Interview - A Serious Man

Interview with Michael Stuhlbarg

A Serious Man's Michael Stuhlbarg is a man of many talents. A Tony Award nominee and a Drama Desk Award winner for his performance in Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman, honored with the New Dramatists Charles Bowden Actor Award and the Elliot Norton Boston Theatre Awards, film work including Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies and guest appearances on TV series Damages and Ugly Betty.

It is safe to say he has pretty much covered the gamet of the entertainment industry.

In the Coen brothers’ latest picture, A Serious Man, he stars as Larry Gopnick, a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university, who finds out that his wife is leaving him. Michael Stuhlbarg sat down to discuss the latest chapter in his illustrious career...

The word "mensch" is prominent in the movie. Is it a synonym for "a serious man" or is it something more?

It is a great synonym for "a serious man". I think within the community that the film takes place, it is a very appropriate word.

A mensch is an important individual, someone who is a good soul. I think it is used a little differently in terms of the Sy Ableman character. He thinks of himself as a serious man. I think Larry wishes he were a serious man.

Larry’s wife thinks he is, which one of the reasons she wants to be with him rather than Larry. Does Sy Ableman fool Larry’s wife into thinking that he is a serious man?

I think she believes that he is serious. I think that he supplies her with some characteristics that Larry does not possess and I think, at the time in her life when she perhaps needs a little bit more attention, or perhaps someone a little more communicative or someone a little bit looser, she finds that in Sy.

We don’t really know why she ends up being with Sy but that’s my guess.

You were in line to play the character of Larry’s brother, Arthur. Could you relate to both characters?

I guess I related to both of them in a different way. Arthur had a great sorrow within him. Having excelled greatly at something at a young age, I imagined, and then falling apart so much socially, I empathize with that, having been somewhat socially awkward in my own life.

Whereas Larry I didn’t think of him necessarily as a sad soul but one that could perhaps be more adept socially and more at peace with himself. I guess I found a kinship with both of them but for different reasons.

The cultural background where the film is set must have had some resonance for you?

I was raised in a reformed Jewish synagogue in Long Beach, California. I am not from the Mid-West, like the Coens, but my father is from there, so I had a sort of smattering of an idea of what that might be like. And there were moments in the shooting of the film where I felt a sense of a strange kind of kinship with the community there.

There was one moment there when we were shooting the Bar-mitzvah scene at the end of the movie, where the whole audience chimed in singing one of the hymns.

We were all strangers and I didn’t know that there were actually congregants in that community that they had hired to come in and dressed them up in period attire, but there was something about everyone chiming in instantly with the same song and everybody knowing the same song that brought us all together. It was like being in church, the Temple, and that was lovely.

Larry’s son, Danny, is struggling with his religious education. Did you connect to your faith as young man?

Absolutely. I was submerged in Jewish culture as a young man. I went to Hebrew school and I participated in our local Jewish Community Centre activities and went to a camp in the summer. It was all part of my life growing up and great fun, mostly because of the people. It was all about hanging out with my buddies.

There were fun songs to sing and fun dances to dance. Wine to drink on the weekends, a great sense of education and humour and beauty, I found in my upbringing. I am not sure Danny feels that way. He maybe in retrospect will find the years that he spent going to Hebrew school were fun.

Can you classify a type of humour that is Jewish? There are many Jewish comedians…

I think there is a commonality that must exist within the Jewish experience that perhaps gives way to a similar world view which one can find funny, I guess, with the history of bad things that have happened and the idea of having to move around and not stay in one place.

There has got to be something that comes out of that experience that you have to laugh or cry at. I think that there is a combination of that tragic comic element within the Jewish experience that is very prevalent in Coen Brother movies and particularly in this film.

Did the Coens hint that they were reflecting their own childhood in the film?
 
There are truisms within the film, of things that are facts within the film, things that are actually lived through or experienced. Little things.

For example, all of Danny’s friends in the movie are names of people the Coens grew up with. And there was a Mrs. Cvcvc and there was a Mrs. Samsky, and there was a guy who they knew who wrote this book called The Mentaculus.

He went mad in the process of trying to create it. Also their father was a professor, of economics at the University of Minnesota. Little things like that. Their mother was the more religious of the two so all those things informed this particular screenplay.

Can you give a specific example of something you added to the part yourself?

There was something in the script that I misread that actually ended up being part of the movie. It was when Larry comes to Mrs. Samsky’s house, and in the original script he was supposed to knock on the door, wait a little bit longer then leave.

I thought I had read that he was about to knock but doesn’t so that’s how I played it. The Coens then said, "Oh no, he is supposed to knock" but when they thought about it for a moment they said, "No, that is actually better. Why don’t we make him get up there and then make him about to and then change his mind".

This was the sort of mistake that ended up as something I can take responsibility for!

How are the Coens with their actors, very hands-off?

They are very hands off, actually. Once they have found the actor they want to play a particular role they let them run with it. Questions are asked and they answer them but if they don’t have an answer they let us come up with the answer. It was unexpectedly hands off.

Do they need a lot of takes?

No. Because they edit their own films, they prefer fewer takes. Absolutely. They have learned that over the course of years that it makes their job easier in the editing room to choose from six instead of 46 different options, which is really smart. I think if I ever direct a film I will do the same thing.

Would you like to direct a movie?

Absolutely. I have done directing in the theatre and I love the question-answering and the challenges that come up. I am sure it would be completely bonkers but eventually I would love to be passionate enough about a script to want to direct and see it through to the end.

I originally wanted to be a cartoonist, an artist of some sort, and I have a crazy imagination, so I would love to manifest that visually in a film one day.

And you once studied mime, right?

A little. It was a summer that I spent. I was one of four finalists for a competition. I was an undergraduate at UCLA and Mr. Marcel had been there the year before to offer a one-year scholarship for one person to go France for a year to study at his school.

I didn’t hear about it until it was already done, so the following year I made sure to audition for it, because I thought what a wonderful opportunity to be in a foreign country and to learn about the art form. I didn’t want to be a mime but I had an interest in the art form and then in the studying of it I learned that I could never be a mime!

Not only was I not very good at it but the amount of discipline that goes into the type of storytelling that they do with their bodies, it is miraculous what they achieve. But that informed and influenced the kind of work that I did from then on, in terms of bold physical work. It made its presence known in a couple of plays I did not long after that.

What are you doing next, the Martin Scorsese TV show?

That’s right, my next job is a new HBO series called Boardwalk Empire. It is executive produced by Martin Scorsese. We have shot the pilot already. It’s based on a book called Boardwalk Empire by Nelson Johnson about the birth, high times and evolution of Atlantic City.

The book goes back into the early 1800’s but the series starts on the eve of prohibition 1920.

So is it a Gangster story?

It is based on the prominent figures in Atlantic City at that time. I play Arnold Rothstein who was, allegedly, responsible for fixing the 1919 World Series. He is a boot-legger and a racketeer and a heroin importer. He owns speakeasies stables and casinos.

It is quite a dense cipher of a character and I am having a great challenge with it. It is a great cast. The pilot has already been shot and it has been edited already. HBO had to see it before they agreed to do it and we are starting to shoot the second and third episodes simultaneously. It is twelve or thirteen episodes, I think.

How would you compare the Coens and Scorsese?

They are very, very different. Joel and Ethan are very hands off, as I mentioned, in letting their actors do what they want, yet they are very specific about the text. They want their words spoken as written.

Scorsese is kind of the opposite...

He is very hands on with the actors: "Go faster! Yeah! Too slow! More this! More that! Be angrier!" - and with the text it is very loose. It is the opposite. He’s like, "Improvise! Come in with ideas! We will play around with the text!".

We are thinking of things we can say on the set. Scorsese gets in there. He is wrestling with himself.

Is Scorsese intimidating to work with?

Well, he is Martin Scorsese so there is that!

I have seen most of his movies so you want to do well. It is not because of anything he does. He is the happiest guy on the set. There wasn’t a down moment at all, even when he wanted people to speed things up. It was all with a sense of humour, a sort of joke. He couldn’t have been funnier and kinder!

A SERIOUS MAN is OUT NOW on DVD & BLU RAY