New movie photos from Everything Must Go

New photos have been published from the movie. Everything must go will be in theatres in May 2011. Stay tuned for more.

'Everything Must Go' director gets in under the wire

Original source LA Times - http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/11/entertainment/la-et-dan-rush-20100911

By Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times Film CriticReporting from Toronto — There is a turning point in the life of any independent movie when the filmmaker realizes it actually might get made. For "Everything Must Go," writer-director Dan Rush's first feature, that moment came when Will Ferrell said yes.

"I love the role, but it was more about the story," the marquee comic actor said via e-mail a few days before the movie's Friday premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. "I love the fact that the world, being the character's front lawn, was contained."

In the movie, inspired by a very short Raymond Carver story, Ferrell plays a man whose luck essentially has run out all on a single day. Fired from his lucrative sales job, giving in to his alcoholism, already facing a divorce he doesn't want, he comes home to find his wife has locked him out and piled all of his belongings outside.

This is not quite "Death of a Salesman" dark, but it's not the typical Will Ferrell project either.

"The first time we met, we had the same questions about how to approach the film," Rush said a couple of weeks before the premiere, when he was still making final tweaks in a Burbank editing room. "Is this a comedy with dramatic moments, or a drama with comedic moments?"

They both agreed the answer was drama, and the result is a much more introspective Ferrell than the one who populates a string of comic goofs, anchored by 2004's "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy," which solidified his star power, to "The Other Guys," the buddy-cop comedy still kicking around local theaters.

"We decided to play every moment as if it was real," said Rush, who exudes a quiet calm that seems a good counterpoint for Ferrell's energy. "If it played funny, great; if it's sad or dramatic, great. But we weren't going to go in to any scene saying 'This is when we want to get laughs.' "

The film also stars Rebecca Hall, Laura Dern, Stephen Root and the very winning 13-year-old Christopher Wallace, son of the late rapper Biggie Smalls, who made his film debut last year playing a young Biggie in the biopic "Notorious."

Before "Everything," Rush, 40, was a commercial director with clients like Sony, Major League Baseball and Dell Computers. He had first read Carver's "Why Don't You Dance" while at Dartmouth, where he studied printmaking and photography, and in April 2008 he started shaping the handful of images that Carver had conjured up into a script.

Two clips from the movie

Agree to terms Clip


PlayBoy Clip

Info on the Movie

Directed by: Dan Rush

Produced by: Marty Bowen
Wyck Godfrey

Written by: Dan Rush (screenplay)
Raymond Carver (short story)

Starring: Will Ferrell
Rebecca Hall

Music by: David Torn

Cinematography: Michael Barrett

Editing by: Sandra Adair

Country: United States

Language: English

Budget: $8 million

Cast:
Will Ferrell as Nick Halsey
Rebecca Hall as Samantha
Laura Dern as Delilah
Stephen Root
Glenn Howerton as Gary
Michael Peña as Frank Garcia
Shannon Whirry as Nurse

Reception of the movie

Reception according to Wikipedia for Everything Must Go.

Reception has been mixed. Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter said "Playing an alcoholic at a crucial crossroad in his life, (Ferrell) uses his middle-age slacker persona well to convey a guy lost in his own immaturity and low self-esteem. (...) But the performance is too one-note. Using an acting muscle hitherto ignored, Ferrell isn't able to track the ups-and-downs in the story's dramatic beats. Instead he falls back on physical humor and facial expressions that don't quite get to the bottom of what ails his character." Stephen Saito of IFC said in his review; "Ferrell is a believable everyman, but morose to the point of indifference (not his, but ours)".

E! Online Article on the upcoming movie

Everything Must Go for Will Ferrell
Original Source: http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/b149271_everything_must_go_will_ferrell.html

No, the comic actor isn't talking about his last couple of movie roles.

Will Ferrell has signed on to star in the indie film Everything Must Go, according to Variety. Go is being written and directed by Dan Rush, who has directed commercials before this, his first feature.

Based on a story by the late Raymond Carver, the film is about a man who loses his job and then finds his wife has kicked him out and tossed all his stuff on the front lawn.

His response? Yard sale.

Sounds promising, and we can only guess that a quality, low-budget movie based on the work of a great American writer (who also provided the source material for Robert Altman's Short Cuts) might be the place for Ferrell to show off his considerable talents after Land of the Lost.

Everything Must Go full official description

Here is the full offical description for the movie:

Everything Must Go – at once a sales pitch and a surrender to fate – is a perfectly apt title for this melancholic yet entertaining film that dismantles the structures, behaviours and relationships we have come to consider normal.

Nicolas Halsey (Will Ferrell) is not having a good day. Not only has he been fired from his sales-manager job of sixteen years, but he returns home to find the locks changed and his belongings strewn outside, the spoils of his failed marriage scattered across the lawn for all the world to see.

So starts Everything Must Go, a wryly humorous drama starring Ferrell, which examines five endless days in the life of a man who believes he has lost everything. Deciding to both fight and give up, Nick appropriates the object-laden lawn as his living room; he stations himself in a recliner and entertains himself with neighbour-watching, while steadily chipping away at his six-month sobriety. When the police show up to shut down the illicit spectacle, he invokes a legal loophole that buys him four more days of lawn-time: residents of Plano, Texas are permitted to hold private yard sales for a maximum of five consecutive days.

That first-time screenwriter and director Dan Rush succeeds in crafting a feature-length film from Raymond Carver’s understated prose (the script is an adaptation of his short story “Why Don’t You Dance?”) is a testament both to the evocative power of Carver’s minimalism and to the imaginative expertise of Rush. The story represents only a short span of time and space, yet it is consistently engaging, tracking Nick’s schizophrenic oscillations of grief, sorrow, hope and liberated inebriation as he befriends a lonely teenager, offers unsolicited advice to his new, pregnant neighbour (Rebecca Hall) and comes to terms with saying goodbye to a life he is unlikely to reclaim.

Ferrell’s nuanced portrayal of Nick elicits gut-wrenching empathy one moment, disappointed repugnance the next. He wears his pain visibly – but never melodramatically – even as he fights through it with deadpan humour and self-deprecation.