Will you read the negative reviews, if there are any?
“Yeah, sure. I just read tons of movie criticism already so I figure it would be ridiculous for me to think that I would stop for a movie that I made. I just read lots of movie reviews so yeah, I’ll read the negative ones.
I think that there have been positive reviews of the movie that have had kind of ideas about the movie in them that I don’t necessarily agree with. But I think it’s interesting that that person has had that perspective. It’s like you make a movie maybe, or you do anything like this, in order to sort of create a conversation.”
Can you share an example of something you’ve read that misinterprets something from the film?
“I just mean there were things that I don’t necessarily begrudge a person for kind of seeing it that way, but that do kind of create interesting perspectives. Like, people talk about the family in the movie as being rural. Which is interesting, because what it suggests is that, for the writer, ‘Southern’ must equal rural. Because it’s a completely suburban atmosphere that they live in.
That’s just one example that pops into my head. Or, I’ve read positive reviews that suggest that the character George [the character Alessandro Nivola plays] is like a really kind of positive, upstanding, good guy and Madeleine, his wife, is a creep. The thing is, I welcome somebody having that perspective but it’s not my perspective. And I read that in a positive review of the movie, so I can imagine someone not liking the movie but having a perspective about the characters that is more like mine. That could be positive as well. I embrace that possibility.”
You have an established working relationship with the screenwriter, Angus MacLachlan. What is it about his writing that interests you?
“Well, I relate. You know, we grew up in the same town. I’ve known him my whole life. I think we share a lot of perspectives about the world, so in that way, I’m just very comfortable with what he writes, with how he depicts people. So that’s part of it.
I think that he is very honest with himself about what he conveys about people. I don’t feel like he’s trying to prove through his writing that some conclusion that he’s come to is the case; but rather he’s writing this stuff in order to try to kind of discover something about people. Which I think is what, was what I hope makes this movie compelling and interesting to people.”
MacLachlan writes about an area of the country you’re both familiar with. Could this have been set elsewhere and still have been the same basic story?
“I think that this story depends to a great degree on class and on the American class structure. Or on a class structure anywhere, which really exists everywhere. And this version of this story, this isn’t a new story, you know. We don’t purport to have created a new story. This version of this story happens to take place in the South and we wanted to be very, very specific to that. Because I think, that hopefully out of that specificity comes a story that people can relate to.
I feel really fortunate that when we were in Cannes, people said, ‘Oh, I come from a little village in Belgium and then I moved to Brussels and this reminds me so much of my relationship with my family.’ And I was psyched about that.
I do believe that it would have been less so if our intention had been to make it universal. Which, I think, is something that they do in Hollywood. Like, ‘We need to make this universal. That detail is too strange and specific.’ People don’t understand what that is to make it universal and generic. Therefore the opposite effect happens, that your attempt to make something universal and generic just flattens it out and so no one can really relate.
I really trust an audience to sort of know God is in the details. And so we wanted to be really, really true with the details. But also not to use details to romanticize our subject or to be cute or precious. You know, like with that church supper. You first instinct may be like, ‘Oh my God, it’s a church supper in North Carolina so there should be heaps of fried chicken and dumplings and beautiful green beans just out of the garden, right?’ Like this great Southern cooking, right? But you know what? A church supper down there is likely as anything to be spaghetti. And so we have a spaghetti supper because to sort of try to take advantage of that opportunity to have this romanticized Southern meal was, well to me that, to some degree… I would have only been doing that in order to sort of flatter myself. You know what I mean? I mean, that’s just one example.”
