I put that in because I had no way of structuring the plot points. I had no way of telling the audience that the invisible child was still with them, so I gave her three wishes to keep him there. Like her wish that her dad could make it – the childish perspective of it. “Oh, everything was okay because I fixed it.” It’s not really magic realism, it’s child magic. It’s the way we believe as children.
How close was the set you used to what the buildings and streets were like when you arrived in New York?
The initial floor space we had was down on the Lower East Side and it was very close to that, but the building we were in was much smaller. But I thought on film you never can make anything look small. It would just look boring. So I made it kind of a different type of loft space, more interesting and more magical.
When you got to America, did the reality of arriving here match what you had expected?
Yes, it was wild. I said it was the first time that my interior paranoia was matched by an outside reality.
These characters are based on your life and the story of your family? Did you ever feel the actors were shying away from doing something they might have done because it was your story?
Not really. I’m very easy to work with. In most films, the actors are playing the director anyway, you know? Some version of the director. This was just the extreme case. We’re all characters. My wife isn’t really like Samantha Morton, maybe a little bit. But Sam had that edge of the bad girl. You know what I mean? Which is good because my wife, the only thing she said was, “Don’t make me look like a saint.” The last thing she wanted to be was boring.
Your two child actors – Emma and Sarah Bolger - are amazing. How did you find them?
They were the first two kids I met. I didn’t audition anybody. I just walked into a room and Emma was there. I asked her to read. I don’t know how she thought she could read, never mind act. She acted it perfectly. I immediately thought she was going to be horrible, one of those precocious movie brats. So I asked some other kid to read and as the other kid was reading, Emma pulled my coat. She looked at me with pity as though I’d crossed an invisible line of etiquette and said, “Jim?” I said, “Yes.” She said, “Is she reading my part?” I wanted to say this is an audition but I didn’t want to break her belief so I kind of tried to stare her out, and that didn’t work. Then I said, “No. Nobody is reading your part. You’re cast.” And she said, “My sister is down in the car.” I said, “What age is she?” She said, “10.” I said, “Too young.” She said, “Well, you should go down and see her.” I went down and saw her and cast her, and that was it. The first two kids I met.
Does your style of directing change when you’re directing children?
Not really. What happens with the kids is they’ll always ask you… Emma would always ask me what was for dinner, even if we were behind schedule and I was stressed. All she wanted to know was what was for dinner because she looked forward to all the different foods. She was a love. I would have to tell her beans and burgers. She’d ask me what the red things were and I’d say cranberries. She sat and ate every food. It was just like me and her were pals. I just couldn’t break the magic – that was hard. But that’s the only thing that was hard.
There were times in the film when I was a little confused about the year in which the movie takes place. Did you do that on purpose?
Yes. First of all, when you make a period film it reduces the temperature. I always think the cars are going to be old, but they are going to look new. All the guys drive up with their ‘80 cars all spanking clean. You’ve got this mania of going back 20 years and nothing looks much different, but it feels odd. The last thing I wanted to do was do a period film. And anyway, it would have added a couple of million to the budget and it would have been stupid. It just drives me mad, all that stuff. I thought I’d just leave it indeterminate. I’d have it the feeling of the ‘80s but I’d make it the recent past with a camcorder.
They give awards to people now for losing weight and for getting things exactly as they were in reality, as if that was a talent. Is that a talent? I think it’s insane.
In the production notes, your style of directing is called ‘organic.’ What does that really mean?
Well, organic in that I’m trying to get it to such a state of ‘what’s going to happen next’ that anything can happen next. In a story about your own life where you definitely know what did happen, you better have a sense of displacement – of not being sure what happened next. I have to put myself in a state of kind of controlled chaos.
And that comes across to the actors as being very ‘actor-friendly’?
Yes. They all think they are helping me to get it right.
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