Michael Shannon Improvised Epic ’99 Homes’ One-Liners Including Film’s Mysterious Ending

Actor stopped by TheWrap Screening Series with director Ramin Bahrani on Monday night

Michael Shannon, Ramin Bahrani at TheWrap Screening Series
TheWrap

When there was something missing in the script of “99 Homes,” Michael Shannon filled in the blanks.

After a screening on Monday night of the film that follows struggling father Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield), who tries to earn back the home from which his family was evicted by working for greedy real estate broker Rick Carver (Shannon), director Ramin Bahrani told the audience at TheWrap screening series that Shannon’s astounding acting skills actually enabled him to improvise a lot of the time.

“What I can tell you about Michael, he is like a bulldog. He grabs onto the scene and doesn’t let go,” said Bahrani. “It’s 100 percent energy on every single take. For me, it was a very rare experience with an actor.”

And although Shannon usually likes to stick to the script whereas co-star Garfield likes to “change things up,” “it was actually Michael who was good at improvisations … He would come up with like, ‘alligators never sleep’ and ‘here comes the zombie.’”

Though Shannon’s improvisation has been cause for confusion when it comes the final line of the movie. At film’s end, Shannon turns to Garfield and says “thank you,” a line that seemed out of place to many.

“While we were shooting, [Bahrani] would tell me that the last scene was missing something in the script — it just had Rick and Dennis sharing a look,” said Shannon. “Ramin said, ‘Something more needs to happen, but I don’t know what it is. We should talk about it and maybe you can help me and we can have a cup of coffee,’ and I would say, ‘No, I don’t want to talk about it, we’ll just see what happens when we get there.”

Finally, the day came, and Shannon improvised a line that didn’t work with Bahrani. But the next one did.

“I said, ‘Let’s just do another take.’ And so I said, ‘Thank you,’ and I looked over at Ramin and he could tell I was kind of pleased, and Ramin said, ‘That’ll work, that’s fine. I don’t know what you mean by thank you, but I have two conditions: I don’t want you to tell me what it means and I don’t want you to ever tell anyone else what it means.’”

“99 Homes” was different than anything Shannon had ever done before, but he said that the “impeccably written” script and “the immediacy” of the topic hooked him enough to sign on to the project after he met Bahrani at Venice Film Festival in 2009.

To prepare for his role, he met with a broker whom he shadowed for a week.

“I didn’t go to any evictions because I didn’t think that would be appropriate,” he said. “Other than that, I basically got all of the ins and outs of what he was dealing with on a day-to-day basis. That informed my performance a big deal.”

The actor also discussed his and Andrew Garfield‘s relationship as their characters progressed from utter hatred to respect and then back to hatred.

“It was really a dance between me and Andrew,” he continued. “It was as intense a relationship as I had ever worked on in a movie. It was difficult for both of us. Sometimes we couldn’t navigate it easily. It was stressful.”

After all, Shannon’s character Rick is an extremely hated man in the movie — but Shannon doesn’t necessarily see him as the bad guy.

“I think Rick is pretty pragmatic,” he said. “If it was up to Rick, he wouldn’t say much at all. The only reason he is saying anything to Dennis is that he is so lonely. It’s not that he feels he is better than Dennis, he just wants Dennis to understand what he is doing, because he knows everyone hates his fucking guts and it hurts his feelings.”

And Bahrani agreed: “The devil wasn’t Michael’s character — it was the system that created him and created the world we are all in.”

Bahrani revealed during the Q&A that there were a lot of non-actors in the film. In fact, most of the people who Garfield was going to evict were real people in their real homes.

“The sheriff, that’s a real sheriff,” said Bahrani. “He’s done acting before, but he’s never done anything like this. But he’s done evictions, so he added an authenticity and intensity to that. The clean-out crew; one is an actor, the rest are real — that’s actually what they do for a a living. When Andrew would knock on doors to evict people in those montage sequences, every other person is an actor and every other person is a real person in a real home. I wouldn’t tell Andrew who was who and I wouldn’t tell him what was going to happen.”

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