INT: Scott Hicks on 'No Reservations'

Directin' the kitchen

By: Brad Brevet
Published: Wednesday, July 25th 2007 at 3:09 PM

Along with speaking with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Aaron Eckhart (read that here), the stars of No Reservations, the press conference also included director Scott Hicks who is probably best known for directing the Oscar winner Shine back in 1996.

This time around he is taking a stab at mixing up romance and cooking and a little bit of opera…

This movie has a lot of musical elements in it, opera especially.

SH: Well I guess it is my fault about the opera. When I thought about the character that Aaron was going to play and what he would bring that was interesting or unusual, I thought that opera was a good choice. Partly I was guided by that, because four of the top ten albums were “pop”-eratic works. The point is that the great arias from the great operas are enormously popular and have become so over the past 18 years or so. So it seemed the perfectly natural choice and something that fit so well with the idea of a character that aspired to all things Italian, the food, the music and the wine. For my own part I rarely go to opera, I go occasionally. The most stunning thing about seeing an opera live is knowing that is a human voice you are hearing, that is the staggering thing. You see in a concert hall that “something” coming out of someone's throat and chest; that is extraordinary. I wanted the music to have a very eclectic feel ranging from pop to opera to [Kurt's] work on the score.

Scott, this is a remake of Mostly Martha and I was wondering how much you deviated and also stuck with that film?

SH: Mostly Martha was a delightful film and given that it was in German it reached a relatively small audience, particularly here in the United States, so I thought it was a lovely story to retell for an English speaking audience. You have to re-imagine a film, any film is set in a particular context and there were numerous things in the original film that pertained to Germany's proximity to Italy and various cultural elements involved including the cuisine, so it's something to refer to and then set aside. Because really you have to re-imagine this story with these characters in a totally different environment, like New York. So you look at it, you admire it, and then you set it aside and make your own movie based on that source material. So there were some substantial things that had to change as a result of that.

How did you find the balance in this film between grief, love and comedy?

SH: The wonderful thing was that there was that range of elements for me as a director to be able to work with that sort of range of emotion and it does become a question of balance and it really comes down to the editing and the weight you give to certain scenes. There was a possibility that the movie could have tipped over to the tragedy that covers the premise of the film, but that isn't really what the film is about at all, but it's always there in the background. I guess that is what directing is, trying to make that assessment, and hoping you got it right. There's nothing more pleasing than sitting in a room with 600 strangers in the dark and feeling like it worked. I was never a fan of the preview process until I started making films in America, but when you are making a film like this it is important to get that feedback and the feedback was telling us that something was working.

I also had a fabulous cast, when I came to the project it was something Catherine wanted to do and the process of finding the other actors for the other main characters was fantastic. Aaron really came forward for this with such zest and conviction that I found it fantastic to feel that enthusiasm because I thought when you're out there on the set the last thing you want is someone that is half reluctant to be there. When someone comes to you and says you know what forget about everything else I have done this is how I see this character being played.

Then Abby was like a gift. When you cast an actor her age you see hundreds of tapes of sometimes very, very good and very talented girls, but when I saw Abby's audition tape it just bowled me over and it just stopped the process in its tracks and it was before Little Miss Sunshine was even finished at that stage and I said, 'That's it, we're done.'

So then you put these three together and you hope for the best, and when it really does happen, I mean chemistry is a really overused word. As a director, you know you have the actors that can do the work, but how will that X-factor translate on screen is an unknown and there is only a certain amount you can do.

No Reservations hits theaters on July 27, for more information click here.

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