Peter Hedges is now one of my favorite filmmakers after writing only 2 features and directing one movie. I don't go in for the sentimental garbage. I hate Forrest Gump, You've Got Mail, Stepmom or any movie that tries to warm my heart and makes me swallow some syrupy crap. Those films are shit because they manipulate you.
Pieces of April doesn't manipulate, it merely tells a story so true that it could be anyone from a real downtown punk to a Mid-Western housewife with five kids and a mortgage.
Hedges latest movie is Pieces of April about a downtown NYC artist who is estranged from her family including her cancer ridden mother. April decides to do one last Thanksgiving that she will cook herself. Chaos ensues when the oven doesn't work and when her family is terrified of her neighborhood.
Hedges got his start in the theater and when he wrote the novel What's Eating Gilbert Grape. He also wrote the screenplay for the film version of Gilbert Grape and was nominated for an Oscar for About a Boy.
Pieces of April opens wide October 31st. Check out the website for Pieces of April.
Daniel Robert Epstein:What About a Boy, What's Eating Gilbert Grape and Pieces of April have in common is that they are heartwarming without being sickly sweet. That must be hard to do.
Peter Hedges: Those are the stories I like to tell. An acting teacher once told me that a cello can't sound like a flute. You have to understand your nature. I spent so long trying to be an actor and be people I wasn't that when I found writing I wanted to show people how good actors were. I think I got pretty early on that I like to laugh a lot, tell stories that don't make fun of people, I just want to make movies I want to see and write books I want to read. I suppose it's hard to do but what would be harder to do is write a story telling people things they already know or scoring a movie in such a way to say cry, cry, cry. I've been thinking about this because I'm doing so much talking and that is I understand what I do when I look at works that have irrevocably altered me. Works that made me look at how I live and how I perceive the world. I'm not saying I write like Tennessee Williams or make movies like Hal Ashby but I want to do in my storytelling what those people have done for me. I like stories that make me laugh as much as humanly possible, stories where I recognize myself because the people feel human and complicated. Most people in this world are really trying hard to be decent and good.
DRE: You dedicated this to your mom who passed away from cancer. How was your relationship with your mom?
PH: My mom was very different from Patricia Clarkson in the movie. The thing they have in common is that they both had cancer. I didn't have a relationship with her like April. She's a great mom and I miss her a lot. People really want to know how much of the movie is autobiographical. I've tried to keep a journal in my life and I got utterly bored documenting what happened. It's not interesting to me. I want to have and when I'm living I want to be Peter the person. I got tired of when I'm in an experience like kissing a girl thinking how I would describe this later. I want to just kiss her or be a son to my dying mother. I don't want to be the writer half watching and half living. It's hard when you're a writer not to recognize a good line. I try to spend most of my time being a person. Pieces of April is a work of the imagination. That said I wouldn't have written this story if I hadn't heard of a group of young people who went to cook a turkey and they couldn't get their oven to work and if my mother hadn't gotten cancer.
I often have ideas and I may not do it right away. I may live with it for years. Then five years ago my mom tells me the devastating news that she has cancer. I can't even go into it without bawling. Those years we took care of her she was adamant we go on with our lives. I traveled back and forth to Iowa. She loved that I was a writer and always found every idea interesting. I one day opened up a file on my computer and there were notes for a movie called Pieces of April about a girl in the East Village with an African American boyfriend who went to cook a turkey for her estranged family and the oven didn't work. So she goes around the building trying to find people to help her cook it. It was meant to be a comedy, in my notes it said "Vivaldi with teeth." What really knocked me out is why she is making the turkey is that her mother has cancer. I called my mother and read her the notes. She said, Peter that sounds like a story you are supposed to tell. After she died I wrote this movie.
DRE: Where did the title come from?
PH: It's from a Three Dog Night song. I realized I had bought Three Dog Night Greatest Hits and was listening to it as I write. When it came time to shoot the movie I was always going to use the song Pieces of April at the end of the movie until my producer suggested we have someone write the music instead. I didn't want to score the movie. There is very little music in it. So I decided to be meet my favorite composer Stephin Merritt [of The Magnetic Fields] came in, saw the movie and said he loved it but hated the last song. He said he would write something. He made the song on the thumb piano and I hired him because it made no sense but yet it ended up making perfect sense. He wanted to change the movie to One April Day after his song. Pieces of April may not be the best title in the world but it certainly won't be as maligned as What's Eating Gilbert Grape was. When that came out everyone hated the title, some people wouldn't even go see it because of the title. It's a lot like a baby. Before it's born you hate the name but then you meet the baby and Helmet is the perfect name.
DRE: Do you have any tattoos?
PH: Oh my god. But I sure like April's.
DRE: How did the cast come together?
PH: I come from the theater. I happen to have a great casting director named Bernard Telsey. He has a talent for finding people you wouldn't expect.
DRE: Was there any improvisation?
PH: There was only one improvised scene and that's the opening scene where Bobby wakes up April. I had written a dream sequence where April would gesture at the camera and an axe would come down and chop off the turkey's head. It sounds silly but it was a vivid read. I never could think of why she would be having this dream and we also couldn't find the right size turkey art a turkey farm. We had scenes at the end where Patty couldn't climb the stairs and a biker carries her up and she says this pithy line to him. But I knew when we were filming we would never use it because I knew the minute Patty was determined to get to April she would get there. There are no other scenes we filmed that we didn't use.
DRE: Did directing change your writing process at all?
PH: I think I've probably written every script as if I was going to direct it. I might be able to answer that better on the next film. I wrote Pieces of April to be made for 10 cents. Then they offered me a budget of 4 million dollars. I'm 41 and I have kids to feed so it had an appeal for me but then that all collapsed.
Early in shooting my script supervisor told me that there are a lot of scenes in the moving car and those are really hard to shoot. So I reconceived so that Joy makes the car stop. It was a great solution. The reason I stopped directing my plays early in my career is that I was solving problems in my scripts with direction. So I wanted to get the discipline of solving my story problems with my writing. I wanted to write it so it stands on my own. I wanted my script to be so good that it attracts Katie Holmes, Oliver Platt and Patricia Clarkson to come work for nothing. But then that means the writer has to do his job. Then the director has to solve his own problems.
DRE: How do you look back on What's Eating Gilbert Grape?
PH: Very fondly. It was a hard experience. I had never written a screenplay, Johnny Depp committed because of the book and he wanted to work with Lasse Hallstrm. Lasse is coming to the premiere tonight and I'm going to cry when I see him because he taught me so much. Gilbert Grape was film school for me that I got paid for and yet I almost killed myself 20 times. I couldn't figure out my own novel. I learned economy, how to write scenes in nine words as opposed to nine pages.
By Daniel Robert Epstein
Pieces of April doesn't manipulate, it merely tells a story so true that it could be anyone from a real downtown punk to a Mid-Western housewife with five kids and a mortgage.
Hedges latest movie is Pieces of April about a downtown NYC artist who is estranged from her family including her cancer ridden mother. April decides to do one last Thanksgiving that she will cook herself. Chaos ensues when the oven doesn't work and when her family is terrified of her neighborhood.
Hedges got his start in the theater and when he wrote the novel What's Eating Gilbert Grape. He also wrote the screenplay for the film version of Gilbert Grape and was nominated for an Oscar for About a Boy.
Pieces of April opens wide October 31st. Check out the website for Pieces of April.
Daniel Robert Epstein:What About a Boy, What's Eating Gilbert Grape and Pieces of April have in common is that they are heartwarming without being sickly sweet. That must be hard to do.
Peter Hedges: Those are the stories I like to tell. An acting teacher once told me that a cello can't sound like a flute. You have to understand your nature. I spent so long trying to be an actor and be people I wasn't that when I found writing I wanted to show people how good actors were. I think I got pretty early on that I like to laugh a lot, tell stories that don't make fun of people, I just want to make movies I want to see and write books I want to read. I suppose it's hard to do but what would be harder to do is write a story telling people things they already know or scoring a movie in such a way to say cry, cry, cry. I've been thinking about this because I'm doing so much talking and that is I understand what I do when I look at works that have irrevocably altered me. Works that made me look at how I live and how I perceive the world. I'm not saying I write like Tennessee Williams or make movies like Hal Ashby but I want to do in my storytelling what those people have done for me. I like stories that make me laugh as much as humanly possible, stories where I recognize myself because the people feel human and complicated. Most people in this world are really trying hard to be decent and good.
DRE: You dedicated this to your mom who passed away from cancer. How was your relationship with your mom?
PH: My mom was very different from Patricia Clarkson in the movie. The thing they have in common is that they both had cancer. I didn't have a relationship with her like April. She's a great mom and I miss her a lot. People really want to know how much of the movie is autobiographical. I've tried to keep a journal in my life and I got utterly bored documenting what happened. It's not interesting to me. I want to have and when I'm living I want to be Peter the person. I got tired of when I'm in an experience like kissing a girl thinking how I would describe this later. I want to just kiss her or be a son to my dying mother. I don't want to be the writer half watching and half living. It's hard when you're a writer not to recognize a good line. I try to spend most of my time being a person. Pieces of April is a work of the imagination. That said I wouldn't have written this story if I hadn't heard of a group of young people who went to cook a turkey and they couldn't get their oven to work and if my mother hadn't gotten cancer.
I often have ideas and I may not do it right away. I may live with it for years. Then five years ago my mom tells me the devastating news that she has cancer. I can't even go into it without bawling. Those years we took care of her she was adamant we go on with our lives. I traveled back and forth to Iowa. She loved that I was a writer and always found every idea interesting. I one day opened up a file on my computer and there were notes for a movie called Pieces of April about a girl in the East Village with an African American boyfriend who went to cook a turkey for her estranged family and the oven didn't work. So she goes around the building trying to find people to help her cook it. It was meant to be a comedy, in my notes it said "Vivaldi with teeth." What really knocked me out is why she is making the turkey is that her mother has cancer. I called my mother and read her the notes. She said, Peter that sounds like a story you are supposed to tell. After she died I wrote this movie.
DRE: Where did the title come from?
PH: It's from a Three Dog Night song. I realized I had bought Three Dog Night Greatest Hits and was listening to it as I write. When it came time to shoot the movie I was always going to use the song Pieces of April at the end of the movie until my producer suggested we have someone write the music instead. I didn't want to score the movie. There is very little music in it. So I decided to be meet my favorite composer Stephin Merritt [of The Magnetic Fields] came in, saw the movie and said he loved it but hated the last song. He said he would write something. He made the song on the thumb piano and I hired him because it made no sense but yet it ended up making perfect sense. He wanted to change the movie to One April Day after his song. Pieces of April may not be the best title in the world but it certainly won't be as maligned as What's Eating Gilbert Grape was. When that came out everyone hated the title, some people wouldn't even go see it because of the title. It's a lot like a baby. Before it's born you hate the name but then you meet the baby and Helmet is the perfect name.
DRE: Do you have any tattoos?
PH: Oh my god. But I sure like April's.
DRE: How did the cast come together?
PH: I come from the theater. I happen to have a great casting director named Bernard Telsey. He has a talent for finding people you wouldn't expect.
DRE: Was there any improvisation?
PH: There was only one improvised scene and that's the opening scene where Bobby wakes up April. I had written a dream sequence where April would gesture at the camera and an axe would come down and chop off the turkey's head. It sounds silly but it was a vivid read. I never could think of why she would be having this dream and we also couldn't find the right size turkey art a turkey farm. We had scenes at the end where Patty couldn't climb the stairs and a biker carries her up and she says this pithy line to him. But I knew when we were filming we would never use it because I knew the minute Patty was determined to get to April she would get there. There are no other scenes we filmed that we didn't use.
DRE: Did directing change your writing process at all?
PH: I think I've probably written every script as if I was going to direct it. I might be able to answer that better on the next film. I wrote Pieces of April to be made for 10 cents. Then they offered me a budget of 4 million dollars. I'm 41 and I have kids to feed so it had an appeal for me but then that all collapsed.
Early in shooting my script supervisor told me that there are a lot of scenes in the moving car and those are really hard to shoot. So I reconceived so that Joy makes the car stop. It was a great solution. The reason I stopped directing my plays early in my career is that I was solving problems in my scripts with direction. So I wanted to get the discipline of solving my story problems with my writing. I wanted to write it so it stands on my own. I wanted my script to be so good that it attracts Katie Holmes, Oliver Platt and Patricia Clarkson to come work for nothing. But then that means the writer has to do his job. Then the director has to solve his own problems.
DRE: How do you look back on What's Eating Gilbert Grape?
PH: Very fondly. It was a hard experience. I had never written a screenplay, Johnny Depp committed because of the book and he wanted to work with Lasse Hallstrm. Lasse is coming to the premiere tonight and I'm going to cry when I see him because he taught me so much. Gilbert Grape was film school for me that I got paid for and yet I almost killed myself 20 times. I couldn't figure out my own novel. I learned economy, how to write scenes in nine words as opposed to nine pages.
By Daniel Robert Epstein
missy:
Peter Hedges is now one of my favorite filmmakers after writing only 2 features and directing one movie. I don't go in for the sentimental garbage. I hate Forrest Gump, You've Got Mail, Stepmom or any movie that tries to warm my heart and makes me swallow some syrupy crap. Those films are shit because...
midori:
Rad! An Ocean In Iowa was one of my favorite books when I was a dark depressed teenager.