Here’s the mp3 of my 9.21 Sony headquarters chat with Moneyball director Bennett Miller. It’s odd but as we were speaking a voice was telling me that Bennett was going too slow and taking too long to articulate this or that response, but listening to it today he sounds fine. He explains it all quite clearly.

Bennett Miller at Sony headquarters at 550 Madison — Wednesday, 9.21, 4:40 pm.

It starts out a little raggedy (audio of my taking his picture, etc.) but I like it that way.

Excerpt #1: “Nobody wants to see a baseball movie, I thought to myself. Outside of this country [the genre is] challenging and even inside….historically they don’t [perform] as well as people might imagine. So I didn’t want to do ‘a baseball movie’, but baseball is an interesting medium by which to tell another story. It’s about Billy [Beane] coming to believe that there was a life that he was supposed to be living, that he wasn’t living. So like a Wizard of Oz or King Arthur story…it’s about somebody who’s displaced or dislocated with the life they have, and they’re a little bit lost, and they’re presented with some kind of impossible challenge, [the deal being] that if you do this thing, be it getting the witch’s broomstick or capturing the Holy Grail, your life will be restored.”

Excerpt #2: “I got a phone call from my agent, Bryan Lourd. I hadn’t really been a baseball fan since I was a kid, not that much, yes and no. And Bryan said, you wanna take a look at this thing? ‘Cause if you’re interested Brad would like to talk to you. So I read everything…the scripts, the book, thought about it…came up with an approach that I thought would be worth the labor of a few years. This is how I see it, I said to Brad. How do you see it?> And we were really compatible. I asked him questions. Why do you want to play this thing? I see it in such a way. If you don’t feel the seme way, no harm, no foul. If we’re all making the same movie, that’s fantastic. But if we’re not, no one’s going to be happy, ever.”

Excerpt #3: “I urge you…I urge you to speak to Mychael Danna, the composer. I think this was the hardest job of his life…one of the most difficult things to get right. He’s very proud of it and I’m in love with it…but it was hard to get to. It’s not literal. It’s not representative in the way that ‘cue’ music often is. The score attempts to conjure a kind of concsiousnes that allow us to observe the story instead of our telling it. The style of this movie is observaitonal. To conjure up a kind of conscousness…movies in which you feel you;re right inside the brain of the filmmaker. There are no fingerprints, but you feel as if you;ve got someone else’s brain in your head. It’s meant to release your own chemicals.”