I sat down with Tamara Jenkins at the Peninsula Hotel the day after the film closed out the 2007 Chicago International Film Festival. A small but spirited woman, Jenkins seemed pretty amped up over the reception the film received. It was obvious that she has a lot of enthusiasm for her film, and showed this by being very, VERY talkative. Our fifteen-minute interview quickly turned into a thirty-minute one, and our conversation went from age interpretation to air conditioning and back again. I warn you: I normally try to wrap up my interviews in neat little packages, but this one is a tad all over the place. Still, there’s a lot to enjoy here:

So “The Savages” screened yesterday…

Yeah, we screened it at the closing of the film festival. I’d never been here before.

Really?

Well, I’d never been to the Chicago Film Festival, and it was in that fancy performance space [the Harris Theater], which isn’t really a cinema. So I was like, ‘Wait a minute… This is where Polopolis dances, this isn’t a proper cinema, this is gonna be a problem!’

Were the acoustics bad?

They were bouncy, it was a little bouncy. But, you know, that’s just the neurotic film director: You want the acoustics of a cinema. They did a great job considering they had to fly in projectors and screens and stuff like that. It was nice. I mean, I didn’t watch the film in the room. I introduced it with Laura [Linney] and then we made sure it was working because there was some problems with the projector at first, which always happens at every festival. And then, once it was working, I ran away and got some coffee and something to eat, then came back for the Q & A. So, in terms of my experience with the Q & A, which is the only way I can get a read on the screening, I really loved the audience. Everyone that stayed and asked questions… They were a very sophisticated audience but very warm, which is something you don’t normally see in the same body. So I wondered if that was Chicago. You know what I mean?

That “Midwestern Friendliness” thing?

Yeah, but not in a fake, polite way. I just felt like there was something warm about it, but probing and sophisticated in terms of the questions and their response to the movie. So you get people raising their hands and asking questions and, after that, there was a little party for the end of the festival and people come up to you individually which is nice. You get a whole different feeling.

You mentioned the Q & A, and I’m very interested in how audiences react to the film. I went to a press screening—

--which is a whole different thing—

Definitely. No one laughs or reacts to anything at all.

That’s interesting because there are a lot of laughs in the movie even though it’s about something that doesn’t initially make you think humor would be present. So when you sit in those press screening it’s just…

It’s just dead, yeah.

Did you feel compelled to laugh but you couldn’t because nobody else was?

At times, yeah. Although I do have to say, I think the funniest line I’ve heard all year is in this movie.

[Laughs.] Which is?

The “This isn’t a Sam Shepard play” line.

[Laughs.] That’s when you know the movie is… Because it starts and there are the dancers and people are like, ‘What is this?’ and they laugh. Then, people getting slightly “Woah!” with Lenny and the bathroom incident which, really, is startling, as it was intended to be and should be. Then, the tone just starts going, like, ‘Where is this tone?’ and then it sort of finds itself. But the Sam Shepard line… That’s when everybody really gets permission to laugh. And the people that are really going to get this movie, that’s one of the first big laughs.

What’s especially interesting about the humor in the film is that, yes, it’s funny, but it’s not easy humor—

--It’s not cheap—

And it’s one of those instances where the jokes are funny but also kind of sad. Like the scene on the airplane when Lenny’s pants fall down… In another movie it would be played for slapstick but here, it’s very intense.

Well, I guess mining that territory… It’s interesting because some movies really tell you how to respond—you really feel like you’re hooking into some system of response. You know, the camera’s gonna push in, the music is going to swell, and this is how you’re gonna feel here. I feel like [“The Savages”] is very observed, in terms of the direction, and not telling you how to feel. And because of the subject matter, it can go either way, depending on how you view it. I think I’m interested in that. A friend of mine said a couple he knows went and saw the movie… The husband was laughing the whole time and the wife was crying the whole time. And that interested me, like, what angle is it hitting you at.

I imagine age is a big factor in that.

Yeah, like, where you are in the timeline of your own life and how close you are to the experience of these characters. If you’re young and your grandparents are in nursing homes; if you’re in the middle and your parents are getting less well; or if you yourself are getting less well.

Well, I know that coming from my age group, I find myself relating with the Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney characters and wondering, ‘Do these characters know that they are going to be in the same boat some day?’

Well, I think the whole movie is an examination of the anxiety of aging. It’s like a prism—looking at it from all these different angles: From the angle of the dog, from the angle of an old man becoming quite unwell, and the angle of a middle-aged crisis. I think the movie becomes a lot about [the main characters’s] anxiety about their own mortality. It’s a sort of subtext throughout the entire movie. They are leading these lives that are very incomplete. When you meet them they’re treading water and—

[At this point in the interview, things grind to a bit of a halt as we both address the near Ice Age temperature of the air conditioning in the hotel conference room and try to fix it.]

So… Where were we? Oh! You were talking about interpretation from different age levels.

Yeah.

Well, one thing that’s been interesting about going around and showing the film at festivals is that it’s really elicited this spontaneous storytelling thing that happens where people my age or older will say, ‘I just put my mother in a nursing home and when the movie started I was scared, but actually, it’s really funny.’ Just a lot of spontaneous telling of caregiving stories. There’s been a lot of that, it’s really interesting.

Another interesting theme through the film seems to be this undercurrent of guilt the children share. Guilt, or maybe even confusion. Hoffman’s character seems to reference the fact that ‘This is more than he would’ve done for us’ to justify the treatment of his father.

Well, they’re dealing with this thing that there’s no guidebook for, there’s no etiquette for how you behave in that context, and there’s a rawness in that, and I also think a lot of humor comes out of that, because nobody knows how to be. They’re doggy-paddling, they’re struggling, they’re pulling at straws, and there’s so much anxiety that it kind of… That’s why I think it’s pregnant with humor. Just inherently. I didn’t have to apply dumb jokes to it. It was already in the mix for me. In those situations I always feel like that stuff is in there.

Going back, maybe, to that idea that one person might find something sad while another might be laughing, all in the same moment?

Well, for me… When I see movies or when I read books, when that type of tension is happening at such a high level… That’s something I like, I aspire to: When I’m not being dragged down, being told how to feel, but I kind of observe it and respond to it. I feel like I’m always the person at the movie theater whose like, “HA!” when there’s silence. And it’s usually a recognition of something so true that you don’t get to normally see because movies can feel very pat and ‘movie-like.’ My favorite kind of movies, I think, really examine humans in a realistic way.

That’s probably best represented by the character of Larry. [Played by Peter Friedman, the character is a married man that Laura Linney’s character is having a troubled relationship with.] In a more ‘movie-like’ film the character would be this handsome, muscular guy she’s having this affair with. In this film, however, he’s older, he’s balding…

Exactly, it’s real. That was a whole struggle when I was auditioning actors for the part. A lot of the actors were quite… Well, whatever. And I just thought, ‘That’s wrong.’ They felt like characters in a movie as opposed to a character in real life. I wasn’t interested in making movie characters, I was interested in making human characters. ‘Who would it really be?’ You know, as opposed to, ‘What would Hollywood do to this?’ It’d turn into ‘Friends.’ Like how did the people from ‘Friends’ afford that apartment? They were waitresses! I’m always obsessed with that kind of stuff, like, how did they get that furniture or those clothes? They worked at a café! It’s crazy! I live in New York, it’s not like that! [Laughs.]

Do you think it’s funnier to be to true to life as opposed to the sitcom style?

Well, that’s how I feel. I don’t identify with that. I find it alienating and unpleasant and unsympathetic. I’m just repelled, I hate it! [Laughs.] But I’m glad that you said that about Larry because he is spot-on. He’s a great actor and he’s not playing the most sympathetic character in the world, but I think he’s great and hilarious. And he’s just so right for the part. I mean, he’s not the worst guy in the world. I mean, he’s ultimately a good guy, he’s just…

He’s just very human.

Exactly!

There you have it. Special thanks to Tamara Jenkins for sitting down to chat with me about her film. And, as always, thanks to Allied Advertising for setting up the interview. “The Savages” opens in limited release on November 28, 2007.

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