"Happy Endings" Cast Interviews

Lisa Kudrow

Now, the director--known for his snarky, scheming characters, cleverly intertwining multi-character plotlines and upfront portrayals of gay relationships--is back in fine form with his latest big screen effort, Happy Endings, which stars Lisa Kudrow, Tom Arnold, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jason Ritter, Jesse Bradford, Bobby Cannavale, Laura Dern, Steve Coogan and David Sutcliffe.

Hollywood.com sat down Roos, Kudrow, Arnold and Ritter to talk about the project's happy beginnings.

Don Roos: "This one I wrote in four months, but it took two years to get it made. In the meantime, I'm doing script polishing and production polishing for other movie when they realize that the script isn't where they want it to be and they have, like, six weeks until the cameras roll, and they call me. I do that mostly for money, because I can't live in the way I like to live just directing. We all got paid scale on [Happy Endings], and it's just not where the money is. Not independent film, anyway…It's the rare studio movie where you can talk about the things I want to talk about. You can have gay characters in a studio movie, but it has to be about them being gay, or else they're the sidekick. You can't really talk about the love life of a gay man like I did in The Opposite of Sex. You can't talk about that in a studio movie. It costs so much money, and the studios are corporations that have to watch every penny, so what happens is the movies get watered down and watered down, because they can't afford to alienate that preview audience they test them in front of. There's a whole game that I don't want to play."

Lisa [Kudrow] and Tom [Arnold]'s characters were written specifically with them in mind?

Lisa Kudrow: "Don and Dan [Bucatinsky, Roos' actor-writer companion] and my husband and I would hang out every Friday night. They'd come to the Friends taping and we'd hang out in my dressing room. And so I knew what Don was doing. He was working on a script. And I would get like [excited] "Eeee", and 'Yes, there's a part for you.' I didn't care if it was just like a featured extra, or a part. And then when he was done to his point of satisfaction, he let me read it, and then it fell apart four times before it got made. It wasn't like 'I have something for you', because, in my mind, I know the way studios are even for independent films, that they still need a certain caliber of cast in order to get the film made. And I can't guarantee money back for a studio. Just because Don wanted me to play it didn't mean I would get to."

Tom Arnold: "When Don gave me the script, he said 'I based the character on knowing you personally. There's a lot of you in this, the guy that I know.' And I was reading it with my wife and was kind of like 'What? Where?' Because this guy is very vulnerable: he's 40-something, dating 20-something year old women. And my wife's looking at me like 'Yeah, you're not 28.' And he buys them stuff. Our first date was at Gucci. And I sort of understand that. It's sort of a stereotype. You see these guys with a younger gal, who's in it for whatever. I think if you're smart, you say to yourself, 'What do I have to offer?' From the time we're a young guy til we die, we're dealing with women or someone we want to like us, we open with our A-game, whatever that is. And if you meet a young woman, you say 'How can I help her?' Because that's always my thing: 'What can I do to improve the quality of this person's life so they will like me?' If you have money--and in the back of your mind you're like 'I do know this could be part of it'--maybe that's the initial thing for both of us, because they're younger and I have some money, but maybe it will grow into something real. I've done that before, where I've had a relationship that ended badly--and not even my choice--but down the road six months she had some problems with money, and it's just so much easier to write a quick check. You kind of feel you want everything to be OK for them, even if they were not nice to you. So I do understand that, and those relationships are tough."

Roos: "The character Frank is very much who Tom Arnold is. He's compulsively generous, he's not cynical enough to be on planet Earth. He's very trusting, he has good intentions, and his desire to help people lead him into trouble all the time. He's very generous, affable guy, and that's who Frank is. And it hadn't really been shown to the audience in his other roles, and I just wanted to show people who Tom Arnold really was. Although it didn't make the acting any easier for him. It's hard to play someone, particularly hard to play someone close to yourself."

Lisa, you worked with Don previously on The Opposite of Sex. What was most surprising about your working relationship on this film?

Kudrow: "It was the same--that was the happy surprise. That now that we're so much closer than we were when we were shooting The Opposite of Sex, when we had just met; that it was the exact same fun dynamic and the friendship didn't interfere in any way."

What are the pleasures of working with Don Roos, the director?

Kudrow: "What's great about Don is he watches it, and 'OK, well, that's not working-let's try this. Let's try to stay hot after this happens and not bring it down.' And by just playing with it, and then we'll shoot it all and let's see what we need."

Jason Ritter: "He's amazing. I think that one of the things that separate him from other directors is he really respects actors, and he really feels like actors have something to bring to the table. Other directors, I feel like sometimes [to them] actors are just these annoying creatures that don't do what you need them to, and you've just got to deal with them in order to get the movie made. He said that his directing is 90% casting, and so he said that once he saw what we were bringing, he just let us do our own thing. I've never seen anyone be so loose…He orchestrated everything, but he listened to us. And if we said something, and it didn't fit into his vision, he'd tell us no. But he would really listen, he wouldn't just be kind of patronizing and go 'Yeah, sure that's great, but I still think we're going to do it this way.' He'd go 'No, I don't think that's right because of this.' Or 'Oh, I like that-I didn't think of that. Let's try it that way.'"

And what about Don Roos, the writer?

Kudrow: "Don has this system when he's writing, his hour a day, or just hour blocks of time. No matter what, you're writing. If you want to break off and journal and go back to it. I don't know if Don has anything other than that, if he has some technique for characters, do you know what I mean? He's inspired. He's got a gift, and he's inspired."

Arnold: "Don is very organized in his life, the way he writes. He's got lists of how you can write, and he'll send it to you, the best way to write, the best time of day, how you segment your day so you can have a personal life, so your relationship is good, and very interesting. But he sent us a memo. I assume you got it?"

Ritter: "Yeah! Luckily he had written [the script] so well that you wouldn't even want to improvise during his scenes because everything was there."

Roos: "Otis, that character is very close to me. I certainly was a young man struggling with my gayness, so that didn't seem to be much of an invention. I don't know, the gay male couple [Steve Coogan and David Sutcliffe] reminds me a lot of me and my boyfriend and our conversations, especially that scene where he's saying I'm going to tell you something but I have to be the boss of it. All that was very much lifted from our life. Most of the characters, if you're a writer, they just sort of come to you, you can't really describe where they come from. Not from life, though, not from people that I'm like 'I want to put him in a movie!"