Augusten Burroughs' horrible childhood plays out on the big screen in Running with Scissors, the film adaptation of Burroughs' memoirs. To describe Running with Scissors as the story of a dysfunctional family and the looney psychiatrist who tries to help them would be putting things way too mildly. Burroughs endured an incredible amount of hardship during his formative years and somehow managed to never give up on the idea that everything would turn out okay in the end.
Making His Very Personal Story Accessible to Audiences: Augusten Burroughs wasn’t as concerned about people understanding his story as he was about the possibility readers would find it slow going. “I actually had anxiety that it would be boring. I remember reading it, after it was typeset, going through the galleys, reading it a few times thinking, ‘Why is anyone going to even care about this?’ My agent had to be the one to tell me, ‘Look, most people have never experienced anything like this. It’s going to be very unusual to other people.’ So I had to trust him on that.”
With the book flying off the shelves, Burroughs wasn’t surprised when he was approached to sell the movie rights. “I made a decision early on that I was not going to option it,” explained Burroughs. “It would never be a movie because I felt it would be too easy to make a terrible movie out of it. But Ryan [Murphy, the writer/director] was so, so, so persistent that I finally decided to give him the respect of meeting him in person to explain my reasoning why it would never happen. During that meeting Ryan showed that he had such a profound understanding of the book, as though he had written it himself. His mother was so similar in so many ways. I just changed. I mean I did a 180. I decided I wanted him to make the movie.
It was a gut instinct. He hadn’t done Nip/Tuck at that point. He hadn’t done a movie and my gut said, ‘Do it.’ All through the process of developing, Ryan never let me forget that he knew and knows that it’s not just a book, it’s *my* life. He took enormous care to make sure that there was never anything that I was unhappy with or that I was uncomfortable with. I never felt like it was taken out of my hands, taken away by ‘Hollywood’. You know, that never happened. That experience never happened, and it was great.”
Art Imitating Life: Seeing his story come to life on a movie set was definitely a weird experience for Burroughs. “Oh yeah, it was very fun, it was bizarre, it was surreal. It’s just out of our normal daily experience to see a movie of your life while you’re still in the middle of living it. It’s just a very odd experience. The one thing I wasn’t prepared for was to be so emotionally impacted by the film when I saw it. I mean, I was relieved first that it didn’t suck. You know, there was this sort of, ‘Oh good, it’s not horrible.’ But then to be so emotionally affected by it was surprising because I had gone through it once and then wrote about it and did a book tour. I just didn’t expect that. I just felt like it wouldn’t affect me emotionally but it did, and I was very happy and relieved.
I feel very good that there’s a document… Part of me has always felt – well earlier, not so much now – what’s the point of going through such a life if no one ever knows and no one ever cares. I felt like I slipped through the cracks my whole life. With school I slipped through the cracks. There was no one ever there to stop it from happening, and so now I feel like at least it exists as a movie. In that sense, it was a profound relief.”
The Responsibility of Playing Augusten in Running with Scissors: Joseph Cross says that at first he found the idea of playing Augusten a bit daunting. “I wanted to do Augusten justice and I wanted to do the book justice. The people that liked the book loved the book. I mean *loved* the book and can recite passages. I knew people would be very critical of who they got to play [Augusten]. It was a little scary for me at first and I didn’t know what Augusten was going to think of me or whether he was going to think I even looked the part or could do it, because I haven’t really done anything before this that would have shown that I could do it except for the auditions I did for Ryan. But when I met Augusten, he was so kind and so encouraging and gracious and sweet that I think that was really… That was the moment where I was like, ‘Okay, I can do this.’ It was really scary up until then and then to have his blessing was like setting me free to go and do it.”
Page 2: The Message of Running with Scissors
