FILM INTERVIEW: REBECCA DEMORNAY

Star of 'Flipped' on Keeping Families Happy & The Challenges of Her Recent Role

By: Izumi Hasegawa

August 29, 2010

Izumi Hasegawa: Do you think the Bakers are a family that can inspire real families to have open discussions, even about difficult things, and to support each other even when they disagree? I loved the Bakers, and I thought they looked like a family I wanted to be in.

Rebecca DeMornay: I really like how the writing of the story emphasizes how the family we come out of really shapes who we are, and what Bryce comes out of, with our family, is there’s a lot of denial about whether or not our life is working, whether our family is happy or not. We’re trying to be in denial about that.

IH: Rob Reiner was commenting about how the movie uses the device of switching between two perspectives, and that Bryce’s is first and then Juli comes in and sheds more light on the situation. Should we take that to mean, as a universal truth, that girls just know more than guys pretty much at any age?

RDM: I would say yes, and I think it’s interesting in our society, which is patriarchal, and Hollywood sort of mirrors society in general, that this is sort of a departure of really showing how much boys do have to learn from girls and what men can learn from women. It’s a different yin yang. There’s a lot to learn from the yin.

IH: Did you have a relationship with the source material before you came to the project, and what were your feelings reading it afterward?

RDM: I actually did know the book because I have two daughters. It was a big book for girls in fifth grade that they were reading, passing around. I didn’t read it, but when I was doing the film, I read the book by Wendelin Van Draanen, and it is really extraordinary because the script is actually so exactly the book. Their gift is to lift just the pieces so it was cohesive for a movie, but in fact, the dialogue — everything — is exactly the novel by Wendelin. I think that’s unusual. Usually there are great, huge differences, liberties taken, and this is very faithful, except for setting it in a different period. But she didn’t write cellphones or anything anyway.

IH: What was the most challenging part in making this movie?

RDM: It wasn’t very challenging. Rob Reiner is truly a gifted, relaxed director and man, and really understands, I guess, what Hitchcock said — that 90% of directing is casting, and when he casts the people he casts, he just trusts them from the second they walk on the set. That’s a certain hammock to fall back in as an actor, regardless of what you have to do. As an actor, a director sets the tone like that. It doesn’t seem so challenging. I’m just saying that because it’s true, but also it’s funny that all of us actors couldn’t think of anything that challenging. In other words, it was a really great experience. I think our society has become very enamored with the evil and the bad, and the stakes get higher and higher — what you have to see to be shocked or be scared. In fact, it’s a challenge to live an ordinary life, and it’s a challenge to play the ordinary people and show what’s really going on underneath — the conflicts that are in them, and choices that are being made by good families, like the Bakers, that are hard sometimes. I was researching ahead to play in another film, a criminal investigator, and I was talking to this chief of police somewhere who said, “With what you see on TV and what you read about and what films are about, you kind of think people are always breaking the law. In fact, about 90% of people in the city don’t break the law at all and are really trying to be decent people.” So that’s the gross majority of us. You wouldn’t really think it, but it’s hard to be a good person and to not break the law. It’s hard to not lie and to not raise your children with lies or cowardice, or being in denial that what you’re giving them is love when it isn’t, necessarily. I think the film is in the pocket of…people actually can be good – are good, I believe, as did Anne Frank, and I think the film celebrates it without being saccharine so people are moved, from what I see in screenings, because it reminds us of ourselves. There are concepts of love — what is love, loving someone, knowing who they really are, what means something to them, and finally giving it to them. As her boyfriend, my son, comes to realize with the sycamore tree — they’re deep things that you feel. They seem simple, but they’re deep, when you watch the movie.

IH: I’m sure there are families where one parent tries to keep the peace because it’s easier, but was it nice to have that one scene where Anthony Edwards’ character goes too far and you say, “Just stop”?

RDM: It was. It was her wake-up. The character was a very, very repressed woman who really was trying to keep a perfect façade together and convince herself that everything was good if she just looked good and the house looked good and her children’s grades were good and the car looked good. Everyone in the movie learns something, and she learns that it really wasn’t worth it, and this is what she has — she has a secretly, or not so secretly, alcoholic husband who is capable of doing that. Actually, in the novel, she winds up leaving him after that happens. We didn’t film it. I asked Rob about that, and he didn’t think it was necessary to tell the full story — enough would be gotten. I sort of liked the divorce in there.