Love And Other Drugs Interview

by Helen Earnshaw | 27 December 2010

Love and Other Drugs

This Christmas Anne Hathaway reunites with her Brokeback Mountain co-star Jake Gyllenhaal for Love and Other Drugs.

The movie, which sees Ed Zwick return to the director’s chair for the first time since Defiance, is a big screen adaptation of Jamie Reidy’s novel Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman.

- This is a more intimate story than we would normally associate you with, having seen Defiance and The Last Samurai, I wonder if you had been actively looking for something of a more intimate nature?

Ed Zwick: Yeah it’s true. I have always been interested in the relationships in those larger stories anyway and I think it was an opportunity to strip away some of the spectacle and the action and really only focus on the performances - and that has always been what has interested me most I think.

But, frankly, it’s also kind of a voice that I would like to think I have been dealing with more in some of the television work that I have done in years past and I have not really done that in a while and really missed it.

- What was the main draw of this storyline for you?

Anne Hathaway: I guess I really believed Jamie and Maggie’s love on the page, and I had had such a wonderful time working with Jake on Brokeback Mountain I believed that we could get there again; actually hopefully with greater results as we didn’t love each other last time.

And then the more conversations that I had with Anne and Marshall the more it became apparent to me that it was an adventure worth taking.

Jake Gyllenhaal: I just thing that there comes a time in everyone’s lives when they say ’Do I have real love?’ ’Do I want real love?’ ’What is real love?’ and when I read this script I was in a period of time when that seemed to be sort of a pressing question.

And for some reason I have always loved, well for obvious reasons, I have always loved movies like Jerry Maguire and Jim Brooks movies because they seem closest to some kind of life that I live and when I read this I very rarely have a moment when I have a moment and get excited and I go ’somebody wrote this for me and the don’t know it’.

And this is how I felt when I read this for the first time and I was loving the character at first but I was crying at the end when the character says ‘sometimes your life doesn’t go how you expect it to’ and usually it doesn’t and if you follow life and not what it should be then it will all work out in the end and that just moved me to the core and I couldn’t not do it.

Then to have Ed at the helm was really the biggest thing because I had wanted to work with him over and over again, we have brushed paths every once in a while and tried to get into his movies and I have auditioned for him many times, so it was a lot of things coming together.

Plus I have always wanted to get naked again with Annie in a movie so I felt like this was an opportunity to help her so I dove right in.

Anne Hathaway: So you are saying that it was out of pity?

Jake Gyllenhaal: Yeah it was out of pity.

Anne Hathaway: I hate you.

Jake Gyllenhaal: I was the forty fifth actor to be offered the role and after everyone heard they had to be naked with Annie they started turning it down. (laughs)

- In the movie Maggie asks Jamie to name four things that he liked about himself so can you name four things that you can name about yourself?

Anne: I can think of few things more painful than naming four things good about myself in front of a room full of journalists (laughs).

Jake: Actually Anne and I, and this is testament to how much we legitimately care about one another, that we could probably name four good things about each other, we have actually because we have been asked that question a couple of times. I enjoy it because I enjoy thinking about how much I admire her because it’s rare.

Anne: I think the reason that you can trust that we like each other is the fact that we would also name four bad things about each other too.

Jake: It’s true. I think both of us recognise our flaws and things that would probably frustrate us about each other and the things that we love about each other and we are honest with each other about those things; and Ed is honest with us too. He is in there with everything that we do, even the scenes uncomfortably, and so it’s the three of us.

- Jake where does Jamie Reidy end and Jamie Randall begin and I know he was on set so did it ever feel like you were playing a real person?

There are so many things that are woven in from Jamie Reidy because I spent hours with Jamie recording him, picking up his rhythms, picking up his stories, stealing from repetition in his conversation so there is a lot of Jamie Reidy in there and that is really where I found the character.

I would say, what do you think Ed? There was a character that was written, and that was pretty clear as to his personality, but when I started talking Jamie I would bring things to Ed.

He always goes ‘Really?’ and it was always in the middle of his telling a story, he was always telling these stories. We use to talk a lot in restaurants and he would always grab a waitress and ask them where they were from, by the time I had been to the restroom and come back he would know their whole life story.

I couldn’t get into the pharmaceutical world, I had a very tough time getting into that world and talking to active pharmaceutical rep, I would talk to my doctors and they would give me pharmaceutical reps to talk to but it was difficult to get the truth out of them about what happens and what did happen if they were active during 1996.

So Jamie was really an essential part, people would sneak information to me on the set ‘my brother is a pharmaceutical rep and he just wanted me to sneak you this pamphlet’.

- In the scene of the unconventional were those actors who were playing Parkinson’s disease suffers actually have Parkinson’s disease?

Anne: They all had Parkinson’s disease but some of them were actors and some of them weren’t. The women who is most heavily featured in that scene, the MC of the group, Lucy she is an actress and she works with a disabled persons theatre group in Denver.

I spoke with her before she was cast in the movie and she gave me some insights into the disease. I spoke with a few different people with early onset Parkinson’s Disease and not just about the physical symptoms and the side effects of the medication but also the anxiety of being sick and what it was like to have stage one.

We make it very clear in the film that stage one is very much about good days and bad days and when I talked to people they kept asking me had she accepted her diagnosis yet?

And that led me to believe that there is a whole world of anxiety before you come to that moment, Michael J. Fox very eloquently and gracefully describes his relationships with Parkinson’s as having evolved to a place where he thinks of it as a gift but it was quite a journey to get there.

And one of the strengths of the film, and one of the things that drew me to my character, was the articulation of that journey and getting to play that.

- Going back to the issue of fact and fiction when you are dealing with Pfizer and their history and their products what were the issues arising from that especially when you have the restraints of telling a dramatic story?

Ed Zwick: Well obviously we were making a fiction film and not a documentary but that being said we felt great license to actually tell the truth because so much of it has been documented, it was coincidental that while we were shooting the United States Justice Department levied it’s largest fine in corporate history against Pfizer of $2.3 billion for various repeated offences, many of which we talk about in the film.

We have not heard from them directly but I have spoken to some reps who have seen the movie and were around at the time and they felt that we were accurate, most surprisingly last week a couple of reps who were going to Pfizer conventions at the time had seen the movie said ’How did you know what we did? ’ We did it as satire but in fact the dancing girls and the fireworks was accurate.

Anne: A Macarena?

- To Anne and Jake, you must get asked this a lot, how did you feel about the amount of nudity? And would you have done it if you weren’t in such incredible shape the pair of you?

Anne: well I will start with the second question first. When it came time to decide how the character would look I did a lot of research into the side effects of Parkinson’s medication on the body, and I actually found that in many of the cases it causes people to lose weight.

So that was my jumping off point for how I was going to look in the film and the nudity wasn’t resting on that cheeky observation because if the medication had caused people to gain weight I would have gained weight and still done the nudity.

I feel that the nudity is an essential part of the story and it shows the intimacy that Maggie and Jamie feel together and how their relationship shifts from sex into love and I think that film is a really wonderful exploration of intimacy in a relationship.

Jake: I do honestly believe that Annie would have changed her body however it needed to be changed to further the character, if it said that Parkinson’s weight made you gain weight or something happened to you to make you Iron Man then she would have done that because that’s the kind of actress that she is.

Me on the other hand it was purely vanity. It is an essential part of the story and I think that it was one of those things where when you are working with someone like Ed then it is going to be done well no matter what. We didn’t think about getting shape, well I didn’t, I wanted by my character to be a little skinny, sinewy and slimy but I didn’t really… we just knew that he (Ed) was going to handle it so we put it in his hands.

Ed: I have been asked a lot about it in the last couple of days and I tried to turn the question around in my head and I tried to imagine if we had done the movie without doing that.

When are people are first in love and into each other as these two are then this bed becomes their world they eat there, talk there sleep there and everything is in that place and if we had done it with the sheets pulled up to their necks like Rock Hudson and Doris Day in Pillow Talk it wouldn’t have been very accurate - and these are the kind of actors who are committed to authenticity so that they could approach this as they were scenes.

If what they were doing was being photographed making love I think that would have been difficult and exploitative but they had a lot of acting to do - they had a lot of lines and comedy and transitions and emotions to get to and I think that the absence of clothes was their costume.

Jake: When we decided that this was going to be a love story, because at first it was about a guy who changes as a result of meeting a girl, but when Annie came onto the project it changed and it became about two people falling in love and I think that we all decided that if we were going to tell a love story then an essential elements of a love story is sex, and it should be.

So if we were going to be as open and intimate in the love story as we could be then we had to do the same thing with the sex and when you see two people in a movie like that, particularly as an actor, and they are portraying two people in love you cannot believe that these people are in love if they don’t want to be naked around each other. I don’t about you guys but I have never had sex with boxers on and it’s an odd thing to watch an actor do.

Anne: Jake don’t reveal so much, honestly. Careful they will print it! (laughs)

Jake: Not to say I haven’t tried, but I don’t recommend it. So that was really important to us because we knew that if we did we would get somewhere in the audience’s subconscious the idea that these two people were really in love and they weren’t just actors telling a love story.

- We have already mentioned the nudity in the film so were the love/intimate scenes more difficult to film? And do you see any of yourself in the characters?

Anne: What I have got to say I think that because nude scenes are somewhat out of the norm, even though nudity is a part of being an actor, everyone does want to be respectful of each other and wants to make people feel as comfortable as possible so those days have a focus.

We really approached it from a very prepared place because we discussed what we wanted to do before hand, we discussed what we were comfortable with and we traded references from different films in order to establish an index of communication references that we could all share.

So by the time we came to do those scenes we were very well prepared some of the intimate scenes required even more trust than that and were even more difficult to get to and to work through and get yourself into that place and sustain it for a long period of time to be able to return back to those emotions again and again and again.

Physical challenges are one thing but to actually leave yourself open and to mean it like that I found it to be difficult some days and that is why I was so grateful to have Jake as a partner who was so sensitive and respectful during the love scenes, and even more so during the emotional scenes.

And about Maggie, oh god I wish I had some of her toughness and temper - I wish that I was more of a confrontational person like her so I had a lot of fun playing her as I am pretty diplomatic. However I am a Scorpio so don’t cross me.

- You have mentioned other film references earlier and I was wondering if, when you were reading the script, that you worried about turning into Ali MacGraw in Love Story; sick girl meets clean cut American boy was that a concern for you at all? And how did you confront that as an actress?

Anne: I was more concerned that people were going to be reminded of Total Recall (laughs).

Jake: She actually has six breasts.

Anne: I’m not even going to talk about how many breasts you have Jake; I thought we were keeping that private.

I’m embarrassed to say that I have never seen Love Story so I can honestly say that it was not on my mind. But from what I understand in that film Ali MacGraw has a terminal case of cancer and Parkinson’s is a degenerate disease which changes the discussion in the story; not am I going to stick by you to the end, which is very soon, but am I going to stick by you until the end which isn’t guaranteed to be any time soon and is going to get increasingly difficult as time goes on.

So although I guess the archetypes of the characters are similar, I suppose, I wasn’t worried that the stories would be similar because they are not.

- Ed what was your idea of the nature of adapting a book where the end result of the movie where perhaps the emotional drive isn’t in the book.

Ed: I think the book provided extraordinary context, not only for Jake’s character but for the universe; it was moment of revolution in America it was the very first time that pharmaceutical companies were able to advertise on television and sell directly to the consumer and that created a whole ambient world for the story. But the truth be known that was only a point of departure and the creation of the story was a very original creation of a love story, that first Charles Randolph began then Marshall and I carried through and Jake and Annie joined in.

It was remarkable for us all to be so personal and professional about that and a lot of our experiences, not necessarily directly but indirectly, influenced that story and how we would approach scenes.

There are any number on conventions and pitfalls of the obligatory beats of a love story and a lot of things that we ask ourselves is how to subvert those, inevitably one character is going to say I love you to the other but not necessarily when he is having a panic attack in order to do that or that she says I love to him at a moment when he is most doubting even that possibility of what that implies.

These are not necessarily going to be in a love story but this was our attempt to find an original attack on that issue.

- Anne one of the most powerful scenes is when your character doesn’t have her medication and I was just wondering about the toll physically that shooting things that this had on you, I imagine that there were a few tearful nights?

Anne: I am still learning a lot about how to do my job on camera and off and this job really confused me in a lot of ways because I didn’t know how to not take her home with me.

I think, in some ways, because she is such a different character to me I was afraid to let her go at the end of the day because I thought ‘oh my gosh what if she is not there in the morning’ and we were shooting at a breakneck pace, not as quickly as Jake had to film all the pharmaceutical stuff, but it was still pretty quickly for intense emotions.

And I think that I was afraid of a lot, which normally I can talk through, work with people I trust and work through it, but I was also playing a character who was trying to avoid feeling fear and so my comfort with my fear and discomfort with hers and her attempt to avoid it and my inability to let her go at the end of the day created for some very confused and tearful nights.

And those scenes were difficult to film, oddly I would have these little panics before we would shoot the close-ups because I was terrified that I wasn’t being truthful enough and Ed would have to sit there with me and hold my hand and talk me through it - and I hate being that sort of needy actress.

I learned an awful lot, just like my character does, about what it’s like to need people around you to help on the days when you can’t get there yourself and those are difficult lessons to learn but I am so glad that these are the boys that I got to learn them with.

- Along with Jake and Anne there is a tremendous supporting cast on this movie so I was wondering how difficult it was getting everyone together to work on the film?

Ed: Well scheduling is always and issue because you want the people that you want and you don’t want to be subject to others. I guess it tends to turn out when people want to do it enough they find a way to do it.

In terms of the supporting cast Oliver Platt, Hank Azaria and Josh Gad are like the staple of players you would have in the 1930s and 40s great supporting actors, character actors, like Thomas Mitchell, these guys who can show on the day bring so much and be indelible in a short period of time.

And without them I think that the film wouldn’t be the same as they created the edifice on which the lead performances rest and that supports them in a very real way.

Love and Other Drugs is released 29th December.

FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw