This article is part of IGN’s Fantastic Fest coverage and is a spoiler-free interview with A Different Man writer/director Aaron Schimberg and stars Adam Pearson and Sebastian Stan.
A Different Man is one hell of a film. The story follows Edward (Sebastian Stan), a man with neurofibromatosis who decides to have reconstructive surgery so he no longer feels isolated by his facial differences. Once on the other side of his surgery, Edward realizes that his condition wasn’t what held him back from forming meaningful relationships when he meets Oswald (Adam Pearson, who was born with neurofibromatosis), a man with the same disfigurement who makes connections with ease. Edward soon finds himself plagued by an obsession with Oswald and a play based on his former life.
Writer/director Aaron Schimberg pulls out all of the stops in a script that is bolstered by two remarkable performances from Stan and Pearson, but the film’s shooting schedule — alongside other challenges — ended up making A Different Man quite the hurdle to get made.
The film had a breakneck 22 days to film, which meant some days were literally spent sprinting around New York City in order to get shots that, if they were missed, simply would not have been in the film. I sat down with Schimberg, Pearson and Stan after the film’s Texas premiere at Fantastic Fest to talk about all the challenges of getting A Different Man through the production process.
“[It was] stressful,” says Schimberg of the lightning-fast schedule.
“I think that a little bit of pressure and a little bit of stress is a good thing,” Pearson adds. “If you’re not on your A-game, everyone else will pull you up there really quickly.”
“I think we got it [done] because it was so truncated that everybody was pulling their weight at all times,” Schimberg agrees. “So in a way it brought us closer, I guess you could say.”
“There’s no margin for error, and then the crew also has to be really involved,” Stan says. “I mean the camera, and I think the sound and everything has to be all on their toes, especially because we were doing it on film [rather than digital] and there were a lot of long takes of one-shot takes.”
The truncated shooting schedule meant that the script had to be considerably trimmed from its original form, and limited daylight meant anything could end up axed at any given moment if the shoot fell behind schedule for any reason. With all that said, there’s plenty of opportunity for regrets or what-ifs. But, despite the odds, Schimberg has none.
“Maybe at the time,” he says of cuts that were made to the script, “but there’s nothing that I look back on with regret. Usually, when you’re up against the situation, and I always do this in a film, you look at the schedule and you look at the reality of the situation, and you have to look at your script with… you have to be very vicious with it.”
A certain scene that ended up being critical to the story made the final cut, but it was met with some stress from Pearson. When Stan’s character Edward starts to get a more crazed partway through the film, there’s a fight that breaks out between him and Pearson’s Oswald.
“That’s the scene that I saw it come up on the schedule and I was like, oh no, that’s today,” says Pearson, knowing that he would be doing his own stunts in the fight. “We had coordinators and we were looking at, okay, how do we make all this work in the stage scene, and we just did it kind of slowly and walked us through it first. We kept on doing it and getting quicker and quicker and quicker. So we’ve practiced it for a while, but then there comes a point where you’ve just got to go for it.”
For me, [it’s about] being aware of what those projections could be and trying to not fall into them
For Stan, the biggest hurdle was less a single scene and more a question of how to bring empathy and a thoughtful portrayal to a character going through something that he would never experience.
“Obviously, there’s things here for me that I will never be able to fully know, but I think we talked a lot about this idea of being a public figure, or I was thinking about the time when I came and moved to this country and how I was being treated for having an accent and trying to fit in,” says Stan, who is originally from Romania. “And so there were other things I was trying to rely on to understand what this experience might be like for someone in Edward’s shoes.”
The actor thinks A Different Man challenges its audience by pushing people to “kind of throw their projections onto the screen. I mean, even just from the idea of representation or who should be playing who, but also what we believe, what we don’t believe, what we think of Edward at the beginning because he’s oh, the poor guy who’s lonely and whatever, how we sort of walk around with these narratives we’re not aware of.
“For me, [it’s about] being aware of what those projections could be and trying to not fall into them […] The movie doesn’t apologize for anything and is not sitting there wagging its finger in your face. And I think that’s very, very hard to land.”
Some quotes have been edited for clarity and length.
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