Thumper – Downtown Magazine

Dispatches from the Tribeca Film Festival: A look through the lens of films to see ourselves in the other, and the other in ourselves.

“It’s a little bit painful to watch at times, in the best way possible. It’s very gritty and raw”, Eliza Taylor tells me of her new movie that just premiered at Tribeca Film Festival, Thumper, a very real portrait of lower class America by Jordan Ross in which she plays an outsider who gets involved in a high school meth ring.

Cozily sitting in front of me, wearing all black, she is tired; her face is flawless but her eyes are sleepy. As she talks about the film and her acting, sentences encompass extremes–hard to watch/best way possible, rough/wonderful–but not for a second is she scattered. She seems to know her place in the world, ingrained in a path in which every challenge to her craft is as rough as it is a wonderful opportunity.
Camila Gibran: Thumper is “hard to watch sometimes”. Why did you decide to take this role?

Eliza Taylor: Because the way the script is written you get a real glimpse into these people lives. The lives of people who in a lot of ways feel like they’ve been forgotten about and left behind by society. And as an actress, for the first time in my life, I got to play a character like Kat/Meredith, a character playing a character and it was a wonderful challenge to separate the two.

CG: You do a lot of television. Can you tell what film means to you as a visual art form?

ET: Film has been a life long love affair. For me personally, it’s about taking people away. I remember being at the cinema and watching really powerful movies and forgetting I was sitting in the theater.

It’s about being able to have a glimpse into different people’s lives around the world that we wouldn’t necessarily have a glimpse into.

If we get to pull that off successfully for an hour and a half, you take people out of their daily lives into a completely different world.

CG: No commercial breaks …

ET: Yes, No commercial breaks (laughs)

CG: Can you tell me about the world of Thumper?

ET: The movie is about kids who get caught up in the world of making and selling methamphetamines. But one thing about it is that you can really empathize with every single character, none of them are black and white, you can see that they are doing the best they can in a situation they are in.

CG: It feels very real. How was the shooting process?

ET: It was fascinating. We filmed in people’s homes that are in these areas that aren’t necessarily the wealthiest and their quality of life isn’t perfect. They were all really good people and very welcoming. But the sad thing was, we would wrap and finish shooting in their houses for the day and they went back to their lives. It was humbling and quite touching.

CG: What city was it set in?

ET: We didn’t want the movie to be specific to an area in America. We wanted it to be very American but we didn’t want everyone to automatically assume that it was in one certain area, one place. We shot it in San Pedro in Los Angeles, but yah… we kinda wanted it to have a hot sticky industrial vibe.

CG: You said that if a movie pulls it off, it can take us away and give us a glimpse into a different world. How do you feel after immersing yourself in this particular world?

ET: I didn’t know myself by the end of this movie… I was like “ Who am I
again?”

It was rough; it was a really intense shoot. I did a lot of research and learned a lot about methamphetamines and the effect it’s having on modern society, it’s quite incredible, even in Australia it’s an epidemic. I came out of it feeling quite overwhelmed by that.

It was a real experience and it wasn’t easy, which was great.

And just like that she gives me yet another glimpse into her world, the path she is on and the kind of actress she is.

Photography by Leslie Hassler

Dispatches from the Tribeca Film Festival: A look through the lens of films to see ourselves in the other, and the other in ourselves with Pablo Schreiber.

I am sitting on a stoop having a coffee and a croissant when a very tall Pablo Schreiber crosses the street in my direction. I’m here to interview him about his role in the new movie Thumper. When I say I’m waiting for the lights to be set up in the studio upstairs, without missing a beat he sits down beside me.

We start talking about LA weather–his new home–being immigrants–he is Canadian–him being a father and how through films we may be able to see the “other”. For a while we are two New Yorkers, coffee in hand having the easiest of conversations on a stoop in Chelsea.

On the way up the easiness takes a pause when the elevator door closes but it doesn’t move. Panic crosses his face. “Is something wrong?”

“It’s really hard being this tall in a very small space” he says.

Seconds later we start to move and we are back at ease again. Upstairs, coffee still in hand but now on comfortable chairs.

Camila Gibran: I saw Thumper last night it’s raw and heartbreaking. In your own words how would you define it?

Pablo Schreiber: It’s the journey of a young woman who gets involved in a meth ring, but swirling in all of it is this idea of an America that has been left behind; people who have to do things that they didn’t originally want to do, making choices that they didn’t necessarily need to. How do you make a life when you don’t have many opportunities? This is the lot that enveloped all of these young kids, and that’s the real tragedy of this movie.

CG: What compelled you to take this role?

PS: It was interesting to hear you say the ‘other’ downstairs, because that’s definitely something that I look for in my work. I’m really interested in the extremes, not just the extremes of society but also the extremes of human behavior. So Wyatt, to me, was a guy who was operating in the extremes of human behavior, in the sense of, you know, cooking meth and giving it to children to sell, not really behavior that I would condone or practice, and so whenever I see someone who’s doing something that’s so far from my experience, I want to know why they do it. There is a scene where he goes into some of the reasons why he does what he does and where this country is, in his opinion, and how immigrants and the workforce shrinking have made things so difficult for him. I was compelled by that really different voice.

CG: We are in a time in this country, and in the world in general, that’s very different to where we were a year ago. How do you feel Thumper to be relevant today?

PS: We shot it last year in March and April, long before the election, and long before this country, as some people say, s**t the bed, but now we’re sleeping in it. We’re rolling around in it, and it’s taken on a whole other weight, since the election, of that voice of the angry white man.

When we were making this movie, none of that was really around, there was some of it blowing in the air, but you couldn’t tell that this was coming. Living in New York, or living in LA, you couldn’t see that blowing in the wind, and the election was such a huge slap in the face for costal livers, and for anyone who was living in a major metropolitan area… So this movie has taken on a whole new significance in the after-math of the election, and only gone further to kind of humanizing in a way a lot of the sentiments that are in the air… that’s not to judge it as good or bad, it’s just trying to understand a little more about where a lot of these feelings are coming from.

How do you see the role of film, and visual storytelling in people’s lives?

PS: As an actor I deal with film and TV. I see it on all fronts. There’s just so much content, as consumers we are so lucky, especially in the market of television right now, but we are bombarded by choices. We are so spoiled, which brings up another problem: When do you watch it all?

I’m a bit embarrassed to say, but as a dad, I mostly watch movies on airplanes because I travel so much. The other day I was taking a flight and I finally just watched Moonlight, after however long it’s been.

So, once you find a little time to watch a story being told either in the form of television or film, what would you choose and why?

PS: You really have to choose something that’s going to make an impact on you. Art is here to influence us in some way or another, to make us re-evaluate or look at our life in new and interesting ways. So if you’re going to commit that amount of time to something you have to be sure that it’s something that’s going to affect you profoundly in some way.

So last question, as an artist and as a consumer of those art forms, do you think they can bridge the gap in understanding what creates ‘the other’?

PS: That’s the next thing, and I never want to take that leap, because to me, how to bridge the gap, I don’t know. The only thing we can do is start conversations. And we can also look into what makes other people tick and try to empathize with them. Through understanding, and looking deeply into circumstances and trying to understand how somebody feels about something is the only way to then … behave in a way that’s more empathetic towards them. So I guess that’s a form of bridging the gap – knowledge and information.

As we are hugging goodbye I am reminded of how tall he is. When the elevator door opens I smile as to assure him that it will go down just fine. The door closes and the easiness is still there.

Photography by Leslie Hassler