Quick Impressions: "Nervous Intern" in Gone Girl

New Series! In "Quick Impressions" we will be looking at the working actor in key movie scenes. Consider it a celebration of SAG card-holders everywhere and free advice for casting directors. Have you ever noticed how many people it takes to populate each film's world? So many showbiz dreams wander around on every film set and are embedded in each frame of your favorite movies, sometimes front and center but off to the side and in the background, too.

Today, we're talking to actor/dancer Brett Leigh who has appeared in two David Fincher movies, The Social Network (2010) and Gone Girl (2014) the latter of which is still in the top five box office six weeks into its release and now the year's biggest hit outside of all those CG franchises.

NATHANIEL: Tell us about your scene in Gone Girl!

BRETT LEIGH: It's towards the beginning when Nick Dunne asks Amy to marry him. I play one of the reporters at the table.  They cut the scene down but kept my line in there along with the girl sitting next to me. 

NATHANIEL:  I love that scene because it feel so performative, as if Nick & Amy are essentially acting out a traditional love story moment for the press. How was the experience and why are you billed as "Nervous Intern"?

BRETT: In scripts, as a general rule, you don’t ‘name’ characters if they aren’t plot changing or show up for several pages or scenes.  So when you have one liners, or help move the scene along as a character for a page or two, writers will just call them what they are:  i.e. ‘Courtier’, ‘Mail carrier’, ‘Nervous Intern’.  I have no idea why I was called ‘Nervous Intern’.  I don’t seem to be nervous OR an intern. [Laughs] The other people were called like, 'Fashionista', 'Above-it-all-Journalist'. I think it was Gillian Flynn's way of staying away from just  ‘Journalist 1, 2, 3, 4’.

I do remember the scene work and was quite pleasantly surprised at how serious Ben Affleck is on set - very good actor, very focused.  And Rosamund Pike was top notch every single take.  We weren’t given the full script, but in taping you could definitely tell Rosamund and Ben knew where they were in the story and where their characters were going.  Of course with David Fincher at the helm it’s quite impossible NOT to know where your character is and where they are going.  

You're also in The Social Network!

I play the frat guy hazing Andrew Garfield in the snow. It’s about 2 minutes and I have the majority of the lines.  

Did you fantasize about further terrorizing him as a supervillain when he got the Spider-Man part?

[Laughs] No, but I would really like to be in a comic-come-to-life movie.

Getting that Social Network part must have been amazing

I was coming back from overseas playing Riff/Action in the International Tour of West Side Story.  

Brett Leigh, center with bandana in the international tour of West Side StoryMy favorite musical !

I got a call for an audition and I was like “They’re making a movie about Facebook?”.  It sounded kind of ‘TV movie’ to me.  It all happened kind of fast.  I was called in about four times for this scene. After getting the role I found out more about who was directing and writing.  Thats when my mind was blown. David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin?!  I couldn’t believe I got the role over other Hollywood hopefuls and the timing worked out so well just getting back from a major theatre tour.

I come from a theatre and ballet background so to transition into film with such an amazing director has been awesome.  I feel like I have been in the corps de ballet for two Fincher films. 

I hope you get a third and that we see you in a film musical some day!

Thanks for your attention dear readers. You can follow Brett Leigh on Twitter @BrettLeigh. He is also a Director/Writer and recently completed this short film "American Day". It's funny and sad simultaneously. Check it out...

COMING SOON: You tell us. Do you like this series idea?
Do you ever think about actors way down the cast list that might be one lucky break away from larger roles? 

Emmy Nom Hangover: Snubs & Peculiarities

Apologies for my radio silence yesterday. Off my game I was for the entire day plus which means I'm know 36 hours behind on writing projects. Hooray. Nevertheless, because Emmy nominations are still very much on my mind after the initial response and the main titles detour (oh don't pretend you aren't still thinking about them) I polled a few members of Team Experience about their feelings. And here's what they had to say on four questions. Answer them yourself in the comments, too. The more the merrier. 

What's the Nomination That Most Perplexes You?

Adam Armstrong: Kristen Wiig – The Spoils of Babylon. When I read her name among the nominees, I was like:

...Pure, unadulterated, ecstatic, confused bliss. 

Andrew Kendall: So many options, but it's impossible for me to let Christina Hendricks in Mad Men just pass - for so many reasons. Everyone loves Joan and Hendricks is one Mad Men's finest actors but in the seven episode "half season" 2014 gave up what did Joan Harris even do to warrant a citation? I'm always willing to defend the Emmy voters when people accuse them of voting without watching (maybe they just have trite tastes?) but can anyone have watched this last season of television and sincerely felt Christina Hendricks did anything of note? Her nomination this particular season is even more of an albatross to the category than Maggie Smith's never ending series of nominations for frowning on Downton Abbey.

Dancin' Dan: Michelle Dockery, Lead Actress in a Drama. Does she actually do ANYTHING remotely interesting or difficult on Downton Abbey? This nomination has always perplexed me.

Anne Marie: Apparently the only people still watching Glee are Emmy voters. It's the only way to explain how it got a directing nomination for an episode with fewer audience members than the population of New Mexico.

Omission You Will Hold Against the Emmys Forever?

[RuPaul, Hannibal, Archer, The Good Wife and much more after the jump]

Click to read more ...

Our Link Summer

Must Reads
The Atlantic 'How Brando Broke the Movies' -excellent piece from Tom Shone on perceptions of movie stardom, acting and chameleon tricks
L'etoile on summer's anniversary nostalgia and childhood idles
Pajiba shares fun excerpts from Neil Patrick Harris' upcoming autobiography. Sounds like a must-read. The Scott Caan story is delicious 

More Links & News
The Guardian "The Glorious Folly of Dance on Film" Singin' in the Rain, Pina and more
The Dissolve Bond 24 gets a rewrite. But why? Daniel Craig returns of course with Ralph Fiennes and Naomie Harris in tow
Geeks Out Boo. Disney is taking pains to make sure we know that 'Wandering Oaken' from Frozen (the guy with the store and sauna) isn't gay like the internet said
Kenneth in the (212) Shia Labeuf and the Jordan Almond defense
Towleroad Gay Iconography: Bette Midler
Vérité recommends Rob the Mob (2014) with Michael Pitt and Nina Arianda. This is one of those rare 'under the radar' recommendations that actually is. I hadn't been aware of this Bonnie & Clyde like tale but I'm up for more Arianda for sure.

Off Cinema
Salon has a list of the 19 greatests 'double entendre' songs from "Brand New Key" to "Milkshake" and so on. I object to the exclusion of Cyndi Lauper's "She-Bop"
Gizmodo how long until we get this weird 'Smart Morphable Surface' technology in sci-fi movie designs? 

Oscar Notes / Production Design
In case you missed it as the weekend began, AMPAS made some minor adjustments to the rules (as they are prone to do) which In Contention analyzes. Mostly it's technicalities like how nominations are credited for Song & Best Picture but the super interesting one is that movies nominated for Production Design which feature heavily digital environments will now have an added nominee, the digital designer. I personally suspected /was hoping that the change which was bound to happen would be closer to the Black and White vs. Color designations that Oscar went through from the mid30s through the mid60s in cinematography and I was hoping it would happen in both cinematography and production design since visual fx achievements keep winning in one or both of those categories (think Avatar, Alice in Wonderland, Gravity, Hugo, etcetera). But I guess that was wishful thinking.

Filming Dance in "Test"

One of this year's best indies Test is about a young understudy dancer in San Francisco. Though it's only made a teensy bit of money in a microscopic theatrical run (that's happening to more and more indies) at one point it climbed to the top 15 on iTunes' indie chart.

TEST's dance troupe at rehearsal

It's a topic for another time perhaps but I wonder how far we are away from box office reports that include money from On Demand and iTunes now that so many films hit all three venues at once or in quick succession?

The following are unused excerpts (edited for length) from my Towleroad interview last week with Chris Mason Johnson the director. I thought they were well suited to you cinephile savvy musical-friendly nuts anyway. It's rare that we get such attentively filmed and beautiful dancing onscreen so I had to ask him about the camerawork and how his history as a dancer played into the movie.

Chris Mason Johnson with his prizes from "OutFest"Nathaniel: Test is your second movie and it feels confident.

CHRIS MASON JOHNSON: Well after The New Twenty (2008) -- making movies is a combination of a hugely difficult set of skills. In the old days all the famous directors we know from the classic era, they apprenticed forever. I think Robert Altman did 11 TV movies before his first feature. In our culture it's this crazy kind of 'come out of the door fully formed and go to Sundance' mythology. It's bullshit. TV is the new Hollywood in a way -  people can learn their craft there.

Why the long break between your two movies?

I tried to get something much more commercial off the ground. It was the classic story of waiting on money. Almost getting going, etcetera. It was such a demoralizing experience because you have no power. At a certain point I said 'Screw it. I know how to make movies and I'm going to do something small and personal.' 

Dance gives the familiar backdrop [the AIDS crisis in the 80s] such a fresh angle. 

It's just as much about dance as it is about anything else. In terms of the dance, I did a fun thing with the dance climax scene where the understudy goes on. That's been the über dance narrative from 42nd street through The Red Shoes through The Turning Point through Black Swan. That's always the story and I wanted to do that again but I wanted to do it how I'd experienced it. I'd gone on multiple times, one time with Barysynikov, one time in New York and you prove yourself and it's amazing. And then you go back to work the next day, the person gets better, and you're watching it again.

It's very different than the Broadway version where you become a star. So I put the dance in the middle of the movie. That's always the climax of those movies but I put it smack in the middle which is a different kind of structure. 

As an aficionado of musicals, I have to tell you that it was hugely refreshing to see a complete dance number that didn't cut every second to a new angle or stay with closeups. That makes me so crazy. You pulled the camera back. Thank you!

It makes me crazy, too. In terms of the overall style we wanted to hit this perfect balance where real dancers would like it and it was real dancing but also just fun for an audience. We knew we wanted to do really exciting contemporary dance. In terms of framing there's this happy medium where you frame the full body and you respect the space but you also cut enough and move the camera enough for dynamics. Otherwise it would be inert. Pina did a genius job of that. I loved that.

For me the moving camera is like a moving body is in choreography so I love playing with that. 

The cinematography is beautiful which surprised me. That's a craft that's hit & miss with indies.

This was $200,000 [budget]. In some sense people really only understand indies on that microbudget level if they look microbudget: down and dirty and gritty. Everyone gets that mode. When you get something that looks really polished and cinematic, it's harder for people to make sense of it on a microbudget. My cinematographer's name is Daniel Marks. It's his first feature out of AFI but I've known him for ten years. He's just super talented. The script was not dialogue based so we planned it as images. I really love an image based cinema and that's not the dominant strain in America.  I'm really happy with the way it looks.

Even though you've said you'd like to move toward TV, I hope you're planning to continue with dance. TV needs more dance that's not reality show competitions.

The question is did Smash ruin the theater for network? From the powers that be point of view 'Oh we tried it, it didn't work!'

Have you seen Test yet, readers? Do you love the trope of the understudy who goes on?

Two Quickies: "Test" and "Edge of Tomorrow"

Two movies you should see: a buzzy queer indie and a struggling would be blockbuster...

TEST
Chris Mason Johnson, a former dancer turned writer/director, really comes into his voice with his second feature. (He previously directed The New Twenty). Test is about a young dancer named Frankie (Scott Marlowe) in San Francisco in 1985 who, like most gay men at the time, fears he might have AIDS. He learns of a new test he could take to find out. The surprise of Test is that it's not really about AIDS despite the setting and time period so much as a slice of life drama about a young man struggling to face his fears and live his dream. Frankie is an understudy learning a dance he might never get to perform. And a young gay man beginning a life he might never get to live. Test is beautifully lensed for a micro-budgeted indie (I was shocked to hear that the cinematographer is a first timer) and though the pacing and subplots are hit and miss the dancer/actors are endearing and the centerpiece performance is just completely electric stuff. B+

P.S. Here's my interview with the director at Towleroad
I'll share excerpts that I didn't use for that piece soon that I think you cinephiles/musical addicts will enjoy. Test is playing in New York and available OnDemand and at iTunes.

EDGE OF TOMORROW
I had planned on avoiding this but the reviews, which I didn't read but gleaned were raves, caught me off guard. If you've also planned to skip, reconsider. I thought a movie that absorbed the very soul and structure of a video game (repeat until your kinetic memory gets every move right) would be highly annoying but I was wrong. It's sharply written, well acted and often exciting even if some of its moves are familiar (Starship Troopers meets Groundhog Day meets Aliens?). Tom Cruise is extremely well cast as a smarmy coward who is all surface and has to actually work his way towards heroics and soul. And Emily Blunt, memorably dubbed "Full Metal Bitch" is approximately 1000% believable as an action heroine, proving yet again that she should be a much bigger star. 

I can't say that I necessarily believe this would hold up to repeat viewings and, like every current action movie, there's too much CGI, too much generic dystopian destruction, typical color palette, but it was so entertaining and cleverly structured that I feel too generous towards it to quibble. But... I am not a fan of the ending which makes no damn sense whatsoever, even given the elaborate suspension-of-disbelief conceit. B+