Movie star gives good movie star.
I thought he might have some insight to it.
And as it turned out, he’s a huge Paul Newman fan.
Silver Screen Collection/Getty; Todd Owyoung/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank/Getty
He met him a few times.
He really wanted to do it."
It uses extensive transcripts from Newman’s unfinished memoir, which will finally be released this fall.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Paul and Joanne’s family came to you with this project.
Did you get a sense of why they felt you were the right person for the job?
And the more time goes by, the more they just become celebrities.
So I guess that’s why they thought of me.
I am so glad they did.
But I remember my first conversation with them, telling them all the people I thought should direct it.
So you were starting from scratch almost.
I guess they saw that as a positive.
That I would look at it like a journalist, with love.
I obviously have dedicated my life to the same thing they dedicated their life to.
And I just did mine, and I hope they’re happy with it.
What made you say yes to it?
I couldn’t get the word “no” out of my mouth.
I really wanted to.
I knew that this project would hijack my brain.
it’s possible for you to lose yourself making a documentary.
It’s never as good as it should be; could be.
That’s what happened to me.
How did you devise this approach to have contemporary actors reading these transcripts and interweaving your conversations with them?
I just let the river take me.
I didn’t have a plan to do this.
It started pretty simple.
There’s so much on them already.
The thing that the family had that was absolutely unique was this abandoned memoir.
Now, unfortunately, I didn’t have the audio tapes.
So then I thought, “Well, actually, Ethan, I’m an actor.
Why can’t we reenact these interviews?”
And then it started to be really fun to talk to fellow actors about Paul and Joanne.
And I started cutting in these Zoom calls with no intention of using them.
I let the film talk to me.
I started cutting things together.
And I went, “Well, that’s interesting,” and I kept building on it.
How did you choose who would read who?
I followed my gut a little bit.
Laura Linney was an obvious choice.
Laura is an actor’s actor like Joanne.
I did my Broadway debut with Laura, and I knew that Joanne was her great mentor.
So I had those things in the back of my mind.
Zoe Kazan is Elia Kazan’s granddaughter, and Elia was Paul’s great mentor.
LaTanya Richardson was directed by Joanne.
She’s from Georgia.
She would know something about Joanne Woodward that might be interesting."
I kept trying to follow my nose.
Sometimes they were just my friends Billy Crudup, Sam Rockwell, Vincent D’Onofrio.
These are guys who I enjoy talking about movies with and talking about acting with.
They’re old friends, and we’ve all learned about acting together.
How did you cull through all that and figure out how to piece it together?
It broke my brain.
Their life is most interesting when you see it in total.
What’s revelatory about them is the 50-year love affair.
It’s these great careers in the context of a 50-year love affair.
That’s what makes it so remarkable.
I know for myself that there’s always some secret reason why I wanted to do a movie.
It might be one line; it might be one scene.
But why do I want to play that part?
So I watched their movies thinking, “Why did they want to do this movie?”
And then you’d start to see it.
“Oh, here’s a scene where he’s getting divorced.
And oh, here’s a scene with a troubled son.
I know why she wanted to play this part.”
I could start to see their life in their acting.
I’ll give you an example.
I started thinking, “Well, what is Paul’s relationship with his mother?”
I let the actor part of my brain [take over].
I know when I say lines, I have to have a go at fuel it with something personal.
So I kept trying to think, “What are they fueling this with?”
And I would find the connections.
There were many, many things that surprised me along the way.
One is their passion for each other.
And that was powerful.
The other element was how funny they both were.
They’re both just outrageously funny, and they had a wit to them that helped keep them sane.
The unfinished memoir that provides so much of your interview material is being published later this year.
Do you have any involvement with it?
No, I keep expecting them to ask me too.
I’m the only other person that’s read all this stuff.
But I’ve also been extremely busy.
It’s a lot of material, I’m telling you.
I didn’t even use the transcript with his brother, which is its own documentary.
It’s a 200-page interview.
It’s just another movie, you know?
It’ll be really interesting what I say about this experience in 15 years.
Right now, I’m so glad to be done.
It really is like jumping off a high dive or something.
You don’t know if you’re going to die when you land.
I learned a lot about my own gender bias.
I learned a lot about seeing this industry from a female point of view.
How hard that was for Joanne.
You see what’s positive about the past.
You see what’s negative about the past.
I don’t think Paul Newman ever worked with a female director.
All those movies, not one woman.
The only female director Joanne ever worked with was herself.
