The star and writer-director also discuss uncooperative eels, lost phones, food poisoning, and… Brad Pitt?
When new client Mae (Rebecca Ferguson) goes missing, his life is changed forever.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: To get us started, Hugh, how did Lisa pitch this film to you?
Lisa Joy directs Hugh Jackman in ‘Reminiscence.'.Ben Rothstein/Warner Bros.
I understand she flew to New York to pitch it to you personally.
HUGH JACKMAN:She did fly in to pitch me.
I was a fan I had seenWestworld so I knew of her work.
Jackman makes memories with Rebecca Ferguson.Warner Bros. Pictures
Normally what would happen is you read a script and you have a meeting.
So she came over to the house.
I was fully invested.
And the story was her baby, years and years ago.
Brad Pitt said no, I get it, that’s fine."
JOY:It’s actually completely true.
They were like, this is a terrible strategy on your part to go all or nothing.
[Laughs]
Why did it have to be Hugh for you?
JOY:There was a very strange compulsion that I had.
And for that, I really felt I needed a character actor who could just be a complete chameleon.
What can you tell me about your character, Nick Bannister?
Now you find Nick Bannister as fairly solitary, very walled-off emotionally from the world.
He’s hiding a lot of secrets.
And I loved playing the character.
And so as he unravels during the movie, it was a really fun and challenging character to play.
It was like I was actively trying to kill you, Hugh.
But you were such a sport about it, and you were underwater for a lot of this film.
JACKMAN:That’s true.
And one of the biggest action sequences in the movie, we shot that week.
I said, “Lisa, that’s a challenging beginning.
No softballs being thrown here for the first few days.”
If the Reminiscence machine existed, how would you use it?
Yeah, I would definitely use it for sure.
Nick is the narrator of this movie, but is he the most reliable?
What about you, Lisa?
JOY:I would definitely dabble.
My kids now are 7 and 4.
So I’m not sure.
I’ll tell you, it’s a great litmus test for a relationship.
If you could get through that, you could pretty much get through anything.
In the film, night and day are essentially inverted.
Tell me about that choice.
JACKMAN:It was like the second thing you told me, that Miami is now underwater.
It is so hot, that everything’s flipped.
What were some of the unique challenges of this film for you two?
So, floor two is now the lobby basically of every building.
We ended up working with the team that has been working onAvatar, doing all the underwater work.
I learned a lot on that.
And it’s difficult and challenging and really fun.
So it was a nail biter.
Do you remember those goddamn eels?
JACKMAN:Those eels.
That was all in that first week of filming.
It was a tough start.
[Laughs]
JOY:So, some eels make an appearance in this film, some terrifying eels.
So we got the animal expert and I told him we need eels for an intense scene.
He told this horror story about what the eels were going to do, right?
So we bring the eels in.
And what happens is… absolutely nothing.
All the eels are on the bottom of the tank, sleeping.
They give a shot to wake them up, they stir them up, they put food in there.
The animal wrangler was doing all sorts of stuff.
And I’m like, “I thought the eels were like killer crazy eels?
We have a whole safety protocol with them.”
So the eels were fired.
They were not camera ready at all.
JACKMAN:Who is their agent?
That was like Olympic chess.
We created a 3D hologram machine.
But so you can do that, we had to film all the memories first.
And it basically involves incredibly complex math.
I can’t wait for people to see that.
A version of this story appears in the September issue ofEntertainment Weekly, on newsstands Friday.
