Into the Breach, Dear Thesps

Last week Back Stage welcomed a sterling group of actors -- including Sean Penn, Khalid Abdalla, and Marion Cotillard -- as part of its Evening With screenings and Q&A sessions. The series, presenting some of the most talked-about films this awards season, began Oct. 17 at the Harmony Gold Theatre in Hollywood with Into the Wild, director-writer Penn's breathtaking tale of adventurer Christopher McCandless' journey into the Alaskan wilderness. Following the screening, Penn joined cast members Emile Hirsch and Jena Malone on stage for a Q&A with Back Stage National Film & TV Editor Jenelle Riley.

Penn told the crowd it was a challenge to find the right actor to play McCandless, a role that required significant weight loss and hours of shooting in extreme temperatures. For eight months the cast and crew followed roughly the same cross-country route McCandless was believed to have traveled.

"It was going to be an enormous feat to do this role," said Penn, who cast Hirsch after being struck by his physicality in the skateboarding movie Lords of Dogtown.

Although Hirsch prepared for the role by running and lifting weights, he told the audience, "Until you're in front of a rapid [in a river], it's hard to have a full sense of the film's physical demands."

Raising Awareness

Back Stage's screenings continued Oct. 20 with another film that chronicles a trip into dangerous territory: The Kite Runner. Based on Khaled Hosseini's best-selling novel of the same name, the film follows an Afghani man who returns to war-torn Kabul to save the son of his childhood friend. Q&A participants were director Marc Forster and cast members Abdalla, Homayon Ershadi, Atossa Leoni, and Shaun Toub. Abdalla told Q&A moderator Riley that Kite Runner may be the first Hollywood film about the Middle East that focuses on the terrorized rather than the terrorists. "This is the first film, I think, where the first point of contact with this part of the world is a human family story and not violence," he said. "The fact that when we think of Afghanistan, we think of beards, we think of bombs, [and] we think of everything negative before we think of anything positive is a horrendous tragedy."

Ershadi said he hopes that after watching the film, more Western audiences will recognize the importance of sending aid to Afghanistan. "Afghan people are human beings. They are not all Taliban," he said. "Please help Afghan people; they need us."

The Oct. 21 screening was La Vie en Rose, Olivier Dahan's stunning portrait of Edith Piaf, which tells the story of the French chanteuse's inner journey from afflicted orphan to international icon. Marion Cotillard portrays Piaf from age 20 to the singer's death at 48.

During the Q&A, moderated by Sarah Kuhn, Back Stage film and TV writer, Cotillard said she was not familiar with the troubled singer's life at first. "When I started to discover who she was, some things were hard to accept, because I didn't understand at that time why she was so tyrannic, for example," Cotillard said. "I realized that my admiration for her stopped me at a point on the way, because when you admire someone, there's a distance between you and the one you admire... . I had to erase that distance and to understand the person she was and not only the icon."

Cotillard said she fully immersed herself in the role, often to the point of forgetting to return to being herself. "I felt that when we were not shooting, I was not totally myself, but I was aware of this. It was not dangerous. [I wasn't] coming back home all crazy.

"I liked her," she said of Piaf. "The way I talked, the way I walked on the set during all these things. Even my humor was not exactly mine. I enjoyed it, and because I was very aware of this, it was okay."

Join Back Stage Oct. 27 for a free screening of Journey From the Fall, followed by a Q&A with director-writer Ham Tran (The Anniversary) and cast members Long Nguyen (Running in Tall Grasses) and Kieu Chinh (Face). The event will be held at the Fine Arts Theatre, 8556 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills. To attend, RSVP to rsvp@studioscreenings.com. For more information, click here.

-- Lauren Horwitch, Brooke O'Neill, and Nicole Porter