Bryce Dallas Howard & Gus Van Sant Talks About 'Restless'

From source: Veryaware

Telling a story that has one of its main characters stricken with cancer can prove to be a tricky sell to audiences. If the material is too schmaltzy, a film can turn into LOVE STORY, MY LIFE or STEPMOM. While cancer is never a laughing matter, this month Hollywood is giving us two films that will change our perspective on how others deal with the disease. With 50/50 set to debut at the end of the month, the first film to bow at the box office is RESTLESS. And this film gets it right.

In the Gus Van Sant-directed film, Annabel (Mia Wasikowska) is a beautiful and charming terminal cancer patient with a deep felt love of life and the natural world. Enoch (Henry Hopper) is a young man who has dropped out of the business of living after an accident claimed the life of his parents. When these two outsiders meet-cute at a funeral, they find unexpected common ground in their unique experiences in the world.

This is not really a film about cancer. Rather, it’s both a heartfelt coming-of-age story and a love story. Actress and first time producer Bryce Dallas Howard (THE HELP and coincidentally 50/50) puts the film’s tone the best:

“The illness is the background of the story, but it’s not really what the story is about. It’s the inciting circumstances for another type of genre.”

Undeniably, there is a lightness and un-morose quality to the script that attracted Van Sant:

“One of the conventions of the story was that it had a very dark background, and yet it had a light attitude towards what was happening. It’s about seeing the light within that situation. There is the light part within a wake or within a memorial. The whole story, we’re heading towards Annabelle’s need to be light – that she didn’t need to be in a dark mood.”

Read the whole interview here

Source: via Twilightish