 |
| Jules director Marc Turtletaub with Anne-Katrin Titze on Ben Kingsley: “This is not a way we’ve ever seen Sir Ben before.” |
Marc Turtletaub’s otherworldly Jules, written by Gavin Steckler, shot by Christopher Norr and scored by Volker Bertelmann (Oscar for Best Original Score of Edward Berger’s All Quiet On The Western Front), stars Ben Kingsley with Harriet Sansom Harris, Jane Curtin, Zoë Winters, and Jade Quon as the title character. The first time I spoke with Marc Turtletaub he was with Kelly Macdonald, star of his Puzzle (screenplay co-written by Oren Moverman) at Sony Pictures Classics. His producer credits include Jeff Nichols’ Loving (based in part on Nancy Buirski's The Loving Story), Marielle Heller’s A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood, Davy Rothbart’s 17 Blocks, as executive producer Robin Wright’s Land, and an Oscar nomination for Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton’s Little Miss Sunshine.
 |
| Milton (Ben Kingsley), Sandy (Harriet Sansom Harris). and Joyce (Jane Curtin) with Jules (Jade Quon) Photo: courtesy of Bleecker Street |
Ben Kingsley (in a picturesque wig) plays Milton, a pensioner who lives in his house in small-town America, taking care of his bird feeder and tending to his azaleas. His daughter Denise (Winters of Succession fame) is the local vet and she is worried that finding a can of beans in her father’s bathroom medicine cabinet may be an early sign of dementia. Dad is passionate about going to the weekly municipal meetings to complain about the confusion surrounding the town’s slogan, that it is “a good place to call home.”
There is also a dangerous crossroads he would like to have addressed, but the idea of ET phoning home is what prepares us for the imminent alien spacecraft crash-landing in Milton’s backyard. Resembling the child detectives in Spielberg’s movie or any other band of makeshift sleuths with good hearts, no experience about the matter to be tackled, and endless curiosity, Milton and his newly recruited friends, Sandy (Sansom Harris) and Joyce (Curtin), take matters into their own hands with Jules (Quon), the polite and speechless alien who arrived so unexpectedly in their quiet community. Jules likes to eat honey crisp apples, gifts urgent drawings of cats, listens with care, and knows exactly when help is needed by friends.
When Sandy’s well-intentioned idea of bringing together old and young goes terribly awry, Jules shows them and us what they are really made of. Turtletaub’s movie pursues questions of dementia, what constitutes home, familial and extraterrestrial bonds, plus that strange premonition how everything could be different at any moment in time that unites us all.
 |
| Jules (Jade Quon) with a plate full of apple slices listening to Milton (Ben Kingsley) Photo: courtesy of Bleecker Street |
From Washington State, Marc Turtletaub joined me on Zoom for an in-depth conversation on Jules.
Anne-Katrin Titze: Very nice to see you again, Marc!
Marc Turtletaub: And to see you! Where are you today?
AKT: I’m in New York. You are in LA?
MT: No, I’m actually in Washington State.
AKT: Still early in the morning for you.
MT: Yeah, although I’m an early bird, so I’ve been up for a bit.
AKT: We talked about Puzzle in 2018 and we ended on a note about the title. I brought up that it reminded me of films from the Forties, Fifties, that have a woman’s name (Mildred Pierce, Kitty Foyle, etc.) and you said you thought about that - calling it Agnes, but then didn’t. Now here is Jules!
MT: Right! Here we are. I took your advice.
AKT: There is a playing with the names going on. The Jules/Gary thing is interesting. Let’s start with that. Was that in the script?
MT: The name was in the screenplay and the humour was already baked into the screenplay. So the Jane Curtin character who begins to call Jules Gary was her idea. But that is in the screenplay.
 |
| Denise (Zoë Winters) sporting dragonflies with her father Milton (Ben Kingsley) Photo: courtesy of Bleecker Street |
AKT: Within the first thirteen minutes we experience three town hall meetings where Milton, your main character, is complaining about the motto of the town. “A good place to call home” of course sets the tone for anybody who has seen ET. In a way the film responds to ET.
MT: It’s so interesting, until people started asking me about it, it never occurred to me. Now I’m sure it occurred to the screenwriter, but it never occurred to me, Anne-Katrin, and that’s so interesting. What interested me about the beginning was that it’s very mundane. You have these three town hall meetings and older people wanted to be heard, wanted to go to those meetings to be seen and to be heard.
As we age people don’t want to see us so much as they did when we’re younger. I’m speaking for myself. And connection becomes harder. What’s so beautiful about the story for me, it’s a story about finding connection later in life. And finding purpose later in life. That’s really for me the takeaway from the movie.
AKT: It also connects to the fact that as children we might not be heard or seen that much.
MT: That’s true.
AKT: Because the three of them also reminded me a bit of child detectives.
MT: Right! They are! Part of it is these wonderful actors I got to work with. You know, it’s interesting because they have this 4′ 11″ alien who comes into their life and who is what we all want - the perfect listener. Someone who can actually without saying a word just be fully present. That’s Jade Quon, who is this wonderful actress that plays the alien.
 |
| Milton (Ben Kingsley) with Joyce (Jane Curtin), and Sandy (Harriet Sansom Harris) Photo: courtesy of Bleecker Street |
AKT: And gives us cat drawings!
MT: And gives us cat drawings. It’s one of a kind, as you know. You won’t see two other movies like this in the next five years. That’s why I knew I had to do it when I read it. Usually when you read about people starting to lose their faculties later in life it’s a sad story. And this is not sad. It had humour and wild invention; it has a tiny science fiction element in it and it has a bit of a buddy movie in it because these three old people become buddies.
For me those things don’t usually go together and somehow or other the challenge of making the movie was to make sure that all those different pieces had the same tone and none of it felt like it was out of that band of performance. That’s the advantage of working with great actors.
AKT: I was thinking about those other dementia movies, Florian Zeller’s The Father with Anthony Hopkins or Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning with Pascal Greggory. With Ben Kingsley, maybe also because of the wig you put him in, there is, as you said, another quality to this. You never really worry that much about him. He’s one step ahead in some strange way.
MT: It’s a funny way to put it but it’s interesting. I think of it - and you referenced the movie The Father - people have talked about this as being a cross between The Father and Cocoon, that old movie that you might remember. But it’s really much lighter than The Father; there’s great humour in the movie.
 |
| Marc Turtletaub with his Puzzle star Kelly Macdonald Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
And this is not a way we’ve ever seen Sir Ben before. We’ve seen him almost always in drama. When he got to see the final version of the movie he was in England and he immediately flew over to support the movie when we had it in its first festival, because he loved the movie. We’re very grateful that he felt so positive about the movie and that we had such a nice response.
AKT: He often has a menacing quality underlying the roles. Not here. In connection with Puzzle we spoke about food and the absurdity of the vegetables shaped like a fish for the vegetarian guest. Here again the big point: what does the alien eat? I love the scene where Milton/Kingsley is carefully preparing the cheese and ham sandwich, and pasta and honey crisp apples, if I saw correctly. And he sticks with the apples! He doesn’t say, well maybe this alien is vegan, let’s try some peaches or strawberries.
MT: Right!
AKT: No, it’s the same apples, which is funny.
MT: I wish I had put that much forethought into it, but it’s just the way it was written. I just loved the idea that he is sitting there eating apples while all this is going on around him. People are coming in and are responding to seeing an alien - should I be afraid? What should I do? How should I deal with him? He, actually a she, just goes on eating her apples.
It’s comforting in a way, it’s comforting to see that this is not that kind of alien. There’s so many horror movies out, so many movies where the alien is a creature - this is not a creature, this is someone that actually is compassionate, we can read that into her silence, into her eyes. I think the apples is all part of that. It’s just a very benign character who allows these other people to begin to express themselves.
 |
| Sandy (Harriet Sansom Harris) speaking at the weekly town hall meeting Photo: courtesy of Bleecker Street |
AKT: Also the connotations with Johnny Appleseed, apple pie, the Americanness of it are all beautifully in there. In the scene with Danny [Cody Kostro] and Sandy there’s a change of tone that suddenly appears. The kernel of real threat is not coming from outside but from inside. She is full of kindness, trying to do something so nice, and is then confronted with something quite evil and it is the alien who helps her out. Tell me a bit about that scene!
MT: That’s a good way to put it, Anne-Katrin. I thought and I tried for a while to make it much more graphic but that’s not the tone of the movie. This movie has so much heart that you didn’t need to be graphic. All you needed to do was have a sense that there was a threat and that the alien could in some way help these people.
After that moment, they all started to trust the alien in a different way. They all get closer to the alien in a different way because they realise the alien is going to help them. And so for me it wasn’t about being graphic. There’s a bunch of ways we could have done it, but I wanted to do it in the way that was most benign and yet showed that the alien was aware of what was going on and could help.
AKT: Again it is a film about someone in a very closed environment and then new worlds are opening up, all of a sudden. With one incident. Is that a theme you are interested in?
MT: Yes, you remember, Anne-Katrin, you remember Puzzle well. Where she goes into Grand Central Terminal and her horizons open up. And here it’s a story about transformation. And I think that’s really what we’re talking about. We’re talking about people whose horizons change and who open up. That to me is what makes a really wonderful story.
 |
| Marc Turtletaub on King Lear and Ben Kingsley’s Milton: “If that’s where he found inspiration, that was great.” Photo: courtesy of Bleecker Street |
AKT: The casting choice of Zoë Winters - did you see her in Succession?
MT: I saw her before Succession. I saw her on stage in New York in several plays. I think one was called [Heroes of] the Fourth Turning. These little independent plays that she was in and I kept thinking who is that? Because she was so compelling on stage and that’s how I was first introduced to her. And then Succession came while we were casting and I already knew that I liked her as a performer very much.
AKT: You put her in scrubs with dragonflies, which is a hint for us, but we don’t yet know about her profession.
MT: Right. I think as an audience you want to discover things, right? You want your audience to participate in the movie. If you give everything to them right away on a platter then it’s not interesting. You want the audience to share with you and that goes right to the end of the movie. You want people to walk out and say: Hmm, I wonder what was going to happen next! It’s the same thing with my last movie, you want people to walk out and say: I wonder what’s going to happen to that character after this movie is over.
AKT: You were a producer on Loving, weren’t you?
MT: Yes.
AKT: Did you work with Nancy Buirski then? I recently spoke with her on her great Midnight Cowboy and its times documentary Desperate Souls, Dark City And The Legend Of Midnight Cowboy.
MT: Nancy is a prolific documentarian and seems to always be a couple of steps ahead of everybody else. She had done a documentary about Loving and that was part of the inspiration for the feature film.
 |
| Joyce (Jane Curtin), Sandy (Harriet Sansom Harris), and Milton (Ben Kingsley) with Jules (Jade Quon) Photo: courtesy of Bleecker Street |
AKT: I noticed that Puzzle was dedicated to your mother and Jules is dedicated to your father. It’s all very personal!
MT: Yes, they are. I think we always try to find that human connection when we tell a story. My father didn’t go through what Milton went through.
AKT: No aliens landed in his azaleas?
MT: Not the aliens and not the apples. He didn’t even go through the beginning stages of dementia. But as he got older he began to lose some faculties and just seeing that reminded me and I was able to connect to Milton in that way. Just little losses of capacity.
AKT: I saw Ben Kingsley mentioned King Lear in that context.
MT: I never would have thought of King Lear. He did, and in my mind, whatever works for an actor! Especially when you’re dealing with such great actors, you try to get out of their way. If that’s where he found inspiration, that was great.
AKT: Are you working on your third film?
MT: As you know, we can’t go into production, we can’t even work on screenplays during this period of time, but yeah, I’ve got my eye on the next one.
AKT: Dedicated to your grandmother? Grandfather?
MT: Maybe my sons!
AKT: Looking forward to meeting you again when the next project comes along!
MT: Thank you, Anne-Katrin, and hopefully next time in person! Thank you!
Jules opens in cinemas in the US on August 11.
