| Ron Livingston Rescues Holly and Finds Something of Himself |
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| Written by Brad Balfour | |
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 "Holly" stars Ron Livingston, Thuy Nguyen, Chris Penn  Ron Livingston as Patrick and Thuy Nguyen as Holly planning to escape this awful situation in the movie "Holly"  Ron Livingston putting his life on the line for his character Patrick, which raise global awareness and action about this crucial social problem of child prostitution in the movie "Holly" His other notable acting credits included the Oscar-winning "Adaptation," the cult hit "Office Space" (he starred opposite Jennifer Aniston), the mini-series "Band of Brothers" (resulting in a Golden Globe nomination) and eight episodes of "Sex and the City." Though Livingston lives in Los Angeles, he did a stint in a very different place, Cambodia, to star in "Holly"--a hard-hitting examination of the child sex trade in Southeast Asia through the eyes of one 12 year-old girl and the American who accidently become her inadvertent protector. Created by a team of Israeli filmmakers, the indie production was shot in real brothels with actual sex workers as extras; Livingston endured the heat, strenuous conditions, and various risks such as imprisonment and intestinal parasites to create an incredibly authentic performance and live to talk about it. Q: You've been doing some heavy films of late, "Holly" and "Music Within," which are different for you, having made your reputation in a comedy like "Office Space" or TV series like "Sex in the City." Was this a conscious decision? Ron Livingston: It's just how it happened. A lot of it is, I think directors look at the last thing you did. A lot times they come together in clumps. When I was doing comedies, I was asked to do comedies. When I was doing some more serious work, I was not asked to do comedies. I think I try to follow my nose, what stories jump out and appeal to me. Q: Is this the new Ron Livingston now? RL: I don't know. One of the fun things about being an actor is that you can't do the same thing twice because the next job I do I'll be a couple of years older; I'm going to be down the road a bit more. No one's going to hire me to be a 24-year-old anymore. I have to discover what story I can tell now. I don't know what they want the "new Ron Livingston" will be. Q: What kind of challenges were there with this film, "Holly?" RL: This movie was a little bit of an experiment for me. I guess the simplest way to describe it is, when you act, you can act big or you can act small. Over a course of a year, I tried big for some films, and in this one I tried to be small just to see what happened. I think it's a movie that required it. [I played] a guy, Patrick, who is in a foreign land and sort of spinning his wheels, not really attached to anybody. He's caught up in his own head, really narcissistic. When I thought of the story for Patrick, I thought the story was about a guy who was swallowed up in himself, who then engages in the outside world and realizes he's part of something bigger. And so it worked really well to let it be small where it could be small, and find only a couple of moments to make it big. Q: There's an ambivalence to your character Patrick and why he is doing what he's doing. There's a fine line as to how you read Patrick. RL: Yeah, there's a "Lolita" parallel in this story. You look at a movie like "The Professional," which I think is a more traditional western telling of this story—good guys and bad guys. In that movie, I think they made a very conscious choice of wanting to protect this little girl. But because this movie is about exploitation of children, and using children for sex, when I read the script, I sort of felt that it needed to be there. Because it was a test that Patrick had to pass. So often with child abuse, it happens behind closed doors. I think a lot of times, the approach is, "Oh he would never--how could you possibly think?" A lot of times, that hides what's actually going on. I think there's a scene in the movie where Holly gets confused, where she's between girlhood and womanhood. It was a test that Patrick needed to pass that he not be confused with where she was at—between girlhood and womanhood. But it was definitely a test he needed to be put through. Q: Did you know anything about child sex exploitation before this movie? RL: No [laughs]. Q: But you learned a lot more in doing this movie? RL: Yeah. It's everywhere. Cambodia is special only in that they can walk up to you there and proposition you on the streets. Not proposition because little kids want to have sex with you, but because there's such a flood of white guys that are there to have sex with kids. We've got child trafficking in the Bronx. We have sexual abuse of children in all 50 states. It's everywhere. And closing your eyes to it, and thinking it's a terrible, terrible thing far away, is what allows it to happen. And so we're all responsible for it, but I don't mean that in a way of guilt. I mean that in that we all have the capabilities to not allow it to happen in the hundred yards that surround us. If we did that, if we make sure it didn't happen within the hundred yards around us, it would be gone. Q: Did you fear or worry about the dangers of making this film? RL: Yeah, this was tough. We had about 40 or 50 security police with us, armed with machine guns. The thing you realize is that they weren't there to keep the people away from us that might want to stop what we're doing. They were there--if they got the phone call—to take us in [laughs]. So it was a little bit "flying in the face" of it. I read some journalist's materials about how danger doesn't look like danger. You don't know you're going to be killed until you get killed. I didn't feel like we were in trouble. Cambodia is an amazingly safe place. I saw a 60-year-old man with stacks and stacks of money, sitting cross-legged on a blanket, changing currency in the middle of an open bazaar. Nobody would even think of robbing this person. The reason for this is, it's mentioned in an article I read about a guy who stole this scooter but didn't get 400 yards until all the locals tackled the guy and poured gasoline on him and lit him on fire. So in some ways its a very very safe place. In some ways, it's not. There are things you can do and there are things you can't do. During shooting, we weren't sure if what we were doing was the thing we could do or couldn't do. |