I find the work of David Gordon Green to be profound, unique and powerful. I simply love Undertow and who can forget George Washington? SNOW ANGELS, one of his newest feature is just his 4th movie to date. Says Green:

The action in SNOW ANGELS, particularly in the film’s second half, is dark by any measure. Most of the adult characters are flawed and, by conventional movie standards, unsympathetic. My strategy for dealing with the darkness: cast actors who understand comedy, so that some degree of humor could leaven the narrative.

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What's the Movie About: A story of love lost and found in a small town, SNOW ANGELS is a heartrending portrayal of three couples in various stages of life orbiting around each other in search of connection and meaning. An unexpected act of violence disrupts the lives of these intertwined couples revealing the profound moments in which they each realize how precarious and remarkable life can be.

High school student Arthur plays trombone in the marching band, busses tables at the local Chinese restaurant and avoids his squabbling parents. At work, he flirts with Annie, who used to be his baby-sitter. Annie is trying to build a new life for herself and her daughter after splitting with high school sweetheart Glenn. A man with a troubled past, Glenn hopes to make a new start by getting a job and reconnecting with his family.

At school, Arthur meets a pretty girl, Lila, who is just as nerdy as he is, and they quickly develop a crush on each other. Though Lila makes her feelings for Arthur painfully obvious, Arthur is reluctant to accept her advances as he watches his father move out of the family home while his mother struggles to keep things together. Determined to find happiness, Arthur begins to fall for the irresistible Lila, even as he witnesses Annie and Glenn tear each other apart in a series of distressing encounters at the same time as his parents begin separate lives.

Then, on a cold winter morning, Glenn and Annie’s past catches up with their future. In one shocking moment, all of the pain and struggle comes to a screeching halt. For them, and for everyone who knows them, nothing will ever be the same.

Written for the screen and directed by David Gordon Green, SNOW ANGELS stars Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell, Michael Angarano, Jeannetta Arnette, Griffin Dunne, Nicky Katt, Tom Noonan, Connor Paolo, Amy Sedaris and Olivia Thirlby.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

SNOW ANGELS as a film began when my friend, New York filmmaker Jesse Peretz, brought me Stewart O’Nan’s novel. Jesse wanted to direct the film and asked me to adapt the screenplay. It was my first “for hire” writing job.
I’d just finished one film and was looking to kind of branch out as a writer and gain experience writing for other people, so I adapted the novel for Jesse to direct and developed it with him and the producers. Jesse had been doing some comedies and wanted to do something dramatic. Predictably, the more I started doing drafts for him, the more I got invested in the characters and their world and certainly I became a little bit possessive, as any writer I’m sure does. Meanwhile, Jesse went on to other projects, as did I, and SNOW ANGELS kind of disappeared for a little while.

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SNOW ANGELS came back when Dan Lindau and Paul Miller of Crossroads Films wanted to give it another shot. Crossroads had been developing SNOW ANGELS for about ten years, since Lindau first read the novel, and had a loose commitment from Sam Rockwell to star. As a late-winter window opened in Sam’s schedule, the producers decided it was time to act, so they approached me and my long-time producer Lisa Muskat and made a plan to shoot.

Jsse was unavailable and I jumped at the opportunity to direct the script I’d written. As I said, I’d become attached and I had some really strong feelings on how to approach the material cinematically. The novel takes place in the ’70s and is told in flashback. Characters had to be condensed, cuts were made, whole sequences eliminated. I wanted to update it, make it contemporary, but also invoke the sensibilities of other time periods. I created ’70s references and ’80s references. I try to identify with every character. No character can be too far away from me or I don’t feel like I’m the appropriate author.

The action in SNOW ANGELS, particularly in the film’s second half, is dark by any measure. Most of the adult characters are flawed and, by conventional movie standards, unsympathetic. My strategy for dealing with the darkness: cast actors who understand comedy, so that some degree of humor could leaven the narrative.

I wanted to put a lot of the focus on the younger characters and almost have the older characters become more child-like. My goal was for the younger characters to illustrate that point in life when they’re starting to take great steps. The movie for me has always been a launch for the Arthur character, to see the world through his eyes, to see his relationships, his likes and hates. Arthur, after all, is watching relationships through whole movie: he’s watching his mom and dad, he’s watching Annie and Glenn, watching himself with Lila.

It was really a joy to shoot this film. The cast we chose was able to add the lightness and humor I’d imagined while penning the script and being in Halifax, the cold, the people, the scenery. It all just seemed to come together into a film I’ve become very proud to have been a part of.

NOTES FROM THE SET

“We do a lot of rehearsals beforehand,” says Green, “and we got to know the characters. I saw immediately that each actor was really desperate to find the humanity in their characters, and equally desperate to find out what makes them laugh. A lot of our dialogue before we went into production has to do with where these characters are coming from, deciding what the funny parts of their lives are, as well as the sad parts.”

Sam Rockwell gives a specific example of how this approach informed his character of Glenn and Kate Beckinsale’s character, Annie.

“When I first envisioned working with an actress on this, I imagined a lot of pent-up tensions would inform the performances. As it turned out, Kate and I really got along and we joked around a lot. When the cameras roll, we are with the characters as they find themselves today. Joking around between takes was very much ‘that’s the way it used to be when they were in love.’ There was a time when Annie and Glenn were both very much in love – intense, passionate love. They probably met in High School and they fell hard for each other. But people grow out of each other, and Annie grew out of Glenn much faster than he grew out of her.”

“When I got involved in the project, Sam had been attached to it and had been talking to Jesse about doing it and when I heard that I was thrilled because I hadn’t thought of him when I was writing it,” says Green. “He is perfect for the part because he captures such dramatic detail with absolute vulnerability. He makes Glenn a sympathetic human being you can feel for.”

“I believe the film is about second chances,” says Rockwell. “Some of the people in the film get them, some don’t.”

“The part of Glenn is a very juicy part for an actor,” he says. “He’s a really complex character, with a lot of layers. He’s kind of the perfect anti-hero, like you might find in some of the better films of the ’70s. He’s not necessarily a likeable person, but my job is to help the audience understand him and somehow want the best for him.”

“The audience should suspect something is not quite right about Glenn right off the bat,” the actor explains. “When we later learn he lives with his parents, that he’s a born again Christian and he’s trying to get his act together, there’s a lot of hope for him. He’s thinking he can get his family back, thinking he’s still got a real shot at that. But, it all goes very wrong. It all probably went wrong way before we’re introduced to him, when he and his young wife were married, even before they broke up.”

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Rockwell says he found the original novel very helpful to the process. “I think Meryl Streep once said books are great for lazy actors, and she’s right, you can learn what he’s supposed to be thinking when he says one line or the other.”

He talks about past roles that he drew on for Glenn, particularly the character’s relationship with Jesus Christ. “I have a friend who is a Jesuit priest, Jim Martin, he was the technical advisor for a play by Stephen Adly Guirgis, I did in New York, ‘The Last Days of Judas of Iscariot,’ that Philip Seymour Hoffman directed. I didn’t know anything about the New Testament and Jim really helped and advised me. Doing CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND prepared me to play Glenn in some ways, too.”

He also tapped such resources as feature films, documentaries, audiotapes, field trips and born-again friends to prepare for SNOW ANGELS.

“I listened to Gregory Peck reading the Bible, one of the best things I got was the BBC TV film JESUS OF NAZARETH directed by Franco Zeffirelli and I went to a lot of church services; they were amazing. I learned a few prayers and how to pray. The services here in Halifax were very helpful. I talked to friends who are born again. I looked at a recent documentary called HELL HOUSE, Billy Graham videos, and a documentary called BROTHER BORN AGAIN. A buddy told me about a film called SOLDIERS IN THE ARMY OF GOD, about guys who kill abortionists and blow up clinics.”

The subject matter would imply that the making of this film would be grueling for Rockwell, but his experience wasn’t that way at all.

He had fun working with Kate Beckinsale. “She cracks me up. I hadn’t met her before this, and I thought she’d be the quiet, mousy type, but she’s actually really funny. She’s also really smart. She understands human nature and sees the whole arc of the character. She’s a sophisticated, mature actress who knows what she’s doing and comes at it from a very intelligent yet sincere point of view. You can see it in the work she’s done in movies like LAUREL CANYON and BROKEDOWN PALACE.

“Kate and I worked very well together,” Rockwell continues. “I looked in her eyes the other day and I saw Annie, I didn’t see Kate. I thought, ‘this is my wife’ when I walked her out into the snow. I truly felt like I was taking my wife out to the woods to do bad things.

Rockwell, who’d loosely attached himself to SNOW ANGELS was excited by the script and by the prospect of working with Green.

“It’s a great script, the fact that David was involved was important to me. He seemed right for the material. He’s really transformed the whole thing into something vibrant and spontaneous.

“I do think there’s a part of David that identifies with Glenn, because like Glenn, David is very passionate. There is ferocity to the way he chews on work. He’s really smart, but his choices are governed more by instinct.”

“A lot of what Arthur feels is what the audience feels,” Angarano says. “Whether he knows it or not, he grows up during the course of the film.

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“To Annie, Arthur is a bit of the past, a bit of who she used to be. For Arthur, being around Annie makes him realize he’s a man now,” Angarano observes. “But Arthur is also an only child whose parents are separating. He has a good relationship with his parents, but to see them going through this puts him in a weird funk.
“Finally,” Angarano concludes, “The audience gets to see Arthur go from a relatively meek character to one that can stand up to his father and realize he can deal with anything.”

“I talked a lot about that with Michael,” adds Green, “about how the character can really build strength from observing the weakness of others. The events of the narrative immediately give Arthur anxiety, but they will ultimately give him strength.”
The relationship between Arthur and Lila is an example of that source of strength for him and it also offers hope to the audience. “Lila is really a light in Arthur’s life at that point,” Angarano observes. “When Lila and Arthur are on the screen together it gives the audience a breath of fresh air.”

Thirlby describes her relationship with her co-star, and the relationship between their characters, as an evolution. “The first time Michael and I met, we read through the scenes and I remember it was kind of awkward getting close to him. Now I’m pretty used to him. We’ve ended up spending a lot of time together on set and have developed a nice, interesting relationship – we’re very comfortable with each other.”

On working with Green, Thirlby, who most recently starred in Juno as Leah, says “I think his approach to filmmaking is perfect, because he manages to capture real life.”

Beckinsale agrees. “When I worked with Scorsese,” she says, “I was struck by how much collaboration he wanted and was up for and how much he really valued the input of the people who were going to be in the scenes, and David’s got that as well. I think he really understands that if a scene doesn’t have meaning to you, then it doesn’t have meaning.”

“When we attached Kate,” Green remembers, “I went out to LA to speak with her because in a way, SNOW ANGELS was the opposite of the studio movies she’d been doing. I’d been a big fan of her work in genre movies, and really liked that this was an unexpected career move for her. Rather than cast the obvious actress to play a working class, hard living woman, I thought it was a good idea to cast somebody that we all have our own preconceptions of, and then reinvent her and give her the opportunity to show us something she hadn’t done before.

“Meeting with her and talking about her own life as a mother and a wife also made me realize that Kate was bringing a lot of real life experience to the role, and her ideas made me really see Annie for the first time. Until then, she’d been kind of faceless. I knew her house, I knew what was in her kitchen, I knew how her bedroom looked, but I didn’t know what she looked like and I didn’t know how she spoke until I met Kate.”

She acknowledges that her choice to work on SNOW ANGELS was both professionally and personally meaningful. “I don’t get many opportunities for such a dramatic role, and I really felt a lot of empathy with Annie. I’ve been researching the working mother situation for the last seven years, so I feel like I kind of know that woman pretty well, and it was nice for me to really do something from what I know, to take a character through a really big emotional journey. It’s sort of the whole point of being an actor really.”

Rockwell adds, “Kate is so elegant and beautiful. As we were doing the scene walking through the snow, she broke my heart. There’s something very noble about Annie, and it’s a hard part to make noble.”

“What may read as complex about Annie,” adds Green, “is meant to be a realistic window into the frustrations of motherhood, especially single motherhood, with very realistic everyday problems and frustrations.”

“I’m highly sympathetic to the working mother,” Beckinsale admits. “I know from experience that motherhood can be a real war and I can’t help but feel for somebody in Annie’s situation. In this film you see Annie lose her temper quite a lot with her child. But I tried to make sure the audience understands that beneath every mother who’s yelling at their child in a supermarket, that same person would lie down on a train track for that child.”

Beckinsale also talks about how motherhood informs her perspective on certain co-stars. As she puts it, “Because I always have a crush on whomever my daughter has a crush on, so I was very keen on working with Michael Angarano,” who had previously starred in the hit family film SKY HIGH. “For my daughter, it was kind of like being in the same room with Elvis when Michael came to our hotel room to visit.”

“Michael has a freshness and an excitement and a kind of guilelessness that is really special that I don’t think every teenager has,” Beckinsale observes. “He has a wonderful little face that makes you wish you were sixteen again.” On their characters relationship, she adds “Arthur is at that moment in life where everything seems possible, and Annie is at a moment where she’s aware that certain possibilities have closed down for her. So it’s a poignant relationship.”

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