Abigail Breslin and Alessandro Nivola Hit the Right Chords in 'Janie Jones'

In the new film "Janie Jones," opening this week, Abigail Breslin plays a girl whose mother leaves her with her rock star father, played by Alessandro Nivola. The music and emotional heart of the inspirational story is brought to life by the two actors. Having completed "Coco Before Chanel" in France, Nivola joined the project a week before shooting began. After listening to the music demo and talking to director David M. Rosenthal about his personal inspiration for the story, Nivola jumped on a plane to Des Moines to record 13 songs in about 24 hours. Breslin was shooting "Zombieland" when she got the script and was excited by the opportunity to play a completely different kind of character. Breslin and Nivola sat down to talk with Back Stage about their experiences playing the father-daughter musical duo.

Back Stage: Alessandro, what role did music play in attracting you to "Janie Jones"?

Alessandro Nivola: I've always wanted to use songs and music as a way of helping to define or bring a different dimension to the character. In "Janie Jones," I wanted there to be a contrast in the way that he was as a performer in concert to the way that he was when he wasn't performing. As a performer, he was really untethered and really combative with his audience and kind of antagonistic and unpredictable, and then when he wasn't performing he was almost lifeless and so depressed that he could barely muster the energy to have a conversation with anybody. To be able to have the music there to provide this other dynamic to the performance was a luxury that I did definitely feel was an opportunity.

Back Stage: Abigail, you had just started voice lessons prior to getting the role. Was that hard to prepare?

Abigail Breslin: No, I was just kind of doing it on my own, just for fun, and then it was kind of coincidental that this movie came along. I started taking more vocal lessons and trying to work with the songs, and it was terrifying because I knew that he was a great guitar player and singer. I was afraid I was going to go into the studio, and they were going to fire me on the spot or something, so it was kind of nerve-racking. But it was fun at the same time. It kind of inspired me to learn more about music, and now I actually have a band [CABB] with my best friend.

Back Stage: What was it like working together? How did you create that father-daughter bond?

Breslin: One of the first scenes that we actually did was a very sort of awkward and uncomfortable scene where we didn't really know each other, so it kind of worked that we didn't know each other in real life.

Nivola: I feel like our getting to know each other was really happening in the scenes, as opposed to off screen. That may have been a good thing as far as allowing us to kind of have that curiosity, but slight discomfort. Also, we had a kind of natural way of performing together, and we would often be sitting on the set waiting for the camera to start rolling and just be talking, and then it would start rolling and the scene would start, and it didn't ever feel like a big transition from one to the other. That's partly because Abby is very unselfconscious. Sometimes you'll be talking with other actors before the scene, and then when the camera starts rolling, everything kind of changes and they become very posy or their voice changes and their eyes get very intense; they, like, start glowering at you or something. You just suddenly feel this shift from the natural comfort of the way that they normally behave and the way that they are performing. She doesn't have that, so it made it very easy to drift in and out of the scenes in a way that felt real.

Back Stage: Do you have a method for preparing for roles?

Breslin: I just like to read the script a few times, because I always feel like if you read it again, you can kind of find different things in it. I don't have any trick or anything cool.

Nivola: In the last couple of years I've started just obsessively knowing the scenes backward and forward before I even go onto the set for the first day of work. Almost like a play. The whole game is trying to achieve some kind of spontaneity, and I kept thinking that I was going to be more spontaneous if I hadn't tried to drill these words into my head to the point where they became stale and no longer had the freshness of hearing them for the first time. But then I just started thinking, "Actually, no, the freedom to be spontaneous only seems to come when I just know the text so well that I don't have to be thinking about it at all." I can then allow myself to let it come out, however it may come out, and react and listen and not be thinking about what the next line is.

Breslin: No, I get that. I feel that way about songs. Like if I'm doing a song, especially if it's a cover. And if you know it really, really well, then you can play with it more.

Nivola: The whole thing is, "How can you be the most relaxed?" That's the thing you are trying to achieve. Relaxation. When you are relaxed, that's when things happen by accident. When you're tense it's just impossible for that kind of surprise to occur. So to me I think this memorization thing has become another way for me to relax.

Back Stage: What was your favorite memory or scene from filming?

Nivola: There's a scene in the Laundromat where we sit together and I teach her this song that we sing later in a club. It was a totally improvised scene where both the dialogue and the playing was all live, which was a big challenge because you want the performance to be good, but you also want the sound of the music to be good. Because the music elevates the movie, and you don't want it to fall flat or be out of key or anything. On the other hand, you want it to be real and alive and to be happening at that moment. [The scene] was a key moment in the development of their rapport that had to come across in a way that wasn't too lovey-dovey. Their relationship in the movie is really a romance between a father and a daughter, and they kind of fall in love with each other, obviously in a purely platonic way, but that was a really romantic scene where they weren't talking about anything to do with their relationship but purely focusing on the task at hand, and it was through that concentration and everything that they kind of edged a tiny bit closer together. Just the way that it was shot was very real.