FILM INTERVIEW: ROB REINER

Beloved Director is Wonderfully 'Flipped' About His Latest Film

By: Izumi Hasegawa

August 28, 2010

Izumi Hasegawa: If the movie ends up being labeled “good for you” by reviewers, is that a good or bad thing these days?

Rob Reiner: Ooh, that sounds like eating your spinach to me. I don’t know. To me, a movie is good for you if you’re entertained and you’re moved. I don’t label this movie as good for anybody except, on that basis, that it’s a real movie about real people going through what every kid goes through at that age, and hopefully it entertains and moves you. That’s what makes it good. I wouldn’t say good for you because that, to me, sounds like you gotta eat your spinach.

IH: Can you tell us how you came about finding this movie and the collaboration with Wendelin Van Draanan (author)?

RR: My son Nick was assigned this in school. He was 11 years old in the fifth grade, and he brought the book home and we read it together, because many times we’d read things together, and as we were reading it, I was just blown away by how good the writing was. Lots of times you’ll read books that are written for children and there’s a level of writing that isn’t particularly insightful, or there isn’t a lot of depth to it. This book had real sophistication. It was a real honest understanding of what kids go through when they experience those first powerful, confusing feelings of love. I was knocked out by that, and I also was taken by the fact that it was told from the boy’s point of view and the girl’s point of view. I was intrigued about the fact that, even though I knew I was going to see essentially the same things done over, I stayed completely riveted and involved, and I was wanting to know what was going to happen, even though we had just seen what was going to happen because now we were going to hear her point of view and her take on it, and we were going to get new insights and new information about it. It held my interest all the way through, and then I cried at the end, and my son, actually, as we were reading it, said, “Dad, this would make a really good movie,” and I said, “You’re absolutely right.” So that’s how I learned about it, and even though it was set in a modern-day setting, it spoke to me because it made me think about the feelings I had as a kid growing up and what I felt when I first fell in love, and that’s when I knew it would work for adults and for kids. Even though it’s about kids, I think adults looking back on that really get more out of it. I thought back to when I did Stand By Me – there’s a great line at the end of Stand By Me where they say, “You never have friends like you do when you’re 12 years old,” and it’s the same thing. When you look back, you never have those kinds of feelings; you experience them once in your life — that first, very powerful feeling of love. I said, “This is like Stand By Me for me.” I have the same kind of response when I first looked at Stand By Me, and that’s one of the reasons we set it back in the late ’50s/early ’60s, because it was the time that I was coming of age, at that period.

IH: In movies, flip perspectives like that can become predictable. You avoided that really well. How true was that to the narrative structure of the book? It seems it would be challenging to adapt something that’s so specific to the book.

RR: It was very challenging. Except for Rashomon, and maybe one or two others, there are not a lot of movies that will commit to the idea of going back and forth through the entire movie. You may have a scene or two that are told from two different perspectives, but not an entire film where you go back and forth, so that is kind of risky. For a while, when Andy Scheinman and I adapted it, we toyed with the idea of: can we tell it in some kind of linear fashion without using the convention of flipping back and forth? But we kept going back to the fact that it worked in the book, and I felt that since it worked in the book from an emotional standpoint, it had to work in the film. When we did The Princess Bride years ago, a lot of people said to us, “You can’t have the grandson keep interrupting the story because the people are going to lose track of the story. You’re going to have to start it up again, or you’re going to lose the momentum of the story,” and I said, “It works in the book. Let’s be true to that and trust that it’s going to work when it’s on the screen.” So we did that when we did Princess Bride, and it worked, so we had a feeling that this would work. Plus, every time we went to the girl’s point of view after the boy’s point of view, there was always new information because it was her perspective, so you weren’t seeing exactly the same thing — you were seeing it from a completely different angle and you were getting new information. The hardest part was not in writing it, because Wendelin gave us the greatest blueprint of all; we basically took her book and made a screenplay out of it. It is essentially that story that’s in the book. The hard part wasn’t doing that; the hard part was keeping track of the points of view when you’re filming it. That was like a real puzzle because you shoot things out of sequence anyway, and now we were shooting two points of view out of sequence, and many times we’d shoot the boy’s and the girl’s points of view at the same time because we’re shooting in a certain direction where the light is a certain place, and it got very, very confusing. I’m now 63, so the whole time — it was interesting – I started doing crossword puzzles and Sudokus during the making of it, just to keep my mind going like this, and while we were making the film, for some reason, the Rubik’s cube became the fun game on the set. Our script supervisor was doing it, Callan [McAuliffe] started doing it, all the kids were doing it, and this was like the Rubik’s cube. Many times, the script supervisor would say, “Wait a minute. Is this Juli’s point of view or Bryce’s point of view? Shouldn’t the camera be over there?” We kept going through that, so that was the hardest part. And I gotta say that I think Wendelin was surprised a little bit, because to me, she did all the grunt work. She did all the the heavy lifting because she wrote a wonderful novel that lays out. Many times a filmmaker will take that novel – and to me, if you’re going to make a movie out of a book or a play, it should be that you like that book or that play, and you should respect it and want to make it – like with The Princess Bride or Misery or Stand By Me — keep what is good about it. Don’t start changing things for the sake of, “Oh, I’ve gotta get my point of view in there” and all this stuff…

IH: Do the kids in the book kiss at the end?

RR: No, they don’t kiss at the end. You know they’re going to kiss eventually; as soon as the camera goes off, these two are going to kiss each other. We know that, and Wendelin, because she’s done so many lectures to schools and stuff with the book, because the book has been a popular thing in schools, she’d get that question all the time! “I wanna see them kiss.” So she actually lobbied me to have them kiss at the end, which was not in her book! I said, “No! What we loved about your book is that he brings the tree, and that’s the emotional moment, and that’s what we wanna go out on!” So I was arguing to stay with what’s in the book!

IH: I loved the Baker family — the way they’re open and talk about things and support each other, even when they disagree. You think putting a family like that on film can inspire real families?

RR: I don’t know if it can inspire people. All I know is what is so wonderful about the story is you have two very real families that live across the street from each other, and the values of one of them is not nearly as solid as the values of the other. The Loski family is more interested in material things, and they’ve lost their way in terms of real values; and the Bakers don’t have nearly as much money, but they have stronger values. Not to say that they’re perfect; they do argue and have their problems, but there is a deeper feeling of love there than there is in the other family. I love that we were able to explore those two types of families living in this rural suburban area that were right across the street from each other. Hopefully people will be able to take from the Bakers. To me, the moral ballast of the movie is the Baker family and then the grandfather in the Loski family. He’s the one that comes along at a time when Bryce is really starting to drift into a bad place, and he comes along to put him on the right track. He has a great line where he says, “Ideas are formed at a very early age. I hate to see you swim so far out you can’t swim back.” He comes along at a certain time in a life where that boy has to start questioning what are his father’s values and are they the right ones? Because a parent has such a strong influence on you, and he’s lucky that he has his grandfather to steer him in the right direction, which is toward the Bakers and toward the way they live their lives. So I don’t know if it will inspire people, but I know that these are two very real families and very different types of families, and that, to me, is a very big part of the movie — not just the first love and all of that, but how families have an affect on the way you think and the way you conduct your life. Bryce is making some pretty poor decisions until he has his grandfather come into his life and put him on the right track. This was a weird thing when we were making the movie. We found this house where the Loskis lived — it was on this street outside of Ann Arbor, and we needed to obviously find two houses across the street from each other. One was a little bit more kept up and the other one was a little more unkempt. The odds of finding this kind of clichéd, split-level house and then this kind of one-story little-bit ramshackle house in the exact spot across the street was impossible. What we did find was this Loski house that was there, and then across the street was empty. There was a park area and it was an empty lot, and we actually built the Baker house. We built it from scratch, and we shot everything inside and outside at the Baker house, and every time we go to that location, which was a lot of the movie, I kept saying, “You know, the Loski house looks like a set to me.” It doesn’t look real, whereas the Baker house felt more real to me. There’s something fake about the Loski house, even though it was the real house, and the Baker house was the fake house, even though it felt more real.

IH: What was the process in casting Bryce and Juli?

RR: It was interesting because Juli, Madeline Carroll, came to us immediately. I had seen her in a movie called Swing Vote, where she played Kevin Costner’s daughter, and I thought she was really good. She was the first person who came in to read for the part, and we were all there — Andy [Scheinman] and Alan [Greisman] and I — and we were all just…knocked us out. She was unbelievable. We all three looked at each other and said, “This is Juli Baker.” We had 30 some-odd other actresses to see, and I said to the casting director, “We’ve got Juli,” and she said, “Well, you’ve got all these people here.” They all came in and read, and there were a lot of very good ones, but nobody came anywhere close to Madeline. She is extraordinary. She’s got gifts of somebody two or three times her age. She was 13 when she shot, she’s 14 now, and she has an instrument that’s as finely tuned as any other 30-, 40-year-old actor I’ve ever worked with. So that was extraordinary. Now the Bryce character was really difficult to find. We were trying to figure out why it was so hard, and I think it’s because Bryce is a very handsome kid. He’s got a sexuality to him — this kid that every girl would just wanna fall in love with and all that, and kids at 13/14…I think Callan was 14 – those kids are out playing ball, they’re not acting! You don’t find those kids that wanna act — they’re playing in a band, they’re playing sports or whatever they’re doing; they’re not usually wanting to be actors at that age, if they’re going to be very real. So we had a hard time finding somebody that would be a regular kid that would be that handsome and be that good an actor, and we searched everywhere. We couldn’t find the right guy, and there was a tape that was sent to us on the Internet from a kid that was in Australia, and that was Callan McAuliffe. He has a thick Aussie accent and he looked great, and I said, “Wow,” and he did this great American accent! So we flew him from Australia and he read with Madeline, and they were unbelievable together. So it was hard to find him, but we got lucky. And then I thought, “Oh my God, he’s got such a thick Aussie accent!” The first time we were up in Ann Arbor, I said, “Maybe you should practice speaking American even now, just keep talking with an American accent.” He never did! Not once! Except when we said, “Action,” boom, the accent would go on, he put it on, and then I said, “Cut!” and he’d would, “G’day, mate,” and he was into that! It was spooky. He always knew before I knew. He’d say, “That was Aussie. I said ‘chicken’ in an Aussie way. I can do it better.” He had a better ear than any of us did.

IH: Do you think you were more comfortable in the Baker House because you’ve spent your whole life on TV and movie sets?

RR: That’s a great question because, if you notice on the street, it says “Bonnie Meadow Lane.” I grew up on Bonnie Meadow Road. When I was a kid in New Rochelle, we lived at 48 Bonnie Meadow Road, when my father did The Dick Van Dyke Show, Rob and Laura Petrie, Dick Van Dyke, and Mary Tyler Moore lived on 148 Bonnie Meadow Road. So maybe you’re right — maybe I am very confused what’s reality and what’s not.

IH: Was there ever another scene with Anthony Edwards after he hits his daughter — an aftermath of that?

RR: There’s something in the book where they indicate that the Loski family is heading toward a break-up. It’s indicated in the scene, but we felt like we’d lose the thread of the boy and girl to get too heavily into the parents. But you get a sense that things are fraying in that household.