The indie black comedy is buoyed by the comic one-two punch of Hanks and Graynor, whose characters' flaws (he's a psycho prone to rage blackouts, she's an opportunistic gold-digger) set the unconventional ground for what's really a sweet, twisted tale about relationships in which communication is key to staying happy together -- especially if you've got dead bodies and ulterior motives to hide.
Movieline spoke with Hanks about achieving comedic chemistry with his co-star, striking the right tonal balance, which veteran actor he considers a career role model (hint: It's not dad Tom), why he needed the help of the Kickstarter community to fund his Tower Records documentary, and what he thinks of the musical stylings of brother Chet, AKA Chet Haze.
Lucky is a twisted black comedy -- was the darkness of playing a serial killer part of the appeal for you?
That was a big chunk of it. For me, I'm always trying to see what's out there and try and do something different each time. I'm not really interested in doing the same thing over and over again. This came along and it was a chance for me to sort of tweak things a little bit, change it around. I got to do the nice guy thing, but I also got to have a very serious dark side that I didn't want to play too much, I didn't want to make a big deal out of. More than anything, we wanted to make this film as dark and as funny as we could. More emphasis on the funny than on the dark.
That makes it even funnier! Your character being a serial killer is almost incidental to everything else in his life.
Yeah, and that to me is really the thing that drew me to it. There were a lot of different shades to him. I really enjoyed coming up with two different looks for Ben, the sort of pre-lottery, schlubby, bad posture, silent type and then the fake façade, rich, better posture, better-fitting-clothes type of guy. And the fact that he's a super sweet kid, but he happens to kill people.
How do you take the comment that this is, in a way, a perfect role for you -- the nice looking guy who's just a little creepy?
I kinda like that! For me, and you find this a lot especially with actors, they never want to play what they're perfectly meant to play. The dramatic person kind of always wants to be funny, or the funny person always wants to be dramatic. The nerdy guy wants to be cooler or the cooler guy wants to be able to show off his nerd side a little bit. You always want to show that you're more than just one dimension, and for me it's nice that it's inherent in the character that he's got these different shades, these different elements, to him. And that is fun to play off of. I really take it as a compliment when people say it was fun to like a bad guy. It makes my job a whole lot more fun.
You and Ari play off one another so well, especially as the film goes on and you both let loose in your scenes together. How were you initially cast together?
I remember the first time I saw Ari in something, when she was in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. She has that scene with a speechless Kevin Corrigan, trying to get some of that sandwich. I remember seeing that and going, "Wow, that person's really talented, she's really funny." After I got cast in the film, Gil Cates, Jr., our director, said, "Will you help us find Lucy?" Because it was really important that the two actors get to know each other and work well with each other. So we met with Ari and she just struck me as, and this is true, I wasn't wrong in this assumption, and she has this ability to be able to handle a bunch of different stuff and try different things.
The two of us very early on said, "Look, you never know what the final outcome of a movie will be, but we have to try and be as supportive of each other as we can and have each others' back, because these two characters interact so much." Ari, I think, is so talented and does so much with this role that it was really more... I just sort of pushed her, because my job was to play off her. It wasn't really a plan, but I really kind of played it straight and tried to push her as much as I could to get her to unravel. Ari also just has a wicked sense of humor, she's just incredibly funny, and we had a great chemistry and liked each other. She's a dear friend now, and we just have a lot of fun.
Your dynamic is kind of a straight man-comic man two-person chemistry, but by the time we get to the scene where you kidnap your neighbor you're both on the same level, a comedic team.
The therapy scene is my favorite scene in the movie. We were so nervous about that scene, because it could have very well turned into a dramatic kind of thing, and I was always very cognizant of not wanting to do that. I wanted to try and keep things funny, to remind people that it was a comedy. And that scene, I think, we were able to find that balance really well. For me, that was fun because both characters are putting all their cards on the table and it's the first time they're being honest with each other. It's funny! I think it's this very funny that it's this forced couples' therapy counseling session, where they're both being incredibly honest about the fact that she married him for money and he kills people.
And they're using therapy speak! For example, "When you kill people, you hurt me."
Exactly! That kind of stuff, I think, is subtle but I think it's hilarious. So it was fun to get a chance to do that sort of thing, where it may not be super broad but if people really take a look at what we're doing... I think it's a funny scenario to play out.
During that scene I wrote down the note, "Psychopaths need love, too."
[Laughs] You're not wrong! It's true. Everyone needs help explaining their feelings.
Your character is about one step away from being Norman Bates, but he's got this humanity to him that makes you identify with him.
Well, great! In that case, I feel like Mr. Burns. "Excellent, excellent... everything's going to plan!"
Did you do much research into the actual love lives of serial killers for the role?
No, not at all. Really for me, my main concern was that we were clear on what kind of movie we were making, trying to focus on being funny and playing the awkwardness of all of those moments. I didn't even think much about him being a serial killer, but it ended up being something I didn't want to focus on. I think sometimes actors really shouldn't judge their characters, because it ends up affecting their performance. So I didn't want to judge Ben, I wanted to make sure it was just part of who he was.
In terms of your career trajectory and the way you've chosen roles over the years, do you feel you've taken any notes, one way or another, from seeing how your father's career developed?
I don't necessarily really compare with him. The only way in which I compare with him is really in the state of the industry when he was starting out versus when I was starting out. When he was starting out there were only three channels of TV; when I started out there were 500. When he started out he was a little bit older; when I started out I was doing high school shows. So I don't really look so much at his career, but I look at the careers of other actors that I find to be sort of inspiring in the wider scope of things, in the long journey. I look at actors like Bryan Cranston, who has worked tirelessly for years and years and years doing all sorts of different things and has now, rightly so, come into prominence for Breaking Bad -- a show in which he is absolutely brilliant. If you had said at the height of Malcolm in the Middle that the dad was going to be playing this conflicted crystal meth maker, you would have been laughed off the road. As an actor who has been acting for over 10 years, it's good to know that you can work that long and it'll still continue to get better. Everything that my dad did, that doesn't happen to everybody. That's rarified air.
Switching gears a bit, you announced that you were making a documentary about Tower Records; where did the passion about this subject originate for you?
I grew up in Sacramento, California -- a lot of people are convinced I grew up in L.A., but that's not the case -- and Tower Records was founded and based out of Sacramento. So growing up it was a great source of civic pride that a large, worldwide record retailer was based out of Sacramento. And the history of the company, I thought, was very interesting; I had a personal relationship with Tower Records because I bought a bunch of records there as a kid, I bought my concert tickets there, it was a place to hang out and being a huge music fan that was one of the places that you went to.
But the history of Tower I found to be fascinating -- the way that it started was Russ Solomon selling used records out of his father's drug store in the '30s and '40s, and it turned into a worldwide behemoth. That doesn't happen very often! When I first started the documentary it was about two years after Tower had gone under, and it was very sad when Tower closed its doors... so once I decided to make the documentary I reached out to Russ Solomon, the founder, and he introduced us to a lot of the people who were instrumental in Tower and I realized that these are incredible people who worked at Tower Records and had great stories... over a hundred thousand people -- and those are just the people who worked at Tower Records -- have a connection to this place. So I felt like there was an audience for this film, not only the people who worked and shopped at Tower but music fans, and it struck me as a great story to tell.
But once you got the concept in place, funding was the next difficult step.
It just so happened that when I was trying to raise funds for it was right when the economy collapsed, and other companies started going out of business, like, almost, General Motors. So I went out trying to finance a documentary about a bankrupt company right when the whole country was going bankrupt. I couldn't really find any takers in terms of people donating money to make the movie, so it sat around for a while and eventually I discovered Kickstarter and said, you know, I might be able to not only find my audience for the film but get them involved, an in a way, sort of create the same sort of vibe Tower had. Give people a sense of ownership in the store, make it their movie. That's what we've been able to do with Kickstarter and it's been really exciting.
That's the great benefit of Kickstarter for independent filmmakers, that it allows them to finance projects by going directly to the community for help. But some might ask why a celebrity like yourself might need to ask financial help of their audience to fund a project. What's your response to that?
Well, Steven Spielberg doesn't make movies with his money -- he has other people to give money to him to make movies. And I tried doing that; I tried going out and fundraising the normal way, I took meetings, I did those kinds of things, and I couldn't get anyone interested enough. I couldn't get anyone to back the movie, for a number of reasons. So for me, Kickstarter was sort of a last-ditch effort to try and raise money so I could tell this story. I understand people being confused, but I don't have the money laying around to make this movie. I've got a wife and a kid, I've got to work. So I don't have money to spare on things like that. I'm only asking people to give what they're comfortable giving, and I only ask them to if they really want to. If they don't want to, they don't have to, I understand. But it's a chance to be involved in something special, and the people that worked at Tower Records that have that bond with the store feel the same way -- they want to see the movie made, and they believe that we'll be able to tell the story in the best way we can.
I take that very seriously, and I don't take it lightly that people have backed our film. It's a great privilege and a great honor, and comes with a lot of responsibility. I look forward to involving them and making the best movie that I can. It was the only way that I could make the movie, and if that's the way it needed to be, that's the way it needed to be. And in a strange way, it was destined to be this way because now we're in contact with people it would have taken years to get. Now, we have people that are in positions of power that have money to finance films reaching out to us, saying, "How can we get involved?"
So the Kickstarter campaign helped raise awareness of the project to the point that you've gotten financiers?
Yes -- and distributors. So, in a strange way, we are a bit of an experiment but we are a new way of making movies.
How much of your initial goal have you achieved?
We achieved our goal! We're just trying to raise more money on top, because the more money we make means the better movie we can make. And we're just trying to come up with cool incentives for people. We're making DVDs, we're making t-shirts, we're going to be pressing our own records. So we're trying to make it as fun and exciting as we can to include people. It's not like I'm just trying to make a movie to scratch a dramatic itch here. Not a lot of people try to make documentary movies.
The success of Michael Rapaport's Beats, Rhymes & Life is a good example of that working out in the best way.
Which I cannot wait to see! I'm so excited to see that movie and so relieved that movie got theatrical distribution, I think that's great.
Do you feel like it paves the way for you, in a way?
I feel like any time a documentary film gets released in a theater, it's a good thing. For me, more than anything, I'm excited about that movie because I'm a big Tribe Called Quest fan, so I want to see that movie. I think the interesting thing with documentaries is that you can learn about something that you're already interested in, or you can learn about something completely new. And I really like that aspect of documentary film. I'm interested more in documentary film than narrative film, some of the time. So it's exciting for me creatively, and exciting and stimulating as a creative person. I'm really excited about the opportunities that we have and the doors that have opened up, and I'm looking forward to finishing the Tower story and then who knows what's going to come up later?
Speaking of music, Chet Haze announced on Twitter that he was shooting his latest music video, so I'm curious: How involved might you be in his future endeavors?
As all young 20-year-olds are, they do everything on their own and they don't need any help! [Laughs] I'm very proud of Chet and very proud that he is as passionate as he is about his music as I am about film, and I support him a hundred percent. He's trying to make a name for himself, and he's trying very hard at it, and he cares about it and has a passion for it, and I support that a hundred percent.
The whole family shares that love of music, it seems!
Yes! Well, each sibling is different in their own way.