“The Messenger” is one of the small movies hoping to squeeze into the Oscar race, with a stack of rave reviews and a cadre of quietly passionate fans that have made it something of a dark-horse best-picture candidate in recent weeks. A quiet, somber and moving look at a pair of damaged-goods soldiers assigned to deliver the bad news to the families of servicemen killed in combat, screenwriter Oren Moverman’s directorial debut boasts extraordinary performances from a cast that includes Ben Foster, Woody Harrelson and Samantha Morton; the film is in some ways a home-front companion piece to “The Hurt Locker,” another tense film movie that takes the measure of war’s human toll in an entirely different setting.
The cast and crew responsible for “The Messenger” clearly bonded during their one-month shoot, which included six searing scenes in which Foster and Harrelson deliver grim tidings to parents and spouses. Six of them joined theWrap for a lengthy, freewheeling recent lunch: Moverman, Harrelson, Foster, producer Lawrence Inglee, co-writer Alessandro Camon and cinematographer Bobby Bukowski. As we sat down, Moverman was talking about an unused scene in which Harrelson reeled off a couple dozen jokes, all in character. So Harrelson wasted no time in recreating that moment – with, I should warn, relatively tasteless results.
Woody Harrelson: What do you get when you cross a rooster with a telephone pole? (pause) A 30-foot cock that wants to reach out and touch someone. That’s a Willie Nelson joke. I’ll blame that on him.
That’s probably a safe route to take with a lot of things: when in doubt, blame it on Willie.
Harrelson: That’s what I always do. What do they say in Muslim strip joints? “Show us your nose!”
Oren Moverman: That’s what it was like for a while on the set. Helped us to get through it.
Did you have to keep things light on the set to counterbalance the tough material?
Moverman: It wasn’t light, but it was very quiet and respectful. When we were shooting a scene there was definitely a kind of focus and energy, and then afterwards there was a calm. And relief, really. Especially when we weren’t shooting the notifications.
Were those notification scenes especially tough on the actors?
Harrelson: Yeah. My character’s meant to be quite stoic, but as soon as Oren would say “cut” I’d start crying. And Ben would hold me, or Oren. It really affected me a lot.
Ben Foster: It was easy to get lost in that space. Oren created an environment for these notification scenes, which were single shots, unrehearsed. The crew was sent away so that Bobby could shoot in 360 degrees, and he was encouraged to go for what he saw, what he heard, what he felt. We all were tuned into each other, and it became a matter of keeping your heart open and trying to keep the tears in.
I know that when Ben and Woody knocked on the doors for those notification scenes, they didn’t know who’d be on the other side or how they’d react.
