Director Burger talks “The Lucky Ones”
By Matthew Price
Director Neil Burger missed his country. So the homesick filmmaker wrote and directed “The Lucky Ones,” which follows three soldiers on a road trip across the United States.
“I did a movie called ‘The Illusionist.’ It was shot in the Czech Republic, so I was gone a long time, about six months,” Burger said.
“You come home as a filmmaker and you want to do something that more speaks to your time.”
In “The Lucky Ones,” three Army soldiers travel across the country in a rented van after a blackout shuts down flights out of New York.
Michael Peña, Rachel McAdams and Tim Robbins play the three soldiers.
The actors hadn’t met prior to being cast, which Burger said worked well for the film.
“Like the characters in the movie, they’re three strangers who then form this tight-knit bond, and that’s really what happened with the three actors as well,” he said.
A growing interplay and camaraderie among the three leads was critical for “The Lucky Ones,” and Burger was pleased with how his cast came together.
“You can’t manufacture chemistry,” he said. “As a director, I can push them in the right direction, but, you’re never quite sure. And you’re hoping to get it. But these guys were great together.”
The actors attended boot camp to make sure they knew proper military terminology and procedure. McAdams, who doesn’t have any scenes in which she is on military duty, nonetheless jumped wholeheartedly into boot camp.
“She learned some self-defense and became a crack marksman,” Burger said. “She had never shot before, but she had done a lot of yoga, of all things. Her yoga breathing … helped her be a better shot,” he said.
Novelist and former “Saturday Night Live” writer Dirk Wittenborn co-wrote the screenplay with Burger, and he and Burger retraced the journey of the characters while preparing to make the movie. Only a small part of their journey made it directly into the movie, but their travels informed the screenplay.
“We took that trip as research, Dirk and I. We saw a lot of things, met a lot of people, and had a lot of encounters, only a few of which made it into the movie. But we had to have that experience to know what we were talking about.”
Burger said he’d wanted to work with Wittenborn, and this premise seemed as if it would draw from both of their talents.
“It’s kind of a far-ranging story,” Burger said. “It’s a road movie, and there’s a lot of different characters and places that we encounter, and just politically and culturally the scope of the movie is pretty wide as well, so it’s good to have two brains on it.”
Coming up next for Burger is “Dark Fields,” about a pill that makes its users smarter.
“If there’s steroids, or other performance-enhancing drugs, why can’t there be a drug that makes your synaptic connections faster, so you can think quicker, think smarter?”
But the pill has an extremely limited supply and dangerous side effects.
“Disturbia” star Shia LaBeouf was scheduled to star, but his recent injury while filming “Transformers 2” has left some doubt as to how exactly “Dark Fields” will proceed.
“We’re trying to figure out whether we wait, or whether we recast,” he said.
(from Friday’s The Oklahoman)
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