Interview in M Magazine

Translation

THE LAST TIME we saw them all three, two boys and daughter were on the porch of a plantation. They got into the Hudson in 1947 and disappeared under the trees of the avenue. It was September 2010, New Orleans, filming on the road had already lasted three months. They still remained the same, to walk the Mexico to San Francisco, via Canada .

A year and a half later, Garrett Hedlund , Sam Riley and Kristen Stewart found themselves in the harsh light of Los Angeles . This is the first meeting of the trio for months, yet it seems that filming has finished . They escape from the studio, where they posed for photographer Steven Pan, to go smoke on the sidewalk.Their complicity physics is intact, the same as that bound them on the bench in the Hudson on American roads. Their way of speaking of movie is not that of the actors constantly rehashing the same language elements imposed by media coaches. In their stories, their thoughts, rather means the echoes of a shared experience that shaped them. Under the auspices of St. Jack Kerouac, edited by Walter Salles, they had another idea in the world of cinema .

May 23, they will be in Cannes for the world premiere of On the road , of Walter Salles , based on the novel by Jack Kerouac , the founding work of the Beat Generation . Brazilian director took over in 2004 of the inspired text of trips across the United States in the late 1940s, published in 1957. It took eight years to complete the film safely, without renouncing to anything, especially not to the three young actors whom he had chosen at the outset, although in the meantime one of them became a star.


For decades Hollywood wondered what faces might take Dean Moriarty, Sal Paradise and Marylou, the trio on the road , as Kerouac modeled from nature.Moriarty is Neal Cassady, the boy who had spent “a third of his youth in reform school, third in pool halls and third in public libraries” , as he likes to remind Walter Salles. Paradise is Kerouac himself, the immigrant Quebec, son of a laborer in Massachusetts. And Marylou is LuAnne Henderson , the girl who fled her family out of love for Cassady, and for freedom.

Six years ago, Walter Salles first chose Garrett Hedlund to play Neal. The actor was 20, he landed his Minnesota farm. A little later, at a dinner, the composer Gustavo Santaolalla has spoken to the director of a very young actress he had noticed in a film which he wrote the score, Into the Wild , Sean Penn. Kristen Stewart - “I remember to have noticed his name on a piece of paper “ says Walter Salles – has become Marylou. Finally, after the screening of Control in Cannes, in 2007, the English Sam Riley was asked to do a screen test with Hedlund. The chemistry between the two boys was so obvious that despite the size difference (Riley is tall and thin, Kerouac was short and stocky) and accent with his model, the British landed the role of Sal Paradise . Partly because they were not well known, the draft Walter Salles has been postponed several times, until early 2010.

AFTER YOU LEFT THE PLATEAU of On the Road , Kristen Stewart filming chained – after the “Twilight,” Snow White and the hunter . While the two boys remained a year with nothing to do . Sam Riley, who lives in Berlin, says that with Garrett Hedlund, they talked by Skype. “Have you found anything? Not? Me neither.” Finally, they both agreed supporting roles under the direction of renowned directors, Neil Jordan for Riley, the Coen brothers for Hedlund. After remaining so long in the skin of the characters in Kerouac, the return to XXI ^th century was not easy.

Kristen Stewart had no choice, he must answer the call vampires. Between the time when, mad with joy, she accepted the role of Marylou and started shooting, she became Bella, the heroine of the series “Twilight,” the lover of the vampire played by Robert Pattinson , who is also his companion in the city. Miraculously, in January 2010, when Walter Salles has found, in the French producer MK2, funds and support that had been stolen elsewhere, the shooting schedule proved to be compatible with the timetable of the young actress. What was the least a prior, it was her star status continued by fans and media , and the will of Walter Salles to the filming of On the road a nomadic experience, as close as possible to the wanderings of Kerouac.

Kristen Stewart played the game During filming, the team sometimes played hide and seek with the press and the fans, the actress who follow the trail. In Argentina(where the team was part look snow in August), to leave the airport, we had to start a limousine vacuum which caused the paparazzi on a wrong track. Part of the filming was repatriated to Mexico to Arizona after kidnapping threats. But on set, no agents, press officers, assistants, this little world that revolves around it in Hollywood. “I do not know how she can stay as sane “ , wonders Sam Riley.

The three young actors went through the “boot camp” (classes, in military jargon) that Walter Salles has organized a few weeks before filming in Montreal. In a large apartment, they watched films of John Cassavetes , met with the writers of Beat Generation , listened to jazz in the late 1940s. Kristen discovered rare recordings of LuAnne Henderson. Of all the protagonists of On the Road , LuAnne is the only n ‘ have not benefited from his experience: “It was his life, three years with the man she loved. That’s all, not a chance to become famous. And God knows that the time was opportunistic. “ Kristen Stewart comes alive, as it did on the set in New Orleans, when she recalls her first reading of On the road , or to 14 15 years.

She, who is about to bind the promotion of three movies, tries to prove that this feel-there is no agreed: “We always say it was a family on the set, it is never quite true. This time, though, she insists. I did not leave the set, I wanted to do with them all the way. But for years, I had prepared myself to the idea of finish the series “Twilight”. “ She is forced to “this huge shift” , has worked continuously for almost a year now and hesitate on the road to follow . “The desire to work very itchy, but I have not seen anything that provokes me, which put me in motion. That’s how movies like On the road , the level of demand increases. “

YOU MUST ALSO MAKE FACE expectations of fans of Kerouac, Americans who wonder why a Brazilian was given the role of Sal Paradise to an Englishman, moviegoers who know that Francis Ford Coppola (who had bought the rights to the book at the end 1960s and is a co-producer of the film) or Gus Van Sant could have made ​​the film. In a bookstore on Sunset Boulevard (if there), a vendor recognized Sam Riley and told him: “You’ll be in on the road ? I hope it will be good. “ Of the three, the actor Britain is the most worried. Matter of temperament, no doubt. He wonders if he will blame his accent (a mixture of Yankee New England and Quebec) that has worked for months. He recalls a story during the “boot camp”. “A writer who had known Kerouac arrived in the room where I was with Garrett. We shook hands and looked over my shoulder wondering where was the one who was playing Kerouac. “

Six months later, in San Francisco on the evening of last day of filming, Sam Riley met with Carolyn Cassady , Neal’s widow, now 90 years (in the film, his role is played by Kirsten Dunst ). “She stroked my face and looked at me. I can not repeat what she told me but, starting again, I thought that people who had hired me had not completely deceived. “ Meanwhile, Sam Riley / Sal Paradise had picked cotton in Arizona by nearly 50 ° C in the shade, danced in hovels of Puebla (at a time of paroxysmal violence in Mexico) and spent an entire Sunday in the snow in Calgary, Canada .

“I remember we came to wake me up to turn the plans in a hurry. In true prima donna, I thought it was my day off, but I went with them. There was Walter, Eric Gautier (director of photography, editor) and Garrett was in charge of costumes and makeup. “ This lurch in the work plan, unimaginable on the set of a Hollywood movie, produced admirable pictures Sal Paradise walking in the mountains, hoping to stop a car or truck. “In three hours we shot twenty shots, remembers Sam Riley, and among these, my favorite.”

A New Orleans, he had also improvise alongside Viggo Mortensen who played the role of Old Bull Lee, inspired by the character of William Burroughs , literary inventor, heroin addict, murderer of his wife. “I knew Viggo was a man intelligent, cultured, a poet. I spent all night on Wikipedia because I was afraid he asks : “So Sal, what do you think of the Übermensch?”, while I've never read Nietzsche. “
These beaches are improvisations in the heart of the film’s Walter Salles wanted.While the trio was traveling on the roads of Arizona by 45 ° C in the shade, the script called for it embeds a hitchhiker. Walter Salles took flight at the talent of singer Jake La Botz. He was humming the sad lament of a man who killed the woman he loves, without warning Kristen Stewart. “The reaction of Marylou when she heard this song the first time was significant, explained Walter Salles . She stayed in the film, to announce the inevitable rupture between Marylou and Dean Moriarty . “

THIS FIGURE OF DEAN MORIARTY , the masculine ideal as Jack Kerouac, the object of desire of women in the film, Garrett Hedlund the door long ago. Walter Salles had seen dozens of actors, none like this one: “Garrett led an emergency, a vitality, but also pain related to the quest for the father. When he auditioned, he arrived in Minnesota. He recited the dialogue she was given, and then he asked me if he could read something. On the bus, he wrote a text on his journey . His interpretation of the wandering, his own life I conquered. “

As a teenager, Garrett Hedlund had read that Francis Ford Coppola was preparing an adaptation of On the road and had said that the role of his life would escape him. When, at age 20, he crossed paths with Dean Moriarty, he no longer wanted to leave , whatever the vicissitudes of the project. “Every time we offered her a role, recalls Walter rooms, he asked me if he could do without compromising on the road . “ By dint of refusing the offers, to the despair of his agent, Garrett Hedlund remains to date a Hollywood hopeful, although he could not doubt have become a star for a long time. Long before the project’s success is a certainty, he accompanied Walter Salles in his research, learning to drive a Hudson, meeting with survivors of the beat generation, as the poet Michael McClure. “At the time, I could not say that I would play Dean Moriarty. I held my tongue, I passed for the traveling companion of Walter. “
“This is a pure soul” , he told Sam Riley. Hedlund lives in a small apartment in Silver Lake , near Beverly Hills . “I prefer to wake up poor in the morning, he said. I do not want to have to work to pay for an apartment. “ In 2009, after the banking crisis was fact derail a first financing package on the road, the young man has yielded to his agent and agreed to star in Tron, big production of Disney. “I was about to ask for rent money my mom, he recalls. Six months later they were in Montreal, in an apartment with Kristen and Sam “

Garrett Hedlund has missed the evening of last day of shooting, he left in a hurry to attend the premiere of Tron , Los Angeles. But Walter Salles offered him his hand.In spring 2011, after having finished a rough cut, the filmmaker has taken the road through the United States for “a moment of complete freedom” , intended to easethe pace of the film. A small team of five people, one actor, Garrett Hedlund, and Hudson, who travels the back roads, away from freeways lined with billboards, to find areas that have U.S. Kerouac and Cassady intoxicated. Garrett Hedlund listening list the steps of the journey: the Adirondacks, Cincinnati, Ohio, Lexington, Kentucky Lubbock, Texas, Las Vegas, New Mexico, lacks only one guitar to do a talking blues.

THE ACTOR REMEMBERS each snowfall, every failure. “In Mississippi, a mechanic named Corndog has repaired the car on the lawn outside his house. He had Jheri curls (a hairstyle popularized by Michael Jackson on the cover of Thriller, ed) and put a shower cap to slide under the Hudson, not to put motor oil on his hair. “

Cannes is the terminus and paradoxical logic of this trip. Although the red carpet is a strange place to park a Hudson’s carrying three celestial tramps. But Walter Salles presented his last two films, The Motorcycle Diaries and A Brazilian family(co-directed with Daniela Thomas). It was after having seen The Motorcycle Diaries , another road movie that followed the young Ernesto Guevara through Latin America, as Francis Ford Coppola had the idea of him proposing on the road. Kristen Stewart on the Croisette find his partner “Twilight”, Robert Pattinson, who toured in Cosmopolis , by David Cronenberg . Sam Riley will make his return, he had been disclosed to the Directors’ Fortnight with his interpretation of Ian Curtis , lead singer of Joy Division in Control , of Anton Corbijn . And Garrett Hedlund will show the world that already know all who have crossed: it is a movie star.

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