INTERVIEW WITH JORDAN ROBERTS:
What did your mother think of the subject of your film?
I decided to make the film about the bad sheep in the marriage, not the good, loyal, devoted mother who raised me. So my mom’s really been a pretty good sport about it. This is a movie about her ex-husband who’s a bad guy.
How did you approach her about this movie?
Well, she knew I was working on it for the longest time. She always encouraged my relationship with him, such as it was. When I say it’s based on a true story, it’s based on the fact that I didn’t know my dad. He split when I was a kid and appeared on my doorstep a couple of times in my adulthood. But she was one of those wonderful mothers who somehow found it in her heart to never trash the man who was well-worthy of being trashed. He was physically abusive to everybody, including her. She just somehow intuitively understood that trashing a boy’s father was a bad idea. And I’m lucky because a lot of women don’t know that. I’m not casting any stones. It’s got to be hard. It’s almost noble what my mother’s been able to do, watch me go through this process of making a film about finding some capacity of understanding, loving, accepting, maybe or maybe not forgiving, but accepting and bestowing compassion on this creep.
Did you go through all those emotions while you were writing the script?
Sure, sure. Not so much when I made it, thank God. I think it would have been a really awful experience for everybody if I was processing my emotional feelings during the production. I just think I wouldn’t have been able to do what I had to do. And I had the opportunity to do that during the course of writing it, which took a long time. I mean, I’ve been writing screenplays for 10 years. I’m fast. Very few people write as fast as me. It’s not that I needed 10 years to write this film, I just needed 10 years to stop dodging what the film’s about for me. It was pretty clear from the get-go. I mean, looking back in hindsight, my first draft of this film was about a young woman estranged from her father in South America. As a writer, I can look at that now and go, “Okay, well, that’s a dodge. That’s a dodge.” That was the most egregious of dodges, but not the only dodge, over the course of the many years it took me to tell the truth.
His dying was really probably the most powerful provocation to put on paper exactly how I felt about this absentee guy. And put on paper exactly how he felt about coming back. I got both of them right, ultimately – I think.
Did he pass away while you were writing the script or prior to your first draft?
No, no, no. The last draft, the draft that led immediately to production, was written right after my father passed away. And so you had this incredibly protracted development period, which was not being meddled with by anybody but me. I mean there were other producers involved along the way, but I was the guy saying, “It’s not right yet. It’s not right yet, it’s not right yet.” My dad passed away, I went back into the script, and got it right in my opinion. Warner Bros. in the person of Warner Independent Pictures and Mark Gill immediately signed on, all the actors said yes, and we were in production within a few months. Once we finished the script we were psychotically quick. We moved on very quickly.
You were a first time director in charge of a cast that included Michael Caine, Christopher Walken, and Josh Lucas. Was that intimidating?
Definitely. It was more intimidating before I got there, before the first day. But what they all did was they all made it really clear that not only was I welcome at the party, I was the host. These were my characters and more importantly, they were my relationships. That was the thing where they needed me the most. "How are we going to flesh out these relationships?" The characters are pretty clear on the page who they are, and these are wonderful actors and they were going to find that.
To some extent – and especially Chris because it was a different character from the characters that he’s played – mostly what I was there for was to help them conduct the journey in relationship to one another. They didn’t allow it to be intimidating for me because they didn’t allow me to be intimidated. They didn’t allow me to be nervous or shy. They needed me, and it was a great gift. They insisted upon me knocking off my, "Gosh, gee, golly," s**t and just getting on with it.
