The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (21 page)

RS:
I think it’s been important to take it “seriously,” to avoid those nods and winks to the audience which might pull the audience out of the worlds you are trying to create for them.

MD:
Straight ahead, but not too traditional. Garth was very keen on the performance element of all this and it’s definitely great to have worked on a science-fiction movie for the last three or four months and not have stood in front of a blue screen or had to act to an imaginary character. Our imaginations were activated by the presence of real things, except for the pad.

RS:
I think that’s one of the things that really gives this movie a heart and a charm that some science fiction doesn’t have.

MD:
Yes, people can detect that too and also it does something for you as an actor. It’s interesting because Garth has done a lot of things in this film that you would do in theatre, like the creation of real creatures and sets. The sense of place and environment is very defined and really strong. That’s great for us as actors and it’s also extremely important for the audience to sense that this is not some fabricated digital world. That it’s a world and a place that has been created not only by people’s minds but by their hands as well.

RS:
Talking about doing things for real, I was impressed with what you and Martin did this afternoon, that was quite a sight!

MD:
Ah, the escape hatch of the Vogon ship! Martin and I did that stunt ourselves and it was quite a long way to fall. I love that the role is so physical because it almost brings to mind Laurel and Hardy. I’m a Laurel and Hardy fan, as is Martin. I’m a big Chaplin fan, a Buster Keaton fan and there’s a lot of room to incorporate that sort of spirit and that is fun in a science-fiction setting.

RS:
How do you make your entrance?

MD:
On a shopping trolley full of beer and peanuts coming down a hill towards the bulldozers that Arthur’s lying in front of. It’s really quite an awesome entrance. As I was reading the script, I could see that Ford was going to be this very way-out sort of guy because when you see him on Earth he does literally look off his trolley. He’s excitable and jumping over the fence to Arthur’s house, but there’s also a very low-key matter-of-fact dimension to him, which makes him seem even dafter. There’s a sense of precision to him and having to do physical things, especially on this film, has required a certain sharpness from all of us. I know people always say, “I’m really excited about this movie.” But I’ve been working on
Hitchhiker’s
for the last eighteen weeks and I’m dying to see it. I feel the same way that I felt when I got here, which is totally enthused, really excited, very open and really pleased and assured that people are going to be floored by this. In a movie with special effects there is a lot you don’t get to see as an actor, but I can see from looking at the sets that everything is there for a reason and serves a purpose. In their intelligence and playfulness I think that Garth and Nick have captured the spirit of the book. You have been really helpful as well, because of your enthusiasm, and we’ve had loads of conversations just about Douglas and small things in the book. I know what it’s like to have love for a book and then to see a screen adaptation that doesn’t quite do it. I don’t think the readers mind it being different and new at all but they want the core of it and that’s why I have had the book on set with me every day and in between my naps I’m always dipping in! Ford can be played in so many different ways . . . tender, otherworldly. It’s an exciting character to embrace but it’s also a character you’ve got to keep your eye on and pay attention to. That’s the type of situation I try to put myself in as an actor and as a singer, where you really have to be paying attention and be involved. Not “put your back to the seat of the chair and relax” type of work. You should be on the edge of your seat, watching, having to stand up, sometimes getting on top of the seat and it’s been very much that experience for me and I’m really happy.

Interview with Zooey Deschanel—Tricia McMillan

Credits include
Elf, All the Real Girls, Good Girl
and
Almost
Famous.

Robbie Stamp:
So to begin, had you ever heard of
Hitchhiker’s
before you got involved?

Zooey Deschanel:
Yes, I read the first
Hitchhiker’s
when I was around eleven. There was like a little
Hitchhiker’s
fan club in my class at school. So I read the first one then and I liked it, but I hadn’t had a chance to revisit it until I found out that I was up for the movie.

RS:
How did you get involved?

ZD:
I knew about the project and was doing a film in New York when Nick and Garth came to meet me on the set. We had a lunch meeting together and I was very struck by their charm and creativity and their approach to the material. One of the first things that struck me was that even though it was a science-fiction movie, they saw the relationships between the characters as something very important, rather than thinking that the special effects were the most important thing. Garth mentioned Billy Wilder’s movie
The Apartment,
with Jack Lemmon, as the sort of movie that he liked and also
Annie Hall,
and those are two of my favourite movies. So right from the first I was intrigued because it seemed unusual to me that someone who was directing a film with a lot of special effects should take a lot of interest in the human relationships and realize that they were really what was going to ground it.

RS:
I am frequently asked why the movie was finally greenlit and I think there were a number of steps but I’m sure one of the key reasons that Nina Jacobson finally agreed to go ahead was that we had worked hard to create a real relationship between Trillian and Arthur.

ZD:
Yes, which is probably the main difference between
Hitchhiker’s
in its other incarnations and
Hitchhiker’s
the movie. I think that it’s going to work very well on the screen. The novel, the radio series and the TV series, they’re all totally different things.

RS:
Having this “humanity” in the midst of it lets the whole piece breathe more easily on screen.

ZD:
Yes, usually there aren’t that many intimate moments in large-scale, large-budget, heavy special-effects movies. To have these human relationships juxtaposed with the massiveness of the universe is what makes the material funny. You have these people who are people and aliens who are strangely familiar in the errors they make and in their misconceptions of things and it makes the universe seem smaller and makes the intimate moments seem larger. Douglas seems to have had this core desire to point out that we’re smaller than we think we are, that a little humility on the part of the human species would go a long way.

RS:
In the other versions of
Hitchhiker’s
it is Trillian of all the characters who is the most underwritten, and we have developed her the furthest in the movie, so talk a little bit about finding her and her voice.

ZD:
From the table read
¹⁴
to now, Trillian has changed a lot, actually, because you always find your character as you do work with them in the film. You just see what works for you and with the other actors and within the context of the film. When we started out Trillian was a bit more passive and we’ve made her a little bit feistier, a little bit tougher. I think it works, especially to create a foil for Zaphod. The female audience will have somebody that they can relate to and root for because I think it definitely started out a little bit more male-orientated. Trillian is most stimulated by questioning things and by the intellectual, so I think she’s most happy when she’s reading the manual on the
Heart of Gold;
she’s just so excited to figure it out. I think that helps me with the physicality of my approach to Trillian. She’s a little nerdy, which is good, she’s bookish, and that’s great. I wanted to play a character that was strong and sexy and above all intelligent, and when she has to she’ll take on certain physical characteristics. When she has to take Zaphod prisoner for the sake of avoiding the Vogons she actually becomes quite tough. I think she’s also a little frustrated. It was slightly disappointing for her to go out into space and find people and species like the Vogons, that were just as much idiots as the people on Earth.

RS:
There are now a lot of moments where Trillian takes charge when the boys are faffing around.

ZD:
Yes, she is very smart, a person who is “to the point,” and I think that there are moments when she does start to grow a little weary of the bickering between the other characters and really does take charge.

RS:
She’s the one who works out the ship; she’s there with the manual. She gets it.

ZD:
Well, they wouldn’t be flying the
Heart of Gold
without Trillian. They all have their own specific things that they do and their own tasks within the story. Without Zaphod there we wouldn’t be on the
Heart of Gold
in the first place and his celebrity saves them a few times. Arthur is constantly questioning things and trying to find a way of relating to the girl he met at the party who bowled him over, vanished and turned up again in space. Ford Prefect is very much an observer who isn’t phased by too many things and his almost Zen bravery moves the story along. Trillian is very direct, a person-slash-alien who really drives them to get to where they’re going.

RS:
Did you think at all about being a semi-alien?

ZD:
I think I am semi-alien myself. All my life, when I was in school, people said I was weird, so now it’s paying off! I think that’s why a lot of people relate to this story. Everyone feels part alien!

RS:
There’s a big thread on alt.fan. Douglas-adams, one of the key fan newsgroups, “Is Trillian human?” What are your thoughts?

ZD:
When she finds out that she is half alien she is quite happy about it. She’s got all these degrees and is so smart that probably the first time she’s ever been challenged is when she gets on the ship and has to face the controls and the manual. It’s pretty amazing and the designers had certainly come up with a lot of buttons and dials. The Improbability Drive poses a pretty big challenge to the laws of physics as we think we know them on Earth! That was the key for me in the beginning. It’s her intellect that explains why she does go with Zaphod Beeblebrox at the party. She has always had this nagging sense that Earth is too small for her really, and the only way to entertain herself is to go off on this crazy adventure and see what happens, because she’s certainly not being challenged on Earth.

RS:
As soon as she gets into space she gets her teeth into the experience in a way that Arthur really doesn’t want to . . .

ZD:
She’s led by her intellect, and she first has to see if she can challenge herself before she can really fall in love with anybody.

RS:
The scene where you meet Arthur is a seminal moment. He’s reading a book and you bounce up to him and say, “Who are you?”

ZD:
Yes, basically that’s like the start of a different genre of movie and then it gets cut short and really gets interesting, because there’s so much more beyond that familiar party scene of boy meets girl. But that “ordinary” beginning on Earth is so important for the rest of the film. It grounds it before things get pretty wild out in space and we have all these fantastic sets and planets. When it really hit me that this was something special was walking onto the
Heart of Gold
for the first time. Remember, I had read the books when I was at school and it was like all of a sudden rediscovering my youth. It was really a feeling that was completely overwhelming and I just was running around and jumping around and running up and down the stairs. It felt there was scope for the imagination and for the first time it really all came together for me that this whole film was a group of tightly knit people who all wanted to make the best film that we possibly could and I was just completely blown away by all the work that had been done. It’s just so inspiring for an actor to see everyone on the set caring so much about what they’re doing and I think that there was a tremendous sense of responsibility to the fans and to Douglas Adams and to his family, just to make a good movie and to make a movie that was really worthwhile, where we all put all our creativity and all our intelligence and all our hard work into it.

RS:
As you say, we’ve all felt a deep sense of responsibility for the fans and the family but an equally big responsibility to millions of people who aren’t yet fans.

ZD:
Our new fans! This is an intelligent comedy with a rare undercurrent of philosophical meaning and I think it’s a film that you could see over and over again and not get bored. Each time you see it, you will be able to see something new that even I, having worked on the film for four months, haven’t seen before or hadn’t remembered. It’s a movie that I cannot wait to see, and I say that in all sincerity. A lot of the time you’re curious about a film you do, but this one is really a special film and I think that there are a lot of people out there who are waiting for an intelligent comedy of this kind. It has a sort of political significance. I just mean you can compare it to a lot that’s going on in the world. Yes, it’s all aliens and it’s the universe but what’s really funny about it is that even on this grand scale things don’t change. There’s still bureaucracy, there are still rash decisions being made on the part of government, there’s still corruption, there are still all kinds of things that are frustrating. And I like the emphasis on the human ability to question all the time. Some of the message of the film is that you should cherish your ability to question things. We can question our government, we can question the things around us, we can question the people around us, and that’s a great thing. It’s interesting that Earth was created to come up with the ultimate question because we are so inclined to come up with questions.

RS:
I’d never put those two things together. The Earth is built, designed to answer the Ultimate Question and of course that was very much a part of Douglas’s character; he loved questions and had this great ability to provide a new perspective, to make you look at a problem from a different angle. I talked with Mos for a long time and what’s been fascinating is how interested both of you have been in the ideas.

ZD:
I was always interested in philosophy and I found it really interesting to read a novel that’s a comedy and a science-fiction novel but so chock-full of ideas. The thing that’s made it stick around is the philosophical core and the things that it says about the world and its beauty and its absurdity. That’s why it’s funny when you hear Jeltz on the loudspeaker talking to the people of Earth when it’s about to be blown up:

“There’s no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department on Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now.”

I mean in the United States it’s just like going to the DMV and trying to renew your driver’s licence and the person behind the desk goes, “Oh you have to fill out that form, but you can only fill it out at home with a blue pen and only on a Thursday.” In our imaginations we tend to think of aliens as necessarily greater or smarter than us but to discover that they are actually being as petty as anything else is a really brilliant idea.

RS:
I was surprised by how physical the film was for you guys, and your Bugblatter Beast stunt was pretty impressive!

ZD:
I used to rock-climb when I was a kid and so I was pretty used to harnesses and that sort of thing. So I wasn’t nervous about it and I figured the best way to do it was to do it myself. It’s better to do a stunt yourself if you can do it but if it’s really dangerous you want to let a professional do it.

RS:
Has the movie been more physical than you thought it was going to be? There are quite a lot of bruises.

ZD: I know, actually Jason
¹⁵
keeps laughing because I come home with a spectacular array of bruises. I got hit by a piece of “bullet” and I
kept
getting hit on the head by flying objects!

RS:
And then there was the shaking around in the
Heart of
Gold,
when you were being chased by missiles.

ZD:
That was fun because we were throwing ourselves against things and it was definitely more physical than I ever imagined it. I thought that this was meant to be the intellectual sci-fi action film! But then again at the same time as the physical comedy we’re shouting philosophy at each other like on the Magrathea set, that was really funny, Martin yelling over that loud vacuum portal machine.

RS:
So what about Trillian’s relationship with Zaphod? Was there ever a physical attraction?

ZD:
I think she thinks he’s cute enough; Zaphod’s like a summer fling.

RS:
But they did have a fling when they got on the
Heart of
Gold
?

ZD:
I want the audience to decide for themselves. Yes, I think she thinks he’s attractive but he’s not a lasting attraction.

RS:
Have you enjoyed working with the others? It’s a very unusual mixture.

ZD:
It really is, I think they did a great job of putting us all together. There’s a great moment in the ship when we have all just been tossed around during the missile attack and Arthur says, “Well, we can talk about normal till the cows come home,” and one by one the characters ask, “What’s normal?” “What’s home?” “What are cows?” I think that’s a really good line, philosophy, character and a joke all in one.