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In the film you do work with young actors like Jennifer Lawrence and Anton Yelchin. Do you find it your responsibility to give them advice like that, although less harshly I would imagine?

JF: They’re not looking for my advice (smiles). I’ve had great experiences with young actors, that’s the great thing about real actors like Jennifer and Anton is that you are seeing something deep. I mean Anton is a really interesting person. He knows more about weird foreign films and Tarkovsky, he reads 600-page books about economics (laughs). Who does that? He’s a very interesting, odd person. … But his interest in [acting] isn’t about waiting for someone to take his picture.

What’s the one lesson you want people to take away from The Beaver as soon as they get out of their seats?

JF: I think that what we finally got to in the graduation speech, which was the one full reshoot of the movie, because the initial one in the script had nothing to do with this one. I didn’t feel as if it worked for the movie, so I cut it out and said, “Unless we can find a speech more perfect for the film, I didn’t want it at all.”

So there wasn’t one at all. And then when we put the movie together, I realized that it was important to bring everything together and to bring Jennifer Lawrence’s character that closure. I think the graduation speech is what the film’s about. That despite the rollercoaster our lives are, the tragedy and comedy that we live inside, and the unfairness of life and the heaviness in which we go through. You don’t have to be alone. That idea sort of is a revelation for people who live the way Walter does in the film or even the way Jennifer Lawrence’s character is in the movie. Including Riley Thomas Stewart, the young son, who is separated from people – the impact that pain has on people sets them apart. There’s no pill to fix it and you probably won’t be okay just because I give you Tylenol. But you don’t have to be alone and that’s enough to save people’s lives.

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