Feature: 127 Hours
James Franco and Danny Boyle wax lyrical about the amazing new film.
Once again, a Danny Boyle film closed the London Film Festival. Following 2008's Slumdog Millionaire debuting at the event, 127 Hours brought the festival to a close, the day after Boyle received the BFI fellowship.
His account of climber Aron Ralston's incredible tale of survival has been brought to life with James Franco, a proper leading man at last. He gives an astounding portrayal of Ralston's ordeal - being trapped by his arm in the middle of a Utah canyon, unable to move the huge boulder. Ralston reflects on his life over the five days, before making the decision to cut off his own arm.
Boyle and Franco were joined by producer Christian Colson and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy at the press conference, where the team enthused about the remarkable movie.
How would you like people to feel after seeing the film?
Danny: Aron used the word ecstasy to decribe the feeling, and I said, ooh, we probably won't be able to use that in Britain, because it'll be misleading! Perhaps euphoria would be better! There is a very profound, deep sense of euphoria in him getting out there, which is life being given back again. I think James's acting of that pain, that process that he goes through, not just the arm-cutting thing, is an extraordinary empathetic thing that takes you to a place that you do feel very vulnerable in. The way we talked about it was about childbirth. I've witnessed three kids, and the extraordinary thing I tried to talk to James about the way women go to a plateau of pain way beyond anything that guys will ever feel. So we tried to get into that territory really, which is disturbing, but worth so much more than the suffering that's involved. We always wanted the end of the journey to feel like a passageway to something that was much greater that was being left behind. Life being given back to him, and acknowledging how he hasn't had enough respect for people's affection and love for him. He grows in the journey. We didn't really want to make a survival film, really that's a documentary, and it's often known as a survival story. It felt very clear from the book and then speaking to Aron, and Simon did a lot of work talking to Aron, about stuff that isn't in the book - he grew as a person. Because if you think about it, he's got everything he needs to get out of there - he's an incredible survivalist anyway. He's a brilliant athlete, he's an achiever, he does everything against the clock. There must be a reason why nature stops him, with a grain of sand. That's why James did this take at the beginning of trying to get out of the rock, when all that power and all that skill seems to be useless.
James, you're a budding director - what did you learn from Danny?
James: I learned a lot actually. There are two major things about Danny, the larger things - as there are many aspects to his directing - are the way he's guided his career, and the way all his movies are shaped. He really looks to challenge himself by approaching different kinds of material, subject matter he is not used to, that have technical requirements that force him into new discoveries to pull him out of his comfort zone. What that does is enable him to make a different kind of movie every time. If you look at his resume, they're all very different and not just because of the different genres but the way that they're made. That I find to be very inspiring. The other thing is that he unashamedly likes to entertain and make entertaining movies. So in this film he has the challenge of using a man in a single area, not even like Tom Hanks' Castaway where he had that whole island to move around in and a volleyball to talk to. We're in a single place, which to some directors, like Béla Tarr, this would be great - really slow and contemplative. But Danny will take that challenge and think how can I make this exciting and entertaining, and he did it. People say it's unlike any other movie experience they've had, and they're really taken on a ride. I really take those two ideas to heart, and Danny gets the best of both worlds - making original films that are entertaining.
James, how method could you be, making a film like this?
James: Well, I didn't cut my own arm off... But Danny does like to push the boundaries a bit, push his actors, and that meant getting a little methody. In an early scene Aron has just been trapped by the boulder. He is a great athlete so tried to pull his arm out with his physical strength. We shot everything in order, apart from the scenes with the young women. So this was a very early scene, and in the spirit of Danny's exploration, and I don't think Danny planned to film this way, but he said to me on the day "so try and pull your arm out, do anything that you can, bash yourself against the rock, knee it, kick it, yank, pull, do anything you can, and don't stop until I say cut". I said "Okay, I'll probably be pretty bruised, and exhausted, I'll probably get hurt a little bit" and I know this is exactly what was said because a friend of mine shot a video. I said "Alright, I'm up for it, just make sure you get it on the first take". So we did it, and by the time he said cut, I think it had been 22 minutes. I was completely exhausted, the next day my arm was literally purple, but we figured it out, how to do those scene. As an actor it was incredibly liberating, because I had the freedom to really experience that. If I had my arm stuck that's what it would have been, like I'm not acting exhausted with the pain in my arm, it's real. We do these long takes on digital cameras that can film for 20 minutes, and they're mobile, so it's a very different process to a typical film. You could get all the set-ups in these long takes, and adjust. It just gave the performance more authenticity because I was experiencing it to a certain extent.
Danny, could you tell us about the bright, colourful look of the film?
Danny: It's certainly symbolic of Utah. It is in the middle of nowhere, but the thing you find are these plane trails. Whenever you fly to LA or Disneyland, you're up there, and it's weird seeing that. Thousands of people, 25,000 feet above him. We wanted it to be very vibrant, because obviously it looks like that anyway. I have to pay a lot of respect to our cinematographers Anthony Dod Mantle and Enrique Chediak, who did all this movement in the canyon which gives the film its physicality. But they also agreed when we graded the film not to grade it in the normal way you do - normally, they grade it wet, so it looks sexy, the blacks look liquidy. We said no, because the one thing that's difficult to do is suggest thirst. James can act it, but you can't dehydrate James, it'll kill him. You can do weight loss, but with water you have to be very careful. You have to get it by acting, and he does his finest lip work in this movie! You also have to find other ways of suggesting it. Obviously we have the diminishing water in the water bottle, but then we graded everything dry, not sexy, because we wanted his whole environment to feel arid, like there was no moisture anywhere. So that's what we did with the grading. They took that risk.
James, how did you capture Aron's mental strength?
James: Well, I talked to Aron extensively before filming to get into his head space. We all did, when Simon was writing. As helpful as all that was, Aron gave us another thing that was incredibly valuable - he showed us the actual videos he made while he was trapped there. As an actor, they were incredibly valuable because it wasn't even necessarily what he was saying in those messages, it was the pure behaviour. We were sitting there watching a guy who had pretty much accepted his own death, and didn't know that there was a happy ending. So now when Aron tells those stories, looking back on it is different, but at that moment, he was in the middle of the situation. When I was watching it, I tried to absorb... however we read each other and behaviour and how our mindset is manifested on the surface, as an actor you train yourself to pick up little signals almost subconsciously. So in the most basic terms, I'm watching a guy that thinks he's going to die, but the very interesting thing is that he wasn't wallowing in self pity, he was delivering this very simple, personal and dignified messages to his family, and to me that says loads. There's great strength there.
When Aron asked me why I wanted to play him, and I didn't say I wanted to work with Danny Boyle, I said, because it's an amazing story and I really admire the strength you had to get through it on your own. You're an incredible example of human will. He corrected me a little bit, and said no, actually it was the connection to his family that got him through the five days. Those messages weren't just goodbye messages, he said he felt a connection while he was making them, and that he felt his family were there, and that gave him the strength to pull through. I think one of the points of the movie is we all have that in us. Aron may have been an accomplished climber and athlete, but when he gets down in that canyon, he's humbled and also gets in touch with whatever it is inside us that helps us survive, and for Aron it was the love for his family.
Can you tell us about the filming locations?
Christian: It was a combination of the actual location, Blue John Canyon where Aron was actually trapped. A very remote location, we set up camp there with 60 tents, and the crew slept out there for a week. For that portion of the shoot we needed to be out there in the canyon, but we had another couple of weeks we could service from local motels. The entrapment zone was brilliantly replicated by our production designer Suttirat Larlarb using a process called Lidar Scanning which can map any complex 3D space. The canyon was actually too complex to draw in the conventional way, so we laid out the scans and recreated it in two versions - vertical and horizontal - in a giant warehouse in Salt Lake City. We spent a month working on that set, with James stuck under this rock and then went out to the real location.
Simon, how did you go about dramatising the story for the screenplay?
Simon: It was a very interesting challenge because obviously it's a true story and there's a template there - he was stuck down there for 127 hours - and we wanted to recreate as much as possible in terms of the gear, and the same order of events. We had a responsibility to him to stick as close to the actuality of it. We spent a lot of time discussing it with Aron, and he saw every draft of the script and he had a lot of contributions to make. We had a lot of discussions about the difference between actuality and fact, and getting a greater emotional truth that fiction allows you to do. So in that sense, Aron absolutely understood that and allowed us access to bits of his past and memories of things that had happened to him. He was very open and honest and let us show things onscreen that frankly a less bold person might have gone, well I don't really want that particular part of my past to be shown. But he understood what we were trying to get at, but obviously they have to be shaped like drama. Unlike life, which is a messy thing, drama needs shape, it needs craft, it needs pushing into a form where you can have a big catharsis at the end. We were constantly walking a tightrope between fact and the needs of drama. I think we've got it right because Aron is very supportive of the film. But that's the biggest challenge, when you've got the real guy sitting next to you, with his prosthetic arm resting on the cinema seat. You're thinking, I hope we got this right because it's the defining moment of this guy's life, and luckily I think we have.
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