Junebug director Phil Morrison
by Daniel Robert Epstein for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

Phil Morrison is the director of the Sundance award winning film Junebug. Morrison first got experience directing with the Upright Citizens Brigade television show on Comedy Central.

When Madeleine [Embeth Davidtz], a British-born art dealer travels from Chicago to North Carolina to pursue a local painter for her gallery, she and her brand-new, younger husband George [Alessandro Nivola] extend the trip to include an introduction to his family: his prickly mother Peg [Celia Weston]; his taciturn father Eugene [Scott Wilson]; his angry younger brother Johnny [Benjamin McKenzie], who has always suffered in the shadow of his over-achieving brother; and Johnny's very pregnant and innocently garrulous wife Ashley [Amy Adams]. Madeleine confronts the difficulty of these two cultures colliding, and discovers the tumultuous outcome as these separate ways of life must coexist.

Check out the official site for Junebug

Daniel Robert Epstein: It’s a pleasure to talk to you. I’ve remember seeing your name on the Upright Citizens Brigade TV show.

Phil Morrison: Junebug doesn’t seem like a very SuicideGirls film.

DRE: We like to cover good films.

So Junebug is obviously a very personal film. You and [Junebug screenwriter] Angus [MacLachlan] have known each other so long. Was it autobiographical in any way for you?

PM: Yeah, that’s what’s kind of weird. Angus wrote the script and he tells me it’s not autobiographical. But my circumstances aren’t different at all from the character that Alexander Nivola plays.

DRE: The big scene that seems to sum the movie up is when he’s singing in the church and his brand new wife just looks really uncomfortable.

PM: Yeah, she’s definitely uncomfortable when he’s praying because she knows him as a Chicago hipster and sophisticate. In fact they met at an art auction.

DRE: They are the kind of people that look down on those who pray.

PM: Maybe, or at least they don’t pray. They’re still very in this particular stage of the relationship where it’s basically sex so they’re really hot for each other and they have yet to necessarily find out everything about one another. They got married really fast and they just want to be all over each other all the time.

DRE: Yeah, it’s amazing how little they know about each other, at least how little she knows about him.

PM: Yeah but pheromones are not to be scoffed at. They are very powerful and a legitimate beginning.

If you have not grown up really in religion, which I did not, religion can be embarrassing. That can be something that makes people uncomfortable, they don’t know how to behave. I remember when I went to my Catholic girlfriend’s house and two nuns were there. I didn’t know what to do or say. It seemed like something had created this embarrassment.

DRE: I understand, because my father wanted to raise us as more Orthodox Jews but it didn’t work. When I brought girls to temple and was wrapping tefillin around my arm. They would ask, “What the hell are we doing here?” and I was like “I’ll tell you later.”

PM: Yeah, it is a standard idea that sophisticated religion is private and personal. Then religion that is communal can be appreciated from a kind of anthropological aspect. For example communal religion in Africa is fascinating. But when you’re in the midst of it and not of it, it can be disorienting. That was what we wanted to look into a little bit.

When George sings that song in church, one thing I think is interesting to me is that Natalie’s reaction after having been really uncomfortable changes when he’s singing. Then she’s really moved by it and part of that is because singing is sexier than praying. Singing is art and that’s something she’s more accustomed to.

DRE: After I saw the movie with a friend and she turned to me and said, “Would you have gone to the artist or would you have gone to the hospital?” That decision seemed to reveal so much about the characters.

PM: I don’t know why she would have needed to go to the hospital.

DRE: That’s what I thought. She didn’t even know the girl.

PM: That scene to me is about George using the circumstance to get some points. Which people can do in relationships where they’re dancing around and needing to stake some ground. But it’s not rational on his part though; part of it is about stuff that he feels guilty about. I think we sometimes punish other people for stuff we’ve done ourselves.

DRE: Right, that’s certainly what he was doing.

PM: Yeah, and so that to me is what’s going on. Because I think that what she’s pursuing in that moment is completely legitimate. It definitely was not meant to indict her for pursuing something that’s really important to her.

DRE: Junebug has quite a few shots that last for a long time, would you do things like that because of time constraints or for artistic reasons?

PM: There’s a lot of ways to handle that. If you don’t have time, you can keep shooting which leads to more coverage. Movies shot on video often seem to be about how much coverage they were able to get rather than the subject matter of the movie. I always like a movie where you don’t feel like the movie is observing something or portraying something or certainly not symbolizing something but that the movie is just something. In the same way with a painting of a landscape, it is still cool because it’s a painting.

DRE: Right, this room could be boring but a painting of this room could be ever so much different.

PM: Exactly, because it is transformed and that feeling of transformation and of experiencing that transformation can be so exhilarating. The same thing with a pop song. You don’t listen to a great pop song about how it feels to make out with someone and think, “That song was so great I forgot I was listening to a song.” The way that people say that the best possible movie is the one where you forgot that you were in a movie. To me my favorite movies are ones where my mind wanders all over the place. The more I like a movie the more I’m likely to start bouncing around thinking about a lot of stuff. Often the less I like a movie the more I’m likely to just watch.

DRE: It was cool to see Matt Besser and Jerry Minor in this movie.

PM: Yeah it was so great of these guys to come down

DRE: Would it have been weird to have Matt Besser, Ian Roberts and Matt Walsh in that scene?

PM: That might have been a little too much. Maybe this is just selfish because that would that have scratched the UCB itch.

DRE: A lot of directors get asked about improv. But you had worked on the UCB TV show and you had great improvisers in Junebug.

PM: As an aside there wasn’t very much improvisation in the UCB TV show. It was sketches which often came out of improv.. But in this movie, you know who’s the big improviser; it was Celia Weston who plays Peg.

Speaking of Besser and Jerry. On the DVD there will be a scene I cut out of three scouts driving to the artist’s house. It’s really good but it ended up not making sense in the final cut of the movie.

DRE: I read that you’ve known Angus McLaughlin since you were born.

PM: Yeah, my Mom says that he held me soon after I was born. She brought me to the community theater where he was in Oliver as a teenager with my brother. I grew up kind of idolizing him.

DRE: Is there anything that he might write that you wouldn’t be able to relate to?

PM: Yeah, it’s possible. But I do feel that I know where he’s coming from. We are interested in the same stuff.

DRE: Where did you first see the UCB?

PM: I saw them at Luna Lounge in New York long before they had the UCB Theater. I saw it and it all made perfect sense. Yet at the same time you’re being constantly surprised. But there’s the kind of surprise where you can’t make heads or tails about something and that’s a cool experience also. Then there’s that weird thing where you just feel like you totally understand it.

DRE: Which videos did you do for Sonic Youth?

PM: There are two videos that I did for them on that DVD that just came out. One is called Titanium Expose and one is for the song Swimsuit Issue. I don’t think of myself as having been an especially good music video director. There are things in the videos that I like a lot. In one Sonic Youth video I got Thurston [Moore] and Kim [Gordon] to make out. At the time you knew they were a couple but you never really got a sense of their couple-ness.

There are videos I really like, such as the one for Yo La Tengo with Bob Odenkirk and David Cross. Then another one I did for Superchunk with David Cross again and Janeane Garofalo. It was fun, but the thing about them was that I was trying to deal with the fact that I didn’t have an especially good handle on the normal stuff that often makes videos good.

DRE: I read you worked for Robert De Niro after film school.

PM: Yeah, I did. I just did whatever he wanted each day. I was like his second assistant. He had this primary assistant who was this great woman who had been with him for a long time and then every year or two there would be someone in my job. When I worked for him, he had just started the Tribeca Film Center so he had a lot going on. I just helped find things out.

DRE: Doesn’t he drink like five espressos a day?

PM: I can’t divulge such things like that. You might be thinking of Martin Scorsese. I do remember that we kept, and I want to make clear, this was not a demand on his part, but just because we knew that he would like it. We kept those Greek diner kind of “We are happy to serve you’’ paper coffee cups in the office for whenever Scorsese came in because he likes to drink his coffee in those kinds of cups.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/interviews/Junebug+director+Phil+Morrison/