The Savages - Tamara Jenkins interview

WRITER-director Tamara Jenkins talks about her latest film, The Savages, why it was difficult to make and how personal the film is to her in many ways! She was speaking at a UK round table...

Q. This is a very personal film for you – is it also autobiographical?
Tamara Jenkins: It’s not officially autobiographical in that if I said it was I’d be like that guy James Frey who wrote that book A Million Little Pieces. It is very personal but it’s not a memoir, it’s very fictionalised – although at its root I had spent time with my father in a nursing home at the end of his life and he had dementia and my grandmother as well. So, it grew out of a personal experience that I thought about a lot. But it’s still a complete grab bag of different things. I had never been to Sun City in my life, I had never been to Buffalo. I fell in love with this little nursing home in my neighbourhood, in the East Village where I live now. I walk by all the time with my dog, and all the attendants are Haitian and Jamaican and from Barbados, so that got turned into the movie. So it’s all these things, but it’s definitely personal.

Q. Was it done as a form of therapy?
Tamara Jenkins: It wasn’t like an intentional act of therapy, it was something I was interested in. I think that in my own experience when my father died – which was 10 years prior – I was in my 30s and he died of old age. It was unusual, only because he was 20 years older than my mother. People’s parents die when they’re in their 30s for other reasons, but not of mortality. None of my friends had experienced that, and it was very lonely in a way. And now I’m 45 and everyone I know is confronting the diminishing health of their parents on some level so it became very relevant.

But it wasn’t like a sociological decision. Things start working on you, this nursing home in my neighbourhood. And I live across the street from a building that’s a low income housing thing that caters to older people. There’s always somebody in a wheelchair being attended to, a white resident being attended by a Jamaican or a Haitian person, all around my neighbourhood. From that building to this building, it’s just something I see every day and I think about. And then there are my own issues with ageing, so I think there’s lots of sources working here, but I don’t know if I thought I was going to therapise. I’m in therapy, I live in New York, so everybody’s in therapy. There’d be something wrong with you if you lived in Manhattan and you didn’t have a shrink [laughs].

Q. Was The Savages a tough sell to financiers?
Tamara Jenkins: It’s very hard… to say that this is a movie about a middle aged brother and sister, their father who has dementia and how they put him in a nursing home – don’t you want to finance that movie, it’s so sexy? If you present that nobody is going to want to finance your movie, so it wasn’t an easy process to get people behind it. It was easier to get the actors.

Q. Did that help secure the funding?
Tamara Jenkins: It didn’t! In fact, when I got Laura [Linney] and Phil [Seymour Hoffman] on board the studio that I was originally working with was not supportive of my casting, which seemed crazy to me. But they were kind enough to let me go off and try to finance it somewhere else.

Q. Isn’t this the first thing Hoffman did after winning his Oscar?
Tamara Jenkins: Yeah, the financing came before the Oscars but after the Golden Globes.

Q. So who did they want?
Tamara Jenkins: I don’t know, it was a film company that is foreign sales based. I don’t know exactly how these things work, they do this weird thing where essentially you give them an actor’s name and they put it through some calculator and it comes out with a number on it, and then they do something and say “yes” or “no”. It’s really freakish. Not that I have anything against huge actors. I like Leonardo DiCaprio – not that they referenced him as an idea! We just didn’t find our way, and I thought Laura and Phil were so right. I met Laura first and then I met Phil and I thought it was great.

Q. Do you distinguish between stars and actors?
Tamara Jenkins: The studios do. I think that sometimes when you see movies of a certain kind you can feel that thing where there’s a movie star presence in an ordinary world. There can be this strange, whatever that is, flicker of confusion about casting sometimes. I was just looking for the best man and woman for the job, and what felt authentic to this story, and these guys were them. I was lucky that they were available and liked it.

Q. This is only your second feature [after The Slums of Beverly Hills], why so long between projects?
Tamara Jenkins: Good question!

Q. Did other things fall apart?
Tamara Jenkins: I did, that was fun. I worked on something for two years, I call it the Bermuda Triangle, and it was something that was through another producer so I didn’t own it. But it didn’t work with us. It was about the life of Diane Arbus, which eventually became another movie that had nothing to do with me. I never saw it, I don’t know anything about it, and I didn’t want to see it. I just spent two years… that was a very unfortunate thing. It taught me lessons in lots of ways, whereas this was my own thing, it wouldn’t be taken away because it was mine. That was an important lesson. I think that when I made my first film it was the very first time that I was in this world. I had been a performance artist and an actor in theatre and a maker of little tiny black and white short films that won prizes at little festivals. And I was a waitress, but I had never interfaced with the world of commerce. I think that making my first movie was very startling. Not like they were all big meanies or anything, but I wasn’t a natural at the business of moviemaking. I feel like I’ve gotten better at that as I’ve aged.

Q. What’s next?
Tamara Jenkins: I’m writing. I have a notebook but I’ve been travelling round with the movie, so my writing habits aren’t very good at the moment. I’m at the pre-natal stage of writing something.