The Messenger's Ben Foster: 'I Love and Hate What I Do'
I just think it's interesting that most people try to keep their emotions on an even keel, yet actors seek out roles that put them through the wringer. How does it shape a person to pursue the opportunity to go through these intensely emotional experiences?
It must shape us, I imagine. Just being a person living in the big bad world, all experiences shape us -- it depends on how available we allow ourselves to be to the experience. I'm sure there's some level of masochism involved, but I'd like to take a more positive approach, which is just that we have an interest in people who experience these things and a great love for people in all of our clumsiness and good intentions to connect. There's nothing more rewarding than going to those scary places and sitting with them. At the end of the day, I didn't get blown up by an I.E.D.; I'm trying to blur the lines of the day and do the homework and allow myself to experience that it's true at the moment, but that my intention is in service of the experience, particularly with this project. It's in service of the people we're playing, not in service of showing you how emotionally wounded or charming or frightening we are. That was certainly the case on both sides of The Messenger: it was a humble group of people coming in.
What was it like to shoot in so many long takes?
The current of filmmaking is cut, cut, cut, cut. There has to be some level of controlled schizophrenia to experience something and shut it down and start it back up again. With longer takes, it just allows you to fall into the experience of it and get lost -- there's less in your way of continuing to channel.
I know that the actual notifications were unrehearsed -- how was that done technically?
Well, the script was the script, and that was written by Alessandro Camon and Oren Moverman, who directed the picture. With Oren, we knew the corners we were gonna play in, we knew what was on the page, but we were encouraged to go off book. He would speak with us separately and he would speak to the other players separately, and he would clear the set so we could shoot in 360 degrees. The people we were notifying, they hadn't met us, and it just created this really intimate frequency on set where we had to listen to each other. We couldn't act at each other, we had to share space and whatever happened in that space, we were gonna be together. The structure of the scene was in place, and the words were so beautiful as written, but there were circumstances, physical actions, and lovely accidents that were surprises for me.
Of course, you had to have a lot of trust in Oren.
Oren is a great director, certainly one of the most intelligent, sensitive, and insightful human beings I've ever met. He is going to show himself to be one of the great filmmakers. The experience, I imagine, is what it must have been like to work with Hal Ashby at the beginning of his career. There's such a confidence and love for his characters an the actors playing them. He's an extraordinary director, and not just an actor's director -- his understanding of the craft and his courage to play with it and push it and respect the emotions of the actors, it's unlike anything I've ever experienced.
How did you view the soldiers before you made the film?
I suppose I viewed them as icons, as these brave men and women on the level of myth. No one directly in my family served -- I have a very close friend who was a four-year P.O.W. in Vietnam, but no one who served in these last two wars. They just seemed like unbelievably brave, but I also associated the politics with them and felt conflicted and distanced, I suppose. It gives me chills now when I see someone in uniform in the airport or in the street. I just want to bow down to them. They're human beings first and foremost, and I suppose I didn't think of that at first, I thought of them as numbers, as variables in this war.
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I served as a female U.S. Marine, and happen to also be Orthodox Jewish. I found it sadly hilarious that poor Ben is "conflicted" by his idealistic notions of service members coupled with his contempt for the politics circumventing today's American military. He says we need to care better for our soldiers, that they're just kids, yada yada. Oh, Ben, thanks for the support, brother, but you're too Hollywood. Here's his irony: the very politics that reduces military care is designed by the administrations and representatives he and his co-stars vote for. If he's going to sum up the military, I'm going to sum up Hollywood actors.
We do join for a variety of reasons, but unless we join the Air Force where bootcamp is 6 weeks long and military traditions don't hold (it's the branch you join when you want to focus on personal growth instead of combat skill and team development, so an A.F. Colonel I moved in recently told me), we join for reasons you can only mimic from a script. We join for college money, which you'll never have a struggle with. We join for the excellent free medical and dental and vision coverage for ourselves and our dependents, another thing you'll never have to worry about. We join because we were accepted to Loyolla Marymount University or UCLA (we are not stupid, despite what most liberals and hippies think) and can't afford to attend even after we receive Stafford Loans. We join to escape gang territory in which we live, like Pacoima and the Bryant Street gangs off Parthenia or to escape MS13 indoctrination as my Salvadoreno husband had. We join for religious inspiration, sorority, fraternity, for the excellent state-of-the-art training in foreign language, intelligence, physics, and certain technical schools. We join for direction, belonging, and sometimes just a graciousness for country once we see the countries we've emigrated from have either no freedoms or very vague protections, again something Ben and his cronies will never experience first-hand.
By the way, Ben, you have no conscience. How dare you take roles in movies that don't support families of the victims these movies advertise? Nick Markowitz was my friend, and you didn't receive that call that summer that Nick was dead, you didn't lose that classmate. The revenue from that movie didn't benefit Nick, but was another fleeting thriller which Jesse James Hollywood can now add to his resume: "I inspired a major movie and it made me look like a hard-*ss!" You and your friends act like you're so enlightened, but in reality, if you could be paid enough to play the rest of the common people, you would. We're just muses who add figures to your pay-cheques and character traits to your repertoire.
I liked it on Freeks & Geeks when Ben Foster as Eli delivered his weekly catchphrase: "I do anything to get away from annoying Vania, maybe even join Military. That why I join Marines."
Seriously, it's a puff interview with Ben Foster. Save your anger for a Shia Labeouf face-to-face.
Wow, bitter much? I agree with R Hoods. Lighten up. This was a nice interview with a thoughtful actor who had nothing but respectful things to say about the military and its personnel. Vania's anti-liberal rant has no place here. I tip my hat to our troops (and as the child of a veteran I do have an appreciation for them, thank you very much). Haven't seen The Messenger yet but it sounds like a good one and I'll definitely check it out.
B.E.P. are the very best! I adore them so much. Let's party with their songs! Boom boom pow!