didn’t want to compromise the look of the film at any time. Shooting for longer helps that you know. You don’t have to shoot during the middle of the day, you can make sure you get the right light at the right time, and when you don’t have a big budget that really helps. Because of the nature of multi-plot characters the actors would usually come in for two week blocks, and because of the nature of the characters and how they intertwine, they don’t really meet up, it seemed to work really well, to have people come in for that period of time.
Luis Guzman for example, he’s spread throughout the film, but he was easy to film in short period of time, most of his scenes are with [one character]. Scheduling is such an important part of the film, its key, and we had such a wonderful A.D. Kim Barnard, and an indie film kind of lives and dies on their A.D. because you have to do things so differently than you would if you had a little bit more money.
You had mentioned to me earlier that this film was done on a particularly low budget, especially when you consider the cast and also that you had filmed it in Louisiana. In terms of what a low budget means to you, what was financing like for this?
Richie: The film was set in L.A. originally, and so when dealing with finances for an indie film, you always have to keep in mind what is the best way to use the budget. A lot of times that means going to the states that have the better incentives. Louisiana was such a good match for the style of the film we wanted to noir feel with the color, and the night, and with so much of the film being at night New Orleans was such a good match for us. So we went there to scout and we wound up rewriting the scenes in the script to suit New Orleans.
My wife Michele – some of this stuff is such original content – we wanted to make a crime thriller that was as much about love as it was action and violence. So we thought if we would invest more in the characters with actors like Justin Long, Gillian Jacobs, Scottie Thompson and Jerry ‘O’ Connell we would get a lot more we would care a lot more about the situation and the genre bending nature of the film, and I think it works. It’s more interesting to me. Balancing the comedy was the hardest thing, but it’s such a witty situational comedy that I think it fits in the heightened world of the script and Michele just did a lovely job of not pushing it too far so we would still appreciate and understand the romantic and the dramatic stuff.
“The Lookalike” had its nationwide theatrical release, and became available for download on VOD on November 7th, 2014 and is currently available to download on iTunes.
