Paul Dano: ​‘When I gave the first draft to Zoe, she pret­ty much tore it apart’

There aren’t a lot of peo­ple out there who can count the likes of Paul Thomas Ander­son, Spike Jonze, Richard Lin­klater and Denis Vil­leneuve among their pre­vi­ous col­leagues, but Paul Dano makes the cut. With almost two decades of act­ing expe­ri­ence under his belt, he’s qui­et­ly become one of Hollywood’s most inter­est­ing per­form­ers, and in his direc­to­r­i­al debut Wildlife, proves he’s as at home behind the cam­era as he is in front of it.

Adapt­ed from Richard Ford’s nov­el of the same name, Wildlife is a ten­der por­trait of a fam­i­ly falling apart in 1960s Mon­tana, anchored by beau­ti­ful­ly nuanced per­for­mances from Carey Mul­li­gan and Jake Gyl­len­haal. Dano adapt­ed the nov­el for the screen with his wife and fel­low actor Zoe Kazan, and as far as debuts go, it’s pret­ty excep­tion­al. We spoke to Dano ahead of the film’s UK pre­mière at the Lon­don Film Fes­ti­val, where he was thor­ough­ly jet­lagged, but charm­ing and insight­ful all the same.

LWLies: You start­ed act­ing when you were 10. Have you always want­ed to make films too?

Dano: First I want­ed to be an actor in the­atre, but then when I was 16 I did my first film called L.I.E., and that exposed me to not just film but inde­pen­dent film, which I didn’t real­ly know exist­ed then. I went to Sun­dance, all these fes­ti­vals, and sud­den­ly I dis­cov­ered a whole world I didn’t know about. Around that time too, in high school, out­side of school, I took a cou­ple of class­es: I took an ani­ma­tion class, an edit­ing class, one 16mm film class, think­ing I might go to film school – I’d already start­ed act­ing, but I didn’t want to be around all actors. But then I decid­ed not to. I just went to school as an Eng­lish major. My expo­sure to inde­pen­dent Amer­i­can film meant that I end­ed up watch­ing films from all over the world, and so around 19 or 20, when I start­ed to real­ly watch a lot of films, is when I thought, ​‘Okay, I want to make a film someday’.

Who were the direc­tors who par­tic­u­lar­ly inspired that revelation?

Cer­tain­ly a big turn­ing point for me was see­ing [Robert] Bres­son and [Yasu­jirō] Ozu. They were film­mak­ers that were work­ing at a slight­ly dif­fer­ent pace and using silence in ways I wasn’t famil­iar with – using the space off-cam­era, com­po­si­tion. Some­thing about that sort of stuff blew me away.

You’ve worked with some incred­i­ble direc­tors, includ­ing Paul Thomas Ander­son, Steve McQueen and Bong Joon-Ho. Did you find your­self study­ing them?

I’m sure I picked up a bit via osmo­sis, but I think when you’re act­ing on a set, you’re kind of a horse with blind­ers on – or at least I am. So, no. Just by read­ing their scripts and work­ing with their mate­r­i­al, being around them and their crew and the actors – the integri­ty, the focus, the details: there’s cer­tain­ly a lot to be inspired by. In terms of look­ing at what they’re doing with the cam­era, prob­a­bly a lit­tle less. I’m not try­ing to be in my own head as an actor, I’m try­ing to lose myself in what I’m doing.

Jon­ah Hill said he asked Mar­tin Scors­ese for advice about direct­ing before he made his direc­to­r­i­al debut, Mid90s. Did you go to any of your pre­vi­ous direc­tors for advice?

I think I prob­a­bly col­lect­ed advice along the way a lit­tle bit, just by talk­ing about movies with peo­ple like that. So I don’t think before mak­ing it… I mean, my friend Oren Mover­man, who’s a pro­duc­er on my film, a writer and a film­mak­er – I went to him for advice a lot. But he’s my pro­duc­er, I could call him any time I want­ed. It was great to have some­one like that in my cor­ner, so to speak.

Carey Mulligan’s per­for­mance in the film is out­stand­ing. Did you always have her in mind for the role of Jeanette?

Zoe [Kazan] and Carey did a play about a decade ago, and shared a dress­ing room, and so they’ve been friends for years. I thought see­ing her get the chance to do some­thing messier might be excit­ing for her. I think when actors get the chance to touch some­thing else in them, some­thing real­ly good comes out, and luck­i­ly she felt the same way.

When did you and Zoe decide that this was the sto­ry you want­ed to tell?

I prob­a­bly read the book in 2011, and I was imme­di­ate­ly tak­en by it. The mys­tery of who our par­ents are felt real­ly intox­i­cat­ing – it remind­ed me about my par­ents, my grand­par­ents. There’s some­thing arche­typ­al yet per­son­al about it, and I just felt it was real­ly rich and uni­ver­sal. I spent a year think­ing about how I could make a movie out of it, and when I thought about the end of the film, that was when I knew we could do it. So we optioned it, and then I wrote the first draft.

Then I gave it to Zoe and she pret­ty much tore it apart. It wasn’t screen­play for­mat­ted, and she just thought it was a mess. And it was a mess – though the guts were there. Then she said, ​‘Hey, we’re fight­ing, why don’t you just let me do a pass?’ That start­ed the process of us writ­ing it back and forth. She brought a great sense of struc­ture to it, how to use struc­ture to help the dra­ma, and to help it scooch a lit­tle fur­ther away from the book and fol­low the char­ac­ters in the film. We’d talk for a few hours and just trade the script back and forth.

The dia­logue in the film feels so flu­id. Was there any impro­vi­sa­tion, or was every­thing scripted?

It was all script­ed. We put a lot of work into the script. We had a lot of room on set, even though the frames are com­posed, it’s still all about the actors, the move­ment inside of them. They had free­dom, but it doesn’t mean they have to change the words. You could do dif­fer­ent takes, but usu­al­ly, it was pret­ty writ­ten. I like when lan­guage is specific.

The visu­al look of the film is so dis­tinc­tive as well, it con­jures up a sense of time and place beau­ti­ful­ly. Were there any ref­er­ence points for that?

I think some­thing about film that’s real­ly fun as an audi­ence mem­ber is step­ping into a world, being invit­ed in. Doing a peri­od film you get to cre­ate your frame, choose the colours and tex­tures and I was so excit­ed by that part of it. I had a won­der­ful team – my cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Diego Gar­cia is very spe­cial, pro­duc­tion design­er Akin McKen­zie too. With such a small bud­get, they made this peri­od film hap­pen. And Aman­da Ford, my cos­tume design­er, again with such a small bud­get, did a great job. Of course, I was inspired by Arthur Miller and Ten­nessee Williams, but most of my ref­er­ences for the film actu­al­ly aren’t from that peri­od – they’re more spir­i­tu­al ref­er­ences, mod­ern Tai­wanese films but also peo­ple like Stephen Shore, William Eggle­ston, Edward Hop­per, Nor­man Rock­well. I won­dered what would it be like to peel back the lay­ers behind the idyl­lic image. The book is set in the future look­ing back, and we want­ed it in the present tense, but to give it a feel­ing of memory.

The end­ing scene is one of the most heart­break­ing moments in film this year. Where did that come from?

There’s one sen­tence in the book. Some­thing like, ​‘Joe got a job at a pho­to stu­dio’. But that’s it. For months after read­ing that, that’s what float­ed up into my head. Once I thought of that, I real­ly felt like I had some­thing to say, some­thing about this sense of let­ting go or accep­tance. I think peo­ple get dif­fer­ent things from it, but it was just the right way to go.

My par­ents got divorced when I was a kid, and I’ve felt that sense of just want­i­ng to push them back togeth­er. There’s this feel­ing of want­i­ng an image that cor­re­lates with what’s in your head.

I think, also, for Joe, it’s a case of, ​‘Could that be the last time that they get this chance?’. The future is not clear for him any­more – it’s com­plete­ly unknown. I think as a kid, every­thing feels so much more known. You’re in this safe world, and then as an adult, you’re out there on your own.

Wildlife is released 9 Novem­ber. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.