Fox's Vantage Point

'Tis the season for good movies. Seriously, I haven't seen a really lousy one in a while. And I'm sure Matthew Fox is hoping this trend continues when his film Vantage Point opens later this month.

MoviesOnline recently interviewed him at a press conference about the film, Lost, and the upcoming Speed Racer. And yes, his film and TV schedules overlapped. Holy time management, Batman! Most revealing in the interview is that he knows what makes Jack suicidal in the future. For the sake of character development, Fox is working with much less mystery than we are.

An excerpt:

Q: Having moved ahead as well as gone back in the story, and now that there’s a time when it’s going to be over, do you know more about the story and what’s going to happen? Your character is kind of a mess in the future, do you know why?

MATTHEW FOX: Oh yeah, I know a lot. I know everything that got him to that point. I know why he’s at that point. That was important to me.

Q: In general terms what does having a final date for the show to end affect the way you as a cast and crew approach the whole process?

MATTHEW FOX: I think how it affected Damon was the – Damon campaigned for that, that was what he wanted, and I understand why, he would always say to me, ‘If somebody told you you were going to go out and run a marathon tomorrow, but they were like we’re not sure whether we’re going to make you run 18 miles or you’re going to run 26, you wouldn’t have any idea how to pace yourself through that.’ And he has the story in his head, but until he knew how many chapters he had to write that story in, it was very difficult for him. And so now that he has that, that’s why the story is going to have a lot of momentum and is going to move quickly, every episode is going to feel like it’s charging forward to the final conclusion of this story.

Q: How surprised were you that the show became the cultural phenomenon that it seems to have become?

MATTHEW FOX: I’ve always believed in it being something very special from the moment I read the first script and met with J.J. and Damon and the people that were involved. I felt very positive that it was going to be a very good show. You can never count on that translating into some sort of finding a massive audience. And what the show has done globally has just been astounding. I’m very surprised by it. But on the other hand, I think the show deserves it.

Q: Do you think it lost its way? It had a huge audience and then a huge drop off.

MATTHEW FOX: No, I don’t feel that at all. The people that jumped, those were all bandwagon jumpers, those were the people who would not have been Lost fans to begin with. We won the Emmy, we won the Golden Globe, we were like this cultural [phenomenon] and then we had a whole bunch of people jump on just because they couldn’t stand being left out, and they weren’t really Lost fans to begin with. And they all went away.