Writer/Director Rebecca Cook Talks About "Shooting Livien"

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On Casting Jason Behr, Dominic Monaghan, and Exploring the NY Music Scene

By Rebecca Murray, About.com

Jason Behr (“The Grudge”), Dominic Monaghan (“Lost”), Joshua Leonard and Sarah Wynter star in writer/producer/director Rebecca Cook’s second feature film, “Shooting Livien.” While Cook’s directorial debut was the sweet romantic drama, “The Chester Story,” “Shooting Livien” is a much darker tale that follows a disillusioned New York musician (Behr) who’s balancing on the brink of success, and the brink of insanity.

With two of the hottest young actors in lead roles – Jason Behr and Dominic Monaghan – “Shooting Livien” is already generating interest from distributors, even before it has its film festival debut. And while the buzz surrounding “Shooting Livien” would make any up-and-coming filmmaker ecstatic, Cook would like to introduce the film to audiences via the film festival circuit first. Cook's hopeful Behr and Monaghan fans will get the opportunity to see "Shooting Livien" at select festivals in early 2005. Until then, here's an in-depth look behind the scenes at the making of "Shooting Livien."

INTERVIEW WITH REBECCA COOK:

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Jason Behr is not necessarily an obvious choice to play the lead in a movie of this sort. How did you connect with him?
It was a real challenge casting this part because we went from do we want a singer who can act, and with that comes a great degree of risk. Can a singer actually act? And having no money and in the short period of time we’re going to shoot this, can I get what I want out of him? And then we went the Broadway route. We met with Patrick Wilson and Adam Pascal and we were going to go that way for a while. Then we got a call from Jason’s manager. I still felt it hadn’t yet clicked, and everything’s starting to click into place and this is the one elusive thing. It just didn’t necessarily fit with me. And I’m telling you, it was like fate. He called my producer and he said there are two people he represented – Sam Ball and Jason Behr. I knew Sam Ball but Jason Behr I was completely unfamiliar with. I’d never seen “Roswell,” although I had heard of it. I looked him up on IMDB and I was like, “Okay, he’s got a great look. We’re in our final hours here so please get him in there so our casting director can get him on tape.” That’s what we did.

[Jason] just nailed it from the get-go. He had actually, ironically, grown his hair long prior to the audition, for really no purpose. He just walked in Livien. He understood my words. There’s probably no other person on this planet who could’ve interpreted them the way that Jason did. It was so evident without my direction even, just from his audition, that he connected with the character. And physically was even in a place where I believed he was a New York underground rock star. I called the producer. I was like, “This is it. This kid needs to be a movie star because he’s amazing.”

That same week we got the audition tape from [Dominic Monaghan] to play the character of Owen, which is Livien’s best friend. It was the same thing. It was just like it had been handed to me on a silver plate. It clicked. So for me, I hadn’t seen “The Lord of the Rings” either (laughing), I wasn’t working with their stereotypes at all. In fact, I still haven’t seen “Roswell” but I did finally see “Lord of the Rings.” But I didn’t want to because they had impressed me so much from their auditions. It was sort of irrelevant to me what the producers may say they could be perceived as. Much the same way that we came to casting Ally Sheedy. She comes with her own set of expectations. And I just thought this would be so interesting to put her in a role that probably someone wouldn’t think to put her in necessarily. We went against stereotypes here. I think that’s why I’m so excited for audiences to see with Jason this incredible depth he has. He really should be a leading man. He deserves a lot more roles that hopefully will come to him once audiences get a glimpse of what he’s able to do.

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And what about Dominic Monaghan? Does he play?
Not so much.

It’s weird you cast him as a musician and then he gets the part of a musician in “Lost.”
It’s so weird. I can’t tell if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. It’s ironic. He has a good friend who is a bass player, so he was excited to play a bass player. He had studied his friend’s actions on stage and how he performed and was excited to be able to take those character attributes to his own performance.

As far as the technical stuff, we didn’t have to get so nitty-gritty with him. For some reason, it really played well. His [role] didn’t require so much work. He didn’t need it. He knew the basics enough to get away with it, really. And poor Josh [Leonard] who played the drummer, there were a lot of discussions there with him where it was like, “Please don’t let the camera go down to the drums during this session.” There’s a lot of cheating.

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