GERMANY: U.S. actor Tommy Lee Jones promotes his new film "Hope Springs" in Berlin

Record ID: 861272

  • Title: GERMANY: U.S. actor Tommy Lee Jones promotes his new film "Hope Springs" in Berlin
  • Date: 21st September 2012
  • Summary: BERLIN, GERMANY (SEPTEMBER 20, 2012) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) ACTOR, TOMMY LEE JONES, SAYING: "Improvise is not a word I would use loosely. That you listen to other actors and respond to them verbally, vocally, physically and in an appropriate way as you try to match the action to the word and the word to the action. And she's pretty good. She's a splendid person to work with."
  • Embargoed: 6th October 2012 13:00
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  • Location: Germany
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  • Country: Germany
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  • Reuters ID: LVA6L54GZC9BKHK7I1GBC51TE7ZI
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  • Story Text: In the popular 1979 film "Kramer vs. Kramer," Meryl Streep's character walked out on an unhappy marriage. More than 30 years on, Streep plays a middle-aged woman struggling hard to keep a sex-starved relationship together in her new movie "Hope Springs."
    The bittersweet comedy-drama brings Streep, 63, and Tommy Lee Jones, 65, together for the first time as a couple whose marriage has so lost its spark that they give each other a new cable TV subscription for their 31st wedding anniversary.
    Desperate for a shake up, Kay (Streep) persuades a reluctant Arnold (Jones) to attend a week-long counseling retreat with a couple's specialist, played by Steve Carell, the former star of TV comedy "The Office."
    As Kay and Arnold try to find their way back to each other, they stumble through a series of sexual exercises often as sad as they are funny.
    That includes Kay experimenting with a banana and an intimate, but awkward, movie date with her husband.
    Streep's Kay is an unglamorous retail employee whose husband is a cranky accountant with a regimented lifestyle.
    "I expect he's a bit afraid of intimacy and I'm pretty well convinced that he's rather dependent on his wife and doesn't want to rock the emotional boat of his life which happens to be stranded in still water, it's not moving," Jones, better known for his dry-humored roles in the "Men in Black" action movie franchise, told Reuters TV in Berlin.
    Each day begins with Kay frying eggs and bacon for her spouse andwhen Arnold falls asleep in his lounge chair watching TV before Kay wakes him to head to their separate bedrooms.
    "And I don't believe the moral is that women should go out and drag their husbands into therapy. I doubt that that's the moral of the film. I think the idea is to see real people having real problems and realise how ridiculous, funny and heartbreaking normal life is," Jones said.
    Speaking later at the red carpet event promoting the film, the actor told journalists that he had enjoyed working with Oscar-winning co-star Streep.
    "I really enjoyed getting up every day and going to work with Meryl Streep on a movie that had some originality in the script," he said.
    Hope Springs will open in German cinemas on September 27.
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