Warren Beatty, Lily Collins and Alden Ehrenreich sat down last month with six representatives from college publications in Atlanta, including The Signal, to discuss their new film. “Rules Don’t Apply” premiered at the AFI Fest on Nov. 10 and will be released in theaters Nov. 23.
The film was written, directed and produced by Beatty, who also co-stars alongside Collins and Ehrenreich. Beatty has been a Hollywood steady since the 1960’s, known for both his acting and directing. His most famous works include “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967), “Reds” (1981) and “Dick Tracy” (1990).
The film follows Marla (Collins), a young Baptist beauty from Virginia who moves to Hollywood on an RKO contract. She falls in love with her driver Frank (Ehrenreich), himself a devout Methodist hoping to develop real estate in Hollywood once he networks his way to a real job. Their situation complicates when her boss Howard Hughes (Beatty), a reclusive, eccentric billionaire who spends his days eating ice cream in the shadows, inserts himself into her life.
Beatty’s character is based on real life billionaire Howard Hughes, who spend his inheritance all throughout Hollywood in the 50s.
“I’ve always been amused by him. I never knew him. I never met him, though I like to think I met everyone who ever did meet him,” Beatty said when asked why he chose to portray Hughes.
“[He] came to Hollywood, made the most expensive movie ever made, made the biggest plane ever made, you know, it was a person who down deep there was some element in him I think wanted to be a movie star.”
Beatty said the film’s “underlying thematic tension” stems from a complicated mix of Hollywood life and sexual guilt. Marla has a relationship with both Frank and Hughes in the film, but emerges as a stand-alone figure.
Collins commented, “I think that wasn’t something I intentionally went out to teach in the movie, it wasn’t like I thought, ‘Well, she’s gonna be this feminist.’ But I think she was on the brink of stepping out and speaking out as a young woman about what she was or wasn’t willing to do.”
Ehrenreich spoke about the shift in his character’s thinking upon reaching Hollywood. “[S]ome people have this experience, where you’re brought up in a religious environment and you move somewhere else… the value system of the place you move to slowly replaces the value system that you were brought up with, and I feel like that’s kind of what’s happening. I think that’s what maturity is, probably.”
An edited transcript of the full interview is available below. Read Alex Graham’s review of the film here.
These interviews have been edited for clarity and readability. “LC” refers to Lily Collins and “AE” refers to Alden Ehrenreich, while “Q” stands for the questions voiced by a group of six interviewers.
Q: All of us saw [“Rules Don’t Apply”] last night. It was really great, and I applaud you for that, first of all. I think one of the questions I was thinking of last night was, Lily, I know that you also played a mom in “Love, Rosie” and it makes me think, how do you act like a mom when you’ve never had kids, where do you draw that from?
LC: I know, it’s super weird… my mom and I are best friends and I always used to think that she was a super cool young mom even though she was in her thirties and now young moms are like 16, so technically she wasn’t that young. But I have little brothers so I think about how I act with them, I have a lot of friends who have younger siblings and I love playing around with kids. You can’t prepare for something you have never been prepared for, it’s very difficult, but it’s been fun playing a mom and I’ve gotten really lucky with the children I played moms to, they’re all really smart. Like, the kid who played my son in this–
AE: Evan O’Toole.
LC: Oh my god, Evan O’Toole! He was asking the most intellectual questions and I was like, ‘How old are you again?’ So he kind of made it easy.
Q: You got to make out with [Alden] and Warren Beatty in this movie, talk about that.
LC: You are the first person to ask, ‘What was it like to make out with Warren Beatty?’ That’s hilarious. Uhm…. you know….
Q: What was that like as an actress, having to go between these two men with such aplomb and also an age difference?
LC: Marla is in a different state of mind when her and Howard Hughes interact. So that was just a bizarre sequence to play anyway because I am playing extremely drunk and everything is quite sloppy and humorous. That’s the thing, her and Frank are truly romantic and it’s a heartfelt, raw, emotional experience. Her and Howard, it’s a ‘in the spur of the moment,’ extremely inebriated, on the fly, humorous experience so, because they were so polar opposite, and she’s so ridden with guilt the entire time in the movie, she’s never really fully indulging in what she’s doing. They’re awkward and there are things that she then right away kind of regrets. So that was interesting, to also play the guilt factor. [TO AE] What was it like when you made out with Warren Beatty?
Q: Are you implying he also made out with Warren Beatty?
AE: That’s how I got the part. One thing about the kiss scene: I think that that take in the movie is the take where he told– [to LC] Do you remember this? He told us we weren’t going to do the kiss.
LC: Totally! I’m singing on the piano and we were like, ‘Are we gonna go all the way through?’ And [Beatty] was like, ‘No, we’re gonna just stop when you’re done singing,’ and we’re like, ‘Okay.’ So we basically did the song… we were this close and then we were waiting for a cut, and there was no cut and we just kept going, and we had never rehearsed it.
AE: He told us we were gonna re-set up and do the kiss separately and stuff but instead he just didn’t cut and we kind of caught on–
LC: He said he was so caught up he just forgot to yell cut.
AE: Right.
Q: I know you said last night about how Beatty has the four different hats going on throughout the movie [producer, writer, director, actor], were there times where you could you tell very specifically which hat was the most forward or did they all just eventually blend together?
LC: I think eventually they pretty much blended, unless he was having a conversation with one of the other producers about something entirely. Or like he was, you know, hosting a guest on set and he would just be Warren. Director, mainly, I think. They all sort of blended together in the end.
Q: I really liked you and Mr. Beatty’s comments last night about feminism and technology underlying in the movie. Do you feel like your character Marla kind of had that pre-modern feminist thing going on?
LC: Yeah, I do. I think that wasn’t something I intentionally went out to teach in the movie, it wasn’t like I thought, “Well, she’s gonna be this feminist” but I think she was on the brink of stepping out and speaking out as a young woman about what she was or wasn’t willing to do. Like, in the screen test they brought out the bathing suit but she didn’t do it. She’s like, “They wanted me to be this person but obviously I didn’t do it.” But that’s not an obvious thing, that’s second nature to her to say no. And she was very vocal in speaking out. Even the way that she speaks to Howard is more ballsy and different than the other females that were… in the school with her. So I think she definitely does represent this new age woman coming up into the 60’s.
Q: Yeah, she was really young and naive at first but by the end she was like a hero.
LC: Yeah and [Beatty] was very adamant that I come back wearing a pantsuit. Pants, no make up, hair back, not all of a sudden matured in some glamorous outfit.
Q: I was just wondering, through this role but also through your professional lives, what you want to portray to our age group.
AE: I feel like as you get more involved in any industry or career you are being told more and more frequently sort of the “way things are done,” traditionally and in the context of doing publicity, in the context of career choices. My experience is with acting so that means the kind of movies you’re supposed to do and, this kind of simple, but it becomes your responsibility to be diligent about continuing to hear your own voice in your head instead of the voices of other people. Especially when you don’t have a lot of experience, especially when you’re around people who have a lot of experience, it’s easy to get swept away in the conventions that they’re presenting to you… If you want to do something… you have to be really dogged about making sure that a) you can hear yourself and you know what you actually want, which isn’t always easy, and b) to stand up for that voice once you can hear it.
LC: I just wrote a book about exactly that, it comes out in March. It’s called “Unfiltered: No Shame, No Regrets, Just Me” and it’s all about finding your voice and not letting other people’s preconceived ideas about you affect how it is that you live your life. Specifically speaking to young women, it’s all about talking about the taboo things we don’t like to talk about but in the end we can all relate to, and once one person speaks up and says something all of a sudden we’re like, “Oh my god! I’m not crazy, you go through that too? Amazing, me too!”
Even with men, too, you start to talk about something and they’re like, “Oh my god, girls do that too?” … As long as you’re kind, direct, and honest with your words, no one can fault you, and as long as you’re doing what you’re passionate about, you’re doing it for the right reason. I think it’s really important to acknowledge and be in conversation with that voice inside your own head, and take that voice and use it among other people.
Q: Are you anxious for it to come out?
LC: Terrified. I mean, I wrote it for a reason and I wrote it knowing that it would then be published but I kind of stepped away from certain chapters and then months later reread it and I was like, “Oh wow, yeah, I did talk about that, okay, great.” I put everything out there.
Q: It must feel good.
LC: It’s so therapeutic, and it really has, with no pun intended– I’ve become so unfiltered. In conversations with anybody I’m just like, “Well, you’re gonna read it anyway.”
Q: What was your favorite scene, and what was your most embarrassing moment [on set?]
LC: Probably something to do with the drunk scene for me. Something to do with a cream puff. Or getting on and off the garters, trying to do that and tripping… luckily I could use any awkwardness since it was super awkward for Marla. I think that scene to me was one of the most– I don’t know if I would use the word “fun” on the day, or during the week that I shot it, but it was one of the scenes I was dreading the most just in terms of it being thirteen pages and I’m totally drunk, rattling off information opposite Warren Beatty, then there’s the whole romantic thing and then I’m singing a song and playing piano, there was a lot going on. But there was a real sense of twisted accomplishment when I finished it, and getting through some moments in that of, like, burping… you know. Fun times on set.
AE: I got food poisoning on set once when I did a movie called “Beautiful Creatures”… It was like my second day or something of shooting. I was wearing a wool Civil War uniform in New Orleans and it was like 100 degrees. In between each take I would run to the restroom and do unspeakable things. That was probably the most embarrassing.
Q: So the song in the movie had a really powerful impact, it kept re-occurring and it almost resonated like Audrey Hepburn, “Moon River,” and the power of it.
LC: Thank you, I just got goosebumps. No one’s said that yet.
Q: I was just wondering if this is your first experience with singing, or how you connected with the song?
LC: I sang in “Mirror, Mirror” but the song was used over the credits and was cut from the actual movie so a lot of people never saw it. So that was my first experience singing in a movie but that was also done in a sound booth and not live… I was really excited because I get to do it twice in the movie under different circumstances and really show off how powerful the lyrics are, because it doesn’t matter in what capacity you sing it or even how you sing it, it’s the lyrics that showcase the sentiment of the song.
That really resonated a lot with me because during the time of the movie… when we shot it, during that point I’d turned twenty five on the movie, at the Beverly Hills Hotel when we were shooting and I went through that crazy quarter life crisis, you know, where you’re kind of like “Am I doing the right thing? I feel like I should have been more successful, and I’m only twenty five but I’m old!” And I was going through a lot of stuff that I think the song also portrayed, so I was almost reminding myself as I was singing it that the song could apply to me, Frank, Howard, anyone really who hears it.
Q: I wanted to ask about the role of religion in the film, just because it is a topic I don’t see in your typical Hollywood films, and specifically Alden, Matthew Broderick comments at one point about how your character stops saying grace. Do you feel like that was a reflection of Frank losing some his religious beliefs or is that more just trying to show the progression into the 60s of more free thinking?
AE: I think over the course of the film… some people have this experience, where you’re brought up in a religious environment and you move somewhere else… the value system of the place you move to slowly replaces the value system that you were brought up with, and I feel like that’s kind of what’s happening. I think that’s what maturity is, probably.
Q: I read that at your time at NYU you started this [performance] group… Did that help grow your love for acting or writing or producing? And what do you see yourself doing in the future?
AE: It did. I had done my first film for Francis Ford Coppola and when I did that movie I learned so much from him, and I wanted to experiment with a lot of those ideas. I also have had the opportunity– I started acting pretty young– and I’ve had several experiences where I was sort of a kid and I was working with these people who were really established so I also wanted to do things and experiment with people my own age and see what came out of that… It was great to facilitate other people working together to do our own thing because even in the acting program in school you were kind of stuck with whatever play you got cast in, whatever play the faculty decided to do that year.
One of the things that was of great value to me working with Warren is he is an actor who was really one of the first people to move into producing and directing his own work, and that’s something I would like to do and hopefully have some other group at some point. I’m editing a short film that I wrote and directed right now… There’s a time when you want to go beyond being in the position of an actor and getting whatever they happen to be making or greenlighting or whatever role you are able to get, especially if your career isn’t going great, you’re very limited in what you’re able to do so it’s nice to take more control over that and just a have life where you’re able to work on a more constant basis because the hardest part about being an actor is being unemployed.
Q: That’s innovative.
AE: Not really, I’m not the first person to do that. I think Warren did that, I think there’s a lot of people who’ve done that and now it’s more possible than ever to do that, with the technology.
Q: What made you want to leave NYU?
AE: First I left the acting program. I was in the acting program for a semester and then I wanted a more regular education, and I’d been there three years, I’d done my first movie right before I went there. It was at the end of my junior year… I was in acting classes outside of school, but I was studying all these different things and I just felt like it was time to buckle down and go after the dream in a more serious fashion.
Q: On the topic of other work and other directors, quickly, is Park Chan-Wook as delightfully insane as I think he is?
AE: Oh wow. No he’s not insane at all. He doesn’t speak english, so you are directed through a translator. [To LC] Does Bong [Bong Joon-Ho] have a translator?
LC: I just forgot we have that in common. He speaks english really well but he also has a translator and it’s the same experience.
AE: [Park Chan-Wook] is a very mild mannered, nice guy.
LC: Bong is wacko. But in the most brilliant, endearing, lovable manner. He’s crazy cool. But he likes to say he doesn’t speak english well but he, like, is perfect.
AE: And I think Park Chan-Wook probably speaks more english than he lets on.
LC: They’re geniuses.
Q: Could you talk a little bit about what’s coming up next for you guys?
LC: I took a break after shooting this movie for numerous reasons but I shot a film called “To the Bone.” I play a young woman suffering from anorexia, directed by the brilliant Marti Noxon, and then I did “Okja” [by Bong Joon-Ho]. And then I did a film that was once called “The Clown” and is now called “Halo of Stars”, which I shot in the Republic of Georgia, which was pretty amazing. I have the book coming out in March, and I start the TV series “The Last Tycoon,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1930’s novel, in January.
AE: I’m doing “Star Wars”, and then I have a movie called “Yellow Birds” that I shot a few months ago. That comes out beginning of next year. It’s based on a book that was written by a soldier who went to Iraq and it’s a novel based on his experiences, about a soldier who promises his friend’s mom that he’s going to keep him alive and then he doesn’t. It’s about being in Iraq and then him coming home, returning from the war. Besides that, going to England and doing “Star Wars.”
LC: He’s, like, Han Solo, it’s really no big deal.
_________________________________________________________________________________________
“WB” stands for Warren Beatty, while “Q” refers to questions asked by a group of six interviewers.
WB: So, what are we doing?
Q: We’re talking about your really amazing movie we all saw last night.
WB: Thank you… I get the feeling that it kind of works.
Q: What was the impetus for starting for this [movie] after the 15 year break between “Bullworth” and this?
WB: I guess I would say “empty nest.” Three of them out, one of them left, and I’m thinking, “I’m getting lonely,” you know. I could see the handwriting on the wall.
Q: What drew you to [Alden and Lily]?
WB: Well I like to talk about a blink… where the unconscious tells you right away, and then the conscious mind goes into work and you think it through seriously, and you study it… I had a blink on both Alden and Lily and what I saw immediately in them was a level of integrity, discipline, intelligence, good-looking, humor, and I thought “Oh, okay.” Right away. With each of them, separately, you know. And then I went into my stupid phase of studying and studying less and less but came around to what I had faith in, which was the opening instinct…
Q: What was it like working with [cinematographer Caleb Deschanel]?
WB: Great. I’ve been lucky, I get to work with the best. I have usually worked with Storaro… He did “Reds” and he did “Bullworth.”
Q: Do you ever think about “Bullworth” when you look at Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump?
WB: I think of “Bullworth” when I look at Bernie Sanders…. Trump, really, what can you say. What Bullworth does, he has the same kind of nervous breakdown and starts saying things in a vulgar way which will attract attention but he spouts the truth, as Bernie Sanders– as Hillary knows that Bernie Sanders is, and so does Trump… So no, I don’t think of Trump, but so many people do… it’s the vulgarity.
Q: I was curious about the role of religion in this film. What drew you to that subject?
WB: Growing up in Virginia as a Southern Baptist, which is the largest religious organization in the United States, and seeing the hypocrisies involved and the main one, the necessity of guilt about making love. Which I always contend has a lot of comical consequences but also sad consequences, and has made made us the laughing stock of Europe and other countries. Trying to study whether that comes from Jamestown, Virginia, or the Massachusetts Bay colony or whatever. What are the assets of it and what are the liabilities? I’m afraid I see more liabilities than assets. I think with the rise of feminism in the 50s– and I’ve always considered myself a feminist– and I think that this liberation of the female, which I think is the most important thing that is occurring on the planet, did help to lead to what we’ve grown to call the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s. So some hot new movie star who goes, at that age, the 1950’s, then to Hollywood [is] basically very interested in merchandising sexuality. Then coming to grips with it and study it and try to be entertained by it– I think that is the underlying thematic tension or conflict in this movie, it is sexual guilt. I love it when Matthew Broderick says to Alden in the movie… he says why Baptists think fucking is bad is because it may lead to dancing. I grew up in that sort of atmosphere, and then I went to Hollywood.
So I think putting those two kids who are influenced by that into the company of a billionaire who can do anything he wants, way down deep there’s an element of puritanism in him too.
Q: What made you want to make a movie with [Hughes]?
WB: A central character that is amusing to me, I mean I’ve always been amused by him. I never knew him. I never met him, though I like to think I met everyone who ever did meet him. The fact that he had this unbridled capacity to do whatever he wanted because he inherited all of this wealth when his father died when he was 18. Came to Hollywood, made the most expensive movie ever made, made the biggest plane ever made, you know, it was a person who down deep there was some element in him I think wanted to be a movie star. And he was in Hollywood, and all the pretty girls and everything, and in some sense he sort of represents that which protestantism would like you to feel guilty about…. I really feel that now we’re dealing with directly with the liberation of the female, and it’s deadly when we talk about ISIS. And it ain’t gonna get sold soon.
