Stranger Than Fiction

[MacGuffin]

Trailer here.

Release Date: November 10, 2006 Nationwide

Starring: Will Ferrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Queen Latifah, Emma Thompson, Dustin Hoffman

Directed by: Marc Forster 

Premise: A comedy about a novelist who is is struggling to complete her latest--and potentially finest--book. There's only one problem: she only has to find a way to kill off her main character, Harold Crick, and she'll be done. Little does she know that Harold Crick is inexplicably alive and well in the real world and suddenly aware of her words. Fiction and reality collide when the bewildered and resistant Harold hears what she has in mind, and realizes that he must find a way to change her--and his--ending.

[NEON MERCURY]

i hate queen latifa....but my confidants at the source magazine tell me that forster has a nack for cultivating annoying black female actresses to oscar winners 

[modage]

beginning seems like it wants to be a charlie kaufman film, end seems like it wants a much bigger audience.  but looks real good.  i'm there. 

[Pubrick]

fine i'll watch it. but only to see if it makes any sense. the premise itself, at least the way it is described and how it's presented in the trailer, seems to be more clever than it can justify. if all she has to do in order to finish her "latest and finest" book is kill her main character the book must be reaching its climax or even at its end, right? but then why is harold crick shown to be so boring. his whole life is explained in a sentence, he's alone and his life has no point.

if the story in her book doesn't include the fact that her character suddenly (inexplicably?) begins to hear the narration of his own life, then the whole thing is bullshit. did harold click only become the character of her book at some later point in the story? what the hell is the rest of her book about??? so stupid. THIS sounds like the worst movie ever.

[Ghostboy]

Reason this movie will be worth watching: Emma Thompson.

Marc Forster has become boring. Will Ferrell, as much as I hate to admit it, is starting to get boring. Maggie Gyllenhall? Not boring, but the trailer sure does downplay her.

[Gold Trumpet]

Reason this movie will be worth watching: Emma Thompson.

Ding Ding.

Match this movie with Lucky You which features Robert Duvall and you have the two best actors at work on films that will even hit my city.

I'll see both because certain actors are worth buying tickets for.

[pete]

I wrote a comic when I was 14 that was kinda like this.  but this one is not in the future, does not star me, and doesn't have kungfu.  It still looks great though.

[MacGuffin]

Ferrell takes dramatic turn as taxman



Will Ferrell, best-known for boisterous, off-the-wall characters, said it was liberating to take on a dramatic role in his new movie but he has no illusions of artistic grandeur.

Ferrell, before a room full of reporters promoting his latest film "Stranger Than Fiction" at the Toronto International Film Festival, was not the outrageous character he is famous for playing in movies like "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy" or "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby."

Nor is he over the top in "Stranger Than Fiction," although it does have comedic moments.

"I found it really freeing to play a character in this way, for lack of a better term, to play something as real as I've gotten to play before," Ferrell said. "That was one thing that appealed to me."

Ferrell plays Harold Crick, a taxman with very regular habits and a penchant for numbers. One day, he starts hearing a voice narrating his every action. The voice says Crick is going to die but doesn't give details.

Little does Crick know but he is the main character in a novel that reclusive writer Kay Eiffel, played by Emma Thompson, is trying to complete as she narrates his life.

With the help of a literary professor played by Dustin Hoffman, Crick tries to figure out how to find Eiffel so that an untimely demise may be avoided.

Ferrell's previous dramatic role was last year's "Winter Passing" and now, like one-time comedic actors Jim Carrey and Bill Murray, he is exploring drama further.

ALL ABOUT THE STORIES

Ferrell says he is not motivated by a desire for Oscars or roles in high-profile pictures -- although those things would be nice.

"It's more about interesting stories for me," he said. "Obviously you'd like to be chosen for those sorts of roles. It's not an obsession of mine. It's not a goal of mine to attain a certain status."

Ferrell was humbled by being in a cast with Academy Award winners Hoffman and Thompson, as well as Maggie Gyllenhaal and Queen Latifah.

"I really did feel like I was placed on an all-star team but I was just hired to play defense, like not throw the ball out of bounds," Ferrell said. "I just wanted to learn from that, hold my own in the best way that I could."

Director Marc Forster hopes "Stranger Than Fiction" is better received than his last film, "Stay," a 2005 thriller starring Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts that followed his critically acclaimed "Monster's Ball" and "Finding Neverland."

"'Stay' was always meant to be an experimental, abstract film. I knew most people would misunderstand," Forster told Reuters in an interview.

"At this point I'm just happy with the movie and feel good about the film ... especially after 'Stay' you felt that the dark clouds (were) coming. Now you feel like there's a little sunshine coming. That's a good thing"

Forster directed Halle Berry to a best actress Oscar in "Monster's Ball" while Johnny Depp was nominated for best actor for playing J.M. Barrie in "Finding Neverland." Could Ferrell find himself getting similar honors?

"That would be beautiful," Forster said.

"Stranger Than Fiction," which made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday, is scheduled to be released November 10.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Emma Thompson Gets Inside Ferrell's Head

On the set of his latest movie, Will Ferrell did whatever the little voice in his head told him to do. Luckily, the words arrived in the classy voice of Emma Thompson.

In "Stranger Than Fiction," Ferrell stars as Harold Crick, a lonely, obsessive-compulsive tax auditor who one day finds he can hear an unseen, omniscient narrator describing his life and imminent death.

Thompson co-stars as an author struggling to finish her novel about a social misfit taxman named Harold Crick, unaware he actually exists and that the dark fate she has in store for him will come true if she keeps writing.

On set, Ferrell was fitted with an earpiece so he could hear British actress Thompson's elegant recorded narration in his head, a voice that drives Harold to distraction.

"It was great to literally use this voice in my head to play off of and not to have to imagine it or have what's typically done, which is have a script supervisor off camera reading it," Ferrell, 39, told The Associated Press at the Toronto International Film Festival, where "Stranger Than Fiction" premiered.

"The physical intimacy of having it inside my head really felt like, OK, this would make you crazy. ... And there's something about, well, her accent. Emma Thompson's not a bad choice. I'm just glad it wasn't Rhea Perlman."

After such broad comedy hits as "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby" and "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy," Ferrell shows great restraint and dramatic pathos in "Stranger Than Fiction," which hits theaters in November.

The cast also includes Dustin Hoffman as a literature professor who offers Harold advice, Queen Latifah as the novelist's assistant and Maggie Gyllenhaal as a baker whose tax audit brings romance to Harold's life.

The film calls for a far subtler comic performance than anything Ferrell has done so far as Harold goes awkwardly about his business, unnoticed by the world.

"What's so touching about him in this is you imagine an actor really trying to be ordinary and nice, and I think Will is that person," Thompson said. "He really does have a kind of very innocent, very unknowing, almost unsophisticated quality colored with this incredible grasp of the ridiculous, which of course is the ultimate sophistication. So it makes him very watchable."

Former "Saturday Night Live" star Ferrell previously had shown off more serious acting chops in two movies last year, Woody Allen's "Melinda and Melinda" and the drama "Winter Passing."

"Stranger Than Fiction" director Marc Forster said Ferrell's depth and range have always been apparent in his characters.

"I think even in his broad stuff, he's always very believable," said Forster ("Finding Neverland"). "Even when it's so out there, he brings it back to the point where you follow the character and care about him."

After "Stranger Than Fiction," Ferrell heads back to big comedy with "Blades of Glory," in which he and "Napoleon Dynamite" star Jon Heder play disgraced ice-skating rivals who stage a comeback as the first men's pairs team.

Ferrell also hopes to reunite with "Talladega Nights" co-star John C. Reilly for "Step Brothers," about two men at odds when their parents marry.

"Kind of `The Parent Trap' meets `Ordinary People' is what we're gunning for," Ferrell said.

While Ferrell has become one of Hollywood's leading comic stars, he acts genuinely surprised that he got to work opposite Thompson, Hoffman and the other cast members.

"I felt like I was mistakenly put on an all-star team and everyone's fouled out and they're like `Ferrell, you're in. Just don't throw the ball out of bounds,'" Ferrell said. "OK, I'll play good defense, I'll only take a shot if I'm wide open. I just trusted in Marc and my fellow actors and tried not to mess it up."

[MacGuffin]

"Fiction" reveals truth - great writing wins out

Five studios, 37 directors and scores of movie stars threw themselves at Zach Helm's script.

Emma Thompson wanted in after page 22. After Will Ferrell landed the lead, he cleared his jammed schedule. Maggie Gyllenhaal had to audition with Ferrell to prove they had chemistry. Dustin Hoffman and Queen Latifah jumped at their supporting roles.

Crammed with witty dialogue and unpredictable suspense, the $30 million romantic comedy-thriller "Stranger Than Fiction," directed by Marc Forster ("Finding Neverland"), proves a Hollywood adage: If you build a great screenplay, they will come.

Like many of the better movies these days, "Fiction" was independently produced apart from the studio system. Producer Lindsay Doran developed the original story with Helm, a playwright-turned-screenwriter who is now 31, without any financial commitment and long before they accepted backing from studio supplier Mandate Pictures. Just before "Fiction" started its six-week shoot in Chicago in summer 2005, Columbia Pictures acquired the film and will release it domestically November 10.

"Fiction," which nabbed raves last week at the Toronto International Film Festival, goes down so easily that it's hard to imagine five years of painstaking labor went into it.

"I spend a long time on these movies," says Doran, who between stints running production at United Artists and Mirage Entertainment produced "Dead Again," "Sense and Sensibility" and "Nanny McPhee," all involving her frequent collaborator Thompson. "Developing a screenplay takes years and years."

Back in 2001, Doran first worked with Helm on "The DisAssociates," a screenplay they sold to Warner Bros. Pictures. Then, one day, the young writer gave her a one-line idea. "I want to do a movie about a guy who has a narrator," he told her.

"That's a good idea," she replied. "The way he described it, it was as if you were watching 'The Age of Innocence,' and Daniel Day-Lewis somewhere began to hear what the narrator Joanne Woodward was saying in his head. It was a comedy situation. But it wasn't a movie yet."

The next time Helm saw Doran, he said, "This guy has a narrator who tells him things about himself that he doesn't know."

"It's not a story yet," she told him.

The next time, he added, "The guy has a narrator and one thing she tells him is, he's going to die."

"That's it!" Doran cried. "I was so excited. We decided that the narrator should be a woman novelist. We talked and talked and talked. I didn't know what he was writing."

While "Fiction" has been compared to the work of the prodigiously original Charlie Kaufman, Helm's screenplay was influenced by Hal Ashby and Woody Allen and predates Kaufman's "Adaptation" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." "We thought of it as a comedy version of 'The Hours,"' Doran says.

The producer and the writer talked about the rules of comedy and tragedy and how to keep the movie real. "I wanted the movie to be like a thriller," Doran says. "It's 'A Chronicle of a Death Foretold,' a murder mystery. I wanted it to feel like somebody was trying to prevent a murder that happens to be his own."

After Doran finally read a draft in 2003, they set to work streamlining and moving one scene into the next with increasing urgency. "I wanted the stakes to be high," she says, "as the novelist finishes her book and as the guy prevents his own death."

One thing they never figured out: how to explain the logic of exactly how this particularly strange movie fiction works. "It was an ongoing conversation," says Doran, who sounds amazed that audiences are buying the film at all. "We never explain it. I kept saying to Zach, if nothing else we need a scene where somebody says, how could this be happening?"

Forster shot one such scene, but he cut it after preview screenings. "Is he a character out of a book or is he real?" Forster asks. "I see him as real, an everyday man who suddenly has a narrator pop into his life. Some parts of his life are part of the book and some aren't. Not everything has to be perfectly explained; that's the freedom and beauty of art and fiction. For me, the title says it all -- 'Stranger Than Fiction."'

"It's contained in the performances," she says. "He believes, and she believes, and they behave as if it's really happening. She goes back and writes the movie we see."

The plan always was to show the movie to one director at a time and then line up a cast. As soon as the script got out, the phone started ringing. But Joe Drake and Nathan Kahane of Senator International (now Mandate) wouldn't stop calling. They signed a deal that gave Doran her freedom. "They never gave us one script note," Doran says.

"The day we optioned the script," Drake says, "every studio called us. If a studio had made it, it could have cost $60 million."

"We work with the studio as partners," says Kahane, who says that Columbia gave them helpful notes in postproduction. "That way, they don't control us."

By 2004, 37 directors had approached Doran, who was producing "McPhee" in London. Their pitches were all for different movies: emotional dramas, love stories, high-concept comedies and FX movies. Only one director understood that they wanted to do all of the above: Forster, who was just off "Monster's Ball."

After several dark films, Forster was looking for a comedy or love story and couldn't find a script. "It was the kind of comedy I like, slightly more low-key and introverted," he says. "It was rock solid. When it came time to shoot the movie, there were no holes in it."

Before the release of his "Finding Neverland," it was a leap to hire Forster, who at that point had only directed dramas, such as "Monster's Ball." But Doran says she was convinced he was right as soon as she met him. "His movies are about pain. And every comedy should have a lot of pain in it," she says. "He's deeply humanistic; his brilliance is not cold. He's a warm, loving and kind person. He has a remarkable visual sense, which is not at the expense of feeling. He creates a reality that you believe could happen."

With Forster aboard, the stars started lining up, enabling the director to cherry-pick his cast. Ferrell approached them to star. Doran had Forster, who had only seen "Old School" and "Saturday Night Live," look at all of Ferrell's talk-show appearances to see what he was really like. When Forster met with him, he saw "a human aspect to him," he says, "the quality I was looking for in Harold Crick. And the crucial chemistry between him and Maggie has to be there naturally to be believable. They don't have much screen time."

Ferrell set up his shooting schedule for the next few years so that all of his films could move to accommodate "Fiction" when it was ready to go before the cameras. Doran laughs at the irony of having the studios pester her to learn "Fiction's" start and finish dates.

Forster wanted to bring in his "Neverland" star Hoffman. Doran wanted to lure her frequent collaborator, Thompson, and for the first time approached her with a script that they hadn't developed together. Thompson was on page 22 when she called Doran to accept. In order to help contain the movie's budget, none of the actors took their top rates.

"If you have something great and palpably enjoyable," Doran says, "studios and directors can't wait to do it."

At its best, great writing is a magnet that cuts through all the rules in Hollywood.

[OrHowILearnedTo]

http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/oscar-watch.htm

Stranger Than Fiction

A contender that needs a boost

Why it may be Oscar worthy: Director Marc Forster's Monster's Ball and Finding Neverland caught the academy's fancy with multiple nominations. This comic fantasy about an IRS auditor (Will Ferrell) who hears his life being narrated by a writer (Emma Thompson) already has been labeled Charlie Kaufman lite, given its mind-game similarities to Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Early word: The intriguing trailer has 'em abuzz, especially with Ferrell's career in post- Talladega Nights overdrive. — S.W.


Wow, I would have never imagined this as Best Picture material, guess that shows you how relaible USA Today is.

[A Matter Of Chance]

It makes me sad where things get oscar buzz for being Charlie Kauffman 'lite'

[Kal]

I loved this. If you want it to make perfect sense and look for hole plots, dont fucking even see it... now if you want to relax and watch something original, funny and well written... be my guest.

Will Ferrel is excellent in this, and so is Emma Thompson. It was very entertaining, but really the thing I loved the most is that is a very original story and its good to see that once in a while.

[modage]

It was very entertaining, but really the thing I loved the most is that is a very original story and its good to see that once in a while.

yes, but i really really really wish i hadn't seen the trailer, or moreover the trailer had not given away almost every beat of the film.  i think i would've liked it more, or maybe loved it, if it had a few more surprises.  otherwise i thought it was a fine piece of entertainment.  i saw most of Just Like Heaven on HBO the other day and it was awful and theres really no reason for it.  Stranger Than Fiction should be like the minimum requirement for a film.  dont be less good than this or you are wasting my time.  i did like it but recognized it as good fluff.

[clerkguy23]

Stranger Than Fiction should be like the minimum requirement for a film.

sounds pretty horrible.

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

This movie didn't do a lot for me, but that's not to say it wasn't good.  I think this would work as a fine date movie because it was good enough to not be paying full attention, but the end kind of drags a bit.