From 24 Frames:
When Kenneth Lonergan’s “Margaret” was quietly released last September, it seemed the end of a very, very long journey for a film caught up for years in post-production problems and various legal disputes. Although very few people saw the movie during its brief theatrical run, a vocal group of critics began to lobby on its behalf — the unusual groundswell of support prompted in part by the year-end awards season crush and in part by a desire to simply be able to see a movie that had not played in their towns.

“Margaret” has since been inching its way toward reassessment and in some sense resurrection, to the point where there is now an undercurrent of backlash from those who feel its movie-you-can’t-see mystique is too much a part of its appeal.

In the film, Anna Paquin plays an Upper East Side teenager named Lisa Cohen — in one of the movie’s signature quirks, “Margaret” has no character named Margaret — who feels in part responsible for a bus accident that claimed a woman’s life. This leads to a portrait, at once nuanced and raw, of dealing with grief and moving forward with life. The film features a deep bench of supporting performances from Matt Damon, Mark Ruffalo, Jean Reno, Allison Janney, J. Smith-Cameron, Matthew Broderick, Kieran Culkin and Jeannie Berlin.

“Margaret” is going to be playing for one week at the Cinefamily in Los Angeles starting Jan. 27, giving local audience another chance to see for themselves whether this most singular film lives up to its legend. Paquin, an Oscar winner and now the star of HBO’s “True Blood,” rather suddenly made herself available to a few press outlets just this week to talk about the film.

How weird is it to be talking about a film you shot in 2005?
I could not possibly have loved that script or loved doing that movie any more. It was one of the most incredible professional experiences I’ve ever had, and, you know, movies all have their own path to being seen by people and some of them are long journeys and some are really quick. And this one’s just been a bit longer. I’m just pleased that people are watching it now.

When you were shooting the film did you have any idea it would become the problem child it turned into?
No, actually. The shoot was extraordinarily smooth. Everything kind of ran perfectly. It was a sort of long script, so obviously if you shoot all of a very long script there’s just going to be a lot more material to play around with when you’re trying to put the movie together. Which ultimately, as an actor, is not something that I really worry myself about. That’s kind of, thankfully, somebody else’s department. I’m just like sweet, I will shoot all one-hundred and sixty, seventy, whatever-it-was pages of incredibly well-written, beautiful scenes with incredible character work.

Did you ever reach a point where you thought the movie would just never come out?
Honestly, my life moved on. I’m doing other things in my career, I’m doing other things in my personal life, a lot’s happened in the last six years in my life. I didn’t really know what was going to happen, to be honest. It moved from, I think about this every month, to I think about this occasionally.
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From Awards Daily:
True Blood star Anna Paquin talks about her role in Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret

Anna Paquin burst onto the movie scene in 1993 at age 11 when she won an Oscar for her performance in Jane Campion’s The Piano. Her filmmography since then has encompassed everything from indies to blockbusters and has featured films from a long list of great directors including Steven Spielberg, Spike Lee, Noah Baumbach, Cameron Crowe, Franco Zefferelli and Gus Van Sant. She’s also been busy on stage and on television, most recently as Sookie Stackhouse on HBO’s hit series True Blood. Paquin completed shooting on Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret back in 2005, but the film reportedly got stuck in the editing room with the director unable to trim the film to an agreeable length for the studio and the studio unwilling to continue funding a film that might not ever get released.

Luckily, hope was not abandoned, a cut satisfactory to all parties was finally achieved and Margaret was released in the Fall of 2011. Somewhat lost in all the controversy surrounding the film’s journey to the big screen is what a terrific piece of work it is. There are a couple of wonderful supporting performances from Jeannie Berlin and J. Smith-Cameron and a remarkable star turn by Paquin who really shines. Her character Lisa is a somewhat privileged New York 17-year-old who is precociously intelligent but not at all emotionally equipped to cope with a very adult tragedy she finds herself wrapped up in. Paquin tears into Lonergan’s finely drawn, full-blooded character with the fearlessness you’d hope for from an actress who has been working at her craft for the better part of two decades.

Paquin recently took a few minutes out of her busy schedule shooting the 5th season of True Blood to talk to Awards Daily about Margaret.

Craig Kennedy: How frustrating was it for you to have this film you worked on and sweated over be sort of put on the shelf for six years before anyone had a chance to see it?

Anna Paquin: At first it was unclear when and if it was ever going to happen, but I’ve been pretty busy the last six years and I kind of just stopped thinking about it. I knew ultimately there was going to be some conclusion to that particular story, but I didn’t really know what it was going to be. Part of the thing about only acting in a movie is you get to sort of walk away when it’s done and, not forget about it, but move on to other things. That’s pretty much the same for me regardless of how long it takes a movie to come out. You sort of go on to the next job, literally.

CK: Did you have any sense before seeing it that you had something special here in terms of your performance and of the movie itself?

AP: You can tell when you’re reading a script if it’s something special and Kenny Lonergan’s script was extraordinary. We all worked incredibly hard and sweat blood for the movie. There wasn’t anyone who didn’t show up ready to go and it was the kind of a job where I left every single night just feeling exhausted and totally exhilarated and so excited for the next day. Generally, when you have that kind of feeling and it’s consistent, it means there’s something happening that’s working. Margaret was an amazing experience.

CK: Is the character Lisa and the experience of being her still fresh in your mind all this time later?

AP: I was reminded of a lot of stuff when I watched the final film before it came out last fall. It’s one of those things where you don’t think you remember the details and then you watch it or see a photograph and you suddenly remember absolutely everything.

CK: Lisa is a difficult character for an audience. She’s an intelligent young woman, but she’s not well equipped emotionally to handle these very adult problems. She acts out in ways that make her not always likable. How do you approach a character like that?

AP: You say “difficult,” but an actress says “exciting.” It’s a challenge. I’m not someone who is burdened by needing to play incredibly likable people all the time. I’m not really hung up on that as a viewer either. I tend to like characters who are real and real people have flaws and real people react to real life events and traumas in ways that are not always necessarily socially acceptable. Lisa is this girl who is kind of just living her life with the incredibly all-consuming problems of a 17-year-old like: “What am I going to wear on my horseback riding trip with my dad this summer?” And then she’s shocked into reality by this horrible bus accident that killed a woman and she knows in her heart she partially caused it. For all her incredibly articulate ability to describe and argue politics in the classroom and to sort of take people on verbally, she has absolutely no tools to deal with what she’s coming up against and what it means to her. She does what she thinks is the right thing to do, which is to try to be honest about it and to say what really happened in the hope that some kind of justice is done, but nobody is particularly interested in listening to her or acting on it. It’s incredibly shocking to her because of that naivety of being the kid and thinking that people should do the right thing simply for the sake of doing the right thing. She hasn’t been disillusioned yet. Even though she lives in the big city and feels very worldly, it’s a pretty rude awaking, that jump from childlike thinking to the adult realization that the world is not a perfect place and sometimes the bad guy gets away and nobody cares. She’s pretty brutal on everyone around her while she’s going through it, too. Some people self-destruct inwardly but she self-destructs by taking out everything else around her. Her behavior and all the choices she makes after the bus accident, it’s all just a big cry for help but it’s so aggressive it gets a bad reaction from people.
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From HitFix:
As the door closes on phase one of the Oscar season and nomination ballots are finalized, Kenneth Lonergan’s “Margaret” takes the stage in the final moments. Screeners of the film were finally sent out to all voting members of the Academy recently, and now, supporters of the film wait to see if said members may have responded to the material.

The actress at the center of the story, Anna Paquin, delivered her performance six years ago, when she was 23. And yet the experience still seems fresh and vivid in her mind, as if she were leaving the set after a day of emotional Olympics on “Margaret” rather than an evening of stunt-heavy work on Alan Ball’s southern-fried vamp camp phenomenon “True Blood.”

What the intermittent years have done is give her a sense of perspective akin to the kind of enriched self-understanding only attained with the passage of time. But then the actress already had the benefit of chronological distance from her character, Lisa Cohen, when production began, providing the space necessary for her to find what was lovable in a girl who she concedes is so often eristic in the film.

“When you’re a little bit older than the character that you’re playing, it’s easier to be compassionate towards their less likable qualities,” she says. “She’s gone through this horrible trauma and she takes it out on everyone around her in that way that people do. And she’s trying to make sense of what’s happened to her. And, of course, she’s only 17.”

In her innocent, yet rigidly determined quest to find a cowboy hat for a trip to New Mexico that will take her outside of her isolated Upper West Side of Manhattan life, Lisa distracts a bus driver long enough for him to hit and kill a woman. The scene, so beautifully, wrenchingly realized, shocks the audience within the first 10 minutes of the film. The remaining 140 minutes depicts Lisa’s reconciliation with the girl she was before she felt the life leave a woman she helped to kill and her journey toward accepting a world filled with senseless atrocity.

“It’s about the pain of having to realize that the world around her is not perfect, and that’s kind of okay,” Paquin says. “She’s trying to do the right thing, and do the right thing, and do the right thing and it doesn’t get her anywhere. Eventually she has to, not give up, but let go of the idea that there’s a good outcome if everyone just sort of behaves by a predetermined moral code. Because that is ultimately a very naïve, young point of view. It’s the passage of childhood into adulthood.”
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