Dane DeHaan calls The Big J Show (KRSQ Hot 101.9) to talk about the #1 movie Chronicle
Dane DeHaan on Chronicle, Road-Tripping With Shia LaBeouf, and Looking Like Leonardo DiCaprio
If you haven’t been introduced to Dane DeHaan on In Treatment or True Blood, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to see the 24-year-old up-and-comer on the big screen this year. He has three meaty movies on the docket (The Road’s John Hillcoat and Blue Valentine’s Derek Cianfrance directed two of them), and starting today you can see him in the supernatural, found-footage thriller Chronicle. He plays a brooding teenager who acquires supernatural powers. We spoke to DeHaan about his fast-rising career, road-tripping with Shia LaBeouf, and his uncanny resemblance to Leonardo DiCaprio.
First off, I want to thank whoever decided to give your character such a steady camera hand, since his footage is a big part of the movie. I say this as someone who’s been nauseated too many times by shaky-cam, found-footage movies.
Yeah, it’s a novel idea that the person filming would have a steady hand.
This is your biggest movie role so far. Will you be going online to read reviews?
I usually do check out the online reviews. Actually, I read Ebert’s this morning. But then I also have a lot of other things I need to focus on, like the next movie I’m making. I can’t really spend my days thinking about how cool it is that Chronicle is coming out. I definitely have to compartmentalize.
Something about you seems very suited for characters with dark stories. What do you think directors see in you that makes them want to cast you in these darker roles?
I’m not really sure. I think it’s a weird mix of I look younger and yet I still seem older. I have circles under my eyes, I know; but I also think that I have a maturity.
Have you ever auditioned for roles on teen TV series, like a CW show?
I remember when I lived in New York and all of my friends were auditioning for Gossip Girl, I was thinking, WHY doesn’t Gossip Girl want me to audition for them?
Aw. You felt a little left out?
I honestly did. I felt like it was this thing, like you have to be this unbelievably pretty New York actress, or young actor/actress, and then you get to audition for Gossip Girl. And I did not belong to the club.
But you’re starring in some pretty exciting movies this year. Can you talk about your role in Wettest County with Shia LaBeouf?
I play a character named Cricket Pate. He’s a young guy with rickets, which means the bones in his legs are a little misshapen because of a lack of vitamin D. He fixes up cars and is a bit of mechanical genius. He’s the best friend to Shia [LaBeouf]‘s character, and together they scheme and get into all sort of trouble selling moonshine and that kind of thing.
I heard that you had a road trip with Shia from L.A. to Georgia?
Because we play best friends in the movie, it was important to us to have that bond shine through. So he rented a car and we drove cross-country from L.A. to Georgia. We spent four days in a car together, getting to know each other.
Did you play road games?
We listened to some music. We spent Valentine’s Day together in a very fancy gumbo place in Shreveport, Louisiana, which was actually pretty hilarious. We were wearing, like, ripped-up jeans and road-trip clothes and we walk in and it’s all of these people from Shreveport, Louisiana, in suits and ties with their Valentine’s Day dates. And there’s me and Shia. We walk up to the [hostess stand] — well, he walks up to it, and he’s like, “Hey, it’s Shia. I called before.” And the woman of course freaked out that it was Shia and they sat us right away. And here we were, two men in Shreveport, Louisiana, at this old-school gumbo place in our torn-up jeans, on Valentine’s Day.
So besides Wettest County, you’ve also got the new Derek Cianfrance movie coming up, The Place Beyond the Pines. What can you tell us about that?
I play Ryan Gosling’s son. It’s a generational story, so essentially the first third of the movie is really all about Ryan, and then the last third of the movie takes place eighteen or nineteen years after Ryan’s part of the story. And it’s about a son that he had during his part of the story.
You probably hear it all the time, but you look a lot like a young Leonardo DiCaprio. Did people tell you this when you first went to Hollywood?
Yeah. I’ve heard it so much more in the last couple years, but I do remember the first time I ever heard it was in a community theater production I did when I was really young. I mean, maybe I was 12. I wore a tux in it and they slicked back my hair and I remember everyone saying I looked like Leo in Titanic. And then I didn’t hear it again for another seven years. Now I hear it all the time. It’s oftentimes one of the first things someone will say to me. Like, “Hey, good to meet you. Has anyone ever told you you look like a young Leonardo DiCaprio?”
Does it get a little tiresome?
If someone is gonna compare you to another actor when they were younger, who would you like them to compare you to? I’d probably go with Leonardo DiCaprio. I don’t think it’s really something I can complain about. He did great work when he was younger. And the girls went wild.
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The adorable cast of “Chronicle” had a few minutes to chat about superpowers, and I happily took them up on it. Check out Alex Russell, Michael B. Jordan and Dane DeHaan as they talk about what attracted them to the project and what superpowers they wish they had.
“Chronicle” is a story of three high school friends who stumble upon a radioactive hole in the ground. With this discovery comes telekinesis, the ability to fly, and much more. Initially the trio sets out pulling harmless pranks, but as their skills greaten, the pull toward the dark side becomes that much more enticing. Though, on the surface, this may seem a bit generic, “Chronicle” is anything but cookie-cutter. What this film attempts to do above all else is keep the characters firmly anchored to the ground (figuratively speaking),while portraying a narrative worthy of any classic superhero tale, and ambitiously setting to capture it in a P.O.V. style yet to be utilized in the superhero genre. In theaters February 3rd.
Q: Hi guys. Congrats on the movie!
All 3: Thank you!
Q: Did you guys grow up watching superhero movies, what attracted each of you to this role?
MBJ: I grew up reading a lot of comic books, and watching cartoons and Marvel comics growing up. When I first read the script, I picked it up like a comic book for the very first time. I read it start to finish, and I definitely wanted to be a part of it. So it just excited me: the characters, the story and the way it was shot. It was awesome.
Dane: I grew up watching superhero movies and dressing up as superheroes all the time…
Alex: Really?
Dane: (laughs) Yeah! I had my superman pajamas…
MBJ: (laughs) The onesies!
Dane: (laughs) Yeah, but what attracted me to the story wasn’t that it was a superhero story, but that it was a human story. I think. But I got to do all these things that I always dreamed of doing as a kid. But I got to do things that I always wanted to do as an actor and as an artist. And I feel like the film really accomplishes all of that.
Q: I agree. This is the first superhero movie I’ve ever wanted to see because the relatability of the characters is so apparent, even from the trailer.
All 3: Wow, thanks!
Q: What about you, Alex?
Alex: I have a very similar answer to Dane. I grew up loving super hero films, watching them and yeah. I guess more than anything, this was about reading the script for the first time and I had ever heard of anything quite like this before and I was just so drawn to it because it was fascinating because it was everything so surreal and epic about a superhero film but it’s still sort of grounded in reality.
Q: If you could have one superpower, what would it be?
MBJ: Telekinesis! Just because it covers everything: flying, stopping bullets or whatever the case may be, you know, moving objects…
Alex: Shields…
MBJ: A barrier!
Dane: I would do time travel.
Alex: I’m a ditto on Michael B. Jordan. I would do telekinesis for sure.
Q: Great, thanks guys! Best of luck with the release and the circuit.
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Thanks to her performances in Martha Marcy May Marlene and Silent House, Elizabeth Olsen became one of the brightest young stars of 2011, and now she’s landed a part opposite Daniel Radcliffe in Kill Your Darlings, a film that explores the very early days of Beat Generation writers Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Dane DeHaan and Jack Huston are signing on, too, to the film that is based on the true story of a Columbia University murder in 1944.
Variety reports that Olsen will play Edie Parker, “the wealthy art-student girlfriend” of Jack Kerouac, to be played by Jack Huston. Radcliffe is Allen Ginsberg, as previously reported, and Dane Dehaan is Lucien Caar, the guy who introduced Ginsberg and Kerouac and for whom Ginsberg developed a crush.
If the movie stays true to history, Dehaan should really be the lead, and here’s why:
Carr had a long-standing friendship with an older guy named David Kammerer. (That role isn’t yet cast.) Reportedly Kammerer was in love with Carr, or at least infatuated with him, and followed Carr around the country as Carr moved from one school to another. Kammerer was an old friend of William S. Burroughs (also not yet cast), who was also in this whole circle, and said that Carr and Kammerer never had a sexual relationship. Kammerer’s attentions reportedly pushed Carr to an unsuccessful suicide attempt in his youth.
(Actually, if you read more about the weird Carr/Kammerer relationship, it sounds in some ways like the real-life version of the central infatuation in The Talented Mr. Ripley.)
I’ll go straight to Wikipedia for a second to explain the core of the relationship between some of these people, and likely the core of the movie:
It was also at Columbia that Carr befriended Allen Ginsberg in the Union Theological Seminary dormitory on 122nd street (an overflow residence for Columbia), when Ginsberg knocked on the door to find out who was playing a recording of a Brahms trio. Soon after, a young woman Carr had befriended, Edie Parker, introduced Carr to her boyfriend, Jack Kerouac, then twenty-two and nearing the end of his short career as a sailor. Carr, in turn, introduced Ginsberg and Kerouac to one another – and both of them to his older friend with more first-hand experience at decadence: William Burroughs. The core of the New York Beat scene had formed, with Carr at the center. As Ginsberg put it, “Lou was the glue.” Carr, Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs explored New York’s grimier underbelly together.
Kammerer kept hanging around, too, and in August 1944 made what Carr claims was a sexual advance that turned violent. Carr stabbed Kammerer, tied his hands and feet, weighed his body with rocks and dumped him in the Hudson River. From there, Carr went to Burroughs and Ginsberg for help.
So while Radcliffe’s casting as Ginsberg suggests that he’s the lead here, and I can certainly see the story being reshaped a bit to put him at the center, the basic events put DeHaan’s character Carr at the center. We’ll see how that turns out. But it is a fascinating story — young writers today certainly don’t seem to have such wild lives.
(This movie has been kicking around for a couple years, with Jesse Eisenberg originally set to play Ginsberg, Ben Whishaw as Carr, and Chris Evans as Kerouac.)
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And 1 more new clip: