Bryce Dallas Howard Talks About Her New Movies & Gus Van Sant

From source: Nextmovie
Bryce Dallas Howard may have Hollywood in her genes via her dad Ron, but she's proved her mettle on the big screen. The multitasking actress costars in Oscar favorite "The Help" as the bitchy Hilly Holbrook and is currently promoting the dramedy "50/50," in which she takes on another hard-to-swallow role as a crappy girlfriend to a young guy with cancer.

With the Gus Van Sant movie "Restless," she's taken on a new responsibility, as producer. The arty romance about a dying girl named Annabel (Mia Wasikowska) who falls for a funeral-obsessed teen (Henry Hopper) is set to open this Friday. Watch the trailer here. She talked to us about working with Van Sant, playing an unsympathetic character and her take on the controversy over "The Help."

You were instrumental in getting the "Restless" script to the screen, and as a hands-on producer. What's it to be involved day-to-day in a production role?
Everything that I have to say, I need to say [with] a huge disclaimer beforehand, which is I don't think it's a normal experience to have your first film be a Gus Van Sant film. Not only is Gus such a masterful filmmaker, but from a production standpoint, he's a very efficient filmmaker. We came in $300,000 under budget because of the way that Gus shoots, and so if I go from here and produce some kind of independent film, I'm not going to really apply the experience that I had with Gus to an experience with, say, a first-time filmmaker or another filmmaker because he's a dream director for a producer, absolutely.

So the experience was profoundly educational for me, really stimulating and exciting and collaborative and fantastic, but all that being said, I feel very fortunate that I was working with Gus.

Was it awkward or stressful to work with a friend like screenwriter Jason Lew? Sometimes mixing business with friendship can be dicey, especially when it's a creative project.
The first time that Jason and I had met was actually [when] we were doing a play together, and we did a series of plays together, so that was kind of the foundation of our friendship ... The particular kinds of plays we did were very avant-garde and experimental and highly collaborative, so we were used to working with one another in that sort of way. And I think it helped feeling not only like an admirer of the person's work that you're working with but also to feel genuinely emotionally connected to them and to feel a real friendship. I think it makes things go faster and easier because there's never any question about how the two people feel about one another. It really gets to just be about the work.

I didn't even know Henry Hopper acted. How did you guys go about finding him and casting him? I understand he was painting in a bohemian commune. How was he on his radar for this movie?
Well, he wasn't. Francine Maisler, the casting director who's been Gus's casting director for a while, and she works with Sony as well, had seen him in a couple of plays and really felt like he could be right. Henry at the time was painting in Berlin, and we weren't quite sure if he was going to be coming in for the audition or not, and when he eventually did, I mean, Francine was absolutely right ... The people that we had seen before him were great actors, really wonderful actors and really read it in the way that we had always envisioned ... And then when Henry read, I remember I was watching the tapes and just leaning forward because he interpreted the character in a way that I had never seen the character previously. And everything came alive in a very, very specifically unique way, and that absolutely stood out.