Director Lisa Cholodenko Explains the Family Issues and Porn Problems of The Kids Are All Right
Posted 07.07.10 by Ryan
Since she made her debut with 1998's High Art, director Lisa Cholodenko has been on a mission to tell personal, family-oriented dramas, continuing with 2002's Laurel Canyon and the upcoming comedy-drama, The Kids Are All Right. Kids tells the story of two mothers (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore) whose 18-year-old daughter (Alice in Wonderland's Mia Wasikowska) decides to make contact with the sperm donor (Mark Ruffalo) that is the father to her and her brother (Josh Hutcherson). Usually the sole screenwriter on her movies, Kids marks the first time Cholodenko has co-written a screenplay (with Stuart Bluberg). Cholodenko told ComingSoon that bringing Bluberg onto the project helped give the story a more personal angle, the continuing hallmark of her directorial work.
I knew Stuart from New York when I was living here, and ran into him about six months or a year after I relocated to L.A. I was talking to him about this script I had begun about this family who has this encounter with their sperm donor, and he revealed to me in the course of our conversation that he had been a sperm donor in college. And I thought, "God, that's so interesting. It's kismet that we're having this conversation," so I just asked him spontaneously if he wanted to try writing this with me, and he did, and we sort of got married right then and there.
I had done two screenplays by myself for my other two films and felt like... it's just a lonely experience and one that I didn't particularly want to have again right away. I also felt there was something about the fact that he had this experience of being a sperm donor, that he could lend an emotional veracity to the whole thing, not just to the Mark character. There was that, and then the third thing was in the course of that conversation, we were talking about how in the course of my career, I had been making these auteur-like films and they were more personal and it would be interesting if I could get them into a wider audience or write them in a way that was broader. He himself was looking to make films that were slightly more personal, because he had been working on studio projects. That was also inspiring. I thought we have sort of a compatibility here in that we can mash up these instincts and maybe become something interest.
While Cholodenko admits she is trying to make a more commercial movie, the MPAA still had issues with the family drama, particularly with the scenes involving gay porn.
Yeah, there were two scenes that they asked me to pull back on the porn. I wonder if I did it in the Moms scene, too. We were still trimming, so I wanted to take stuff out, but when the boys are watching the porn, they didn't like how graphic it was, there were a couple shots that were really blatant, so I switched a shot and repositioned a shot on the screen, so it wasn't so stark. That was toned down, and when Julianne and Mark are having their shagfest, there's some of that. They thought it was going on too long, so I pulled back on some of that. Yeah, I was pissed off, and I was disappointed and in a way...
You know it was a weird thing, because I had lost my editor at that point, and I brought him back and he only had a certain amount of time, so at a certain point, I was just like, "You know what? F**k it. Just cut it here. I don't want to go back and forth with the MPAA. I gotta get on with this." It's frustrating, and I sort of regret that I didn't... there's ways to play the MPAA a little bit more and get away with more, and I just was like, "F**k it." I cut my nose to spite my face a little bit. I think I went too far... but it's fine and I'm okay with it. And you know what? It's still that question of that's pretty graphic stuff and some people aren't even going to like that. I want it to be a mainstream film, and the cineastes among us can watch the Director's Cut.
With three unconventional independent movies to her credit, Cholodenko says she would still be interested in doing a more commercial project.
If there's a studio film, I'd be more than happy to consider it, especially if it's in the kind of genre that I can feel confident about.
Next Showing: The Kids Are All Right opens in limited release July 9