BOP Interview: Lawrence & Meg Kasdan
By Ryan Mazie
April 26, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Now he is back in the director’s chair, his wife of 40 years, Meg Kasdan, by his side with their co-written film, Darling Companion. The movie is about what happens to a marriage when the husband (Kevin Kline) loses the dog that the wife (Diane Keaton) loves more than him.
Unlike his previous films, Darling Companion was not made with studio support. “July 4th, two years ago, we met a woman who said she would put up the money,” said Lawrence Kasdan who took the time to sit with me at the Four Seasons, with Meg sitting to his right, “From the time we met this woman ‘til the time we were in production was two months… The Friday before the Monday we started, it was not certain that we had Diane Keaton. If you’ve made a student film before, it doesn’t change. It’s all up in the air. It’s crazy. It could fall apart at the last minute.” Luckily for the Kasdans’ everything clicked. “We just flipped,” said Meg, speaking about the film’s impressive cast, which includes Richard Jenkins, Dianne Wiest, Sam Shepard, Elisabeth Moss, and Mark Duplass.
The couple talks about the inspiration for the story, family, the importance of a good score, and Whitney Houston.
To start things off with the basics, where did the inspiration to write this movie together come from?
Meg Kasdan: The inspiration was that we rescued a dog [Mac] from a shelter about seven years ago. A year and a half after that, we took [Mac] to Colorado. We had to leave town briefly to go to a wedding so we left him with a friend of ours. She took him for a hike and a mountain biker startled him and he bolted. She ran down after him and could not find him. … We came back and we ran radio announcements, we looked in shelters, we put posters up, we did everything we possibly could think of to do to get this dog back, but he didn’t show up... We thought, “No way he could survive.” The weather had been terrible with storms and thunder and lightning and this was a city dog who had never experienced that kind of environment… We went back to Los Angeles without him, and that afternoon he showed up on a trail. A woman saw him, she was with her dogs, and now he is back.
So it is very autobiographical then?
Lawrence Kasdan: A lot of the incidents are from life. We’d like to think that the relationship is not from real life (laughs). I’m sure I would never be so self-absorbed.
MK: And Larry did not lose the dog.
So what’s it like to have a film that begins within your own reality and then create fictitious characters around that?
LK: I think everything is sort of like that, even things that don’t appear that way. When I made Silverado, it was about the movies I loved growing up, but it was also about friendship and having adventures with friends and going out into the wild and making up your own rules. Those were things that I had been doing when I was growing up in West Virginia and I loved Westerns. I think this is true with all of the movies I have made – they all come from real life in some way or another. Otherwise you are not driven to make the story work.
Now, when you are writing a script like this, do you have specific actors in mind? Are you writing in their tone of voice?
LK: Not for this movie. Even Kevin [Kline], who I have worked with a lot, we weren’t really thinking about him when writing it. I always wanted to work with Diane Keaton, Dianne Wiest, Richard Jenkins…I put him in his first movies 25 years ago. These were people I idolized.
MK: We were trying to write parts that people would want to play. That’s how we thought of it. Giving each part some richness so we could get good actors to commit to it. Our dream came true. We got everybody we wanted.
LK: …When you admire people and you just want to work with them and then to hear them do your stuff and to have them respond very enthusiastically when they read the script – that’s all you are hoping for.
Someone like Kevin Kline seems like someone who could improvise an entire scene without blinking an eye. Are you someone that is open to improv like that or are you a by-the-script writer/director?
LK: I used to talk about sticking to the script. I had a lot of success with people in the beginning. I thought it was coming from people sticking to the script. But, my ideas have loosened up a bit over the years. What I really believe and I have always believed is that improvisation is what actors do every single time they open their mouths. They may be speaking my lines, our lines, but what they do is bring life to it. They find the rhythms and new meanings in it. So I consider every single performance an improv.
Your previous films like The Big Chill and Grand Canyon are ensemble pieces where the characters aren’t blood related, but they end up feeling like a family at the end. With Darling Companion, they are a family from the start. So how does the writing dynamic change when you are writing about a real family as opposed to a group of characters?
LK: I make so many ensemble films where there are a lot of characters and not one protagonist. And the result of that is you see a family forming and falling apart. Even The Accidental Tourist, which is based off of a wonderful novel by Anne Tyler, is really about the main character’s family falling apart and how he has to form a new one with Geena Davis. Silverado is absolutely about families trying to get together and new families forming. I think it is a major thing for me and a major interest for me. Here we obviously have generations, as you say, dealing with each other, which is always complicated.
I was wondering how your opinion on family over the years has changed the way you see it.
MK: We have two sons and they are grown up. We have a grandchild. I think that experience, of raising children; of having them go out in the world and having them start to form their own families, is central in our lives. Family is a reference to us in every conversation.
LK: When you have children, your life changes forever. Something really rich and wonderful comes into your life. And you have fear. Fear is a concern for something beyond yourself. It starts when you fall in love with someone and are committed to them. But you know that marriages fall apart, people do separate. But once you have a child, that connection is never broken and you feel responsible. You never have peace when you have a child. You always ask, “Where are they?” Even when they get to be 30 years old, he is still your son. Our oldest son has a little boy and they are going to have more and right now we are very involved with the next generation. “Where is he?” (laughs).
You see that in this film, with the grandkid he doesn’t want to let go of. So it is clearly from your heart.
LK: Yes, it is. Very personal.
MK: And we have a lot of friends all around the country since our time at the University of Michigan. And we have kept in touch with them. And now everyone is starting to have grandchildren. The first thing we say when we talk to them is, “How are your children?” We send pictures of our grandchildren, back and forth, it’s huge.
LK: People who don’t have any kids find this extraordinarily boring (laughs). They don’t want to see the pictures necessarily or hear about it. But for the people in that age, it becomes just so important. It’s exactly the renewal you are hoping will come. As your own life peaks, you see this whole new life. So the generations are kind of a reminder of the cycle you went through.
Your films have a lot of music in them. The Big Chill and The Bodyguard sold millions of albums combined. Is that something that influences you while you are writing or does that aspect come afterwards?
LK: I love music. On The Big Chill, Meg was actually the music coordinator.
MK: It was a fun job (laughs).
LK: That album has sold seven million copies.
MK: Larry has worked with James Newton Howard many times and his contribution to these movies is gigantic.
People don’t realize what music can do for a film. The score for Star Wars is almost a character in itself.
LK: It is everything. If you turn off the music while watching a film, you see it very differently. … I am writing a script right now for a thriller and I often come to a spot and I’ll write-in, whether it will be in the final screenplay I do not know, but for my own benefit, it says, “music begins here. Music plays over, plays over, continues to play, music ends,” because it is so much a part of how I see these things.
MK: But that is also a note to James who is a good friend of ours.
With all of the craziness aside, is there a memory of Whitney Houston you’d like to share? (ed. note, this interview took place on April 6th, two days after the coroner’s report was released)
LK: I had very little to do with her at that time. We were making Grand Canyon which we had written together. They wanted me to direct The Bodyguard, but I couldn’t do both things so I produced it. It was my original script and they pretty much shot the script I wrote in 1975. I was around somewhat and Whitney was always delightful with me. It was a good period in her life. Kevin was very protective of her in a great way. She had no idea what she was doing acting wise and he helped her a lot. I’m not crazy about the movie, because I wasn’t crazy about the way it was directed, but the rest of the world went crazy for it. It was twice as big as it was overseas as it was here and it was huge here. In adjusted dollars, I saw recently that it made something like $700 million. So it was nuts. I am sure if I directed it, it wouldn’t do as well (laughs).