Your character spends a lot of time off by himself. Did you create a backstory on where he goes and what he’s doing when he’s not with the family?
“The movie sort of suggested some things; like he goes in the basement and he sort of mopes around down there. He looks at all of his old knick-knacks and albums and wanders out into the forest or goes driving or goes to sleep. Things like that. Anything just to kind of avoid having to deal with everybody.
It’s this thing where people place onto him everything, that he’s the solution to all of their problems. Everyone in the family needs something different from him. He satisfies something for each person. And he is willing to kind of give them, provide whatever they need but there’s some part of him that’s left behind. That pressure of having everybody kind of want a piece of him, I think it’s just sort of overwhelming. He just sort of drives off or goes and sleeps in the basement.”
There’s a special connection between your character and the one played by Amy Adams in the film. What's the connection between the two?
“One of the things about the way that Phil’s done this is that it’s very true to life in the sense that people can have conflicting emotions all at once. And I feel on the one hand, I think that that whole scene in the hospital, for example, it’s so complicated - my presence there. Because first of all, I think I use the fact that there is this kind of important moment in my family’s life as an excuse to kind of put a guilt-trip on my wife for not coming. And I think that initially I do that more just out of some kind of, I don’t know, feeling of needing affection from her or something. Just to sort of make her feel guilty for not being there with me or whatever. I think I do it more out of that than out of some real sort of self-righteous feeling that family is more important than anything else, obviously because I haven’t been around my family.
So there’s that. On the other hand, I think I have real pity for Amy. I think it’s very upsetting to me that she’s in this relationship with my brother that is clearly hurtful to her and looks like it’s heading for real disaster. It’s upsetting for me to see that. I’d rather my brother be there with her but because he’s not going to be, I feel like I have to look after her almost on his behalf because he’s just kind of refused to take any responsibility for the whole situation. I probably feel somewhat uncomfortable there.
There’s some line in the thing where she says, ‘Are you gonna be here for some…’ I can’t remember what it was. She asks if my wife and I are gonna stay for something that they’d wanted us to stay for. And even I can’t promise that I’m gonna stay. And so it’s just this real kind of tug between feeling some kind of sense of responsibility to these people and also the South - and then this town and everything being a major part of who I am, which is surprising to my wife and the church social scene and everything - but at the same time just feeling this pressure from all sides. From people needing something from me, something to save them all somehow.”
Working on an ensemble film like this, and playing a character who keeps disappearing out of the picture, did you ever worry your character would get lost in the mix or be diminished?
“You have to go into this type of film with different kind of ambitions than you do in one where you are telling the story of the movie. You know, in this kind of a film you have to have just a constant sort of sense of what the whole story of the film is and how everybody is playing into this woven tapestry of whatever this story is going to be. And you have to just kind of focus moment to moment on just the total reality of what you’re doing. Whereas in a different kind of film, you might be concentrating more and plotting the arc of your character to the story, and finding different places where you can get certain information across about the character. You plot some kind of journey. Whereas this kind of a movie it’s sort of moment to moment, and you just want to be as truthful and real in every moment that you can.”
PAGE 4: Alessandro Nivola on His Love of Soccer, "The Darwin Awards" and "The Sisters"
