'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.