Matt Bomer and Len Amato discuss ‘The Normal Heart’
Photo by Megan Balser
**SPOILER WARNING: This article contains spoilers for the HBO film “The Normal Heart.”**
The Savannah Film Festival screened “The Normal Heart” Sunday afternoon. The HBO movie, starring Mark Ruffalo and Matt Bomer, is about the start of the HIV/AIDS crisis between 1981 and 1983 and the activists who founded an organization to fight it. After the showing, Len Amato, president of HBO Films, and Bomer sat down with moderator Chris Auer, chair of SCAD’s film and television department, to answer questions about the movie.
According to Amato, accuracy was key. Production employed medical consultants and pulled from the experiences of people who were there in the places and times the movie recreated.
“Basically having as much truth and authenticity as possible was kind of a task from the beginning,” Amato said. “And not pulling any punches, either, on the disease or on the lifestyle or on the panic that involved the city.”
Part of that authenticity was getting the “look” of men dying of AIDS painfully right. To achieve that, production paused for three months so Bomer could drop 35-40 pounds. Bomer also worked with doctors to chart the trajectory of his character’s illness scene-by-scene.
Adapting the story from stage to screen presented some additional challenges, Amato said, but also great opportunities.
“In this case, the director and the camera put your eyes and put your attention right where you want it to be,” he said. “The pacing of the story is controlled, and then as we were talking about, it’s opened up, so you actually experience the places and you can suspend your disbelief.”
One area the film was able to expand on was Ruffalo’s portrayal of the activist Ned Weeks.
“A big part of [opening the story up] is Mark Ruffalo finding the nuance in all those tirades and really giving a sense of humanity and dimension to this character,” said Bomer. “So it wasn’t just a bunch of diatribes, which is kind of numb at the end, so they could actually relate to him.”
This is crucial, because the relationship between Weeks and Bomer’s character, Felix Turner, is the crux of the movie. It’s what brought Bomer to the role.
“What I loved about Felix was his heart,” he said. “I loved his relationship to Ned and how they both brought out things in each other that they never would have gotten to experience if it weren’t for each other. I love that Felix gets to soften some of Ned’s edges and really give him a humanity. But I love that at the same time, Ned’s sort of fiery, firebrand personality gets [Felix] more in touch with his authenticity, something he probably wouldn’t have experienced had they not been together.
“I just think the journey of their relationship and the fact that it was all about love and real, unconditional love that we all want to experience in life – that got to shine through in their story.”
When asked which scenes were most difficult for him to shoot, Bomer gave an unexpected answer.
“I found some of the more challenging scenes to be some of the earlier scenes where they were first meeting,” he said, specifically citing Ned and Felix’s first date. The tempo of so many things going on was, for him, more difficult than the scenes where he’s suffering. And of the look of shock on his face during that date when Ned plants an unexpected kiss on Felix – “It was authentic!”
While there were such moments of levity on set, Bomer said for the most part the behind-the-scenes atmosphere reflected the film’s solemn tone.
“I think everyone had an understanding of the kinds of responsibilities we had in telling the story, because it is a true story, because we all were affected by it in some way,” he said. “So I think we tried to just stay wherever the scene was.”
“Sometimes it was so quiet on the set, it was the quietest set I’ve ever experienced,” he continued. “Everybody gave the actors the breathing room they needed.”
The last question of the afternoon was similarly solemn: how did the filmmakers decide whether to educate modern audiences on the reality of HIV/AIDS now or focus on capturing a snapshot of the crisis in the ’80s? Amato paused a moment before answering.
“I think the idea was that if you make the best movie possible that’s accurate to the period, that’s accurate to what was going on, that has a high degree of authenticity and truth, that would serve as the best learning tool to where we are today than anything else,” he said. “The quickest way to drive a movie into the ground is to say you want this movie to be a kind of a lesson, and that’s what really puts people to sleep. You want to make a movie and you want people to be entertained and inquisitive.
“One of the aspects of this for us was that people would be aware first of all of the history of the disease, be aware that the disease is not eradicated, be aware that it’s a worldwide epidemic and continue to be tested.”
