Was it nice being able to shoot back on home turf?
KD: Yeah. Well, we were shooting in Austin, and it’s not technically anything like the rest of Texas, and growing up – I grew up in Dallas, Texas – I actually heard so much about Austin, how it was a nice city and great, and never went down there. So it was nice to finally be there. I was actually down there for South by Southwest for Short Term 12, but being there and spending a lot of time there was a lot of fun.
You mentioned your co-star, Ansel Elgort. Is he a good partner to share a scene with?
KD: He’s incredible, he’s such a talented guy. He was very good about being his character, I think it was really cool. Something that stood out to me was that someone handed him a football, and in the movie his character stops playing football. I was throwing the football around – Jason [Reitman] was teaching me how to perfect my football throwing. Someone tried to hand [Ansel] the ball and he said “no, I don’t play football.”
He’s method.
KD: A little bit, but not over-the-top, where you’re like, “alright, come on dude.” [laughs]. He’s very, very good. He’s a funny guy too, very hilarious. He would make me laugh so hard my stomach would hurt.
Jason does a lot of great work with younger actors, could you tell that he was a director who’s good at working with young people?
KD: He’s good at working with anyone, I think. He’s just an all-around great director. I learned so much from him, as an actor, and just as a person. And I look up to him so much, and he’s a huge role model for me. He’s a very, very smart guy, very funny, he was always making me laugh. We were always talking about music, constantly sharing different songs that I knew, different songs that he knew. He became my friend, and he’s just a really good guy. One piece of advice that I took from him was – you know, there’s a lot of heavy lines in this script, and he would tell us, “this line is pretty heavy, so try to not act it heavy. Just say the words, and it will come off as heavy, or sad, or depressing, or dramatic.” And it did, I’ll take that on with me for the rest of my life, and that was some really cool advice that I got from Jason.
Once the film reaches a wider release, what are you hoping people are going to takeaway from it?
KD: I don’t know. I think it’ll just get a lot of reactions, and a lot of different spark, and conversations will be started. I don’t think that there’s anything specific that the movie is going to tell someone, I think it’s a broad spectrum of messages that it will portray. And I think that’s really cool, that the movie’s not just about one specific thing, one lesson that you come out of the theatre learning. You come out thinking about a lot of things, and that’s what Jason wanted. And also, it scared a lot of people too. People that I’ve talked to, they’re like, “that’s scary, that’s scaring me!” And that’s what Jason wanted, that’s what he told us at the beginning, “I’m going to scare people with this movie, sort of” [laughs].
WGTC: You’re doing movies and still TV, so is there any chance we’ll see you popup before Justified ends next year?
That concludes our interview, but we’d like to thank Kaitlyn very much for her time. Be sure to catch Men, Women & Children when it hits theatres tomorrow!
