The Soloist Interview, Joe Wright & Steve Lopez

From the director of the Academy Award-nominated “Atonement,” Joe Wright, and starring Oscar winner Jamie Foxx and Oscar nominee Robert Downey Jr., comes a poignant and ultimately soaring tale. “The Soloist” is based on an incredible true story of a disenchanted journalist’s transformative odyssey through the hidden streets of Los Angeles, where he discovers and builds a most unlikely friendship with a man from those same streets, bonding through the redemptive power of music.

Columnist Steve Lopez (Downey) is at a dead end. The newspaper business is in an uproar, his marriage to a fellow journalist has fallen apart and he can’t entirely remember what he loved about his job in the first place. Then, one day, while walking through Los Angeles’ Skid Row, he sees the mysterious bedraggled figure Nathaniel Ayers (Foxx), pouring his soul into a two-stringed violin.

At first, Lopez approaches Ayers as just another story idea in a city of millions. But as he begins to unearth the mystery of how this alternately brilliant and distracted street musician, once a dynamic prodigy headed for fame, wound up living in tunnels and doorways, it sparks an unexpected quest.

Imagining he can change Ayers’ life, Lopez embarks on a quixotic mission to get him off the streets and back to the world of music. But even as he fights to save Ayers’ life, he begins to see that it is Ayers – with his unsinkable passion, his freedom-loving obstinacy and his valiant attempts at connection and love – who is profoundly changing Lopez.

MoviesOnline sat down with director Joe Wright, Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez, producer Gary Foster and screenwriter Susannah Grant at the Los Angeles press day for their new film, “The Soloist.” Here’s what they had to tell us about bringing “The Soloist” from street to page to screen:

Q: What is your position on homelessness and can you speak about it from the standpoint of a cause?

Steve Lopez: First of all I wanted to say that I don’t like being on this end of the microphone [laughs], and I’m willing to trade right now with anybody. Well, I learned a lot from Mr. Ayers, I didn’t know much at all and I think that one of the great things about this movie, I think it’s a powerful drama about friendship, about music, about chance encounters and a million other things. It also happens to be about a guy who was homeless when I met him. And what I’ve learned is that it’s not somebody else that’s out there, that everybody has a story somewhat like Nathaniel’s, and those are our sons and daughters, and brothers and sisters, and when you get to know the population and realize how many of them are military veterans, some of them who came home bomb-rattled and never did get the help they might need, and how many people are dealing with a serious mental illness, maybe then it’s a little easier to open our hearts and our minds and to take a look at this country’s many failures in public policy in that area. So I’ve also been able to learn through getting to know Nathaniel. There are many gifts that have come my way through Nathaniel. One is I’m now convinced that we know what works, it’s not that we don’t know how to help people like Mr. Ayers, it’s that we have not made the commitment to it.

Q: Gary, was there anything you needed to take some creative license with?

Gary Foster: In terms of the specific, at one point in the relationship with Steve, Nathaniel played at a club. It was called The Blue Bongo and when Joe, Susannah and I were working on this, we had originally, the first draft actually had him playing at the Blue Bongo. When Joe got involved and we were shooting at Disney Hall, we wanted to draw more of a direct connection to the L.A. Philharmonic and to the kind of gleaming monument on the hill, we just changed the location. But the true is, he did play in front of an audience at one point and he did have trouble one evening and kind of had a breakdown. We worked very hard. When Susannah got involved and started doing the adaptation, she spent a lot of time with Steve and Nathaniel and the folks downtown.

From the beginning, it was our intention to make sure that this stayed as true and authentic a story as possible. Yes, we took some dramatic license. The biggest dramatic license is that Steve Lopez is a very happily married man with a young daughter. We worked through that but for the betterment of the story we took some dramatic license there. But, as it related to downtown and the homeless community and the missions and agencies down there, it was our number one goal to make sure that we did right by them and that we were true in our portrayal.
 
Q: Steve, did you actually meet Nathaniel when you fell off your bike?

Steve Lopez: I did fall off my bike and mess up my face, and ended up in the hospital. It was a little bit before I met Nathaniel. Those things were kind of conflated, but I thought it worked.

Q: Susannah, can you talk about adapting this into a screenplay, the process that you went through, and some of the challenges you faced staying true to the original source?

Susannah Grant: This was a little different. I adapted a couple of other books before. This one was different in that it had not been fully written. I started with the proposal in the columns and Steve and Nathaniel. We were kind of writing at the same time. (to Steve) I think I may have hit the finish line before you. [laughs] It was very close.

Steve Lopez: [laughs] I remember finishing chapters and sending them to you.

Susannah Grant: I feel like what I ended up adapting actually was the book not yet written because we were talking while Steve was doing a lot of his processing before and during the actual writing process. I didn’t have an actual document to work from which in a way I kind of loved because most of it came from our conversations and time spent together. There are things that you can do in a book and columns that Steve does very well, which is relating human stories and using that as a feeder for an honest discussion about policy. You can’t really tell a movie about policy. You’ll lose a lot of people really quickly. I thought the best thing you can do for the issues is to tell a moving, compelling, human story and then let the policy discussion grow out of that. I left out a lot of the interesting stuff that you were talking about. We know how to do it. We don’t have much of that in the movie at all because moving people is a better first step towards change, I think.

Q: Steve, what kind of exchanges did you have with Robert Downey Jr.?

Steve Lopez: Well, the first encounter was that Mr. Ayers and I frequently go to concerts at Disney Hall. We still do that. We’ve been to three concerts in the last month, and they’ve made him feel very much at home there. Thanks initially went to Adam Crane, the publicist at the time, and then to some of his buddies in the orchestra, so it’s not uncommon to see Mr. Ayers backstage at intermission chatting with the musicians. And the first thing that we did was, we all went to a concert together, Nathaniel and I and Robert and Jamie. And I think Gary was at that one too. Nathaniel and I are sitting together, and Robert and Jamie are sitting together, and we’re watching the concert and they’re watching us watch the concert.

Jamie had a tape recorder I recall that had every word that Nathaniel uttered. He was right there with it. Jamie Foxx looked like a reporter on an assignment. And the next time I saw him, or the first time I saw him in costume and make-up, it was pretty eerie. You could almost have a problem telling the two apart, Jamie and Nathaniel. But then Robert and I, I think we started with some email exchanges, then we just hung out together one night. I was a little concerned that if he played me, this would be a really boring movie, because let’s face it, how exciting are we reporters? I said, look, as talented as he is, just take something and run with it. And he said, “But I need some piece of you, can I go through your closet? I want to come over and go through your closet.” He said it so many times I started to be a little concerned about what he was really after.

Gary Foster: It was hilarious because then one day he said to Joe and I, “I do need a piece of Steve. Maybe I need his nose.” So I actually had to pick up the phone and call Steve and ask him to come to the make-up trailer and we took an impression of his nose and we actually made a prosthetic nose. We didn’t know whether this was actually going anywhere or not but, at the end of the day, Robert doesn’t wear Steve’s nose but it felt like he was getting closer.

Steve Lopez: Although I’m not in the movie business, I knew that my nose would not fit on Robert Downey’s face and that this was a bad idea. Fortunately, he changed his mind.

Q: But you insisted that he not do an impersonation of you?

Steve Lopez: Somebody asked me that the other day. I never insisted anything. I’ve not insisted one thing from the day this whole thing began. I’m not in a position to insist that anybody does anything. I merely suggested to Joe and to Robert, I forget the exact words, but I said, “What is the point of an artistic contribution if it’s not something original? Don’t feel compelled to make a copy. I wouldn’t feel very fulfilled to make a copy of something that already exists, so trust your creative instincts and just make it original. Make it your own.” I said that to Robert, but I felt a little silly telling Robert how to think of approaching a role, because he’s a great actor and he didn’t need to hear from me. I didn’t want him to feel obligated to try to represent me necessarily. But, you know what? Each time that I see the movie, I’ve seen it, I forget whether it’s three or four times, I see some new way in which he’s captured some little nuance. Each time I see it I appreciate the depth of his performance all the more.

Q: Were the people on Skid Row extras or real people?

[Joe Wright joins the press conference late.]

Gary Foster: This is perfect timing. This is Joe Wright. When Joe got on board to make this film, he came out for 10 days. He spent a lot of time walking in Skid Row and getting to understand the community and Los Angeles. He and Susannah spent some time. When he agreed to do the film, the first and most important thing we had to agree on was that we made this film with the community and in a way that we included them. That was the bottom line and I completely agreed and embraced it and that was our mandate moving forward. So when you refer to these scenes, we were not going to go down to Skid Row and ask the community to vacate for 3 weeks. We were going to find a way to use their community to film it. It would make no sense for extras and people who had not experienced this life to populate the world that we were filming, so almost every mission and every agency, we did auditions, we did extra calls and all but 10 people on the streets as extras were real members of the Skid Row community. They were from LAMP and the Midnight Mission and L.A. Union Mission. It was they that populated our film. (to Joe) You should talk a little bit about how you pulled all that together.

Joe Wright: It was them who showed us how to make the film really, so that when we were filming scenes on the streets, I had a couple of collaborators there from the missions and we’d walk up and down the street and they’d say, “Well, you’d have this here, and you’d have that there, and that’s not right, and this would be like this.” They basically directed it and I facilitated their involvement. That was my job really, to create an environment in which all these people could express themselves, and express their lives and speak about their experience.

Gary Foster: And I think one of the things that made it work was we had spent months leading up to the shooting getting to know the agencies and the leaders of the community. We hired members of the community as interns – people who were interested in acting or people interested in photography or set design or whatever – and we gave them opportunities to learn and to see how a film is put together. It was just one big family. You know, we weren’t the big circus coming to town. We were all together in this. I think it allowed Joe and our team to put an authentic look on the screen.

Q: Have any of the organizations down there embraced this film for the purpose of exposing the homeless situation and perhaps trying to improve it?

Gary Foster: Again, we did a lot of outreach with most of the leaders of that community and they have been amazingly receptive. Not only have they reached out to us and thankfully applauded us for the work that we’ve done, but we have been working with them. Again, LAMP, which is a big part of our story, they’ve become close friends. We’ve worked with each other. We’ve helped them with some of their needs. And Midnight Mission, we all went down and served Thanksgiving meals. I had our head grip come to us one day while we were shooting and hand me an envelope. I said, “What is this?” He said, “I can’t be a part of this movie unless I’m contributing.”

There was a wonderful moment, the last day we worked with our LAMP chorus, which are the people that were in LAMP with Jamie, we had an impromptu awards ceremony where each of them got an award. There were some people that were in need and our group came together with some money. Nobody planned this. It was just, here’s an envelope, somebody needed an operation and they couldn’t do it without having an apartment because the medical people wouldn’t return them to some temporary housing or to the sidewalks. The group of people embraced all that and we were there to support making her life a little bit easier.

So the answer is yes, it was a really nice partnership between the community and our film and, as far as we’re concerned, it’s ongoing. Participant Media who is one of the financers of the film has a great social action campaign that will continue to bring notice to this issue for years to come.

Q: Susannah and Joe, can you address how you approached exploring the mind of someone with schizophrenia?

Susannah Grant: That was definitely the most challenging part of writing the script simply because without having done any research, I had trouble imagining it. I did spend some time with Nathaniel and Steve but that didn’t actually put me inside. What I ended up doing is tracking down a number of books written in the first person by people who had struggled with it and that gave me a sense of what the experience must be like. I wouldn’t presume that I even now can know what the experience is like but that gave me enough that I felt that I could write it. Someone told us about a simulator down in San Diego that you could go in and it would recreate the experience of schizophrenia. We were chasing that for a while and eventually people told us it had either ceased to exist or had never existed. But that was definitely the most challenging part of writing it.

Joe Wright: Unfortunately I could imagine what it was like. I think one element of schizophrenia that fascinated me was this kind of hypersensitivity to all the environmental aspects that are happening around you 24 hours a day. We have in our brains something called the motor gating system and that is a system by which it kind of filters the information that our sense are receiving and it decides what is important and what isn’t important and feeds what’s important through to our unconscious mind. One element of schizophrenia is that this gate is wide open and so you’re constantly bombarded by information and that information is given no hierarchy. So, the fact that this gentleman here is wearing a red shirt doesn’t matter at all, but to a schizophrenic it might take on quite a deep meaning – that maybe this guy’s a communist, and if he’s a communist then maybe he’s KGB, and if he’s KGB then maybe he’s chasing me so I’d better get out of here quickly because I’m being chased by the KGB.

So I found that quite interesting because sometimes I feel like that. Sometimes I feel like my senses are bombarding me with information and it’s difficult to determine what’s important and what isn’t important. I don’t really believe in there being any such thing as mental illness. I think we’re all just varying, different personalities and we all have varying, different chemical make-ups. I think that the job of the director is to empathize and so I tried to empathize with Nathaniel – not too much but I tried to kind of see the world through his eyes a bit. I think it’s quite a schizophrenic film. Also, I think about cubism and seeing the same material object from different aspects or from different perspectives all at the same time. So that’s why the film’s perspective jumps quite a lot from kind of extreme wide shots to extreme close-ups to this kind of God’s eye view.

The line that really excited me the most when I first was sent the script was the line where Daniel said, “You’re flying in an airplane,” which was from the source, but Susannah was wise enough to put it in the script and that line completely spun my head -- the idea that you and I are here talking to each other and I might think that you’re flying the airplane out there. It’s so abstract and so far removed from my conception of reality. It’s that far. And that line was one of the lines that first really intrigued me. I wanted to understand that line. I still don’t.

Q: Do you feel that the human interest story is headed toward extinction or is at least endangered in the internet information age?

Steve Lopez: Are you talking about in journalism? Well, it is now about who can shout the loudest and get the most attention, and I think it’s more about opinion than about hard fact. That’s unfortunately one of the things that’s been happening. But no, I think that – take a look at this story, this story played out at a time of the decline of this American institution, the newspaper, and I have been a journalist for almost 35 years, and I’ve never had any reaction like I’ve had to this, and that began with the very first column. I had thousands of emails from people who related and saw this as a story of second chances, and they were rooting for Nathaniel and rooting for me, so the human interest aspect of this story, and their appreciation of just a simple human connection, and how a chance encounter can change two lives has riveted people from the beginning. I can’t go anywhere without them asking me, “How is he?” And, “Why aren’t you giving us more updates? When is the next story? When’s the next story?” So I think that whatever happens in this revolution, however it settles out, that people out there are still going to like powerful, human dramas and I think that maybe it might help that so much of the news these days is about who can yell the loudest. I think that people will always go for a real human story.

Q: First, what are your thoughts on the movie being moved out of the Academy Award window to now? Second, how did the movie come about? Did you pitch it or did the studio come to you? And finally, what are your thoughts on the movie? I thought it was sensational.

Steve Lopez: I’ll answer your third one first by saying I agree. You’re asking me about the movie being bounced and the Academy Awards. I’m probably the last person up here to ask that, because I don’t really – I don’t work in the film industry. Well maybe nobody understands how Hollywood works, so maybe I am as qualified as anybody else here. You know, I think there are a lot of considerations that went into that. I think it was unfortunate, but wasn’t it Mr. Downey who said, “There’s no good time to release a bad movie, and no bad time to release a good movie.” And this is a good movie, and it’s coming out soon and everybody here’s pretty pleased about that. So it’s going to have its day, and I’m gratified so much that what Gary told me on the day that we met, his vision of this movie, and his desire to do something that combined art and commerce and social commentary, which unfortunately is a bit too rare from major studios, that’s what you have. I mean, it’s a compelling drama thanks to Susannah and Joe and everybody involved, but it also might change the way you think about things. I consider it a grown-up movie and I’m so pleased at the way it turned out. I think it’s terrific.

And so many great memories too from the beginning, including the day that Joe, Nathaniel and I went to a football game at USC and it was just to get to know each other. Joe did not know the first thing about American football, and it was clear from the opening kickoff that he was a hopeless case. He did not know why they were kicking versus punting, why they were throwing it now, this guy’s running with it, and every time anything good happened, Nathaniel stood up with Beethoven sheet music and showed everybody that this was – just as that play was worth celebrating, let’s not forget Beethoven. So this has just been a great experience for me from the beginning, and I feel so gratified that these guys made the movie that they said they were going to make, and it takes what I think are some really powerful messages around the country now and around the world.

Q: Did they find you or did you go to them?

Steve Lopez: Oh, what happened was, when I was writing the columns, the calls started coming in and I think they really picked up after I spent a night on Skid Row with Mr. Ayers, and after we were first invited to Disney Hall to see a concert, and that’s when my phone was ringing off the hook. I’d say that there were probably twenty calls and maybe ten from feature people and ten from documentary people, and I didn’t return the calls, not because I intended to be rude or anything, but because number one, I was really busy doing my job and taking care of my family, and working Nathaniel through this thing, and also because I’d had two novels optioned and knew that the odds were pretty long.

I didn’t know at that point that I was going to write a book, and I had no idea whether I was even helping Mr. Ayers or not. I was at times frustrated and didn’t know where this thing was headed, and so I thought if I don’t even know where the next column is going take me, and I hadn’t even begun to think about a book, how can they be talking about a movie? So I didn’t return the calls, and then I got a call from Lucy Stille at Paradigm who works with my literary agent in New York, and I’d worked with her on the first two novels, and she said, “What if I whittled it down to people that I thought would make a really good movie, would you clear the time to meet with them?” And she picked three different producers, and they were all very compelling arguments that were made by these guys.

What made Gary and his partner Russ Krasnoff stand out was when I asked them what kind of a movie they saw, they didn’t see a movie with Nathaniel ending up as principal cellist or violinist at the LA Phil and I thought, okay, that’s a relief, that’s a good start. I said, “But I don’t know where this is going,” and they said, “This is a story about a relationship, it’s a friendship, it’s a love story. You two guys by chance bump into each other and you’ve had this lasting impact on each other’s lives. That’s all the drama you need. We’ll worry about the ending later.” So I liked that, but what I really liked was that they wanted to meet Nathaniel and they wanted to meet him by walking through the heart of Skid Row, and back then – it’s a little different now, but back then there weren’t a lot of people who wanted to walk through the heart of Skid Row, and they saw it and their jaws dropped and Mr. Ayers happened to be at his witty, charming best that day, and he apparently had the same instinct about them that I did, and everything went well and I went back to my office and I called Lucy and I said, “These are the guys.” And these guys made the movie they said they were going to make.

Q: I was pleased you dealt with the issue of Nathaniel staying inside rather than remaining homeless on the streets. What did you get from being Nathaniel’s friend and what did he get from you?

Steve Lopez: There have been so many gifts that have come my way through this relationship. As for people being out there on the street a lot, when I was frustrated – it took a year for me to, with the help of Lamp community, convince Mr. Ayers that it might be better if he moved inside. He didn’t want to move inside, and I was very frustrated and probably several times almost gave up, and even asked myself, “Who am I to even make the judgment that he’s better off inside?”

But I was aware of some crime out there and then a gentleman was beaten nearly to death who slept very near to where Nathaniel slept. And Nathaniel was walking around with a bunch of instruments that I got for him, so I was worried that I was going to get a call one night that he’d been beaten to death for these instruments. And so I was determined to try and help him, and I also tried to speak, to appeal to logic with Mr. Ayers, and I said, “If all you want to do is play music, and I loved that [you do] and I envy that passion, you need a different plan, because you’re wasting half your day getting up, packing the cart, trekking across downtown, unpacking it, getting your instruments out. You’re spending half your day doing this, and if you really just want to play music and get better at it, let’s set you up in an apartment.”

And what I didn’t understand, there were a number of things I didn’t understand about the psychology of this and the many challenges that were out there. Among them, when you’re out on the street, one advantage is that you have nothing to lose, and when somebody says, “Hey, here you go, we’ve got an apartment,” all of a sudden, that’s terrifying because are you going to be able to handle it? Given your history, might you get this and then have your heart broken because you blow it because you don’t trust somebody, or you don’t get along, or you can’t abide by some of the rules? So I think the fear of losing something that’s being offered to you is one big hurdle. As I began to learn this, I would remind people, you’d hear people say, “Well, look, there’s somebody on the street, he was offered a bed in the mission, and if he didn’t take it, then the hell with him.” Well, there are a lot of reasons why somebody might not want to go into a mission, and they are pretty good reasons.

And then the other thing that I think I learned with Mr. Ayers that made it difficult for him to come inside, I thought about this and I realized that all of the places that he played music on the street were pretty noisy places, and when you play with a lot of racket, you’re a pretty good musician because you can’t hear your mistakes. And I began to think that maybe one reason Mr. Ayers had trouble coming in was because it was a return to the world in which he had snapped, and if he were in that room with those four walls and every mistake bouncing off the walls, it might take him back to where he had his breakdown, and so we worked a number of different things to try to get him to ease back into it. The thing that helped the most was that his friends in the orchestra took on the cause and Mr. Peter Snyder agreed to give him lessons in that room, and those lessons made him a little more comfortable in there and it became a place of comfort for him.

And then the last thing was that he said he couldn’t come in because he couldn’t leave Beethoven alone out there, and Adam Crane from the LA Philharmonic went to the Disney Hall shop, got a bust of Beethoven, we put it in the room and Nathaniel moved in, and he’s been in that room every night for three years.

Q: Was he compensated for this project

Steve Lopez: Yes he was.

Q: What does he think about having a movie made with him as the star?

Steve Lopez: Mr. Ayers is interested in being acknowledged as somebody other than somebody to just walk past on the street, he appreciates that we know that he’s a man, that he’s a musician, that he’s a poet, that he’s a soul, that he’s somebody’s brother, that he’s somebody’s son. All of that interests him and, because the movie gave him even greater access to the music that he loves, and because the movie is in part about the power of music, he’s thrilled. But, he’s not interested in moviemaking, and I think his best experience with the whole moviemaking process was the scene that was shot at Disney Hall, because he got to see the orchestra perform. The LA Phil plays itself in the movie. So he’s flattered in some ways but not terribly interested in moviemaking.

Q: Has he seen the film?

Steve Lopez: He did go to a screening.

“The Soloist” opens in theaters on April 24th.