Cinemacy talked with Daniel Radcliffe, Dane DeHaan, and Michael C. Hall about
Kill Your Darlings during the press day.
Clip: Daniel Radcliffe's advice from his English teacher for Kill Your Darlings
Daniel, What has the journey been for you, from childhood actor to more adult roles?
Daniel Radcliffe: Since finishing [“Harry Potter”]
there’s been a huge journey for me, like, I had never worked with
different crews before or different actors before… doing
Kill Your Darlings
was a huge thing for me because I wasn’t going to be working with
anybody I knew. It was like starting fresh in a way, and that was really
exciting.
Like the beat poets you portray, did you have any angsty writing and thoughts that you put down?
Michael C. Hall: I definitely have some journal entries…
[Laughter]
MH: They’re ultimately just run-on sentences.
DR: Yeah I definitely wrote my fair share of real bad poetry
from when I was about 13-18… Some of mine were actually published under a
fake name when I was 17. Don’t look them up.
[Laughter]
Dane DeHaan: Yeah, also guilty of teenage poems of trying to achieve naked self-expression.
Why do you think the beat poets have that “staying power?”
DD: I think their affect on today’s society is kind of
amazing. Their books are still celebrated and read, they were the
original hipsters. In where I live in Williamsburg/Brooklyn, I can’t
walk down the street without seeing at least 10 people dressed exactly
like Jack Kerouac.
[Laughter]
DD: It’s insane. Their books obviously have this huge impact
and also what they stood for, how they dressed, all of that still
resonates today.
Is there any difference in playing characters in the 1940’s as opposed to contemporary characters?
MH: Yeah, the script is so well rendered that a lot of it could
be unconscious, you could [easily] give over to living in a world that
is contextualized in a totally different way… I was excited more
specifically, about the opportunity to humanize and sympathize [with]
this guy who’s sort of a footnote of the beat generation and was, if
anything, characterized as a bit of a 2 dimensional villain/stalker. I
liked that the movie aspired to round him out a bit, and that was
appealing.
DR: Allen [Ginsberg] is one of the characters that is probably
easiest to find empathy or compassion with. There are moments where
he’s so easily manipulated by Lucien where there’s a part of you that
wants to shake him. Also John [Krokidas, Director] took the pressure off
by telling us not to really research our characters too much past the
point where we find them in the movie, so there wasn’t really a sense
that we were having to live up to the icons they became.
DD: Yeah Lucien’s a tricky one because Lucien worked so hard
to make sure this story was never told. My responsibility is to honor
this person by trying to figure out truthfully who they were at this
point in their life, not necessarily
how Lucien would want himself to be portrayed in the film.
Was there any sort of research you did into the time period?
DR: The thing I found really helpful was [listening] to
music of the period. I listened to a lot of Jo Stafford, who I had never
come across before, and his songs “No Other Love” and “You Belong to
Me.”
As actors, are you excited about the opportunity that you can take to challenge the rigid, more formulaic parts of the film industry with some of these roles you're taking?
DR: I’d like to think that if the choices I make are
slightly unexpected or challenging people then that is good. I don’t
know if it’s like we’re railing against the industry but I also do think
that that we [Dane & Michael] are fairly right-minded people in
terms of what we value in scripts and storytelling.
source:
cinemacy.com
