Nick Cassavetes My Sister's Keeper Press Conference
Audiences might find some of the ideas in this film controversial – not just asking hard questions but suggesting hard answers. How do you propose those ideas without coming across as judgmental or conceited?Nick Cassavetes: "Families aren’t logical. Families are emotional. There’s always some weird person in the family and, if you’re like my family, all of us are strange. When things happen, people are entitled to have opinions that aren’t politically correct. I don’t believe the mother is particularly sympathetic in this movie, but I understand her completely. I don’t think that the daughter wanting to stop being poked, prodded and cut upon is perfectly logical, but I sympathize with her. If things were so politically correct and pat, then they’re not worth exploring. The fact that this family doesn’t come together and all the pieces don’t exactly fit is what makes the story worth telling, and it’s also my experience with family. I’ll probably have a message on my machine right now with my family having some kind of a problem that they shouldn’t have, but that’s the beauty of it. What [screenwriter Jeremy Leven's] done so well is to capture a family in all its imperfection. That’s really what the film sets out to be and hopefully becomes, is an examination of a family that’s going through something very hard."
This film works because of the two young actresses. Can you talk about the process of finding the two young women who play the sisters?
Nick Cassavetes: "Sure. It’s strange because I don’t do a lot of auditioning. The auditioning of children is an empty experience because some kids are very well prepared for auditions and aren’t particularly good actors, and some are really great actors that have certain problems with auditioning. That’s true with children and adults alike. So, what you do for an adult when you cast adults is that you go by their body of work and then you talk to them about the part and their points of connection to the character and all the kind of stuff that you do when you’re making a movie."
"With children, it’s harder, not because they can’t talk eloquently about their part, it’s that they don’t have the body of work to support your absolute belief in them. With Abigail [Breslin], that wasn’t the case. I’d seen her work. She’s a 70 year old woman in a 12 year old’s body. She’s so soulful and so gets it. I find myself trying to catch up to her intellectually, as opposed to dragging her along. There’s something very, very special and still and knowing and nurturing about Abigail Breslin. It’s astonishing when you think this child who’s so caring, and she just gives that off, that she’s not going to help her sister, which really helps our film. So, when she said she wanted to play the part, I was like, 'Okay, we’ve got her. Good. That’s my girl.'"
"Sofia [Vassilieva] was something completely different. Sofia was on a television show. I had never heard of her. My casting director walked back into the office - she and [producer Mark Johnson] had found this girl - and said, 'You’ve got to see this.' I said, 'I’m busy right now.' She said, 'No, you’ve got to see this.' So I came in and I read with her. With Sofia, the beauty, the thing that you want to capture, exploit, whatever the word is, is she leads with her heart. She feels so much sometimes, she almost feels too much. Her sensors are wide open to the world. When you watch her - selling the fact the a girl is 16 but she knows so much about this world and the other world that she decides it’s better to go to the other world now and that’s okay - that’s a tough thing to sell and it’s a tough thing to sell for a girl who is not still water, who you don’t believe has an understanding of this world and the next. With Sofia, that responsibility fell upon her shoulders and it fit her like a suit."
"For some reason, I believed that she was the type of person that would make that sacrifice, not only for herself, but for her family. It was just as simple as that. Obviously, she’s going to be one of these brainiac kids that graduates summa cum laude from some Ivy League university. She certainly has got the intellect but it’s not what I was looking for. I was looking for her emotional intelligence. I was very lucky to have her."
