PRISONERS : Media alert/press interviews/ other publicity

[jo]

Rollo, Hugh's ex-student at Uppingham, talks a bit more about the red carpet meeting and how Hugh was like before (when he was their teacher).

www.hlntv.com/video/2013/10/02/hugh-jackman-and-his-former-student-reunite

*He said that Hugh was 18 then, but looked like 24
*He said that Hugh was tall and thin then
*He had a recent reunion with classmates and they asked him to say Hi for them.

Jo

[JH4HJ]

Oct 2, 2013 18:53:54 GMT -5 jo said:

Rollo, Hugh's ex-student at Uppingham, talks a bit more about the red carpet meeting and how Hugh was like before (when he was their teacher).

More on this store here.

[mamaleh]

Oct 2, 2013 18:53:54 GMT -5 jo said:

Rollo, Hugh's ex-student at Uppingham, talks a bit more about the red carpet meeting and how Hugh was like before (when he was their teacher).

www.hlntv.com/video/2013/10/02/hugh-jackman-and-his-former-student-reunite

*He said that Hugh was 18 then, but looked like 24
*He said that Hugh was tall and thin then
*He had a recent reunion with classmates and they asked him to say Hi for them.

Jo

To a 14-year-old, 18-year-olds could be 30 for all they know.

Ellen

[jo]

Didn't Hugh also teach drama ( but only as a substitute teacher) at Uppingham? Maybe because he had been involved in some school musicals? When he was filming Les Miserables, he revisited Uppingham.

www.uppingham.co.uk/hollywood-star-hugh-jackman-returns-to-uppingham




Jo

[jo]

Which body of work of Hugh Jackman impressed Denis Villeneuve to cast him as Keller Dover ?


au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/breaking/19333709/hugh-jackman-prisoners/

Quebec filmmaker Denis Villeneuve set out to direct Prisoners - his first English-language movie - and told his producer that he didn't want any "narcissistic mad idiots" on his set.

"I said, 'I want real artists. It's tough to make a movie. I don't want any crazies'," he said.

They needed to cast an actor in the lead role who was approved by the studio and Jackman had been attached to the project when it fell apart under a different director. However, it wasn't simple convenience that worked in his favour. Villeneuve had been impressed by the actor's work in Christopher Nolan's The Prestige, and thought he was "fantastic" in a play in New York, and he knew that there were depths to the Australian that hadn't been explored before on screen.

"He's an actor that has a lot of skills and is very powerful," Villeneuve says, "but who is trapped, in some ways, in an image of Mr Nice Guy and of a superhero, and he wants to get out of this image."

Interesting that it goes back to A STEADY RAIN! Hugh himself notes some similarity in the character arc of the role he would eventually portray in PRISONERS with that of Denny in the play

The Prestige always comes up when people talk about their favorite Jackman movies! It is quite an interesting coincidence that movies that Hugh filmed in the early part of the year ( at least some part in winter) - The Fountain ( started in late November 2004), The Prestige ( filmed in early 2006), Les Miserables ( rehearsed and filmed from February 2012) and Prisoners ( early part of 2013) seem to yield great dramatic results

Jo

[jo]

More insights -- interviews with Australian media ( the movie is released in Australia only on October 17):

www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/hugh-jackman-shows-his-dark-side-in-child-abduction-thriller-prisoners/story-fn9n8gph-1226736702021

Hugh Jackman shows his dark side in child-abduction thriller Prisoners

michael Bodey•
The Australian•
October 12, 201312:00AM



THE Hugh Jackman-Jake Gyllenhaal drama Prisoners didn't need further affirmation after its successful North American release late last month. The mere fact a dark film about child abduction topped the box office was success enough.

But further affirmation came last week in the form of a love letter from American producer and Oscars magnet Harvey Weinstein, who described Prisoners as the best film he had seen this year. This from a man who is pushing at least five films for credible tilts at next year's Academy Awards.

Jackman and Gyllenhaal hoped they had made a strong movie. But they couldn't have anticipated this reception. Jackman admits he's surprised at how well the middle-budget thriller has performed.

"Even if I wasn't in the movie I'd be pretty thrilled that the message is getting through to the people who sign the cheques that people do want to see a movie like this," he tells Review. "It's such a mercurial thing, which films work and which don't and which ones people remember you for. It's interesting for me."

Jackman plays arguably his most American role in Prisoners, as Keller Dover, a working-class patriarch bent on retribution.

His family, and their neighbours the Birches (Viola Davis and Terrence Howard), are ripped apart when their daughters disappear during a Thanksgiving dinner. Dover abducts, imprisons and tortures a man he thinks has something to do with it. On paper, the plot feels like a straight revenge drama.

Jackman says as soon as the Canadian director of Polytechnique and Incendies, Denis Villeneuve, signed on, the film "had a chance".

"You never know how your character's going to turn out but I thought the film had a chance of being pretty rare and entertaining, thrilling and gripping but more unconventional," he says.

Villeneuve played against convention by casting Gyllenhaal as Detective Loki, the young local cop charged with appeasing the families and tracking their daughters.

"I'm always grateful to people who cast me in movies, but even for this role, which could have been cast in a typical way, when Denis wanted to cast me and Hugh was cool with it, there was a sense that it made sense completely," Gyllenhaal says.

Their age difference - Jackman at 44 is 12 years older - exacerbates the doubt and lack of respect in the film's key relationship, one that is kept on slow burn through precise plotting and deliberate revelations. Prisoners is 2 1/2 hours long, in a genre where as a rule predictable story arcs stretch no more than 100 minutes.

"They took a bold choice," Jackman says. "The tone of the movie is different, it moves slower in some ways, which adds to the tension, and it's a dark subject handled in a very dramatic way, so everyone was a little surprised ... pleasantly."

The film, written by Aaron Guzikowski (Contraband), complicates the normal conventions of its genre. It is a realist nightmare in Hollywood clothing.

"This is not just your typical whodunit movie," Gyllenhaal notes before recalling with a laugh a childhood radio ad for the Texas Motor Speedway: "You'll pay for your seat but only need the edge!"

He says his experience talking about the movie suggests it has connected with viewers because, beyond the frightening subject matter, people are intrigued by its complex portrayal of control. The film asks, uncomfortably, what do you do, what is reasonable action, when you're out of control?

Gyllenhaal notes the film also focuses on what we do when confronted with "primordial questions that just reach us to our core".

"What do we do when those things are threatened?" he asks. "It's such an important time for a movie like this - and I don't mean to be all lofty with it - but I think it goes right into the unconscious.

"Even in the way the movie's lit and the way Roger Deakins shot it. There's not a ray of sunshine ... yet really in the end the movie is about great hope."

And due to its "dressing", Prisoners asks such questions while bypassing the controversy about torture that upset the terrorism thriller Zero Dark Thirty.

Villeneuve explained to the duo that Jackman's character represented the individual and Gyllenhaal's character represented the institution. "And in today's world we have them fighting against each other ... and really when they're working together they can solve many problems, and in a way in this one they do," Gyllenhaal says.

One of the film's great strengths, he points out, is a narrative that stresses ambiguity before clarity. "Where we're so used to films with fathers avenging situations like this, there's a fantasy, this sort of myth that's being perpetuated."

Jackman's casting is an element of the ambiguity. We know the actor as a screen hero yet this character upends his personae from previous movies.

"He takes this idea of what a man is, this mythological idea, and brings tremendous vulnerability to it," Gyllenhaal says.

"Ultimately that for me answers what a man is more than watching somebody break out their claws [as the Wolverine], although that's a great metaphor too."

Jackman, however, says the character wasn't any kind of risk in terms of genre or role. "Obviously, as an actor I want to do things that are challenging to me and hopefully the audience," he says.

His wife, Deborra-Lee Furness, pointed out that despite many saying he'd not done a dark dramatic role of this calibre, the first feature he did, Alan White's Sydney urban drama Erskineville Kings (also featuring a young Joel Edgerton) was very similar.

Jackman classifies previous feature films including Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain ("which nobody saw") and Christopher Nolan's The Prestige, as well as his Broadway performance opposite Daniel Craig in Keith Huff's A Steady Rain, as "in the same ballpark".

"It's not like in my experience I've never had a go at something like this, but in terms of the sustained intensity and tonally, I can fully understand people not seeing me in a movie like this," he says.

Despite Jackman's solid performance and a spectacular cast including Paul Dano, Melissa Leo and Maria Bello, Gyllenhaal's Loki anchors the film.

The star of a mixed bag of credible art-house movies and commercial fare including Love & Other Drugs, The Day After Tomorrow, Donnie Darko, Zodiac and Source Code, doubled up with the director after making the smaller Enemy with him last year (it is yet to be scheduled for release here).

"He's making very interesting choices at a relatively young age," Jackman notes.

Gyllenhaal's Loki is an enigmatic character who, like the film, reveals his secrets and motivations progressively. He says the screenplay only gave him one line on which to base his character's back story. (For what it's worth, it's a line recalling his six years in a boys home.)

He and Villeneuve then constructed a character who was saved by institutions and was drawn to them but remained ashamed of what he had done in the past. Loki's tattoos became a physical manifestation of something shameful he couldn't hide completely.

"My intention with Loki was to make him a questionable character from the beginning," the actor says. "It was just important for me to have somebody who is searching for question marks in the story and narrative and, essentially, he's the narrator in the story, to be a question mark himself and carry that on him.

"And knowing Denis's style, that allows for the audience to search and to look at everybody in the middle of this very complex story, which is just fun."

Jackman says he has always been impressed by Gyllenhaal as an actor but he excelled himself in Prisoners. "He was playing a cop so he's more expositional in a way but he anchors the movie and what he brought to that character and the history and the emotional repression you see starting to unravel is fascinating to me," Jackman says.

He observes Gyllenhaal is a talker who "likes to rehearse and dissect things - I do too - and then has this unique ability of being able to just let it go and be very instinctive".

Jackman adds the duo did "quite a lot" of ad-libbing together "which always sounds like a good idea but unless you're with someone who's actually good at it, it can be pretty disastrous and boring for everybody".

Gyllenhaal is similarly praiseworthy of his co-star, describing his performance as "his best work".

"I sat there across from him when he did some of it and was so moved," he says. "To watch an actor do incredible work is really exciting. I love it. I love sitting across from another actor as they're just destroying it. And this for me, he destroyed it in a very quiet way."

Prisoners opens nationally on October 17.