Reel life: 'Meddler' creator talks truth, mom and grief
Actress, writer, director Lorene Scafaria, 37, is best known for her bitey adapted screenplay to “Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist.”
In 2012, Scafaria, Lemont native Diablo Cody, Dana Fox and Liz Meriwether formed an award-winning writing group called the “Fempire.”
Scafaria's second directorial effort “The Meddler” hits theaters this weekend, based on her own mother, Gail, dealing with the death of her longtime husband Joseph.
Q. Watching Susan Sarandon playing your mom reminded me of Jimmy Stewart's beneficent Elwood P. Dowd in “Harvey.”
A. I love that! I was in that play in high school. That's funny. I started writing the screenplay in 2010, a month after my mother officially landed in Los Angeles and got herself an iPhone and started calling me on it a lot. I've always thought of her as a really fun character.
Q. Your movie really pulses with something personal and authentic. Did you mean it to be this personal?
A. I didn't know how personal it would get when I first started writing it. I thought of it as this great character study. But I wasn't sure if she would be solving crimes or be in a film noir or what it was going to be. The more I wrote, the more personal it got, until I realized I have to be honest now.
Q. How so?
A. I decided just to talk about grief and how hard it is to deal with something like that, when you're really close to someone who's gone, and the dynamics shift and you have to get used to your new roles in life. I knew I wanted to write about that.
Q. You sure don't cut your own character, the daughter, any slack.
A. It's funny, because as I was writing this, I realized I was the antagonist! I wanted the audience to feel what the mother felt. Also to see where the daughter is coming from, but I wanted to really go behind the curtain with the mother.
Q. Speaking of your mom, were there any moments when writing “The Meddler” that you felt yourself going too deep and personal?
A. She's a pretty open person. She's happy with the portrait of her. She is so selfless and generous that she doesn't even think of this movie as being about her. She thinks of this as being a movie about my father, as in “It's a Wonderful Life.”
This movie will live on in a way, and I think she appreciates that. She's having the time of her life right now.
Film critics notebook:
• “Mad” will be shown at the Midwest Independent Film Festival starting at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 3, at the Century Centre in Chicago. It's a comedy about “the missiles of resentment” that a matriarch and her two daughters fire at each other. A producers' discussion precedes the movie. Go to midwestfilm.com.
• Join me and film historian Raymond Benson when Dann & Raymond's Movie Club presents “Great Child Star Performances” at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, May 5, at the Schaumburg Township District Library, 130 S. Roselle Road, Schaumburg. Free admission. Go to schaumburglibrary.org. Clips featuring Elizabeth Taylor, Hayley Mills, Jackie Cooper and 12 more!