Reaping, The : David Morrissey Q&A


QUESTION: How was the experience of making this movie?

DAVID MORRISSEY:
There were two experiences. There was the experience of making the film, which was a real pleasure. It’s strange, actually, making a film that deals with darker side of life. It’s sort of a heavy subject. You actually have a ball off-set, because there’s a sense that you’re exorcizing something as you’re working, some sort of dark and unpalatable thing. And then, off-set, you’re so relieved that there’s a little bit of hysteria going on. So, we all got on really well. And it was just a pleasure to do. Also, I think with Hilary and Stephen, there was a real sense of concentrating on character. And I think that in a film like this, it’s really great to have that. What you’re talking about with each other on a daily basis is backstory, characterization, who you are, what your relationship is with each other, and in a film that has a lot of effects in it, it’s great to be able to be working on a daily basis on that.

QUESTION: Does it give you pause when you’re doing a movie about acts of God on a set that’s decimated by an act of God?

DAVID MORRISSEY:
Yeah, the other experience of the film, in the circumstances in which we filmed it, you have to take that onboard in a way, but there’s also a retrospective look at the experience when you get home. At the end of the film, you think, ‘God, I went through that.’ But then, there’s the daily basis of dealing with something like that. We were in Baton Rouge, and what I found in Baton Rouge was I would be watching the TV and I would be getting calls from home about the situation, but what I saw on the ground – because Baton Rouge wasn’t necessarily affected by the hurricane in a devastating sort of physical way – it had to deal with a refugee crisis. And what I saw on a daily basis was a massive sense of community and solidarity there. There were people opening their doors for people that they didn’t know. I was really impressed and humbled actually by the sense of community within Baton Rouge of helping people out, and that was amazing for me. It’s important to remember that retrospective look at things, it’s a very good privilege to have, but actually, on a day-to-day basis being down there, you were dealing with a crisis that was immediate. It was happening right in front of you. But you have to take an experience like that as you find it individually. And that’s how I found it, and people were worried back home, as they would be worried about anybody in a place like that, that they know and love. But because I was in Baton Rouge and not New Orleans, I didn’t feel at any time that we were in danger. It was a very collective response to it, from my experience of just being there.

QUESTION: How did you approach your character, who has so many sides to him?

DAVID MORRISSEY:
It’s important to approach any character by backstory. That’s where I start – what his parents were, what his grandparents were, what his experience was as a child. It’s a very sort of Freudian way of working through character, but it’s a very important way for me. And with this character, I think he has a way of living that you can equate to any society. It just happens to be that the society he’s living in is a different one than the one we know. But he has his own rules and he lives according to them. I think it’s important that when you see him and you see him with Hilary’s character, you think of him as a man who is on the outside of his community. He is a man who is trying to get his community to do something that they don’t want to do, so he has different values to the people you are seeing. And that was the important thing for me.

QUESTION: Do you go over your character work with the director?

DAVID MORRISSEY:
It’s always for my own personal use. I will share it with the director if he wants to, but it’s my job, I think, as an actor. You have a script, the script has clues to your character in it. People may talk about your character; they don’t necessarily have to be true things about your character, but they say things about you. And then what I do is I go back and I plot that guy’s journey up until when the film starts. He would have been living in that community with his wife and had a child and they would have carried on. But he actually is a man who’s in pain. He has lost someone whom he cares about and I think that’s the complexity of the character, that he has lost someone and that’s what’s troubling him, really, with her.

QUESTION: There is also a lot of fear in this town.

DAVID MORRISSEY:
Yeah, but I do think that what the film deals with is the arguments and the battle between science and religion, between faith and intellect, really. And that was what really interested me about the film. On one side you have the arguments of the scientists, which is about getting proof, about A equaling B equaling C and you come up with the answer. And on the other side you have people who are talking about faith and spirituality. And, of course, what you need is a bit of both of those things in order to work as a human being, I think. But you can’t separate them and make them battle because that, for me, is the grounds for great diversity, for division, and not a healthy place to be. But I think Katherine is somebody who has absolutely had one total belief in one side of her life, which is a religious life, and she’s denied that totally. She has turned her back on that completely and now has a total belief in the other way, and it clashes. The film is about that clash of ideals.

QUESTION: Do you believe in miracles?

DAVID MORRISSEY:
I believe in human type of miracles, yeah. I do, actually. I think there’s a sense that I have seen people achieve things that they couldn’t have achieved without some sort of spiritual help, I guess, is my tack on it. But I think the idea of organized religion is one that is something I don't buy into, but I believe in spirituality in a big way.

QUESTION: With this role, are you going to now start to appear in more American films?

DAVID MORRISSEY:
As an actor you have opportunities that come along, and what you want as an actor, or certainly what I want as an actor, is choice. You want choice of roles. Now, the way this business works is that in order to have choice of roles, people have got to know who you are; they’ve got to have an identity with you. And, yes, there is a sense of being in America that is about getting more choices. I love film, and if you look through my CV you won't see a lot of theater on my CV. As an English actor that’s quite interesting, but I don't do a lot of theater. What I watch, and what I enjoy, is films and a lot of it is American films, or certainly sometimes American independent films, and stuff like that, that’s where I go. I love that type of work. And I want an opportunity to be able to do that. I like movies. It’s what I do. It’s like in my down time, it’s what I do. And being here, and being in part of America movies, gives me more opportunity to do that. I want diversity of character. I want diversity of roles.

QUESTION: Do you believe that good overcomes evil? And if you do, why?

DAVID MORRISSEY:
I think that good overcomes evil, in a sense. It depends on whether you believe in evil or not, but I think that good needs a lot of work. It needs a lot of help. I think the essential human spirit is good, but it’s good amongst the boundaries that are put on top of you the way that some people behave well in their community, but in another community it would be outrageous. It’s the survival thing. It’s survival. It’s all about survival, and if good means survival is happening to you, then that’ll be it; you’ll make that choice. But the community around you has to be one that is telling you that behaving well, being good, will be rewarded. You can’t be in a community in which behaving badly and being dark and horrible is rewarded. If your community is telling you that, then you will go for that. It’s a collective responsibility of everybody, that good is the best way to go.

QUESTION: Because the film was so dark, you said that when you were off-set it was a ball. Can you talk about that?

DAVID MORRISSEY:
There was just hilarity. It was Stephen Hopkins’s birthday at one point. I don't know whether you heard this story from anybody else, but what Hilary did was she got all these masks made. It was like being in Being John Malkovich or something. She made all these masks of his face, and I was getting my lunch, and I suddenly went into the tent and there were, like, 40 Stephen Hopkinses there, and I just freaked. Then we got him down, and we all had these masks on, and I've never seen anyone freak the way he freaked. It must’ve been, like, his worst nightmare, walking in and seeing yourself. People were playing tricks on each other in that way and Hilary is really great at that. So, that was one of the things that stuck in my mind. I have some very freaky photographs on my laptop of that day, so it was very like that scene in Being John Malkovich where everyone is John so – everyone was Stephen Hopkins for a day.

QUESTION: Thanks very much.

DAVID MORRISSEY:
No, thank you. It’s been a pleasure.