It’s not that writer and director Tamara Jenkins meant to take nine years crafting the follow up to her acclaimed 1998 debut Slums of Beverly Hills, things just sort of worked out that way. Not that the wait wasn’t worth it, The Savages one of the more talked abut and discussed independent pictures of the year ever since its debut at this year’s Sundance Film Festival back in January.
Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney in Fox Searchlight's The Savages
“I wasn’t working on this for nine years,” says the filmmaker with a smile. “I spent a lot of time being lost for a few years, working on a project about the life of Diane Arbus with a producer that we ended up not making together, and that was like a two year Bermuda Triangle. And then I had a series of disappointing things before finally making my way to this material where the writing of it probably took another two years, financing took about a year and then making it took another year. But I was working, it just took some time.”
Jenkins and I were sitting in a suite at downtown Seattle’s Fairmont Olympic to discuss her picture, this stop just the latest on the smartly dressed filmmaker’s whirlwind tour promoting the film. Starring Laura Linney, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Philip Bosco, the Fox Searchlight production revolves around an estranged brother and sister suddenly confronted with taking care of their dying father.
Faced with having their lives put completely on hold, this pair discovers more about one another than they ever anticipated, and it was the story’s unflinching (yet surprising humorous) honesty which had me excited to talk with the director. Not that our entire conversation centered completely upon the film, geography also came into play as well.
“I keep thinking I’m in San Francisco,” laughs Jenkins. “I’ve been traveling a lot. I was just in Paris and then I was in London and then I was Virginia and then I was in Phoenix and then I came here, but right before that I was in Toronto and in San Francisco. I’m a little bit lost and am not getting the chance to see the landmarks anywhere, so I keep feeling like I’m in San Francisco. But, then, Seattle and San Francisco are a little bit similar, aren’t they? Kind of melancholy and beautiful.”
While no true Seattlite would ever agree our city is just San Francisco north, I can’t help but agree with the latter comment. The city can be melancholy and it is certainly beautiful, much like the reception her moving – if difficult – motion picture is garnering as it tours the globe before its release in New York and L.A. today.
“It’s been great,” the filmmaker concedes with a smile. “But, you know, the people who hate the movie are still coming up to me and telling me luckily, otherwise I’d probably be in some weird bubble. Thankfully the people who respond to it have a strong response.”
“Someone else had said to me [the film] radiates in different sort of way. I think that is because it is gentle and it has a very delicate tone. It doesn’t smash you. It’s like seriocomedy. It’s very observational. It’s a different impact that certain other things might be.”
Laura Linney, Philip Bosco, Philip Seymour Hoffman and director Tamara Jenkins on the set of Fox Searchlight's The Savages
Which couldn’t have been an easy sell for Jenkins when she started approaching producers with her multilayered and decidedly honest screenplay. A lot of films put their themes out on the table from the very beginning, their tones constant and unwavering first frame to last. The Savages doesn’t offer that comfort, doesn’t give audiences that crutch, the fact of which must have given the filmmaker pause and caused her to wonder if she should make some changes.
“It’s true, [this] had its own nonconformist tone,” admits the director. “It’s one of the reasons it’s kind of unique and it’s authentic. But, it wasn’t easy to get financed, that’s the short answer. There were people saying there were no redemptive moment with the father, that happened a couple of times, and they asked if I would be willing to do a rewrite. They’d say the father was so unlikable and they’d ask if I could add a moment where he talks to the children.”
“Nobody wants to be the person asking you to do that so they’ll come at you like, ‘We don’t want a redemptive moment but if we could have a moment where we could see him say he’s sorry.’ And, I’d always be that this is the kind of moment we have in films it isn’t the kind of moment we have in life. I thought it was important to stay true to the characters and the honesty of their experiences.”
Still, the thought had to cross Jenkins’ mind to make some of these changes in order to get the money to proceed. “I do remember one moment being so desperate and sitting in a California hotel room thinking maybe there would be a way to do this,” she admits. “It was so wrong but I was so at the end of my rope. But I was so propelled and I knew it was so false and against the rules I just couldn’t do it. Thankfully I did end up getting financed and I didn’t have to make those changes, but it was really after running the race and [getting] so tired.”
“It’s like this ethical slash artistic thing to be part of the sentimental propaganda machine, it’s just too much. And, I also feel like it’s lonely [watching] movies that show that and your life doesn’t reflect that. It’s very alienating. I know when I see movies or I read books and I’m connecting to things that are familiar to me and make me feel less alone. I think that is why grownups turn to literature and to [films].”
Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney in Fox Searchlight's The Savages
Does that mean the filmmaker is against the Hollywood status quo? “Not at all,” says Jenkins. “Obviously there are all different types of movies and we’re all after different things, but [those films] are a type of wish fulfillment where you get the great moment with the not-such-a-great father on the deathbed where he says, ‘I was kind of a shit but I’m sorry and I love you.’ That’s wish fulfillment, and there is probably room for those sorts of [pictures] but The Savages wasn’t one of them.”
Seeing that her screenplay contained more than a few autobiographical moments, this lack of wish fulfillment on Jenkins’ part isn’t exactly a surprise. Still, one has to ask where she decided to draw the line between fiction and reality, which pieces of her own life were just too hard to have a pair of actors reinterpret.
“I always make this distinction between [the film] being personal and autobiographical,” she says with conviction. “If I said it was a memoir I’d be like that guy James Fry. If it were a memoir it would suggest that it was true, an actual depiction of the way [events] occurred and this is not a memoir of my experiences.”
“That said, I have had experience with two relatives who were in nursing homes and had dementia. I’ve spent a lot of time in that world. But [this movie] is very fictionalized even if emotionally it is still something I am very connected to and know about.”
I can’t help but imagine that depicting this sort of raw emotion both on the page and on the screen can’t be easy, and I also cant help but wonder what goes through a filmmaker’s mind when they stumble upon a moment that is deeply connected to their own personal experiences. “In a way I think it is important,” answers Jenkins with conviction. “If it is literally transcribing from your own life, that’s one thing, but if you also have some sort of emotional insight into something in order to be drawing characters you really have to have that [connection].”
“Human beings, actors, are going to be having to play these people. In a way, it helps them and it helps you to draw something real. It’s almost life drawing, just like art class. You have a person standing in front of and you’re in an art class and you’re sort of drawing them. It can help, but it isn’t a transcription, just like this [movie] isn’t a transcription of my own experiences. I had gone through it in my own way so that when I’m riffing on it I’m connected to it but that doesn’t make it an exact memoir.”
Speaking of actors, Jenkins found herself lucky to have two of the best in Linney and Hoffman working with her. But how did she relate to them on set? What sort of direction do you give to professionals working very near (or even at the very top) of their respective games?
“There were so well suited to the material that it became clear to me very quickly that a lot of stuff was happening,” admits the filmmaker with a twinkle in her eye. “And that is sort of your dream. People say 90-percent of directing is casting and what they mean is if the fit is right than it is working. I have these amazing resources at my fingertips which are these actors who are so sensitive and so at the top of their form and so warmed up and so ready to go that I want to see what they’re bringing. I want to see what a [particular] scene stimulates in them.”
“While I had a very strong intention on the page, but because these actors were so fine and so well-suited to their dynamic they really fell into it, in a way, that I was excited to see what they would do. It’s kind of a corny thing, but in yoga they talk about the line between effort and relaxation. Directors are control freaks and you’re sitting there trying to force everything in, but if you’re doing it all the time then you might miss this very beautiful thing that is organically occurring and I just felt like there was a stuff that was occurring that all I had to do was observe and enable and let them be. I was very lucky.”
Director Tamara Jenkins and Philip Seymour Hoffman on the snowy set of Fox Searchlight's The Savages
All of which makes the film ring harrowingly true, and what with this connection to her own experiences and to the experiences of others she discovered while doing research this bittersweet authenticity only helps make The Savages that much more poignant. Thinking back, Jenkins can’t help but light up when she starts recollecting her journey putting the screenplay together, a story involving one of the film’s most heartfelt and moving moments forcing her towards a slightly teary – if still joyous – smile.
“The toes curling was a thing I friend had told me about,” she reminiscences. “And he just told this story to me. He’s a film editor in New York and he’s a pal and a long time ago I showed him an early draft of the script and we were talking about elder care sort of stuff. He told me a story about his grandmother. He was visiting her in Florida and she was at the end of her life but she was still living in her apartment with a home healthcare worker.”
“He was there for like a week solid and some friends were trying to get him out of the house and he said no because he was petrified his grandmother might die and he wouldn’t be there. The home healthcare worker said to not worry about it and to go out with his friends because her toes hadn’t curled yet. And he asked her what she was talking about and she told him the story of the toes curling before death happens.”
“I just loved the idea that there was this whole other criterion other than the medical criteria and I incorporated that into the [screenplay]. I loved that there was this other layer, whole other level, that had to deal with people’s corporeal relationship with the patient, with their bodies. That they had this whole other way of measuring. I just loved that.”
Additional Links:
- The Savages Theatrical Trailer
