Presenting its own hurdles and challenges beyond portraying real people, was portraying them in a different era. He was definitely an interesting character, regardless of what else he went on to do in terms of being a poet.” That difference between that inner confidence and outer shyness was very interesting to me. That’s a really interesting split in a personality. But, that doesn’t marry up with what he presented to the world at the time, because he was still quite reserved and shy as a young man. But also, the diaries reveal him to be this really interesting mix of somebody who had immense confidence and intellect and a very rich inner life. He seemed by all accounts of people who’d talked about him, to have been very kind and warm and very good company. Portraying one of the more famous and notable of The Beats, Alan Ginsberg, Daniel Radcliffe steeped himself in “Allen’s diaries from when he was a teenager.” By combining the words and emotion of the diaries “with the character I saw in the script, he was somebody I found to be very likeable immediately. I was excited more specifically about the opportunity to humanize and sympathize this guy who is a footnote in a lot of the accounts of the formative years of the Beat Generation, and was, if anything, characterized as a bit of a two-dimensional villain/stalker.” He seemed like a hard person to wrap my mind around.” Hall, on the other hand, “was aware of this story and went through my period of fascination with the Beats and was excited that it was being told, especially being told as well as it was in John and Austin’s script. He has this charisma and this extroverted quality to him that I think is different from work I’ve done in the past, but he’s still a really complicated individual. However, the greatest challenge came from the fact that this is the first time any of them has played a real life person.ĭeHaan, admittedly not knowing “that this story actually happened”, found the revelations about Carr “a surprise. Hall, as Ginsberg, Carr and Kammerer, respectively, were more than ready to tackle. As personalities and literary and sexual lust collide, Carr kills lover/stalker David Kammerer, a killing which both pulled The Beats together while driving them apart.Ī story that has remained relatively dormant all these decades, writer/director John Krokidas, together with co-writer Austin Bunn, now brings this chapter of history to life, something that the principal actors Daniel Radcliffe, Dane DeHaan and Michael C. Kerouac, a free spirit, is ready to ship out with Navy while Kammerer, well, Kammerer is in love with Carr, frustrated at being rebuked thanks to Carr’s fascination with and seduction of an adolescent Ginsberg. Ginsberg, Burroughs and Carr are students at Columbia. The boys are still boys, Benzedrine fueled and on the precipice of becoming men for some, on the cusp of greatness for others, self-imposed sequestration. KILL YOUR DARLINGS is the “untold” true story of the seeds that would make each man what he would one day become. But it’s the lesser known men, Lucien Carr and David Kammerer, whose actions may have been the most responsible for how lives would unfold, careers would play out and perceptions and philosophies of the world would change. The faces and names of The Beats are, for the most part, well known – Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Generation after generation has fallen under the spell of their words, their thoughts, their adventures. For over 50 years, America, and the world, have had some sort of obsession with the “Beat Generation”.
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