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Tamara Jenkins Gets Savage
Oscar-nominated writer-director beats the sophomore slump
Tamara Jenkins directs Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Savages (2007).
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A moviemaker workshops a script through the Sundance Institute, the finished feature gets accepted into the prestigious festival and the critical hosannas start pouring in. Then he or she gets courted by a number of studios, several projects stall and years pass… Soon, the moviemaker is regrettably relegated to the “Where are they now?” files, along with a number of other indie film alumni who sprint out of the gate and then find it hard to get a follow-up made.
In Tamara Jenkins’ case, you’d need to tweak a few peripheral details (Slums of Beverly Hills, her biting bildungsroman of a debut feature, played at both Sundance and the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes); but otherwise, the arc followed the trajectory of an extraordinary talent who got lost in the shuffle. With The Savages, however, the writer-director has more than proven that she isn’t another one-hit wonder. Boasting incredible performances from Laura Linney, Philip Seymour Hoffman and the amazing Philip Bosco, this tragicomedy about a dysfunctional family dealing with the aftershocks of its patriarch’s elderly dementia ended up being one of the more buzzed about titles at this year’s largely lackluster Park City hoedown. It’s the kind of chewy, character-driven movie that used to define “independent” before pop-culture criminals and opportunism took over the party, and one of the recent few that you could call a “Sundance film” without using the term derisively.
Having gone to the festival with a patron already in place—Fox Searchlight had committed to the movie shortly before production began and will release it on November 30th—The Savages didn’t have to worry about wooing potential buyers. But that doesn’t mean that Jenkins didn’t suffer along the way to beating the sophomore slump—or that selling a story about a Brecht scholar and a burnt-out, would-be playwright taking care of their sick dad was filled with bidding wars. But it does speak to her commitment to making the kind of mature, intelligent movies that are more than worth the wait.
David Fear (MM): You’ve mentioned that the film essentially sprung from a single scene…
Tamara Jenkins (TJ): I’d had this scene I’d written which involved a woman calling her brother in the middle of the night, saying, “Dad is running around smearing the walls with shit!” It was just this long back and forth, but it was all very vague. No background or details whatsoever.
So I scrawled this exchange down and that scene sat in a drawer for years. I had no idea what to do with it, but every so often I’d start wondering what the story was with these two people: Is she the emotional sibling and he’s the rational one? Maybe he’s an academic. I eventually pulled the scene out again and started adding things on. It built from there.
MM: It’s the conversation that’s in the movie, right?
TJ: The initial phone call between Wendy and Jon, it’s almost verbatim from what I scribbled down that day, too.
MM: Like Slums of Beverly Hills, this story deals with a dysfunctional family. What is it about that dynamic that fascinates you?
TJ: Besides having seen that dynamic firsthand, you mean? (laughs) I find that the regression you experience when you’re around a sibling to be really interesting; you can end up showing a very petty, childish side of yourself, even if you don’t mean to. It’s almost like Philip and Laura’s characters still think of each as 12-year-olds. “Oh, my uptight brother.” “Oh, my sister who’s always late and is such a drama queen.”
Eventually, as the story progresses, they can see each other as individuals and adults, but that wasn’t even happening consciously as I was writing it. Honestly, it was only as I started getting deeper into the script that I realized that they were moving toward that sense of finally understanding who the other person was.
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This story was published in the Fall 2007 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
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