Interview: Matt Roloff of “Little People, Big World”

Posted on April 11, 2010 at 10:00 am

Matt Roloff is a businessman, entrepreneur, farmer, husband, and father of four, including teen-age twins. He and his family star on the TLC series Little People, Big World. Matt, his wife Amy, and one of the twins are little people, with genetic disorders that affect their height and limbs. The other three children are not. I spoke with Matt, former head of Little People of America, about the show and about what it is like to be a part of a reality series and let the world see the ups and downs of their family’s life. He is the author with Tracy Summer of Against Tall Odds: Being a David in a Goliath World and Little Family, Big Values: Lessons in Love, Respect, and Understanding for Families of Any Size.

In an especially touching episode of the series, Matt goes to Iraq to visit a family whose children need surgery for dwarfism-related health problems. I began by asking him about that trip.

How did you come to meet with the family in Iraq?

I made three trips all in all. It was mid-2008 and a friend of mine who had a little person daughter was stationed in Iraq as a helicopter pilot and called me from Iraq to say one of their street patrols had stumbled across a family with several children with dwarfism or what we call skeletal dysplasia, that’s the most technical term to describe it. And they are in dire need of medical help. I said, “What can I do over here?” We needed permission from the officials in Washington to bring them to the US and that was going to be a tough road because they are trying to build the medical community over there and not bring people over here.

I got permission to go over there and the military escorted me. We brought the families to a facility to get x-rayed and brought them back over to the states. We were actually able to convince a doctor and an anesthesiologist to go back there with us and perform operations on a couple of the different children. But they needed more serious operations that cannot be done in a tent in a war zone. They needed really sophisticated spinal monitoring equipment. So on the third trip over I was able to bring the kids back. I use the term loosely — there was really an army of people involved, the military, the State Department, I was just an observer of a lot of this, a facilitator, but there was a lot of people really intensely dedicate to these children and this family.

The oldest gal who had the most dire need went first and there was complications and unfortunately we lost her. We knew that was a strong possibility, but it was very sad and disappointing to have made all that headway getting them over here. The reality was heartbreaking.

Is there much of a little people community in Iraq?

There is an active community. They don’t have the kind of organizational structure we have here, with by-laws and everything. The second trip, when I went over with the doctors to do the operation and it turned into a clinic. They announced it and they came out of the woodwork, little people did, parents holding their children, adults, the same variety and a larger percentage than you would get here in the states!

How has the show affected the way Americans see little people?

It has affected us and it has been positive. People see us as real people. Even people that hate our show and dis on us about keeping a messy house and not raising our children right, and that’s fine, that’s what makes our show popular, to have not polarizing but different opinions about us — I think our show has positively affected society’s view of little people. And now, with the other shows, Jen and Bill, The Little Couple, The Little Chocolatiers, we had known all of these people for years and we’re all high-fiving because it gives a more rounded view, other little people who have interesting lives, too. The only thing that’s the same about us is our size.

How did you meet your wife, Amy?

I met her at a little people’s conference in Michigan, that’s where she’s from, in 1986. It was not exactly love at first sight but we stayed in touch by mail. We were both interested in each other. And then about six months later she said she was coming to visit a friend in California. I don’t think she ever actually saw her friend! We ended up spending all of our time together and hit it off pretty heavy that week. I visited her a month later, and she came back to see me. Our total courtship time was three visits in six months. I popped the question, and of course I wanted to elope. But she was a nice conservative Christian girl and she wanted a big wedding. So we compromised and she cooked up a wedding in short order and a couple of months later we were married, in September of 1987.

How has raising your children so publicly made it harder or easier to be a parent?

It has made it harder, absolutely. There’s a lot more influences in their lives, producers and people dragging them around. But one advantage is that I didn’t realize Jacob was hanging out on the roof as much as he was, but I saw it on film and was able to tell him not to. There’s a lot of filming that does not make it to television, and I see things I might not have seen. Or the producers will tell me what they’re up to. But it is harder in a sense because I don’t want to scold them on camera. No one wants that. Some people think what they see is all there is. The bloggers don’t have a clue that it’s quite a bit more balanced that what they’re shown. That is frustrating for us. It seems like a big window on our lives but it’s not everything.

What’s unique about our show compared to other reality shows is that we spend a lot of time hanging out and waiting for something to happen. A lot of shows are much more produced. They’re focused on the activity. There’s hours and hours of just sitting around watching us do nothing in the hopes of a five-minute interaction and then they zone in on how that comes to a conclusion over the next few months, whether a conflict or a triumph. But that means that they will catch one part of an interaction, like maybe some angry words, and not necessarily have or show the other part, kissing and making up. That’s the nature of television.

What is coming up on the show that we should look forward to?

We have a trip to Europe where the boys go off and do their own thing. They backpack through Germany and Amsterdam. Despite what you may think, the producers do not interfere and if they get lost, they get lost. Then I meet up with them in Paris and we have all of the logistics of travel and who wants to go where and the evolution of the family, what everyone wants to do, Molly’s birthday, and our everyday on the farm stuff happening!

Little People, Big World: Season 5 Episode 21

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The Brat Packers Are In Their 40’s

Posted on April 10, 2010 at 12:54 pm

A new book by Susannah Gora takes a look at the group of young actors who appeared in the John Hughes films that seemed to define a generation — and certainly changed the way teenagers were portrayed on screen. You Couldn’t Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation is the story of Molly Ringwald, Andrew McCarthy, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, John Cryer, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estavez, and Anthony Michael Hall and the movies they made with Hughes and others. It was New York Magazine that termed them “The Brat Pack,” a nod to Frank Sinatra’s famous “Rat Pack” of performers who played Vegas and made movies together in between drinks and parties. Hughes’ movies include The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink (I still want Andie to get together with Duckie!), Sixteen Candles, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

Gora quotes Roger Ebert’s description of writer-director Hughes as “the philosopher of adolescence” and talks about the impact the movies and their music had on the culture and on the teenagers who appeared in them. The highlight of this year’s Oscar ceremony was the tribute to Hughes from his favorite performers, concluding with Matthew Broderick’s just-right thank you: “Danke Schoen.”

You can listen to Scott Simon’s interview with Gora and the brat pack actors she covers in the book on NPR.

Interview: David Nixon of ‘Letters to God’

Posted on April 8, 2010 at 8:00 am

If you were desperately ill, what would you say to God? What would you ask for?
A boy named Tyler had some things he wanted to ask God when he became ill with cancer, and now his story has become a movie, Letters to God. I spoke to the film’s director, David Nixon, who has made a career out of faith-based films that, to the astonishment of Hollywood cynics, have been very successful with audiences. “Letters to God” opens tomorrow.
Tell me about the movie.
It’s the true story of a little boy in Nashville, Tennessee who went through brain cancer. While he was going through the chemo and all the horrible parts of that disease he was writing letters to his best friend, God. And he would put a stamp on it and put it in the mail. And the mailman, knowing that the little boy was a cancer boy, couldn’t bring himself to put those letters in the undeliverable bin — you know, that’s what happens in the post office, and it sits there for about six months and if nobody claims them, they shred them. But the mailman knew the little boy, so he kept the letters and he began to open them. And he discovered that the little boy wasn’t asking for anything for himself. He was asking for help for everyone else in his family, for the people in his neighborhood, for the people that the cancer was affecting, his mother and his grandmother, his brother, the little boy in school who was bullying him, saying things about his shaved head, about his best friend.
So the mailman started giving all those letters to the people the little boy was writing about. And you can imagine how they felt, how they responded. It did not only change the lives of the people in the community but it changed the mailman’s life. He was an alcoholic. His life was turned around because of the faith of the little cancer boy.
An extraordinary story. How did you find out about it?
We were putting together a film deal and looking for scripts and a friend who is a writer, Art D’Alessandro, had just polished the script for a guy up in Nashville, the father of the real boy. He’d never written a screenplay before so he asked Art for help. As soon as I read it, it just connected with me and I got on a plane to Nashville and met with Patrick and his wife and said, “We’ve got to make this movie.” Not just because it was a cancer story — though cancer is a universal theme that touches everyone because we are only about one degree of separation from somebody we know who is going through or has had cancer. But I thought, what a wonderful way to tell the story with the little sweet letters, a great way to get across the message.
I’d like to hear about your commitment to making faith-based films in an industry that does not seem to have as much interest in them as audiences do.
I’ve had this dream for about 30 years. I’ve had a secular production business but always wanted to make these kinds of films. You could never get distribution until something radical happened: “The Passion of the Christ” made $600 million. That opened the eyes of Hollywood. They saw that there was an under-served audience. Christians are going to movies! We’d better make a God film. And we were there with “Facing the Giants.” And that made $35 million. And then the church asked us to do “Fireproof.” And now every studio in LA has a faith-based arm. They are not quite sure what it is, but they know they can make money on it! We’re making as many of these as we can. We’re shooting two more this summer and we’ve got plans for number ten and number 100. We have to make money. But we can certainly use that pipeline to get our message out.
I think films are the greatest evangelical tool of our time. How else do you get to people who would never darken the door of a church. Or to your neighbor over the back yard that would never talk about faith. But they go to movies all the time, so why not use that to deliver your message.
What makes a movie a Christian movie?
You’ve got to have a message. We don’t want to be preachy or overbearing but you’ve got to get the gospel out. You’ve got to come up with a way to tell a true life story or a story that could be true of an average Joe, going through life like anyone else, maybe going through adversity, and how they react to that. Maybe they turn to the Bible instead of the bottle. Or they turn to God instead of the darkness.
That’s all our movies do. They’re telling true stories that people can connect with. It has to be real, or people aren’t going to get it. When people go and sit in that dark room for 90 minutes, and they drop their guard and empathize with those characters they see up on screen, it sears through your heart like nothing else can. People come out of these movies physically and emotionally changed.
And what’s next for you?
We’re making a Christian comedy called “Saving Livingston” and a true story about a girl here in Orlando called “To Write Love on Her Arms.”
What are some of your favorite movies?
“Chariots of Fire” and “The Mission.” Billy Graham’s Worldwide Pictures, the Cecil B. DeMille movies like “The Robe” and “The Ten Commandments. Then Hollywood went away from that and now here we are with a chance to tell these stories again. It’s heartening to me that we’re seeing more of these movies coming out.

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Interview: Conor McPherson and Ciarán Hinds of ‘The Eclipse’

Posted on March 25, 2010 at 7:00 am

“The Eclipse” is a ghost story for grown-ups, which means that it is story first, ghost second. It is an Irish film about Michael (Ciarán Hinds) a recent widower with two children, who is volunteering at a local literary festival. Two of the festival guests are the arrogant, self-centered Nicholas (Aidan Quinn), a novelist, and the sensitive Lena (Iben Hjejle), author of a popular non-fiction book about ghosts.
I spoke to Hinds and writer/director Conor McPherson about the film.
What do people ask you most about the film?
CM: They want to know exactly what was going on, to answer the questions the movie leaves unanswered.
Yes, Americans are very concrete, very literal. We want everything explained.
CM: When people are out of their comfort zone, it’s more dramatic, more prone to have more entertaining experiences, get into fights. That’s the dramatic instinct, to move people out of what they know and make them deal with it. In theater it’s all through dialogue in traditional plays. In movies, it’s so lovely, you can show him putting dishes in the dishwasher and everybody just knows what’s going on, that his wife is gone and he has to do everything. You still tell some things with dialogue in scenes but we’ve taken some away…
CH: Pared it away, really.
CM: And that’s enough. Film has that magic.
You play a quiet person in this film. How do you as an actor convey all you have to about what he is thinking and experiencing?
CH: He’s just a guy like anybody. We’re all ordinary in a way. We can all be hurt. We can all be unbalanced. We all have feelings. Life can treat us harshly, even shockingly sometimes. He has minor pretensions but he is a woodwork teacher. He works with his hands. He is a practical man. But though he is doing his best with his wife gone he is out of his depth a bit apart from the grief. He’s a real person but you bring elements of emotion to a heightened situation. He just wants to survive and take care.
I loved his interaction with his kids. It felt very real. The frustration and the need to convey a sense that he is in control.
CH: When Lena says she is sorry to hear about his wife he responds, “It was terrible for the kids.” He knows he hasn’t grieved enough but he has to keep a lid on it for the kids. In the end, in the story, he is allowed to let it all out and properly to grieve.
Do you find that now, like Lena in the film, people want to come and tell you their own ghost stories?
CM: At the first screening last April in New York, it turned into a sort of heavy session with people talking about how they lost people and the film made that feeling come back. It’s probably the last thing you think about when you’re making a film is other people’s problems. You’re thinking about your problem, which is making the movie. But you do have a responsibility. You can’t mess around with people’s emotions.
CH: You find people genuinely relating to something or a truth they felt, and that is what you aspire to.
Do you believe in ghosts?
CM: Yes I do, but I don’t know what they are. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one. But if someone said to me, “Last night I saw the ghost of my sibling” or whatever, I wouldn’t say, “That’s impossible,” I’d say, “What was that like?”
CH: I don’t disbelieve.
CM: There’s a very old tradition in Ireland, and as an island at the edge of Europe, for thousands of years with no one knowing what was beyond there, I wonder if a sense of the beyond was internalized into the Irish psyche. We’re very quick to accept the supernatural. And I think Catholicism took root very quickly in Ireland because it’s a very superstitious religion, the holy ghost, the holy spirit, it has a goddess, very visual, the music. For me, philosophically, we don’t know anything anyway. We have this short little life we have to somehow try to get a grip on without understanding anything about the nature of time or existence or the universe or God or infinity. We’re just here for a brief moment and we open up these little eyes and go “What is this?” and then we’re gone! I love stories that frame that: This is what life is about — you don’t have a clue.

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Interview: Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders of ‘How to Train Your Dragon’

Posted on March 24, 2010 at 3:59 pm

Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders are the writer-directors behind one of the best family films of the year, “How to Train Your Dragon.” It was a very great pleasure to talk with them about adapting the popular books and the movies they love most.

One of the great pleasures of this film is the fabulously imaginative assortment of dragons. Were they based on research into legends about dragons or did you start from scratch?

DD: The well-spring of the dragons who are in the film started in the book, of course, but really it was Nico Marlet, who also did designs for Kung Fu Panda. We have seven dragons in the movie, five of which are his designs. He has piles of drawings in his room, no kidding, about two feet thick of other dragons that he drew. It’s endless. We realized we had an opportunity in this movie to do something that had not been done before — not just multiple breeds of dragons but individual personalities.

Each new dragon turned all my thoughts on what a dragon was upside down.

DD: Each of them was based on animals we recognize in the animal kingdom. For example the gronkles, the big, fat, dump-truck-like dragon, was based on the walrus and has walrus-type behavior, lying around in packs and being lazy and grumpy. And then the nadders, the blue ones with the yellow spikes, they’re very parrot-like, and they have bird-like actions. Toothless is very feline. But he has dog in him, too. He’s based in part on the black panther, so he has mammalian qualities to him. One of the characters has two heads and is very snake-like and slithery. So every one of them had an animal reference to it, and that influenced its behavior both in personality and movement.

Did you have to think about the physics of the way they moved?

CS: There are links to the larger world that we wanted to create for this film. The believability factor was the most important thing. They have to move and breathe as if they’re really alive. It’s important that they not come across as too cartoony because then we would lose the emotional weight in the film. We wanted people to really believe in this world. Even though the designs are really fanciful, they move and breathe as though they’re really alive. They adhere to a strict set of rules. They never break or shatter that illusion.

The voice talent is terrific. But your Vikings (Gerard Butler and Craig Ferguson) have Scottish accents!

DD: It’s a conceit. It’s silly and admittedly flawed, but here it is: growing up in North America, I was in Canada, I had a lot of friends whose parents sounded like they came from somewhere else. There’s always a remnant of the mother tongue in the older generation. When we came on the film, they’d already cast people with very American voices and then they had Gerard Butler. We had to cast someone to be Gerard’s best friend and the confidante to Hiccup. We thought, we’ve already got this Scottish voice in place, and we could just flesh out the rest of the older generation with Scottish accents and then the next generation could have their own assimilated accent.

CS: Gerard really loved it when we encouraged him to be himself. The only casting that we did was Craig Ferguson and he happens to be Gerard’s really good friend and they happen to have the same accent. Craig Ferguson is completely at ease in front of a microphone. It’s funny because Gerard Butler is really funny off-mic, constantly goofing around and talking about pranks, amusing himself. And then when he’s on mic, well, his character is called Stoick. He was a little jealous — “Why is Craig getting all the funny lines?” But Craig, off-mic, was the opposite. He’s so funny when you have the mic running, and then when you stop, he’s actually a serious guy.

I was also thrilled to see that you have three disabled characters. You rarely see that in movies, especially disabled characters who have full personalities and experiences and are not just there to be disabled.

DD: Definitely we brought to the mix the ending, for many reasons. We wanted to give it a little bit of weight, believability, and peril. The satisfying quality of the ending would be generic if he did not come out of it so that he and Toothless can complete each other.

How did you go about adapting the book? You made some big changes.

CS: The main reason Dean and I were asked to come into the film was to “age it up,” giving it a little more weight, more adventure, and one of the very first decisions we made was that in the book there were elements of humans and dragons being in a symbiotic relationship but also elements of humans and dragons being at war. We decided it had to be one or the other. We made the decision that they were mortal enemies, which made it possible for Hiccup to take the greatest risk possible by befriending one. It allowed us to have Hiccup live this double life in the second act. At night he’s repairing a dragon and learning to ride a dragon. By day he is learning to fight one. This is not going to last. This has to get discovered. Everything else came from that.

DD: It’s fun that by the end he gets everything he wanted but he no longer wants it. The attention he’d rather avoid by then.

What movies are your favorites?

CS: Both of us are huge fans of a movie we referenced in this one, The Black Stallion. The scene on the beach is our homage.

DD: What really worked for us was the young protagonist. I love characters that are young and relatable in their childhood but also have adult qualities and are in over their heads in a world of fantasy, like “Escape from Witch Mountain,” “Watcher in the Woods,” and even “E.T.”

The movie is very rich, very exciting, but also exceptionally well-paced and satisfying.

CS: A lot of movies do not have much in the second act, but we really had one packed with events. But it is also important to have moments when the characters are quiet. There are three moments in the film where we let the camera and the acting and the music tell the story.

I liked the fact that he is really an engineer, a problem-solver. And he doesn’t get it right away.

DD: In the concept of the book Hiccup was much younger and they collect eggs and teach the dragons to do tricks. We kept the spirit of the runt Viking who changes the world but we had to give him a dragon who could be ferocious and at the same time cuddly. We thought he’s a nuisance, he’s the bane of the Viking community. He is made an apprentice to get him out of the way but in the shop he learns to compensate for what he doesn’t have. We combined this organic form with early mechanics.

CS: He also discovers that he has to operate it. He is only really himself when they’re together.