In Contention

Category: Interviews

  • INTERVIEW: Jeremy Renner

    Jeremy Renner at the 2008 Venice Film FestivalJeremy Renner doesn’t have one of those handy “I always wanted to be an actor” stories.  His journey to the screen was, much like the man, a rather unpretentious, play-it-by-instinct series of events that began to unfold in college.

    “I was fumbling around with different majors like most people do,” the actor says, calling from somewhere on the road to Los Angeles in Northern California.  “I was a criminology major and I was interested in science.  I took an elective, which was an acting class, and that was a pretty wonderful place for me to express 19 years of repression, and I fell in love with it.  I fell in love with the stage.”

    Even though Renner is making his screen impact felt in films like “28 Weeks Later,” “The Assassinantion of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” and Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker,” opening in limited U.S. release today, he says he still holds a special place for theater.  “There’s something that you can’t get anywhere else,” he says, “that living, breathing sort of synergy that kind of happens on stage and with your audience, it’s a wonderful cohesive feeling.”

    Nothing he had performed could serve as any sort of preparation for his role as an Army bomb squad officer, a cog in the wheel of the military’s Explosive Ordinance Detail (EOD).  Mark Boal’s thoroughly researched screenplay first crossed Renner’s path when he was in London filming Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s “28 Weeks Later.”  Producer Greg Shapiro approached him with the material and the character leapt off the page at the actor.

    “It wasn’t one of those things that I needed to decide to do it or not,” Renner says.  “There was no choice in the matter to me.  I’ve never been so affected or so interested in a project.  I just thought that EOD was a whole world that had never been explored in cinema.  On paper, he was one of the best-written characters I’d seen in a long time.  I had so many questions and answers, at the same time, to what made this guy tick and I was just so curious I couldn’t wait to figure it out.”

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  • INTERVIEW: Francis Ford Coppola

    Francis Ford CoppolaThe words sound like they might be spoken by a young up-and-comer experiencing his first big break, someone fresh off the bus with stars in his eyes and the unbreakable, still unsoiled spirit of art coursing through his veins.

    “Here I’ve finished this film and now I can dream up some new adventure that I know I can finance and keep doing that and learning from it and learning how to make movies.”

    Except this isn’t a young up-and-comer experiencing his first big break.  This is a filmmaker whose contributions to the cinema have altered the course of the medium.  And only now is he able to do what he really wants to do.

    At 70 years old, Francis Ford Coppola is embarking on the career he says he thought he was going to have from the start, back when he was a post-UCLA film student training as an assistant to filmmaker Roger Corman.  When he and colleague George Lucas established American Zoetrope in the Bay Area in the late 1960s, the sky was the limit.  But life had other plans.

    “In a sense we never really got it going,” he says.  “We were all there at Zoetrope in San Francisco wanting to make personal films and films that were not usually expensive so they could afford to be more extravagant in ideas and freedom, and yet I was never able to get any money to do ‘The Conversation.’  In the despair of the on-coming poverty I took this job that was offered to me and it turned out to be ‘The Godfather’ and it was like getting hit with a tsunami of success.  I didn’t know that was going to happen to me and that opened up all sorts of possibilities.”

    Possibilities that came with fiscal consequences, of course.  The next thing Coppola knew after a wave of creative successes in the 1970s, he was in debt and “had to make a movie every year for 10 years in a row.”

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  • INTERVIEW: 20 questions with ‘Up’ director Pete Docter

    Pete DocterPete Docter’s filmmaking career is as tethered to the history of Pixar as it gets.  After all, he was the third animator hired by John Lasseter back in 1990, when the company was a fledgling computer-animation house making it’s name in short films and commercials.  Nineteen years (and 10 features) later, the studio has more than made its mark on the industry, and Docter has just finished helming his second feature film, “Up,” which opens nationwide today.

    Docter’s initial crack at a project this size was 2001’s “Monsters, Inc.,” the first Pixar film to be nominated for the animated feature film Oscar.  Eight years later, the pressure is certainly on, especially in the wake of the studio’s most critically acclaimed film to date (2008’s “WALL-E”).  But if early reviews are any indication, Pixar — and Docter — not only have another success on their hands, but one that could potentially eclipse the impact last year’s lovable robot had on the critical community.

    I recently spoke with Docter about, among other things, taking the reins on his second feature, what impact 3D technology will have on the medium, the decision to write an Asian-American character into the film and just why the heck no one has cast Delroy Lindo in an animated film until now.  And yes, I asked about that little conversation we’ve been having about the final shot of “Monsters, Inc.”  Keep reading to find out what he had to say.

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  • INTERVIEW: Michael Caine

    Michael CaineSo far 2008 hasn’t offered much for an Oscar shortlist beyond a few festival offerings that have yet to see a domestic release.  Certainly nothing in the way of powerhouse awards-caliber performances has come down the pike, leaving some to talk up smaller, menial turns amid the lull.  But one actor has certainly put forth an effort in the year’s first half that deserves the kind of recognition we cover here at In Contention.

    In John Crowley’s “Is Anybody There?,” a delicate little film focused on the unlikely friendship between an aged magician and a death-obsessed young boy, Sir Michael Caine gives perhaps his best performance since 2002’s “The Quiet American.”

    It is, of course, his first significant role in the seven years between the two films.  Supporting work in “Children of Men,” “The Prestige” and the Batman franchise has certainly been laudable, but in Crowley’s fourth feature the actor shows that he still has both the chops to carry a film and the courage to explore mortality in ways that unexpectedly cut close to home.  I had the chance to speak with Caine about the film last week and found a delightful legend trying his best to have a blast with the opportunities he’s given.

    “It’s an attitude you have to have towards growing old,” he says, calling from London.  “People ask, ‘How do you feel about getting older?”  Well, what is the alternative?  I think it’s great.  I’m one of those people who tries to have fun the whole time.”

    And whether it be the high-budget antics of a blockbuster like “The Dark Knight” or something as independent as Crowely’s film or Caine’s upcoming “Harry Brown,” the actor tries to approach all material with the same philosophy.

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  • INTERVIEW: Jan Troell

    Jan TroellAfter taking a backseat to younger, scrappier film industries in recent years, 2008 marked a defiant resumption of the throne for a number of traditional world-cinema stalwarts – Italy was the talk of May’s Cannes festival, while France churned out one masterwork after the other. Joining them at the top, meanwhile, was Sweden, with a pair of exquisite, acclaimed titles that otherwise couldn’t be more diametrically opposed.

    While Tomas Alfredsson’s dreamy, disturbing awards-guzzler “Let the Right One In” announced the arrival of a startling new guard in Swedish cinema, the country’s official Oscar submission was the work of a decidedly gentler, more practiced hand.

    “Everlasting Moments,” a lyrical account of the life of Maria Larsson and her journey from abused housewife to accomplished photographer at the turn of the 20th century, is but the latest in a long line of works by esteemed 77 year-old veteran Jan Troell.

    The film, which opened Stateside on Friday, has been a humble yet not inconsiderable presence throughout this past awards season. Greeted enthusiastically at the Telluride and Toronto festivals, it went on to score a Golden Globe nod, and only narrowly missed the cut at the Oscars, having made the 9-strong shortlist in the foreign-language category.

    Troell, however, dismisses the whole awards business with good humor. “I was nowhere near as disappointed as people would like me to be,” he chuckles, speaking on the phone from his family home in Sweden. “They expect you to be depressed when you don’t make it, but that’s not the reason you make films. It would have been nice to go to the Oscars, but I’ve been there before, and I know not to take it all too seriously.”

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  • TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: The crafts of ‘Benjamin Button,’ part two

    Tech Support at In ContentionYesterday was the first of our two-part look at the crafts artists behind “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” Today, I feature conversations with cinematographer Claudio Miranda, visual effects supervisor Eric Barba and film editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall, who have all received Oscar nominations for their work on the film.

    When asked about the enormity of the project, Wall rhetorically asks, “‘How do you eat a whale? One bite at a time.  The metaphor we always used is that we always look not at the peak but our feet. It was a two-year process and you have to be sure of every decision you make every day because it affects the end project.”

    Miranda admits he was intimidated by the task of breaking down the script. “I had to just try to imagine how this would be realized on screen,” he says, “going through each task at hand, devising a plan for all the different looks, especially with some things on blue screen.”

    Barba was especially scared that the main character would have to be created by visual effects for the first 50 minutes. “We had to make it work or else it wouldn’t be believable,” he says. “I had to think of the enormity of having to do what up until now hasn’t been done.”

    As regards the man at the helm, Baxter agrees with his colleagues who were featured yesterday that David Fincher is “extremely helpful and very very clear. He knows when to be loose and when to be a lot more specific. He’s got great intuition on what his crew needs from him.”

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  • TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: The crafts of ‘Benjamin Button,’ part one

    Tech Support at In ContentionThirteen Oscar Nominations.

    Very few films in Academy history have achieved that status and, prior to this year, no film had secured that many nods since “Chicago” in 2002. But “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” has managed it this year, largely because of the incredible work going on below-the-line.

    Last week, I featured composer Alexandre Desplat and his role as film music composer on David Fincher’s film. In the past week, I have spoken to cinematographer Claudio Miranda, production designer Don Burt, set decorator Victor Zolfo, costume designer Jacqueline West, film editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall, visual effects supervisor Eric Barba and makeup artist Greg Cannom, a healthy lot, all of them cited for their work on the film by the Academy this year.

    Today, I concentrate on my talks with Burt, Zolfo, West and Cannom. Tomorrow, Miranda, Baxter, Wall and Barba will be featured.

    “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is, without any doubt, a film extraordinarily reliant on visual attributes to be effectively told. The crafts artists acknowledge the intimidation poised by such a project.

    “‘Hmmmm…’ is what went through my mind when David [Fincher] first asked me to do this,” says Burt. “How in the world are we going to do this? Then I started going through the different periods in my mind and started building a plan, thinking maybe – just maybe – we could pull it off.”

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  • TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: Alexandre Desplat

    Tech Support at In ContentionOver the last several years, Alexandre Desplat has gone from being a relatively unknown (in the United States anyway) French composer to emerging as one of the most acclaimed and sought after commodities in the business today.  Receiving his second Oscar nomination this year for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” Desplat has continued to cement his place at the top of his field.

    Despite the acclaim, however, he remains very close to his home in European cinema.  “I have tried to keep as much of a relationship as I can with my French directors,” he says.  “I always try to go to do two or three French movies a year.  That’s a lot but I don’t want to lose that.”

    While there are certainly exceptions, there is definitely a difference in the manner that French and American filmmakers approach their work, Desplat says.  Being forced to think differently because of different filmmaking styles helps his creative resources.  “It feeds me,” he says.

    David Fincher’s “Button” posed unique challenges for Desplat.  “It doesn’t have a linear storytelling,” he says.  “It’s a complex puzzle and I’d ask myself, ‘How do you deal with this in music and deal with the main character when he is a passive character?’  It’s not easy to capture in music.”

    Describing the film as a “sound epic,” Desplat notes that the music had to be strong without being overly dramatic or imposing.  It was a crucial demand from Fincher that Desplat says he had to struggle with.

    The composer has worked with some of the world’s top directors in recent years – Ang Lee, Stephen Frears, Jacques Audiard — but despite Fincher’s unique perspective in the wake of those talent helmers, Desplat says certain professional similarities smoothed the journey.

    “He has an amazing quality as a collaborator,” Desplat says. “He’s very demanding but so am I so that’s fine.  He’s very detailed but so am I, so that’s also fine.  He wants his people to bring their own world, talents and colors into the film.  I think that’s the sign of a great director.  All the great directors I’ve worked with know that it is crucial that your creative energy is opened and not just restrained.”

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  • TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: the crafts of ‘Slumdog Millionaire’

    Tech Support at In ContentionGarnering 10 nominations last week confirmed “Slumdog Millionaire”’s established status as the frontrunner for this year’s Best Picture Oscar.  Unusually for a Best Picture winner, the film failed to nab any acting nominations.  Its high tally counts comes from seven nominations in the crafts fields.

    I recently had the chance to speak to three of those below-the-line nominees: composer and songwriter A.R. Rahman, cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle and film editor Chris Dickens.  All are first-time nominees and all must be considered in genuine contention for statuettes, if not favored to win.

    Rahman, a self-proclaimed introvert, has already won Golden Globe and BFCA awards for his score, which has become massively popular.  Though very humble, it is clear he is relishing the opportunity to have his music exposed to such a wide audience.

    “I was attracted to the film right away,” he says.  “It is about modern India, young people and optimism.  There’s a kind of urge to it.  It’s not a laid-back score.  It needed something edgy and experimental to create interest in the whole thing.”

    Dickens also was attracted to the film right away, not only because of the story but because of the unique way it was to be told.  “Basically, the film was designed that way in the script,” he says.  “Though there was always a doubt in my mind as to how it would work when you saw it.  There are lots of different scenes that the audience had to understand to get to know where they were with the story.  The intention was always to shoot in different formats and different styles.  I found that fascinating.”

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  • Interviews with this year’s Oscar nominees at In Contention

    Mickey Rourke (Best Actor, “The Wrestler”)
    Michael Shannon     (Best Supporting Actor, “Revolutionary Road”)
    Amy Adams     (Best Supporting Actress, “Doubt”)
    Marisa Tomei (Best Supporting Actress, “The Wrestler”)
    Danny Boyle (Best Director, “Slumdog Millionaire”) (also here)
    James Marsh (director, “Man on Wire”)
    Kristi Zea, Albert Wolsky (Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design, “Revolutionary Road”)
    Chris Menges (Best Cinematography, “The Reader”)

  • INTERVIEW: Amy Adams

    Amy AdamsAmy Adams has arrived.  No “doubt” about it.

    Sunday she was sitting at a table with Meryl Streep, Viola Davis and John Patrick Shanley at the Hollywood Foriegn Press Association’s Golden Globe Awards where she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, one of five nods the film received. Surrounded by major artists such as Ron Howard, Frank Langella, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Clint Eastwood, Kate Winslet, and so many others, she looked comfortable and right at home.

    But seven years ago she was struggling to find work.  And the actress says she was ultimately stunned to land a plum role in a major film being directed by Steven Spielberg, two time Academy Award winning director and starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

    “It’s been fantastic,” she explains by phone, “surreal, but I am loving it.  ‘Catch Me If You Can’ was a huge break for me and Steven was just so generous as a director, so enthusiastic and positive all the time. Going to the set was a constant pleasure.”

    The actress says she is “trying to just experience things right now, to let them happen and see where we go with it — take everything as it comes to me.”  She’s somewhat overwhelmed by the attention she is getting these days. I liked Adams within seconds of speaking with her: soft-spoken yet talkative, forthright, honest, and modest.

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  • INTERVIEW: Marisa Tomei

    Marisa TomeiI’m coming around to Marisa Tomei rather late in the publicity game this year.  I didn’t make it to Venice or Toronto and we just haven’t crossed paths here in L.A. during this exhausting — as always — Oscar season.  But the first thing I have to ask is if she feels the pressure yet.

    A studio can run an artist ragged this time of year, especially when they’re on the cusp of an Oscar nomination.  And that’s a position Tomei undoubtedly finds herself in as we move into the new year and her performance in Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler” continues to light up the circuit.

    “I’m getting there,” she says of the approaching fatigue factor.  But you wouldn’t know it from the energy that still pops.  Those bright brown eyes are as beautiful as you’d expect, of course, and that laugh is infectious.  She’s fresh off a much-needed holiday vacation — back east for Christmas and home in L.A. for new year’s, quiet and with depressurizing on the mind.

    When she comes over to the table she takes a moment to speak to a fellow celebrity sitting adjacent to us before popping open the menu and declaring, “I’m gonna eat.”  What was going to be maybe a half-hour discussion over coffee turns into almost an hour of talk over lunch, topics ranging from her early passion for acting to her attempt at going back to college at one point in her career to, of course, the process of creating Cassidy, the “stripper with the heart of gold” at the center of “The Wrestler.”

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  • TECH SUPPORT INTERVIEW: The Crafts of ‘Revolutionary Road’

    Tech Support at In ContentionIn less than a decade, filmmaker Sam Mendes has established himself as one of the most intriguing directors of his generation. “Revolutionary Road,” his fourth film to date, hit theaters over last weekend. Regardless of its Oscar fate in the writing, directing and acting categories, the film seems poised to be a major player in the craft arenas, our central focus here at Tech Support.

    I recently spoke to cinematographer Roger Deakins, production designer Kristi Zea, costume designer Albert Wolsky and film editor Tariq Anwar about their work on the film, a 1950s period piece featuring the on-screen reunion of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. All four artists are veterans, having had long (Deakins is the youngest at age 59) and successful (each has been nominated for an Oscar at least once, with Wolsky earning two statues to date) careers.

    Each of the respective department heads commented on Mendes’s tendency to balance a well-defined vision with the necessity of cooperative discovery on the set. Deakins previously worked with Mendes on “Jarhead,” stepping into the shoes of late legend Conrad L. Hall, who lensed Mendes’s first two efforts. “He’s not happy until he gets what he wants,” he says of the director, “but he has an enormous respect for the collaborative process.”

    Zea, meanwhile, says Mendes has a great “willingness and affection for collaboration, but has a precise vision and, because of that, the movie, in its entirety, is very controlled.”

    Anwar received an Oscar nomination in 1999 for his work on Mendes’s “American Beauty.” This year marks their own reunion. He agrees with Zea’s reflection of the director’s balance of his own preparation and the input of his collaborators.

    “In spite of being so sure-footed in his approach to film production, there is never a feeling of being excluded from the creative process,” he says, “or a sense that his material is too precious not to be rearranged or even deleted.”

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  • INTERVIEW: Michelle Williams

    Fate can have a bittersweet sense of timing, and Michelle Williams understands this better than most. A 2008 that started bleakly with the passing of Heath Ledger, her former partner and the father of her daughter, has ended as a professional banner year for the 28 year-old actress.

    A triptych of startling performances in a disparate array of projects — Sharon Maguire’s “Incendiary,” Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York,” and, most prominently, Kelly Reichardt’s “Wendy and Lucy” — have made this the year Williams consolidated the Oscar-nominated promise she demonstrated as a member of strong indie ensembles in the likes of “Brokeback Mountain” and “The Station Agent,” and emerged as a great, free-standing actor in her own right.

    Further accolades have rolled in, with her tricky, film-carrying performance in “Wendy and Lucy” earning her an Independent Spirit nod and a Best Actress award from the Toronto critics, while in the background, her late ex remains the year’s most talked-about thespian. When she sighs wistfully over the phone from New York and says that it’s been “a weird year,” that barely seems to cover it.

    It’s another curious reversal that the film largely responsible for making this such a big year for Williams truthfully couldn’t be any smaller. “Wendy and Lucy” is a brilliant, elegiac piece of Americana that easily ranks among the year’s finest films. The story of a young, broke drifter, Wendy, whose already fragile existence collapses when she is separated from her best friend Lucy, a yellow-gold mongrel, it inauspiciously came her way as a short story (“Train Choir,” by co-scripter Jon Raymond) with a brief note attached — the lean script still uncompleted.

    “Todd Haynes recommended it to me,” she says, referring to the iconoclastic auteur who directed her in last year’s “I’m Not There.” “He’s a mutual friend of mine and Kelly’s, and he thought we’d be a good fit. So I read it — I mean, I’d be stupid not to trust the judgment of someone like Todd.”

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  • INTERVIEW: Dustin Hoffman

    Dustin HoffmanHe doesn’t seem like Dustin Hoffman for some reason.  He sounds like Dustin Hoffman.  He looks like him.  But there aren’t really any traces of his decades-long assemblage of characters.  And he’s got an approachability that seems somehow uncommon for a star of his stature.

    But there he is, piecing together a sandwich with arugula, veggie cheese, spicy mustard and wheat bread as he recalls his first major interview with Studs Terkel over 40 years ago.  Terkel has passed recently, which brought the topic to the fore.

    “It was Chicago, right after ‘The Graduate,’” Hoffman says.  “I went into his office and he had floor-to-ceiling books and everything, you know.  The office looked like him.  He turns the tape recorder on and it was an intricate and intensive interview that probably went on for over two hours.  We shook hands and he said, ‘Let me just check’ — and the tape didn’t work.  It had been blanked for some reason.  So he says, ‘You wouldn’t mind doing it again?”

    So it was that we kicked off our own two-hour conversation, one steering in and out of his legendary career, briefly touching on the particulars of his latest film, “Last Chance Harvey” (now playing in limited release and for which Hoffman received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor), but mostly wandering from this mundane particular to that.

    He has a fondness for iron furniture, a number of antiques peppering his Brentwood offices.  A large Italian “Midnight Cowboy” poster hangs in the lobby, but I’m caught off guard by the food and drink spread in the hallway as we move into his personal office.  The dainty dishes and cutlery seem to clash with the casual air of the actor before me.

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  • INTERVIEW: Michael Shannon

    Michael Shannon in Revolutionary RoadIf you’ve seen James Marsh’s “Man on Wire,” then you know of Philippe Petit’s dazzling tight-rope walk between the towers of New York’s World Trade Center on the morning of August 7, 1974.  What you probably don’t know is that while Petit was criss-crossing back and forth between the towers for roughly 45 minutes, Michael Shannon was coming into the world down in Lexington, Kentucky’s Good Samaritan Hospital.

    “I don’t think it means anything,” Shannon says.  But it’s certainly an interesting aside to the Oscar season, drawing a connection, however meaningless, between these two contenders, one of them a thoroughbred frontrunner, the other deserving of that consideration but strangely under the radar this year.

    I get a call from Shannon to kick off the morning.  It seems he’s somewhat stranded at the hotel and will be late meeting me over at Hugo’s on Santa Monica Blvd.  I later find out he was industrious enough to grab a cab rather than wait on a studio-provided car, probably the east-coaster in him.  “Don’t worry,” he says.  “I’m going to make sure we get a full hour.”

    When Shannon walks into a room, his striking height seems to command at least a glance in his direction.  A couple of brunching patrons stare for a bit, sure that they’ve seen him in SOMETHING before.  And for a number of years, Shannon has been that kind of actor — the hard-working sort that AMPTP has certainly disavowed as SAG tries to find some sort of plan for sustaining the acting middle-class throughout the industry.

    You’ve seen him in “Pearl Harbor,” “Bad Boys II,” “World Trade Center,” “Bug” and any number of bit roles that call for the unusual image he cuts.  But you’ve never seen him like he is in “Revolutionary Road,” a two-scene wonder of a performance that cuts the the very core of a narrative already concerned with getting at the hardest of truths.

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  • INTERVIEW: ‘Man on Wire’ director James Marsh

    James MarshIt’s a rare achievement, but through the ups and downs the last fortnight’s precursors, one film has failed to miss a beat, landing gongs from the New York, Los Angeles and Washington critics, as well as the NBR and the British Independents, not to mention Indie Spirit and BFCA nominations.

    That film would be “Man On Wire,” James Marsh’s crisp, witty and ultimately very moving documentary about Philippe Petit, the charismatic French performance artist who in 1974 committed the so-called “artistic crime of the century” — an illegal tightrope walk between the Twin Towers of the New York’s World Trade Center. Despite being what some might have seen as a niche project, it has emerged as one of the most acclaimed films (a Metacritic score of 89 speaks for itself), not to mention one of the top-grossing documentaries, of the year.

    Marsh, for one, admits to being a bit taken aback to his film’s dizzying trajectory. “It‘s both a thrill and a surprise,” he tells me on the phone, taking a breather from the deadline-driven editing of his new film. “It’s a great, hopeful story, but there’s such a tragic connotation to those buildings now that I wasn’t sure how audiences would respond to it.”

    By avoiding any 9/11 discussion in the film, however, Marsh was keen to keep the focus on themes of art and ambition, and he believes this is what so many viewers have connected with in the material. “It’s a fairytale, really,” he elaborates. “A real, true movie premise about achieving the impossible. Philippe is an adventurer, a superhero made flesh and blood. I love that what he did was in a way kind of pointless — it’s beauty for its own sake. And I love that audiences appreciate that.”

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  • INTERVIEW: Sally Hawkins

    Sally Hawkins“We didn’t necessarily set out to create someone as perpetually sunny as Poppy,” says Sally Hawkins of her radiant performance in Mike Leigh’s “Happy-Go-Lucky,” which is currently making waves in the awards race. “But Mike was very dismissive of doing anything maudlin or moody with this project. So the optimism came early on for her. It’s like trying on different skins. And this skin just fit.”

    Spoken in a breezy, unassuming tone, it strikes me as a statement — equal parts pragmatic and eccentric — that could as easily have some from the mouth of Poppy herself, the cheery North London schoolteacher who forms the delightful center of Leigh’s latest perceptive study of British social mores.

    Indeed, when I first encounter Hawkins in the top-floor café of a West End bookshop, dressed in a somewhat Poppy-esque ensemble of emerald-green cardigan and flowing tie-dye skirt, it’s difficult not to be reminded at least a little of her character. Hawkins is certainly calmer and a little softer in person, but her easy-flowing conversation, accompanied by increasingly wild hand gestures, reveals something akin to Poppy’s humor and generosity of spirit.

    “I’m nothing like as extroverted as she is,” she says, smiling broadly.  “But how many people are?  If anyone says they see even a little of me in Poppy, or vice versa, I take that as the hugest compliment, because she just has life worked out. It’s not as if she’s negating that it’s hard. She just finds a way to deal with it, and finds a way to flow with people. She’s an extraordinary person. I think I learned a lot from her.”

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