What does surprise him is the dog.
Viewers go crazy for Uggie, the Jack Russell terrier so charming he may make cinephiles forget all about Cosmo, the terrier from this summer’s “Beginners.” The filmmaker is puzzled that so many admirers comment on how “expressive” the dog is.
“Actually, I’m not sure he’s so expressive,” he argues. “He’s very cute,” the filmmaker allows, but “he doesn’t incline his head, he has really a stone face; he’s not an actor. He’s just going from Point A to Point B.” (And because filming without a sound crew meant Uggie’s trainer could call to him openly during takes, Uggie shouldn’t even get credit for that.)
But the writer/director acknowledges that although he initially “just thought it was funny” to put a dog in the script, it turned out to be crucial. He realized the dog was why people liked the movie’s leading man.
“When you look at the character of George Valentin” — a silent-era movie star whose career ends with the arrival of talkies — “he’s selfish, egocentric, proud. He’s mean with his own wife, he’s not a positive character. But the fact is, the dog loves him and follows him during all the movie. What happens is, the audience trusts the dog. We think if the dog loves the guy, the guy has to be a good person.”
All true, but let’s also give some credit to actor Jean Dujardin, who has a face made for the silent era, particularly when it’s decorated with a pencil moustache. Dujardin, who starred in the two pitch-perfect James Bond spoofs Hazanavicius made before this film (under the rubric “OSS 117”), knows exactly how much eyebrow-wagging the camera wants from him — no small feat in a film intent on celebrating, not mocking, early cinema.
The director encountered silent comedies as a child, when his grandfather took him to Paris revival houses to watch Charlie Chaplin and Laurel & Hardy. Not until he became a filmmaker himself did he discover F.W. Murnau, Josef von Sternberg, and other trailblazers of drama and romance. “When I discovered those movies,” he recalls, “I realized how powerful the format could be.”
He decided he’d like to work in that mode himself, using modern methods (including better film stock and special effects) to replicate the look of the period and relying on title cards, not sound, for the dialogue. Studios did not exactly compete to finance the film, even when Hazanavicius argued that the absence of dialogue meant the movie was equally appealing around the world.
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