“Yesterday was pretty achy. Little mild fever. Spots came in the afternoon. Today, I woke up feeling good,” Edwards said in the video.
Cera plays Liesl’s Norwegian tutor Bjørn Lund. And because of the strong leading performances, you couldn’t quite say Cera steals the show, he’s certainly one of the very best things about “The Phoenician Scheme” — and that’s something for a movie that includes Tom Hanks and Bryan Cranston playing a game of HORSE. Bjørn is an entomologist, which means Cera spends a sizable portion of the movie in a bow tie with an insect gently poised on his finger.“He is sort of a bug, himself,” Cera, speaking in an interview at the Cannes Film Festival shortly before
says with a wry smile. “And he sheds his skin and becomes his truth self.”If Cera’s role in “The Phoenician Scheme” feels like a long time coming, it is. He and Anderson first met more than 15 years ago. Cera, 36, was then coming off his early breakthroughs in “Arrested Development,” “Superbad” and “Juno.” A comic wunderkind from Ontario who stood out even among the “Arrested Development” cast as a teenager, Cera had caught Anderson’s attention.“It was something arranged by an agent in New York and we went to a kind of cocktail party,” Anderson recalls by phone. “We were with Harvey Keitel, too. So it was me and Harvey and Michael Cera — a totally unexpected combination. But I loved him. For years I’ve kind of felt like: Why haven’t we already done something together?”
For Cera, the meeting was even more memorable.“I remember being very excited to meet him,” Cera says. “I remember him being very disarming. Obviously, he was like a luminary inspiration. He has had a huge impact on my general sense of taste. I discovered his movies when I was a teenager and watched them over and over.”
They nearly did come together on a movie before “The Phoenician Scheme.” Anderson had a small role for Cera in
but when its production schedule got pushed, Cera had to drop out because of the coming due date for his first son with his wife Nadine.Hawaii is hard on preservationists. Between heat, wood rot, fire risk and termites, the islands cultivate the idea of impermanence. But the greatest threat is
“Hawaii has exceptionally high land value and so there’s often pressure to redevelop — anything — to a more intense commercial use,” she says. “It takes a lot of commitment to say we’re going to keep something that’s important to us, even in the face of that kind of pressure.”Remarkably little of Hawaii’s 20th-century architecture has been preserved, especially in urban areas, says William Chapman, dean of the school of architecture at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
The mid-20th-century was a particularly harsh period for historic buildings in Honolulu, he says: “We lost a lot.” What’s left is “probably two handfuls of buildings, dating back in time to the pre-territorial period, back to the 19th century.”Developers use neglect as an excuse to tear down buildings, Chapman says. “Old-timers love to talk about the house being held together because the termites hold hands, right? I get sick of that.”