The picture centers on brother and sister (newcomer Josh Hutcherson and Mia Wasikowska) set out to find their same-sex parents’ sperm donor (Mark Ruffalo), who totally upsets their family dynamic once he enters their lives. The lesbian parents are played by Julianne Moore and Annette Bening and ‘Kids’ is a comical, thoughtful, touching and well-rounded look at family dynamics without any need for political underlining.
It’s one of our favorite films of the year so far (review soon). We recently spoke to Cholodenko about her long feature-film absence, crafting her fully-realized ‘Kids’ characters, her L.A.-bound story proclivities and her tendency to make “emotionally messy” films. The film hits theaters in limited release (NY/L.A.) this Friday, July 9th and expands after that.
The Playlist: Let’s rewind for a sec. Is there any reason why it took six years for another feature?
Lisa Cholodenko: Well, I did a feature film for Showtime that was a television film with Kyra Sedgwick [“Cavedweller”]. And then I did some television [“Six Feet Under,” “Push, Nevada,” “The L-Word”]. So I’ve done things for cash, but mostly I was writing this script and rewriting and rewriting and getting pregnant and taking time to have a kid.
And the child was the impetus for the film, or was it kind of the other way around? The original kick to the imagination came out of a lot of time spent figuring out the way that my girlfriend and I were going to get pregnant, selecting a [anonymous] sperm donor which we did. We have a four year old now. It just was on my mind in a very specific, kind of myopic way for a long time. And then when I sat down to finally write a new screenplay, this is what began.
This was your first writing collaboration. You wrote with Stuart Blumberg [the screenwriter behind, “Keeping the Faith” and the very underrated “The Girl Next Door”].
We ran into each other in L.A. one day and were kind of talking about the differences in the kinds of films we make — admiring each other’s choices. I kind of gave him the pitch of ‘The Kids Are All Right.’ I had just begun. And we got to talking during this meet-up and he revealed to me that he had been a sperm donor in college! And I thought, “wow, that’s fascinating.” And the next thing I knew, we were writing a script together.
Wow, that’s some good fate! It took five years, right?
Yeah, it was good. It was like any relationship. There were times when we wanted to throttle each other and quit. It was protracted and kind of painstaking and there were differences of opinion, but ultimately I think we both defaulted back to where we began, which was, I liked that he was bringing a comedic and commercial sensibility and he liked that I was bringing a more kind of auteur sensibility. And we each wanted a little something of what the other had or could do well.
You had an early version of the script you almost shot in 2005, before you got pregnant, how did that one differ?
It was originally a river rafting trip and all the big drama happened on this rafting trip. But once that went away because we realized we weren’t going to get $15 million dollars to make the film, we really just focused in on the characters and felt like that was the material that was going to make or break this film. I don’t know that there was an enormous amount in the plot arena that changed, but it was just getting the characters right. Probably the biggest shift was the comedy— pushing that out front and center, more than it had been in earlier passes.
And then the next part of that puzzle’s obviously the casting. And how does that inform the script and the characters? Did they change from then?
Well, you know, Julianne [Moore] was involved from early on. She kind of stayed in the zone, because we were really clear that she was going to do it. The idea of casting Annette Bening really helped us hit the final stride in shaping that character. I think once we realized that character was meant to be funnier and kind of larger and just kind of a bigger presence then we had imagined her earlier. It all came together in a really great way.
Mark Ruffalo is such an inspired choice for the role of the sensitive, but womanizing, self-centered father figure. It’s a great character, and he’s so sweet, but so flawed.
I think all writers kind of steal from people they know and then do mash-ups and composites and it just goes on and on. But creating that character was hard. That was some real brain surgery for us. It was very easy to stop short of making him sympathetic. A person like that, you have to dig into deeper recesses that are redeemable and where that person is broken or empty or in need of repair or self-reflection. I ran into Mark in a diner or something in L.A. and it was just one of those, “Hey, you’re you and I really love your movie, “High Art,” and I was like, “I really love your movie, ‘You Can Count on Me,’ let’s work together.
Your films tend to be emotionally messy, and I mean that in a good way. I wanted to know what drew you to those stories.
I’m a big fan of movies that were made in the ’70s, when you’d see more often comedy dramas that had soulful or humanistic stories; Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, those types of movies. I really loved the emotional ambiguity you saw in those films. They struck me as real character studies. There was more of an independent spirit even in studio-made films. I’ve always been drawn to watching those kind of films, I’ve always been most affected by those kind of films. The literature I like has that quality of ambiguity and irony and tension. I like movies personally that I go to them to illuminate my life or things that I’m going through and help me understand better the human experience, for lack of a better word. Or feel less lonely in the human experience. That’s just where I’m coming from, and that’s why it turned out the way that it did.
So the basic intentions here?
We were really going after what felt true and heartfelt to us. We wanted to make a film that was mainstream in the sense that it could reach a lot of people and that there would be something in it for everybody, but that was a very specific subtext to it. That was what was subversive about it. We were showing that in a certain way it doesn’t matter what configuration your family is — what color blend or gender blend or whatever. Those aren’t the issues. The issues are the more human issues, and we all struggle with them, and we want to show you that in a way that you’re not going to expect, and that’s the fun reveal of the film but it’s not a “message film” in that way.
You’re an independent filmmaker, and you seem like you didn’t have much trouble with this, but are you concerned at all with the climate out there?
You never know. People can be all excited and it’s discovered that you put it out in the world and it’s still too rarefied to get past a certain point. There’s something in my gut that tells me that the blend of accessibility and humor and great acting and how desensitized people are to these topics at this point—the gay marriage topic and the gay this and the gay that — from the west coast to the east coast it’s just sort of in your neighborhood. I think that makes it very inviting and accessible and I hope people go even if they have a head scratch before they buy a ticket. Because I think it’s a fun trip and I don’t think it’s a political movie, per se. I think it’s just a movie that’s intended to reach people.
It’s a great statement about family and at the same time it doesn’t ever feel like it’s intended that way.
Well, that’s good! Then you don’t feel like you’re watching somebody on a soapbox. You’re just in it, you’re on a ride. — elements of this Q&A were from a separate Lisa Cholodenko interview with Kimber Myers.
“The Kids Are All Right opens in limited release (NY/L.A.) this Friday, July 9th. The film will expand shortly after that.