Anchor ads are not supported on this page.

4S Ranch Allied Gardens Alpine Baja Balboa Park Bankers Hill Barrio Logan Bay Ho Bay Park Black Mountain Ranch Blossom Valley Bonita Bonsall Borrego Springs Boulevard Campo Cardiff-by-the-Sea Carlsbad Carmel Mountain Carmel Valley Chollas View Chula Vista City College City Heights Clairemont College Area Coronado CSU San Marcos Cuyamaca College Del Cerro Del Mar Descanso Downtown San Diego Eastlake East Village El Cajon Emerald Hills Encanto Encinitas Escondido Fallbrook Fletcher Hills Golden Hill Grant Hill Grantville Grossmont College Guatay Harbor Island Hillcrest Imperial Beach Imperial Valley Jacumba Jamacha-Lomita Jamul Julian Kearny Mesa Kensington La Jolla Lakeside La Mesa Lemon Grove Leucadia Liberty Station Lincoln Acres Lincoln Park Linda Vista Little Italy Logan Heights Mesa College Midway District MiraCosta College Miramar Miramar College Mira Mesa Mission Beach Mission Hills Mission Valley Mountain View Mount Hope Mount Laguna National City Nestor Normal Heights North Park Oak Park Ocean Beach Oceanside Old Town Otay Mesa Pacific Beach Pala Palomar College Palomar Mountain Paradise Hills Pauma Valley Pine Valley Point Loma Point Loma Nazarene Potrero Poway Rainbow Ramona Rancho Bernardo Rancho Penasquitos Rancho San Diego Rancho Santa Fe Rolando San Carlos San Marcos San Onofre Santa Ysabel Santee San Ysidro Scripps Ranch SDSU Serra Mesa Shelltown Shelter Island Sherman Heights Skyline Solana Beach Sorrento Valley Southcrest South Park Southwestern College Spring Valley Stockton Talmadge Temecula Tierrasanta Tijuana UCSD University City University Heights USD Valencia Park Valley Center Vista Warner Springs

Interview with The Drop director Michaël Roskam

Trashcan puppies

The Drop: Aww.
The Drop: Aww.
Movie

Drop **

thumbnail

Tom Hardy is Bob Saginowski: hunched and shuffling, folded in on himself both physically and otherwise. When we meet him, he's tending bar at his cousin Marv's (a ponderous, sullen James Gandolfini) old place, a neighborhood joint now run by Chechen gangsters who sometimes use it to receive unbankable cash deposits (hence the title). But when he finds a beaten pit bull puppy in Noomi Rapace's trash can, his shell starts to crack, and not a moment too soon. Director Michael Roskam favors mood, symbolism, and character over action, spectacle and plot; indeed, what plot there is serves the revelation of character. Mysteries abound, many of them having to do with missing bodies, but the real mystery is, what makes Bob not tick? The tension builds unhurriedly, as he finds himself forced to deal with both the dog's past owner (a genuinely creepy Matthais Schoenaerts) and his own past. And because this is the neighborhood, those things have a way of intersecting.

Find showtimes

I spoke with Mr. Roskam shortly after his latest film had screened at the Toronto Film Festival. He reported that the screening had gone very well: people applauded not only at the end of the film, but also after a climactic scene. I asked if he ever thought of the audience when making a movie, and he said that he tried to make films that worked both anecdotally — this happened, and then this, and then this — and in a more layered fashion. Then I asked him why Dennis Lehane’s story “Animal Rescue,” on which the (Lehane-scripted) film is based, made him think this should be his next project after the well-regarded Bullhead.

Michaël Roskam: First of all, it was extremely well written. Within a couple of pages, it started turning into images for me, and I wasn’t reading dialogue, I was hearing it. The mind and the gut started to connect, and that’s good.

Sponsored
Sponsored

Second, I love characters who are static — someone who is not actually living, but just existing — because they are trying to handle their past. It could be something that happened to them, some attack or trauma. But we forget that you can also be traumatized by the things you do. Things that you regret or struggle with can become a force within you. These static people don’t want to deal anymore with the past; they want to forget it. They enter into a kind of existential hypnosis: day in and day out, the same thing. Bob has done it to the extent that, at the outset, people might think he’s a little simple. Tom Hardy and I felt that we had to present him as a kind of idiot savant — not in the insulting sense, but in the sense of the fool. It reflects a simplicity that you otherwise see only in children and animals. We cannot judge them if they do harm because they didn’t do it on purpose, or it was just their nature. You cannot bring a dog to trial for biting because he’s a dog, you know? That feeling was there in my first vision of Bob, [but] of course, he’s carrying a secret.

Matthew Lickona: Right. We know he’s got something to feel guilty about, because otherwise, he’d go up to receive communion at Mass.

MR: Exactly. We tried to make this a suspenseful character study, peeling layers off like an onion until we get to the core of who Bob is and find out the truth about everything. It starts when he finds the dog. I said to Tom, “The dog is like your soul. Your soul is in a box, hidden somewhere, and you’re going to find it. The reason is unknown: maybe it’s destiny, maybe it’s the gods saying, ‘Oh, there’s some shit that’s going to happen with Bob, let’s give him a soul to help him.’ ‘How are we going to do that?’ ‘Give him a puppy. He’ll open up, become emotional, become vulnerable, and maybe wake up and be ready to stand and defend when the time comes, and at the same time, face the demons in his past.’ With the dog comes a girl, with the girl comes a gun.

ML: Well, we are talking about Dennis Lehane.

MR: He is so good at describing that world, keeping it grounded and faithful to genre elements. And I love the old gangster films, the crime films. The good ones, the innovative ones, are actually social dramas. They’re criticizing society, providing a voice, as Dennis says, for the man without a voice. He said a wonderful thing yesterday: “Shakespeare wrote about kings falling from thrones. I write about people falling off the curb.” I’m very interested in that world: people who are confronted with the dark side of the law, because the law is not always going to take care of them. They live lives that are pretty dangerous; they have pressure about everything. You get people trying to survive and using whatever tools they have to do so. Sometimes, those are the tools presented by crime.

ML: The church Bob has been attending closes by the end of the film. Is he ever going to go to church again?

MR: Well, he might get married there. We don’t know, but I think he will try. It will take time for him to deal with all the things he’s done, but he expressed his vision: “After I die, I will probably not go to a good place. But let’s try to make a good living until I have to go.” And I think the dog is definitely going to help him have a little bit of innocence as long as he lives.

ML: At one point, he says that there are some sins you can never come back from, sins that mean you have to be alone forever.

MR: I think the film plays out to give a sense that he’s going to have a shot, but we’re not sure if he’s going to succeed.

The latest copy of the Reader

Here's something you might be interested in.
Submit a free classified
or view all
Previous article

Live Five: Songwriter Sanctuary, B-Side Players, The Crawdaddys, Saint Luna, Brawley

Reunited, in the round, and onstage in Normal Heights, East Village, Little Italy, Encinitas
The Drop: Aww.
The Drop: Aww.
Movie

Drop **

thumbnail

Tom Hardy is Bob Saginowski: hunched and shuffling, folded in on himself both physically and otherwise. When we meet him, he's tending bar at his cousin Marv's (a ponderous, sullen James Gandolfini) old place, a neighborhood joint now run by Chechen gangsters who sometimes use it to receive unbankable cash deposits (hence the title). But when he finds a beaten pit bull puppy in Noomi Rapace's trash can, his shell starts to crack, and not a moment too soon. Director Michael Roskam favors mood, symbolism, and character over action, spectacle and plot; indeed, what plot there is serves the revelation of character. Mysteries abound, many of them having to do with missing bodies, but the real mystery is, what makes Bob not tick? The tension builds unhurriedly, as he finds himself forced to deal with both the dog's past owner (a genuinely creepy Matthais Schoenaerts) and his own past. And because this is the neighborhood, those things have a way of intersecting.

Find showtimes

I spoke with Mr. Roskam shortly after his latest film had screened at the Toronto Film Festival. He reported that the screening had gone very well: people applauded not only at the end of the film, but also after a climactic scene. I asked if he ever thought of the audience when making a movie, and he said that he tried to make films that worked both anecdotally — this happened, and then this, and then this — and in a more layered fashion. Then I asked him why Dennis Lehane’s story “Animal Rescue,” on which the (Lehane-scripted) film is based, made him think this should be his next project after the well-regarded Bullhead.

Michaël Roskam: First of all, it was extremely well written. Within a couple of pages, it started turning into images for me, and I wasn’t reading dialogue, I was hearing it. The mind and the gut started to connect, and that’s good.

Sponsored
Sponsored

Second, I love characters who are static — someone who is not actually living, but just existing — because they are trying to handle their past. It could be something that happened to them, some attack or trauma. But we forget that you can also be traumatized by the things you do. Things that you regret or struggle with can become a force within you. These static people don’t want to deal anymore with the past; they want to forget it. They enter into a kind of existential hypnosis: day in and day out, the same thing. Bob has done it to the extent that, at the outset, people might think he’s a little simple. Tom Hardy and I felt that we had to present him as a kind of idiot savant — not in the insulting sense, but in the sense of the fool. It reflects a simplicity that you otherwise see only in children and animals. We cannot judge them if they do harm because they didn’t do it on purpose, or it was just their nature. You cannot bring a dog to trial for biting because he’s a dog, you know? That feeling was there in my first vision of Bob, [but] of course, he’s carrying a secret.

Matthew Lickona: Right. We know he’s got something to feel guilty about, because otherwise, he’d go up to receive communion at Mass.

MR: Exactly. We tried to make this a suspenseful character study, peeling layers off like an onion until we get to the core of who Bob is and find out the truth about everything. It starts when he finds the dog. I said to Tom, “The dog is like your soul. Your soul is in a box, hidden somewhere, and you’re going to find it. The reason is unknown: maybe it’s destiny, maybe it’s the gods saying, ‘Oh, there’s some shit that’s going to happen with Bob, let’s give him a soul to help him.’ ‘How are we going to do that?’ ‘Give him a puppy. He’ll open up, become emotional, become vulnerable, and maybe wake up and be ready to stand and defend when the time comes, and at the same time, face the demons in his past.’ With the dog comes a girl, with the girl comes a gun.

ML: Well, we are talking about Dennis Lehane.

MR: He is so good at describing that world, keeping it grounded and faithful to genre elements. And I love the old gangster films, the crime films. The good ones, the innovative ones, are actually social dramas. They’re criticizing society, providing a voice, as Dennis says, for the man without a voice. He said a wonderful thing yesterday: “Shakespeare wrote about kings falling from thrones. I write about people falling off the curb.” I’m very interested in that world: people who are confronted with the dark side of the law, because the law is not always going to take care of them. They live lives that are pretty dangerous; they have pressure about everything. You get people trying to survive and using whatever tools they have to do so. Sometimes, those are the tools presented by crime.

ML: The church Bob has been attending closes by the end of the film. Is he ever going to go to church again?

MR: Well, he might get married there. We don’t know, but I think he will try. It will take time for him to deal with all the things he’s done, but he expressed his vision: “After I die, I will probably not go to a good place. But let’s try to make a good living until I have to go.” And I think the dog is definitely going to help him have a little bit of innocence as long as he lives.

ML: At one point, he says that there are some sins you can never come back from, sins that mean you have to be alone forever.

MR: I think the film plays out to give a sense that he’s going to have a shot, but we’re not sure if he’s going to succeed.

Comments
Sponsored

The latest copy of the Reader

Here's something you might be interested in.
Submit a free classified
or view all
Previous article

Colorado governor Polis’ days in La Jolla canyons

Why Kamala might not run for Calif. governor
Next Article

Tuna within 3-day range Back in the Counts

Mind the rockfish regulations
Comments
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed Big Screen — Movie commentary Blurt — Music's inside track Booze News — San Diego spirits Classical Music — Immortal beauty Classifieds — Free and easy Cover Stories — Front-page features Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts Feast! — Food & drink reviews Feature Stories — Local news & stories Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore From the Archives — Spotlight on the past Golden Dreams — Talk of the town The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it Letters — Our inbox Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news News Ticker — News & politics Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated Poetry — The old and the new Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers Reading — The hunt for intellectuals Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds SD on the QT — Almost factual news Sheep and Goats — Places of worship Special Issues — The best of Street Style — San Diego streets have style Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves Theater — On stage in San Diego this week Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads Your Week — Daily event picks
4S Ranch Allied Gardens Alpine Baja Balboa Park Bankers Hill Barrio Logan Bay Ho Bay Park Black Mountain Ranch Blossom Valley Bonita Bonsall Borrego Springs Boulevard Campo Cardiff-by-the-Sea Carlsbad Carmel Mountain Carmel Valley Chollas View Chula Vista City College City Heights Clairemont College Area Coronado CSU San Marcos Cuyamaca College Del Cerro Del Mar Descanso Downtown San Diego Eastlake East Village El Cajon Emerald Hills Encanto Encinitas Escondido Fallbrook Fletcher Hills Golden Hill Grant Hill Grantville Grossmont College Guatay Harbor Island Hillcrest Imperial Beach Imperial Valley Jacumba Jamacha-Lomita Jamul Julian Kearny Mesa Kensington La Jolla Lakeside La Mesa Lemon Grove Leucadia Liberty Station Lincoln Acres Lincoln Park Linda Vista Little Italy Logan Heights Mesa College Midway District MiraCosta College Miramar Miramar College Mira Mesa Mission Beach Mission Hills Mission Valley Mountain View Mount Hope Mount Laguna National City Nestor Normal Heights North Park Oak Park Ocean Beach Oceanside Old Town Otay Mesa Pacific Beach Pala Palomar College Palomar Mountain Paradise Hills Pauma Valley Pine Valley Point Loma Point Loma Nazarene Potrero Poway Rainbow Ramona Rancho Bernardo Rancho Penasquitos Rancho San Diego Rancho Santa Fe Rolando San Carlos San Marcos San Onofre Santa Ysabel Santee San Ysidro Scripps Ranch SDSU Serra Mesa Shelltown Shelter Island Sherman Heights Skyline Solana Beach Sorrento Valley Southcrest South Park Southwestern College Spring Valley Stockton Talmadge Temecula Tierrasanta Tijuana UCSD University City University Heights USD Valencia Park Valley Center Vista Warner Springs
Close

Anchor ads are not supported on this page.

This Week’s Reader This Week’s Reader