The Novice: Isabelle Fuhrman, Dilone & writer/director Lauren Hadaway - Tribeca Film Festival 2021

Описание: Writer-director Lauren Hadaway makes her feature debut with The Novice, a collegiate rowing drama that some are comparing to Whiplash, albeit with oars in place of drumsticks. There's no hard-driving teacher in this film though, as Alex, our obsessive female protagonist puts all the pressure on herself to succeed. Hadaway and stars Isabelle Fuhrman and Dilone spoke to Collider about the physically demanding movie, which recently premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.

"It's a sports film, but it's not a sports film. It's a film about grit and ambition, and it's inspired by my own years as a collegiate rower," said Hadaway, whose goal was to dramatize, in a visceral way, what it means to be obsessed with something.

"Everything that you see happening in terms of the injuries, or the team dynamics, or all the bad stuff that happens, those [either] happened to me, they happened to someone on the team, or they happened to people I talked to when I was making this film. I talked to an Olympian rower and she was telling me stories about infected blisters and things like that, and when she told me that, I was like, 'holy fuck, that's extreme!' You're pushing yourself so far that you literally might kill yourself doing this sport."

By sheer coincidence, Fuhrman had been looking for a physically demanding role that would challenge her as an actress.

"For such a long time, I wanted to do a movie where I play a superhero, but not a typical superhero, and I really feel like I got the whole transformation aspect with this movie. I got to be, like, a rowing superhero. But what really attracted me to it was, once I read the script -- and I didn't even realize this until Lauren and I had been together in person recently, I was so caught by the emotion of going after a goal and having a very specific idea in mind of what I wanted to achieve by a certain age. From the time I was about 14 to 19 in the acting industry, I had so many ideas of where I wanted to be in my career at 16, and I wanted to have this kind of role when I was 18, and I wanted to have this kind of award when I was 20, and I felt like I was closing in on myself and really kind of losing the social aspect of my life [because] I was so set on achieving this goal. And when I read this script, I didn't even realize that subconsciously, that's what attracted me to play Alex. And Lauren is the one who saw that in me, which is probably why she cast me."

Fuhrman revealed that in addition to sending in an audition tape featuring her drenched in sweat, she wrote Hadaway a personal letter because she really wanted the role. Hadaway said she received several letters from actors vying for the plum part, "but if a person's not right for the part, they're not right for the part." She also offered her theory on casting as a first-time filmmaker.

Rad the full article on Collider here: https://collider.com/the-novice-isabe...

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