Wednesday afternoon I sat down with director Aaron Schneider, producer Dean Zanuck, and stars Robert Duvall, Bill Murray, and Sissy Spacek to discuss Get Low, in which Duvall plays Felix Bush, a curmudgeonly old man who plans his own funeral party while still alive in 1930s Tennessee. We sat down for a roundtable discussion (about four other Internet film journalists with me) with this combination of young filmmakers and living legends of the silver screen to discuss the stresses of independent filmmaking, but the conversation quickly went off-topic, maneuvering in several interesting directions including Duvall’s extended discussion of the talents of mules and Murray’s desire to share his lunch with the young starving bloggers around him. It was an engaging, if unusual, Q&A, and an honor to meet these veteran actors and new filmmakers and I for one am glad they went off-script, not repeating the same old blurbs and soundbites one hears when promoting a film.

Get Low is slated for release by Sony Pictures Classics on July 30, 2010. Read my review here.

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