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Mother and Child (2010)

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Re: Mother and Child (2010) - 2x official poster

snapshot versions:

Last edited by steandric, 3/18/2010, 11:30 am

3/17/2010, 10:18 pm

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Re: Mother and Child (2010)

Last edited by steandric, 3/18/2010, 2:08 pm

3/18/2010, 2:04 pm

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Re: Mother and Child (2010)

The Official Poster:

Last edited by steandric, 3/19/2010, 10:51 am

3/19/2010, 10:47 am

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Re: Mother and Child (2010)

more from the official website:

"A love letter to motherhood...the one movie you must treat your mom to this Mothers Day. A tough minded yet delicate drama. Naomi Watts is handed one of the most tantalizing roles of her career, and she comes through with a blazing, faceted performance."
- Caryn James, Marie Claire

Last edited by steandric, 4/17/2010, 8:14 pm

4/17/2010, 8:11 pm

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Re: Mother and Child (2010)

WRITER / DIRECTOR RODRIGO GARCIA’S STATEMENT (from the production notes)

In the beginning there was no plot, only a vague idea about two strangers who longed for each other, and how that longing had shaped and misshaped their psyches. It was to be, hopefully, a portrait of complicated feelings and the intertwined destinies of two women, then three. I have no idea what organ in my body this all came from -- I hardly recognized myself in the story. (It’s possible that it came from every parent’s fear of being separated from their child by time or illness or accident or misunderstanding or malfeasance -- but no parent in their right mind will voice these fears.) This much was clear from the beginning: I was only going to fly as far as the wings of actors would take me.

I don’t know how actors work. I have never acted myself (beyond a couple of school plays) nor studied acting. I have only a daydreamer’s idea of the kind of things actors must do to develop roles -- the conversations they might have with themselves, the unnerving realizations that may come as they search in a character’s soul for themselves. Nothing human can be foreign to them.

Annette Bening speaks of the screenplay, of the repercussions of any action, of the roots of every emotion, with such clear-headed authority that it’s fascinating for me to stand in my own set and learn about characters that I thought I had written. That’s a mesmerizing part of the process: to discover that’s how Karen moves and that’s how she talks and dresses and laughs and lives. Wow, look at that, that’s Karen right there, right here, now. Where did Annette find time for this? She’s raising four children and has a career in the theatre and is developing other film projects and has siblings and parents and a husband with a big world and is serving on the board of the Academy and planning a trip to Iran.

And she must also need time to tend to Annette, to spend time with Annette in the rooms that will never be open to anyone but Annette. (Edith Wharton called these rooms “the holiest of holy”. Maybe Karen was allowed to visit.) Was Annette thinking about Karen while brushing hair, turning off lights, picking up a shoe, wiping tears? During the shoot I asked you, Annette, if later, months later, you could tell me how you came to Karen. Now I don’t want to know. Don’t tell me how you came to map such a remarkably precise and moving journey for Karen’s feelings, to find such compassionate understanding for her prickliness and frustration. Please don’t show me the compartment where the rabbit is hidden.

We’re in the house of the mother of a friend of a friend in New York, months before principal photography, shooting a shot of Elizabeth watching Naomi Watts’ expectant belly. I’ve met Naomi only once before, for dinner.

Now she arrives in pregnant splendour and seemingly at ease. I soon discover that she has a delightfully bawdy sense of humour and that she’s both a girl’s girl and a boy’s girl. We talk a little between lighting setups about Elizabeth, but when I sense she is listening to me with more attention than I’m comfortable with I pull back and listen to her. Nothing worse than actors acting with the director’s voice in their head. But my fears are not justified. It’s clear half-a-year later, during production proper, that Naomi has developed her own Elizabeth. I don’t ask who she is. I watch her Elizabeth unfold in front of my eyes, moving in her world with feral autonomy, with hard discipline and naked ambition -- as well as with disguised frailty and fear. Your Elizabeth, Naomi, dangerous and heartbreaking, is absolutely endearing to me. You dove into her head first. (If there is trepidation -- and there’s always plenty with artists of this calibre -- I can hardly see it). The role is physically demanding and involves nudity and emotional outbursts and the days are long. Naomi is funny and she makes us laugh. She’s nursing a six-week-old baby and tending to a two-year-old. She confesses that she sometimes daydreams about a third.

After shooting the belly shots in New York the owner of the house asks me what the movie is about. “I too was born when my mother was fourteen,” she says, “and she gave me up for adoption. By the time I was an adult and I finally tracked her down she had passed away.” Naomi listens in silence, betraying nothing. As with Annette, Naomi’s links to the heart of Elizabeth are a mystery to me. A mystery like a drug.

I want to be Kerry Washington for twenty-four hours but not for twenty-five. At twenty-five hours my wheels would come off: a movie career with range, political work (a fearsome debater!), charity work, the friendship of world leaders, an interest in practically everything, directing, endorsements, travel, a fun loving person who is a people person and comfortable in her own skin -- more weight than even a man with my frame could carry -- Kerry

carries it all without breaking a sweat -- all the while doing the hard work of an artist. On what flight, in what hotel room, before what television appearance, in between acts of what play reading did you dream your dreams of Lucy?

You taught me that Lucy was petit bourgeois and a perfectionist and that her desperation could be funny and her fears of failure agony and her pain profound. After the long winding road her happy destiny is, thanks to you, Kerry, completely earned and satisfying to me.

The most despicable thing we have in our film world is its conventional wisdom. A part of it is the belief that actors are vain and insecure and demanding. Some are that, as are some taxi drivers and surgeons I’ve known. Not much is said of what we ask of actors: to stand in front of others and undress and display their skin for a character – the beauty but also the bruises -- the scent, fungus, abrasions, goose bumps -- the landscape of flesh exposed to direct sunlight. Nakedness like that is the stuff of a nightmare to me.

Often, when actors do and say the things that I wrote, I cringe and retract in the shadows behind the camera, hoping that no one will look at me at that moment and realize that Karen/Annette and Elizabeth/Naomi and Lucy/Kerry and Paul/Sam and Paco/Jimmy are so close to me that I’m blushing with shame. Thanks to them I can indulge my dreams of storytelling and of living other lives. How else am I going to learn what it’s like to be another human being?

Maybe there’s an easier way. I ask my daughter what it’s like to be a girl of ten. The question annoys her and she shoots right back: "it’s the same as being a man of forty-nine, dad. Duh!"

5/7/2010, 8:48 am

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