WAMG At The ARTHUR NEWMAN Press Day

Colin Firth and Emily Blunt team up for the “gently comic screen romance” Arthur Newman, in theaters now. Recently, I sat down with both Colin Firth and Emily Blunt in a roundtable discussion about the film. Check it out below.

Wallace Avery (Colin Firth) is tired of his existence. Divorced, disconnected from his young son, dissatisfied with his love life, depressed and in the doldrums of middle age, he decides to make a radical change by walking away from his old life. He buys a new identity and hits the road as Arthur Newman to begin life anew, bound for Terre Haute, Indiana, where he dreams of reinventing himself as a golf pro at a tiny country club.

So who’s better, Nicole Kidman or Emily Blunt?

Colin Firth: Nicole Kidman. (laughs)

Emily Blunt: Whatever! I know the real truth.

So I see the same repore we saw on screen right here before us. I don’t think you two were acting onscreen.

Colin Firth: Without the dog.

Emily Blunt: That poor, traumatized pug. Scarred for life.

Colin Firth: No animals were harmed in the making of this film. Tell that to the dog psychiatrist.

Did they have a dog whisperer on set?

Colin Firth: They did!

Emily Blunt: As we were going at it, we had this lady going “Snuggles, lay down. No stay. Sit. Sit. Stay.”

Colin Firth: For a moment I thought she was talking to me. (laughs)

How’s it playing characters, because you get into other people’s skin, it’s the very nature of your job, and you take on other personas. Here you are playing two people that want to take on other personas. Life imitating art?

Emily Blunt: Well I think a lot of people want to at some point in their life be someone else, run away, escape in some way. We do get to do it. We have a job that allows for that. We have an outlet for it.

Colin Firth: A lot of people think that these lives seem unremarkable throughout this. I think in some ways for Arthur, probably for both of them, speaking for myself I think he his role up to life is ludicrous. He’s a boy scout, kind of proper… I don’t think it has much to do with him at all and I think people do get stuck in it and try to do what they think is the appropriate thing at every stage and it doesn’t necessarily deliver what anybody else needs. His marriage obviously didn’t work, his relationship with his son is catastrophic, his relationship with his subsequent girlfriend. He’s not getting anywhere with either the golf, the job or anything, all of this sort of doing the right thing in a precious, prissy sort of way, hasn’t worked out. So that was probably the role, that in some ways rather than escaping his true self and trying to reinvent he was probably shedding something that was bogus from the start.

What interested you both about these characters? They’re both very complex, there’s multiple layers. We see with you, in the beginning, she’s a little bit lost and then there’s a kindness underneath that I found.

Emily Blunt: I’m glad. I think Arthur is much kinder to Mike than she is to him. I think she finds it kind of baffling at first because she really tries desperately to keep everybody at arms length by adopting this crazy persona.

Colin Firth: They’re both looking for a connection. What could seem like an implausible coincidence that two people that change their identity would find each other on the road, that isn’t really chance. It’s chance that they meet, but she would have gone her own way in the beginning if she had not found out he was lying about who he was. That’s the entire reason she decides to be curious about him and stick with him for awhile, so she’s driven by that. The fact of some sense of commonality there. These are two people who somehow have managed to deny themselves some real intimacy for years and years. Whether they’re looking for that in each other, they find it through the paradox of pretending to be other people. So it’s only when they quite literally dress up as others and talk like somebody else that they actually can express something a little deeper and actually get sexual, get intimate with each other.

Emily Blunt: Get sexual. (laughs)

You guys are in costume, it’s kind of like a…

Emily Blunt: Do you not think that Colin looks so sexy in a salmon polo t-shirt, creepy glasses?

Colin Firth: I’ll tell you, by the end of it I was rocking that look. Everybody was pulling their pants up.

Emily Blunt: Everybody was pulling them up to their nipples!

Colin Firth: I thought that costume might have been silly.

I’m from Texas and that’s how they dress.

Colin Firth: I was going to say come on, this is too much. I kind of like it for the character but then I walked into environments where okay… this is subtle.

At least you weren’t wearing a green jumpsuit for motion capture.

Emily Blunt: Have you done that before?

Colin Firth: It was a heavy… the motion capture jump suit. That was another costume experience.

Emily Blunt: When did you do that?

Colin Firth: It was “A Christmas Carol” and yeah, the experience was very, very heavy spandex.

Emily Blunt: And you have got… (laughs)

Colin Firth: Oh my… Let’s face it. No, I tried actually. I’ve got to do something about this. I’m not going to be on set, on my first day, in this indignity.

Emily Blunt: Was it tight on the legs as well?

Colin Firth: Yes. (laughs) Let’s not go down… but I tried everything! Fruit, culinary equipment, I mean everything.

Emily Blunt: I told Colin that he had spindley legs one day, that’s why I’m laughing about this.

Colin Firth: One day? I think you told me on several days.

I have a question about the rehearsal process. So in the press release the director said that you didn’t have much of a rehearsal process, that you kind of got to know each other as the characters got to know each other. Talk a little bit about that process, because …

Emily Blunt: There wasn’t one really. We kind of sat in a room and…

Colin Firth: But we did find… I remember we talked about this at the time, we encountered a scene with a preconception about it and think this is what it’s for, this is what it’s about, this is what it’ll be like, this is funny, and then often we were surprised by it. In some ways it always felt like that. The first reading of the script had a lot of mystery to me because I wasn’t sure what it contained. I wasn’t sure who these people were going to turn out to be. It was a little bit elusive and I think doing the scenes, we kept uncovering that… The scene where she gets in the bridal outfit for the first time, I thought that was going to be a romp. The way it read was comical to me. He’s being all sort of proper and we mustn’t be doing this, behave yourself, and she’s like “This will be fun!” and then it was going to be kind of raunchy. Then something else happened when she stood at the top of the stairs. The tone changes and she’s captivated, and actually something rather tender and sad about the need these two people had came out of that. I didn’t see that until we played it, until we did it, and that kept happening, that sort of thing.

I felt that in the polaroid scene too, when you turned the camera around and took a picture of him. There was a sadness there that all of a sudden came out of nowhere.

Emily Blunt: We didn’t even… To be honest, that scene we sort of improved a lot of what went on there. That wasn’t really scripted, that moment with the camera. It just sort of happened, we sort of did it. It was nice to work in that way.

Colin Firth: One of the great things about Dante [Ariola] actually is that he comes in with very strong ideas, but he’s rigid about them, and that’s the perfect combination, so you’ve got a great launch pad for everything. A director who’s flexible to the point of where you have absolutely nothing to offer to him at the beginning is no good at all. The same with an actor is the same. Come in with something and be prepared to make it malleable. And so it was constantly quite exhilarating to see…

How much of the film did you get to improv?

Emily Blunt: We didn’t really. I mean the script was very… there was a very descriptive tone to it. There was a starkness to it. I didn’t ever feel the need to embellish in it.

Colin Firth: I think the stuff that was improvised was without dialogue. A lot of that montage stuff in the military costume and the pregnancy, those are the things we thought out.

Emily Blunt: Well I’ve went both ways. I’ve done films where I’ve entirely improvised, and that’s exhilarating in itself, challenging in itself, but this one was I think there was a specificity to these characters and how they interacted was all Becky Johnston. I never felt the need to try and elaborate on anything that she’d written.

How did you like playing Americans? Your accents were fairly good.

Emily Blunt: Good! God bless you. I like it. I mean I find that it really helps that I live in the States, I’m married to an American, I have lots of American friends. I think that if you’re immersed in the sounds on a habitual level, that helps a lot. But I don’t necessarily think of it as an accent. I think you’ve just got to find the voice for the person, who that person is becomes the voice, not necessarily finding in just concentrating on getting your vowel sounds right. Even if it’s not perfect, you need to try to do all the technical stuff and just hurl it out the window because you’ve just got to play the character.

These two characters are so different from anything you guys have played in the past. Just to kind of tie into what you said about the voice, how did you prepare to get into their heads? They both have such unique pasts. Did you read about someone who had a mental illness?

Emily Blunt: I read a couple of books, but not a lot. Yeah, I did, I read some books on it, on schizophrenia and stuff like that, not like Mike is actually schizophrenic, she’s just terrified that she’ll become so. I got an idea for what maybe her upbringing might have been like, witness, what she might have been around with her family. I never really like talking about the process because I don’t know how to talk about it well. I don’t like sounding wanky or what I don’t know what I’m talking about, because it’s really hard… It just sort of happens. I think a lot. I think about it.

Colin Firth: How much technique you’ve drawn or how much training you have is actually a mystery, or else we would be doing master works every time.

How did they end up using English actors to play American characters?

Emily Blunt: God knows.

Colin Firth: You know what? I asked Dante is it a coincidence that… because Emily was the first person he mentioned to me, and we weren’t American. He just wanted the actor that he wanted.

We don’t have any good American actors.

Colin Firth: We all know the answers to that.

Emily Blunt: Yea. Exactly!

You were talking about the scene with the wedding dress, how it became such a different thing when you thought it was something else on the script. Taking that kind of notion, what were your thoughts when you saw the final product for the first time? Was it any different than you thought it would be?

Colin Firth: To be frank we haven’t seen the final product.

Emily Blunt: We haven’t seen it.

Colin Firth: The version that… it’s been changed.

Emily Blunt: We saw a very early cut.

Colin Firth: Yeah, we saw an earlier cut and it’s… I’ve been told it has not radically changed but it has changed. The sound, the music and pace are different than the version that we saw so we’re a bit of a disadvantage on that note. Again, I don’t know because I’m not quite sure what I expected. I’m not quite sure what I expected the film to be when I read it, I wasn’t quite sure what the finished product was going to be when we finished shooting. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that I’m in such a kind of unknown zone. I felt complete belief in the world that we were in and I felt very warm towards these characters and felt I was rooting for them. I’m very curious to know what would happen to them after this film ends sort of thing.

You think it kind of being a road movie, being in the locations, the environments you were in went into that rather than being on a sound stage?

Colin Firth: Yes. There was a sense of reality because you’re going through the steps that your characters are going through in some ways.

Emily Blunt: Any time you’re actually in the environment is transporting. Doing anything on a sound stage is a bit shit.

North Carolina made you think you were in Terra Haute, Indiana.

Emily Blunt: A bit, a bit.

It’s interesting because what you’re saying is that the script is how I felt as an audience felt “I don’t really know what this is or what’s going on,” specifically the moment at the beginning where it becomes this story of where you steal this man’s wallet and you save him. Why do you think the characters chose to do that? It’s such a drastic move and it really launches this movie.

Colin Firth: I think the characters surprise themselves at every step, and you’re absolutely right. In some ways it’s kind of difficult for this film out there because I think expectations define people and the way they think when’s the romantic comedy going to start? I think if this film were in Swedish or Polish with unknown actors, I think there would be less of that sort of expectation. If you had familiar faces in something that’s to do with people who are inconspicuous and lost, I think it takes awhile to adjust to what it is, but that is precisely what drew me to it. The moment you think here we are, that’s a romantic– actually it didn’t go that way. Here we are, this is a bit where it lightens up, but no it goes that way. I think life is more like that. I find it really conformed to the way that I experienced things.

I think it was amazing where the scenes where you were trespassing, putting on these people’s clothes, could have easily come off as creepy or awful, instead it’s sort of sweet and poignant. Did you ever worry about that?

Colin Firth: Well it could’ve been. One of the things that really occurred to me was that actually it’s a transgression. I think there’s a kind of warmth to the people that they’re targeting. I think they’re not just mocking them, in some ways they’re sort of celebrating lives that were denied to them. People who somehow… the Russian girl and the guy at the golf club, they may be absurd but they actually clearly have a connection. They enjoy each other. I think there’s an envy and almost a desire to celebrate what they’re about, particularly the first couple, these old people getting married. Charlotte is completely captivated by them. Look at them, it’s so sweet and they’re adorable and in love, let’s follow them. I want to know what that is and I want to inhabit what that is. I think that probably takes the edge off of that.

ARTHUR NEWMAN is in theaters now