"The Upside of Anger" is a very personal film for Mike Binder. Binder's experience of being raised by divorced parents inspired him to write about how a family copes with anger and other strong emotions. "The Upside of Anger" follows Terry Wolfmeyer, a wife and mother whose husband suddenly disappears. Left to care for her four strong-willed daughters, Terry finds a companion in her next door neighbor, an ex-baseball player turned radio DJ (Costner).
INTERVIEW WITH ERIKA CHRISTENSEN ('Andy'):
How hard was it to act with the director?
I adore Mike [Binder], he’s such a passionate person. He really loves his job and I admire that so much. He’s so funny and so talented and by the time we got to the point where he was directing me in his underwear, I was ready. I love this guy, I was totally comfortable around him. It was great.
Can you understand the attraction of a younger woman to an older guy like that?
Definitely. There’s the whole thing of women maturing faster than men, right? Or girls than boys, so I think girls hope that by that point they’ve got it figured out. …Somehow age - you lose sight of that consideration at a certain point and, you know, I’ve grown to love Mike so much that it makes sense to me.
Do you think it’s more rebellion on your character’s part?
It’s most definitely part of that, but I think it’s more, too. I do think they saw something in each other and it wasn’t what was supposed to be, ultimately. But they definitely saw something in each other, and I think they learned things from each other.
How close are you to your character?
We’re alike in that I am ambitious, I don’t want to do things, and I’ve been attracted to older men. I think I have a much better relationship with my mother.
What would your mother say if you starting dating a much older guy?
It would depend upon who it was.
What if it was Tommy Lee? What would your mom say then?
She would physically come to wherever we were and drag me away.
And it if were Sean Connery?
She might be jealous.
You’ve been able to go back and forth between teen genre films to more adult fare. How did you avoid getting stuck in the ‘teen queen’ thing?
I tend to choose roles in films that say something that I can get behind, something that I agree with, something that I can relate to [and] something that I think is good to say. Because if you’re putting it out there, it’s got to be something worth it.
So nothing frivolous and silly and superficial?
No, that’s fine, because, hey, sometimes you need a comedy and it’s the perfect antidote to whatever’s going on. It’s great and it builds relationships between people, because you can speak that language to each other. “Did you see Napoleon Dynamite?” and you have the common ground, which is great. What I mean more is, kinds of movies that tend to project a viewpoint of hopelessness - I’m not interested.
You already knew Evan Rachel [Wood] but did you and any of the other daughters do any off-screen bonding?
Oh yes, when you have to play sisters there’s that tacit agreement, “Okay, we’re going to get into this.” And from day one, we kind of gather around Evan and were like, “So tell us about your boyfriend.” And so we hung out, went out to dinner, and actually had two weeks of rehearsal, which was more like sit around and chat. And then three hours into some digression Mike would go, “Okay, maybe we should get back to reading the script.” And then actually also Joan [Allen], Alicia [Witt] and I, our birthdays are three sequential days, so we had a girly get together. Only girls [were] allowed. We just hung out in Joan’s flat.
So was Kevin Costner the odd-man-out on the set?
Not most of the time. It was actually perfect because he didn’t get there until after we’d all been together for awhile. So it’s kind of the same journey as his character went through, which is he gets thrown into this mess of crazy women. Which he had no problem with, trust me. We love Kevin and Kevin loves us, but it was good to have him come into an already going operation.
Did you learn anything from working with Joan Allen?
I did learn from watching her, because she… Let me know if this makes sense or not, she so firmly had a structure of this character that within that structure, she could go nuts. She could try all different kinds of things from one take to the next, and it all made sense. And I imagine this was really tough to edit, because there were so many great choices. I liked that. I think that changed the way I work a little bit. It freed me up to watch her work.
PAGE 2: Erika Christensen on Advising Her Brother, "Flight Plan" with Jodie Foster, and "The Sisters"
