Chloe Grace Moretz leads Let Me In with a real understanding of darkness.
In fact, Moretz knows the evil in her vampire Abby better than anyone should, and that’s what makes her performance so poetic, passionate and primal. Moretz doesn’t shy away from Abby’s pain, but she’s got a grip on her power as well, and she’s not afraid to use it.
Overture’s Let Me In is about that power at the end of the day. Abby is the 12-year-old vampire whom Owen [Kodi Smit-McPhee] finds a friend and protector in. The film’s stark brutality is ethereally beautiful and uncompromisingly brutal, making it a unique reimagining of the brilliant 2008 Swedish movie, Let the Right One In. Let Me In is sharper in its own way and it cuts a lot deeper, primarily because of Moretz’s skillfully satanic acting.
Chloe Grace Moretz sat down for an exclusive interview with ARTISTdirect.com editor and Dolor author Rick Florino about pulling the strings in Let Me In, how fun being evil is, listening to My Chemical Romance and Christina Aguilera and so much more.
Your performance highlights how manipulate Abby really is. How did you get into her mindset?
As you can imagine, it was pretty hard. I just really went over the character with my brother Trevor, who’s my acting coach. We talked about it, and I discussed it with Matt Reeves and Kodi Smit-McPhee and went with it.
Abby’s in control of everything. Was it easy to roll with that?
I’d say she definitely is the puppet master. She certainly knows how to hold Owen on a string above her head.
Was it fun to be that evil?
It was a lot of fun! I got freebie to do crazy stuff and also be able to walk away from it, you know? [Laughs]
There’s a vulnerability to Abby that makes her even more evil. Were you trying to strike that balance to make her strangely sympathetic?
Yeah, I think she’s naturally sympathetic because she’s just a girl. She doesn’t necessarily want to be a vampire at all; she wants to be a normal girl, but she knows she can’t have that. That pains her and kills her.
It’s more about her longing for normalcy than her longing for love.
Definitely! I’d say the same thing.
Was there anything that creeped you out on set?
No, filming it was super funny. I’m totally fine with all of it. It was pretty fun.
Do you ever listen to music to get into character? Where you listening to anything for Abby?
Yeah, for crying scenes I’ve always listened to music and gotten into that. It comes naturally. I was listening to a lot of Parachute and a little bit of My Chemical Romance during Let Me In. I was listening to My Chemical Romance to get into that frame of mind.
Were you listening to The Black Parade?
That’s exactly what I was listening to! I love that album. My favorite songs are “The Sharpest Lives” and “Dead!” “Dead!” is so crazy and, of course, “Welcome to the Black Parade” is pretty awesome.
Does Let Me In remind you of any songs?
A lot of My Chemical Romance is what I remember! I listened to a bunch of alternative music while we were shooting, like Muse and such.
Who are you listening to at the moment?
It’s like the polar opposite—Christina Aguilera right now [Laughs]. She’s definitely my number one at the moment, but I do love Neon Trees and stuff. I listen to everything. It just depends on my mood.
Other than My Chemical Romance, what would Abby in Let Me In listen to?
I feel like she would listen to classical music like Beethoven and Mozart. That’s probably what she grew up with. She definitely likes some Tchaikovsky!
The whole movie involves Abby gaining total control. Did you feel that way?
She’s so unique, and that’s what I love about Abby. The character is drastically different from anything I’ve ever done.
Would you want to do another horror movie?
Yeah! It’s so difficult to pinpoint to Let Me In. It’s horror but, at the same time, it’s not horror. It’s a thriller, but it’s a love story. It’s this blood-sucking vampire flick, yet it has a comedic side to it. It’s so unique that I can’t pinpoint it. It’s fun to be that different person.
It’s a very human story.
Definitely, every kid goes through the lonely stage or the “I-don’t-fit-in” stage. Or they feel distant from their parents. However, in Let Me In, that’s all heightened and much different than what a normal child’s life should be. I get mad at you so I just suck your blood [Laughs].
If only things were that simple…
I hate you! So I’m going to suck your blood [Laughs].
Had you seen Let the Right One In?
I didn’t for a couple of reasons. One, my parents wouldn’t let me because it’s R-rated and two, I didn’t want to because I wanted a natural experience for the character of Abby. I went into a totally different person when I became Abby.
What’s next for you?
I’m shooting Hugo Cabret at this moment. I’m in London until December shooting it. I’m so excited; it’s such an amazing film!
[Source]
During an exclusive chat at last weekend’s San Diego Comic-Con, teen actress Chloe Moretz, a.k.a. Kick-Ass’s Hit Girl, gave us the skinny on her future projects.
Following the release of the upcoming remake Let Me In, Moretz will next be seen in Hugo Cabret. “It’s a Martin Scorsese project,” she said. “It’s his first 3D film and it’s with Asa Butterfield playing Hugo Cabret, me playing Isabel, and Sir Ben Kingsley playing my father, [and] Sir Christopher Lee. There’s a lot of different people in it and it’s a really amazing film.”
Moretz called the Oscar-winning filmmaker “fabulous. I’m still working on it. I’m actually going to be there until late November so we’re still doing it.”
As for Kick-Ass 2, all Moretz could say was, “We don’t know yet right now. Matthew Vaughn is actually doing X-Men right now.”
She may not be kicking criminal ass again anytime soon, but Moretz still has a pretty full dance card coming up. “I do have a couple films that I am about to work on. I’m doing Old St. Louis, which we’re working out dates on, with David O. Russell directing and Vince Vaughn, he’s in it,” she said over a cup of coffee. “And this is Vince Vaughn’s kind of labor of love. He’s been working on it about eight years now and he’s really been working at it.”
Deadline reported today Old St. Louis is about a traveling salesman who reconnects with his estranged daughter, and that “actresses including Kick-Ass star Chloe Moretz have been mentioned as possibles to play the daughter.” Given her aforementioned comments, it appears that Moretz has indeed already won the role.
“I also have a film with Karen Kusama, who did Jennifer’s Body, and she’s doing this film called The Rut, which is this really amazing, amazing role. And I also have a film with Derick Martini called Hick, which is based off the novel Hick.”
The Los Angeles Times says The Rut “concerns a father-daughter relationship and centers particularly on hunting, as a daughter must learn the tricks of hunting and archery taught to her by her father after said father goes missing.”
Taylor Lane Productions says Hick “follows 13 year old Lulli McMullen, a Nebraska teen who gets more than she bargained for when she sets out for the bright lights of Las Vegas. Part coming-of-age story and part raggedy picaresque, Hick leads us at a blinding pace down broken roads through a world thats seems to this extraordinary and indomitable young girl, dangerously uncharted.” The book’s author, Andrea Portes, also penned the screenplay adaptation.
Let Me In opens October 1.
(via IGN)
On the big screen, she stabs bad guys with samurai swords and launches bombs both virtual and verbal.
In real life, her bedtime is 9:30pm. Chloe Grace Moretz turned 13 last month and before she turns 14 she could become a hotter female property than her role model, Angelina Jolie. Later this year she stars in a remake of the cult vampire film Let The Right One In, and Martin Scorsese has just snapped her up to star in his next picture. But the reason we’re sitting with Chloe, her mother, Teri, and two publicists – two more guardians, incidentally, than were deemed necessary when I interviewed Courtney Love – is Kick-Ass.
Directed by Matthew Vaughn, the film is based on Mark Millar’s vibrant and hugely violent comic book series about a teenage loser who resolves to become a crimefighting superhero called Kick-Ass, despite lacking any real superpowers. The movie was supposed to offer a global launchpad for Nowhere Boy‘s British star Aaron Johnson, but the buzz is all about Moretz as Hit Girl, an 11-year-old who is half of a vigilante father-daughter team.
Moretz is not the star, she’s not even the loopiest character in the film – not with Nicolas Cage playing her ever-loving dad as a combination of Pa Walton and Adam West – but Moretz is the character you will remember. In a purple wig, black mask, tartan skirt and fighting leathers, she screams at a denful of villains “OK, you c***s, let’s see what you can do now” and proceeds to slice and dice them all with deadly blades and martial arts moves that would give Jet Li a nosebleed.
In our tiny hotel room, Moretz, dressed in Claire’s Accessories pinks and blues, chats and smiles easily in between sucks on what appears to be an iced frappucino. So let’s get the big question out the way first: did she expect her character’s four-letter word bombs to have become such a talking point from the moment the movie trailers hit cinemas?
“It’s a movie,” she says, a little wearily. “Obviously a little girl can’t beat up and kill huge heavy men. I don’t see how anyone wouldn’t realise that it’s not real, it’s Hit Girl. I’m just Chloe Moretz.”
Has she ever used a four-letter word off-screen? “Never,” she shrieks. “Ooof. My mom would ground me for, like, the rest of my life.” Moretz can’t even bring herself to say the film’s title out loud in interviews, instead calling it “the film” and later she admits that at home they called the movie “Kick-Butt.”
“I knew it was a controversial role, but it was a role I wanted to do,” says Moretz earnestly. “A month or so before I got this script, Wanted (like Kick-Ass, based on a comic by Scotland’s Millar] came out, and I really, really wanted to be a take-charge action heroine like Angelina Jolie.” Who knows how Moretz became aware of an 18 certificate film about hipster assassins, but let’s assume she saw TV trailers. “Anyway, when she read Kick-Ass, my mom was like, ‘Chloe, you’ll never believe this …’ I read it and I was like, ‘I have to be Hit Girl!’ “
In the course of the movie, Hit Girl and her father fight crime with their fists, feet and the odd bazooka. Her most demanding stunts were doubled by an English gymnast, and a Chinese stuntman who specialised in gravity-grazing backflips, but Moretz is proud that some of the fights setpieces are Moretz herself, after four months of action training that included learning to load, clean and take apart a gun. “I learned martial arts moves, gymnastics, combat moves and knife handling,” she counts off. “I actually learned to flip two balisongs (Filipino folding knives] at the same time, one in each hand too. And the last two months of it I spent at the Toronto Circus School! They took me there because they wanted me to get really flexible for the role.”
Moretz has finally seen Kick-Ass herself, and pronounced herself relatively satisfied with her performance. “There are times when I’m running up to stab someone, and my face is going ‘grrrrrr’,” she says. “I was really happy with that, because the sequences are all choreographed and you have to start off on the right foot, or have your head a certain way, or the shot won’t work. So when I’m looking like I want to kill someone, I’m really thinking, ‘One, two, three, FOUR’ in my head.”
There’s always debate as to the credit and debit sheet of being a child actor. They grow up mostly around adults and deal with adult-world paycheques and expectations: experiences that inevitably accelerate adulthood. And while Jodie Foster found there was life after Taxi Driver, she’s outnumbered by child stars who end up working as taxi drivers. More immediately, there’s the emotional turmoil of winning and losing roles. Moretz faced a rejection a couple of years back when she was abruptly dropped from the Disney animated feature Bolt, after recording the voice of Bolt the dog’s preteen owner. Was she disappointed to be replaced by Miley Cyrus? Her bright smile wobbles only briefly.
“Well you get a thousand nos, and then you get one little shining star that says ‘yes’. You just have to go with it. Miley is an amazing woman, she’s very sweet,” she says. Disney might be regretting the decision a little, since Cyrus is now hurtling towards adult roles and away from her old fanbase with almost indecent enthusiasm, while Moretz is currently hotter than steam and already making movies for both adult and teen markets. “Well, it’s what they saw,” says Moretz, evenly. “I’m cool with it.”
Moretz got into acting when she was six. Her older brother Trevor trained at New York’s Performing Arts High School, and his little sister used to watch him rehearse his lines, and later, helped feed him his cues. Her first major film was a remake of The Amityville Horror, and in The Eye she haunted Jessica Alba’s dreams. Not all the roles in Moretz’s CV are unsettling kids – there’s Pooh’s Super Sleuth Christmas Movie and Big Momma’s House 2 – but it does seem that directors are attracted to Moretz’s startling maturity as an actress. In (500) Days of Summer, she pulled off playing Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s preternaturally wise little sister, and in the remake Let Me In, Matt Reeves’s anticipated reworking of the Swedish modern classic Let the Right One In, she’s thoughtful about her role as a 250-year-old child vampire in a way that leaves the kids of Twilight looking like dim bulbs.
“A lot of movies glamorise being a vampire but for my character it’s a burden that she has to carry with her,” she says. ” It’s like a devil inside of her, an alternate personality, and when it takes her over, she has no control. The director gave me a journal to write as my character, and I tended to think about little things: if you are 250 years old, could you remember even your parents, or the person who turned you into a vampire? I think it’s these details that help you find a character.”
With her knack for adult-oriented material, it’s not surprising Moretz has to stress how normal she is. When she’s not filming, Moretz attends school in Los Angeles, and insists her friends aren’t interested when she disappears off to work with Jessica Alba or Donald Sutherland. They aren’t even envious of the Tiffany starfish Nicolas Cage gave her when they wrapped Kick-Ass, chosen because he thought she was “a real star”. But when her dad tried to open a can of fizzy soda for Nic Cage by stabbing it with his penknife, she sniggers like any 13-year-old at the memory of parent and actor getting soaked in Red Bull.
She’s also marvellously unimpressed by Martin Scorsese, who is about to direct her in children’s fantasy The Invention of Hugo Cabret. According to Moretz, Scorsese is a man who “talks really, really fast”.
If Kick-Ass is a success, Moretz says she’s keen to revisit Hit Girl (“Maybe with a purple Ducati to go with my hair”) but she has already decided that in the long term she wants to use her acting superpowers for good and is a StarPower Ambassador for the Starlight Children’s Foundation.
“Being an actress is so fun, but I also want to do something that will help the world. Helping kids in Africa and Asia,” she says. “I want to be more than an actor who can just entertain.”
Kick-Ass has its Scottish premiere at Cineworld, Glasgow, tomorrow night, as part of the Glasgow International Comedy Festival. It is released nationwide on Friday.
(via The Scotsman)
Deadline is reporting that Chloe has been cast as Isabelle in Martin Scorsese’s upcoming film, The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Asa Butterfield, Sacha Baron Cohen and Ben Kingsley are also attached to the film, which is an adaptation of the novel by Brian Selznick.
Here is the plot summary of the book, according to Common Sense Media:
When Hugo’s father, a clockmaker, is killed in a fire, he’s taken in by his uncle. They live together in a hidden room inside the walls of the Paris train station, where it’s his job to maintain the station clocks — until one night he disappears. Now Hugo is alone, still living inside the station walls, stealing to survive, and still maintaining the clocks so no one will know his uncle is gone.
Hugo also works on an automaton, a mechanical man, that his father was trying to restore. He steals parts from a toyshop in the station. When he is caught, the mean store owner takes away his father’s notebook and threatens him with arrest. But the old man’s hidden past and Hugo’s are intertwined, and the secret message hidden in the automaton’s workings is only the beginning. Includes Acknowledgments, Credits, and References.
The film is slated for a 2011 release. You can check out the film’s IMDb page here.
