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I was very lucky to have the opportunity to speak with Jake Scott about his film, Welcome To The Rileys, which is released on DVD on Monday the 27th of February.
As well as talking about the unfair criticism Kristen Stewart gets, alternate endings and method acting, he spoke about the research that went into the film and what he’s working on next.
Please note – this interview contains spoilers.
HeyUGuys: It’s obviously a very character-driven film and at times I felt that it was remarkably natural, as if any sense of a set script had been stripped away. Were Gandolfini and Stewart actually given free reign in regards to improvisation?
Jake Scott: First of all, thank you for saying that. It’s a massive compliment, actually. It’s so interesting to me how the British have responded to this film compared to the American critics. It’s weird. It’s like they just seem to get it more. I found with American critics there almost wasn’t enough emotional guidance or something, you know? It’s interesting. Yeah, with actors like that you find because they’re already really committed to the work that it makes the director’s life fairly easy. I really learnt on this film that you get your casting right, you don’t have to work that hard. You have the room to explore and investigate various ways and different dimensions of the character and the relationship. I mean, James is a method actor and Kristen’s not really formally trained, but the relationship they had in the film is very much the relationship they had off set. He really was her caretaker and he really guided her and when we’d come in in the morning onto set, you know, it was such a small film and there was nothing really to set up other than the scene with the actors. We would do like forty-five minutes of rehearsal on set to see how we could make it better and as a result there was a lot of improvisation. The first scene was the most improvised – Kristen improvises everything. She can be quite frustrating for a writer because she kind of just makes her own words up. She takes what’s written on the page and then just makes her own sense of it. She wouldn’t warn you she was doing that, she would just change the words. She’s very comfortable with improvisation, but the scene when he first goes to her place, the house, was almost completely improvised. When she rolls the joint, it was guided by the script, but I just let them go, it was great.
