It wasn’t just the script that got actors John Cusack and Paul Dano excited about playing Beach Boys singer-songwriter Brian Wilson in director Bill Pohlad‘s new film, Love & Mercy; it was also their homework: listening to The Pet Sounds Sessions and The Smile Sessions over and over.
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Brian Wilson Talks Sentimental Beach Boys Reunion
“You have this treasure trove where you can hear the process and you can hear him molding the songs,” Cusack tells Billboard. “To me, The Smile Sessions and Pet Sounds Sessions were my way in, because then I saw his mind and his creativity and the music work and you can hear it all.
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“I found these things to be absolutely revelatory. As a music fan, Smile Sessions, that record, and then the outtakes, you can hear everything that happens for the next 40 years in music — Sgt. Pepper’s, everything; ELO, all of it; everything that happened, Brian was first.”
Dano was equally blown away by what he discovered of Wilson when he immersed himself in the music.
“He’s like a vessel or something. There’s some kind of radio antennae that’s on a level that most people can’t get to,” he said. “Pet Sounds is definitely one of the greatest albums that’s ever made, but definitely unfinished Smile, he was way ahead of his time — and still no one’s done anything like Smile. It’s really singular and extraordinary and, definitely, doing this film I was spending that much time with the music.”
Capitol will release a soundtrack of Love & Mercy, Pohlad told Billboard, although he has no further details. He is still talking with distributors about picking up the film.
But Love & Mercy is not just about a genius at work. Written by Oren Moverman and Michael Alan Lerner, the film is about a fragile individual with mental illness, who hears voices (audio hallucinations), whose state of mind is seen as an opportunity for a controlling abusive psychotherapist, and how a loving, brave, astute woman (make that two, if you include his longtime housekeeper) comes to the rescue.
Endorsed by the 71-year-old Wilson and his wife Melinda — both of whom readily made themselves available as consultants to the screenwriters, director and actors and attended the premiere screening at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month — the two-hour film is not a this-is-your-life; rather, it’s a sharply focused capsule of two different and significant eras in Wilson’s life: the ’60s and ’80s. Both stories continually alternate to show how Wilson got from A to B — and it is not whitewashed.
“Oh my God, are you kidding me?” Dano said. “He was sitting right next to me, across the aisle, and I was worried. I felt, ‘Oh my God, this is so intense to watch this movie with him sitting right there,’ but he’s a pretty unfiltered guy, Brian. He seemed genuine afterwards. He loved, loved the film. I’m sure that there were parts of it that were hard to watch.”
Dano, 30, plays the younger, extraordinarily musical yet mentally ill Beach Boy painstakingly and obsessively composing every note; and Cusack, 48, plays the bed-ridden, doped-up, controlled Wilson during what is known as “the Landy Years.” Paul Giamatti does a stellar job as the manipulative, nasty Dr. Eugene Landy. Elizabeth Banks plays Melinda Ledbetter, the Cadillac salesperson to whom Wilson wrote “lonely, scared, frightened” on the back of her business card. The two eventually married.
Both Cusack and Dano play guitar — Cusack recreationally with friends, while Dano considers himself a musician and sang and played guitar in bands before pursuing acting with vigor. Dano actually learned piano and expanded his vocal range for the part (his tracks are merged or overtaken by Wilson’s) to re-create “Surf’s Up” and “God Only Knows.” Cusack’s part didn’t require that.
In talking about their roles in Love & Mercy, both steer the conversation to Wilson and the music rather than how they nailed his mannerisms and speech patterns. Cusack still seems excited by it, passing on tidbits such as Paul McCartney chewing carrots on the song “Vegetables” and recommending the 1995 Don Was-directed documentary Brian Wilson: I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, as “a companion piece” to Love & Mercy.
Pohlad — producer of such films as 12 Years a Slave and The Tree of Life — doesn’t know if he would’ve proceeded with the project without Wilson’s blessing.
“I can’t answer that because so much of what developed out of it was based on the ability to get into tracks,” he said. “From a music perspective, certainly, the ability of Atticus [Ross] and I to get into the tracks and play with them was important. Also to have the music in the film was important. It was not ever going to be a Mama Mia! kind of movie. We didn’t want that.
“Brian and Melinda were involved from the beginning and we knew that we would have the rights to the music from the beginning. Now from there, it was a matter of also building trust with Brian and Melinda so they would open up more of the unreleased stuff or the tracking sessions that they have.”
Interestingly, Love & Mercy opens with a blank screen, as the music gets progressively louder. We then see the older Wilson in bed, before it cuts back to a grainy montage of re-created classic Beach Boys footage and music: “Surfer Girl,” “Surfin’ USA,” “I Get Around, “Fun Fun Fun,” as if to say, “Remember? This band the Beach Boys had all these hits, but this film will show you their cost.” As Cusack said, “there is a burden to that kind of genius. Gifts come with burdens.”