Q&A: Tamara Jenkins
by Mina Hochberg
November 30, 2007
Until this year, director Tamara Jenkins was starting to look like a one-hit wonder. When her first feature film, Slums of Beverly Hills (starring Natasha Lyonne and Alan Arkin), came out in 1998, critics and fans hailed her refreshingly honest comic sensibility. But instead of sating her audience with a follow-up, Jenkins retreated from the spotlight, dabbling in theater and essays while working on a Diane Arbus biopic that never saw the light of day.
Eight years later, Jenkins has emerged with The Savages, which is just as raw, unpretentious and darkly funny as her rookie project. It's also clearly the work of a more mature director. While Slums concerned a teenage girl adjusting to boobs, boys and Beverly Hills, Savages plunges you into the story of a grown brother and sister forced to confront mortality when their father develops dementia. It stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney in one of her best performances since You Can Count on Me. Recently, we spoke with Jenkins, who hopes not to make eight-year hiatuses a habit. — Mina Hochberg
You really capture the drab ambience of nursing homes. What kind of exposure did you have to nursing homes before the movie?
I had two of my own experiences with family members, my father and my grandmother. Both of them at the end of their life were in nursing homes. They both had dementia from different illnesses, so it was something I had a firsthand emotional experience with. And then I live around the corner from a nursing home in the East Village, and that became a sort of model for the nursing home in the movie.
A lot of movies portray death as either grim or sentimental. Did you want to present a more nuanced, realistic experience of people coping with death?
I definitely wasn't interested in a sentimental portrait or a sanctimonious portrait or a maudlin portrait. It was really important to be blunt and honest about it, but I think inherent in that is this sort of humor that courses through the movie simultaneous with the tragedy. Sometimes when people are ill-equipped to deal with such a primal situation, there might be this stereo occurrence of humor that's happening at the same time.
Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman's characters cope with death in two totally different ways —
They cope with everything in totally different ways.
That's true. How would you describe their respective attitudes toward death?
I like the idea that there were these two people that were brought up in the exact same circumstance, a family, but they both reacted to their upbringing in completely opposite ways. He's a brutal realist, an academic. And she's, I don't know, an emotionalist — I know that's not a real word — and an artist and slightly less able to be as blunt as he is. She comes at things from the side, not so head-on.
Is it a coincidence that the man is the more stoic one and the woman the more emotional one?
I mean, I wasn't thinking, "Okay, this is the gender divide," but I guess it's true. The irony of course is that John's character, although he presents himself as this tough rationalist and this Brechtian scholar, is incredibly vulnerable. We come upon him crying twice in the movie. You start to realize that all of that intellectual, practical approach is really some kind of armor.
Did making this movie affect how you deal with death?
It certainly hasn't made me the expert. But the kind of contact I've had with people when they share their experiences, that's been very profound. People don't really talk about [death]. Maybe they go off and deal with it quietly — someone disappears from the office for two weeks and then they come back and everyone's like, 'Oh, you know she had to put her mother in a nursing home.' It's this thing that happens on the sidelines, and when people talk to me about their own experiences, I like that it's created a sort of dialogue. When I went through my own experience with my father I was pretty young. He was eighty-five and I was thirty-five, and I remember it being very lonely because none of my friends were going through it. Now I'm forty-five and lots of my friends are having to contend with this stuff. Anyway, I think that maybe a feeling of community is nice and comforting.
Were you nervous about directing after eight years? Were you afraid you might have lost your touch?
Yeah, I guess. I think you're always nervous when you're embarking on making a movie, period, because each offers its own unique set of problems. But I felt very confident about the script. Also, I had been disappointed professionally so many times that by the time I came to this script I was incredibly focused and driven by disappointment. You know what I mean? The way that can fuel you and make you very clear about what you want.
You must have been ecstatic when you got the go-ahead.
I was in physical therapy because I have this rotator cuff problem with my shoulder. I just was feeling so defeated, like my life was just a series of little exercises for my rotator cuff, and then there was my producer calling me, letting me know that Fox said yes. There [had been] so many no's I just couldn't believe it.
Why were you getting so many no's?
We'd send the script to a financier or a studio and from the first round of executives we'd always get a really good response. "Really good characters, interesting subject matter, very relevant, something we don't usually see." It'd just be this very positive report card. And then they'd send it upstairs, whatever upstairs meant, and then there'd be silence and a couple days later I'd get an email that said they passed.
Will we have to wait another eight years before we see a movie from you?
Then I'll be in a nursing home. I hope not, that's a long time. I'm gonna try not to make that the case.
©2007 Mina Hochberg and Nerve.com