FRANK AND CINDY, dir. G.J. Echternkamp
G.J., or Geej (Johnny Simmons), graduates early from college due to an unusually high aptitude, but what he comes home to doesn’t exactly reward him for his intelligence. His mom, Cindy (Rene Russo), has been married to Frank Garcia (Oliver Platt) since Geej was a little boy, and the two live in a co-dependent, angry relationship fueled by inertia, bitterness, and alcohol. Frank was part of a one-hit-wonder band called OXO in the ‘80s (their claim to fame was opening for Hall & Oates), but quickly devolved into a life of drug abuse, alcoholism, and unemployment, enabled by his equally addled wife. Somehow, Geej has grown up to be a somewhat normal young man with aspirations of going to film school, but although Cindy is making an effort to quit drinking and act like a mom for once, he’s devastated to learn that his mom used his school money to buy Frank some recording equipment. Robbed of his future and stuck with parents (technically a parent and a stepparent) that he hates, he decides to film Frank and Cindy in hopes of editing together a humorous sort-of “Where are they now?” type video out of their combative and often hilarious lifestyle. Cindy couldn’t be more willing to help her son out, and Frank finds himself energized by talking about his music and his former glory, but G.J.’s initial intent of creating an ironic parody video slowly becomes something deeper and more cathartic than he expected.
FRANK AND CINDY is actually based on director G.J. Echternkamp’s real life: his stepdad, Frank, was actually part of the band OXO, who made it to the charts with “Whirly Girl” before disbanding after their self-titled debut album. Echternkamp actually filmed the documentary the film portrays, and it was edited into an episode of This American Life before he decided to adapt it into a narrative feature. G.J’s real life footage of Frank and Cindy at the end confirms that their looks, attitudes, and relationship with one another was directly taken from reality, and that personal touch is a big part of why this film works.
We’ve seen a million stories of strained parent-child relationships and post-collegiate coming-of-age dramas, and one of the elements here that makes this one stick out is the believability of the core relationships. Sure, there’s some inherent sitcom humor in the bickering between the title characters, but that’s quickly revealed as a smokescreen for a much more balanced, functional relationship than is evident on the surface. These characters may suck at showing it, but they love each other, just like many families we all know or might very well possibly be part of. Their flaws are real, and their struggles to escape the traps they themselves create are never easily resolved, but thankfully never dovetail into grand, operative misery. They live the defeated, vaguely desperate lives many of us lead, trying to outrun their surroundings despite being overwhelmed and trapped by them.
A huge part of why the central relationship works so well, and provides the beating heart for the rest of the film, is the perfectly cast team of Russo and Platt. Obviously relishing the chance to dig into something deeper than a supporting role, the pair bounce off of each other in a way that’s somehow both vicious and tender. There’s always a tinge of sweet affection whenever Cindy calls Frank a “fat shit” (which is often), and Frank’s inebriated bluster always has a noticeable tinge of self-pity and regret. When he calls himself a “drunken asshole” in front of the camera, or when he tries to play his music for G.J., we feel for Frank despite his apparent irredeemability; this is clearly a guy who has failed a lot of people, but no one is more aware or angered by that than Frank himself, despite his wisecracks and buffoonery. Russo, now an even more valued presence after a decade-plus offscreen (prior to THOR), gets to balance her fierce-minded strength that we’re used to with a strained, but ingrained sense of maternity. She plays at being a mother figure to Frank, but now she’s actually making a go of being an actual mom to her now-grown son, and it’s endearing to watch her try and reconcile her self-abusive, obviously damaged mentality with her newfound optimism and protective instincts. I grew up with these actors, and it’s great to watch them doing something that allows them to be both serious and funny, but more than anything else honest, especially as part of a pair as potent as this one.
Simmons, as the exasperated, cynical son, has less to work with, and ultimately comes off as something of a cypher compared to his vibrant, fleshed-out co-stars. He falls into the sort of well-meaning, but vaguely angsty “I want to be an artist” trend of several other recent young-adult leads (BOYHOOD’s another example), and ultimately, his arc of learning how to “suck it up” and get over his tough upbringing doesn’t quite have the impact it should. The weakest moments of the film involve G.J.’s attempt at creating a social life in his hometown, and a relationship with a snappy video-game-adept young rocker feels tacked on and lame, despite a game performance by THE EVIL DEAD remake’s Jane Levy. However, when G.J. is in his house, acting as a sort of de facto moderator/victim for his mom and stepdad, Simmons is believable as he puts up with the same old fights and excuses, exacerbated by Cindy’s apparent attempts at recovery. It would clearly be easier if he could just cut and run, leaving these people to rot, but he can’t, and we know that it’s as much for internal reasons as it is for practical ones.
This is a film about relationships and not moments, so Echternkamp’s aesthetic sense is low-key and invisible aside from the documentary footage and a few concert sequences. For the interview sequences, he mostly just lets us look through Geej’s camera and gazes upon the performers rapping and doing their thing without punching it up through close-ups or (heaven forbid) “Jimming the camera” as Abed recently put it on COMMUNITY. I applaud Mr. Echternkamp for adapting his story, warts and all, into a feature film instead of rendering it into a more conventional, palatable fiction. You get a sense of this odd, yet relatable family over the course of the runtime, and their growing closeness feels more like the natural progression of their lives than a forced happy ending. There are no enormous victories or life-changing epiphanies, but everyone learns a little bit more about each other and how to treat their loved ones, and because that feels earned and not contrived, this film ends up striking that ever-elusive balance between humor, pathos, and honesty.
But seriously, if you’re fans of Rene Russo or Oliver Platt, it’s worth seeing just for them.
Below is my interview with Ms. Russo and Mr. Echternkamp where the two talk about their close working relationship, the weirdness of telling your own life story, and the challenge of doing the real Cindy Brown justice:
VINYARD: I just wanted to get starting by asking G.J. about the inception of this project, because it predates both this film’s incarnation and the film it was based on. You did a documentary about the real-life story that the film was based on, which you then decided to adapt into a feature script. Can you talk about the decision to make the documentary, and then the decision to make that into a fictional feature film?
G.J.: It’s funny, this project is interesting because it was all by chance. I hadn’t had the idea to make a documentary about my parents. It sort of came about by accident, where I wanted to make a short, like a five-minute short, just to preserve the music video I had of (Frank). My goal was just to convert the old VHS tape of his music video to digital, and then cut in a tiny clip of him now, to be like, “This is my stepfather.” I made that, and started showing it to people, and people were like, “This could be a feature!” And I was like, “Well, I’ll try it…” I didn’t know what I would get, or what would happen, so I half-consciously started filming them for like a year, and then I made the film the best I could. Again, I was still like, “Well, I don’t know if this is self-indulgent. This is just my parents.” I had a screening where I showed a group of people, and their response was good, and I said, “Okay maybe this is worth finishing.” Some of the people who were at that original screening were some of the people who said, “You should make this into a scripted film,” and again, I was hesitant, and I went, “Well, I can try…”
In the process of writing the script, I realized it was a good opportunity to show things that I didn’t get on camera, and that happened behind-the-scenes, and things I couldn’t quite elegantly explain in the documentary format. To make the narrative wasn’t just this rehash of the original doc, but to kind of expand on the story and make it its own thing. Both the times, those things weren’t really my first idea, but then I embraced them, and I said, “Hey, this is great, this is worth doing!”
Spending that much time with my parents was never part of the plan.
VINYARD: Did you make anything significant up, or were you pretty faithful to your interpretation of how your parents are in real life?
G.J.: There’s some fictionlized elements. The relationship with the girl is more symbolic than she is like an actual person. Some of the things like them spending the college fund is like infinitely more complicated than that, how they blew through all my money. It seemed like too much to have to explain.
I mean, it’s pretty close. I would say it’s probably closer than most “based on a true story” stories probably are, you know?
VINYARD: Rene, when you got the script, had you seen the documentary, or did you just go on the script in your decision to take the role?
RENE: No, I definitely saw the documentary, and loved it. I saw the documentary, and thought, “This woman is so unusual and has so many amazing colors, that I’d never be able to pull that outta my ass.” You know? I needed to see her. She’s like everything you’d want to play, for me. She’s a mother, and I can relate to being a mother in terms of the guilt you always feel about not being the greatest of mothers. You’re judging yourself all the time, so there’s a certain…burden that you walk around with as a mother, and even though my situation wasn’t Cindy’s- I don’t do drugs, I don’t drink- but I understand her, and I thought, “How brave of her to be so transparent with this group for G.J.”
She’s just so interesting, man. I find her brilliant in so many ways. I mean, yes, what she put G.J. through was awful, but I still have so much compassion for her. She’s everything. She’s funny as hell…she’s just so interesting. There’s not a color in the paintbox that she’s missing. She made me laugh, she made me cry, and everything in between. I totally got her. I understood her. I know people who saw the documentary and went, “Oh God, who is this awful, awful woman?!” I didn’t see that. I saw a brave woman really making an effort to somehow make it up to her son and help to make it right, even through her struggle. She has struggled. We all struggle. I would not want that road.
She’s amazing, I mean look at her life. She did everything she said she was gonna do. She fixed her teeth, she got a job in showbusiness, she did everything she said she was gonna do, and at the end of it, you’re just like, “How did she put that together?” Except for that Cindy is brilliant. And she actually- and this is no bullshit- she passed it on to G.J. I said to G.J., “Look, I know it’s been hard. I can only imagine how difficult it’s been. But the one thing she did leave you with is a certain creative ability,” because she is so creative. She’s so smart.
I’m just rambling here at this point. Do you have another question? (laughs) But yeah, I loved her, I related to her, and I had compassion for her, and I found her extremely interesting and strong and wacky and crazy and everything you’d want to have in a character. But I think you have to have compassion for her to play her, and I know a lot of people didn’t.
VINYARD: What was your personal interpretation of why she’s stayed with Frank? I mean, as an actress, not speaking in terms of real life, but as a character, what was it in your mind that kept her with him for so long?
RENE: I think in every relationship, whatever it is, there’s always codependency. I don’t care how healthy you are in certain ways. It wasn’t that I thought, “There’s a specific reason here.” I just thought that two people are together and they have their reasons, and sometimes it’s unexplainable. I mean, sometimes it’s pulled to dramatic stress that you don’t even know. I don’t think I gave it a label necessarily, but I understand it. People are complicated, and relationships are complicated. I’ve seen so many of them that I think, “Oh my god, I can’t believe it,” but they make it work somehow. I understood codependency, but I didn’t think it through, necessarily.
VINYARD: Let’s talk about Oliver for a second. G.J., how did you settle on Oliver to play Frank, and Rene, what was it like to work opposite Oliver?
G.J.: From the moment the idea came up to do this, he was the first person that came into my mind. There were only two people who were actors who reminded me of Frank, and he was one of them. He was always so funny, and I was always such a big fan of his to begin with. So when the financing came through, he was just the one. I went straight to him, and I was like, “Well, I really hope he likes this!” And then he did, and it was on. That was an easy choice to be honest.
VINYARD: Did he do his own singing?
G.J.: Yeah. The hard part was the guitar stuff. Frank actually came over, and we recorded videos of Frank playing old songs that I gave Oliver to watch, then Frank came over and taught Oliver how to do it. And it’s Frank singing, (laughs) Frank-style singing, so it’s not like it was all that, you know…Oliver can definitely carry a tune, so he was definitely able to pull it off.
VINYARD: Sure. Rene, was this your first time working with Oliver?
RENE: Yeah. He was very giving. I love him. We had a good time, we had a really good time.
VINYARD: How did you guys get that rapport? Was there any kind of rehearsal time, or did you guys just find the groove of it on set?
RENE: We had a day rehearsal, but I think we just kind of found it on the set. It took us like a couple of days to really find it. Maybe just one day, actually. He was prepared. We were prepared, but you never know what you’re gonna get when you prepare separately, there’s always something different when you get together. Yeah, he was great to work with. He came with Frank, so he’d just play off him, and it was a good tennis match, for sure.
VINYARD: Was there any improv or anything like that, or was it all basically what was on the page?
G.J.: There was a lot. There was a lot of improv with the kids, but with Frank and Cindy it was more stuck to the page.
RENE: That’s true, it was improv with the kids. For me, the words were so great, I didn’t want to improv.
G.J.: There are a couple moments that are in there, but for the most part, FRANK AND CINDY is pretty scripted.
VINYARD: So you cast Johnny Simmons as yourself, basically. How did you even approach that in terms of what you were looking for, how you directed him, etc.?
G.J.: Casting oneself is a process I don’t recommend anyone try and go through. It does really start to make you question who you are, and what you think you are is actually what you are, you know? It’s like “I want a guy who’s pretty cool, and real good lookin’!” (laughs)
But really, what it came down to for me was that the character was written very specifically. I wanted him to be sort of flawed. I didn’t want him to be your bland protagonist who goes through the film and everyone else is crazy and they kinda deal with it, you know? I wanted him to have his own quirks, his own problems, because how couldn’t he, growing up with Frank and Cindy as parents?
I think the issue when we were auditioning people was that people tend to fall into these certain categories, particularly for like a young leading man. There’s sort of the straight men, and then there’s the kinda the comic sidekicks, and I wanted someone who was a little bit of both, who had something weird about them, something off-putting…maybe not off-putting, but something like, this guy’s kinda been through some stuff. He can be extremely patient with his parents on one hand, but then he can go out and get sorta crazy ‘cause he has nothing to lose.
So it was tough finding that right balance. (Simmons) came in, I was like, “Okay, this is an interesting guy. This guy seems a little deeper than the surface level a lot of young actors have.” And then he got the part!
Everyone asks me why I didn’t do it. “Oh, you made a movie with someone playing you? Why didn’t you do it?” I’m just like, “I…I couldn’t.” I couldn’t be the best version of me that somebody else could, because I’m not an actor.
RENE: Yes you are!
G.J.: I couldn’t direct myself. I’d feel so weird.
RENE: When we were shooting, there were a couple of times it really affected G.J. and it was really interesting. He had to relive those moments, which is not easy.
G.J.: Sometimes, the trickiest thing was trying to explain the inverse reaction to Frank and Cindy. When something really terrible happens, sometimes you have to kind of laugh, and I think that was the part I wanted to get across. You just had the worst day of your life, Frank walks in the room, and you laugh. You have to laughThat’s the only way you can survive this long. That was the real basis of what I wanted to get across more than anything, really.
VINYARD: How did you deal with that shift in tone? Like you said, a lot of the movie is laugh-out-loud funny, but then under that is a heavy undercurrent of sadness, anger, tension. How did you maintain that balance, ‘cause this is your first fictional feature, right?
G.J.: Sort of. I did a really weird project (VIRTUALLY HEROES) for Roger Corman a few years back that was all made from stock footage, so I wouldn’t really count it. It wasn’t really a scripted narrative with drama and so, we can just pretend that never happened. (laughs) You can ignore the Corman movie.
RENE: Can we just not talk about it, Vincent? I don’t know, I haven’t seen the movie.
VINYARD: Did you do that before or after Cindy started working for Corman?
G.J.: Oh, after. She got me the job.
VINYARD: Oh, cool.
RENE: She actually got him the job!
G.J.: For better or worse. The original documentary has a scene in it that sort of gets to my aesthetic. It’s the original scene in the park where she’s crying, and it took both of us off guard. I’ve talked about these things with her a million times, but the photos brought out a reaction in her that I wasn’t expecting, and it was pretty hard to film and pretty hard to edit. Later that day, she’s going on and on and on, and there’s Frank playing the organ. It’s a nice trick, because watching it, you think, “Why is G.J. putting this horrible organ music on his mother, what a dick!” Then it pans over, and you realize it’s Frank, she cracks up, because it’s this sort of endless cycle they’ve been playing out over and over again: she does the drama, the yelling, the anger, the regret, the making up. She had to laugh at herself in that moment, and that’s kinda my point. It’s sort of an opera.
At the end of the day, everything actually worked out fine, despite all the drama. You just have to learn to laugh. And then the scene I follow that with in the documentary is me just by myself, dancing like an idiot, because you just gotta dance through life. That was my take on it, in the doc anyway.
VINYARD: Is the thing about you attending and graduating college early true?
G.J.: Yeah, that’s true. And that’s only in there, I think, to sort of point out the drive I had and the frustration I had having to come back, when I had been so motivated to get the hell out of there, you know? That’s definitely true, yeah.
VINYARD: Rene, I read that you spent three hours in hair and makeup to get ready for the role, is that true?
RENE: Maybe two and a half? They spray you with sort of different things, and that took a little bit of time. And it had to be very subtle. He’s an absolute genius. The stippling took a while, and the shading took a while, and we did some spattering of three different colors of ink.
G.J.: You did your shoulders and your arms too.
RENE: Shoulders, arms, my entire body. Hair, the hair took forever.
G.J.: And teeth, don’t forget the teeth.
RENE: And the teeth, you know we had to get those teeth in. My god. And we lost the teeth one day, that was fun.
G.J.: Nobody told me that!
RENE: Of course we didn’t tell you that. We had an extra one, someone had it in their fucking pocket, I don’t remember what happened. Who knows.
So yeah, it took a little while. We had Lee Grimes, and he’s an amazing special effects guy.
I want to say one thing that’s very interesting though. One thing that was very helpful and valuable to me during shooting, was that I think G.J. actually relived his childhood…G.J. I’m gonna say this once, and you may hate me for it, and I’ll never say it again. But especially in the park scene. I was living out his life in that scene, and I think that was probably the first time that G.J. was really able to be in it in a way that was real and had to feel emotions, and it was so beautiful and so touching. To have G.J. direct me was so amazing, so I really played off G.J. the director maybe even more than Johnny in some ways, because he was there, he was present, I was speaking to him. It was wonderful. And to be honest, that happened a lot.
G.J.: During that scene, I had my head looking at the little portable monitor with like a hoodie over my head, and I was just crying on the monitor, and I didn’t want anybody to see me. I was so embarassed.
RENE: And I didn’t realize what was happening, Vincent, until he came over at one point, and he goes, “T-t-t-this is really hard for me.” And I was like, “Good, good. That’s good. This is where the gold is. If that’s affecting you, I want it.”
It was beautiful as a mother, because I thought if I could be Cindy, and you could see that kinda pain, it’d give you more compassion, because, look, as kids, we get hurt, man. We just do, we get hurt by our parents. I was the parent and the kid, I understood both sides.
G.J.: It’s just an interesting process. It’s almost like Freudian surrogate mother therapy! And obviously, as you can tell, since then, we’ve become so close.
RENE: It’s true.
VINYARD: Did you interact with the real Cindy at all?
RENE: You know, she was very respectful. I think she instinctively knew to sort of stand just…I got to meet her one time, and I loved her. She’s kind of shy.
G.J.: She is shy.
RENE: But I’ll never forget the talk we had. One night, we just sat in the car, and talked about life, and I drove away thinking, “Oh my god, she really gets it.” For me, I mean, maybe not for anyone else, but she’s so complex. It was a great evening,
So that’s kind of all I needed, and I had a feeling anyway that that’s who she was, and it was there, and I wanted to try and bring all of it out. I think in some ways, I wanted to go a step further than she went in the documentary. I could see that it’s very painful for her, so she could kind of deflect with humor and stuff, or laughter, and I wanted to take it a little bit deeper during those parts, and really open it up. I don’t think she went there completely. As I was watching the docuemtnary, I was thinking, “I’m seeing glimpses.” She would catch herself, I don’t think she went all the way, so I wanted to do that for her.
G.J.: We shot in the actual house. I made a point to get them out of there. They actually stayed at my house, and I stayed at the house, basically on set, the whole time.
RENE: I think Frank would’ve come, but I don’t think Cindy would have.
G.J.: She stopped by one time, and it’s so funny, because you never know what’s going to set someone off when you’re portraying them, you know? It’s often not what you think, neccessarily. She comes to the house, and I immediately get a call like, “What is that lamp?? Why do they think I would buy a lamp like that?!”
RENE: You didn’t tell me that G.J., that’s very funny. I mean the fact that she only complained about the lamp. Cindy’s beautiful, and we totally aged her up, so we took some liberties with everything, and by the end, I thought, “God, your mom looks better than this, I hope she’s gonna be okay.” When we got going, we really did it.
She did let herself be on film with G.J.’s lighting. There were moments where it was like, “Really?” But if you see Cindy, even if she doesn’t have her makeup on, she looks better than she does in the documentary, because lighting of course is everything. That was the only thing I was worried about, I was like, “G.J., your mom’s prettier than this!”
G.J.: Well, her eyes are terrible. She can’t tell. Don’t worry.
RENE: Take her glasses away, for fucks sake.
G.J.: She refuses to wear them, you’ll be fine.
VINYARD: I want to talk a little bit about the music Frank composes. There’s the OXO song, but the stuff Frank composes, is that original stuff that the real Frank had come up with?
G.J.: Yeah, that’s all his original stuff. I had scored the documentary with only his music, but it was always problematic, because it wasn’t explicitly said it was his music, so sometimes I wonder if people saw the doc and just thought I had terrible taste. Like, “What are these songs you’re using?”
RENE: I kind of like some of his songs!
G.J.: I know, but taken out of context, you might go like, “What is this?” So I didn’t use his stuff for soundtrack, but I did try and use his stuff in-camera, in-world as much as possible. So the songs that he does play on screen are all Frank’s original songs. That also just made it easy, because obviously he would give those to us so we wouldn’t have to license music. In the actual party, he played a couple of cover songs as well, so it was easeier to just use his own stuff than try and put in the cover. But that’s all his stuff. And you can’t recreate it. Come on, stuff like “Borderlands”? I couldn’t write that stuff if I tried.
VINYARD: Did OXO actually open for Hall & Oates, or was that something you made up?
G.J.: No, no, that was the thing. That was their big claim to fame. That’s why they say it like three times in the movie, ‘cause that was always the thing like, “We opened for Hall & Oates!”
VINYARD: (OXO’s song) “Whirly Girl” did hit the charts, right?
G.J.: Oh yeah, it hit the charts, and there was a lot of press, and they were on AMERICAN BANDSTAND, and SOLID GOLD, and all those shows, POP ’N ROCKER or whatever. And then they had a follow-up song that had a really extensive music video, actually, it’s called, “Dance All Night.” You can see it briefly in the film, but I only have a VHS copy of it. It’s this weird, futuristic thing where everyone’s doin’ the robot really bad. But that was a very expensive video, and there was a lotta hype behind it, and almost immediately, they all just tried to go solo and their egos got too big, so they ended up sorta vaporizing.
Frank actually owes the record label money, still. He didn’t even make any money, he owes them money. Back in the day, they’d give you an advance, right? And you’d have to sell a certain number of albums to pay off that advance, and they reneged on their contract, so to this day, he’s actually in the hole because of OXO, if you can believe it.
VINYARD: I liked seeing Mark Maron. I’m still not used to him as an actor, other than on his own show, but why the decision to get Maron to play your real father?
G.J.: It was just a convergence of their type and character and personality, you know? Gilbert, in real life, is probably like a little bit less together than Maron is, but they have similar smarts and self-obsessed and hyper-self-awareness. Of the people we looked at, it just kinda came together with him. It was the right match to kind of express this guy who might’ve once been the coolest guy in school, who now lives in a trailer park. Too smart for his own good, and writes sex poetry, and is probably a little bit paranoid-schizophrenic. That’s sort of what the character is to me, anyway.
VINYARD: I saw Scoot McNairy’s name listed as a producer, but he’s not in the film. Can you talk about how he got involved?
G.J.: He was one of the people who was at that first screening of the documentary. He’s a guy I’ve known for a while, and he was one of the people who had the idea to make a scripted film. He was behind-the-scenes originally trying to get the film backed and get it financiers and stuff, so he was instrumental in getting us connected with the people that gave us the money to get it made. It was pretty damn helpful.
VINYARD: Cool. My last question is for Rene: a little off-topic, but you took about six years off after I believe it was YOURS MINE & OURS. I was a huge fan of NIGHTCRAWLER, and the THOR movies as well, and I’m just really excited that you’re working more regularly these days. Can you explain the break, and why now you’re motivated to jump back into it and be prolific again?
RENE: Two things. One, I can’t say I’m motivated to jump back into it, but I love NIGHTCRAWLER of course, and FRANK AND CINDY may have been equally as interesting in terms of any role that I’ve ever gotten, and the challenge. We were in a car, I was changing my clothes in the car, and it was ready to explode. I’m not kidding. There was a gas leak, and we would be in and out of there, and finally I said, “Get the fuck out of the car!!” I was like the mother! “Get out! We’re all gonna die!” But you know, there was something great about that instead of sitting inside of some frickin’ trailer all day. I just loved the pace, it was great. That was good for me.
So I would only take a film where I wasn’t just bored to death sitting for fifteen hours a day. I’m not necessarily motivated to work. It depends on the script, and for a woman my age in this business, they don’t come along often. So I wouldn’t necessarily just embrace, you know, taking any watered down part I’ve already done. You know, acting is not my first choice in life. I just wanted to take off. I said, “If I don’t take off now, I won’t.” So I did some other things, things that I’ve always wanted to do, and then THOR came, and I thought, “Why not, just play a queen for two minutes. Go ahead. Go for it.” And then NIGHTCRAWLER came, and FRANK AND CINDY came around before that, and I was waiting to do FRANK AND CINDY for a long time. But I think that it’s just that this script came and I loved it. It was just that I decided suddenly to get back in the business.
G.J.: You can say it, Rene, it’s the role of a lifetime.
RENE: Actually, you know what the truth is? That character, it won’t come for me again. She’s just got everything. Literally, like I said, every single color in the paintbox. There’s not one I wasn’t able to sort of play with. So that was really exciting for me. And you know they don’t come along often, so…
