Page’s Perfect PartAn interview with The East star, Ellen Page.
Let Felicity Jones be a lesson to all of you up and coming actresses out there. She dropped out of THE EAST, a new eco-thriller hitting theatres this summer, to work the awards scene for her critical darling, LIKE CRAZY, only to see nothing come of it, leaving the door wide open for Academy Award nominee, Ellen Page, to assume the part. When you have work, you should keep it. This is especially true when the work is as good as THE EAST.
“I think a lot of the ideas that were being explored in what they’d written was stuff I was already so personally interested in,” Page confides when we meet in Toronto on a break from shooting X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST. And so Page headed to Shreveport, Louisiana, in October 2011, to join co-stars, Brit Marling and Alexander Skarssgard for two months of shooting.
Director, Zal Batmangli, co-wrote THE EAST with Marling, and even though Page describes the pair as “besties”, she never felt as though she, nor anyone else, was excluded from that relationship during filming. “Their closeness doesn’t feel like you’re left out of it,” Page begins. “They bring you into that and you then experience their closeness as it ripples off to everyone. I think that’s an incredible atmosphere to be in.”
In fact, Page also feels that the close relationship between Marling and Batmangli is what leads to such great scripts like THE EAST, or their previous collaboration, SOUND OF MY VOICE. “You can feel their closeness in the writing too. It’s so beautiful and cohesive and moving. The fact that two people collaborated and fused together to create this is pretty incredible.”
This interview was originally published on The Toronto Film Scene. Click the link to read the rest now.
You can also read Black Sheep’s interview with Brit Marling here.