TELLURIDE, Colo. — Standing ovations at film festivals are a rite: part appreciation, part obligation, part a need to stretch your legs after sitting for a couple of hours.
But for an audience to explode and roar their approval in the middle of a movie? That rarely, if ever, happens.
Except it did, midway through the Telluride Film Festival world premiere of Jesse Eisenberg‘s delightful comedy “The Debut.” The applause followed a scene between Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti that took its audience on such an exhilarating journey that there was almost no choice but to cheer in admiration, as if to say: What did we just see?
Sitting in the theater, Eisenberg, producer Emma Stone and Paul Giamatti looked at each other and asked themselves the same question but for a different reason.
“It was hard to process and, at the same time, just so affirming,” Eisenberg told me a couple of hours after the premiere.
The next day, sitting down to grab a quick bite with Moore and Giamatti, that giddy feeling had not dissipated, though, truth be told, they knew this scene was an all-timer from the moment they read it.
Let’s set the stage for you in a way that won’t spoil this constantly surprising film when it arrives in theaters in December and starts piling up acclaim and awards for all concerned.
Moore plays Mona, a meek, thoroughly unseen wife and mother who impulsively decides to audition for a community theater production of a musical titled “Nosy Neighbors,” despite having no experience apart from singing in the church choir when she was 13. The director Jerry (Giamatti) cuts her tryout short, sending her home, only to relent when the woman he’d already cast (Bernadette Peters!) drops out and he has nowhere else to turn.
Mona is, as Moore puts it, a “nice lady.” But she’s not a natural performer. She can’t get into character playing Miss Danielle, the show’s tough, toolbelt-wearing building super. So Jerry takes Mona aside because that’s what he does. As her cast mates note, “He’s going to drag you through the s— and the mud and you have to be ready for the s— and the mud.”
It turns out, though, that Jerry is the one who isn’t ready for what’s about to happen. Sitting in a chair on the theater stage, Jerry holds an envelope containing cash, telling Mona that it’s her job to make him hand over the rent. It’s an acting-class exercise designed to make you listen, react and dig into your character’s truth. Moore begins with a whisper and builds to a roar as Mona improvises a manic rant that involves rats and the plague.
Suffice to say, Jerry hands over the rent.
“When I read that scene, I stood up, put my iPad down and started doing laps around my dining room table,” Moore remembers. “I couldn’t believe how beautiful it was. I was just like, ‘Oh my God! Aaaaaaagh!‘”
“It was five pages long,” Giamatti marvels. “Jerry just needs Mona to be better. And then he sees that maybe she could actually be kind of great. He cracks her open and he’s like, ‘Oh wow, who is this lady? Who the hell is this?’ The funny thing about that scene is s— like that happens in classes.” He turns to Moore. “Did that ever happen to you?”
“I had an audition for a university, actually, where they threw chairs in front of me while I did the monologue and made me climb over the chairs,” Moore says, laughing. “I look back on that now. I was 18 years old and I was like, “What?’ Yeah. It was really strange. They’re trying to get you to react authentically and be alive.”
She smiles at Giamatti. “Hopefully when you get to be our age, you don’t need that.”
Though the scene has Mona improvising, it was performed as written, down to every last pause.
“Everyone keeps asking if we improvised and I’m like, ‘Hell, no,’” Moore says. “Jesse’s like the Coens. Everything’s there on the page.”
Adds Giamatti, “It’s incredibly specific. You follow his punctuation. The commas matter in his writing.”
“What’s so f—ing delightful about about working with Paul is that his sense of timing and rhythm is so tight,” Moore continues. “That scene is a set piece that requires you to work in tandem and you need somebody to hit it back with the same intensity and the same speed.”
When Eisenberg first met Moore, he told her flat-out, “I don’t want you to worry about this scene.” He knew it was a bear, with pages and pages of lines, so he told her he’d have a teleprompter on set.
“That section, all that crazy s— she goes off on, that would be really hard,” Giamatti says.
“And I was like, ‘Phew, that’s fantastic,’ because I knew all I would do would be to worry about all those lines and be so scared,” Moore says. “But because he said that to me, I never worried. And I didn’t need the teleprompter.”
They shot the scene in one morning, just Moore and Giamatti alone on the stage with the rest of the crew downstairs in the video village. There was an energy on set, spiked by an unusual number of visitors (“People knew,” Giamatti says) and then they went to work.
“I remember the first time you really hit that speech and they called cut, I just couldn’t stop grinning,” Giamatti tells Moore. “And I reached out and just kind of held you for a second because I was like, ‘That was amazing.’ I wanted to convey just how great it was, what you were doing.”
Moore beams. “I just love him. Just love him, love him, love him. I have so much gratitude for Paul.”
“To watch you be a bad actor was so hilarious and then you would you would modulate it and change it,” Giamatti continues. “Watching her was the experience that Jerry was having. It was such a joy.”
The scene is the beginning of a simpatico relationship between Jerry and Mona, mentor and protege, predicated on the power of imagination and how it can make outcasts feel seen and heard.
“Everyone wants to be known as who we are, even though it’s so scary for us to really reveal it,” Moore says. “There’s a real mind-altering power in just being yourself.”
