Filmmaker Maya Forbes cast Mark Ruffalo to play her likable bipolar dad in "Infinitely Polar Bear" and shows the human side of mental illness. Singer/Songwriter Ryn Weaver's quick rise to fame and the internet haters that came with it. Report from the floor of the massive video game trade show E3; Neil Young v. Donald Trump
'Infinitely Polar Bear': Mark Ruffalo plays a dad struggling with being bipolar
The new movie "Infinitely Polar Bear" is based on the true story of writer/director Maya Forbes's family. It brings to life a particular period in Forbes's childhood when her bipolar father (Mark Ruffalo) finds himself raising Maya and her sister in Boston, while their mother (Zoe Saldana) goes to graduate school in New York in the hopes of improving the family's perilous finances.
It wasn't an easy movie to get made, and Forbes repeatedly lost her financing. But her two lead actors never abandoned the project over five years of false starts.
In addition to Ruffalo and Saldana, the movie stars Ashley Aufderheide (as Maya's sister China) and Forbes's own daughter, Imogene Wolodarsky. She portrays a younger version of Forbes in the film.
Maya Forbes met with the Frame's John Horn to discuss the film, her inspiration and her own experience growing up with her father.
Interview highlights
Where did you get the idea for the title, "Infinitely Polar Bear"?
In the film it's a younger daughter's misunderstanding of the term "bipolar," which is what her father is. In truth, the term was given to me by my father. My father was having a manic episode and we had to take him to the hospital. He was in an agreeable manic state and he was filling out his intake form. It asked, "What is your diagnosis? Have you been diagnosed manic depressive or schizophrenic?" He wrote "other." He wrote "infinitely polar bear."
Tell us about your relationship with your father. You obviously grew up under his care. He obviously was suffering from bipolar disorder. You live that life. It obviously affects who you are as person. How does it affect you as a storyteller, and at what point did you want to revisit this episode in the history of your life?
Well it was really when my daughters turned 7 and 5. When they turned the age that I had been when my father had his big manic breakdown, I was sort of catapulted back into memories of the past. My father had died in 1998, and I started telling my daughters bedtime stories. My father was a great storyteller. I started telling my daughters bedtime stories about my father, and then also stories that he had told me when I was a little girl.
I started to reflect on how much I had really learned from those times — really the lessons and some of the gifts I'd gotten. He was a great storyteller, he was a great singer, and he took us to the movies all the time. I wanted to tell the stories of the memories that are painful, but also the memories that make you who you are.
When you're writing this movie and thinking about how you are going to tell the story — even if you're fictionalizing in certain parts of it, does it change the way that you yourself remember this story? Do you see your father in a new light having written this film?
The really funny thing I saw as I was directing Mark Ruffalo in this role, who plays my father, is how theatrical my father was. I would say, "Mark, do it like this," and I would realize — dad was doing that because that is what [Jean-Paul] Belmondo did, or dad was doing that because that is what [Jack] Nicholson did. I mean, he loved films and he had a real theatrical quality to him. I didn't really see that as a kid. I thought he was just fun and funny. As I watched the film I realized just how much he was taking from his movie star heroes.
A father suffering from bipolar disorder raises his children in the absence of their mother in Maya Forbes' new film. (Claire Folger/Sony Pictures Classics)
Can you talk about how you cast the parts of your mother and your father? What sort of reference did you give them in terms of home movies or memories? How did you have to leave them so that they could create their own performances and not do an imitation?
Well with both Mark and Zoe — Zoe Saldana plays my mother, or I should say the mother — it gets confusing. I gave them a lot of materials. In terms of with Zoe, my mother is still alive. So Zoe got to meet my mother and talk to my mother. I told her a lot of stories and I showed her a lot of photographs.
Then with Mark, I gave him a Super 8 film my father had shot when he was manic of himself, which is what a manic person does because they are so self-focused. I mean, when you are really in the height of mania, you're like God. So my father made this incredible Super 8 film of himself. That was helpful. Then when we got to the set and we were actually about to shoot, I sort of said, "Let all that go."
Were there any scenes when shooting this movie and revisiting his illness that were particularly difficult for you to shoot?
There is a scene in the mental hospital where he is very sedated. That was always the hardest thing for me to see. I mean, it was really painful for me when my father was sedated like that.
How old were you at the time?
The first time I saw that, I was probably 6. That was a hard scene. It was really visceral — the room we were in and the way Mark played it — it just made my heart break. It's very hard when people have to be deadened like that.
As you're thinking about telling this story, are there certain things you have to fictionalize because if you presented them as they actually happened audiences wouldn't believe them?
One of the interesting things for me and the writing of this film, was that it seemed so crazy to say, "My mother went away to business school and left us in the care of my manic-depressive father." That seemed crazy. I went around in my Hollywood brain — because I've written for Hollywood studio movies for so long — "How do I make this make sense to an audience?"
I mean, are the parents divorced? Did the mother run off with somebody? Did the mother die? I mean, no problem. That is why they're with their dad, the mother is dead. I just thought, "I'm going to tell the really messy true story." I embraced all of that.
Also, my mother is African-American. I don't look African-American. I look white. My mother says I am "unidentifiably black." That is the new term for me. But just all the crazy things I couldn't explain in my life — my father is from this wealthy family and we were quite poor, we weren't getting any money from them. I just decided to take things that were hard to explain and put them in this movie.
It's really also hard to tell a story about a marriage, the struggles that any married couple experiences, the struggles that any married couple experiences when the mother wants to have a career and the struggles that any married couple experiences when one of the partners in the marriage is not well.
Yes. I always thought of it as a love story, I mean, with love being a painful and hard thing — half the time. My parents really loved each other, but it's very hard to love someone when they can't get it together. It's hard to keep coming back and hoping hoping hoping that they're going to figure out how to stay stable. How to maintain any sort of order in their life.
That was the thing with my father. He could create some order, but he could never sustain it. It's very hard to say, "I have to walk away from this. I can't keep expecting that you're going to be able to be the kind of husband that I want you to be, but I still love you."
The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2014. It's just now coming out. What has that wait been like for you?
It's been strange, because everything at Sundance felt like, "It's all about to start. My life is about to begin!" Now I've been waiting and waiting and waiting. But I'm happy. Really, we were waiting for Mark, because he is so busy and he wants to promote the film, and I want him to promote the film — he is wonderful in the film. So it was nice knowing that it was going to come out sometime in the distance. That was very comforting. But it was a little strange. Everyone kept saying, "Did your movie come out?"
Mark Ruffalo stars in Maya Forbes' new film "Infinitely Polar Bear."
In the interim, Mark Ruffalo was going on to amazing things. I mean, he has "Foxcatcher," he has the whole "Avengers." Do you think that helps your film in some way?
I think it does. I think Mark is recognized as one of our greatest actors. He is also, with "The Avengers" and everything, just a big star. Everyone knows who he is. So, I don't think it hurts.
The movies have been enamored with depicting people who are suffering from some sort of mental illness. I mean, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "A Beautiful Mind," but there are certain kinds of depictions that Hollywood tends to favor.
They're not depictions that we see in this film, which is that people — generally, not always — with mental illness, are dangerous, or they're to be shunned. This is a very loving portrait of a man who is suffering from an illness. Is part of your movie made even subconsciously in reaction to how people with mental illness have been shown in Hollywood?
Yes, I really wanted to humanize someone with a mental illness. Mental illness is not about this one person — it is about families. Mental illness affects families. We all, I think most people, have somebody that they love — whether it's a parent, child or a sibling — who is struggling either with mental illness or an addiction, and it really affects everybody.
So I wanted to show that it's not all of who they are. They're loved, and they're a part of our lives. So yes, I really wanted to tell the story of a family and what it is to have somebody who you love that is suffering from this.
"Infinitely Polar Bear" opens in select cities Friday, June 19.
Ryn Weaver deals with Internet backlash while learning to be a pop star
When singer-songwriter Ryn Weaver released her song “OctaHate’’ online last June, it got over 2 million hits in a little under a week. And that was just the beginning.
Since then, she’s been featured in the New York Times. Billboard has pegged her as the next big pop star for 2015, and other musicians are taking notice. Gwen Stefani has tapped Weaver to write songs for her highly anticipated new album.
"I’ve had to grow a lot in front of people, but that’s cool. That’s just a part of the game," the 22-year-old confesses. She was born and raised in San Diego, where she had been writing music before moving away to pursue a theater degree at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Eventually, she dropped out and moved back to Southern California to give music another shot.
In 2013, she had a chance encounter with influential music producer Benny Blanco, who’s worked with Katy Perry, Britney Spears and Maroon 5, just to list a few names. One year later, Blanco helped produce the song that introduced Weaver to the world.
Looking back, Weaver recalls, "Things moved at a very rapid pace. So then people, all they want to do is be like, 'How did she, who is she...?' Every interview’s like, 'Do you write your own songs?' Then you’re automatically on the defensive. It’s like, 'Of course! I’m a writer! That’s why I got signed.'"
If Weaver sounds a bit defensive, it’s because she achieved her fame in the digital age, in which the Internet can make an artist and then ruin them just as quickly. It’s what happened to the singer Lana Del Rey, who became the most talked about artist on the Internet in the summer of 2011 only to be bashed by that same community a couple months later for her quick rise to fame. Just like Lana, Weaver suffered her own backlash.
"In the beginning," Weaver says, "it just hurts, because you are a sensitive person if you're a writer. It's weird — they expect you to be sensitive enough to share everything about yourself, but then strong enough to deal with literally the underbelly of it all. You can't control that you're a female in the game and you like music with a pop sensibility. But being in that genre, you have to kind of expect...hate."
But while it's one thing to expect hate, it's another thing to deal with it. And that took Weaver a while to come to terms with. She claims that, "If you're a female and you're not ugly, you don't really get a pass. They're like, 'We're gonna pee on you.' And you're like, 'Do it!'" she said, laughing.
"I can take it now, though," she continues. "This year has been crazy for me, but hate has actually for me become a fuel. I'm like, 'Cool, now I get to prove you wrong. And then I get to write another record and prove you wrong. And then you're the guy who wrote the article at the beginning of my career and discounted my worth.'"
Weaver didn’t always have this confidence to brush off the haters. She was a shy kid growing up, and she wasn’t the most popular at school. Her mom used to poke fun at her thin skin — literally thin skin.
"Like on my arms, you see my veins very brightly," Weaver says. "It sounds silly, but my mom's very poetic in her own way, and since I was very sensitive and I was bullied when I was younger, she would talk about how I had this paper-thin skin, and that's who I was and that's what made me special. But, you know, as you get older you're like, 'Buck up, kid.'"
Even though she’s gotten used to criticism, she still hasn’t had the time to come to terms with how far she’s come in such a short amount of time. She remembers that, the night before, "I was in the car with my friend and we were driving in the sunset, listening to classic rock on the radio, arms out the windows, and I just started sobbing.
"And I just couldn't stop. She was like, 'What's wrong?' And I was just gasping, couldn't catch my breath, and she was like, 'What is it?' And I'm just like, 'It's everything!' Because every now and then, everything hits me, and I...I couldn't be more thankful."
Ryn Weaver’s debut album, “The Fool,” is out now.
E3 2015: Oculus Rift, 'Star Wars: Battlefront' and life at E3 in 30 pounds of armor
We went to E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, on the event's opening day to see what's coming up in the video game world and how the industry is responding to it. Unlike a convention like San Diego Comic-Con, E3 is a trade convention targeted at insiders — but those insiders still love video games as much as anyone. The production values look even higher and more polished than that of Comic-Con, and with good reason — it's a significantly larger industry than film when it comes to how much money gaming generates.
There was a smattering of cosplay at E3, but far fewer people among the 50,000 attendees dressed up in costume than you'd see at the average non-industry fan convention. Still, we talked to a few of them, from one cosplaying civilian to Rex Howell, who was dressed up in 30 pounds of armor working at the booth for the game "Life Is Feudal" — and slowly sweating to death.
The attendance is also reflective of the male-heavy video game industry. While there are plenty of female gamers, particularly in the mobile-casual game market, those working in the industry are still predominantly male. That's reflected at the industry-exclusive convention, with women on the floor being few and far between. Many of the women who were in attendance were actually working at the booths rather than being there as attendees.
Star Wars: Battlefront
One of the biggest games was "Star Wars: Battlefront," with a huge line of people waiting to get in for their chance to play it. It's coming out ahead of the new film, "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," so that it can cash in on the Christmas video game sales surge. It lets fans enter into the classic "Star Wars" films in a first-person-shooter game.
"My expectations were low, based on other 'Star Wars' games in the past, but that one was pretty cool," one fan said.
It's an example of how video games are just as susceptible to sequels as the film industry — if not more so.
Virtual reality gaming, from Oculus to Morpheus
The biggest story of E3 2015 was the proliferation of virtual reality gaming, with numerous companies taking a swipe at a more immersive experience. It came from both the hardware side, with companies like Sony showing off their Project Morpheus hardware and the headline-grabbing Oculus Rift available for fans to try out, as well as the software side, with developers using devices like the Oculus at their own booths for fans to experience their games.
We also tried out the Oculus ourselves. It's maybe not as immersive as you would like — our intern Natalie Given explained her experience.
"I would call it more of a broken reality," Given said. She found it disorienting to be able to control your viewpoint by moving around your head, while still using a traditional video game controller for much of what your character does in the game we tested it with, "Adrift."
We also saw other variations. Project Morpheus, for example, combines with Sony's Move controllers to let you control your game without a traditional controller. We even saw one booth with a demo showing how you could run in real life to control your character in the game, using special shoes and a special surface. Virtual reality might not be here yet — but it's getting closer.
E3 runs through Thursday in downtown Los Angeles.