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CS Video: Alan Cumming and Travis Fine on Any Day Now

Source: Edward Douglas

December 11, 2012

Actor Alan Cumming has played a lot of memorable roles on stage, television and movies, but few of them really give him a chance to shine as does his role in Travis Fine’s Any Day Now.

Taking place in California of the late '70s, Cumming plays Rudy Donatello, a flamboyant drag queen who meets and becomes involved with Paul (Garret Dillahunt), a lawyer still in the closet about his sexuality. When Rudy discovers his neighbor’s Downs Syndrome-stricken son Marco (Isaac Leyva) is being neglected by his junkie mother, he takes responsibility for the boy and the two of them move in with Paul as he tries to make it possible that they can adopt him. It turns out that two gay men adopting a young boy, let alone one with special needs, is far more difficult in 1979 than it is now--and it’s not easy now either--but that’s the tableaux created by Fine for what turns out to be a fascinating and original story.

Granted, there may be elements to the premise of Any Day Now that may immediately turn off audiences looking for more mainstream far, because it’s not the most obvious slam-dunk high concept movie we normally see. That said, the relationship between Rudy and Paul and Marco at the heart of the film is something really special, and Fine has created a film that’s both joyous and heartbreaking. Once you watch it, it’s absolutely no surprise that it won the Audience Award when it premiered at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival and then at many subsequent festivals since then.

Fine himself worked as a filmmaker and actor during the '90s but then took a decade hiatus from both before returning with 2010’s The Space Between, another film about an unlikely meeting between an adult and child and the bond created between them.

ComingSoon.net sat down with Cumming and Fine last week and we spoke about the movie and other things in the video interview such as:

* Fine talked about what got him going on making the movie
* How the script was sitting in a drawer for 30 years before Fine found it
* How Cumming was approached for the role and why he wanted to do it
* The preparation Cumming did for the songs he sings in the film
* The challenges of making the film as a period piece
* Cumming talks about developing Rudy as a character
* Fine talks about finding Isaac Leyva, a young actor with Down’s Syndrome, to play Marco
* Cumming talks about his first meeting with Isaac
* They both talk about Cumming’s other co-star, Garret Dillahunt, who normally plays more tough guy roles and how he was so open about their sex scenes
* Filming fake home movies with the three actors
* Travis talked about developing his next film "The Chicks," which will start shooting next summer
* Why he has chosen to go the independent route with his films
* Cumming says he’s writing a book and will return to doing MacBeth at Lincoln Center next year
* We also asked Cumming about possibly returning as Nightcrawler in an upcoming X-Men movie, since others are being brought back with Bryan Singer on board to direct:

"I haven’t gotten the call. Someone told me that Nightcrawler doesn’t appear in the story but I don’t know, I think they would have called by now," he told us before continuing, "It was funny that film because I really like it and everyone really responded to Nightcrawler and enough time has elapsed that I would like to go back to it. Although then when I did that film it was sort of the start of this spate of superhero and comic books made into films so it felt a little more special then it does now. X2 was a really great film, not just as a comic book film. I think it’s one of the films I’d been in that I think of as really good."

We also pointed out the fact that Jason Flemyng's character in "First Class" is Nightcrawler’s father, which would make it easy to get him into the story, presuming Flemyng returns now that Matthew Vaughn left the project.

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