Father mark webber actor father movie#

With this one, it’s the strongest representation of this technique that I’m exploring, and it’s by just being so super-prepared.

Father mark webber actor father movie#

This process really started on my second movie “The End of Love,” and I’ve been refining it since then. Since you’ve applied this approach to four different films now, have your ideas about that interaction between reality and fiction changed or has your approach to blending them changed in any way? I feel it’s a little disarming and as an audience member, it makes you engage in a different way than when you see traditional actors acting.

Basically, I love making what I call reality cinema, blending real-life relationships and dynamics into fictional narratives to make things feel so authentic and raw. I went and I saw him for the first time in 30 years and the whole time I’m sitting there with him, I’m thinking, “Man, I wish I was filming this right now.” So that gave me the idea to make this movie and to ask my mom and my brother if they’d be willing to go on this journey with me. Nearly a decade after Webber premiered his first directorial effort at the festival, he will lay it all out there once more and before heading to the festival, he took a few moments to talk about the inspiration to make “Flesh and Blood,” how his baby bro unexpectedly outlined one of the film’s major themes with an ad-lib, and how he powers through an editing process for a work that’s so personal.Ī year before we shot this film, I reconnected with my dad, who was not really in my life. It’s no coincidence that the journey of Webber’s character in the film leads him to seek out a father he hasn’t seen in years, becoming an especially intimate show of rapprochement that echoes the smaller gestures he documents throughout the film and suggests the common ground there is to be found, even when bridging gaps – personal, economic, and regional – may seem impossible.īy rendering reality and fiction indistinguishable, Webber also brings audiences closer to empathizing with those so far from their own experience and it’s likely many in Austin will be overwhelmed by how moving “Flesh and Blood” is when it premieres at SXSW this week. In “Flesh and Blood,” he surveys a community where Honkala has had to get ordained as a minister just so she could help bury all the bodies piling up because of poverty and gang violence, bringing out the daily acts of decency that push back against a feeling of hopelessness in dire circumstances. Though Webber would seem to run the risk of having his work called vanity projects, they couldn’t be any further from that description, his decision to turn the camera on himself usually an act of considerable generosity as he opens himself up in order to show situations and environments that don’t often get the big screen treatment. the World.” But regardless of the background, his time away results in a shock to the system upon coming back, arriving just as his mother Cheri Honkala, a longtime community activist, decides to join the Green Party presidential ticket (which actually did last fall), and his brother Guillermo, a sweet fifth grader with a yen for philosophy, is getting bullied at school. “Flesh and Blood” is no exception, seeing Webber’s return to North Philadelphia where he grew up homeless and raises the stakes by suggesting he’s been in prison for years when in reality, he’s been busy of late with a successful acting career in such films as “Green Room” and “Scott Pilgrim vs.

With films such as “Explicit Ills,” “The End of Love,” and “The Ever After,” he’s remixed his recent past with actors using their real names interacting with non-actors from his real life, reinterpreting experiences he’s had with dramatic flourishes. Intentional or not, the line has an extra sting coming from Webber, an actor/director for whom the term ‘cut’ has never been a part of his vocabulary when it comes to the separation between his personal life and the films he’s made professionally. “What do you mean, ‘cut’?” Mark Webber can be seen asking his younger brother Guillermo in a scene from “Flesh and Blood,” waking up to being filmed with a camera that he picked up with the aim of giving his insatiably curious kid sibling with Asperger’s something to focus on.