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Burma – SXSW 2013: Abbott & Potter Interview

By Meredith Alloway · March 18, 2013

You may have seen him on Girls, but you haven’t seen anything just yet. Christopher Abbott gives an incredible performance, stoic and raw, in his latest film Burma this year at the SXSW film festival.

Playing the wanderlust writer Christian, he demonstrates the tribulations of navigating family secrets and the return of his long-absent father. It’s no surprise Burma won the Grant Jury Award for best Ensemble Cast.

Gaby Hoffmann, Christopher McCann and Dan Bittner round out a truly pitch-perfect family. But it seems these guys have more than just on-screen chemistry. They’ve also assembled a team of indie filmmakers that are sure to pop up on everyone’s radar in no time. They’ve already delivered films like Martha Marcy May Marlene and this year’s festival favorite Simon Killer.

Amidst the madness that is SXSW, Christopher, along with his producer Brett Potter, sat down with me at the Intercontinental Hotel in Austin. With coffee, smoke and sunshine, they talked about working with their team and writer/director Carlos Puga, their favorite lines from the film, and how many of them are brutal truths we’re all too afraid to admit.

ATW: Chris, I’m going to go way back to the beginning with you before Burma, before all of this. Tell me how you got started acting?

A: I grew up in Connecticut mostly. A year and a half into college, I was going to a small community college and working a few other jobs while I was going to school. I liked film growing up but never thought about acting. I just joined a class. I don’t know why really, I wanted to give it a try. Once I started taking that class, I really liked it. It took about 6 months, and I stopped going to school there and found a school in New York. HB studios, a small acting conservatory. It’s got an old school 60s-70s vibe. Then I just started going to big open calls for Off-Broadway plays.

ATW: Carlos cast you after seeing your performance in the play The House of Blue Leaves with Ben Stiller. After that, what was the process of starting Burma like? You’ve assembled a great team of people.

A: Carlos asked me if I wanted to do it and I said yes, and we started casting from there. Calavera [Brett and Grant’s production company] was already part of it from the get go. We assembled the cast through Susan Shopmaker. She’s very much part of our family; she cast Martha [Marcy May Marlene]and Simon Killer. Gaby and Chris came through her. It happened all very quickly. These dudes got it together in an insane amount of time.

P: We prepped and shot in a month. We knew we wanted to build the film around Chris. Chris is not only one of our best friends, but he’s the best actor we know too. It was basically like calling the horn and the whole team coming in and everyone doing their job seamlessly for a month.

A: At least 30 of us there had all worked together before, crew and everything.

ATW: In the Q&A yesterday, you all said 90% of the script didn’t evolve once you started shooting. How did you go about making the dialogue real for you and forming this wonderfully specific  “family language” between the cast?

A: Honestly, it was written that way. Carlos has this way of writing…he’s one of the most unpretentious people I’ve ever met. That translates to Burma quite a lot. I liked the writing of the script a lot. One of the reasons I thought it jumped up another step, by the end, the film has this Meta last line. In a good way, it’s kind of cheeky. Not to give a spoiler [so I won’t guys]… it’s a little bit of a nod back to the movie. There’s a lot of talking in the movie, people talking around things. You’re saying so much, but you’re not moving forward. That’s the idea behind it. Carlos has this way of throwing in these fairly grand gestures in a very subtle way. I thought it was very important to stick to the script because it is so specific in that way. Any adlibbing or improving takes away.

ATW: What was set life like working on such a heavy movie?

A: Tom Richmond, our DP, did an amazing job of setting up a space to shoot in and light for the entire space. A lot of scenes have a lot of movement. We shot the dinner scene for an entire overnight. We split it up in parts and actually ran through it a few times. It has an orchestration to it, almost like Robert Altman. Tom is a genius in that way. With all the scenes, we took it day by day and tried not to think of too much of the big picture. All the actors come from theatre in some way, so there’s a natural instinct to read the script over and over before you even get there. Everyone was extremely prepared going in so on the day we could just focus on that scene that day. Tom, Carlos, the actors, the crew, everyone’s preparation gave us as much time as possible.

P: Absolutely. When we were up state, we shot it in chronological order; we tried our best, so these guys had some time get to know each other. We’re all living in this Stanley Kubrick Shining-esque hotel that’s practically abandon in up state New York together. There’s one bar that we’re all at every night. By the time we did the family dinner scene, we basically were a family. We got so much footage from this one-day of fireworks.

ATW: You have a line in the film Chris, “I thought when my mother died, it would improve my image.” I was so excited Carlos went there because these are things we think, but often we go to the grave with.

A: That’s one of my favorite lines in the script. There are three or four lines that really struck me. That one, also when Chris McCann’s character, the father, says, ‘The only thing I’m guilty of is loving her, meaning the wife, more than you guys.’ There’s a line that Win [his brother in the film] says to Christian: ‘You teeter on the line of being an addict…you keep it just on this recreational level.’

P: My favorite is, ‘There’s a lot of things that I’m supposed to do, that I don’t want to, but I still do them.’

A: All these lines are so poignant and extremely honest. It’s hard to judge them too. Even though they’re somewhat brutal things to say, they are true and like you said these are things that always cross your mind, but you just don’t say them. You would be embarrassed of it. That’s the beauty of the script, There’s those moments that even though people don’t necessarily feel that way, it’s something they’re like, ‘Oh shit, I’ve thought that way. I’ve been that dark person.’ They’re things that make someone extremely imperfect.

ATW: Do you feel like Christian had to forgive himself before he could forgive his father, or the other way around?  Is Christian unable to move forward not just because of his father, but because he’s afraid of becoming him?

A: That’s a big thing. Him and his father mirror each other in a lot of scenes. He realizes it and is afraid of it. The thing about Christian in the movie is that as much as he dwells in his own life and is very reflective and is reacting probably the strongest to their family history and the father, he’s also very much aware of it. In a way like a 12 step program, admittance is the first step. The thing I found interesting is that he knows his faults and he’s aware of them and trying to work through them. A lot of this movie for him takes place hopefully during that transition period.

ATW: Tell me about the relationship between Christian and his ex-girlfriend Kate (Emily Fleischer) in the film. It’s very vague to us an audience. For you all as actors, how much back-story did you build?

A: That relationship I thought was pretty interesting. The trap of a relationship like that in a movie would be that they have this long, long history together, and it’s deep and really connected. I find it very funny actually that you’re forced into this situation with this girl you dated and you liked but you haven’t talked that much about each other. But she winds up in this situation with him. I find that in real life something like that would happen more often than not. It’s the randomness of these people being together for this weekend. It’s what that randomness does instead of an extremely deep history with everyone. It takes the edge off the melodrama in a way.

ATW: Kate’s character reminded me of the younger couple in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Without them, the main tension would be incredibly strong.

P: I think Carlos was trying to subvert those expectations [regarding Kate and Christian]. When they go up state, I think them coming back together and staying emotionally on the surface allows us to explore their dynamic. Ultimately, it doesn’t turn out to be some big juicy thing in the end. That’s what Carlos wanted.

A: It makes the scene where I get into bed with her so honest too. At that point in the movie, he’s a little drunk and high, and then it’s that thing that you do when it’s late at night and you don’t care who it is. You just need some kind of affection and attention. It’s not supposed to say too much other than just that. That’s what people do.

ATW: What are your goals for SXSW with Burma?

P: We just want to show this labor of love. We’re so honored to be here. We’re lining up a few film festivals afterward and an international premiere as well. I think our main goal here is to A) Promote Chris here as a leading man actor. He did a fantastic job on the film.

A: Thank you, Brett.

P: I think he’s ready to move on, no biased! And then just keep producing work from our family in New York.

A: We’re all in it together. In my eyes, it’s already quite a success, just having it here. People have responded to it. That’s all you can hope for. You just want people that you also respect and love to see it. That’s the cool thing about festivals; it’s a chance to get together with people that you run into over the years. You go see their movie, and they come see yours, and then you talk about it.

P: That’s the most fun about being a filmmaker, honestly.

A: That’s the art of it. The art of it is really talking about it more than doing it. A place like SXSW makes it so easy to do that.

 

The boys have plenty of projects lined up. Christopher and Josh Mond (Borderline Films) just wrapped a short together based on what Josh’s next feature will be. The Places Where We Live is an animated short and another film Brett has at the festival. Brady Corbet (Martha Marcy May Marlene, Simon Killer) and Christopher have an exciting feature they’re both starring in, The Sleepwalker, that’sin the final editing stages. Bottom Line? These guys are ones to watch.