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Adam

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

 

Actor Hugh Dancy

Story : Adam Raki (Hugh Dancy), an electronics engineer, suffers from a developmental disorder called Asperger syndrome. When a young woman named Beth (Rose Byrne) moves into his apartment building, Adam is quite taken with her. Beth does not know quite how to react to Adam's unconventional overtures, but decides to give him a chance nonetheless. But Beth's parents are apprehensive about their daughter's new romance, which could end the young lovers' relationship before it has a chance to grow.

Opens today July 29, 2009

Runtime:1 hr. 37 min.

Interview with Hugh Dancy

Q : What do you think attracts Adam so much to astrology?

(Hugh Dancy): Yeah, well it is symbolic but it’s also quite common actually. People with this condition do have these areas of special interest, and sometimes they’re very very narrow, like they’ll be interested in trains but their interest in trains really only extends as far as the track. It’s very hard to empathize with that or even to understand that really. But often it is, it can be stars, it can be areas of chemistry. I remember watching a documentary about a guy who’s fascinated by crystals and the way they form, and somehow that does take on a kind of symbolic quality; it’s often very beautiful, they’re seeing something pure. I think that’s to do with their extreme focus. It can be the same with music, or kind of pure maths; they basically cut past all of the undergrowth that for me gets in the way when I try and think about maths or anything else, and yeah it does take on a kind of almost metaphorical quality.

Q: The research; what were the demands of research for you?

(Hugh Dancy) : The demands of research were quite great for me because when I first read this script and I got to that point of the script, you know a third of the way in when he announces that he has Asperger’s. I had not been prepped in terms of what the script was about and I found that moment both fascinating, because I thought it was such a brave way, an intelligent way, to structure the story, and also at the same time slightly horrifying because I had no idea what Asperger’s was, I really was completely ignorant. So I had to start from scratch, and I won’t bore you with the entirety of what I did because I think in a way it’s better to keep schtum about that to some extent, but obviously you start with a more academic version of research and you go on the internet a lot, you read a lot, and eventually that’s a process building towards being able to sit and interact and listen to people with Asperger’s and obviously people who work with people with Asperger’s and all the time going back, trying to find things to engage your imagination.

But more specifically to engage your imagination in a way that’s relevant to the script and going back to the script always. And Max’s, I found this script was kind of strong enough, I recognized the first time I read it, I knew it was a good structure because I’ve read enough scripts, but I didn’t realize until I started learning more and more how intelligently it was written, because the more I could bring to it the more I found it supported. That was a good motivator.

Q : When you’re playing a character like this, is it hard to separate yourself from the character when you’re off set?

(Hugh Dancy): No.

Q: Is this one where you can sort of put it into the corner? Because you know, doing theater you’re really carrying characters with you.

(Hugh Dancy): Yeah you are, but I think never in the cut and dry way that perhaps people imagine. We only had I think 25 days to shoot, so there just wasn’t much time between set-ups to go and drop everything, which is probably beneficial. But at the same time I wasn’t trying to be Adam; it wouldn’t have been possible because I wouldn’t have been able to take direction, nor was I trying not to be Adam; I was just getting on with my job. And I did find that after the event I realized that that meant that my experience was much more contained than usual, and I really hadn’t been able to have the same kind of conversations with Rose that you normally have with an actor when you’re working with them.

You spend time before you do a scene discussing “What are our characters feeling? What’s going on underneath the conversation, what’s the subtext?” you know, so you can play all of that and invest it all in the scene and of course that was completely antithetical to what we were doing and what the story is about. So I didn’t really get to know Rose – I mean I did in a superficial way – until after we made the movie and then we actually got to spend some time together and it was very nice. But during the film I kept to myself.

Q: Did you find your theater background was helpful? Or did you have to divorce yourself from the experience? Because this is so much a focus on you.

(Hugh Dancy): Yeah, but I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive in that way. I mean, there’s maybe a different technique but the thing that lies at the heart of it, for me anyway, is the same thing.

Q: What do you think of people are so interested in this ailment? What do you think is the draw?

(Hugh Dancy): I think… that’s interesting, I didn’t think of it as a draw but I do think that it is fascinating and I think it impacts upon all of us as we consider the ways that we think. We imagine ourselves to be an interactive species, which we are, but essentially we are also all within ourselves and kind of working out how to get over that, maybe without the same level of obstacle. But actually I think the reason that you’re seeing it now in some movies and certainly more and more when I open the paper, is that Asperger’s was only, well a brief history is that it was described by a German doctor called Hans Asperger in the ‘50s, I believe.

I should really Wikipedia this because I’ve been saying it a lot and I’m not 100% convinced I’m right. It was described by Hans Asperger in the middle part of the 20th century and basically just not translated, nobody got around to translating that particular research until the ‘90s. So there was no diagnosis really within the medical community, certainly here. And then those things take time to trickle down, anything complicated like that, even just from the upper echelons of the medical community down down through the doctors through to your normal GP, so that when you take your kid in and say “There’s something up with my kid,” that he knows enough to recognize it. And then, after that, it takes a bit more time and it trickles into popular culture. And I think you’re just seeing that kind of tipping point at the moment.

Q: In a weird way I thought that story was like with an average, neurotic New Yorker.

(Hugh Dancy): I think you’ll find a lot of those average, neurotic New Yorkers probably have Asperger’s.

Q: Undiagnosed cases.

(Hugh Dancy): But at the same time, my focus when we made the movie obviously was on this character and clearly it was a character entirely about remaining within that character, and being specific, as specific as a I could. But the reason for doing that was to serve this script, the story of Max’s, which I knew when I first read it was universal and just about, as I was saying before, the effort to make a connection, which I think that we are all engaged in. And particularly in a city like this, in a metropolis, where you’re crammed in together and in a way, half your life is about keeping people at a distance and keeping your own space, and the rest of the time is about, it’s weird how lonely you can feel in a place this crowded, And again, that wasn’t my thought or something I thought about while we were making the movie, but sitting down to watch it afterwards I was actually taken aback by, I said that I felt quite very self-contained when we were making the film, and when I watched it I was amazed how much it’s about these two people and their connection.

Q: Did you ever have a pretty neighbor you were trying to get the attention of? And how did you do it? What’s your technique?

(Hugh Dancy): Oh god, no, I have no technique. I mean, I have no technique dramatically or otherwise.

Q: Do you know your neighbors?

(Hugh Dancy) : Do I know my neighbors? This is getting broader and broader. If I answer it in that context and they read it they might be scared. Do I know my neighbors? Well neighbors in New York kind of because one often shares an elevator, you know, and actually in London as well. But not so much. Maybe I’ll keep that to myself.

Q: This is an odd vehicle to use to make you into a romantic icon. Were you trying to do what you could to subvert the romantic icon thing that a person can easily get pushed into?

(Hugh Dancy) : No, but not in any way, like in terms of trying to do something different for myself, perhaps, but then that’s basically been my guiding principle, this just clearly offered a more extreme example of that. But I mean over the last few years, maybe three years, I’ve felt lucky enough to kind of, I felt like quite a wide variety of characters, albeit several of them were different versions of, I guess fell within the boundaries of romantic characters I suppose. But I wasn’t thinking about other peoples’ perception of it, it didn’t cross my mind actually until after we’d made the thing and I think the reason for that was my resting assumption was that nobody would ever see the movie. [you laugh] And at times that was a real relief [laughs] “Well it’s okay, it’ll only be you and your close family and hopefully not even them.” And that sounds terribly pessimistic or that I didn’t believe in myself but actually it’s just a way of keeping the focus inwards you know.

Q: Now people are talking about it for awards and things. Already.

(Hugh Dancy) : Honestly, it was amazing to me, well not amazing to me, but the fact that we got into Sundance, the fact that we were in competition, that we then got the response we did, that it was bought; every step of the way has been something that I’ve been prepared for it not to happen. I love the movie and I’m really proud of it so I’m not going to sit here and say that I hope it doesn’t have that success, nor is it, it doesn’t stand and fall by that for me.

Q: In your research for the part did you come across any cases of neurotypicals in long term relationships with someone? Was that in study, did you meet them? What did you draw from that?

(Hugh Dancy) : It was in study, I don’t think I ever met any… I met some aspies, as they occasionally call themselves, who had been in relationships with a variety of people. I don’t think I met anybody who was currently in a relationship with somebody, or at least not that I discussed, and I certainly didn’t meet any NT’s, as they say, who were in that position. But I read about them, I mean I read, there’s a fantastic book called Look Me in the Eye by a guy called John Elder Robinson, who is the brother of Augusten Burroughs, who wrote Running with Scissors, who wrote his own memoir last year which is this book, Look Me in the Eye, about growing up with Asperger’s and it’s very humorous.

It’s very honest inevitably because it’s written by an aspie, and it describes his relationships and he’s in his second marriage now with kids I believe. Reading between the lines, you get a sense of some of the challenges he's facing, that must face his wife and also him, but basically you get a sense of a strong, loving relationship. That was one of the first books I read, and his voice was really helpful to me; like I said, you’re looking for things to hook the imagination as well as just the raw data and it was so rich, that it kind of made it real for me at the very beginning, as well as Max’s script. But beyond that, the idea of talking to somebody who lived with, who was in that kind of relationship, talking to an NT, I think would have not been maybe that productive to me. It might have been if I’d had a longer period of time but I didn’t, I had about five weeks so in a sense I just kind of had to go in as quickly as I could to that character rather than stepping out and looking at it from that perspective.

Q: We were having a discussion earlier about the ending and whether she would have done what she did, was there something more? Was there something that had been discussed and it was just made to end that way? Or is that pretty much what there was?

(Hugh Dancy) : Well you could talk to Max about that as well; I know that at one point he was persuaded to try his hand at writing a different version of the ending, again without giving it away, but obviously the movie takes the shape in some respects of a romantic comedy and kind of subverts it and so the question lies are you going to give it that RomCom ending where everything is tied up? Well, again without giving it away, nobody had any interest in doing that, but he tried a version that steered more towards that, essentially where the two of them got together, and it didn’t work, I think for really obvious reasons.

And for me, when I read this script, actually the first time I read this script weirdly I was sent both endings, I think by mistake, it was very odd. I don’t know if you read those books when you were a kid where you could kind of like “If you want to fight, turn to page 64.” And it was obvious to me which ending worked because one of them kind of retained the comedy of the script, and one of them, as far as I was concerned, just like crumpled it up and threw it out the window. It just betrayed all of the good work he had done. So no, I mean among us when we were making the film, there was never any debate about that, it was very obvious.

Q: You’re such a theater actor in a lot of people’s eyes.

(Hugh Dancy): I do think that and I do think actually there is a good chance that the next thing I do might be a play, and there’s certainly the possibility of something here in New York, but there’s no point in going into it further because it’s not solid, but yeah it’s not something I would ever walk away from. And it is something that you have to cut out time for, the theater, yes that’s true.

Q: You mentioned earlier that you thought maybe nobody would see this movie, what was exactly the draw then for you? Why did you want to do it?

(Hugh Dancy) : I just loved the script. I guess it’s funny; you’re holding two things in your head at the same time, because I maybe felt that nobody would see the movie but at the same time I always believed in it myself. Just because you make a movie on this budget, which was tiny really, and the time constraints and everything else, and a subject matter which is not obvious or easy, and I think a script that was complicated enough and multifaceted enough that I was aware of all the different ways I could screw it up all the time, that’s the way it felt to me. You do that and you’ve got to be aware that statistically, you’re kind of unlikely just to break through because you’re in competition with so many other films. I mean, you go to Sundance or any of the film festivals, there’s just an endless number of really good movies that are competing to be seen. I don’t think it was being pessimistic, I think it was just being realistic, and that’s why I feel very grateful now because I feel that we got lucky.

Q: What do you think are the basic elements that turn a romantic comedy into a classic and what are some examples that you consider classics?

(Hugh Dancy): Good god. I think first of all, films that aren’t made with the intention of being described as a romantic comedy. As I say, it occurred to me about halfway through making this film, “My goodness somebody could actually look at this as a romantic comedy,” and that was, I don’t know why it took so long for that to dawn on me, but I guess it was because I was thinking in terms of story and character and so on. And the good ones for me are always about that. Examples: When Harry Met Sally, Bringing up Baby, It Happened One Night, they’re all purely character driven and the momentum that drives them through, sure it’s got romance and comedy, but that’s like saying we’re all carbon life forms. I’d also say the basic elements are so basic, just conflict, and actually I’ve never seen a good romantic comedy without a genuine sense of conflict, even if it’s fun, even in something like It Happened One Night where you know, obviously they’re going to end up together, but he’s a bastard, you know, I don’t know if you know the movie. And I think a lot of RomComs, i.e. movies that are made pre-packaged as romantic comedies, are made with a kind of gesture towards that kind of conflict but basically it’s completely unbelievable.

End.