Mary
Elizabeth
WinsteadSource

A couple of more video interviews with Mary from yesterday’s TIFF premiere for Smashed have been released online, and I’ve posted them below. Also, in another new interview, Aaron Paul talked about working with Mary on the film and their on-screen chemistry.

There’s also one more interview here and here.

CS: Did you spend some time with Mary Elizabeth beforehand to build the relationship?
Paul: Yeah, yeah, before they officially offered it to me, they set up a meeting with Mary and I and we met at this restaurant slash bar and just kinda talked and felt each other out and we hit it off. You know, I’m such a huge fan of hers and I couldn’t wait for a project like this to kinda come her way because I thought she really deserved it. I always knew that she was super-talented, but she just needed the right project to be able to kinda spread her wings and this is just that and she’s brilliant.

CS: I’ve been a big fan of hers a long time and I’ve met her a few times, and I remember seeing her work in “The Thing” and how much she put into the role, but unfortunately movies are a director’s medium and I don’t think some of the more dramatic work she was doing made the movie.
Paul: Yeah, I mean, what’s going to hit the cutting room floor and make the film, but it was so great because she just really stayed in character pretty much the entire time, which must’ve been so exhausting for her. Then, that was exhausting for me.

We already know that Mary’s been working on an album with Dan the Automator for some time now (see here and here), and with Mary giving interviews during the premiere of Smashed last night at TIFF, Indiewire got some more scoop about Winstead’s upcoming album:

“It’s kind of random,” she told us. “I’ve always been a singer, I’ve always loved to sing. I never really thought I’d do an album, though, I never wanted to be an actress/singer. But he called me up, he’d seen something I’d done on the Internet, and it was just like ‘You wanna make some stuff?’ And how do you turn that down?”

Winstead says she’s loved the producer’s work long before he contributed to the ‘Scott Pilgrim’ soundtrack, and the two turned out to have a similar idea on what to collaborate on. “I was a huge fan of his,” she said, “I had been for a really long time. And when he told me his idea of what he wanted to do, it was perfect, because I’m a huge French ’60s pop fan.”

It’s been a while coming, and there’s no set date for any kind of release, but Winstead says you should be able to hear the fruits of their labors before too long. “We’ve been slowly writing and record stuff,” she told us. “It’s been like a year and a half. It’s a slow process, it’s something we’re doing more for fun, and then hoping it’ll turn into something we want to release. But that’s the goal, ultimately, is to make something to actually release and put out there. But we don’t know when we’ll actually finish it.”

She also said she plans on working on another new short film with her husband, writer/director Riley Stearns:

“We have one more short we want to make,” Winstead says. “And then he has a feature idea that we’re both really excited about, that we’d probably do a Kickstarter thing for, unless we could find some financiers or something. Something really small and low budget and contained.”

How exciting!

Film critic Roger Ebert has reviewed Smashed. Here’s what he had to say about the film:

One of the tales of folklore around Alcoholics Anonymous is that if your spouse joins AA, “it” will take him or her away from you. What’s much more likely to happen is that if your spouse sobers up and you continue to drink alcoholically, your partner may no longer be able to stand you. Marriages have been saved by AA, but usually when both drinking spouses sober up, or if one already is. If a spouse wants you to continue drinking just to be good company, what does that say about that person?

James Ponsoldt’s Toronto entry “Smashed” is an intelligent film about marriage and alcoholism. Mary Elizabeth Winstead stars as Kate, a maintenance drinker who steals a swing of beer after her morning shower and sips from a flask in the parking lot outside her job–as a grade school teacher. Non-alcoholics may find it difficult to understand how common a version of this behavior is. Drinkers may find it quite possible that she pukes into a wastebasket in front of her kids.

Finally dragged to an AA meeting by a colleague, Kate meets Jenny (Octavia Spencer, who you may remember as the most sensible character in “The Help,” for which she won an Oscar as best supporting actress). Her new life doesn’t much interest Kate’s husband Charlie (Aaron Paul) or her boozy mom (Mary Kay Place, in a spot-on performance). Give Charlie credit: As long as he stays topped up, he doesn’t much mind how Kate spends her evenings. Eventually she will begin minding how he spend his.