The Young Star Of We Need To Talk About Kevin Tells Us Why It’s Always Fun To Go Dark
By Simon Jablonksi

Despite being fully aware of the boundary that exists between the magic land of cinema and the real world, there’s still an initial scare when Ezra Millar swings into the room with the same authoritative air and mischievous twinkle as the onscreen demon boy, Kevin, in Lynne Ramsey’s adaptation of the bestselling novel We Need To Talk About Kevin. One of the year’s best films, the story follows the ongoing psychological war between the manipulative Kevin and his downtrodden mother – a brilliant performance from Tilda Swinton. The blinkered delusion of his father, insistent that Kevin is a normal all-American kid, pushes his mother further into despair. Splendidly shot and heavily stylised, We Need To Talk About Kevin is a beautifully traumatic and compelling exploration of the bleak extremities of human motivations. The film’s devilish star, Ezra Miller, spoke to Topman GENERATION about working with Ramsey and the fun of exploring darker characters.

Topman GENERATION: Was it quite intense playing such a dark character like Kevin?
Ezra Miller: Every time you endeavour to work on dark material you’re endeavouring in an effort to shed light – it’s interesting, I’ve actually had happiest times on sets creating characters who are the darkest, and vice versa, had some of my darkest experiences on set because when you’re portraying perhaps a character with levity or who holds light, then the action of portraying that character will be using darkness to shadow detail. In that respect, Kevin was the most ecstatic filmmaking experience I’ve ever had because it was so much an act of time and time again going to the heart and the goodness of this character. A lot of the fuel that I used to the fire of Kevin was the fuel of his goodness, or where he truly can be justified, not only in his own mind, but also from an objective standpoint.

Topman GENERATION: Is it more fun to play those kinds of characters?
Ezra Miller: Certainly. I think this whole art form is so fun. We have this amazing opportunity to explore the parallel versions of ourselves, and this is the art form where you can get to know them.

Topman GENERATION: I was talking to someone about whether Kevin loved his mother or was purely manipulative, is that something you thought about?
Ezra Miller: Yes, and it’s something I would never want to betray the beauty of, because hearing that you and that person had that debate is certainly testament to the success of the film. I would certainly ask where lies the motivation to deceive and manipulate? Where lies the motivation to do anything as a human being outside of love, or removed or detached from love?

Topman GENERATION: From an actor’s perspective, what makes Lynne stand out as a director?
Ezra Miller: She’s vastly different from any other filmmaker I’ve worked with or will ever work with. The fuel to her fire is her vast emotional drive and her emotional standing. So it’s almost like a magical Willy Wonka machine. I’ve watched her field these questions when we’ve been doing press and promotion where she’ll try to explain her decision-making behind something like sound or imagery or colour where really what I witnessed when working with her is that those things just sprout naturally form a deep emotional understanding of the story and truly she brings to light the fact that all of the tools of filmmaking are essentially going to be representative symbols of one great big unspeakable emotional complex. She’s a visual composer, she has been for a long time. There is that aspect of a fine artist at work who instinctually knows how the image will tell the story.

Topman GENERATION: Were there any scenes that were particularly strange or difficult to film?
Ezra Miller: They were strange and difficult each and every one of those scenes because of the way we shot so much chronologically. And then also because of the pinnacle importance of the last scene, which had to be shot last because my hair got shaved off my head. For natural reasons it felt like all of my performance was in build up to that scenes. It’s almost like the rest of the performance is a gathering of tension, like the drawing of a bow, and then that’s sort of where there is, that scene we see release.

Topman GENERATION: So did you feel a lot of release when you finished filming?
Ezra Miller: Yeah when I finished this movie I breathed a deep sigh of relief just in these initial moments of coming back to my own personal consciousness and feeling like ‘hooo I’m okay!’ And you go on a really long trip and mid-way through you think ‘will I ever be the same?’, and then a voice in your head says, ‘no, you won’t ever be the same, but keep going.’ And then to come to the end and realise I’m fine and I wasn’t internally plotting to murder anyone and such things, it was very nice, a great release and I got to a phone as early as I could and I called my mother.

If you haven’t heard of Ezra Miller yet, that will surely change by the end of the year. The actor stars as Elliot, the son of Ellen Barkin‘s character Lynn in Another Happy Day, which hits theaters November 18. Ezra Miller also stars as the title character in We Need to Talk About Kevin, debuting in theaters December 9, along with the upcoming adaptation The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which debuts in theaters next year. I recently had the chance to speak with Ezra Miller over the phone about Another Happy Day, which centers on a wedding that could be a powder keg of emotions for a highly volatile family. Here’s what the young actor had to say.

Can you talk a bit about your initial reactions to the script, and what you took away from it?

Ezra Miller: Yeah. I was blown away by how many characters were fully understood within the context of a two-hour movie. Usually, you see that sort of subtlety and nuance in the understanding of a whole plethora of characters, as both antagonists and protagonists, as being human beings who are, at times, easy to identify with and, at times, impossible to understand. Usually you only see that in an extended television series, where they have time to explore each character over the course of an hour, or you see it in a really long theater production. The script, at first, it was almost like there was no narrative. There was no plot, but you found yourself in this really undefined cohesive order, falling into sympathetic grasps of each character. When I read the script, I just thought that was incredibly refreshing, because, usually within a movie, you only come to understand or identify with, one or two or three characters. Then the rest just tend to just fall into their archetypes and remain there. (Writer-director) Sam (Levinson) has this understanding of people, where the complexity of the ways and dimensions of a human being, that any character will have so many different sides, and masks, and appearances. When I first read the script, there was just something amazingly refreshing about that.

Yeah, it almost doesn’t feel like a narrative feature. It feels like this actual glimpse inside a family. That’s how real it felt, to me. It was really wonderful to watch.

Ezra Miller: The official narrative within the dysfunctional family, to this point, has been done. It’s been so explored and over-explored. It will never be fully explored, but yeah, I feel like Sam knew his own voice as sort of an alternative storyteller. That’s incredibly impressive that he was able to write the script and know, even within the way the camera moves, that you feel this omnipotent voice to Sam‘s storytelling. It moves you, I feel, compellingly through a story which, essentially, has no direct plot line.

Ellen Barkin also produced this, so she must have been on board when you were approached for this. Who else was attached when you came on? There is quite an amazing cast here, so were those people who were attached part of the draw for this role also?

Ezra Miller: It was very, very exciting to see in action. Ellen had been involved for years before I got involved and, around the time that I got involved, everyone else was kind of falling into place. I think Kate (Bosworth) had just been cast, and Ellen Burstyn had just come on board. A week later, George Kennedy and Eamon O’Rourke, who played Brandon, came on board, and everything just sort of fell into place, right around the time I jumped on. But yeah, Ellen had been involved since the beginning, and Demi (Moore) was also involved very early on.

What kinds of things did you take away from being around this much talent?

Ezra Miller: It was hilarious, man. It was like being in one of those cheesy Hollywood murals, with Elvis Presley and James Dean smoking a cigar. It was fucking amazing. I’m still not sure how I snuck my way into such a situation. It was like school, you know, college for a dropout actor (Laughs). It’s that sort of environment, especially when you have a director who, in the act of production, is still actively learning, it makes it this beautiful open learning experience for everyone. It’s actually the best way to make art, because in the given moments when artistic production is really happening, when creation is happening, there’s always something new to find. If you can approach it with that sort of receptivity, I certainly found that having a bunch of amazing old-school and new-school actors, all rallying behind the vision of this first-time director who was determined to learn everything, yeah, it became like one big school. Sometimes those school projects are the coolest pieces of art you ever make.

How would you compare Sam‘s style as a director, as opposed to other directors you have worked with? What did you really take away from working with Sam?

Ezra Miller: I think within him being a first-time director was something that will follow his style throughout his entire career, which is that every day, he was keenly aware of, in the moment, what was really interesting. Even in this world he created, this world that stemmed from his vision, he knew what was really the point of drama or the pinnacle of comedy, of that particular moment. Even though we were moving through a very tight shooting schedule, and working to form his vision within the story, he kept all of this room, this space, to be spontaneous, in what he was choosing to capture. We had these amazing experiences of being able to roll a full canister of film out on improvisation that came out of nowhere, except for what was already happening in the air of the true realizations of the characters and the family that day. I think being able to maintain a vision, while also being that wide open to what is truly popping in any given moment, that’s a style in and of itself. That made him very, very cool to work with.

I was just blown away Ellen in this. I have to watch it again, actually, just to take it all in. What was it like being in those scenes with her?

Ezra Miller: It was very intense, you know. It was a great challenge to match her nature of vulnerability, the internal justification for her anger. Essentially, there were some parts of it that were vastly complicated to approach. She had a lot of wisdom, regarding how to breathe thos complexities into life. Sometimes it would be as simple as us listening to the same Cat Stevens song before we stuck up a crazy fight scene. I think a lot of her genius is in this willingness to do whatever it takes to access a performance. She’s got this stern determination and this constant rekindling of the commitment to sacrifice for the piece of art. As Sam was responsive to the day-to-day spontaneous truths, she, as well as a lot of the other actors on this, were really determined to create them.

I was wondering if you could talk a bit about The Perks of Being a Wallflower. That’s another one with a phenomenal cast, so could you talk a bit about who you play in that, and your experiences shooting it?

Ezra Miller: Yeah. I play Patrick, who is a young man in the throes of yet another adolescent tribulation. He’s sort of a character who’s full of pride, and determined to live haphazardly, or, in other simpler words, to live. In that simple task, he’s meeting incredible resistance. There are all these challenges to his pride as a person. It’s such a beautiful movie, because it expands out to encompass, again, many different characters. In understanding them, we find these little whispers of a blueprint for how to juggle the fucking nightmare of adolescence (Laughs). All of these amazing actors were put in the same strange hotel in Pittsburgh, and we all had these specific missions that came to one big mission, to hopefully expose a little bit of that reality, through the lens of this one group of kids in Pittsburgh, in the 90s. It’s a random lens, but it’s one that is much loved by the readership of that book. Hopefully, we found even more in those characters, and just those little, true stories of how difficult it is to navigate the highs and lows of adolescence, when the highs and lows are more extreme than ever, and yet, at the same time, you have the least amount of experience and wherewithal to deal with them. It was so amazing, to be plunged into that exploration with all the talented young actors of this time. There were just so many amazing kids who I got to realize that vision with. It was very cool, man.

Finally, what would you like to say to anyone who’s curious about Another Happy Day, about why they should check it out in theaters on November 18?

Ezra Miller: Well, it’s impossible to not identify with this. I don’t know where else you’re going to be able to endeavor so deeply into dark, dramatic content, with such beautiful, comedic, levity. I think something amazing has been accomplished, in how heavy, and also how funny, this movie turned out to be.

Awesome. Well, that’s my time. Thanks so much for talking to me, Ezra. It was a real pleasure, and I really enjoyed the film.

Ezra Miller: Great. Thank you, sir.

You can watch Ezra Miller in the fantastic dramatic comedy Another Happy Day, which debuts in theaters November 18.