Post by Picap on Jul 23, 2020 2:43:36 GMT
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Pablo Schreiber on Working with Chris Evans in ‘Defending Jacob’
by Christina Radish
July 22, 2020
COLLIDER: This is a very twisty crime drama, but you’re playing a very straightforward character. When this project came your way, what appealed to you about playing someone like him?
PABLO SCHREIBER: What appealed to me about the job was the material. When I read the scripts, I thought the writing was some of the most complete and well-conceived eight scripts that I’d read, maybe in my career, in terms of as a whole, with the way that Mark Bomback, who wrote the piece, weaves the themes together and keeps you guessing, and puts your attention on the gray areas of human morality and asks, what would you do, in a certain situation? And that’s not just for Andy, but for all of the characters that are posed with that question. There was no pure good and bad. All of the characters were doing their best, and succeeding and failing, at different times. I really was attracted to that dynamic, and to the writing.
Then, it fit very well into a window for me. I had nothing to do, until I was going out to shoot Halo in October, and it fit into my summer window really well. So, even though one of my concerns was that the character could be perceived as an antagonist and I was not wanting to go down that road anymore, because of the areas of gray and human morality, and the fact that Neal, while he is perceived as the antagonist, is actually really just doing his job. He’s a very good prosecutor. He’s just doing everything that he can to win the case. It’s only because you’re following the story through the Barber family and through Andy Barber (Evans), specifically, that he gets perceived as an antagonist. By the end of Episode 8, his actions are forgiven and justified by the fact that he’s really just trying to get justice for this kid.
You have a lot of scenes with Chris Evans, and it’s fun to watch the dynamic between your characters, especially when your character is someone who seems to be immune to his charm. How did you find the experience of working with him and playing that dynamic between you guys?
SCHREIBER: I loved it. I love Chris. I think he does amazing work in this series, and I told him, as soon as I saw it, that I think it’s the best work of his career. He’s so grounded and comfortable and easy in this role, and so relatable. I was blown away by it, immediately. The process of shooting it was quite painless. It was a little terrifying. The courtroom scenes, we shot all together. Episode 7 was shot as a chunk. But the Grand Jury scene, which ended up getting put through the entire season, to drive and move the plot along, we shot in two days. It was 52 pages of dialogue, just he and I, going back and forth. That was one of the most singular challenges of my career, preparing 52 pages of pretty intense scene work, and then packing it into two days of shooting.
Had you ever done anything like that before, where you are so focused on doing the dialogue, in that sense?
SCHREIBER: Yeah, it was the most similar experience I’ve had, in television and film, to doing theater. A lot of things in this felt like theater, to me, in the sense that, number one, I was working with Cherry Jones, in Episode 7, for all of the courtroom stuff. She’s a classic, wonderful theater actress, and we had a lot of fun, prepping and bouncing off each other, in that way. And then, doing 52 pages of dialogue in two days really ended up being that theater-like marathon, where you better know your lines and you better know what you’re saying, in order to get that kind of volume done.
This show has a really specific look, feel and tone, throughout the season. Did it feel like having the same director and the same writer helped with making it feel uniform in its vision?
SCHREIBER: Absolutely. I would say that the only reason that it feels such of a piece is because Morten Tyldum was the director for all of them. We essentially shot it like an eight-hour movie, so that’s how it ends up feeling. They just ended up editing it and cutting it into one-hour chunks, but it essentially was one big, long movie.
This is a story that continues to go back and forth, with whether or not this kid really committed this crime. What did you think about the way the story ended? Were you personally satisfied with how things played out? Did you draw any of your own conclusions?
SCHREIBER: I would say my conclusions were different from what Neal’s might’ve been. I was very satisfied with the ending. My biggest fear about the ending, as I was reading the scripts, would be that it would wrap up in some tidy, neat bow, and that would have been, to me, a huge disservice to everything that had come before, which was really trying to talk about the unknowability of the people that we live with. I’m a father and I have young kids, and I thought about who these people really are that you’re living with, and do you really know them, and how can we ever truly know our offspring or our parents or any of the people that we live with? By the end, if we had really known decidedly, one way or the other, I would have been disappointed.
For me, it had to end, in that way where we don’t know. We really don’t. The rub with human behavior, in general, is that the scariest reality is the truest, and it’s that we are capable of everything. Humans can do so much that that might seem shocking or awful, in any given moment, but it’s all within the realms of human behavior, and we have to reconcile that we, as people, are almost infinite in the possibilities of what we can do and how we might behave. We, ourselves, are unknowable, to ourselves, and that’s a terrifying thought.
Pablo Schreiber on Working with Chris Evans in ‘Defending Jacob’
by Christina Radish
July 22, 2020
COLLIDER: This is a very twisty crime drama, but you’re playing a very straightforward character. When this project came your way, what appealed to you about playing someone like him?
PABLO SCHREIBER: What appealed to me about the job was the material. When I read the scripts, I thought the writing was some of the most complete and well-conceived eight scripts that I’d read, maybe in my career, in terms of as a whole, with the way that Mark Bomback, who wrote the piece, weaves the themes together and keeps you guessing, and puts your attention on the gray areas of human morality and asks, what would you do, in a certain situation? And that’s not just for Andy, but for all of the characters that are posed with that question. There was no pure good and bad. All of the characters were doing their best, and succeeding and failing, at different times. I really was attracted to that dynamic, and to the writing.
Then, it fit very well into a window for me. I had nothing to do, until I was going out to shoot Halo in October, and it fit into my summer window really well. So, even though one of my concerns was that the character could be perceived as an antagonist and I was not wanting to go down that road anymore, because of the areas of gray and human morality, and the fact that Neal, while he is perceived as the antagonist, is actually really just doing his job. He’s a very good prosecutor. He’s just doing everything that he can to win the case. It’s only because you’re following the story through the Barber family and through Andy Barber (Evans), specifically, that he gets perceived as an antagonist. By the end of Episode 8, his actions are forgiven and justified by the fact that he’s really just trying to get justice for this kid.
You have a lot of scenes with Chris Evans, and it’s fun to watch the dynamic between your characters, especially when your character is someone who seems to be immune to his charm. How did you find the experience of working with him and playing that dynamic between you guys?
SCHREIBER: I loved it. I love Chris. I think he does amazing work in this series, and I told him, as soon as I saw it, that I think it’s the best work of his career. He’s so grounded and comfortable and easy in this role, and so relatable. I was blown away by it, immediately. The process of shooting it was quite painless. It was a little terrifying. The courtroom scenes, we shot all together. Episode 7 was shot as a chunk. But the Grand Jury scene, which ended up getting put through the entire season, to drive and move the plot along, we shot in two days. It was 52 pages of dialogue, just he and I, going back and forth. That was one of the most singular challenges of my career, preparing 52 pages of pretty intense scene work, and then packing it into two days of shooting.
Had you ever done anything like that before, where you are so focused on doing the dialogue, in that sense?
SCHREIBER: Yeah, it was the most similar experience I’ve had, in television and film, to doing theater. A lot of things in this felt like theater, to me, in the sense that, number one, I was working with Cherry Jones, in Episode 7, for all of the courtroom stuff. She’s a classic, wonderful theater actress, and we had a lot of fun, prepping and bouncing off each other, in that way. And then, doing 52 pages of dialogue in two days really ended up being that theater-like marathon, where you better know your lines and you better know what you’re saying, in order to get that kind of volume done.
This show has a really specific look, feel and tone, throughout the season. Did it feel like having the same director and the same writer helped with making it feel uniform in its vision?
SCHREIBER: Absolutely. I would say that the only reason that it feels such of a piece is because Morten Tyldum was the director for all of them. We essentially shot it like an eight-hour movie, so that’s how it ends up feeling. They just ended up editing it and cutting it into one-hour chunks, but it essentially was one big, long movie.
This is a story that continues to go back and forth, with whether or not this kid really committed this crime. What did you think about the way the story ended? Were you personally satisfied with how things played out? Did you draw any of your own conclusions?
SCHREIBER: I would say my conclusions were different from what Neal’s might’ve been. I was very satisfied with the ending. My biggest fear about the ending, as I was reading the scripts, would be that it would wrap up in some tidy, neat bow, and that would have been, to me, a huge disservice to everything that had come before, which was really trying to talk about the unknowability of the people that we live with. I’m a father and I have young kids, and I thought about who these people really are that you’re living with, and do you really know them, and how can we ever truly know our offspring or our parents or any of the people that we live with? By the end, if we had really known decidedly, one way or the other, I would have been disappointed.
For me, it had to end, in that way where we don’t know. We really don’t. The rub with human behavior, in general, is that the scariest reality is the truest, and it’s that we are capable of everything. Humans can do so much that that might seem shocking or awful, in any given moment, but it’s all within the realms of human behavior, and we have to reconcile that we, as people, are almost infinite in the possibilities of what we can do and how we might behave. We, ourselves, are unknowable, to ourselves, and that’s a terrifying thought.