Four in a row from Paul Dano

Being Flynn, Ruby Sparks, Looper, and now For Ellen: Paul Dano has turned up in the cinemas for the fourth time in as many months. The silent teenager in Little Miss Sunshine who drank a milkshake with Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood has really blossomed as an actor. “Acting is both enjoying yourself and having a hard time.”

God may be everywhere, but Paul Dano is not far behind. In September we saw him first in Being Flynn as a troubled young man dying of embarrassment before a nasty Robert De Niro and later as a writer who has a close relationship with his invented dream woman in Ruby Sparks. His co-star – who also wrote the screenplay for that original romantic comedy – was his girlfriend Zoe Kazan. A few weeks ago we saw Dano side by side with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis in the excellent SF film Looper. And then this week along comes For Ellen, a grim indie drama that recalls Five Easy Pieces. Film-lovers know its director, So Yong Kim, from the impressive Treeless Mountain. Dano plays Joby Taylor, a drunken rock star who has failed to have the success he had dreamed of. Finalising his divorce forces him to think about his relationship with Ellen, the six-year-old daughter he never bothered about before.

That’s four films in a row. You’ve broken through.
Paul Dano: I have acted in a few films that went down well. Hopefully there will be a few more. I have the feeling that I am only at the beginning of my career. I still have a lot to learn, to explore, and to do. There are still so many films to make, so many voices to try out. I wonder every single time whether I will really be able to cope with the role. Acting is both enjoying yourself and having a hard time. The fact that it is a continuous learning process is maybe the best thing about acting for me.

You got involved in the production side of both Ruby Sparks and For Ellen. Is there a producer lurking inside you?
Dano: I don’t think so. Zoe [Kazan] could have sold the screenplay for Ruby Sparks for a healthy sum. But we preferred to see her idea develop into the kind of romantic comedy that we were enthusiastic about. So we took the helm ourselves. We sent the screenplay around and tried to remain as closely involved as possible. It wasn’t that we wanted everything our way; we wanted a film everyone could agree to without making too many compromises. Sometimes, OK, I did spend a lot of time on the phone for reasons other than the acting side of things. I was involved in For Ellen from an early stage too. I see myself more as a creative producer. I helped out by going to talk to other actors or by being a sounding board for the director. I do enjoy that. The more you put into a film, the more you care about it. The more you care about a project, the more enjoyable it is. But I don’t have to have that extra involvement. I’m quite happy if I just have to portray a character. During shooting, in any case, I’m exclusively engaged with the character. Don’t ask me to do anything else then.

In Being Flynn you were confronted with a problematic father; in For Ellen you are one yourself. A nice double bill.
Dano: And yet the characters are opposites. Flynn experiences some bad shit, but decides to become better. The real Nick Flynn got over his addiction, went to school, and succeeded in the impossible: being a successful poet. Joby in For Ellen, on the other hand, is a selfish narcissist. All that boozing and screwing is a way of putting off facing his problems. The encounter with that little girl obliges him to live in the present and to open up for the first time in a long time. It is an almost virginal experience. It is almost a coming of age. I was moved by the script; I thought the ending was really powerful and I immediately saw the character as absolutely for me. It is a good sign if your imagination starts working without you asking it to.

Both characters face difficult choices that could determine their future. What crucial choices have you made yourself so far?
Dano: You constantly need to make difficult choices. One early, important choice was to give myself the time to figure out what kind of an actor I want to be. What kind of films do I want to act in? What does this work mean to me? What do I get out of it? What do I put into it? That’s not something you can work out in a few seconds. After high school I went to university and put acting to one side for the moment in order to find out whether it really was what I wanted to do. It turned out that it was.

When did you realise that a life as an actor was actually a possibility?
Dano: When, during the making of The Girl Next Door, I was offered a role in The Ballad of Jack and Rose. I thought it was fantastic to be able to act with all those great actors [Daniel Day-Lewis and Katherine Keener – NR]; but, above all, I was delighted with the opportunity to play someone who was completely different from me for a change. That was the first time. I still remember thinking, “And now I’m an actor.” So long as you are playing yourself or something similar, you don’t really know. That was a decisive moment.

Indie film, prestige project, romantic comedy, blockbuster: you seem to want to try everything.
Dano: You have to think of your career too. I don’t automatically say no to big films. Trying to entertain the public is an attitude I respect. Someone like Jon Favreau [Dano was in Cowboys and Aliens – NR] cares about his public. Iron Man and Elf were good films in their genre. Knight and Day was suggested to me when we were in the middle of the desert, shooting Meek’s Cutoff [an excellent, if slow-moving Western, dominated by women – NR]. Subconsciously, the fact that I was ready for something completely different after that must have played a role. Acting with Tom Cruise sounded cool. But even in that case the director was decisive. James Mangold has talent: 3:10 to Yuma was a good film.

It can’t be There Will Be Blood every time.
Dano: That’s true. A film like There Will Be Blood doesn’t even turn up every five years. Waiting for one isn’t an option. There are plenty of challenging characters. I choose on the basis of the script and the director.

Says a guy in his twenties who has already acted with Robert De Niro, Bruce Willis, Tom Cruise, Daniel Day-Lewis, Brad Pitt, and Michael Fassbender.
Dano: Of course it makes a difference who you act with. Of course it is an exciting prospect to work with men of that calibre. But that only comes in third. Imagine that Twelve Years a Slave [starring Brad Pitt and Michael Fassbender – NR] was being made exclusively with unknown actors: I would still have taken part. It would still be a Steve McQueen film; it would still be exceptionally intense, challenging, moving material. By the way, Twelve Years a Slave might just be a really good film.

For Ellen ●●
US, 2012, dir.: Kim So Yong, act.: Paul Dano, Shaylena Mandigo, 95 min.