Sunday, October 05, 2008
A+E, Movies, Q&A

Getting in focus with Greg Kinnear

Since establishing himself as the host of E!’s “Talk Soup” in the early ’90s, Kinnear has become a legitimate, Oscar-nominated actor...

By Bert Osborne

Virtually unrecognizable as the same actor who plays a debonair spirit in the recent comedy “Ghost Town,” Greg Kinnear offers further proof of his versatility as an antisocial nerd in the new drama "Flash of Genius." It’s the fact-based story of Bob Kearns, inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper, who took the Ford Motor Company to court in the '70s for stealing his idea.
 
Since establishing himself as the host of E!’s “Talk Soup” in the early ’90s, Kinnear has become a legitimate, Oscar-nominated actor (for “As Good As It Gets”), who seems to transition effortlessly between leading roles (“Invincible”) and supporting parts (“Baby Mama”), between mainstream studio projects (“The Bad News Bears”) and offbeat indie fare (“The Matador”). Kinnear, 45, talked about his latest film during a recent promotional visit to Atlanta.
 
Q I wasn’t surprised to hear it took 10 years to secure the financing for this movie. “So, it’s about the guy who invented the intermittent windshield wiper ... ” What drew you to the project?
 A It was just the opposite for me. It wasn’t a very hard pitch at all. What appealed to me was that the character wasn’t painted as some kind of a perfect individual, some larger-than-life hero figure, which happens quite often in these David-versus-Goliath stories. Here was a man with real human flaws and weaknesses. On the one hand, he was a rather prickly guy, and you could see where a company as big as Ford could’ve underestimated him. But, still, I found myself rooting for him to succeed. He felt familiar to me on some level. He had an Everyman kind of quality that made it a story worth telling. I felt I knew him, even though I never met him.
 
Are you worried that the movie might be a hard sell for audiences, too?
 Sure. I mean, it’s not exactly “The Dark Knight” [laughs]. Audiences who’ve seen the movie are having a great ride. You might have certain preconceived ideas about where the story’s going, and it could’ve been really heavy-handed, but it reveals itself in a lot of unexpected ways, with a lot of nuance. There are themes in it that traditionally play well with audiences—about family, injustice, standing up for your principles—and it seems particularly relevant right now, when more and more people are losing their jobs, feeling marginalized and like they’re not being heard. It’s a movie about fighting back and sticking it to the big guy, which is kind of nice.
 
Do you feel any greater responsibility playing real people, as opposed to fictional characters?
Well, either way, you want to make them compelling, somebody that audiences want to spend a couple of hours with, you know? I’ve played real people before, but Kearns wasn’t a public figure in the same way that a guy like Bob Crane was [whom Kinnear played in “Auto Focus”], so it wasn’t all that important that he talk like this or walk like that. We didn’t really have that burden. In this case, we all felt very strongly about telling this story as honestly as we could, warts and all, and it was amazing how little interference we had a long the way—no pressure to make the character nicer or softer. I think one of the things that feels so good about where the story ends up going is that we didn’t give it up so easily along the way.
 
Are there additional pressures that go along with carrying a studio movie like “Flash of Genius,” compared to doing an indie ensemble piece like “Little Miss Sunshine”?
 I probably should feel like I’m under more of a cloud, but I don’t know. With all of my movies, I feel that I do them for reasons that don’t have anything to do with the size of the role, because I believe in the story or the character on some level. It’s not as if the only reason I wanted to do “Flash of Genius” was because it was a leading-man role.
 
Are you ever amazed about how far you’ve come from your early days hosting “Talk Soup”?
 It isn’t lost on me, the odd transition I made into movies. I think my own lack of understanding about what the hell I was doing actually made it easier for me. I never had the audacity to think I’d end up making movies. It was just a matter of being in the right place at the right time, and having somebody like [the late director] Sydney Pollack take a chance by casting me in “Sabrina.” He really got the ball rolling for me, but that kind of thing doesn’t happen very often. SP