Op 7 april wordt The Kids Are All Right uitgebracht op DVD. De film werd onderscheiden met twee Golden Globes én werd genomineerd voor maar liefst vier Oscars/Academy Awards. Tijd voor een babbeltje dus met ondermeer regisseur Lisa Cholodenko en Julianne Moore.

Conception and Delivery

Q: The ampersand in the credits of The Kids Are All Right would seem to indicate that you wrote this script together. Is that the case?

Stuart Blumberg [screenwriter]: We’ve been very close. Hated each other. Really liked each other. Taken naps together when we were tired.

Lisa Cholodenko [screenwriter/director]: It was a long process: it took us over four years.

SB: We’ve gone through it together. I wouldn’t call it brother/sister –

LC: Our history was, we were acquaintances for many years in New York – SB: We always got along really well. I had met Lisa through a mutual friend, and we became friendly.

LC: We ran into each other in a coffee shop in Los Angeles, and Stuart asked what I was doing. I told him that I was writing this script, but I had just started and I was into writer’s block, and what was he doing?
[My second feature film] Laurel Canyon had been released: I was doing some [directing for] television. But I really wanted to write an original screenplay: everything that I was reading that was being sent to me was just not areas where I wanted to go. I felt that I’d already started this process of doing more personal work: where I felt comfortable was with more character-identified scripts.

SB: She said, “I want to write a mainstream movie about moms who have kids and sperm donors,” and I said, “That’s funny, because I want to do something more like [the movies] you do:” something more indie.

LC: I kind of pitched him the idea. He for his own reasons had an interest in it –

SB: I was a sperm donor in college.

LC: I had friends who had been on all sides of that equation, and my partner and I were trying to get pregnant. There had been a lot of stories about donor kids – in The New York Times, on 60 Minutes – and those kids are now coming of age. That’s a brave new world for families. So while Stuart thought it would be fun to go for the more indie flavor, I thought it would be interesting for this project to bring in somebody who had a more commercial sensibility. We figured this could be a good marriage.

SB: Neither one of us had written anything collaboratively before.

LC: We got together the next day and decided to try.

Q: Did you just start writing scenes, or went at it another way?

SB: We spent months on the outline, months on the first draft. We sat side by side for months on end, pounding it out together. Every single scene, character, line was reworked at least 10 times.

LC: We worked the script to the bone. We asked each other questions about these characters, shaped them, and put them into contrast with each other. When I felt like the script was veering into the superficial, or politically correct, we would rein it back in.

SB: It was an interesting dynamic: men and women are different. I loved working with Lisa. Sometimes I’d sit at the computer and be like, “Okay, I’ve only got so much time, so let’s get started,” but she’d be like, “No, no, tell me about your weekend. What happened?” “We really have to start.” “No, no, we need to process.”

LC: When I would lament to my partner that I didn’t know if the script was any good, she’d say, “Keep writing ‘til you break your own heart. If it’s resonating with you, it’s on the right track.” Stuart and I had been writing for about a year and a half, and I was simultaneously trying to get pregnant – which I did. We thought we could make the film and get it all done before I had the baby. There was a first incarnation of the film: we tried to get the production up in 2005-2006. That didn’t exactly time out. By the time the financing came together, I was too pregnant to make the movie. So I had my son, and spent the next couple of years trying to get my life re-oriented and spend time with him. But Stuart and I continued to write.
Revisions made the script better. Because we had worked on it for a long time, it read really visually, too.

Q: Speaking of visuals – you shot the movie on film, right?

LC: Yes, [cinematographer] Igor Jadue-Lillo and I used 35 millimeter [film]. I love film [stock], and I didn’t want a dense, hyper-real vibe [from digital]. I wanted to see some grain in the picture. It felt to me like it should be very photographic, like the films I grew up on.

Q: Were you also intent from the beginning that audiences take away a message from the movie?

SB: There isn’t a message about gay marriage. There is maybe some of that old joke: “Gay people deserve to be as miserable as straight people...” I think when Lisa and I started writing The Kids Are All Right, we were saying, “This is something that happens and let’s explore the story that comes out of that.” We focused on human beings, not on issues.

LC: I don’t see myself as an overly political person, in part because I feel these are human rights issues. I know, human rights issues are political issues, but my relationship and contribution to them is from the creative and artistic perspective.
I know some will say, “Oh, there’s an unconventional family, two moms and their kids.” To me, it looks pretty typical. We’re putting it on-screen in a way that isn’t part of a politicized environment. It’s just, “Here’s this family.”

SB: They’ve led a wonderful sort of Ozzie and Harriet life, but we’re catching these characters in transition. Hopefully the story is rich and complex enough that it compels on its own merits.

LC: The story is meant to be an exploration about what all families face, especially families with children: the anxiety and comedy and pain and pathos of watching your family shape-shift on you. Whether you’re gay or straight or single or interracial or whatever – everybody has a similar trajectory, all families face similar challenges: the emotional rites of passage, the choices made, and whether you stick things out and stay together as a family. What goes into making those decisions, and where can you get derailed – that’s also what we’re exploring.

SB: Our story’s family is as wonderful and troubled and flawed and impractical as any family. With stories like this, you get to delve into why human beings behave the way they do. While I love action movies and thrillers, getting to spend time within human nature can be really fun and fulfilling.

LC: When I decided I wanted to try to make films, what gave me the yen to do so were the movies that I saw when I was younger: films that had a real sense of comedy and tragedy. You could find the humanity and the complexity in the characters, and your sympathies were waxing and waning.

SB: Thinking of the films I’ve done before, well, unconsciously, are there any patterns? It’s, “a new character comes into an established situation and shakes things up.” I’m interested in people who are trying to find the meaning of where they are in their lives, and another person comes in and serves a catalyst to really make them think about those questions.
Mark Ruffalo brings a lot to the role of Paul. He goes really deep, and he’s really funny. This role reminds me of ones he did earlier in his career.

LC: Paul is a richer character with Mark playing the role. He was somebody I thought of for the part from the outset. He had other offers, for bigger films, but I think that some of the great actors feel that the pleasure of acting is being able to do smaller films that you can get fully into. Julianne Moore was great, because I said, “I’m going to go out to Mark, could you back me up? Maybe give him a call?” She called him.

Q: Was Julianne Moore always your first choice?

SB: Sure, we wrote the character of Jules with Julianne in mind. It was wonderful to have the person you visualized actually say the words.

LC: On the set, Julianne was ready for anything, including the sex scenes. I first met Julie about 10 years ago. She and I talked casually over the years, and she’d say, “Write something for me.” I sent her an early draft of The Kids Are All Right and she attached herself in 2005, when the movie was going to get made and didn’t. Julie made herself available to do the movie for four years. She stuck around, stuck with me, and stuck with it. I went to New York and met with her and we talked a lot. There were many conversations with Julianne about where the drafts were heading, and how things had changed for the characters and why. Julianne got to know her character in a more organic way as Jules evolved.

SB: We thought that this was going to be something different than we’d seen from her before: Julianne usually plays very strong women. Not to say that Jules isn’t strong, but she’s much more vulnerable in this relationship.

Q: While you were writing for Julianne all along, with no one cast as Nic was there by default a lot of Lisa in Nic?

LC: There’s parts of myself in Nic, strains of my personality. But, I am not the breadwinner in my family… To play Nic, we needed a yin to Julianne’s yang. It took me a long time to determine who I would cast to play Nic. I knew I wanted a great actress who was funny, dramatic, strong, sexy, over 40, and recognizable. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to sit down with anyone in an exploratory way: it was going to be an offer only, so I took the choice very seriously! In New York, Julie and I discussed a short list of actresses and focused on how Annette Bening was somebody we both adored, and I went out to her [with an offer]. Julie e-mailed Annette and said, “I’d love for you to do it.” It was like an arranged marriage: much of the preparatory work for the movie was done in this act of choosing Annette. Both of them knew they were hand-picked for each other, and needed to make it work. They also liked the challenge of getting deep into this couple’s psychology and emotional space.

SB: Annette is amazing. Literally, she was putting on an acting clinic: every day on the set was an impressive display. The commitment she brings to the character! She’s done so much homework: it was inspirational to watch somebody so professional taking it so seriously. She inhabited the role of Nic.

LC: Since Annette was in L.A., she and I and Stuart had several script meetings and did some important revisions together. Script work is important to her and she’s good at it. Annette is formidable – very incisive, smart, and methodical. I realized that she was the character I had written, in that in real life she is a Mama Bear. So it was easy for her to access that for the part, being completely involved with her kids’ lives.
Working with Annette prior to Julianne getting to L.A. helped me have a greater understanding of the characters and their relationship – and how to help both actresses find the key moments that would translate into relationship authenticity on the screen. Playing the normalcy and humanity of their characters and of their marriage freed them to be natural and steer clear of anything arch and artificial.

Q: How and in what ways did the younger actors surprise you?

SB: Well, Mia Wasikowska may seem to be one of those “it girls” who’s exploded onto the scene, but she’s incredibly level-headed and calm. She brought a real centeredness to playing Joni, a real gravitas to this 18-year-old. Josh Hutcherson did a wonderful job: he’s not at all like Laser in real life. We’d see him go from his own extroverted self to playing someone very internal and almost imploding.

Q: How has the initial feedback been from audiences? The film was first screened in January and February 2010 at the Sundance and Berlin International Film Festivals…

LC: …which I hadn’t been preparing to do. We showed it unfinished as a world premiere at Sundance – it was fairly nerve-wracking hustling through temp mixes – but, in spite of that, the film played incredibly well. In fact, the reception was tremendous. The Berlin experience was also incredibly positive. I think people were relieved to see a film that was grappling with something real and complicated, but was also funny. They’ve found the honest depiction of marriage and family refreshing, and the gay family aspect takes some audience members into uncharted territory. Viewers at both festivals appreciated the experience – more than I ever anticipated. The movie takes you on a ride that feels truthful and surprising, and drops you off somewhere that is hopeful.

Q: Are you looking forward to further feedback/discussions?

LC: Of course! It’s going to be fun!

Family of Four, Plus One

Annette Bening [plays Nic in the movie]: With movies, everything follows from the writing. To me, The Kids Are All Right is a great and poignant story about a family who very much love each other, and who are going through what a lot of families go through – things that we all share and can relate to. There’s so much heart in it, so much genuine feeling – and it’s not saccharine, or earnest: earnest is boring.

Julianne Moore [plays Jules in the movie]: One of the reasons that I really responded to the wonderfully funny script is that it’s about where you are when you’ve been in a relationship for a long time and you have children. Annette and I have both been married long-term, have children and know what it’s like to parent. When you have a child that’s leaving home, it’s a big transitional time for everybody.

Mia Wasikowska [plays Joni in the movie]: Family dynamics change when people grow up and start living their own lives.

Annette Bening: All the characters in the story have their journeys. Nic and Jules are really good moms: they have brought up their children in a loving, supportive environment. They’re human, like all the rest of us with our families. The two women are very different from each other: I liked that in the writing, that they’re each such distinct people.

Julianne Moore: My character has tried different jobs: she was in architecture school, had a business, and now is trying to be a landscape designer. But she’s been more the stay-at-home parent, and for her the idea that Joni is leaving home now is major. Because her whole life has pretty much been about staying home with the kids. It makes for a complicated dynamic. In movies, characters generally have a clear idea of where they’re going. In life, I’ve seen a lot of people who don’t. So I wanted to play that with Jules: her predicament is that she doesn’t feel like she can go forward or backward, she feels stuck – and Nic has to deal with that, they have to work it out together. I loved that Jules is at such an amorphous place in her life, and that seemed to be a compelling thing to play.

Annette Bening: I felt like I understood Nic: I saw her as a sane, stable, smart woman. The dilemma that she gets in, going through a hard thing – one of the joys of acting is trying to put yourself as much as you possibly can into the shoes of another person, and to look at the world through their eyes.

Mia Wasikowska: Nic and Jules bring out different things in Joni’s personality. To me, Joni always came off as a fiercely driven person: very ambitious, and wanting to achieve in school. She’s more involved in the life of the mind than, say, fashion.

Josh Hutcherson [plays Laser in the movie]: Laser gets along great with his moms, but when he meets Paul it’s that, he hasn’t really had any male influences in his life. At the beginning of the story, he’s the one who wants to contact his biological father. Lisa, Julianne, Annette, Mia, and I all talked about, “What would you do if it was your kid? Would you let him meet him?”

Mark Ruffalo [plays Paul in the movie]: Paul is kind of interested in the idea of picking up where the moms have left off a little. I feel that Laser expects more of a traditional dad, but Paul is much more eclectic. Paul doesn’t totally give up on him, but goes to where he’s getting the most responsiveness, which is from Joni.

Josh Hutcherson: Laser keeps his guard up, but Joni is more outgoing, with Paul.
Mia Wasikowska: At first, she’s very apprehensive, as it’s an unexpected relationship she finds herself in.

Mark Ruffalo: Paul has never really learned to make any real emotional connections to women, other than as f—k buddies. When he gets the call and this newfound information that he has kids from having given sperm so many years ago, I think he’s a little proud. There’s the fantasy: “Maybe I’ll start being a dad now.” He won’t have to take care of a baby.

Julianne Moore: At the core of a family, there is a primary relationship between the parents. The most interesting thing about the relationship is how very normal it is. In the script, it’s mentioned that Nic was a resident at UCLA and Jules came in: she was probably in college at the time. They met and had a family right away.

Annette Bening: These two parents have been together their whole adult lives, which is a very familiar family story: this story is never self-conscious about it being two women, which I love [about it]. That’s just part of the mix of this particular family.

Mark Ruffalo: For Paul, Jules is like the ultimate conquest: not only is she married, but she’s also a lesbian. [laughs] Forbidden fruit, kind of taboo. They have an immediate intimacy and connection because they share a child. I had worked with Julianne before [on Blindness], so we had this rapport that we’d already developed. Having some sexy scenes together was made easier by our friendship, and [laughs] she’s friends with my wife, so that helps a lot.

Julianne Moore: I was grateful that we knew each other so well [prior], that made everything less weird. The whole cast is tremendous, and it’s the strength of the script that attracted them to The Kids Are All Right. I first met Lisa years ago at a Women In Film event. I’d seen High Art, and thought it was brilliant. I actually said to her, “Why didn’t I see that script!?” I think she’s a wonderful writer and director, and we stayed in touch and were looking for things to do. She sent me the script she and Stuart had written, I said yes [to being in it], and then it was a long process of actually bringing the film to fruition. I stuck with it because I believed in Lisa as a filmmaker, and I believed in the beautiful script as a movie.

Josh Hutcherson: I was a fan of [Lisa’s second feature] Laurel Canyon. I thought this script had a very similar feel with the vibe and the pacing. When I was reading it, my heart was pounding when Nic found the hair in the drain. I was thinking, “No, stop, don’t!” As an actor there was a lot in the story to sink your teeth into, to get emotional and really personal with.

Mia Wasikowska: When I read the script, there was a lot that I could identify with. I formed an image of Joni in my head. Preparing to play the character, I imitated the image that was already in my head: I read the script over and over again and then I wrote about anything that came to mind.

Mark Ruffalo: Lisa and Stuart’s script was so well-written: there was a lot of direction on the page. Lisa understands actors really well, and I had such a good time with her. On this size film, we were shooting 6-7 pages a day. But it was a mellow set: Lisa exudes this confidence in all aspects.

Julianne Moore: Lisa was very well-prepared: after waiting so long to make this, she was really enjoying herself and using every single moment to the best of her abilities.
Annette Bening: The Joni Mitchell/dinner party sequence had been written perfectly, and Lisa knew in advance how to dramatize that [one particular] moment [for Nic]: she knew where she was going to put the camera and when the music was [going to be in] there. It’s like a novelist revealing a story to you. There’s something about the way she runs a set that is very sane. She’s very chill, and receptive to what’s happening. Good directors understand that they’ve made the biggest decisions already by casting, and can go with what people’s instincts are while making their own decisions about changes during shooting. She will come up and whisper in your ear, “Try this…”

Josh Hutcherson: Lisa is collaborative, but she has a vision and keeps it consistent throughout.

Mia Wasikowska: Lisa’s cool and calm radiated throughout the whole cast and crew. Some sets can be tense but she definitely keeps it light, which is a real achievement.

Julianne Moore: The crew was fantastic, and the whole process was delightful. This was a 21-day shoot, but we had a few days in a room [beforehand] with everybody just to read through.

Annette Bening: We had discussed their relationship and their history in detail, and some of those pieces of their history had ended up in the script and some of them – for me, as an actor, I do need to put a history together in my head, and no one else ever knows: it’s not important that everyone share everything. Lisa and Stuart were attentive, continuing to work on the script all the way through, which is for me a great thing, because there can be so much that’s being learned while you’re shooting. At that point in the process, small details can make a huge difference in a movie, whether it’s the angle of a shot or the way one chooses to play a scene. You try to become attuned to the other actors so that what is happening feels natural, which it did immediately [on this movie]. Again, that’s because of Lisa: she knows how to create an atmosphere where people can behave, rather than act. I felt very comfortable shooting the picture.

Julianne Moore: It was very easy for us to feel like a family. Mia and Josh have been working [as professional actors] for years: it was a pleasure to work with young actors who were so experienced and enthusiastic.

Annette Bening: Both Mia and Josh understood that being good with the camera is listening and receiving, and letting the story work: moments that a lot of us remember in movies are when people are reacting – and, when you’re giving your performance you don’t know what’s going to end up in the movie, so all you can do is fully invest your in the moments that you’re in. Yes, it’s not you, you are pretending, it is a scene. Yet, you want – as much as possible – to be surprised. That knife edge is where you are all day long when you’re shooting.

Mia Wasikowska: To be able to be on set with Julianne Moore and Annette Bening, and to watch them and see their process and learn from how they work was an awesome experience.
Josh Hutcherson: It was amazing. When I started acting, I never thought I’d be doing a scene with actors who have seven Academy Award nominations [between them]. Look at their careers and how much they’ve done — and they were everything and more that I could have wanted them to be.

Mark Ruffalo: With not a lot of ego, you enter into an ensemble and so there is a real give-and-take quality. It’s always like a homecoming to walk onto a set with someone like Annette. They take it seriously: it’s about serving the material.

Annette Bening: I was so impressed with Mark’s generosity: he spoke to me on the phone before the first day of shooting, [knowing that] it was when I had to do a scene and talk about him [referencing a sequence that had yet to be filmed]. Mark plays the genuineness of Paul, which makes everything more pungent in the story because he’s sympathetic. I think that people will see themselves in these characters. The Kids Are All Right has the feel of real life: complications, joys, disappointments, neuroses, intimacies.

Julianne Moore: The Kids Are All Right tells a very universal story in a unique way. It speaks to what it is to be in a family: that is something we all have a real understanding of, no matter what culture we live in, no matter what generation we’re part of.

Mark Ruffalo: I’m really proud of this movie. It’s a beautiful way to show a family – and, it’s funny.