Tag: little gold men

In terms of having to really commit, is that something you felt comfortable with right away? Did it require a level of adjustment?

I remember reading the Dubai sections, and just trying to make that language conversational but alien at the same time was always what I was going for. There’s a version of this show I think that is very stoic and takes itself too seriously, and I don’t think any of us ever wanted to make that show and thank God.

This is going to sound like a very random thing to say, but I got a weird bit of inspiration the night before my first day of shooting. One of my favorite films is Hot Rod with Andy Samberg. I think it has one of the best plots of any film ever, and I think the performances in that are incredible. After all of this preparation for season one—learning to tap dance, learning these huge passages of Anne Rice’s writing and Rolin Jones’s writing—I felt really overwhelmed by the whole task ahead. I had a bath and I watched Hot Rod on my laptop. Genuinely, the commitment that everybody in that film gives to what they’re doing, I had this realization that the only way that any story works is if everybody is giving their all.

I don’t mean this in a shady way, because there’s lots of great stuff being made at the moment. But this was never going to be a show where we were banking content and just saying our lines and going home. It was only going to work if all of us allowed ourselves to be as silly as possible and as emotional as possible.

That makes me think of the moment in the finale, in your scene with Lestat, where there’s this very dramatic music playing and we’re having this long-awaited meeting between the two of you—and then Lestat says, “Siri, stop.” The music coming from his phone just stops.

It’s one of my favorite moments! When those heightened moments are infused with humor, that’s what makes it feel real. That’s what grounds these really big feelings. We all metaphorically slip on a banana peel on the worst day of our lives.

Episode five is one of the strongest of this season, where we get to know Louis in the 1970s—and in one of his darkest moments. It also ends with you in head-to-toe prosthetics, after Louis walks toward the sun in a suicide attempt.

I was doing a lot of Jeff Goldblum in The Fly things. It felt reminiscent of that. I was doing a lot of Jeff Goldblum impressions. [Laughs] There are things about Louis in San Francisco at that time [from Anne Rice’s books] that aren’t really in the episode, but hopefully I managed to sneak some in. That version of Louis more closely matches the Louis of the book, the way that he speaks about Lestat. There’s cockiness and a genuine detachment. I wanted to make sure that that would be a little bit jarring, because in season one, we first meet him, he’s charming. As soon as they get back to the apartment, that drops, and he doesn’t have the energy anymore. I always thought of it like, Louis is an addict at that moment. His mood is defined by his meal and by what his meal has put into their body, and so he’s very erratic. I wanted him to feel like he could flip at any moment. He could burst into tears or he could do what he does.

There’s a moment in John Carney’s Flora and Son that might feel thrillingly familiar for fans of his breakthrough musical romance Once. A man and a woman are finding connection via music,  with Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Jeff showing Eve Hewson’s Eve, via Zoom guitar lessons, the power of a song to express emotion. There’s an unspoken charge between the two of them, even through a computer screen, and the audience feels it too — until Flora breaks the spell. She asks Jeff if he’s coming on to her, and he’s so flabbergasted he shuts the whole lesson down. 

That moment feels a bit like Carney making fun of his own reputation as spinner of delicate, music-driven romances, from Once to Begin Again to his poppy coming-of-age film Sing Street. But as he tells is, Flora’s impulse to take the air out of any sincere moment is something he shares, as do many people in his native Dublin. And that impishenss does nothing to diminish the emotional heft of Flora and Son, a quasi-long-distance-romance betewen Flora and Jeff that’s really, as the title suggests, about Flora and her teenage son Max (Orén Kinlan) finding a connection to each other through music. 

Flora and Son premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and made its way to the Toronto Film Festival this month; it opens in theaters on September 22 and comes to Apple TV+ a week later. With his magnetic cast on strike Carney finds himself unexpectedly the lone ambassador for the film on the press circuit, but he’s also comfortable digging into the film’s very personal origins — Flora is based on his own mother, and Max on his own teenage years — and why he, like Jeff, is willing to embrace music snobbery. 

Usually if Joanna Naugle is doing her job correctly, you don’t notice she’s there at all. As an editor on comedies like Ramy and Big Mouth, she’s helped jokes land and performances sing, maintaining the rhythm and snipping the extraneous moments you might not have noticed but definitely would have felt. 

And then came The Bear, the propulsive dramedy created by Christopher Storer, who brought Naugle on to the show after their work together on Ramy. It’s not just the frenetic pace of the show that makes you notice the editing, the way dialogue will overlap or scenes will change in an instant. There are insert shots of knives cutting or pots overflowing, and then images from entirely outside the scenes themselves — childhood photos, Chicago skylines, overdue bills. Each new cut brings you further into the stressful kitchen at The Beef, or into Carmy’s frazzled mind. It‘s the kind of editing you notice, but only because it’s so successful at drawing you further in. 

On this week’s Little Gold Men podcast Naugle joins to discuss how she became an editor after attending NYU film school, and how she and Storer worked together to find the voice of The Bear in season one, only to change their own rules in the more recent two. Naugle, an Emmy nominee for season one, was back for the second season and calls it funnier than the first — proof that as The Bear continues, it may continue to change, as well.