TRADITIONALLY, THE interviewer's role is to ask questions, while the subjects - in this case star Rachel McAdams and director Robert Schwentke of "The Time Traveler's Wife" - answer them, hopefully with wit and grammar.
But 10 days ago at the Waldorf-Astoria, which, on its upper, empty floors is starting to resemble the hotel in "The Shining," I added to my questioner's role by bringing Schwentke breakfast, a croissant and cinnamon roll from the hospitality suite on the fourth floor. Room service seemed to have been dawdling and it's bad for the interview if the subject passes out midway.
Fittingly, when I entered with my pastries, McAdams and Schwentke were talking about food, specifically the giant steak the director had eaten the previous night.
"A rather large slab of meat," McAdams said, surprised.
"Medium rare," the director sullenly answered, still feeling it.
"What happened?" asked McAdams. "The last time I looked you were a vegetarian."
"I'm mostly vegetarian," Schwentke responded sheepishly.
"But sometimes you just get crazy," McAdams said, laughing (it's a nice laugh, by the way). "Now you're good for a year."
This, however, isn't a story for tomorrow's Food section, so, as Schwentke ate his croissant and McAdams sat regally, legs crossed, in a saronglike brown-and-white print dress, we discussed their adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger's best-selling romantic drama, which opens Friday.
DN (to Rachel): As an actress you're sort of a time traveler. When you're trying to have a relationship, you're here, you're there, you're gone for months shooting on location. Was that something that appealed to you in the script?
RM: We realized that shooting it that this idea of coming and going all the time and leaving and being left is actually quite familiar to us. And to many people, I think. And it is a real catalyst in a relationship which either makes you stronger or tears you apart.
I also think we realized that shooting all of these scenes out of sequence . . . that the jumping around in time is something we actually do in a film. And it's your job to keep track of your character's arc at any point in time, so that was actually quite a familiar feeling and easier to keep hold of because I think we had a lot of practice.
RS: We always regarded time travel as kind of a stand-in for the sorts of problems that occur in any relationship. Of course, most guys I know don't disappear and then wake up butt-naked in a back alley . . .
RM: You're not hanging out with the right people. You need new friends.
RS: [Laughing, but not going there] . . . So it was a flexible metaphor in terms of what it meant to us. We viewed it as a metaphor for memory and an affliction - something that reminds you every step of the way that you have a finite amount of time together. But then in the actual scenes that pertain to the relationship and the actual problems that arise in the relationship, we always tried to ground what the conflict really was about in emotionally resonant ways. . . . Time travel is not a concept you can emotionally support - it doesn't really give you an emotional charge that you can then live and translate into specific behavior. So we spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out 'What is this fight really about?'
DN: Because it's a love story and not straight science fiction were you concerned that all of the inner workings of the plot had to make logical sense?
RS: We tried to downplay the indexes used to create a period a little bit for that specific reason.
RM: It is like a current, the moment you give over to it, you sort of immediately get swept away. I found the book the same way. I was having a brain melt for the first 100 pages and then I took a deep breath and decided to go with it and it suddenly cleared itself up.
But filmmaking is that way. The filmmaker says this is what's happening here and then you take the journey.
DN: Rachel, you've mixed small films ("Married Life," "The Lucky Ones") with big films (the upcoming "Sherlock Holmes") so how do you balance the career with creativity? You're a big star . . .
RM: Biggish.
DN: How about you're a lead but you're a character actress?
RM: That is the best compliment anyone has ever given me. But it's a balance and diversification that keeps me passionate and interested. I think you try to balance every film with the creativity and commercialism because if no one sees it doesn't matter. Then it's just masturbatory . . .
RS: I've made a couple that no one saw [laughing] and it doesn't feel great.
DN (to Rachel): You're now making a second movie with Diane Keaton ("The Family Stone," next year's "Morning Glory"). When you work with her do you pick her brain about comedy subtly or do you just go right at her?
RM: I literally just finished shooting last week with Diane. I try to pick her brain, but she's slippery. She doesn't like to talk about herself. She likes to talk about everybody else. She's one of the most curious women I've ever met and I think that's part of what makes her so great. She has such an insatiable love for the world and the people in it and what everyone else is doing and she tries to take all of the focus off herself. That's very admirable but I want to know how she does it and what she's thinking.
RS: Actors are proprietary about their craft.
RM: Yes. She says, "I don't like to talk about how it works because as soon as I talk about how it works it doesn't work anymore."