Mark Fergus, Guy Pearce Interview, First Snow

 Posted by: Sheila Roberts

MoviesOnline recently sat down with writer/director Mark Fergus and actor Guy Pearce to talk about their new film, "First Snow.” The film, shot in New Mexico, is directed by Fergus in his feature debut from a screenplay he co-wrote with Hawk Ostby.  Pearce plays the wound tight and cocky Jimmy Starks, a smooth-talking salesman certain he’s on the verge of a big break. When his car stalls in the middle of nowhere, a roadside soothsayer (J.K. Simmons) assures him a windfall is on its way. But although Jimmy should be happy when his boss suddenly agrees to financially back his business venture, he starts to become paranoid instead.

As his girlfriend Deirdre (Piper Perabo) and his best friend/business partner Ed (William Fichtner) watch him slowly come unwound, Jimmy wonders if a past betrayal of his friend, newly paroled Vince (Shea Whigham), could be catching up to him. And, as the weather turns cold, Jimmy can’t help but fear the mysterious seer’s other prediction…that they’ll be no tomorrow after the first snow. One of the most versatile actors of his generation, Guy Pearce made his mark over a decade ago playing a pretty young drag queen in "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.” The film was a critical and box office hit, becoming one of the 10 most successful Australian films of all time and receiving an Oscar, two Golden Globe nominations, two BAFTAs and numerous AFI nominations. Guy’s diverse array of roles since that time include Ed Exley in the slick crime drama "L.A. Confidential” and the complex amnesiac Leonard Shelby in the thriller "Memento,” and most recently as Charlie Burns in John Hillcoat and Nick Cave’s IF-Award winning feature, "The Proposition.”

Guy’s other recent credits include "Two Brothers,” from acclaimed French director Jean-Jacques Annaud ("Seven Years in Tibet”), the HG Wells adaptation "The Time Machine,” directed by the author’s great grandson Simon Wells, the big budget adaptation of the Dumas novel "The Count of Monte Cristo,” and the drama "Factory Girl,” directed by George Hickenlooper. He recently completed production on "Death Defying Acts” opposite Catherine Zeta Jones. Mark Fergus wrote the screenplay for the upcoming "Iron Man” which begins shooting this month for release in 2008. He is also writing the script for the recently announced "John Carter of Mars” which is slated for release in 2009.  Here’s what Mark Fergus and Guy Pearce had to tell us about their recent collaboration:

Q: What’s the writing process between you and Hawk and then what was it like to go and direct?

Mark Fergus: Yeah, we’ve been writing together for about 12 years now. We met in New York and just started to edit for each other, and we both needed help kind of pushing material to another place. And then we just decided, ‘Oh, let’s just write something original.’ And we just went from there, and it’s just one of those things where I never really thought we could work together because we have very different personalities and sensibilities. But there’s something about the back and forth between us that just totally worked for the kind of… things I never would have thought of, things he would have never thought of.
 
We just were banging things back and forth, and we pretty much like to… It just started out that way because we usually lived in different places, so we were able to not write kind of hovering over each other. We’d each tackle one phase of it, and then bounce it back to the other guy, and then they would do their pass, and then bounce it back; we had this great… We weren’t editing for each other, we weren’t editing each other before we got a chance to try something and I think that’s been really helpful for us, and that’s how we wrote all our assignments.

When we did Children of Men, I was living in New Mexico and he was living in New York. Now, he lives in Vermont and I live in LA. It’s a really fun way to work, and it’s just by necessity. But I think doing the project now, Iron Man, he’s had to be out here, and we’re in a room together – and it’s cool, but it’s a different dynamic, and I like the non-editing, loose way that we work. And also, when you get burned out, you just hand it over and let him carry it for a while, and projects move forward much quicker and weird stuff starts to happen in the midst of it.

And then directing, I think he’s got a family now, and a bunch of kids, and I know he’s going to direct one of these days when he gets everything settled. When we wrote First Snow, I always wanted to – I felt like when I saw In the Company of Men, I keep talking about that. That was one of those films that made me realize – you can say there’s no directing gigs out there, but you can just go and write something or try to write something that fascinating and it’s just all about the acting and the writing, and there’s no big money behind that movie. You can do something like that. That ended up being our reason for writing First Snow, and it was always something to direct; so I always made it clear that I wasn’t interested in giving the script up. And if anyone wasn’t cool with that, cool, we’d just walk away there. And that was all that really needed to be said. They just wanted to see how committed you were to actually seeing it through, and that’s how we got that first one off the ground.

And I think also the casting, since that’s where the money comes in. But if the cast will take a chance, I think the guys who back these movies are willing to. They feel a lot better when the actor feels very comfortable with you. And it was actually pretty smooth, smoother than I would have expected to get a film put together – and, of course, a lot of luck in that with the Yari Group, and all the factors that coalesced to make it happen. But certainly, I think the main thing was just to get past the writer thing, you had to show them you could, you had a visual conception of the film, and all the dog and pony that goes along with that, the story boards and visual. And I always watch that LA Confidential, Curtis Hanson always shows how he pitched LA Confidential to executives, even though he had a track record, a great track record; but the way he did the slide show – ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ That’s what you gotta do, so thank God for DVD extras, you can learn all this stuff. So that’s sort of what helped us – the little flip board of influences and sources and things you wanted to do visually.

Q: Did you have a particular experience that served as an inspiration for this story?

Mark Fergus: Just really, I think, Hawk had dealt with fortune readers down in New Orleans where he had lived for a couple of years; and he had a lot of disturbing feelings like somebody was a phony, but having them say stuff that stuck with you, and kind of lodged into you, that you couldn’t really shake. Like if someone tells you, you have a short life line, screw that; but then you think about are there people who have access to – people who read energy. I think there are super intuitive people who can feel energy. There was a great documentary about it – I can’t remember the name – but it wasn’t so much that gift of sight, but the extraordinary intuition and ability to read people’s energy.
 
I just like to leave it as a big ‘what if.’ I’ve never gone to -- other than recently as a joke, I was put in front of a tarot reader -- but I never wanted to know too much about it, because to me, it’s a great mystery, and a great ‘what if’ of life. Do people have sight? Is there anything to see, even if somebody had sight? I think we just approached it as it’s a drama about somebody who is really poisoned by guilt and needs to kind of tear themselves down and what would be a catalyst to get them to start looking inward. It would need to be something superficial from the outside to kind of push them into that.
 
I think I look back at all the characters we’ve done now, and there’s always somebody, some male character with a lot of demons who needs to have a reckoning, and have some kind of redemption. And maybe that’s our story. Everybody has that one story you’re telling over and over, and maybe that’s our story which speaks to us. And so, I think the fortune teller was just a cool way in, a simple mysterious way into ‘what does it take for people to look inward and solve or unravel themselves and find some grace in life?’ What would force you to do that, and I think fear of death is certainly a compelling one.

How do you go about writing these huge, big budget Hollywood films such as Children of Men or Iron Man?

Mark Fergus: We’ve only come into those of late. We met Jon Favreau on an adaptation called John Carter of Mars, and when that one didn’t go forward, we jumped onto Iron Man. And I think what he likes about us is we’re going to approach it the same exact way as we would First Snow. There’s a different context and we’re just going to write a story about a screwed up guy trying to – same thing -- tear himself down and rebuild himself and that’s still the same story. And I think Jon appreciated that we were going to approach it that way, as if it was a small story, because if it works as a small story, I think it works on a larger scale. And Children of Men, we wrote that as the tiniest, we just saw – it’s a Casablanca story in a slightly distant future and a fairly plausible dilemma facing mankind.
 
But all we really cared about is this is a guy with a difficult past, with a woman who now comes to him for help; and just the shear simplicity of ‘what would you do in that situation if someone who hurt you comes back and now needs you?’ And the scale of it just kind of takes care of itself. The project is what it is. And I don’t think you have to write any…we never thought of writing any differently given those situations. It just comes down to the simplest human story, and Favreau was amazing at always reminding us. When you think you want to go bigger, because ‘oh, I just watched Spider-Man last night, and god, there’s so much of this.’ And you start thinking how to get more razzle-dazzle in there and he always kind of reminds us why he hired us was ‘just tell me what the human story is.’ Like Children of Men, ‘get the girl to the boat and save her.’ It’s something real simple that translates.

(Guy Pearce walks into the room and joins our interview)

Q: (to Mark Fergus) This is the perfect time to say he was your fifth choice. (Laughter)

Guy Pearce: I thought I was your seventh choice.

Mark Fergus: Yeah, I forgot.

Guy Pearce: Yeah, cause Russell passed, Tom passed, Brad passed, and then Keanu passed –

Mark Fergus: Hugh Jackman –

Guy Pearce: Yeah, Hugh passed. Then there were the girls. That’s when you thought you would go with a girl.

Mark Fergus: Yeah, Piper was originally going to play it.

Guy Pearce: That’s right, yeah, cool. How’s it going? (to Mark Fergus) I’ll talk to you later. (Laughs)

Q: How did you get involved in this?

Guy Pearce: Well, it was pretty straight forward really. My agent had gotten a hold of the script and really liked it, and sent it my way. And then I read it, and clearly really liked it as well, and we just met up. And I think at that first meeting it was pretty clear that we probably thought in the same kind of way. It’s really important for me – it’s really important to make a good film, but I actually find it probably more important to have a good experience when you make the film.
 
I think if the film’s going to be good, then it’s going to be good. But to be able to communicate and have great respect for each other and be open enough and honest enough to say what works and what doesn’t, and go and say, ‘Oh, I’m having a problem with this’ or ‘I don’t really know what I’m doing here’ or whatever, I find really more important than anything, and Mark’s clearly someone who is sensitive to that and aware of that. So I think we kind of clicked pretty quickly and easily.

Mark Fergus: Yeah, absolutely. And I was expecting to kind of be intimidated, not just by his career, but by his presence.

Guy Pearce: Yeah, my sheer intelligence; but no, he wasn’t at all

Mark Fergus: (Laughs) Yeah, it was very important for me to know that I was going to be able to gain your trust, to be able to direct the film because you had worked with so many great directors. It was really relaxing and disarming to know that we could just talk as people and connect on a personal level and then the story would come out after. And I thought that was going to be the foundation, but it ended up being a really solid working relationship.

Guy Pearce: Yeah, and I think it’s clearly, for me, it’s just the best way to work anyway. It’s a little like just grabbing your friends and saying, ‘Let’s go make a short film’ and ‘What do you want to do?’ And just being able to communicate right there and then, and spontaneously be able to come up with any ideas – but even if everybody thinks it’s not a great idea, have enough respect to go, ‘Well, no, how about this?’
 
I’ve met lots of directors who have far more experience than Mark and I put together, who immediately I go, ‘No, I couldn’t come and work with you because I just feel like you’re not listening to me or you’re not actually compassionate enough to want to listen to what I find an issue.’ And I clam up pretty easily – I find that I kind of go ‘Oh, my god’ really easily around people. So if somebody’s of that kind of nature, I just kind of find the idea of working with them too difficult. With Mark, I knew I could boss him around and tell him what I wanted. (Laughs)

Mark Fergus: Yes, sir.

Q: Is that the norm with directors?

Guy Pearce: No, not necessarily, I think it comes down to personality types. Some people you click with and others you don’t. Some people are sensitive enough to really want to listen to – and I think it’s more – if I was making a film and I had a bunch of actors in front of me, I would need to know, and I would need them to know that I know exactly how I’m going to support them in what it is they’re going to try and do, and how I’m going to help them try to get there, and if they don’t need help getting there, how I’m going to actually leave them alone as well. Whereas I think a lot of directors just kind of plow in and try and boss their way around. And you suddenly go, ‘Am I actually…?,’ ‘Can I connect to this?,’ or ‘How’s this working?’

Q: Is that something you know early on in meetings?

Guy Pearce: Well, to a certain extent. I think generally you pick up a vibe straight away, and I’m actually a lot better these days at sitting down and going, ‘So, do you like to rehearse?,’ ‘How do you feel about this?,’ and ‘What do you reckon about that?’ Just sort of asking a few basic questions that will kind of give you – like if I mention the word ‘rehearse’ and the director goes, ‘Oh, ugh, I don’t know, ugh, ugh,’ I think, ‘Oh, this is going to be tricky; I don’t know how this is going to work with me.’

Q: What about with a co-star?

Guy Pearce: Well, I must admit, I’m also aware of how difficult it must be for a director when they have a scene with five actors and every actor has a different approach – how do you handle that? But, I think that takes an ability to be able to communicate with your other actors, ‘Listen, this particular actor really, really needs to do this, this, this, and this. Do you think you can just block it through loosely? You guys can go, I can stay with you, and we can just kind of nud it out a bit more.’ But I think that juggling ability, not many people have.

Mark Fergus: There’s always a way. I think there’s a phrase about casting that ‘90% of your job is casting correctly,’ and then everything else is intuitive. I think maybe it’s just dumb luck, but everybody who came onto this seemed to be of a single mind and spirit about the way we all wanted to work together.

Guy Pearce: And I don’t think it’s dumb luck, I think it’s your intuitive ability to go, ‘You feel like the right person to me.’ I don’t know that there was – I wasn’t there for the process as far as producers saying, ‘We only want A-list actors.’ I know there was a little bit of that from finance people as far as who they wanted and who they didn’t want, etc. But I think within the sort of realm of who was acceptable, you pretty much picked the people you wanted.

Mark Fergus: Yeah, I think they came to the project feeling good.

Q: Guy, with all the emotional suspense of the movie and the mystery-thriller aspect, how did the experience of telling this story compare to telling the story in Memento?

Guy Pearce: How did it compare? Well, I don’t know how to answer that.

Q: Was one more emotionally taxing than the other?

Guy Pearce: Memento was faster and more furious; and Chris (Nolan) and Mark are very different people. It’s different because you’re surrounded by a different group of people, I think. I don’t know, I think even though Mark kind of knew – the film that’s there on the page is pretty much the film that’s there on the screen, but I feel like there was a more... Well, this is going to sound like the Memento experience was kind of insensitive, ‘cause it wasn’t; it was very sensitive. But I feel like this experience – I was probably quite a different person by the time I did this film than when I did Memento as well.
 
Chris Nolan is very articulate and very clear cut, and he’s incredibly sort of deft when it comes to technical stuff, and he said to me initially, ‘I’m not really sure how I work with the actors.’ He’s far more technical, I suppose, whereas Mark is far more connected emotionally. But in saying that, that’s not to say that Mark is not technical and that’s not to say that Chris is not emotional. I’m just trying to find some sort of difference, I suppose, between the two. But Memento was fast and furious – (to Mark) how many days did we shoot this in?

Mark Fergus: I think 29 days.

Guy Pearce: 29; Memento was 24 or 25 days. Memento felt like we were just running around like crazy; ‘We’ve done this, now let’s run to the next location.’ And it kind of took that– there was just a different vibe. Chris and Wally (Pfister, director of photography on Memento) are just fast and furious guys, whereas our team was pretty chilled, I suppose. I mean, Richard (Fox, first assistant director???) is pretty snappy (snaps his fingers), I suppose, but it was a sort of chilled vibe about this film in a way. I don’t know how chilled you were directing your first movie, but it was pretty chilled –

Mark Fergus: No, it was definitely – I think we wanted to discover more, we didn’t want to know exactly how every scene was going to -- we knew what we wanted, we knew where we were starting from, but we wanted to let some chaos into the process.

Guy Pearce: And I think Memento is kind of a technical miracle, really; it really is a kind of a machine that you really don’t understand until it’s up there on the screen – and I think the only person who fully understood it was Chris. And I was certainly able to do my job emotionally, but I don’t think I was really aware of how brilliant a thing it was until I saw the finished product; whereas this felt more like a normal film, organic, and we did a lot of discussing about the character, this, that and the other, and the relationships between the characters, and so it was kind of different in a way.

Q: Do different directorial approaches affect your performance as an actor?

Guy Pearce: Yeah, sometimes it just depends on how safe and secure you feel; that’s my first thing, you know. When I go into a photo session with somebody, and if their attitude isn’t right, I immediately feel insecure – like a kid who doesn’t know what the hell they’re doing. And yet someone else can go, ‘No, what you’re doing is great.’ ‘Cool.’ And you’re immediately relaxed; and it’s amazing how you can go from that place to that place depending who you’re talking to.

Q: What are you doing next?

Guy Pearce: I don’t know what I’m doing next.

Q: What have you done recently?

Guy Pearce: I finished doing Death Defying Acts with Catherine Zeta Jones in England with Gillian Armstrong directing, which is sort of a fictional story about a woman and her daughter in the 20’s in Scotland, who have – funny enough (laughs) -- a psychic act. Houdini, on his world tour, stops off in Scotland and makes this announcement -- which was true -- that anybody who could come forward with his mother’s last dying words would win themselves $10,000, which was a huge amount of money in that time. So they’ve taken that idea, and made it as a sad sort of fictional account of these two people coming together, and Houdini really acting as a catalyst for what then happens to Catherine’s character. I play Houdini, but it’s not a biopic, or anything like that.

"First Snow” opens in theaters on March 23rd.

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