BERLIN – Bryan Cranston is sitting with members of the press to discuss his role in Wes Anderson’s “Isle of Dogs.” He’s jovial and as charismatic as always, but it’s clear on this mid-February morning he has other things on his mind. We’ll get to that in a minute.
In Anderson’s latest stop-motion animated wonder Cranston voices the role of Chief or, as he succinctly notes, “I bite. I’m the one who bites.” The film takes place in the near future where a ruthless cat-loving Mayor has worked with a clandestine organization to convince the public that dogs carry a “canine flu” and should be quarantined on an island used as a garbage dump (better known as Trash Island). Chief leads a pack of dogs, four distinctly different breeds mind you, that include Rex (Edward Norton), Boss (Bill Murray), King (Bob Balaban) and Duke (Jeff Goldblum). The pack end up helping young Atari (Koyu Rankin) search for his missing dog Spots (Liev Schreiber) who is somewhere on the island. Anderson had sent the script to Cranston with a note saying, “I like your work. I’d love to have you consider this.” Needless to say, the Emmy winner was on board even before he knew what role Anderson wanted him to play.
“I was kind of hoping it would be Chief. He had the most meat, and he was the most damaged,” Cranston says. “I can relate to that. I seem to play a lot of damaged characters.”
“Isle of Dogs” Is A Good Boy, A Very Good Boy [Review]
Since his success with “Breaking Bad,” “Argo” and an Oscar nomination for “Trumbo,” Cranston admits he now finds himself working with filmmakers he would have only dreamed of ten or 15 years ago.
“In the very, very fortunate position I find myself in, sometimes surprisingly, I’m able to now work with really great auteurs and really wonderful storytellers,” Cranston says. “It almost doesn’t really matter what he wanted me to do. I’d have done it, because from his film history, we know that we’re going to experience something that is eclectic and unique. The way he opens up to the worlds that we’re not familiar with, I love that.”
As for working with Anderson, Cranston adds, “What Wes does he seems to open that up and write what he imagines. By doing that, he opens up that can of worms. He’s got to go learn that culture, that language, that sensibility. He’s got to pull that in. He creates more work for himself and agonizes over it, as any good writer, I think, does, and has a lot of care and consideration. And he’s a lovely man, just a lovely man who is open and congenial and collaborative.”
“Isle of Dogs” is arguably Anderson’s most subtly political work to date touching on themes of immigration and authoritarianism even if the filmmaker was unclear of how relevant it would be when he wrote it before the 2016 election. For Cranston, the sociopolitical parallels are obvious.
“I think for me it’s that these dogs all come from different backgrounds, these five main dogs, and yet they’ve carved a relationship between them,” Cranston says. “They didn’t exclude the other because they’re different, they included the other because they’re different and because they had a common goal. Now, it was very clear for them, for survival. But isn’t it always for survival? I mean, we have that common goal. We all want to survive. We’re here in Germany. This has a very deep history of division and evil here, in this city especially.”
And we soon get to where Cranston’s head really is at. His frustration with the political discourse, with Trump in particular and the reaction to the Parkland Florida school shooting, is obvious. Cranston was engaged and eager to discuss beyond his new movie.
“We’re swirling right now. We’re in a downward spiral, I think,” Cranston says. “Now, it’s not the first time in history and it won’t be the last, I don’t think. But it really feels that way. At some point, hopefully, civility and normalcy and common sense will band together, and that movement will bring us out of that. That’s what I’m hoping for. I’m hoping that it happens sooner rather than later. But right now we’re in the muck and mire. We’re on Trash Island.”
Well, credit where credit is due for Cranston tying it back into the movie, but thankfully he wasn’t finished.
“I just sent out a tweet today, because I have a soapbox. I don’t want to be a person without opinions,” Cranston says. “What’s the point? And I don’t mind if people disagree with me. I hope that I can be respectful in my disagreement with them. I think that’s what we need more of. We need more of this discourse. I think it was written by Paddy Chayefsky, ‘Network,’ back in the mid ’70s, over 40 years ago. [It was] almost farcical at the point saying I’ve got the terrorist hour, I’ve got the death hour. We’ve got a book that commercials on the death hour. It’s like, ‘Well, what are we seeing on television? ‘You’re about to see is very graphic. We warn you. What you’re about …’ It’s like oh my God. We’re seeing the hangings. It’s like the slaughters. I mean, look at what happened in the States the other day.”
[This discussion took place two days after the Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.]
He continues, “It could be very discouraging. It could be demoralizing, even. Our job, really, as citizens of the country, of any country, is to fight against the apathy of that, is to fight against the giving up and saying, ‘This is not how people should live. This is not acceptable.’ Our country was founded on revolt and resistance. And there is always room for that. And you shouldn’t be afraid of that. It should help to point out the direction of a problem somewhere.”
Cranston wants to make it clear that his activism isn’t about one party vs. another. He still believes common ground can be found.
“In this tweet today, I didn’t say anything about Republican or Democrat. I talked about Congress,” Cranston says. “Congress’ inactivity and impotence as far as getting some common sense thoughts about gun registration. It’s insane to me. It’s insane to anybody. What I wrote is that it’s not tragic anymore when there’s a shooting and 17 people die. It’s not tragic. What’s tragic? That’s commonplace now. When’s the next one? We all know there will be another one. That’s what’s tragic is that we’ve now just accepted that there’s going to be another one. It’s like, ‘Holy fuck, what have we come to?'”
It’s worth noting since this interview there have been at least three more high school or college campus shootings in the United States.
“Isle of Dogs” opens in limited release on March 23.