His latest picture, “Life During Wartime,” — which hits in limited release and VOD this Friday, July 23 — is a quasi-sequel to his films, “Happiness” and “Welcome To The Dollhouse” — which essentially picks up with several characters from these previous films (though mostly “Happiness”) years later and inhabits them in a new milieu (the sunny domesticity of Florida) with the theme of forgiveness filtering throughout (we made a handy cheat sheet last year to tell you the entire new cast and who was playing who).
And while his past works have been called provocative, scabrous or button-pushing, ‘Wartime’ has a mature warmth to it while still maintaining the writer/director’s caustic bite and wit (read our review from last year’s Toronto Film Festival).
We sat down with the director recently to talk about the original and odd meta-concept of “Life During Wartime,” issues of identity, forgiveness, Paris Hilton’s MIA-ness in the picture plus the original film announced in 2005 that would have starred Emma Thomspson, Demi Moore and more.
The Playlist: You don’t strike one as the type of filmmaker who make sequels, even a pseudo one.
Todd Solondz: When I had finished “Happiness” years ago, I had never imagined I’d revisit any of these characters. I had no interest. Look, “The Godfather Part 2,” I love it. But I just had no interest at the time. What can I say? Years go by, and suddenly I write this first scene and I say, “Oh, I like this, I like what I wrote. Is there a movie here though? “Is there stuff I still want to explore?” Evidently, there was. But also there was a liberating thrill: recasting it freed me up from some of the realities that had been established earlier so that I could play with different color, shape, nuance, so forth. For example, I love Jon Lovitz but Paul Reuben [who takes Lovitz’s role in ‘Wartime’] is such a funny character. He of course has a whole history that the world knows about so it heightens everything and lends a kind of pathos, sorrow, poignancy that I couldn’t otherwise achieve. I love Dylan Baker, but this character has a kind of weight, he’s kind of a dead man walking — a spent life.
Was the idea spurned on wanting to revisit Dylan’s character, the pedophile who kicks this story into gear?
There are a bunch of characters, so that’s one aspect, certainly. One of the things that sort of lodged in my head in the reaction to the movie was how sometimes people would come up to me and in a complimentary way tell me how sympathetic they found Dylan’s character. I think I know what they meant but for me the character was never sympathetic. Because I would never sympathize with someone who would commit these terrible crimes. But he was a tragic character because he was a great father who loved his son, his children. So I think I wanted to bring clarity to that point that, as the son says to the father, “I have no sympathy for you.” And yet what makes it so moving is that nevertheless he loves his father. So that’s a distinction I wanted.
It’s there of course, but also the more you say you’re sorry, the less meaning it has. Like you said, I don’t want to reduce it to that. If you have two families, one of a certain religious persuasion. They have a child, their child is murdered, raped, and yet when they capture the criminal they forgive him. And then you have another family with a different moral character, when their child is raped and murdered, they want vengeance. They’re both valid responses, and I won’t even say that one is superior to the other. But my aim is not to dictate or prescribe, but it is an examination, an exploration, and that’s part of this movie, which is a much more politically overt film than “Happiness,” certainly. It is very much a post 9/11 film and very oblique even, with the child, I guess.
How is Florida different from New Jersey your usual setting?
Florida, for me, has a certain resonance as a place. It’s like the OJ Simpson place. OJ can go there and escape the past. It’s place you can go tabula rasa, you can just erase. It’s very fresh and clean and that manicured quality — everything’s new, and it provides that illusion that one can let go and start all over.
The film was actually announced a long time ago with a different cast, people like Demi Moore and Emma Thompson back in 2005? What happened with that?
It fell apart! At that time, the financing was contingent about having a star and the star at that time was Emma. Emma wanted to do it, and then balked at the end because she realized she needed to stay with her family in England and couldn’t come to the States. So the producers said, “Can you work with Michelle Pfeiffer” and I said, “It’s over.”
So you pulled the plug.
I wouldn’t say I pulled the plug, but there was that panic about that whole, we have money so we can go with one of these other actresses that will give us the money, but it didn’t seem right to me.
That’s a smart choice. And you waited for the right time.
It wasn’t waiting. I just assumed I wouldn’t make it and I just moved on. I started teaching. It’s just disheartening. I let it go, and my producer emailed me one day. I was in Singapore doing a teaching thing. The day I got back he said, I’ve got money. I’d heard it so many times from so many sources. But the fact was he got it.
The characters, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jon Lovitz, at least in the indie space, those are iconic roles and characters. Were you ever concerned…?
You know, you can’t focus so much on that. It’s like being focused on fear and failure. You can focus on that in life, but I don’t find it very productive. Yet you make a leap. You’re scared, but that’s what the definition of courage is. You have no courage if you’re not terrified. But I don’t sit around thinking…I can’t afford to. I operate under the notion of, this engages me, this moves me, this stirs me, this excites me. And will it work, I don’t know. I just never know.
Are you preoccupied with identity? “Palindrome” played around with a lot of the same ideas, different actors playing the same character.
No, but I leave it to others. You’re much smarter–you can analyze much better than me. I don’t see a doctor or anyone, maybe I should. You can tell me what my movies are about?
In some ways, I feel like this movie is your most ambiguous in a way and the most up to the viewer, whereas some of the others ones were a little more…forceful in a way?
I don’t know. I’m too biased, too immersed to have the objectivity that you have would have in evaluating. They’re all fraught with ambiguity and have been both embraced and attacked by all sorts of people. When it gets assigned as being misanthropic or cruel, it’s a little reductive, I think, and missing the point. My feelings about these characters are a little too complicated and I’m too absorbed by them — it’s too facile to write them off in that way. That said, sometimes people have praised the film or my work and I’m actually very discomfited. They’re not hilarious to me. They are comedies, but I don’t think I’d describe them that way. When I meet anybody, I never recommend my work. If someone discovers it, I think that’s the best way. I’d never want to impose any of this on anyone.
When this project was first announced, Paris Hilton was in the cast. Was she cut out?
Her part wasn’t shot. I had written a cameo for her, actually. I’d spoken to Paris about it and she did want to do it and she liked my work, but it was a very small thing. And when I knew it wasn’t going to work out, I always had a Plan B, which was I knew how to make [the role] invisible so no one would know, unless you follow these reports in the Hollywood screen journal— no one would know that she would ever find a place, and it’ll always be a mystery. What would she do in this movie? Because it makes no sense. But, there was a lodging, at one point.
You once said you cut out actors from every one of your films. Are the any out of this film?
You put me in an awkward situation with this question! If I say I cut someone out… I wouldn’t want to tell you because that would make the actor feel worse than he or she already feels. All I can say is that I’m not as good a writer as i wish I were. But “Storytelling,” because of James Van Der Beek, because he was so famous at the time, got so much attention. But there are others—there’s a least one more well known, as well.
Who is that?
I’m not going to tell you! And others not well known, who had significant material that I loved that’s on the cutting room floor. Because, in the ultimate shape, art for artistic reasons — and solely for artistic reasons, James Van Der Beek and these other actors are not in these movies.
But there wasn’t a third story as some have said?
No. I did have a two-minute epilogue, which I really liked a lot. But obviously I decided not to retain it. And James Van Der Beek was not in that.
Do you think that’ll ever be seen, like on DVD one day?
I hope not.
It’s interesting your choice to make a modern, pop-culture-referencing movie now, in that you’re referencing your own piece of pop culture.
I didn’t realize that…I’m sure you’re right, but it didn’t occur to me. As you can see, it’s a kind of what I would call variation or quasi-sequel to ‘Happiness’ and it’s certainly a prophetically overt film than the former one. You probably could analyze it better than me — I don’t know. If it has more pop cultural references, I believe you. I just never thought about it. I do what I feel is right just for the characters in the story.
But you recontextualize everyone both literally and figuratively.
It’s a very compelling phenomenon I think — you see those Truffaut movies with Jean-Pierre Leaud. The subliminal message is always one of mortality and that’s always most compelling and profound, I think. I opted though, for me— it was a way of freeing myself from the literalness of what I had established, so I could play with histories and story and not be bound by my own rules. Paul Reubens, for example. I could have cast maybe another celebrity/comedian type, but Paul Reubens has a certain kind of baggage that I think lends a certain kind of poignancy. He had read for me a long time ago, so I made a leap of faith. I thought this would be a side of him that I don’t think had been shared or exposed before.
There’s that question that continues to dog you: your character —do you like them? Do you hate them?
It’s a kind of pivotal, key question that I think the movies invite. As a writer and filmmaker, I don’t think I’d get together the script and get absorbed if I weren’t in love, in my own way, with each of these characters. It’s a very—their flaws are all so apparent, and yet I am moved by those flaws, and I think the comedy happens and is so inextricably linked. It’s a very fine line that I walk. Not all laughter is the same, and it doesn’t have the same meaning. And I appreciate laughter. Certain things, as I’m writing, are kind of funny, but oh my God so horrible. It’s a broad, ambivalent response that I have. But for me the movies would be unbearable if they weren’t comedies.
Could you give us any thoughts on your first, little-seen film, “Fear Anxiety and Depression”?
No, not really, its always a going to be a memory that haunts me, a very unfortunate experience, but you take what you get from everything and you move on.
“Life During Wartime” hits theaters in New York and VOD on Friday, July 23. The following weekend it opens up in L.A., and then the weekend after that it begins to expand.