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Lost In The Woods
Stand-up comedian Demetri Martin takes the lead role in Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock.
In the States he's known as a stand up comedian or the guy who wrote for Conan O'Brien and Jon Stewart before landing his own TV show titled Important Things with Demetri Martin. And yet Oscar winning director Ang Lee wanted Martin to star in his latest film Taking Woodstock - rather than the latest hot young Hollywood actor. Martin plays lead character, Elliot Tiber, the guy who inadvertently brought the iconic music festival to his hometown of White Lake in 1969. The 35-year-old Martin, who looks much younger than his years, was at the Cannes Film Festival in May where the film competed for the prestigious Palm d'Or. Interview by Gaynor Flynn.
Did you say yes right away to this role?
"I had a general meeting and I didn't know there would be anything more than that. Then I had a second meeting with Ang and James (Schamus, writer/producer). The first meeting was just with James and then they mentioned this film about Woodstock and the ‘60s. I was immediately interested, then I heard that the character was gay and more about the storyline and I thought ‘well that will definitely be challenging,' not because I'm particularly homophobic as much as I hope I can sell that. I'm not trained; I just don't know how to do this stuff. But I was excited. I thought ‘this is cool'. And for a guy like me who looks dorky, and I don't look like an actor, it was an unexpected opportunity so I feel like an honoured guest in the whole process."
This is your first film. Was it always the plan to move from stand-up to film?
"No. I got into doing stand-up because I really wanted to be a stand-up comedian and then I started to realise that certain ideas that I had didn't quite fit into a joke structure or a stage structure so much, and I started to write down stuff in my notebook and I was thinking ‘this might be good in a scene', or ‘this might be good dialogue and maybe this is a drawing' or ‘this might be a cartoon' or ‘this might work better as animation'. So I started to learn to let the idea dictate the medium. Along the way I feel I've been lucky to be cast in someone else's project because my understanding was that if I'm ever going to be in a movie I'll have to just write it to get myself in there. And I thought of Woody Allen and Albert Brooks and people of that ilk who basically used themselves to just tell a story they had in mind. They were also guys who developed their comedic voice on stage and then tried to translate that into a narrative structure and developed and got to more and more complicated structures."
Would you have liked to have lived at the time of Woodstock?
"I always fantasise about living in the ‘60s. I don't like using my cell phone that much. I'm not a technophile and I certainly have a lap top computer and a blackberry and a hover board and a jet pack and all that stuff, but there's something romantic about it. Even just the design and style. I think hindsight gives you the benefit of seeing things in the past better. We hear the coolest and the best songs or at least those most likely to live on from the ‘60s so therefore the music seems to be so amazing, which it is. I like being in the present but if I had to go back to somewhere it would probably be the ‘60s."
Have you been to a music festival?
"I've been to a bunch of comedy festivals."
Did you camp out?
"No I was totally spoiled. Every festival I've been to I was performing so I got to be a total poser and I would just stay in a hotel on site or right next to it and I get to go ‘Hey I'm at a festival, woohoo. Boy I'm tired, I'd love a shower'. So I've never really done it. I'd love to go to Glastonbury."
Did you watch the original documentary on Woodstock?
"I fell asleep at some point. It's really long. I saw it but I couldn't get over people's body's looking very different. Especially in America, in our country people have gotten bigger, more tattooed, more pieced. Like me for example, I'm tattooed from neck to nuts. I'm kidding. And the other end of it is that people wax themselves now and they're really cut and they have all these muscles. There's a different vanity. It seems a more natural shape back then."
What were a couple of the differences to go from TV to film then?
"What I learned is that trust is a very large and important commodity in the film process. When you do stand-up comedy in the States, you just have to trust yourself and then you kind of control it and call the shots on stage. If you trust the audience too much they'll just eat you alive and then you are done. With film you have to trust your director, costumes, hair and make-up, lighting, everybody. When they say don't touch your hair then don't touch your hair; it's ok right now."
Taking Woodstock is in cinemas from August 27. For more on Demetri Martin and Taking Woodstock check out the latest issue of Filmink Magazine.
