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As beat poets, Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, and David Cammerer were set on destroying the old, formulaic, rules of the then-traditional literary world, and create a “New Vision” of expansive, free form, truthful language. In the  60’s counter-culture set biography/murder mystery, Kill Your Darlings, Daniel Radcliffe, Dane DeHaan, and Michael C. Hall play the aforementioned roles, respectively, and bring a commanding life to each of the real-life characters. At a Four Seasons press conference, I learned how each actor prepared for their roles, and how the famous literary icons’ writing inspired them.

 

DANIEL, WHAT HAS THE JOURNEY BEEN FOR YOU, FROM CHILDHOOD ACTOR TO MORE ADULT ROLES?
DANIEL RADCLIFFE: Since finishing [“Harry Potter”] there’s been a huge journey for me, like, I had never worked with different crews before or different actors before… doing Kill Your Darlings was a huge thing for me because I wasn’t going to be working with anybody I knew. It was like starting fresh in a way, and that was really exciting.

 

LIKE THE BEAT POETS YOU PORTRAY, DID YOU HAVE ANY ANGSTY WRITING AND THOUGHTS THAT YOU PUT DOWN?
MICHAEL C. HALL: I definitely have some journal entries…

[LAUGHTER]

MH: They’re ultimately just run-on sentences.

DR: Yeah I definitely wrote my fair share of real bad poetry from when I was about 13-18… Some of mine were actually published under a fake name when I was 17. Don’t look them up.

[LAUGHTER]

DANE DeHANN: Yeah, also guilty of teenage poems of trying to achieve naked self-expression.

 

WHY DO YOU THINK THE BEAT POETS HAVE THAT “STAYING POWER?”
DD: I think their affect on today’s society is kind of amazing. Their books are still celebrated and read, they were the original hipsters. In where I live in Williamsburg/Brooklyn, I can’t walk down the street without seeing at least 10 people dressed exactly like Jack Kerouac.

[LAUGHTER]

DD: It’s insane. Their books obviously have this huge impact and also what they stood for, how they dressed, all of that still resonates today.

 

IS THERE ANY DIFFERENCE IN PLAYING CHARACTERS IN THE 1940’S AS OPPOSED TO CONTEMPORARY CHARACTERS?
MH: Yeah, the script is so well rendered that a lot of it could be unconscious, you could [easily] give over to living in a world that is contextualized in a totally different way… I was excited more specifically, about the opportunity to humanize and sympathize [with] this guy who’s sort of a footnote of the beat generation and was, if anything, characterized as a bit of a 2 dimensional villain/stalker. I liked that the movie aspired to round him out a bit, and that was appealing.

DR: Allen [Ginsberg] is one of the characters that is probably easiest to find empathy or compassion with. There are moments where he’s so easily manipulated by Lucien where there’s a part of you that wants to shake him. Also John [Krokidas, Director] took the pressure off by telling us not to really research our characters too much past the point where we find them in the movie, so there wasn’t really a sense that we were having to live up to the icons they became.

DD: Yeah Lucien’s a tricky one because Lucien worked so hard to make sure this story was never told. My responsibility is to honor this person by trying to figure out truthfully who they were at this point in their life, not necessarily how Lucien would want himself to be portrayed in the film.

 

WAS THERE ANY SORT OF RESEARCH YOU DID INTO THE TIME PERIOD?
DR: The thing I found really helpful was [listening] to music of the period. I listened to a lot of Jo Stafford, who I had never come across before, and his songs “No Other Love” and “You Belong to Me.”

 

AS ACTORS, ARE YOU EXCITED ABOUT THE OPPORTUNITY THAT YOU CAN TAKE TO CHALLENGE THE RIGID, MORE FORMULAIC PARTS OF THE FILM INDUSTRY WITH SOME OF THESE ROLES YOU’RE TAKING?
DR: I’d like to think that if the choices I make are slightly unexpected or challenging people then that is good. I don’t know if it’s like we’re railing against the industry but I also do think that that we [Dane & Michael] are fairly right-minded people in terms of what we value in scripts and storytelling.