Can We Trust the Man?
Can We Trust the Man? - ComingSoon.net
August 18, 2006
Anyone who thinks that Bart Freundlich (World Traveler, The Myth of Fingerprints) is the luckiest director on the face of the earth, being married to the beautiful Julianne Moore and having her readily available for all of his movies, only needs to see Trust the Man to get some idea that being married to a glamorous actress may not be all it's cracked up to be.
It's Freundlich's first foray into comedy, and of course, his wife was along for that ride, as were his good friends David Duchovny and Billy Crudup, and poor innocent bystander, Maggie Gyllenhaal. Duchovny plays a stay-at-home husband married to Moore's actress, while Crudup is her slacker brother Tobey who has been in an 8-year relationship with Maggie Gyllenhaal's Elaine, but won't commit to getting married and having kids.
CS Indie talked to all five of them, separately, in an early Saturday morning junket at the very tip of New York, which plays the prominent fifth character in Freundlich's comedy.
Freundlich kicked things off by giving us an idea how he turned a bunch of random ideas into his latest movie. "The way I tend to write things is I just have a scene in mind for something. I don't have any idea where it's going to fit into a story, and then I start to form the narrative around that as I'm building. I did know I wanted to write a comedy, so I was taking a lot of notes about things that happened with my kids that were funny or just experiences in the city that were very specific to where I was living. I started with a germ of a few very autobiographical things and just grew it out into these different characters. The first thing I wrote down was the exact conversation that David Duchovny has with his son on the toilet, which was exactly what I had with my son. Oddly, the domesticity of it kind of grew out of that, trying to have an adult relationship and be a parent and have these preposterous conversations. Just a contemporary view of a relationship where two people are working and trying to balance out everything of their lives and be happy."
"I think that maybe the person I put forward is the funny person, but I'm really sad and tragic inside," Freundlich said facetiously when asked why he decided to turn from drama to comedy. "I guess it's a lot of work to make a movie, so I always felt that it should be about something important and I think in doing that, I closed myself off to certain parts of myself that I think were valuable for making this movie."
"Bart is very funny," his wife Julianne Moore chimed in enthusiastically. "I think all of his friends have been encouraging him for a long time to do a comedy. Everybody always says--after they say how handsome he is--they say how funny he is."
"One [friend] in particular, director Peter Berg, pushed and pushed and pushed me to write a comedy," Freundlich confirmed. "It wasn't coming naturally to me. It wasn't in my instinct to do that because it felt indulgent on some level. I just put the indulgence aside and said I'm going to make this because a lot of the movies I like to watch are like this. The earlier Woody Allen stuff or the current Alexander Payne or David O. Russell [movies] feel very three-dimensional in character but also easier to watch and entertaining."
"I think he's a very funny person in general," Billy Crudup told us. "We make each other laugh a lot, so I was glad that he was pursuing a comedy. I always like his writing, so it matched my sensibility very well. I think the fact that we wanted to work together again shows that we have similar tastes, and the comedy writing was right up my alley."
Like Crudup, David Duchovny was long-time friends with the director, but that didn't make things easier. "Actually, it's more nerve-wrecking to make movies with your friends, because you really don't want to disappoint them," he admitted. "If you disappoint a stranger you are like, 'Maybe I'll run into him, it will be awkward and you will say 'Sorry I f*cked up your movie,'' but you can't with a friend."
Duchovny had worked with Freundlich's wife before in Ivan Reitman's 2001 comedy, Evolution. "This time, when she went off to sleep with the director, I wasn't shocked," he joked, before explaining why he liked working with Moore again. "We know each other as people and as friends and we are in this fictional space where we are lying, we are making believe and there is always, this moment 'Oh I wonder if she thinks, I am full of sh*t or a bad actor right?' So there is little more of that. On the other hand, maybe there is little more trust."
The mutual admiration goes both ways. "The two of us have a nice energy together," Moore told us. "We feel like a realistic couple. He's very, very funny, he's very smart, and we've been friends for a long time, so there's a degree of comfort that we have. That was one of the nice things about this movie when we started, there wasn't a 'getting to know you' period with anybody. Maggie, she was the only one. Poor Maggie, she was feeling a bit nervous because we all knew each other, but I was like 'Don't worry. Everybody's an @$$hole,' then she laughed and felt better, but she kind of quickly became one of our friends, too, so it was nice."
"It took about five minutes until it felt totally comfortable," Maggie Gyllenhaal said in agreement. "We're all friends now. We were shooting in my neighborhood and have remained friends. I think that must be how it is working with them. We really got to know each other the real way."
"I found Bart to be really comfortable as a director and really relaxed on the set," David remarked on being directed by his good friend. "To me, the quintessential Bart story is when we were shooting the last sequence when we were in the theater, and Bart came up to me and he looked really intense. I thought he wants something else [in the scene], but he goes, 'Can I ask something? Do I have bad breath right now?' And he was serious. He wanted me to tell him if his breath was bad or not."
And how is it for Moore, having made three movies with her husband while also living together, caring for a family, etc.? "That's the hardest part, because honestly, he's a great director. One of the things that I think is wonderful about him, and I noticed this with 'Fingerprints' is that there was this enormous cast, and he knew how to speak to everybody in the way that they liked to be spoken to. Every actor likes to be directed in a different way, and he was able to instinctively figure it out, which is a gift, because a lot of people can't do that. We've always had an easy time working together, but the hardest part of him working as a director and me working as an actor is we have two kids that have to get to school every day and be picked up and taken to basketball."
"Bart's in all of these characters; there's parts of him in all of them," Billy Crudup affirmed, when it was suggested that Tobey might be another of Bart's alter-egoes. "I think Bart really likes to explore different parts of himself through all of his characters. For instance, sometimes he's feeling really selfish, or he's feeling particularly infantile, he'll use the whole character of Toby as the personification of that feeling. So that's not really the way Bart is, but he has some of those feelings, and for me, it's really fun to be an extension of that, because you're in a dialogue with a friend of yours about their life."
"There are lots of things in there from our life or from other people's lives that we know," Moore confessed. "Another thing that's sort of from our life is when Billy's on the phone and like, 'Calm down! Calm down! First, which remote do you have?' That's the thing, I cannot tell you. We have so many remotes and I can't operate any of them. I'm furious all the time, and when you have a three year old that wants to watch something and you're home by yourself and you can't get that television on. I've made that phone call. All I ask is that I'm able to push the button."
"A lot of it is personal," her husband agreed. "There's that distinction between being personal and being autobiographical. There are some autobiographical moments in it, but I would say that all-in-all, it's fiction. There's so much stuff that's personal to me in it in that I live with Julie and she's an actress. I'm not a stay-at-home Dad, but I am home a lot with my children."
Moore seemed fine with her husband possibly revealing private secrets about what it's like being married to an actress. "I liked the fact that she's presented as an actress, but she's a person who has a job. It's not like she's walking around being like 'I'm an actress, I'm an actress.' She's like, 'I have to go to work' and 'I need to do this' or 'I'm going to get the kids" and 'let's get dinner ready.' That's the reality of our lives. I love my job, but it is a job. It's not like this calling that I have where I go into a trance and whatever. I love the way that was presented, and then I think it also does deal with things in his real life, that the reality of living with an actress is different than the fantasy. The fantasy is that you have this very glamorous woman at your beck and call; it's not that you have somebody with a retainer in your bed. The retainer was my idea because he had her [wearing] face cream and I was like 'Nobody really goes to bed with that stuff on your face!' I said to think about the one thing that really truly disgusts you."
"I think basically the movie is about just the trials of relationships," Gyllenhaal explained when asked about her own character's relationship in the movie. "I think this sort of idea that there's a man who is not willing to commit. I think I've been in that situation. I think almost everybody has. That's kind of what I imagine a good relationship is, that you're kind of constantly saying that to each other, "Okay, we got to this point, but now I kind of want to go here. Can you come with me? I really hope so.'"
"Tobey's an infant, so I don't totally empathize," Crudup admitted, when asked if he could relate to his character. "If I was Tobey's friend, I would be very critical and very frustrated with him. I empathize with anybody who's going through a substantial change in their life, and offers to alter their behavior in some way, because it's a hard thing to do as an adult, to realize you've been wrong about something, accept that, accept responsibility, and then change. All of those are really difficult steps for anyone, so I'm admiring that Toby took that leap eventually, but I don't particularly empathize with the route that he took to do it."
"People have been saying to me, 'Why are you with him?'" Maggie Gyllenhaal remarked, "but I think it takes two people to stay in a relationship like that. Elaine is flawed too, and sometimes that can be appealing. It doesn't mean it's healthy, but sometimes it can be. I think ultimately she gets to a place where she just says 'you need to grow up and step up or I'm not interested in this anymore.'"
"Well, there is something endearing about him, too," Crudup said in Tobey's defense. "You pair up with people for a multitude of reasons, and some of the best pairs are some of the most unlikely. I think that's something that I kind of find interesting and lovely about love. You never know exactly who's going to get caught by it. Some people really long for stability and simplicity in relationships, and Tobey's girlfriend had a lot of chaos in her life. She was very ambitious, working in a profession in [which] she was facing a lot of rejection, and there was a lot of instability in that. So I think to some extent she was grateful for his simplicity. He wasn't particularly intellectually challenging for her, but he did provide a sense of warmth, and a sense of general enthusiasm, and I think she found him funny, too. I think at a certain point, though, she said 'Those are things that I needed from a boyfriend when I was 24, and now I'm 30. I don't need those things anymore. I need some other things, so if you wanna continue to do that, you have to make some space inside yourself for characteristics that more closely resemble a man (as opposed to a teenager).'"
You can see how things turn out with these two dysfunctional relationships in Bart Freundlich's Trust the Man, which opens in select cities today, July 18.
August 18, 2006
Anyone who thinks that Bart Freundlich (World Traveler, The Myth of Fingerprints) is the luckiest director on the face of the earth, being married to the beautiful Julianne Moore and having her readily available for all of his movies, only needs to see Trust the Man to get some idea that being married to a glamorous actress may not be all it's cracked up to be.
It's Freundlich's first foray into comedy, and of course, his wife was along for that ride, as were his good friends David Duchovny and Billy Crudup, and poor innocent bystander, Maggie Gyllenhaal. Duchovny plays a stay-at-home husband married to Moore's actress, while Crudup is her slacker brother Tobey who has been in an 8-year relationship with Maggie Gyllenhaal's Elaine, but won't commit to getting married and having kids.
CS Indie talked to all five of them, separately, in an early Saturday morning junket at the very tip of New York, which plays the prominent fifth character in Freundlich's comedy.
Freundlich kicked things off by giving us an idea how he turned a bunch of random ideas into his latest movie. "The way I tend to write things is I just have a scene in mind for something. I don't have any idea where it's going to fit into a story, and then I start to form the narrative around that as I'm building. I did know I wanted to write a comedy, so I was taking a lot of notes about things that happened with my kids that were funny or just experiences in the city that were very specific to where I was living. I started with a germ of a few very autobiographical things and just grew it out into these different characters. The first thing I wrote down was the exact conversation that David Duchovny has with his son on the toilet, which was exactly what I had with my son. Oddly, the domesticity of it kind of grew out of that, trying to have an adult relationship and be a parent and have these preposterous conversations. Just a contemporary view of a relationship where two people are working and trying to balance out everything of their lives and be happy."
"I think that maybe the person I put forward is the funny person, but I'm really sad and tragic inside," Freundlich said facetiously when asked why he decided to turn from drama to comedy. "I guess it's a lot of work to make a movie, so I always felt that it should be about something important and I think in doing that, I closed myself off to certain parts of myself that I think were valuable for making this movie."
"Bart is very funny," his wife Julianne Moore chimed in enthusiastically. "I think all of his friends have been encouraging him for a long time to do a comedy. Everybody always says--after they say how handsome he is--they say how funny he is."
"One [friend] in particular, director Peter Berg, pushed and pushed and pushed me to write a comedy," Freundlich confirmed. "It wasn't coming naturally to me. It wasn't in my instinct to do that because it felt indulgent on some level. I just put the indulgence aside and said I'm going to make this because a lot of the movies I like to watch are like this. The earlier Woody Allen stuff or the current Alexander Payne or David O. Russell [movies] feel very three-dimensional in character but also easier to watch and entertaining."
"I think he's a very funny person in general," Billy Crudup told us. "We make each other laugh a lot, so I was glad that he was pursuing a comedy. I always like his writing, so it matched my sensibility very well. I think the fact that we wanted to work together again shows that we have similar tastes, and the comedy writing was right up my alley."
Like Crudup, David Duchovny was long-time friends with the director, but that didn't make things easier. "Actually, it's more nerve-wrecking to make movies with your friends, because you really don't want to disappoint them," he admitted. "If you disappoint a stranger you are like, 'Maybe I'll run into him, it will be awkward and you will say 'Sorry I f*cked up your movie,'' but you can't with a friend."
Duchovny had worked with Freundlich's wife before in Ivan Reitman's 2001 comedy, Evolution. "This time, when she went off to sleep with the director, I wasn't shocked," he joked, before explaining why he liked working with Moore again. "We know each other as people and as friends and we are in this fictional space where we are lying, we are making believe and there is always, this moment 'Oh I wonder if she thinks, I am full of sh*t or a bad actor right?' So there is little more of that. On the other hand, maybe there is little more trust."
The mutual admiration goes both ways. "The two of us have a nice energy together," Moore told us. "We feel like a realistic couple. He's very, very funny, he's very smart, and we've been friends for a long time, so there's a degree of comfort that we have. That was one of the nice things about this movie when we started, there wasn't a 'getting to know you' period with anybody. Maggie, she was the only one. Poor Maggie, she was feeling a bit nervous because we all knew each other, but I was like 'Don't worry. Everybody's an @$$hole,' then she laughed and felt better, but she kind of quickly became one of our friends, too, so it was nice."
"It took about five minutes until it felt totally comfortable," Maggie Gyllenhaal said in agreement. "We're all friends now. We were shooting in my neighborhood and have remained friends. I think that must be how it is working with them. We really got to know each other the real way."
"I found Bart to be really comfortable as a director and really relaxed on the set," David remarked on being directed by his good friend. "To me, the quintessential Bart story is when we were shooting the last sequence when we were in the theater, and Bart came up to me and he looked really intense. I thought he wants something else [in the scene], but he goes, 'Can I ask something? Do I have bad breath right now?' And he was serious. He wanted me to tell him if his breath was bad or not."
And how is it for Moore, having made three movies with her husband while also living together, caring for a family, etc.? "That's the hardest part, because honestly, he's a great director. One of the things that I think is wonderful about him, and I noticed this with 'Fingerprints' is that there was this enormous cast, and he knew how to speak to everybody in the way that they liked to be spoken to. Every actor likes to be directed in a different way, and he was able to instinctively figure it out, which is a gift, because a lot of people can't do that. We've always had an easy time working together, but the hardest part of him working as a director and me working as an actor is we have two kids that have to get to school every day and be picked up and taken to basketball."
"Bart's in all of these characters; there's parts of him in all of them," Billy Crudup affirmed, when it was suggested that Tobey might be another of Bart's alter-egoes. "I think Bart really likes to explore different parts of himself through all of his characters. For instance, sometimes he's feeling really selfish, or he's feeling particularly infantile, he'll use the whole character of Toby as the personification of that feeling. So that's not really the way Bart is, but he has some of those feelings, and for me, it's really fun to be an extension of that, because you're in a dialogue with a friend of yours about their life."
"There are lots of things in there from our life or from other people's lives that we know," Moore confessed. "Another thing that's sort of from our life is when Billy's on the phone and like, 'Calm down! Calm down! First, which remote do you have?' That's the thing, I cannot tell you. We have so many remotes and I can't operate any of them. I'm furious all the time, and when you have a three year old that wants to watch something and you're home by yourself and you can't get that television on. I've made that phone call. All I ask is that I'm able to push the button."
"A lot of it is personal," her husband agreed. "There's that distinction between being personal and being autobiographical. There are some autobiographical moments in it, but I would say that all-in-all, it's fiction. There's so much stuff that's personal to me in it in that I live with Julie and she's an actress. I'm not a stay-at-home Dad, but I am home a lot with my children."
Moore seemed fine with her husband possibly revealing private secrets about what it's like being married to an actress. "I liked the fact that she's presented as an actress, but she's a person who has a job. It's not like she's walking around being like 'I'm an actress, I'm an actress.' She's like, 'I have to go to work' and 'I need to do this' or 'I'm going to get the kids" and 'let's get dinner ready.' That's the reality of our lives. I love my job, but it is a job. It's not like this calling that I have where I go into a trance and whatever. I love the way that was presented, and then I think it also does deal with things in his real life, that the reality of living with an actress is different than the fantasy. The fantasy is that you have this very glamorous woman at your beck and call; it's not that you have somebody with a retainer in your bed. The retainer was my idea because he had her [wearing] face cream and I was like 'Nobody really goes to bed with that stuff on your face!' I said to think about the one thing that really truly disgusts you."
"I think basically the movie is about just the trials of relationships," Gyllenhaal explained when asked about her own character's relationship in the movie. "I think this sort of idea that there's a man who is not willing to commit. I think I've been in that situation. I think almost everybody has. That's kind of what I imagine a good relationship is, that you're kind of constantly saying that to each other, "Okay, we got to this point, but now I kind of want to go here. Can you come with me? I really hope so.'"
"Tobey's an infant, so I don't totally empathize," Crudup admitted, when asked if he could relate to his character. "If I was Tobey's friend, I would be very critical and very frustrated with him. I empathize with anybody who's going through a substantial change in their life, and offers to alter their behavior in some way, because it's a hard thing to do as an adult, to realize you've been wrong about something, accept that, accept responsibility, and then change. All of those are really difficult steps for anyone, so I'm admiring that Toby took that leap eventually, but I don't particularly empathize with the route that he took to do it."
"People have been saying to me, 'Why are you with him?'" Maggie Gyllenhaal remarked, "but I think it takes two people to stay in a relationship like that. Elaine is flawed too, and sometimes that can be appealing. It doesn't mean it's healthy, but sometimes it can be. I think ultimately she gets to a place where she just says 'you need to grow up and step up or I'm not interested in this anymore.'"
"Well, there is something endearing about him, too," Crudup said in Tobey's defense. "You pair up with people for a multitude of reasons, and some of the best pairs are some of the most unlikely. I think that's something that I kind of find interesting and lovely about love. You never know exactly who's going to get caught by it. Some people really long for stability and simplicity in relationships, and Tobey's girlfriend had a lot of chaos in her life. She was very ambitious, working in a profession in [which] she was facing a lot of rejection, and there was a lot of instability in that. So I think to some extent she was grateful for his simplicity. He wasn't particularly intellectually challenging for her, but he did provide a sense of warmth, and a sense of general enthusiasm, and I think she found him funny, too. I think at a certain point, though, she said 'Those are things that I needed from a boyfriend when I was 24, and now I'm 30. I don't need those things anymore. I need some other things, so if you wanna continue to do that, you have to make some space inside yourself for characteristics that more closely resemble a man (as opposed to a teenager).'"
You can see how things turn out with these two dysfunctional relationships in Bart Freundlich's Trust the Man, which opens in select cities today, July 18.