To celebrate the release of My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To, which is streaming and on digital download from next week, we sat down with the star of the film Patrick Fugit to find out more about this hugely surprising film.
Set in the modern-day, the film concerns a family of siblings – Dwight (Patrick Fugit), Jessie (Ingrid Sophie Schram), and younger brother Thomas (Owen Campbell) – who are facing an impossible dilemma that eats at them every day. Thomas is fighting for his life but no medicine will help him, for he can only survive on human blood. Immediately, you may be thinking that the film is a standard vampire film, but Jonathan Cuartas assured debut is so much more than that – in fact, it’s almost an after-thought.
Fugit told us about receiving the script with no prior knowledge of what it was about and within the first ten pages, was in disbelief as to what it turned out to be, but fell in love with the story and family dynamics, as well as allowing him to play a character he hadn’t quite played before. He tells us about Cuartas’ passion for the story (this is his directorial debut), the relationship between the three leads, and the danger in putting the film in a box as it is much more than what the cover suggests.
In addition, and with a new 4K remastered special edition due next month, we talked about his memories of Almost Famous, working with Cameron Crowe and his first day working with the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman and the advice he gave him on working in Hollywood.
You can watch the full extended interview below:
My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To is on digital download from June 28th.
