[IMG:L]Films with all-star ensemble casts are all the rage in Hollywood this year, but few of them generate quite the same kind of delirious frission as the actors who populate this year’s indie standout Juno.
With an outstanding lead actress on the verge of major stardom in Ellen Page and a deep bench consisting of major movie stars (Jennifer Garner), award-winning TV talent (Jason Bateman, Allison Janney), stalwart supporting players (J.K. Simmons), recently-minted icons (Michael Cera) and newly discovered standouts (Olivia Thirlby) combined for comedic gold, the cast is a shoo-in to land several nominations as an ensemble during the heady awards season around the corner.
“I’ve made two movies and I’ve been really lucky with my casting,” director Jason Reitman (Thank You For Smoking) told Hollywood.com. “Working with this cast is like conducting an orchestra and realizing, ‘Oh, that’s Wynton Marsalis and Yo-Yo Ma.’ You’ve got virtuosos and you don’t have to say anything.”
Reitman said he is so delighted in both the performances and the company he hopes to keep them all in his permanent repertory company for his upcoming films. “No bullshit, I really hope that. This was like a family and I’d go make Juno 2 right now. I love these people.”
Hollywood.com got an inside look at how the ensemble gelled to make Juno one of the most critically hailed films of the year.
[IMG:R]Ellen Page on finding her connection to pregnant teen Juno:
“I’m obviously totally not the characters that I play. But you always get the ‘How do you relate?’ question no matter what character you play. I feel like whenever a character is honest, and whole, and well written you are going to be able to connect to them. We are all kind of made up of the same stuff. It’s just about approaching it by connecting to that person and creating whatever individual aspects you feel are right.”
Michael Cera on how to deliver the script’s whip-smart dialogue:
“The dialogue is so great, you don’t want to hit it too hard and really call a lot of attention to it. It was just so much fun to say those things and to do it without putting too much emphasis on the things that we were saying. I like the idea that these guys just talk like that all the time. That is how the script felt. Everyone in that town, or in that world, was on the same page with each other talking like that.”
Allison Janney on falling for the quirky characters’ curveballs:
“Even before my character made an entrance into the screenplay I was blown away by Diablo [Cody]’s writing. I just thought it was so unique and so fun. It was a weird ride I was on and I thought ‘I’ve never met kids like this before, who talk like this.’ Then you meet her and you know where it comes from. That first scene where we find out that she’s pregnant that is where I went ‘Oh, wow. That is not at all the direction I thought these characters were going to go in.’ And that is what made it so fun.”
J.K. Simmons on playing against type as a surprisingly understanding dad:
“So often you read a script and you think ‘Yeah, I can make this work. We’ll tweak this a little bit.’ But this was a rare, word-perfect, thing…Bless Jason [Reitman] for thinking of me for this. I have been a lot of bad guys. The first on camera thing I did that got much attention was Oz on HBO. Then every call my agent got was to play the Nazi bastard of the week. I just thought ‘I can’t do that for the rest of my life’…Whatever they have seen you do, that’s what they want you to do. Now there is one more thing that they have seen me do and hopefully it broadens the range of what they will let me do.”
[IMG:R]Jason Reitman on discovering the softer side of Jennifer Garner:
“Jennifer and I met for the first time and we both just started talking about being parents. We’ve both recently become parents and that was our complete inroad to making this film. The second that I met her she started talking about motherhood and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is going to be perfect.’”
Jason Bateman on what he owes Garner, his co-star in The Kingdom:
“Jennifer was very, very vocal about getting me to do this. I don’t say no to her. She’s just too angelic. And will give you a beat-down. The idea of hanging out with her for another couple of weeks was pretty interesting…I think that she saw perhaps some similarities between this character and me, in that I’m kind of a low-key and water-off-the-back kind of idiot like this guy, except for the fact that the whole growing-up-and-being-a-good-husband-and-being-a-good-father is something that I had always planned on doing. So I got a lot of the stuff that Mark deals with done and out of my system before I walked down the aisle and said yes to the whole baby thing. So he’s kind of screwed up there, but I was a little smarter.”
Ellen Page on resisting research on real-life Junos:
“I think if you are playing the tortured girl, in the 60s in the Midwest, then you have research to do. On films like this it’s just easy to judge the situation–you don’t want to go overboard and get all analytical. It’s just about being as genuine as possible.”
Michael Cera on his own real-life research:
“I went to high school. I went there for a year, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but a year gives you an idea. I got the idea. This movie didn’t really stretch.”
[IMG:R]Jason Bateman on doing more research than he really planned on–and the results:
“Reitman was really F-ing annoying about demanding that I learn how to play the guitar for this one eighth of a page in this f*cking movie. I mean, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ve got a tutor that’s going to come over and teach you how to play guitar.’ I said, ‘Okay, awesome.’ So the guy came over and I have Maltese in my family and I guess they were fishnet pullers there in Malta. So I’ve got real fat, fishnet-pulling fingers so that the netting doesn’t cut in and cut your fingers off. That’s not good for playing guitar because then you touch four strings instead of one and it was a very frustrating process and I hit ‘f*ck it’ really quick in my lessons. So I called Jason, I think, after the first lesson and I said, ‘You know, I don’t mean to tell you how to shoot this scene, but if you happen to shoot this scene in close-ups and you’re above the guitar then no one is the wiser and I just kind of make it look like this with my shoulders and you just do it to playback. Why do I have to learn this?’ He said, ‘Ooh, well, there’s a whole guitar thing that’s going on in this movie. I’m thinking about Ellen [Page] and Michael [Cera] actually playing this song at the end of the movie.’ I was like, ‘All right. I’ll do it.’ So I get up to Vancouver where we’re shooting and in my hotel room is a guitar and a little mini-amplifier and now I’m starting to get pissed off. So I don’t do it. I don’t even touch it until the night before we’re about to shoot that scene. There was nothing on TV or something and I dragged out the amplifier like a little brat and I plugged in the guitar and I taught myself how to play this song and raised some eyebrows the next day. Reitman was just like, ‘You’ve been practicing for like a month!’ I said, ‘Yeah. I’ve got a pretty big commitment to this part.’ Then of course you see the movie and you see me do it for a second. You hear it as Jennifer is coming up the stairs. She opens up the door and it’s like bling, bling, bling and I stop.”
Olivia Thirlby on being awestruck by co-star Ellen Page:
“It’s complete, unbridled, ridiculous talent. The girl has chops and she can play anything. We’ve seen this and it’s kind of like a new point on the arc that is Ellen Page‘s career. I mean, I think that she’s a remarkable actress, not to mention person. That’s what makes the movie so special. She brings the soul and heart to Juno every second.”
J.K. Simmons on Page’s skill set:
“She’s smarter than most young actresses, which was obviously great casting. Yeah, there is a combination of just native intelligence and she’s incredibly well read. She’s ridiculously down to earth. She obviously puts everything into whatever she does. There is a career where she does these edgy indie things. Hard Candy was the most visible of them. It’s easy for people to say ‘Oh, that’s who she is.’ I’m happy for her that she gets this now and she gets something with a little lightness, a little joy to it. People will hopefully let her have a broad career.”
Jason Bateman on the secret of Page’s success:
“She couldn’t be more normal. She couldn’t be more us. There isn’t somebody there where you need to really go through their process with them. She’s just so natural and so all of this conversational dialogue just came out very, very freely. It was easy for me being 38 to have a sort of peer dynamic with someone who’s 20 because she’s just so cool and mature and isn’t really taking a whole lot too seriously. So it didn’t need to have a whole lot of work done.”
[IMG:R]J.K. Simmons on how the director made such a disparate cast come together seamlessly:
Jason Reitman is in a lot of ways similar to Ellen. When I did his first feature he was 28. When you are 52 years old that seems young. He grew up in the business, obviously, he made his one effort to not go into show business. ‘I’m going to go to Medical school and live a normal life.’ Then he realized that this was where his heart was. Same thing, he’s got a combination of having his heart in the right place, being very well educated in his field, and he knows every aspect of filmmaking as a truly accomplished director should. He just has that innate ability, and taste. He just has taste in casting and the way that he directs a scene. Plus, he’s just a fun guy to hang around with, too.”
Allison Janney on how Reitman let the actors find their performances:
“Jason was wonderful letting us do some of our activities that we did. He does a lot of tinkering with stuff and I got to do my vision for what I decided to do. So, he let us have some freedom there with some props and activities. Most of it was right there on the page, though. J.K. says ‘Try not to get in the way and mess it up.’ It’s all right there.”
[IMG:R]Olivia Thirlby on taking a master class in acting on the film and not even knowing it:
“I learned that a lot of actors have fun and I don’t mean that in a party-type sense, but I think that everybody who worked on this movie was having so much fun in the work of it because it’s such a fulfilling kind of bite to take out of the burger that is this movie and we just all had a great time. We reveled in the dialogue, the scenes that we got to have. It was generally so cheerful and so amicable and I was so happy just to be on the set.”
