Interview: Lisa Cholodenko of ‘The Kids Are All Right’
Posted on July 15, 2010 at 3:51 pm
Lisa Cholodenko co-wrote and directed one of the best-reviewed films of the year, “The Kids Are All Right,” about the teenage children of a lesbian couple (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore) who seek out their biological father, leading to upheavals and realignments. I spoke to her about developing the film from her own experience. It was a joy to see middle-aged actresses with beautiful but real faces. Bening and Moore let us see their real faces in this film.
I adore them. They are tremendous people on and off screen. One thing that was great about the experience was that everyone had the same agenda, to bring this script to life and make sure we got it right. We spent five years developing and revising the screenplay. It was five years in the making. By the time we got it together, with very little money, they were ready to bring it forward and it was more than I ever expected, what they did with these roles. How did the screenplay evolve?
It originally evolved from a very personal place. My girlfriend and I were deciding to have a baby with an anonymous sperm donor and it was complicated. It took us a long time to make the decision and find the right donor. I had been fully absorbed in that process and when I sat down to write a script I realized that there wasn’t much on my mind but that. I started from a place of imagining this girl turning 18, her prerogative to open that Pandora’s box and make contact with her sperm donor, what that would be like.
I have a four-year-old now. I imagined he would want to meet this person and that the donor we selected would be open to that. That was something I felt strongly I would want for him. I made a right turn there with the narrative and made the moms are more anxious about it. I sort of threw a dart at the wall and that’s where the story began.
Stuart Blumberg (the co-author), I had known before and we re-connected. It turned out he had been a sperm donor in college.
Josh’s character Laser has the keenest, most perceptive take than anyone in the family. What are the biggest challenges for people in long-term relationships?
It’s keeping an equilibrium. It’s easy to get lost, as Jules says at the end. Boundaries get blurry and identities can get lost easily. It’s easy to take your partner for granted. Keeping boundaries and equilibrium so you can move through the whole menu of life experiences and recover and grow. In this film and in “Laurel Canyon” you allow middle-aged people to be sexual, which you don’t see very often in movies.
We don’t see it in a way that resonates as true or interesting. What interested me about the characters in these two films is that understanding their sexual gravitas helped to understand them as people. Who are some of your influences as a film-maker?
I was very influenced by the films of the 70’s. It was a golden era for independent-minded films being made at studios — Hal Ashby, Mike Nichols, Robert Altman, movies with a keen sense of character and psychology and were also funny, drama-comedies, taking bigger risks with character than we see now, more naturalism than we see now. Everything today is more digital and finely crafted and controlled. I really wanted this family to feel natural and lived-in and real.
Two of the greatest story-tellers of the 20th century say that they both learned how to tell a story from the illustrations of Norman Rockwell. George Lucas (“Star Wars”) and Steven Spielberg (“Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Jurassic Park,” “Jaws”), close friends and sometime collaborators (the Indiana Jones movies) both collect the work of America’s foremost illustrator because they love the way he packs an entire story into just one frame.
For the first time, their collections are being made available to the public at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum in Washington D.C. until January 2, 2011 in an exhibit called Telling Stories. In a movie accompanying the exhibit, the film-makers talk about how as children they scrutinized every detail of the pictures to understand the story behind each one and how that inspired their visual styles. Spielberg talks about two paintings in particular that continue to inspire him — one of an author at his typewriter dreaming up a story about Daniel Boone and one of a boy holding on for dear life to the end of a high dive board, peering down at the endless space below. He says the first inspires him to tell stories and the second is how he feels every single time just before he signs on to do another film.
Rockwell has been taken for granted, marginalized, and dismissed as corny by those who think that art has to be anguished and the era of representation is over. But shows like this one are recognizing that he deserves to be seen as an artist of the first rank in ability and importance. He is not unaware of despair, squalor, and pain. Indeed, it is all there in his pictures, if you look. But his images are aspirational, inspiring us to live up to the values and dreams of our forefathers and, when we fail and fail again, to start over.
How did director Taylor Hackford (“An Officer and a Gentleman,” “Ray“) get Dame Helen Mirren (Oscar-winner for “The Queen“) agree to appear in his film, “Love Ranch,” the story of Reno’s first legal brothel? It helped that she is his wife. But, as he told me in this interview, she had turned him down six or seven times when he’d asked her to appear in his movies. This time, though, he had what it took to get her to agree, a role of such range and force that she found it irresistible. In this film she plays Grace, a madam since she was 20, tough and cynical. And then she meets someone who opens her to feelings she never imagined she was capable of. Tell me about the movie. I know that it is inspired by the true story of the Confortes, who ran the first legal brothel in Reno, Nevada, and an Argentine boxer.
The essence of what’s behind this film is — can not just one but three cynical professionals with no romantic delusions — can they find that they are overcome by their emotions, that passion explodes, that love and jealousy and all those things overpower them and take control. All this taking place in this cynical world where you’re selling sex, which is not erotic but businesslike. I loved the costume design in this movie. The clothes did more than evoke the 1970’s — they really helped to tell the story, illuminating the characters and how they changed over the course of the film.
It’s great you say that. I went with a very young designer. Her name is Melissa Bruning. She had not done a lot of films, but she gave me her book, she draws, she has a great style, and I decided to take a chance. I didn’t have a big budget so she didn’t have a lot to work with but she just does fantastic work. The important thing here is you’re doing a film in the 70’s, and it’s a very arch era, big hair, disco, everything was high styled. Some people would make the whole film about that. But I wanted the actors to be wearing the clothes instead of the clothes wearing the actors. She found a lot of vintage clothes, all that lingerie, all those things the girls are wearing, that’s all period stuff. She did build some clothes for Helen. These clothes helped define these characters.
The antecedents of these characters are real. The character played by Joe Pesci is based on Joe Conforte who was an Italian from the Northeast but once he came West he affected the clothes and the style of his customers who were truck drivers and cowboys. You know by the clothes Charlie is wearing that he’s still got New Jersey all over him even though he is trying to have this bravura style of the West. Each actor collaborated with Melissa in their own way. I like the way the costumes don’t just show us the characters but they show us how the characters change, especially Grace.
You see her come alive. My wife is incredibly brave. She goes for whatever the character needs regardless of the way she looks. People appreciate the fact when someone is real, not phony. When you meet Grace , she is plenty tough, she is a cynical professional; I don’t think there’s an ounce of romantic illusion left in her. She’s tired, she’s done this for a long time. She’s sick. She discovers she’s terminal. She knows her husband is a philanderer. You can have that knowledge, but you don’t want your nose rubbed in it. She’s an unhappy person. Helen allowed herself to have that look. She has the big hair and the outfit, but it’s a uniform. She is tired, she doesn’t look so good, but as she discovers that it isn’t over for her, as the juices start to flow, she comes alive. Part of that is hair, makeup and costume and part is the actress herself, and the transformation is wonderful. You worked with three stars from three different countries and three different acting traditions. How did you get them to work together so seamlessly?
Two things. When I first mentioned to people I as pairing Helen Mirren and Joe Pesci, they looked at me like I was joking. But I knew with both of them, their traditions are different but the commitment is total. You’ll never see either of them go half-way. They immediately hit it off. Neither one would give an inch and they realized, “We really feed off each other.” I thought they were terrific together.
The biggest and most difficult casting situation — it’s not a duet at the core of this film, it’s a trio. Joe and Helen are consummate thoroughbreds. Then the actor who plays Bruza, he has to go toe to toe with them. He’s younger, but he’s a forceful character, a boxer from Argentina. It was really tough. To find an actor who could do that was, I thought, almost impossible, though he has this bravura exterior he has secrets and pain he has to reveal over the course of the film. My writer, Mark Jacobson, handed me a picture of Sergio Peris-Mencheta and said, “This guy is from Madrid, he has a great look and is supposed to be a pretty good actor.” He stopped in Los Angeles, he came to our house, and he and Helen read. It just was uncanny. He had the spark, the humor, the incredible intensity, the animal magnetism. Helen said, “There’s so much going on. This guy has it.” He is a physical man. He was the captain of Spain’s national rugby team. But he didn’t know anything about boxing and he’s a slender guy. He had to train at Gleason’s gym in Brooklyn and worked with Jimmy Glynn, a very famous boxing trainer and put on 35 pounds. I also liked his being there because he was speaking English. He is the great discovery in this film. He could be a big movie star. I didn’t expect to see in the middle of this movie an electrifying — and brutal — boxing match.
I love boxing. I’ve always been a boxing fan. I was the co-filmmaker on “When We Were Kings.” This film is about the flesh business, selling flesh both in a brothel and in the boxing ring. There’s a kind of poetic metaphor in that world of flesh when you can find true love. So my own ego says that if there’s going to be a boxing scene, it’s got to be great. It’s like doing a love scene. It better be there for a reason. If it truly is about two people coming together and something being discovered, there is a place for it. This is a catalyst, it’s the moment where everybody’s role changes. Charlie’s dream turns into a nightmare. Bruza, based on the boxer Oscar Bonavena, is hiding something and we discover his weakness. Grace realizes his vulnerability and that drives her. You need to see the bitter reality and the horror she feels. Everyone takes a 90-degree turn at that moment.
I’m proud of it because it is a realistic approach to boxing, done in Bonavena’s style. You shot the film in New Mexico rather than Reno. Why?
We got a tax credit to shoot there. But it’s not dissimilar. It’s that austere, monochromatic, look, bare but still beautiful. Juxtaposing that natural exterior with an artificial interior, where you’re never supposed to know whether it’s day or night, you’re supposed to lose yourself. That juxtaposition was a wonderful stylistic metaphor. But we did go to Reno for three days. It has not been the success story Vegas has and you can still capture the ethos of the 70’s because so much hasn’t changed. What inspires you?
Talent. Story. I’m a story-teller. I know how to use a camera and style is important to me but I like to reveal a story through the actors. You can only achieve that through a level of trust. Telling a story I’m excited about and I try to do something different and not make the same film twice. If I can take a personal journey that takes me on an adventure, I’m interested.
Too many children and too few spots — that is the story of The Lottery, a heart-wrenching documentary from Madeleine Sackler, the story of four children hoping to be the among the fortunate few chosen for admission to New York City’s best-performing public schools. The consequences of a random selection can be life-changing for the better or worse and can affect the entire family. Will the child become an active, engaged learner open to opportunity? Or will the child be condemned to a school system weighed down by bureaucracy and a structure that puts the interests of teachers over those of students? And it is a poignant contrast to Nursery University, the documentary about the scramble for New York City’s most sought-after preschools.
I spoke to director Madeleine Sackler about making the film and what she learned.
How did this film come together?
There were really two reasons I decided to make the film. The first was a statistic I read a few years ago out of New Haven that 17% of kids were at grade level. And there’s a school downtown serving the same kids that had 71%. And then several years later I saw footage of the lottery that we ended up featuring in the film and I realized that there were so many parents trying to get their kids into a better school and I became interested in telling that story.
How do you describe your style as a documentarian?
I really like cinema verite films. The director of photography I was fortunate enough to work with had shot some of my favorite verite films like “Children Underground.” The way that the stories are told without narration poses unique challenges for the filmmaker. Initially that was what the whole film was going to be, a portrait of four families. We encountered all of this political controversy surrounding the school that they wanted and I couldn’t ignore that but that meant we had to include more narration than we originally planned.
I was happy to see Geoffrey Canada in the film because I am interested in his work.
He’s an amazing guy and his schools are phenomenal. The three school leaders, Geoffrey Canada, Eva Moskowitz, and Dacia Toll, that are featured in the film have almost 30 schools between them. There are good charter schools and bad charter schools but these leaders show that their schools can be replicated. The point is not whether the school is charter or not, but that some people have demonstrated that they can make it work. Some people point to charter schools that aren’t as successful as a reason we should not have charters as an option but I do not understand that. No one wants to replicate bad schools. There are some school leaders that are willing and ready to open more schools that have a very successful track record.
What works?
There’s a few things that are consistent among higher-performing schools. The first is the use of data to drive both instruction and teacher and student evaluation. It’s exciting to watch because every few weeks kids can be moved around according to their achievement level. So the students are always achieving at the highest possible level. They’re not in groups with kids that are significantly behind. They often end up reading at one or two or more grade levels ahead which I think is exciting. And then school culture is something you cannot quantify but it is very noticeable at these schools. They are all very focused on high achievement, from working to get the parents on board to the teachers and students and administrators.
They do things like naming the classrooms after the university that the teacher went to and naming the grades the year that the kids will graduate from college. Instead of being in kindergarten, the student will be something like “Wesleyan 2024.” So they’re constantly working toward that goal.
It’s also the flexibility to hire and let go teachers, to lengthen the school day and the school year and to adjust the curriculum and instruction methods really at the drop of a hat if they see it isn’t working today they can fix it tomorrow.
What are the biggest obstacles to success in the regular school system?
There are some fantastic traditional public schools so it is possible, but the lack of flexibility makes it harder. Those rules have been shown not to lead to success. There are some fantastic traditional public schools, but those rules make it a lot harder and have not been shown to lead to success.
How can you address the problem of reaching parents to make education a priority for their children?
Involving the parents is something the high performing schools work very, very hard at. They don’t necessarily have a 100% success rate but that means they have to make up the difference. As a society it’s a moral obligation for us to give kids that opportunity. I talked to a lot of parents who were very frustrated with all of the rules and obligations, but then when their kids were reading before all of their friends’ kids, they were happy. People respond to results. But a study documented that it is the school that makes the biggest difference.
A new documentary called 8: The Mormon Proposition exposes the $22 million secret program to defeat gay marriage in California sponsored by the Mormon church. After a court ruled that gay couples could get married, a ballot initiative called “Proposition 8” was submitted to overturn it. A “yes” vote on “Prop 8” was a “no” vote on gay marriage. The Mormon church, headquartered in Utah, orchestrated a campaign to support Prop 8, working through local, non-Mormon organizations and individuals to hide their involvement. The movie is now available in theaters, on DVD, on cable via On Demand, and through iTunes. I spoke to co-director Steven Greenstreet and one of the people interviewed for the film, David Melman, from Affirmation, a support group for GLBT Mormons. Both were raised in the LDS church.
SG: The Fair Political Practices Commission in California found them guilty on 13 counts of political malfeasance for late reporting of non-monetary contributions. The fine itself is around $5000, which won’t even put a dent in the bumper of the Mormon church. But it is a big victory. The facts we presented in the film and the case that we build in the film is essentially that — that they cooked the books and they lied and they under-reported. The separation of church and state was this really blurred line.
One of the most shocking revelations in the film is when an enormous cache of documents is leaked by an insider within the church, with memos laying out the strategy very explicitly, including frank admissions that the Mormons want to hide their involvement.
DM: A church that believes you should be honest and truthful in your dealings and then hides behind these other groups, groups that at one time they taught were abominable and detestable, the little bit you do disclose you don’t disclose until after the election when it’s too late, a lot of the campaign is not based on getting the truth out but on confusing and muddying the waters. A lot of people who voted one way on Prop 8 thought they were voting the other way. A lot of untruth went out in the campaign: “If Prop 8 doesn’t pass, your church won’t have any choice about who it marries. You won’t have any say about what your children are taught in the school.
SG: After the fines were imposed, I advocate a disciplinary hearing within the church of the Mormon elders. They should be stripped of their temple recommend and brought in for internal investigation. I grew up in the church. One of the questions they ask you to issue you your faithful member temple recommend card is “Are you honest and truthful in your dealings with your fellow man?” If you’re not, you can’t get that status. This fine proves that the people at the top are not even following their own rules.
Do they believe the rules can be broken in furtherance of goals like preventing gay marriage?
SG: Religions are made or broken by how honest they are with their members versus how honest they are behind the curtain. I was a Mormon missionary, knocking on doors and carrying the message of love, charity, compassion, and tolerance. This is what I was told from the top down, this was the message and core of the church. And yet I see the church going to California with a complete lack of those ethics. I do feel there’s a disconnect between their political teachings and their doctrinal dealings.
DM: The church has always taught: love and family. With these actions, they’ve worked to tear families apart. Two people marry each other, and their family just splits apart because some stay with the church, some support the individual. The family comes apart. The campaign was obviously one of hate and not love. It left a lot of us feeling like someone had stolen our church from us.
SG: Tyler and Spencer were one of the 18,000 couples that were married in that small window when gay marriage was legal and now the closing arguments are happening in California. One of the goals of the opposition is not only to win this but to go a step further and negate those 18,000 marriages. Their marriage certificate may be torn up.
How did this movie come about?
SG: Reed Cowan, my co-director, was doing a film about homeless teenagers in Salt Lake City who had been kicked out of their homes because they were gay. When they came out to their parents or were discovered to be gay, their parents were informed by their bishops that it was better for them to take them out to the street than have them contaminate the rest of the family. So Reed started working on that and around the same time Proposition 8 started bubbling up in California and we really saw a correlation between what was happening there and the effect that it had on these kids. So we blew up the ambition of the film and said, “There’s a bigger story here.”
Some of the most shocking revelations in the film come from an enormous file of documents provided by an anonymous source. How did you get hold of them?
SG: We had been working with Fred Karger, who has been at the forefront of investigating the church’s involvement. He got an anonymous phone call. He met Fred in a bar with the documents and it was like a scene from a thriller. Reed went through every page. It was shocking to see the names of the top Mormon leaders, their candid language. Their strategic plan to hide the money and hide their involvement, to create front groups. It was really a revelation for me, having grown up in the church.
With Mormons, you do what you do because it is such a saturated culture. Everything you do — everything — is built around the church. I am a film-maker and so my instinct is to turn a lens on the culture that raised me and better it.
What do people who are not Mormon don’t understand about the faith?
DM: Quite a bit. The church operates differently from other religions. They have a different view on our purpose in life. We live before this earth and we live afterward and there are things we need to accomplish. The church is also a huge, multi-billion dollar, mutli-national corporation. It controls so many aspects of everyone’s life. They own airlines, they own broadcast media. The top radio stations in Washington are owned by the church. What politician in this country is going to challenge a religion? The church believes there is a divine decree that at some point they will control the government of the United States.
Do the younger people in the church have the same views? Or are they like their contemporaries in other faiths and more supportive of gay rights?
SG: I do believe that the younger generation is waiting for the older generation to die off. The older generation is clinging to ethics that are so outdated and so far in the past that in order to progress we need to wait for them to relinquish their hold on it. In general the younger generation is more in tune, more accepting of people and their peers. Gay clubs are popping up in high schools in Utah. But the church tends to only change its doctrine when it hits them in the pocketbook or in their membership numbers. That is what happened in 1978 when they changed their policy and allowed black Mormons to have leadership positions. Up until 1978 the church was an officially racist organization. They were faced with an onslaught of bad PR. So in 1978 “God spoke” and the policy was rescinded. And they could go into Africa and preach their message.
What inspired you to make movies?
SG: I was always into films. All of Spielberg’s and Lucas’ films. I bought my first camera when I was 17, analog tape VHS. I would edit the movies in my camera. I’ve always been filming. I have an entire filing cabinet just filled with tapes, everything I’ve done and everywhere I’ve gone. It is who I am and I can’t imagine doing anything else. When I first got home from my Mormon mission in 2000 I saw my first two documentaries, “The Thin Blue Line” by Errol Morris and Michael Moore’s “Roger and Me.” Both of those films just blew my mind and I knew that was what I wanted to do. Then when I saw “Paradise Lost,” by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, that sealed the deal for me. I knew that the rest of my life would be making documentaries. I have some narrative scripts, but documentaries will always be my thing.
And you, David?
DM: Stephen was working on a news story about Prop 8 and that’s how we started working together. Most of the people in the film are members of Affirmation. We’ve been around for about 33 years. We represent gay and lesbian Mormons. We advocate on their behalf. We try to create safe spaces both within the church and outside the church for people. We try and build bridges of communication and end some of the damage done by the church. We started on the BYU campus. They all met under assumed names because at that time BYU security would send people into gay clubs. To this day, if they find out you are gay, you are not only expelled from the university but they erase your transcript. It is as if they never attended college as well. We’ve worked with the University of Utah and other schools to accept whatever documentation we can put together to restore credit. We have a website called Keep them and Love Them as part of our outreach. Within the church there are people who are supportive.
The most horrible thing I’ve had to do is sit with parents with their son’s brain splattered on the wall and try to help them make sense of all of this. It’s a horrible, horrible situation that the church puts these people in. No one wins on any of this.
, the DVD 
, and the catalog of the show, 
. But most of all, I recommend seeing Rockwell’s pictures, masterful in technique and in spirit. 
