After graduating from NYU's prestigious Tisch School For The Arts, Tamara Jenkins directed a few acclaimed short films before embarking on her debut feature, the semiautobiographical comedy Slums Of Beverly Hills, in 1998. In the years since, Slums has amassed a significant cult following, but Jenkins herself seemed to drop out of the scene just as quickly as she'd arrived. Nearly a decade later, she's returned in excellent form with The Savages, a painfully funny comedy-drama about grown-up siblings (Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman) who are forced to take care of the demented, irascible father (Philip Bosco) who abandoned them. Jenkins recently spoke to The A.V. Club about her long absence, the difficulties of pitching an unpitchable movie, the test-screening process, and how much of her life goes into her films.
The A.V. Club: So what's with the Terrence Malick-like interim between movies?
Tamara Jenkins: That's so funny. Someone just recently said, "God, it took a long time," and I said, "Yeah, it's the Terrence Malick schedule without the masterpieces." [Laughs.] I spent a couple years working on a project that didn't happen, so that was one little Bermuda Triangle of maybe two and a half years. And [The Savages] probably took four years, so that's six years, and the other three, I was probably doing things like directing theater. Little projects—not feature-film projects—you know, theater things, writing things, and jobs like doing rewriting for money, stuff like that.
I don't recommend it. It's not a schedule that I'd want, although it was really good for me in a lot of ways. I became a better writer. By the time I came to this subject—or whatever you want to call it, this idea for this movie—when I finally landed on it, I was so resolute about it, and I was just a better writer. Like this piece that I worked on for a long time that never happened, for various reasons—it was owned by somebody else, it was about [photographer] Diane Arbus—I went to this artist's colony that I've gone to three times in my life, called Yaddo. Most of the writers there are novelists, fiction writers, short-fiction writers, and poets. There's other disciplines, too—painters, poets, stuff like that—but I met a woman there and she said she was working on this novel, and she said, "You know, my last one, it didn't get published. It's like some 400-page book." And I'm thinking to myself, "Oh, my screenplay…" And she just sort of shrugged and said, "It's making this one so much better." And maybe that sounds like making lemonade out of lemons, but I think it's true, and it's a practice. Personally, I became a better writer because I was writing a lot.
AVC: Did the existence of the other Arbus project cause the problems?
TJ: No. [Producer] Ed Pressman had a book about Diane Arbus—it's the only biography that exists—and there had been many Diane Arbus scripts. Many. I don't even know how many over the years. And it's sort of a cursed project, for lots of reasons. There's probably some pile somewhere of all these weird attempts, all these portraitures that can't get made. And [Arbus'] family hated the book. Mine was a movie about somebody trying to write a portrait of her and not being able to do it. That was the structure of it, and eventually, Ed Pressman had somebody else make the movie—that wasn't my script, obviously. I've never seen Fur [Steven Shainberg's 2006 Arbus film]. I don't know anything about Fur except that it wasn't my script and somebody else did it. But I was very attracted to her, and it was a totally different treatment. So I spent a lot of time on it, not only writing it, but running around talking through various production issues. All this crud, and then it didn't happen. There's a lot of time-wasting stuff that happens in life with movies. I was younger—not chronologically, but experience-wise, I think—and I don't think anything like that'll happen again.
AVC: The dilemma of how grown-up children care for—or don't care for—their parents when they're old and infirm is common to just about everybody, but there are very few films on the subject. Tokyo Story is the only one that springs immediately to mind.
TJ: There are a couple of films. I know Tokyo Story is based on an American movie called Make Way For Tomorrow, which I had only learned because I had never seen Tokyo Story, even though I was a grown-up person and should have it in my arsenal of film-history knowledge. But when I was writing my script, it was playing at Lincoln Center. I'd never seen it, which was an embarrassing glitch. And it's about something that my movie's about. So I went and saw it—and was completely and obviously blown away by it—because it's a great film, but also I was like, "This is so weird, because the children are kind of bad, and the parents are sort of great and loving, and why did they produce these awful children? Oh, I guess this is metaphoric of traditional Tokyo and modern Tokyo." But it bothered me. I mean, I love the movie, so it's such a dumb thing, but maybe because I was in my own movie that was dealing with a similar subject, I was viewing from the opposite end of the telescope. It was very useful for me to see it. Just the way that the children were so awful, and the parents were so good, bugged me. And in the case of my movie, it was from the children's perspective as opposed to the parents' perspective. I loved the movie, and then started reading about it, and discovered that [writer-director Yasujiro] Ozu's screenwriting partner [Kôgo Noda] had seen an American movie called Make Way For Tomorrow. It's a 1937 movie by Leo McCarey, and it's an adaptation of that. Make Way For Tomorrow is such a great title, because the children… That's what it means: Move over, old people, we're here! And it's a great movie. You can't believe it was made in America. Well, it was a different time in moviemaking, but it's so gentle, and so is Tokyo Story.
AVC: What was the process of convincing people to make The Savages?
TJ: Oh, it was an easy sell: Nursing home? Dementia? Brother-sister? Buffalo? Sexy! [Laughs.] Yeah, it wasn't easy, and there was obvious resistance. People weren't like, "Yeah, we have to make this film!" I wrote it as a little deal at Focus Features, and [Focus head] James Schamus and the Focus people really responded to the script, but ultimately, we couldn't agree on the cast. So they let me go into the world with the movie and with Laura and Phil, and so then I was really knocking on people's doors.
AVC: How could they not agree on Philip and Laura? That doesn't make any sense.
TJ: Call Focus. I don't know. Their foreign sales were a factor, meaning stars have to have a certain price on their head in European territories, or something? But really, I don't know. It was mysterious to me.
AVC: It seems like such a strange thing to want bigger stars than Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman for a project like this.
TJ: When people find that out, they're so baffled, and I'm like, "I know!" I mean, I love James Schamus. I think he's a great person and I like him a lot, but we just couldn't agree on the cast. And when I finally hunkered down and said, "I think these guys are great," then I met Laura individually and I met Phil, and I went back, and after other discussions about other actors, and meetings, and going through the chain of the process, I at one point just came back and said, "These guys are great." And they said, "Well, if that's the decision, then we should let you go." But they were kind enough to let me go with the material. They didn't put it in a vault and say "Too bad!" So then I went knocking on other people's doors for money, and it did not come easily. It's not a movie that you can pitch well, frankly. Financiers are risk-averse. They're scared, and the film was dealing with a subject matter that people don't want to deal with anyway.
AVC: You couldn't say the movie was funny?
TJ: I did! I said it was funny, and I think that's why Fox [Searchlight] said all right. Ultimately, I was like, "No, it's funny! I know it's about something quite serious and hard, but it really is funny, too." Not with some cheap, stupid layer of gags on it or something, and I think that they understood that, ultimately.
AVC: What kind of experiences did you have with nursing homes or assisted-living facilities before working on this project?
TJ: I had the experience of having my grandmother in a nursing home at the end of her life, and had dementia set in with my father. He was in a nursing home with dementia at the end of his life, but it happened for me personally 10 years ago. My father was much older than my mother, so I experienced it as a pretty young person. People's parents die at various ages, but my father died of mortality. He died of being an old person. Illness and stuff happened, but essentially, he was old and he was going to die. And in terms of my peer group, nobody's parents were dying of old age. There was no dialogue to have among friends.
So I had that experience, and then 10 years later, I started thinking about writing about it. It's obviously an indelible thing when that happens, and I wasn't looking for material at the time or anything; it just started becoming relevant to me. And I lived in the East Village, and there's a nursing home on the corner of my block, and I walked my dog by it every day, four times a day, and thought about it. And then across the street from me is a low-income housing place that caters to elderly people. So there's just lots of people in wheelchairs around out my window, so that's one thing. And then around me, around my friends, it's starting to happen—we're all in our mid-40s, in some cases older, and they're starting to deal with their parents becoming less well, and [with] elder-care things. So all those things were just percolating, and they all just started pushing me in this direction. And I was very interested in writing about grown-up siblings, so it just started mushing into this idea.
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