Interview: 'Blackbird' director Roger Michell

Other than Werner Herzog, Steven Soderbergh, and Richard Linklater, few filmmakers have had as diverse a career as Roger Michell. He’s helmed romantic comedies (Notting Hill), hard-hitting dramas (Changing Lanes), gothic thrillers (My Cousin Rachel), and documentaries (Tea with the Dames) with equal aplomb, and keeps his winning streak intact with the moving drama Blackbird, starring Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Mia Wasikowska, Sam Neill, Rainn Wilson, Bex Taylor-Klaus, Anson Boon, and Lindsay Duncan.

Connecting via Zoom from a sunny patio a couple of hours outside of London, Michell spoke with Asheville Movies about his varied portfolio, bonding with his latest A-list cast, and nothing less than the future of movies.

Edwin Arnaudin: I don’t know if you were been prepped, but I’m based in Asheville, North Carolina. I didn’t know if you have any history with this part of the world or Western North Carolina in general.

Roger Michell: No. I’ve been to South Carolina to hang out with Bill Murray. I did a film with Bill Murray [the 2012 FDR biopic Hyde Park on Hudson] and he lives in South Carolina — or has a house there. So that’s as close as I’ve got to North Carolina, but I like South Carolina. I imagine it’s not totally dissimilar from North Carolina.

EA: Well, it’s a little hotter, I’d say. We’re more mild in the mountains. I guess he owns a baseball team down there and Asheville has a team in the same division. And he’s come up here sort of unannounced and popped around music venues and bars and…

RM: That's very typical of him. It’s kind of weird walking around…he took me to a baseball match, and you can imagine what that felt like. It’s like walking around with the King of England in the 19th century. He knows everybody, but everybody’s quite relaxed with him because they’re used to him walking around. “Hey, Bill!” “Hi, Bill!” “Hey, Bill!” But he loves it. He’s very good at it.

EA: [Laughs] I believe it. Yes. Well, how have you been during the past six months of unusualness?

RM: I’ve actually been great. I’ve had a fantastic time because I’ve just been cutting a film [The Duke, starring Jim Broadbent] which opened last week at the Venice Film Festival. I finished shooting the film, like, three weeks before lockdown in London — thank goodness. Can you imagine, being interrupted in the middle of a film? Imagine having, like, a week left or something like that. That would drive you insane, I think. So, I was able to spend the lockdown in London, cutting the film and doing all the post — pretty much in the normal way, actually, and it’s been very nice.

London’s been very quiet. The weather in the spring was unbelievably beautiful, so I cycled in to the cutting room every day and it was strangely, strangely pleasing. I feel slightly guilty about that [laughs], but it was still a rather pleasant way to spend a difficult and odd time.

EA: Well, I’m glad we could connect. I’ve been enjoying your films for quite a while and I feel like you have one of the more eclectic careers in modern cinema.

RM: Is that good or bad?

EA: I’d say “good” because I like the variety, and I think that you hit many different genres well, and I think that’s what I’m so impressed about. I feel like you’ve done pretty much everything except straight up horror — even though My Cousin Rachel has a lot of horror in it.

RM: Yes! Yeah. I’m writing a horror film right now, actually. 

EA: You are?

RM: Yeah. Because I think you’re right — that’s a missing chink in my eclectic armor, the horror genre. So, yeah, I’ve got one coming up.

EA: Excellent! Well, when you started your career, was it your goal to have this varied a path or was that just sort of how things played out?

RM: It’s completely…it’s very hard to choose a career in our business, and I made no attempt to carve out a particular genre or niche for my own work. I’m just sort of led by my nose into things that interest me. I see directing as a sort of unbelievably privileged tourism where you’re welcomed into different worlds, and you can converse with those worlds and you can briefly become an absolute expert on those worlds. And then, of course, you pack your bag and you get back on the airplane and you go somewhere else. I think I’m just sort of driven by a sense of curiosity and hopefully pleasure in the work and pleasure in the diversity of the work. There’s no other sort of mystery to it.

EA: And then when you pack your bag and get back on the plane, is there any sort of compartmentalizing or special shifts that you do to sort of shake off that project, especially if you’re going from one kind of extreme to the other?

RM: Not really, no. I think that just happens naturally the minute you start fiddling around with something else and thinking about a new project. I mean, to be honest, there probably are common themes or threads in the films that I make, but I don’t…I’m not massively interested in examining them. In some way or another, most of the films that I make are love stories. They may not be successful love stories, but I think most of them have a kind of love story at their heart.

EA: Well, I feel like Blackbird has one of the year’s best ensembles, which doesn’t always translate to a good film, but I think it does here. In what order did this impressive cast come together?

RM: Kate Winslet was the first one to come on board. We’ve always wanted to do a film together. We’ve done some little bits and pieces together. And that’s a really good start. If you get Kate Winslet in your film, then that’s a really good sort of ”flying the flag” for everyone else who might join the cast.

It came together pretty pleasantly after that, really. Obviously, getting Susan to do it was a huge, huge bonus. And I just had this instinct about Rainn Wilson being [laughs] really a surprising husband to Kate Winslet, but probably a very interesting one — and a funny one. I wanted to film to be funny. The film’s got lots of good things that are sad about it, but I wanted it above all to be joyous and funny and have a bit of wit to it. So that was very useful for me to manage to land Rainn. And then Sam Neill was a phone conversation between London and…I can’t remember whether Sam was in New Zealand or Australia, but it was one of those odd conversations with a massive time difference, but that seemed to sort of work very easily and very quickly.

EA: And I’d read that Diane Keaton was originally supposed to be in the Lily role. Was that just an issue of timing and schedules not lining up?

RM: She was in another film that was running and overrunning and overrunning. And it was a film that she was not enjoying doing very much, and she was getting more and more panicked by the fact that she wasn’t going to be able to have a break between this film that was overrunning and our film. And I was trying to reassure her and say, “Look, it’s fine. We’ll make it work.” But I could feel she was becoming more and more distressed about the whole deal.

And I really adore Diane. I did another film with her years ago [2010’s Morning Glory] and I’m really a big fan of hers. It became obvious that it was going to be misery for her, and therefore misery for everyone to hold her to her commitments. So we said, “Adios, Diane! Buongiorno, Susan Sarandon!” And I’m sure Diane would have been great, but I think Susan is especially good in the role.

EA: There is that definite strong rapport cast-wide. It’s not a huge cast, but everybody seems to really be on the same page and that was a joy to see. What kind of efforts were made to build those connections prior to shooting?

RM: Well, I do something that some directors do, but I think a lot of directors don't do, which is I always spend a week in a rehearsal room with the cast, going through the text, doing research. We all went off to meet someone who was suffering from ALS. We met people who were responsible for looking after people who suffer from ALS — or motor neuron disease, as it’s called in the UK. We spent time in the house where we were going to shoot and, you know, we hung out together and we did work on the script. And by the end of that week, I felt that we already had a good sense of the ensemble.

And then we had this odd thing of, you know, we have one location. We all lived very close to this house in digs or in flats or apartments or little cottages, or whatever it was. So it felt a bit like being back at college. Everyone was living in everyone else’s pockets. Everyone was going out in the evenings and eating together and spending weekends together. We all became sort of slightly Stockholm Syndrome’d and fell madly in love with everyone else and it was a really marvelous, magical time — to the extent that, at the end of the shoot, Kate Winslet insisted that we all got a tattoo of a blackbird. That’s mine. [Reveals tattoo on forearm]

EA: Very nice!

RM: It’s the only tattoo I’ve ever had in my life and it’s of a blackbird. So, yeah, it was a special thing. There’s a lot of very emotional scenes, which means on set there’s going to be a lot of laughter, a lot of mischief, a lot of fun. And shooting those incredibly long dinner scenes, which we shot over, I think, two or three nights, it was great to see how the cast kept their focus, kept their invention, kept their sense of the spontaneous — or the apparently spontaneous. And the result, I think, is an extraordinary display of collective, detailed acting, which I think is marvelous.

EA: And the script, I guess, when you walk into it — it feels like a familiar set up: this family gathering for one last weekend with a sick relative. But then you learn pretty quickly that there’s a lot more going on and I thought that the handling of assisted suicide was very tasteful and soulful. I was curious what your stance on assisted suicide was going into the film and then how that evolved during the making of it.

RM: Well, I read around euthanasia, which just means “good death” in Greek. And the film doesn’t proselytize euthanasia. It’s not a campaigning film. It’s not a film saying, “You’ve got to go out and persuade your representative or senator to go and change the law in your state.” It’s not about that. It’s a very complicated subject, legally, and I wouldn’t want to be the person having to legislate around such a difficult subject — which is so subject to abuse and to mismanagement, greedy relatives, people getting fed up with their old relatives. It’s really difficult to make laws around this issue. But, having said that, I think it would be quite hard to come out of this film without thinking that what she did in this particular example was rather glorious and was rather wonderful, and to be supported and applauded.

EA: This far into your career, was there any challenge you faced on this production that you felt really elevated your skill set and that you’ve never really been faced with before?

RM: Well, I’d never done something set in one house with eight actors, so I was very sensitive to the fact that I had to stage the piece in a particular way and stage the scenes in a kind of graceful way. I didn’t want it to be talking heads. I wanted it to feel like a piece of cinema. So I wanted there to be a kind of democracy to the way in which the film is shot so that all the eight voices in the film are present and watchable and listenable, too.

Every time you make a film, you decide some ground rules for how you’re going to shoot the film. And on this occasion, I didn’t want to hardly move the camera at all until the very end of the film and to let the action develop around a still camera, bringing the various actors into different sizes in relation to the camera. So that was my ambition. Every time you make a film it’s like “approach time.” You feel, “Oh my God. How am I going to do this one?” You can’t just rely on things that you’ve done before because they might be wrong for the material that you’re embarking on. That’s the challenge and that’s the new excitement, I guess, of it.

EA: We talked about these being odd times, and cinemas in North Carolina are still not open, so viewers will be seeing Blackbird on VOD, but I guess there are some other theaters across the U.S. that are going to be showing it. What do you see as the pros and cons of not having a full-fledged, traditional theatrical release for your latest film?

RM: I think the pros are that more people will probably watch it this way than if it had simply gone theatrical. I think that the older audience in America and also here in the UK are probably more disinclined to go out into theaters than the younger audience, and I think this film will probably appeal to older audiences.

But conversely, it’s a film that was made to be seen in theaters with other people. It’s a film where — luckily, I have seen this in big theaters with big audiences and it’s a great experience to see a whole room laugh and then cry. It’s wonderful. In a way, this film is a machine designed to make grown men cry. That’s what it’s for. [Laughs] And so, it’s nice to be in a room full of people snuffling away, and when the lights come up, a terrible, terrible [yet] wonderful, wonderful stillness in the room of 2-, 3-, 400 people is the biggest prize for a filmmaker, really, is the greatest result for a filmmaker.

EA: Lastly, you mentioned that you are writing a new film now and I didn’t know how far along you are in that process. But I was thinking, since we’re in such uncertain times and traditional film production is not what it was, how do you anticipate moving forward on this new project in these bizarre times?

RM: Well, “very slowly” is the answer. I can’t imagine that anything I write will start shooting before the spring when hopefully our world will have lurched toward some sort of resolution, either though a vaccination or through other means. I told you I’ve just finished a film, so I was lucky to spend lockdown cutting The Duke, so I don’t feel…I always feel itchy about what I’m going to do next, but a little time now where I’m going to be doing this writing and doing some thinking and wandering around is quite a nice prospect.

(Photos by Parisa Taghizadeh, courtesy of Screen Media)