STACK NZ Sep #66

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- INFINITELY POLAR BEAR -

S et during the 1970s, Infinitely Polar Bear tells the story of Cam, a bipolar father who has to take care of his two young daughters while his wife (played by Zoe Saldana) reluctantly moves interstate to pursue a business degree. It certainly doesn’t sound like your average movie about an average family. “I love this movie, and as strange as the pitch of what this movie is about might sound, it really is about family and is very relatable”, says Ruffalo. “What family doesn’t have a character in it?” It was this balance between the humour and the drama that drew Ruffalo to the challenging role. He also saw the appeal in being part of a very real story; the film is based on the childhood of writer-director Maya Forbes. “When you are playing someone who really lived you are doing a balancing act,” Ruffalo explains. “What people come to the cinema for is to see the actor’s interpretation of the people they are playing. To make it lively and interesting, you really have to filter it

through yourself to make it alive and spontaneous.” He also believes it was the “honesty” in Forbes’s screenplay that allowed the film to be realistic and emotionally resonant, without being too heavy. “Mental illness manifests itself in many different ways. Cam had a lot of humour and love and it was a good way to broach a scary subject for a lot of people, and [that’s] what makes it so enjoyable to watch.” As Cam is severely bipolar, Ruffalo conducted extensive research to prepare for the role. “Maya was a wonderful resource for me,” he says. “Her father was prolific in shooting videos and photographs and some of the videos he shot when he was manic really gave a sense of the sort of emotional rhythm, and his point of view of the world

Although it might seem like the rampaging Hulk exists in a completely different universe to Ruffalo’s Cam, there are some similarities. “When Cam would change, it would be extreme. The Hulk is extreme”, he says. “[Cam] is definitely not unlike the Hulk in that he could turn, in that something would trigger him and he would turn and then wake up afterwards and think, ‘oh my god what have I done?’” Despite his preparation, Ruffalo notes that bipolar disorder is a condition that many still struggle to understand. “Some of the stuff, I didn’t understand; his relationship to his family or to money,” he explains. “So it took me a while to understand why they saw it as being easy to give him a Rolls Royce, but impossible for his family to help him

send his kids to school. So that took me a long time to get my head around.”

• Infinitely Polar Bear is available on DVD and Blu-ray on September 23.

from within his mania. I have also had people in my family who are bipolar and I have seen them struggling with it, so I am not a stranger to it myself.”

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