Director Don Roos made a major splash in 1998, helming his own indie film debut The Opposite of Sex. But then took a lengthy hiatus after a somewhat unsatisfying experience directing the Gwyneth Paltrow–Ben Affleck romance Bounce.
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!”
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Jason’s character struggles with his sexuality and has a fear of coming out to his dad. It is both funny and touching. Tom and Jason, did you draw on anything from your own lives to infuse your performances?
Arnold: “I remember with my brother, I knew he was gay, my younger brother, and I kept saying ‘I know you’re gay and it’s OK’ He was in denial. I’d say, ‘Well you have a lot of gay friends, talk to me about it.’ We’re from a small town in Iowa, and he was like ‘No, no, no.’ So I let him know that I was hip, I was cool. And I was doing a movie, and he never admitted it, and he came down to the set with a guy, and they had shorts on. And the guy, the boyfriend, put his hand on my brother’s leg, and that instant I knew he was gay. And even though I’d said it a million times, you know, ‘Talk to me, I’m your cool brother,” my heart kind of sank because I thought, ‘Oh my God, people are going to be mean to him back in Iowa.’ And I think that’s probably what [my character] is feeling. When you have a kid, you want people to be nice, you want everything to be smooth. When my brother went home–and his boyfriend was black, too, by the way–they were so confused. The small town just embraced him. They were like “Oh my God, he’s black, he’s gay-boy, come on over.’ So it worked out. ”
Ritter: “As far as I’ve been able to understand from my friends that I went to college with is that it almost seems like Russian roulette when you’re coming out of the closet to your parents. I’ve heard stories of these parents that the kids were most afraid of telling being totally OK with it and embracing them and working through it. And then the parents who are like ‘Oh, well, we love you unconditionally’ going ‘Get out of my house!’ So it’s that kind of thing where you don’t know how your parents are going to react. As much as you love them and as much as you think they love you, there are some people who are tolerant of other people, but once it’s in their family it’s a different thing. He’s realizing this thing about himself, but he doesn’t even want to risk his relationship with his father. I feel like at the beginning of the movie Otis had almost said to himself ‘OK, I guess I won’t be with anyone. Me being with a guy would maybe hurt my dad and make him hate me, so I won’t be with anyone.’ So he’s in this place where he’s stuck, and the lie has created this rift between them and he doesn’t know what to do about that but to keep his dad away, because if his dad looks too close, he’ll see.”
Roos: “When I was writing the script, I was aware of Otis getting beaten up so often, by Jude and his dad, and I didn’t want to do a poor gay boy story. So I wanted to make sure the audience understood: don’t feel sorry for him. He’s happier than you are, losers. That’s what I really wanted to write, because I felt bad about beating him up so much. But then I got a crush on Jason, and now maybe he will be in my next movie, I’m sure.”
Arnold: “[Jason] had a special relationship with Don, that’s all there is to say. There were a lot of crushes on this film. I am guilty myself. Don was wearing a shirt with Jason’s picture on it for half the film. Even though Don wrote it and was directing it, he was very angry, angry at Ramone for kissing Jason.”
Lisa, are you sad you didn’t get to have like a big romantic moment with Tom?
Kudrow: “But I did! We were swimming and kissing in the pool. I think I made out with everyone in the movie. Except Maggie [Gyllenhaal]. And Laura [Dern]. And…OK, not everybody.”
Don, Maggie’s character is a scheming young temptresses who gets a gay man to sleep with her, much like Christina Ricci‘s nastier character Deedee in The Opposite of Sex.
Roos: “That’s true. No one ever bothered to get me to sleep with them. She’s wish fulfillment.”
Happy Endings opens limitedly in theaters July 15.
