Paul Bano as the younger Brian Wilson in Love & Mercy.
Paul Bano as the younger Brian Wilson in Love & Mercy.
It took two actors to depict the pivotal eras in the life of legendary music man Brian Wilson. The man himself and the men playing him talk about Love & Mercy.
It's a little weird talking to two Brian Wilsons at the same time. Wilson and John Cusack, who plays the former Beach Boy in the new biopic Love & Mercy, were supposed to take turns answering questions in a joint interview. But the actor ended up doing most of the talking, including delivering answers from time to time on Wilson's behalf - and with Wilson's permission - in response to questions that the 72-year-old either couldn't hear or was simply tired of answering, in what was certainly not his first interview that day.
For example, regarding the synergy between the film, which was made with the blessing of Wilson and his wife, Melinda, and a forthcoming autobiography, I Am Brian Wilson, Cusack jumps in, like a good spokesman: "I think Brian would say that the book and the movie, because Melinda and he were involved in making both of them, is a very accurate representation of his life." The musician seems slightly confused at times. But whether that's because of his deafness in one ear or the result of past drug use - "I burned my brain out," he told Diane Sawyer in 1991 - isn't clear. More than anything, Wilson comes across as limelight-averse, even painfully shy.
"Brian is not a huge fan of social interaction," director Bill Pohlad told the New York Times last year, when it wasn't clear whether the singer, songwriter, producer and musical polymath would even be available for interviews.
Pohlad isn't even sure whether Wilson realized what he was getting into when he agreed to collaborate with the film-maker, opening his life up for re-examination. "I don't think he did, in a lot of ways," the director says.
Love & Mercy focuses on two main threads. The first concerns the Beach Boys' meteoric rise to pop stardom in the 1960s with a string of 11 albums, culminating in 1966's Pet Sounds (a commercial failure now widely acknowledged as one of the greatest pop albums of all time).
Brian Wilson in the late 1960s (Warner Music).
The second thread involves Wilson's well-publicised mental breakdown, drug addiction and subsequent recovery from dependence on the controversial psychotherapist Eugene Landy, who exercised almost total control over Wilson's medical, personal and financial affairs from 1982 to 1991.
Of Paul Giamatti's creepily Machiavellian performance as Landy, who died in 2006, Wilson calls it "letter perfect."
"I almost wanted to walk out of the theatre," Wilson says of his reaction to the Landy scenes. "I was so depressed." At the same time, he acknowledges that the depiction of his creative peak was a blast.
"The good times were good," he says, with the kind of cryptic understatement that makes Cusack describe him as a "Cheshire cat." In an unorthodox bit of casting, Cusack, 48, plays Wilson in the 1980s and Paul Dano, 30, plays him in the 1960s. As the movie cuts back and forth between those duelling Brians, each of the performances, in its own way, contributes to a prismatic whole.
According to Pohlad, the double-casting was essential to what he calls a "two-strand"approach to capturing Wilson's life. "You can't tell Brian's story without telling about the Pet Sounds' era," he says. "Love & Mercy is the story of a hypercreative musical genius reaching his peak, really, his most creative period. And then he falls off the edge."
If Dano's Wilson is the manic genius teetering on the precipice, Cusack's performance presents an entirely different persona - one we meet many years later as he's crawling out of the hole he has fallen into. Cusack's character seems shell-shocked, almost catatonic, caught as he is in the throes of Landy's psychological and pharmacological manipulations.
In addition to taking LSD and other illicit drugs, Wilson had been prescribed lithium, Xanax, Halcion and other psychotropic medications, all under the supervision of Landy's in-house psychiatrist, Sol Samuels.
The first strand of the film follows Wilson's descent into madness. The second picks up the narrative just as the singer is meeting and falling in love with his future wife (Elizabeth Banks), whom Wilson credits with helping him escape from what he calls Landy's prison.
John Cusack as Brian Wilson (older) and Elizabeth Banks as Melinda Ledbetter, in a scene from Love & Mercy. (supplied)
In a sense, Pohlad says, it's almost as if these two Brians aren't even the same man. "The Brian of today is significantly different from the Brian when he's 20-something," says Pohlad, a veteran producer of such prestigious fare as 12 Years a Slave, The Tree of Life and Brokeback Mountain.
Initially asked by producers John Wells and Claire Rudnick Polstein to help produce an earlier screenplay based on Wilson's life called Heroes and Villains, Pohlad wound up in the director's chair almost by accident. "I read that script, but I didn't like it at all," he says, calling Heroes "more of a "traditional biopic-y, melodramatic thing."
Although the idea to tell Wilson's story by jumping between two eras - and two actors - was Pohlad's, he hadn't planned on directing until the writer he had hired, Oren Moverman, suggested he should, in order to protect his vision.
"There were those who said, 'You know, you should really do this with one actor, because it would be a tour de force for somebody like Ryan Gosling," Pohlad says with a laugh.
Even riskier than the double-casting was Pohlad's decision to implement a kind of voluntary quarantine on Cusack and Dano, neither of whom ever consulted with - or even watched - the other during filming.
"I never liked the idea of them going, 'Why don't we both move like this? Or why don't we both scratch our nose like that?' "Pohlad says. "John and Paul were both very on board with that idea. There was something intriguing for them about the two-actor thing, I think, that played out in the way they found their Brians." Cusack chose to meet extensively with Brian and Melinda. "I hung out as much as I could," he says, "without becoming the guest who wouldn't leave." Dano, on the other hand, steered clear, instead poring over archival films of the early Beach Boys and listening to tapes of the Pet Sounds recording sessions.
A singer and guitarist for the band Mook, Dano immersed himself in the technical minutiae of those recordings, according to Pohlad, for whom musical verisimilitude was paramount.
Brian Wilson and the actors playing the young Beach Boys in the movie Love & Mercy.
Period accuracy was ensured by the services of Mark Linett, a producer with a long association with Wilson who came on board as a consultant (and who can be seen in the film's recording-studio scenes, playing real-life sound engineer Chuck Britz.) Wilson's music also was key to helping Cusack unlock his character's troubled psyche.
"John would be listening to the Smile sessions right up to the moment we said action," Pohlad recalls, referring to the follow-up album to Pet Sounds, whose abortive and contentious creation precipitated Wilson's breakdown. "He'd pull off his headset, toss it off to the side and do the scene."
Both Cusack and Pohlad say they found Wilson's character by feel, rather than observation. "I don't think you can play Brian as an intellectual thing," Cusack says. "You can't just do a take on him. You have to try and feel what he felt." The answer, Cusack believes, lies is the man's complex music. "There's joy, there's longing, there's heartache, there's triumph." Such complexities are echoed in Wilson's life.
Much has been written about him over the years, including his 1991 autobiography, Wouldn't It Be Nice: My Own Story, now disavowed as having been ghostwritten by Landy. But there are many details that don't line up. Wilson, for instance, has variously attributed his deafness to a congenital condition and to physical abuse by his father. (The film comes down on the abuse side, because, Pohlad says, that's what Wilson has always told Melinda.)
Pohlad insists that he isn't trying to create the definitive - or even an authorised - version of the Brian Wilson story. "This is my portrait of Brian," he says. "All I can do is be as respectful as possible to my vision of it. Hopefully, along the way, part of that is being responsible to Brian and to his life.
But you never know where the truth is. You can't stray into that area where you're trying to protect someone, or trying to change the story so they're super happy with it." Happy may be overstating it. But the taciturn former Beach Boy is suddenly effusive when asked what he thinks about Love & Mercy."
"I thought the film was ingenious, sensitive and loving," he says, just before hanging up the phone.
Washington Post
Watch the trailer for Love & Mercy here
Paul Dano on playing Brian Wilson
Paul Dano playing Brian Wilson during the recording of Pet Sounds (supplied).
"I was intimidated but that's something you have to exorcise. Once I got to spend a little time with Brian and the material, one of the greatest things about him is how generous he is. You see that he had a tough go of it at times but it was something he always talked about, how he wrote music that would help heal people and make them smile and I took that as a generosity and tried to capture an ounce of that spirit.
"I was never really interested in grilling him about parts of his life that he might not want to revisit and I think we had plenty to work with.
"I feel like Brian's true self is in this music so it was like singing my way into the part. In the studio scenes it's kind of me and it's kind of Brian. On the second day of filming I had to play and sing Surf's Up, one of the hardest of his songs.
"The musicians played everything live and the energy of that music being built energised everyone and crept into the spirit of the film. "They're such beautiful songs and I really wanted to try to be able to do it but wasn't sure because they're tough songs.
"Bill [Pohlad director] had some sort of insane trust in me. He believed I could do it. and I was saying, 'I don't know what this guy's thinking'. That was definitely the most important work I did for the character - to learn to sing a couple of songs on the piano and to sing them myself, because that's what brought me closer to Brian." - Helen Barlow
Beach Boys on the road
The Beach Boys at Vector Arena in 2007 with Mike Love (centre) and Bruce Johnston (right) (NZPA / Wayne Drought)
One version of the Beach Boys is headed back to New Zealand this summer. The band will be playing at Mt Maunganui's Baypark Arena on November 24.
The group features Mike Love - an original member of the band and a cousin of the Wilson brothers - and Bruce Johnston who replaced Brian Wilson in the band's live line-up in 1965.
Love, whose portrayal in Love & Mercy doesn't improve his reputation as the band member who objected to his cousin's artistic ambitions, licensed the Beach Boys name for touring after the 1998 death of Carl Wilson.
Brian Wilson starts a solo summer tour of the US today followed by shows in the UK. He'll be joined by original Beach Boy Al Jardine and Blondie Chaplin, who had a brief stint with the band in the early 1970s.
The surviving original members - including Jardine and Love - reunited in 2012 for the band's 50th anniversary and the album That's Why God Made the Radio.
Wilson released his 11th solo album No Pier Pressure, earlier this year.
Wilson's studio guests included Jardine, Kasey Musgraves, the She & Him duo of Zoey Deschanel and M. Ward and Nate Ruess of fun.
What: Love & Mercy, the film about the life of Beach Boys songwriter Brian Wilson When: Opens at cinemas on June 25
