INTERVIEW: Everybody's Fine director Kirk Jones

Everybody’s Fine tells the story of Frank (Robert De Niro), a widower with four children. When they can’t make Thanksgiving dinner, he decides to visit them and so begins a road-trip where he’ll find out that things aren’t always what they seem.

I was reading that you yourself took a road trip for the movie. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Kirk Jones: I was paranoid about the fact that I was English and I was attempting to write a film that had to be set in America and I thought the only way to get around this was to take the trip myself and travel cross country.

And looking back on it, I don’t think I could have written the film without having done that. It was really important to me to get under the skin of the country. I took about 2000 photographs and interviewed 200 people on my trip across and it inspired so many ideas and thoughts and characters in the film.

Everything from looking out the window and seeing the wire undulating between the telegraph poles and seeing these stunning landscapes with these telegraph poles in them which led to this idea that Frank should make telephone wire and help millions of people communicate with each other but is unable to communicate with is own family.

So ideas like that came about. Also just meeting and talking to real people reminded me that making a journey is as much about the people that you meet and the opinions that you’re exposed to as taking pictures for the album. In fact a lot of change that takes place when you travel comes about by talking to other people; being exposed to situations that you wouldn’t have experienced if you’d stayed home watching TV.

So I don’t think I could have done it without the trip. And when I finished the trip I felt just about qualified enough to come back to London and sit and write.

Did you do it all on your own?

KJ: Yeah, it was just me yeah.

How long did it take you?

KJ: I think it was about three weeks. I enjoyed it actually because I’d never travelled too much when I was younger. After I left school, I started working quite quickly, so I’d never done that kind of backpacking thing. And although this wasn’t exactly backpacking, it was just me on my own with a bag trying to get across America, it was good fun.

One of the key themes of the movie is communication. Do you think that people have become more disconnected from each other even though oddly it’s probably easier than ever to stay in touch with people?

KJ: Yeah, I definitely do. And I think we congratulate ourselves on how smart we are developing all these form of communication, ultimately the internet and mobile phones and texting and phone calls are probably a tenth of the cost they were a 10 years so there’s really no reason not to keep in touch.

But because we know it’s so easy, we tend not to do it. I think we’re all inherently bad at keeping in touch with our parents and families and stuff. I suppose it’s because we really find it quite boring.

Because we know that what they really want to know is what’s going on in our lives and actually…it’s a bit like when you come home from school and they ask what you did and you say “nothing”. And of course you did do something but you can’t be bothered to drag it up again.

Maybe by telling your parents what’s going on in your life it reminds you of all the things you don’t like about your life or whatever. I think we’re all quite lazy about that.

But as we get older, you remind yourself that no one’s around forever and one day you might look back and think, I wish I’d kept in contact with my parents a bit more, spent more time with them, or appreciated them while they were here.

So many people I speak to feel that they didn’t appreciate their parents while they were alive and unfortunately they’ve lost their parents, and suddenly they have all these regrets – they didn’t go on holiday with them or they didn’t invite them for dinner or make an effort to see them. So it a big part of the film, communication and I still don’t think we’re very good at it.

Speaking of communication, every parent hides stuff from their children and vice versa. How much do you think we should tell?

KJ: I don’t think that everyone should tell everyone everything because that would be crazy. I think one of themes that comes up in the movie is that Frank’s wife and children didn’t tell him some things because they were protecting him because they loved him and cared about him and they didn’t want him to be worrying about things, so I think that’s quite common as well.

It’s an interesting debate and one that I don’t have the answer to. Some people say you should be honest with everyone all the time but I think that if my teenage kids were honest with me about everything they’ve been getting up to, that would just feel really weird and the same thing with adults and children.

So I think whether we know it or not, edit information that we pass on to other people most of the time because we believe it’s for their own good or for the good of the relationship that you have with them.

At the end of the movie, Frank reveals that he knows a little bit more than he perhaps is letting on to them. Do you think parents instinctively know their children better than their children think they know them?

KJ: I do and I think it’s one of the things that annoys kids and I think it annoyed me when I was younger and it annoys my kids. They think that you don’t know them or they think you don’t suspect things that are going on. When it becomes clear that you do know them and you do read between the lines, I think it does annoy them.

When you bring a child up or when you have a close relationship with the family just like you do with your partner, you kind of know when something’s up. I think instinctively there’s a connection within families.

Was that part of the decision to have that confrontation scene at the end with the kids?

KJ: It was. I could see that there was the need for a scene with the characters confronting each other because there were lots of things the kids hadn’t told him, lots of things he hadn’t said to the kids.

And I thought I could set that around the hospital bed, but that just seemed a bit predictable and I thought actually why don’t we have it in this dream sequence where he’s collapsed and he’s on his way to the hospital and he lives out the scene in his mind where he asks the kids all these questions.

And I like that because kids I think are naturally not shy to be honest about how they feel, they’ll just say it.

And from a dramatic point of view, that interested me much more than playing out the scene with adults because adults are very polite and they structure their sentences and they think about how they’re going to say things, whereas kids just say them and they’re very instinctive, so it made for quite a punchy confrontational scene.

There’s a good line where one of the characters says, “She can’t decide if she likes girls or boys”

Yeah, and that’s exactly how a kid would see it. If the same question were asked of an adult, that’s a five minute response.

Do you think parents never stop seeing their children as children?

KJ: I don’t think…so many people are relating to the subtle technique of just showing a flash of the kids throughout the film and I think when you have kids it’s very easy to remember them when they’re older as how they are when they were younger.

Obviously with my kids, I don’t sit there and imagine I’m having conversations with them but you just look at them now and then and just literally for the flick of a second remember them when they were on a beach someone or in the garden one time and you can’t help but do that.

And of course kids can’t relate to that at all because they haven’t got their own children, they think it’s some kind of silly notion, but they forget that you can remember much more clearly all those years when they’ve been growing up than they can because most kids can’t remember much before they were about 10 or so.

It’s a great cast but was it difficult to portray them as a family because they don’t share much screen time together apart from right at the end?

KJ: Offscreen they felt very good together as a group of four people. A lot of them had worked together before they knew each other, so when I brought them together it was much more like bringing together a group of old friends.

I didn’t want to get distracted by the way people look. I think it’s very common to get hung up on this idea that a stage family has to look a like. But if you look around, you’ll find lots of families who have siblings who don’t look identical.

So I was more interested in putting them together so that they could convey the dynamics within a believable family. So the bossy elder sister was Kate (Beckinsale) whereas Drew was more vulnerable and then Sam Rockwell was a little bit more confrontational as the only son. The time they spent together, they felt good together.

Drew plays the younger sister and she’s a bit more attention seeking. Was that something you want to bring out in her character?

KJ: Yeah, that was the point of her character and I talked to her about that. That she was the one who needed more attention so that’s why she’d gravitated more towards a showbiz career.

I think most actors would accept that the reason why a lot of the ended up being actors is because they’re quite insecure and they like attention basically.

Was there a big difference between working on Waking Ned Devine which was a number of years ago now and Nanny McPhee and then this film? You’ve gone from a relatively unknown British cast to an all-star American cast.

KJ: You know it’s funny, when you turn up on set for the first day it always feels like the same thing. You have a crew around you, you have people you trust around you and you just start working and I don’t think about it too often.

I did get out a lot of De Niro’s films before we started filming and then decided not to watch them because I thought that would just freak me out; I’d turn up on set and just be distracted by who he was, so I was more interested in his life experience as a real father or five kids than I was by anything he’d achieved in his acting career.

So I looked at this as a very fresh project and just tried to be very honest with him and he was very honest with me.

The projects should feel very different because they’re different sizes and different casts but actually that just feel like films.

You’ve had very big gaps between your projects (seven years between Waking Ned Devine in 1998 and Nanny McPhee in 2005). Have you anything lined up next or are we going to have to wait another five years?

KJ: I haven’t got anything lined up in the next month or so but I’m really keen to try to make more films. There are a couple of projects I’m working on myself and a couple of scripts I’m reading.

I never really think about genres but De Niro’s said that he’d like to do something else and I’m really keen to work with him again, so that’s in the back of my mind when I’m making choices.

Everybody's Fine (12A) is in cinemas now.