Were there moments on set where either you and Tatiana or you and David would be like “Okay, no wait. We have to do this again because it’s not grounded enough.” Were those conversations?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, what David and I discovered was over time he trusted me inside on the field. Right? So, he started to discover that. You know, we’d sit at a shot and we’d stay there and then we’d set certain shots up and certain scenes up so that Tatiana could push it. You know, like the scene in the car that we shot where we get in a fight?
Yes.
We had a very weird schedule where we were shooting everything backwards. We’d shoot the Bruins game first because the Bruins season was almost over.
Oh, right, right.
They were not maybe going to playoffs. And it was like all of this shit and we end up shooting the elevator scene where he freaks out and he has PTSD moment-the first scene.
That was the first scene you did?
Yeah. It was so crazy, but so the scheduling of this movie was really intense, but that fight, for instance, happened because we just kept going. You know there’s a moment where she screams where she goes “You don’t scare me Jeff.”
Right.
That was just Tatiana improvising in that moment ’cause I was like I went at her in that moment and then she was like “I’m not fucking scared on you.” That’s the microcosm of our exchange. It’s not what we would say to each other, but it was always like her pushing me and me being like “Try and go farther.” And we were always in that together. We were also so pressured by the real Jeff and real Erin. Not by them, but by the idea of them. How do we do service to the two of them and what they went through? And I think that just pushed us even farther into what was really real.
Well, I have … I only have time for one last question.
I’m sorry. I just talked my ass off.
Oh, it’s O.K.. Was there anything he specifically Jeff told you that wasn’t in the script that you ended up using? Was it how he moved or something?
His walk, you know? How he walks in those legs. You see right there? There he is. You can see it.
Jeff : Hey Jake.
[Jeff Bauman walks by the open door to our interview suite.]
Hey dude.
Hey man.
Jeff: Hey. How you doing?
[Jeff continues down the hallway with a wave goodbye.]
Now he walks even better, but when I first met him he was heavier. He was drinking still. He’s been 13 months sober and just walking with him over hours and hours, over months and months, watching him walk. I mean that was just physically something he gave me to see how hard it is to walk in those legs. And that last scene I’m very proud of ’cause I also felt a lot of responsibility to people who walk in Ottobock legs and people who are amputees who know how hard it is to walk on those things. He’s basically on stilts. You know what I mean?
Yeah. You guys do a great job of conveying that in the picture.
There’s that and I think he’s a little hard of hearing because of the bomb.
Oh, right.
So, a lot of times his physical behavior is, he sort of stares down to try and listen and it’s very off putting at first when you first sit with him ’cause you think “What is that?” Or he’ll sort of stare off at you or sort of do this thing and a lot of it is his need to be able to listen to what you’re saying or read your lips.
Oh.
And so, there’s all this behavior in that’s not mentioned in the story or what, but that I started to observe with Jeff that was this stuff that I love. You know? Things like he always does his thumbs up, you know? You watch all the videos of him and after he threw the first pitch at the Red Sox game [he raised both hands with a very exaggerated thumbs up]. We always joke in pictures now because we’re both going for the thumbs up, but I think the physicality of Jeff is a big thing. I mean, there’s more … Maybe time for one more question?
[Jake looks to the hallway and his publicist for the O.K.]
Publicist: No.
I talked my ass off.
She’s like “You’ve got to go.”
Publicist: Sorry.
I’m sorry.
No. It’s okay. No worries.
“Stronger” opens in limited release on Friday.