Interview: Ryan Reynolds, writer Chris Sparling get "Buried"

Whether he's prat-falling through a Sandra Bullock movie or trapped in a box, Ryan Reynolds knows how to hold your attention.

It's not just his affable charm and distractingly good looks, which he very much has in spades, but in his new thriller, Buried, he shows some surprisingly versatile acting chops as he tries to act his way out of a coffin.

Reynolds is Paul Conroy, a civilian contractor working in Iraq who is captured and wakes up to discover he's been buried alive. We, the audience, are stuck right there with Paul the entire time and it's on Reynolds to get himself, and essentially the viewer, through the situation.

"It was the most terrifying script I ever read. Very rarely do you read a script that puts the viewer in a position in which you really wonder, 'What would I do? What would I do,'” Reynolds said during a roundtable interview in San Francisco this week.

"Obviously it was a great narrative challenge to be the sole performer on screen for the duration of a film, and a little nerve-wracking to say the least, but there was a huge technical challenge as well," he said. "It all felt very Hitchcockian to me. Hitchcock used to tie those two elements together and marry them so beautifully, and it felt like kind of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."

Buried is directed by Rodrigo Cortes from a script by Chris Sparling. It made Hollywood's "Black List," a venerable catalog of the greatest yet difficult-to-produce projects circulating through the industry.

Both Reynolds and Sparling, who joined the actor in San Francisco, credit Cortes for pulling it off the list and tackling the unimaginable.

"Rodrigo and I would talk on Skype about the film. And we were talking one day and he tells me, 'this movie is a comedy,'" Sparling said as he recalled his initial wave of panic at the response. "And I was like, 'What do you mean?' And he explained to me that the timing of this movie is everything, it's about hitting certain beats, and that’s why he and I thought that Ryan was so perfect for the role, because we knew he had this innate timing."

Reynolds noted Cortes' sheer persuasiveness.

"He was incredibly convincing as to how he could shoot it," Reynolds said. "And the next thing you know, he was directing it and sending me an incredibly compelling letter as to why I should do it and how he would do it, and he flew over, and 40 minutes later we shook hands and said ‘Let’s get Buried.’"

Reynolds cracks that slightly mischievious smile as he says this. He's as funny as he is self-affacing. He's grateful for the opportuinities he's been given and he takes his roles seriously, which is why he figured he could pull off Buried.

"I wanted to do a film where there was no right or wrong, there was only truth, and that’s all that matters. You have to be 100 percent authentic in that moment, and if you’re not, you lose the audience immediately," Reynolds said. "Probably the only disagreement I ever had with (Cortes) was that I didn’t want to rehearse, I said 'Let's just put it all on camera,' all of it.

"I think that was terrifying for him as well. I think we saw this as a mutual trust exercise, I was trusting him to shoot this thing in a way that the audience could track it and he was trusting me to get in this coffin and be the only person on camera for 94 minutes," he said. "So it was a real leap of faith for both of us. We had our pinkies interlocked and we were 'Thelma and Louise,' about to drive over the cliff together."

That "cliff" was written in about three weeks, according to Sparling.

"I came up with the idea first, of a guy being buried alive, and I knew it was the movie I was going to make because at the time I was going to shoot it myself, and basically it was the only movie I could afford to shoot myself," Sparling said. "So from there I needed a compelling story to support that.

"I actually did write a totally different script based on that conceit, and it was more of the horror/thriller route where someone was evil and they were putting them there for a reason and they were a deranged person," he added. "But it felt like things we’d seen before, so I wanted to try to do something different. And that’s when I tried to do the more 'Hitchcockian' psychological thriller, with a good dose of drama as well."

Sparling interviewed several real-life contractors who praised him for his willingness to listen to their accounts.

"You hear a lot of different things in the news, as you should, about what’s going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, but you seldom hear what's going on with these civilian contractors," Sparling said. "If I were a documentary filmmaker, I probably would have set out to make a documentary about these guys, but that’s not me…so I set out to make what I thought would be a compelling way to tell their story."

For Reynolds that meant fully dedicating himself to Paul's plight, one he says was one of the most difficult experiences of his life. And that's saying a lot for a guy who's played everyone from a man on the verge of possession (Amityville Horror) to a superhero empowered through an alien ring (the upcoming Green Lantern).

"Some stains just don’t wash out, and 'Buried' is one of them. I think my very hardest day on 'Green Lantern' will always pale in comparison to my easiest day on 'Buried,'" Reynolds said. "'Buried' was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and there’s a reason it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience."

Check out Buried today in San Francisco. The film opens wider Oct. 1.

FUN FOOTNOTE:

Here's what Reynolds and Sparling had to say about the films that scared them the most:

Sparling: For me it would have to be Jaws. I'm afraid of sharks, I'm a little girl when it comes to them. And Open Water too, that isolation, surrounded by sharks. Basically anything involving sharks is not good.

Reynolds: For this film, I mostly drew upon Finding Nemo. No, when I was a kid, my brother subjected me to The Exorcist. That sh*t f*cked me up good! That was a four-year process, getting over that film. I needed help after seeing that movie. I mean, I needed to see people re-enact things with sock puppets with a nice cardigan, I was really messed up when I saw that movie. And I don’t think I can watch it again. I was like 7-years-old when I saw that film and it just permanently scarred me.