National Post (National Edition)
Career all over the map ... and that’s by design
Versatile director relishes offbeat challenges
Good luck making sense of the film career of David Gordon Green.
The 42-year-old Arkansas director wowed Toronto festival audiences in 2000 with his feature debut, George Washington, a lyrical tale of poverty and resilience set in the American south. But his big-screen credits since have included a stoner comedy (Pineapple Express), a remake of an Icelandic drama (Prince Avalanche), a tale of redemption starring Nicolas Cage (Joe) and the political satire Our Brand Is Crisis, with Sandra Bullock.
His newest, Stronger, tells the true story of Jeff Bauman (Jake Gyllenhaal), who lost both his legs in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. After a gala world première at the Toronto International Film Festival, it opens in cinemas on Sept. 22.
“Your average audience wants to go see a little of this, maybe see that this weekend, and something else the next weekend,” Green says by way of explanation. “That’s what I do as a film enthusiast. I always look at something and think: What if I’d made that? What would I do with that concept, that actor, that genre?
“It’s just me being professionally greedy. Just as I love to travel around the world and go to countries I know nothing about, I like to step into that type of film experience. I personally am engaged by challenges where I’m stepping outside my comfort zone.”
Green says he shoots commercials to live, but he lives to make movies. In fact, it was while he was filming a Nike commercial in Oklahoma City that the Boston bombing took place. Ironically, he was visiting the memorial to that city’s bombing at the time. “That really triggered something in me.”
While the injury sets Bauman’s tale in motion, Green says he was most taken with the love story. Canada’s Tatiana Maslany plays Erin Hurley, Bauman’s girlfriend, who was running the marathon when the blast hit him near the finish line.
“If it was a front-andcentre recent event tragedy movie, I don’t think I’d be the right guy for that,” Green says. “You give that to Oliver Stone. What I was drawn to is that the event is way in the background. The event is never in focus.” (That’s literally true in the scene where Bauman’s amputated limbs are unbandaged for the first time; the camera avoids showing his bloody stumps, though we will see them later in flashback.)
Keeping true to his method of constant reinvention, Green’s next film will be Halloween, which he calls a sequel, though to which version of the 1978 classic he didn’t say. But he’s never done a horror movie before, which was reason enough to do this one.
Green wishes more directors would try something new. “I wish there were assignments. I wish I could assign David Fincher a lighthearted comedy. I wish he’d do a sitcom with a laugh track. Just step out of that serial killer comfort zone and do Fuller House.”