All of these characters were real people. Is it more daunting to portray someone who’s a real life person, and is it hard to hold back judgment and portray them without bias?
Michael C. Hall: It’s fun to have some real things to hold onto. It makes it, to some degree, a different exercise to play a real person. I certainly think, whether it’s purely fictional or based on a real person, that judgment must be withheld or not exist in the first place. In the case of David Kammerer, I certainly didn’t think of him as a stalker. I thought of him as someone who was in love with the wrong person and couldn’t let it go.
Daniel Radcliffe: You do have a certain responsibility but also, as Michael said, it’s fun. There’s a huge amount of material for you to hang onto; he actually did that, this happened and that’s how he responded to that event. So you get a real insight into somebody’s character so you’re not starting from scratch in the same way. Allen is somebody out of the three characters we played that is probably the easiest to find empathy or compassion with. I found him very simple, but there are still moments where he’s so easily manipulated by Lucien that there is a part of you that wants to shake him as a person. It’s fun to just give yourself over to that, and it’s enjoyable.
Also, John (Krokidas) took the pressure off us a lot in this film by telling us not to really research our characters too much past the point that we find them in the movie. So there wasn’t really a sense in any way that we were having to live up to the icons that they became. It was just that we were playing them as the people they were at this moment in their lives.
Dane DeHaan: Lucien is a tricky one because I think he worked so hard to make sure that this story was never told and to make sure nobody ever found out about this story, at least while he was living. My responsibility is to honor this person by trying to figure out truthfully who they were at this point of their life. Not necessarily how Lucien would want himself to be portrayed in the film, but trying to actually dig to the truth and the facts. What’s great about playing a real person is that there’s real stuff out there, but a lot of the work is kind of already done for you. You just have to read it.
Have any of you played real people before or was this your first time?
Daniel Radcliffe: I played Rudyard Kipling’s son in a TV movie in the UK.
Michael C. Hall: First time.
There are so many emotionally and physically intimate scenes in the film. Which scene was the most difficult to shoot, and after shooting which one helped you grow as an actor and as a person?
Daniel Radcliffe: There’s one scene that really stands out for me, and it’s the scene where I come back and find Lucien and he tells me he’s leaving and going off with Jack (Kerouac). That was a scene that we had really done a lot because it was the audition scene. It was my audition scene when I initially auditioned for Allen, and then it was the scene everybody that read for Lucien did, and Dane had already done that a million times. You worry about a scene that’s that intense and emotional. Having done it so many times, will you still be able to retain that same sort of feeling like when you first read it?
On the day, just as we started to shoot the scene, John asked the crew to leave the room for our first rehearsal and just took me to one corner of the room and gave me this goal; he said, “Whatever happens, just don’t let Lucien leave.” Then he took you (Dane) to other corner of the room and he said something to you that I don’t know. Then he just said to us, “Okay, now just improvise the scene without any of the lines.” As somebody who wasn’t used to working in that way, it should have been intimidating but it sort of wasn’t in that moment, and then within two minutes I was crying. It was just very real and it was an amazing exercise, and I never really had that very intense, really emotional experience during acting, so that was pretty cool. Thanks! (laughs)
Dane, what did John say to you?
Dane DeHaan: I don’t remember (laughs). I don’t think that ever happened… No I’m just kidding, but I really don’t remember what he said to me.
What was your most difficult scene?
Dane DeHaan: I don’t know. That’s always sort of a tricky question for me. When you’re making a movie in 24 days, every day presents a whole lot of challenges truthfully and every scene is challenging in its own right. There is a lot of tough stuff in this film that we had to do really fast. The scene with me and Dan on the stairs of Columbia’s library, when he’s trying to convince me to stay, we shot in 12 minutes. I think that’s a good example of the challenge that this entire movie presented.
Michael C. Hall: That water in the Hudson River was pretty cold. I’m surprised Dane didn’t mention it because he had no clothes on. I would agree with Dane that it’s really hard to single anything out, but I think just tolerating being in a place of such unfulfilled passion, that’s just a challenging place to live and tolerate.
Dan, that dance you did in your dorm room, was that improvised or was it scripted?
Daniel Radcliffe: Thank you very much! That was one of those weird things where the song I was doing that to was a completely different song to the one that would be playing in the movie, and I knew that at the time. So I was trying to both dance to the music and make it non-specific (laughs). So that’s my non-specific jazz dance that you saw! You know how you can sync up Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon with the Wizard of Oz? You can do this if you would like with Ain’t Nobody Here but Us Chickens by Louis Jordan. You can do it if you have the inclination.
That concludes our interview but we’d like to thank everyone for their time. Be sure to check out Kill Your Darlings when it hits theatres tomorrow!