Posts Tagged ‘Beautiful Boy’

Amazon.com have added  Beautiful Boy to their catalogue.  As yet, they are not displaying a release date, but if you have an Amazon.com account, you can sign up to be notified when it is announced.

Beautiful Boy DVD

Beautiful Boy Bluray

So far, there is nothing on any of the other Amazon stores.

IMDB are reporting a DVD release date of 3 August in Sweden, so I am hoping that a worldwide DVD release will be around the same time. As soon as there is anymore news I will let you know.

DVD & Bluray cover images ave been added to the Gallery, or you can click on the thumbnails below.

Article from AV Club 8 June 2011

The actor: Versatile Welsh performer Michael Sheen, who’s apparently following in the footsteps of fellow Brits like Michael Caine and Judi Dench by seemingly never turning down a role. He’s taken leading roles in highbrow, awards-bait fare like The Queen and Frost/Nixon, but can also be seen hamming it up as a werewolf leader in the Underworld trilogy, a vampire lord in the Twilight movies, a rakish sybarite in Tron: Legacy, and so forth. At least he always seems to commit to the serious roles, and have a lot of broad fun in the more ridiculous ones. But he’s more about commitment than fun in his latest, Beautiful Boy, a painful, poignant drama in which he and Maria Bello co-star as the struggling parents of a college boy who kills 21 classmates before turning the gun on himself. As always, Sheen gives a terrific, intense performance as a father and husband who’s falling apart.

Frost/Nixon (2008)—“David Frost”
Michael Sheen: The journey, the whole journey of it—starting on a small stage at the Donmar Theatre, doing a workshop reading of the play at a point where David Frost ended the first half singing a song. Ultimately to doing a production at the Donmar, then at the West End, then on Broadway, and then the movie of it, and then being at the Oscars with it—it was an extraordinary journey.

AVC: Was your rendition of David Frost notably different over those changing spaces, in those changing versions?

MS: Yeah—well, hang on. The demands of each were different, even the different-sized theaters, and then theaters in different countries, and that kind of stuff. There was a big adjustment each time, so that was the most extraordinary relationship you end up having with a story, doing it in so many different ways, with different casts as well. I had three casts I worked with over the whole period. It was an extraordinary way of getting intimate with a particular story and character.

AVC: Did you feel like you were refining that role every time, or just transposing it for different media?

MS: No, I think my understanding of it deepened each time. Obviously, when different actors were playing different parts around me, I was still the same character, but I was revealing different parts of the character depending on what I was reacting to all the time. If there are different actors playing different characters around you then you change as well, so it wasn’t just about changing it for the medium. No, you discover parts of the character.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009) and Breaking Dawn parts 1 and 2  (2011-2012)—“Aro”
MS: That’s a character I just find really, really fascinating. I’m a big fan of vampire movies generally, and that sort of tradition of characters. So being able to have my own take on a character, and being someone who taps into all the things that really frightened me when I was a kid, like Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and The Blue Meanies in Yellow Submarine, and [Laurence] Olivier’s Richard III on film. All these characters really stayed with me and disturbed me in some way, and yet sort of thrilled me. That’s what I always tend to draw on when I play that character. And also, the level of excitement and passion that the audience has. My own daughter is a big fan of the Twilight stories, the books. So that’s the other thing—it’s the first time I’ve done something my daughter actually actively had an interest in.

AVC: Have you gotten caught up by the fan mania that’s hit some of the people involved in the series? Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart have had fairly complicated lives since they started doing those movies.

MS: I guess they have, yeah. I don’t get any of that, probably because the audience for those films, I don’t think on the whole, know other things I’ve done, and certainly wouldn’t recognize me if they saw me walking down the street. So I get away with all that.

AVC: Is it ever strange going back and forth between playing serious, buttoned-down, real-life people and playing outsized fantasy roles in Twilight or Tron: Legacy?

MS: No, that’s why I got into acting in the first place. It’s the variety and the challenge of doing different things and playing different characters. It’s all one big dressing-up box.

The Queen (2006)—“Tony Blair”
MS: [Laughs.] The Queen, that was… no wonder it’s something. You have such a long journey with these films, there’s so many different things. I guess, in a way, what was most important about that was that it was the beginning of my collaboration… Well I did [the TV film] The Deal with [director] Stephen Frears and [writer] Peter Morgan, and that was the first thing I had done with Peter. But The Queen was on another level. So in terms of the first movie, the first cinema film I’ve done as part of the collaboration with Peter Morgan, The Queen cemented my relationship with him. He’s had such a big effect on my career, as has Stephen Frears, who directed that as well. So that was a very exciting collaboration. And that was the first time I had ever been in something that ended up at the Oscars, as well. So being a big part of that whole journey for the first time was very exciting and interesting.

Mary Reilly (1996)—“Bradshaw”
AVC: Was Othello your first film role?

MS: The first one I ever did was with Stephen Frears, a film called Mary Reilly. Stephen directed, and Julia Roberts and John Malkovich are in it.

AVC: Ah, that came out the year after Othello, but was filmed earlier. What was that first experience like?

MS: It was fascinating. I discovered much later that it was quite a difficult shoot for everybody, for various reasons. But because it was the first time I was seeing all that happening, seeing just how a film got made, I was just fascinated by it all. Although, I was very nervous whenever I had to actually do anything in the film, because I just felt so much pressure, you know, to get it right and not mess it up. So it was quite a nerve-wracking experience, as was being around Julia Roberts, who was lovely, but you know, a huge star. It was all so new and exciting and interesting.

Wilde (1997)—“Robbie Ross”
MS: That allowed me to spend a bit more time in front of the camera, so I started to relax a bit more, and I felt a bit more involved. So I really enjoyed that. There were a lot of actors in that who went on to do better, or great things: Jude Law and Orlando Bloom were in that. There was a great company of actors, and working with Stephen Fry, who played Oscar, who I then went on to be directed by [in Bright Young Things]. A really fascinating man with a fascinating life and story. It gave me the opportunity to get a bit more experience working in front of the camera, so I felt a bit more relaxed doing that.

Midnight In Paris (2011)—“Paul”
MS: Well, to be able to work… I always find working in a city is the best way to discover it, really. It makes you feel like you’re not a tourist anymore. So I had the opportunity to do a play in Paris quite a few years ago, but to film in Paris with Woody Allen was fantastic. It’s such a beautiful city, you know? The sort of access we had, we would turn up every day to a different location, and there would be some sort of amazing work of art in front of us that we could have all to ourselves. Whether it was the Rodin sculpture garden, or Monet’s water lilies—actually, the one thing I’ll always remember is being at Giverny, where Monet lived, and standing on the Japanese bridge, and looking at the actual water lilies he depicted, that we had been in front of a few days before. So that was just stunning, beautiful, just thinking, “Normally, there would be hundreds of tourists here, but I get it all to myself because we’re filming.”

AVC: To the degree that Midnight In Paris has a villain, you’re playing him. Woody Allen has used that intellectual blowhard character before, and he seems to authentically hate the type. How did he ask you to play that role? Did he encourage you to play it up?

MS: No, he got me to play it down, if anything. He said, “You know, I think this character is sort of the ultimate peasant, and I think you might have some fun with him.” But in the actual playing of it, he wanted to not make too big a deal of it, just to be very simple with it, not to go too over-the-top, make him very real. Other than that, he sort of left me to it.

Underworld (2003), Underworld: Evolution (2006), Underworld: Rise Of The Lycans (2009)—“Lucian”
MS: Given that he died at the end of the first film, to be able to go back and play the character again was great. Especially because he started out as a villain, and one of the things I enjoyed most about playing that character for the first time was to try and find a way for the audience to sympathize with him. By the time I got to do the third film, and to tell his story, it was really interesting to see how he turned into what he turned into. It’s a really enjoyable exercise to know where you have to end up, and to try and tell a surprising story about a character so you reveal aspects of it that people weren’t aware of before. I enjoy that too. As a general thing, I’ve always been drawn to characters who appear to be one thing on the surface, but are actually something else underneath. I’ve always enjoyed that, the challenge of taking characters who seem fairly villainous or monstrous, and finding a way to empathize with them.

AVC: Given a choice on an average day between seeing a popcorn-y action film like Underworld or something more serious and involved like Frost/Nixon, which do you think you’d pick?

MS: I think the films I’m in are a pretty good reflection of my taste, which is very varied. I only tend to really want to be in things if I’d want to go see them myself. My tastes are fairly wide-ranging, and the things I do are a reflection of that. I’m not someone who just sees one genre of film or one type of film; I enjoy going to see all kinds of different things. It’s very rare that there’s a mixture of the things I like all in one film, but I would point to—well, my favorite film of all time is a film called A Matter Of Life And Death, which was called Stairway To Heaven in America, by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger; that’s a film that combines sort of the real world with the more fantastical world. And a film in more modern times, like Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, [is] very much anchored in reality, but also has an element of the fantastic. Those are the things I’m most drawn to on the whole, but I’m as happy going to see something that is very much in the real world, or something that’s in a more fantastical world as well.

The Damned United (2009)—“Brian Clough”
MS: I suppose it was the first, and pretty much the only, time where the two great obsessions in my life came together, which was then soccer and acting. Before I got very involved in acting, I always wanted to be a soccer player. Being able to combine the two was fantastic. And such an extraordinary character as well; he was someone I grew up with as a child in the ’70s. He’s a huge figure in Britain, not just in the world of sports, but also in the world of entertainment as well. He was an extraordinary character, so to be able to actually get to be him for a short time was really exciting.

30 Rock (2010)—“Wesley”
MS: I loved doing that. It was great. It’s quite nerve-wracking to do out-and-out comedy. I’ve always enjoyed looking for the humor in the things I’ve done, but it’s very rare that I’ve got to do something that is pure comedy. Especially working alongside someone like Tina [Fey], who is so, so brilliant at it, and so smart, and so quick, and so sharp. It could have been quite intimidating, but actually, everyone was so generous and lovely to work with that it put me at my ease. It was really enjoyable to play a character who, the more I played that character, the more Tina wrote it more around what I was doing. That was a lovely thing, to see a character develop because the person you’re acting with is also the person who’s writing it.

Beautiful Boy (2011)—“Bill”
MS: It’s exciting to work with an actor who you really connect with, and feel like the only thing important to this person is doing the best job you can do and working together, and there’s no ego involved. You can really cover huge amounts of ground when you feel as trusting and safe with someone as I did with Maria [Bello] on this. The level of honesty and connection and trust that we had in working on it was quite remarkable, and exhilarating, and special. So that will be the thing I will always remember.

AVC: In our interview with her, she said she doesn’t like rehearsals, and she also doesn’t do much research for a role; she wants to find the character in the moment. Is that simpatico with your style?

MS: Not necessarily—I wouldn’t say I have a particular style, really. It depends on each project, and the requirements and needs as I see them on each thing. Some things are really great with a lot of rehearsal, and some things aren’t. Sometimes I do a lot of research—with the characters I’ve played who are real-life people, I’ve spent anything up to six months researching and rehearsing and working on them. And there are other things I haven’t done any research or rehearsal on in particular, so it really depends on each project. I plan and work out what’s appropriate and what fits, and the needs of each thing as it comes along.

AVC: How do you determine that? Is it more in the script, or from interacting with other people who are going to be in the movie?

MS: With something like Beautiful Boy, I didn’t feel the need to do a huge amount of research. I felt like the most important thing, looking at the script, in terms of what would help tell the story the best, it seemed like the best thing to concentrate on working on the right sort of relationship with me and Maria, given that we were going to spend so much time together on such intense material. It would just be the two of us, and we had a very short shoot—it was only 30 days, so we needed to have a really good working relationship. And for us to really bed ourselves into who these people are, and what’s this relationship like, and what’s the dynamics, and what’s the backstory. And then the aspect that I suppose we could have done more research about, which would be about looking into the experiences of people who had gone through something similar.

Actually, in this case, I felt like the strongest element was that these characters have no idea what they were doing, or what the rules are, or what they should be thinking or feeling, or what’s the next step. So I felt like not knowing anything about it was probably more appropriate. So in this case, it was more to do with backstory, and me and Maria getting together and working things through, but on something else, it might be completely different.

IamROGUE.com have a video interview with Michael Sheen and Maria Bello talking about their respective roles in Beautiful Boy. A copy of the video has been added to the Video Library, but you can also watch it by clicking the thumbnail below.

Article from FilmCritic.com 6 June 2011

In Shawn Ku’s Beautiful Boy, a married couple learns of a violent school shooting at their only child’s college campus. The twist? Their son turns out to have been the shooter, and has taken his own life at the conclusion of the bloody melee. Maria Bello and Michael Sheen, who play the emotionally devastated parents, called FilmCritic.com to talk about what draws them to a script, how parenthood changes an actor’s perspective, and the next round of The Twilight Saga.

Q: This is the first time I’ve ever interviewed an actor who has played an O’Connell onscreen.

Maria Bello: When did I play an O’Connell?

Q: You played Evelyn O’Connell in the third Mummy movie, Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.

Article from LA Times 4 June 2011

These days, Michael Sheen seems likely to turn up anywhere — and everywhere.

The actor who gained attention and acclaim with a string of roles drawn from real-life characters in films such as The Queen, Frost/Nixon and The Damned United also has demonstrated a fondness for turning more commercial films on their heads — delivering joyously odd performances in vampire franchises such as Underworld and Twilight and sci-fi outings such as Tron: Legacy.

“I suppose it reflects my taste as an audience member,” said Sheen, 42, regarding his seemingly unlikely range of roles. “I’m as likely when I’m deciding what film I want to watch to go to the small art-house cinema as I am to go to the big multiplex. And I don’t see why my acting career shouldn’t reflect my taste as well. I do things that I would like to go see ultimately. They’re all things that I’d like to watch myself, and therefore I should like to be in them.”

Sheen’s latest round of projects is particularly eclectic. He had a recurring role on the sitcom “30 Rock” as Wesley Snipes, a mismatched love interest to Tina Fey . In April, he appeared in a 72-hour-long performance of “The Passion” in the small town in Wales where he grew up. And Sheen appears as a blowhard academic in Woody Allen’s new “Midnight in Paris,” turning in a bone-dry comedic performance as a know-it-all intellectual and romantic rival to Owen Wilson’s unmoored Gil.

“He’s a stock character in Woody’s films, someone who the Woody Allen character can feel both superior to and inferior to and complain about,” said Sheen, who’s been making a cameo appearance in the gossip pages thanks to his relationship with his “Midnight” costar Rachel McAdams. “If I’d ever thought about doing a Woody Allen film, I would have thought it would be in New York, not Paris. It was a surprising experience in a lot of ways.”

Then there is his powerful turn in “Beautiful Boy,” which opened in limited release on Friday after premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival last year.

As Bill, the father of a college student who died committing a bloody campus shooting, Sheen, alongside Maria Bello as his wife, Kate, cycles through all the conflicting feelings and self-criminations one might expect from the emotional aftershocks of such a devastating event.

Like Lynne Ramsay’s upcoming “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” about a mother coping with the devastating consequences of a son’s violent, lethal outburst, “Beautiful Boy” tackles a hot-button subject matter. But for first-time feature writer-director Shawn Ku, the story was principally a portrait of a marriage in decline, watching two people forcefully thrown together at the very point they are most distant from one another.

“Initially we set out to write a story about a relationship, with two people who didn’t know each other as well as they thought they did,” Ku explained of the process with his co-writer Michael Armbruster. “And from that we came to this idea of having them be parents of a campus shooter. We’d never seen that before, even in press coverage. We tend to vilify these people when those things happen, so they’re not open. The Columbine kids, those parents didn’t speak for more than a decade.”

While the film touches on events with real-world echoes, Sheen said he didn’t prepare in the same way he did for his turns as Prime Minister Tony Blair in “The Queen” or TV personality David Frost in “Frost/Nixon.”

“There’s always something you can research, and I can do this as much as anyone, but you can start to do research for the sake of doing research. Almost for the sake of being able to say, ‘yes I did research’ in interviews to make you sound like a proper actor,” he said. “But sometimes it’s just not appropriate. It felt in a way that it would be more useful not to know anything because they have no idea what to do. They’re lost.”

“Beautiful Boy” was shot in just 18 days in late 2009 — “Basically Michael and I had to pay them in order to be in this movie,” joked Bello — and Ku acknowledged the difficulty of the low-budget production.

He mentioned that Sheen had to shoot one of his most emotional scenes, a poignant voicemail message Bill leaves on the phone of his dead son, in a rush at the tail end of Sheen’s first day of filming.

The production schedule also didn’t give Sheen and Bello much rehearsal time to build up the small shorthands that make them seem so much like an authentic couple in the film.

“We didn’t have a lot of time, but we got a lot done in that time,” said Sheen of his working relationship with Bello.

“It is rare, even when you connect with another actor, to have such a level of trust as we had. Because of what we worked on before shooting, talked about with Shawn, we were very honest with each other about our relationships and our own experiences and that connected us, I think. I’ve never felt more comfortable with another actor.”

Sheen and Bello determined that in the series of scenes featuring just the two of them together, each actor would always be at some differing point on the emotional scale in an effort to make the film more than just a one-note chamber piece on grieving.

“I read this book on grief beforehand because I had heard that the grief process when someone loses a child takes years,” Bello said. “Here we have to fit it into two weeks [of on-screen time] and go through grief, rage, denial, all the levels. Michael and I wanted to be sure we weren’t playing the same emotion at the same time in the same scene. So when he was in anger I was in denial, or I was in sadness when he was in rage. It was interesting to figure out how to get all these levels in there so you’re not just playing shock.”

Although his performance in “Beautiful Boy” shows off Sheen’s dramatic skills, it is his versatility that might be most notable about his work overall. In “Tron: Legacy,” for example, Sheen turned a small role as a duplicitous nightclub owner into a spectacular piece of showmanship that was purposefully drawn from David Bowie at his most chameleonic.

“All these things get put together and out of it comes this weird thing,” said Sheen of the self-aware playfulness he tends to bring to his roles in bigger-budget films. “And until someone says, ‘No, stop it,’ I’m just going to keep going. It was the same with Aro in ‘Twilight.’ There’s this character who is ultimately completely insane who was driven mad by being immortal and plays games with himself.”

He’ll reprise the role of the menacing vampire leader later this year with the release of the first installment in the franchise’s two-part finale “Breaking Dawn,” and Sheen noted that the majority of his time on the shoot was spent on a single battle sequence, which should promise to be a showstopper.

“People talk about the characters being camp, but there’s just a sense of self-conscious theatricality about them because they are playing games,” he said. “There’s a sense of joy there but also an anger and darkness as well.”

There is also a lovely new image attached to this article. A copy of which has been added to the Gallery.

Article from NY Mag 3/6/11

In Beautiful Boy, Michael Sheen and Maria Bello play grieving parents who must come to grips with the fact that their son has perpetrated a massacre. It’s a drastic change in tone and content from the last film Sheen had a major role in — Tron Legacy, where he played a peroxide-blond baddie with extreme flamboyance — but that’s the way this Welsh actor likes it. Toggling freely from fact-based dramas like The Queen and Frost/Nixon to vampire movies like The Twilight Saga and Underworld, Sheen (who can also currently be seen in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris) keeps his roles as diverse as possible, and as he told Vulture, there’s a method to his madness.

Are you aware of this film with Tilda Swinton that just played at Cannes, We Need to Talk About Kevin? Who would have thought that around the same time, there’d be these two films about parents struggling with their child having committed a mass shooting?
Yeah, I’ve heard about it. What is that all about? You don’t get anything about a certain subject matter, and then there’s lots all at the same time. I haven’t seen that film, but I’m sure it’s wonderful. It’s a wonderful director, Lynne Ramsay, and Tilda Swinton is a phenomenal actress. If the work is good and it’s well made, hopefully there’s room to see a number of films about the same thing. We do see a lot of films about love! [Laughs.]

This is a very controlled performance, but you’ve also played very flamboyant men recently. Do you ever get role whiplash from two wildly different back-to-back parts?
In a way, that’s the thing that helps. To bounce out of one thing that I’m really immersed in, I sort of need something to be totally different to get me out of the last thing I did.

What was the best example of that?
I remember when I was doing Tony Blair in The Queen, the next thing I was going to do was a film about a very well-known actor in Britain called Kenneth Williams, and he was very, very skinny, so there was no way around it: I just had to lose a lot of weight. So, all through The Queen I was losing a lot of weight, and because we shot it all out of sequence, when I watch the film now I can see Fat Blair walk out of a room and then Thin Blair comes out the other side. I also remember Frost/Nixon and Underworld 3 coming out on almost the same day, which was an extraordinary double bill. After Frost, I’d been doing that for two years and then I did the film of it, so I had kind of let myself go on purpose. He needed to look like someone who enjoyed food and the finer things in life, and then I had to get myself ready to play a lean, mean werewolf in Underworld 3. That was quite a switch.

And you just played a Christ-like figure a month ago for a live performance in Wales, so I’m sure there will be some crazy whiplash from whatever you take on next.
For the first time ever, in fact, after doing that I thought I can’t go on to something else after this. It was such an intense experience, so I’m still sort of in my phase where I need a long lay down in a darkened room, really.

Can you tell me about that play? I read that it was essentially a nonstop three-day performance that ended in your crucifixion?
It’s something that I did in my hometown in Wales, and I’ve been working on it for two years. Ultimately, it was one performance that took place over three days, 72 hours of nonstop, continuous action, and it took place all over the town in different locations. It was based around the story of the Passion and it played over Easter weekend, but it was very much set in the modern day and it was about the town celebrating its community. I played a teacher who disappears for 40 days and lives on the mountain above the town, then reappears on the morning of Friday. Extraordinarily, the very beginning of it was at dawn on Friday on the beach, this sort of unannounced happening with about 300 people there who’d heard rumors about it, and then it culminated with about 12,000 people standing on a roundabout watching the crucifixion scene at the end. To see all these people in a town take part in this story, it was an extraordinary experience.

I have to say, I’m a little disappointed that your character Wesley Snipes didn’t show up in either the live episode or the 100th episode of 30 Rock.
Yeah! Well, he’s sort of unpredictable, so who knows where he’ll pop up again. That’s what’s enjoyable about the character: The more I played him, and the more Tina [Fey] got used to me playing him, the weirder he got.

Since he directed you in The Damned United, you must have been very pleased with the success Tom Hooper had at the Oscars this past year with The King’s Speech.
Oh, it’s amazing, for lots of reasons. Aside from Tom’s success, there were a number of people on that film who had also worked on The Damned United, so it was great to see them have so much success. And obviously for British film, it was a fantastic thing, and for Colin [Firth] as well, who’s a wonderful actor who’s been around for a long time.

Have you hit Tom up for a role in his next film, Les Misérables?
I only found out the other day that that’s what he might be doing! I haven’t hit him up yet, but I will. [Laughs.] I’m sure that the next time I see him, I’ll start singing “Empty Chairs and Empty Tables” while we’re in the bathroom or something.