Sundance: Kieran Culkin has notes, Christopher Reeve’s children speak, and actors learn to talk sasquatch

It was an adjustment, actor Kieran Culkin said, to have his scene partner also be his director.

“That was a first for me,” Culkin said Saturday at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, during the Q&A after the premiere of “A Real Pain,” written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg. Culkin and Eisenberg play cousins go take a tour of Poland, to honor their grandmother who fled the country to avoid the Holocaust.

“It felt like there was a pretty good rapport right away,” Culkin said of shooting with Eisenberg. “Then, right after the first scene, it’d be, like, ‘Cut!’, and he’d start giving me notes. And my first thought was, ‘B----, I’ve got notes for you, too.’”

Culkin is getting raves for his performance in “A Real Pain,” whose premiere came just weeks after he won both a Golden Globe and an Emmy for his work on HBO’s “Succession.”

The Hollywood trades reported Sunday that “A Real Pain” scored a worldwide distribution deal with Searchlight Pictures, for a reported $10 million.

Sundance Film Festival screenings run through Sunday in Park City and Salt Lake City, and on the Sundance online portal from Thursday through Sunday.

— Sean P. Means

‘The right time’ to tell Reeve’s story, children say

Sniffles — and later applause — were heard around the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center during the Salt Lake City Sundance gala opening of the documentary “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story.”

The audience, which included several Utah lawmakers and philanthropist Gail Miller, gave a standing ovation after the screening, when Reeve’s children — Will, Alexandra and Matthew — took the stage.

Being at Sundance is “the highest honor,” said Matthew Reeve, himself a filmmaker.

The documentary looks at the life of Christopher Reeve, who shot to stardom with the 1978 movie “Superman,” playing the superhero and his alter ego, reporter Clark Kent — roles he would play in three more movies. The film also shows the aftermath of the 1995 horse-riding accident in which Reeve broke his neck, and how that injury affected him and his family. Among the topics within the documentary is the impact on Reeve’s life of his friend, the late comedian Robin Williams.

Reeve’s story is told through archival footage, along with current interviews with Reeve’s children and celebrity friends like Glenn Close and Whoopi Goldberg.

This October will mark the 20th anniversary of Reeve’s death — which is why his children felt it was the right time to participate in the documentary.

“Twenty is a big round number,” said Will Reeve. “Over the years, as we had talked as a family about considering a project like this, we knew that we would only do it at the right time and with the right people.”

Alexandra Reeve Givens stressed that the children gave directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui “free rein” in telling their father’s story.

“They took the story and really put it through an honest filter, showing that there were highs and lows that were strengths and weaknesses to our dad,” Reeve Givens said. “That he was human, above all.”

— Alex Vejar

A ‘sasquatch bootcamp’ for actors

Before Sunday’s Salt Lake City screening of “Sasquatch Summer,” co-director David Zellner gave the audience a warning.

“I just want to let you know, in case you’re looking for a movie with humans, you’ve come to the wrong movie,” said Zellner, before the irreverent and sometimes hilariously uncomfortable movie started.

The movie follows a year in the life of a family of sasquatches — or Bigfoots. There’s no dialogue, aside from the skillfully practiced grunts from the cast, which includes Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, Christophe Zajac-Denek and Nathan Zellner (David’s brother and co-director).

In the Q&A after the screening, David Zellner said the directors organized a “sasquatch bootcamp” to make sure everyone’s tone was on par for their grunt language.

“It was so important to convey the tone, which is very much for us a mixture of humor and pathos, but we didn’t want it to feel spooky or anything,” David Zellner said. “There’s a sincerity and earnestness, even though things become completely absurd. We wanted it to be relatable on a human level.”

Nathan Zellner added, “It’s a tough project because there’s no dialogue, and so a lot of it relies on the makeup, on our body language.”

Nathan said they also relied on the film’s composers, the indie-electronica band The Octopus Project, “to really help us with some of the more dramatic moments, and let the score help the audience learn the story the same way.”

Josh Lambert, one of the members of The Octopus Project, said they tried to mimic the “hoots” the sasquatches made, using flutes. They also used a device that hooked a computer up to a plant, to register the “electrical impulses in the plant.” They read the impulses of ferns and mushrooms, Lambert said, and took those readings back and translated them into music.

— Palak Jayswal

Director ‘not crying’ at her premiere

Many moviegoers cried at Sunday’s premiere of the tragicomic “Suncoast” — but the film’s writer-director swore she wouldn’t be one of them.

“I’m not crying this weekend,” filmmaker Laura Chinn declared at the Park City Library Center when introducing her film, an autobiographical tale of a 17-year-old girl (Nico Parker) trying to have a normal high school life while her older brother, unresponsive after years of brain cancer, is in hospice care about to die. (“Suncoast,” distributed by Searchlight Pictures, is scheduled to start streaming on Hulu on Feb. 9.)

Chinn’s brother was in the same Florida facility at the same time, in 2005, as a woman named Terri Schiavo. When Schiavo’s husband made the choice to end life-prolonging treatment for his wife, who was in a persistent vegetative state for the last 15 years of her life, it prompted legal challenges from her parents, protests from Christian groups, and legislation signed by then-Gov. Jeb Bush that was declared unconstitutional.

“That was just a coincidental event that took place in my life,” Chinn said during the Q&A after Sunday’s screening. “I was right in the center of this debate, and this weird political protest. I was seeing these people as real people going through this thing. It definitely expanded my empathy and my understanding of the world.”

Chinn’s vow not to cry was tested when an audience member introduced herself as a nurse at the same Florida hospice — and thanked Chinn for depicting the work of hospice nurses. The woman gave Chinn a small gift from her colleagues.

“The nurses in that place were living angels,” Chinn said.

— Sean P. Means

A filmmaker’s ‘thank you’ and ‘I’m sorry’

Sean Wang, writer-director of the coming-of-age movie “Dìdi (弟弟),” got his Sundance moment Friday night: A packed audience at The Ray — including many of his cast, crew, producers, backers, friends and family — giving him a heartfelt standing ovation.

Screening the movie — a semi-autobiographical look at a 13-year-old Taiwanese American kid (played by Isaak Wang) growing up in the Bay Area with his mom (Joan Chen) and grandmother (played by the director’s own grandma, Chang Li Hua) — was a “full-circle moment,” he said.

Seven years earlier, he told the audience, he was in The Ray, watching the first screening of the first movie he ever worked on: Carlos Reyes Estrada’s “Summertime,” in which Wang was a second-unit cinematographer. He stayed connected with Reyes Estrada, and told him of the script he was working on. Reyes Estrada became his producer on “Dìdi (弟弟).”

“I really think of this movie as a ‘thank you,’ ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I love you’ to my family and my friends,” Wang said after the screening. “I wish my adolescent self, my 9- or 10-[year-old] self … wasn’t such a brat to my sister and my family.”

— Sean P. Means

Carol Kane as a casting revelation

For his movie “Between the Temples,” which premiered Friday at the Park City Library Center, director Nathan Silver said casting was everything.

The comedy-drama stars Jason Schwartzman as Ben Gottlieb, a cantor in an upstate New York synagogue, grieving the death of his wife a year before. He is surprised by a new student in his mitzvah class: Carla O’Connor (Carol Kane), Ben’s grade-school music teacher, now retired, widowed and reconnecting with her Jewish roots.

The part of Ben was written for Schwartzman, Silver said — but he and his collaborators spent a long time trying to find the right actor to play Carla. Then it hit him.

“I remember at one point, right after I got married, I suddenly jumped up in bed and said, ‘Carol Kane! That’s Carla!,’” Silver said at Friday’s Q&A. “And I texted everyone excitedly from abroad, and they were like, ‘Duh! How did we not think about this beforehand?’”

Kane — whose long career has included roles in “Taxi,” “Addams Family Values,” “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” and “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” — said she was struck by how Carla is “going for her dream.”

“Maybe this is going to sound odd,” Kane said, “but I don’t think she’s particularly courageous, but I think she’s very brave.”

— Sean P. Means