If you ask Ben Foster, he was born to play the part of a mustachioed, chest hair-baring gangster in the ‘70s set drama “Motor City.”
“We had a fabulous wardrobe designer, Amy Roth, who went into the deep trunks but also went to the great designers who did Burt Reynolds and Frank [Sinatra],” Foster told Variety about preparing for the role. “But the truth is, I was in utero, in my mom, in a disco roller-skating rink in Boston. [My parents] didn’t have a car and she would roller skate to work.”
“So, that’s how the chest hair came to be,” his co-star Shailene Woodley cracked as their director Potsy Ponciroli chimed in: “We actually designed every piece of his outfit around the chest hair.”
Indeed, Foster embraced the retro look so much so that he arrived at the Variety Studio at the Toronto Film Festival sporting an outfit that would surely be approved by his character — amber-tinted aviator sunglasses and slightly bell-bottomed pants, with his cell phone bumping era-appropriate tunes. (Woodley and Foster also embraced vintage vibes on the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival, where the film made its world premiere.)
Committing to the bit was crucial to the success of “Motor City,” as the action thriller is nearly free of dialogue. (“There’s loosely six lines,” Ponciroli noted. “The ‘Hi’s don’t really count.”) As such, wardrobe styling and other modes of non-verbal communication — from raising an eyebrow or throwing a cutting look to the way one lights a cigarette or sways to a disco beat — were particularly key to creating character.
“Words can be such a great device to lie to the people around us about how we’re actually feeling and who we actually are,” Woodley explained. “Without words, there’s still the ability to put on an illusion, but I like to say the space is thinner between what is truth and what is story. And in this film, we were fortunate enough as actors to have this guy [gesturing to Ponciroli] as our brilliant leader and companion and collaborator who trusted us to play.”
Set in 1970s Detroit, “Motor City” stars Alan Ritchson as John Miller, a blue-collar auto worker, who falls for Sophia, the ex-girlfriend (Woodley) of Reynolds, a rising drug kingpin (Foster). In retaliation, Reynolds enlists a corrupt cop (Pablo Schreiber) to frame John on drug charges, sending the innocent man to prison, where he plots his revenge and to regain his lost love. What follows is nearly 100 minutes of violent vengeance as the two men wage war for Sophia’s heart, all set to a propulsive retro score curated by Grammy winner and Detroit native Jack White.
“It was originally written as more archetypal in the sense that there was an antagonist, a protagonist, and she was really sort of a victim to the antagonist to be saved by the protagonist,” Woodley said, explaining why she was interested in playing the Helen of Troy-esque character.
“The energy dynamics between Sophia and these two men — one of which provided a home, a safety, a relaxation for her nervous system, a coming home too. And one provided, the space for her to be a wild woman and to let her feminine really fly in big colorful ways, but didn’t necessarily cater to her feeling safe or protected,” she said. “That dichotomy between the heart wanting two things and the intellect knowing there’s one choice to be made is something that I can certainly relate to and I think many people can relate to.”
Foster was drawn in by the film’s “beautiful script,” which was about 89 pages long. “There’s not a lot of dialogue, but it’s behavior-based. If we think about character, it’s how we behave,” he said about playing the ruthless gangster: “To echo Shai, his love is devoted. It’s not stealing the princess. It’s his person. And he’ll put out fire with gasoline to get her back.”
He added: “I just love dancing with Potsy and Shai. We all work very intuitively. We understand shapes, we dig on dance, but we’re also hunting something that hurts, and to share that a little bit and exchange that when the cameras are rolling, it’s jamming.”
And because this is the disco era, the characters quite literally dance through the drama. “The dancing was the easiest scenes in the world. It was basically [saying] ‘Action,’ then hold on and watch,” Ponciroli said. “We have like an eight-minute cut of the disco scene because everything was incredible! We had to whittle that down.”
For more about the movie (as well as Woodley teasing her role in “Paradise” season 2), watch the video above.
