It’s a painful moment when Jennifer Aniston turns to her overly good-looking boyfriend (Scott Caan) and says, “Are you just stupid?” In the movie Friends With Money, she’s playing a lonely, well-meaning but good-looking and talented Los Angeleno whose heart gets trounced on by handsome studs and she just keeps going back for more.
It’s a particularly more painful moment to realize that this movie was being filmed right in the middle of the announcement of the very public break-up of Aniston and her handsome hubby Brad Pitt in January 2005. She has become the public persona to feel sorry for, and this upcoming film is only going to add to that perception. Some of the dialogue seems to be a window into what she and Pitt may have actually said to each other.
The cast members protect their famous co-star, and they all understand why she’s hardly doing any press to promote this little intimate indie from Sony Pictures Classics being released in April, but they all seem willing to talk about how the former Friends star handled the filming during one of the toughest times in her life.
“She was charming all the way through,” said Aniston’s co-star Catherine Keener. “We all know what it’s like to have our hearts broken, we all had our share of references for some of the people depicted in these stories.”
Keener plays a screenwriter who works with her husband (Jason Isaacs) and their marriage is about to break up over a second story bedroom being added to their house. Frances McDormand portrays a successful fashion designer who won’t wash her hair and has a husband (Simon McBurney) who everyone thinks is gay. Joan Cusack plays a woman with a ton of money whose husband (Greg Germann) is now running her family’s business. Aniston is a school teacher who felt inferior to the kids she taught in Beverly Hills because they all drove better cars than hers, so she’s a maid, and one of her clients is a schlub played by Bob Stephenson.
The ironic parallels of Aniston being the sole single lonely girl who’s struggling to overcome a major heartbreak, and whose true love has left her for another woman, is uncanny (if we actually need to recap her whole real-life brouhaha for you, you might try Googling “Brangelina” for a full history). In reality, though, things seem to be looking rosier for Aniston than her down-and-and out film character: she appears to be getting happily involved with comic screen start Vince Vaughn, and then there’s the other fact that although her character lives hand-to-mouth, the actress’ personal wealth is perhaps greater than all the other cast members combined.
“I’ve been where Jennifer’s character has been, pretty close to being destitute, but of course she’s more like my character in real life,” said Germann, best known as attorney Richard Fish (“Bygones!”) of TV’s Ally McBeal.
Particularly nervous about working with Aniston was Bob Stephenson, who plays the geeky guy and has a sex scene with her in bed. “Brad and I did a couple of movies together, and it was completely awkward, but she was a pro through it all, she is a really great actress,” said Stephenson, who worked with Pitt in Se7en and Fight Club. “I could totally identify with her character, especially in the scene where you go out to dinner and divide up the bill and you know one person can easily pay for it all without any trouble, and the other person, just their share is their weekly food bill.”
In the film, he’s paying Aniston to clean his toilet for her role in the film. “She has no entourage, except security guys, but even during the whole announcement you would never know on set,” Stephenson added.
One major distraction on the set was the paparazzi constantly haranguing Aniston and sneaking into the filming to take her photo. They chased the actors when filming on Venice Beach and in other very public locations, and they sneaked onto the closed sets. McBurney, who plays the suspected gay husband, was doing a scene with Aniston and when she had a stiff neck gave her a neck rub. “They came in to tell me the next day that my picture is in the tabloids giving massages to Jennifer Aniston! That’s a crazy life she has to lead.”
Jason Isaacs, who’s part of the screenwriting couple that’s breaking up in the film, said, “I can’t imagine my wife and I working together so closely like that. We can’t even decide on a restaurant together… Jennifer is good with her job, and it’s great that she can become a character and forget about all the other stuff going on around her in her life.”
When Nicole Holofcener wrote the role, she obviously could never imagine that Aniston would be going through some of the same heart-wrenching moments she wrote for the character. “She kept it separate, but Jennifer was vulnerable, she allowed her emotions to come into the role,” the director said. “My job was to say, ‘less, less.'”
Keener, who is the writer/director’s longtime friend and alter-ego, and has been in all of her films, said Holofcener “writes in a way that’s completely understandable, I know the characters, and I know her. That’s quite different from like when I read Charlie Kaufman and don’t what language he’s even writing in,” laughs Keener, who starred in the Kaufman-penned Being John Malkovich.
Read our interview with director Nicole Holofcener.
Friends With Money opened in a limited release April 7.
