by James Mottram
“I was thinking about it, this is actually my fourth time here,” says Greg Kinnear when we interview him at Cannes. “I was here with Fast Food Nation few years ago. Then Nurse Betty, and prior to that I was, in a past life, MovieTime, it was a cable channel, so I had a microphone and I drove around trying to get interviews with anybody that would talk to me.”
That’s right, you may recall, but Greg Kinnear started off as an entertainment reporter, first with little known channel MovieTime, which was bought out by E!, where he found himself hosting Talk Soup for four years, before landing a small part as a talk show host on Blankman in 1994. But it was his substantial role in the Sabrina remake opposite Harrison Ford in 1995 that really launched his acting career.
Today he’s lending support to a film that he’s extremely proud of, Brigsby Bear, which premiered to great buzz at Sundance, then off to Cannes and now in cinemas. “It’s really about the serial life of this man-child and his acceptance into the world,” says Kinnear.
Co-written and starring Saturday Night Live’s Kyle Mooney, and directed by his comedy partner Dave McCary, Brigsby Bear is about a young man who finally learns that he was abducted and kept inside a house all of his life, watching a children’s show that was created especially for him by his captors. “Tricky,” says Kinnear about the subject matter for the comedy. “When I read it, I knew a few of their things from SNL, they said ‘look at our YouTube clips’, and I kind of did, but you don’t really know what you’re getting yourself into with a first-time director. When I got to Utah [where the film was shot], I wanted to see this bear, like ‘who’s this fucking bear?’, I had no idea what it’s supposed to be, but when I saw the bear, I thought they really had a great tone there.”
In the film, Kinnear plays a sheriff, who is “a closeted actor. I immediately thought that would really be fun to kind of work that angle.”
Greg Kinnear has been working the actor angle in many different roles for a number of years, popping up in everything from the US network remake of Rake to the indie film Little Men by Ira Sachs, to the streaming show Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams.
The streaming landscape for content is timely considering it was at this year’s Cannes where Netflix got slammed by the French press for their practices of launching films at major film festivals and then making them available to view on their platform, bypassing the cinema experience.
“I have young kids, and you learn very quickly that things are adapting and changing at a furious rate,” says Kinnear, also acknowledging that the marketing required to release films in cinemas can sometimes fund a whole TV series. “The kids embrace technology. It’s the way they think about traditional movies. Sure, they’ve been to movies and it’s been perfectly fine to go there. There’s chairs and a screen. I don’t think they differentiate that from the other forms that they are watching. Whether that’s in the house, or up on the iPad in the bedroom, whatever. It’s the same conversation, and I always feel like at the end of the day, it’s a pointless conversation because no-one is going to control it. Booing is nonsense.”
Coming up, Kinnear has a number of feature films readying for release. “The Red Seas Diving Resort is about the Ethiopian Jews that were being persecuted, had crossed into Sudan and were put into these internment camps in Sudan. Worse conditions than they were previously in. The Mossad in the late ‘70s, sensationally take over this Italian hotel and started using it as a base to get Ethiopians to Israel. I finally get to play my dad, bald with a moustache.
“In Same Kind of Different As Me I play a philandering, questionable art dealer,” he trails off. “It’s based on a book and it’s basically this wealthy couple, Renee Zellweger and I. She secretly gets involved with this homeless shelter and surreptitiously brings me into this world. Our lives get changed by this guy, played by Djimon Hounsou, and it’s really about homelessness.”
Brigsby Bear is in cinemas October 26, 2017.
