Focus Features

Welcome to the world of people, places, and things related to our upcoming film Beginners. This blog is very much inspired by the decorum-busting enthusiasm, the deep belief in sharing, and the all-embracing inclusivity of Henry Rollins’ amazing radio show Harmony In My Head. If you haven’t heard it, you must check out this radical whole food of a show; always geared to turning people onto things he loves, with a surprising and subversive lack of any kind of cultural attitude or punk’s I-know-of-things-more-rare-than-thou judgment. He’s a real self-taught student of music, and truly eclectic, the kind of eclectic that wakes you up to how strange life is. Every time I listen to the show I feel flush with possibilities of the world. And indeed, his show is the kind of thing that kept me warm during the long dark nights when I was dispirited, unhinged, and had lost my way while trying to get this movie written and made. I struggled a fair amount with how to make a film that is so personal. The looseness, aliveness, and wildness of Mr. Rollins’ energy gave me one model (of many I need) of how you could be personal, concrete, specific and also reach out to people – and have the nerve to invite a bunch of strangers along and to keep in mind how much we share. Even our innermost mysterious parts, like sex and dying and falling in love, believing in things and not believing in things, things that feel so confusing to ourselves how could we possibly share them? Mr. Rollins’ show creates the kind of atmosphere where I say “well... I want to be the kind of person who at least tries.”

So, in this blog you’ll find entries on the films, and books, and music, and graphics, and photography, and people, and moments, and events, some years, some jokes, some dogs and some rivers that fed my writing of Beginners. We’re also gonna go to some of the locations where we shot, we’ll talk to our dear cast and crew, I’m gonna do some drawings you can download; basically, I’m gonna share the things that keep me happy and excited, the heroes (the big kind and the small kind) that made me say “Lord, please let me make something that is half as good as that!”

Photo of me drawing on set by my much-more-than-an-assistant Sarah Soquel Morhaim

I included this photo in my first e-mail to Mélanie Laurent. I thought it would be good if she knew who she was talking to from the get-go. She informed me that she was more of a cat person, and so, ever accommodating, I sent a more appropriate photo in the next e-mail.

So far so good.

I adore this film, and his previous film Father – the two are sort of a dyptych – they share actors, characters, and themes. If I tell you it’s about the political history of Hungary during/after WW2 and how that affected the love of a couple who knew each other from childhood, you might want to take a nap instead, and that doesn’t get to how groundbreaking this is! This film always reminded me to try to be braver in my storytelling, as it’s a river of concrete moments, mostly memories, fragments unexplained and repeated, odd pieces of one’s life. It all builds to a very emotional, sharable, sometimes funny story. Maybe what I love most is its commitment to the mystery and hugeness of the small and concrete. And it showed me how a story built of real personal histories, interwoven with larger histories, can feel magical and strange - not ponderous. Oh, how could I leave this for last; it’s the best film about memory, you experience how fleeting, repetitive, odd, fragmentary and yet totally world-shaping our memories are.

The prosecution is asking Ginsberg to explain/defend his sexually explicit “Love Poem on Theme by Whitman,” and Ginsberg here tells of what he channeled from Walt Whitman...

"Unless there is an infusion of feeling, of tenderness, of fearlessness, of spirituality, of natural sexuality, of natural delight in each other’s bodies, into the hardened, materialistic, cynical, life-denying, clearly competitive, afraid, scared, armored bodies, there will be no chance for spiritual democracy to take place in America."

How amazing is that? In many ways this film is a continuation of conversations this straight son had with his recently out gay dad about relationships. He wanted me to finally stay with someone, and he and I would talk and argue and finally get past the niceties that kept things between us sweet yet flat for so long. I learned a whole lot more about love, vulnerability, commitment, sex, and the confusion that is relationships from my gay dad than I did when he was my straight dad.

My parents were married in 1955, even though they both knew my dad was gay, at a church in San Francisco, just blocks away from the apartment where Allen Ginsberg was simultaneously writing his poem “Howl”. How multilayered, strange, and hard to fix are the options available to different souls at the same historical moment?! So not only is Ginsberg’s “Howl,” and his apartment, and his soul part of the landscape of Beginners, his euphoric intertwining of the personal and the political has always been very inspiring to me. In the 1968 trial Ginsberg goes on to tell the judge...

GINSBERG: "Walt Whitman is one of my spiritual teachers and I am following him in this poem, taking off from a line of his own and projecting my own actual unconscious feelings, of which I don’t have any shame, sir; which I feel are basically charming, actually."

THE COURT: "I didn’t hear that last word."

GINSBERG: "Charming."

PROSECUTOR: "I have no further questions."

For more Ginsberg: Allen Ginsberg, Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958-1996

If you were worried that it was strange, or outlandish, or at least really pushing your own sense of decency to create a film about some of the more intimate, vulnerable-making questions of your parents and yourself, wait until you make a trailer and advertisements for that film! While you tried to show all the humor that came with these unanswerable questions, and how much we all share these emotions, on the day when your trailer appears on Apple, you still might feel Rather Exposed. Simply put, it feels as curious and out of control as a dream, seeing the film broadcast out into the world. Luckily I’m in the very smart and thoughtful hands of the people at Focus. And, even more luckily, so many people have been really kind and generous in their response to it - especially my family. There were many times when it seemed very likely that as much as desperately I wanted it, this film might not happen, and so, it's kinda hard to imagine how it got out of my head and is running around in the world. Like the first time I saw one of our location signs out in the world (picture above) and I thought to myself, "How is someone else making a film with the same title as mine?"

Click here to watch the trailer.

I’m so happy that one of my favorite pieces of music made it into the film and trailer, “Stardust” written in 1927 by Hoagy Charmichael (lyrics written in 1929 by Mitchell Parish). Besides just being so beautiful, with a warmly melancholy feeling, it’s oddly connected to many things I love:

1. Thinking about memory: "Though I dream in vain/In my heart it will remain..."

2. My mom. Born in 1925, she had me late in her life, and “her” music was always exotically out of sync with my 70’s childhood world. I remember the soundtrack to The Sting playing all the time, hence there’s a lot early jazz-rag in the film - Jelly Roll Morton, Mamie Davis, Mr. Charmichael, Josephine Baker, and Gene Austin.

3. The song personally reminds me of “To Have and Have Not” (1944; Howard Hawks, starring Bogart and Bacall). While the song isn't in the film, Carmichael himself plays “Cricket” the piano player. Being a good Depression-era kid, my mom loved Bogie. And so in my family, if Carmichael was in the same room as Bogart, he must be great. It’s also the film where Bogart met Lauren Bacall for the first time, and to my romantic mind this is some of the cleverest flirting dialogue ever performed.

4. Woody Allen’s amazing “Stardust Memories” which features a Louis Armstrong version of the song, and of course the title. This is a gorgeous film, both so real and unreal, honestly sad and funny, funny, funny. Does anyone else act out the “I’m doing my face exercises, it’s important” scene with their loved one?

OK, anyone who hasn’t seen this owes me one. And Mr. Leth, I owe you a whole lot. I kind of think anything I say will not begin to get at why this is a masterpiece, one of my favorite films ever. It’s one of the first things I shared with Ewan McGregor when we began talking about Beginners, and I think the first thing we really bonded over. You may notice that the character Oliver’s dancing style is more than a bit indebted to this film. Strangely, I once very randomly had dinner next to Mr. Leth, years before I saw this film. He was so self-deprecating and unassuming, when I asked him what he did (I know, horrible question) I think he said “this and that” – funny way to meet a future hero.

Again, trying to talk about these gorgeous films is a bit daunting, but then not trying seems a bit chicken. I was late to discover this film, and ended up watching it many times while writing and trying to get BEGINNERS made. It’s hard to say why it became a sweet little medicine for me during hard times, but good things always feel more possible after watching it. I think it’s because the film is so wonderfully misshapen, the story does not progress in anything like a straight line (but it works so well). Most dramatically, there is filmically delicious whole-life-in-20ish-uninterputed-minutes-flashback that occurs halfway through the film. The film does follow a typical gangster story and is based on a David Goodis novel, but it’s like a conversation that can’t stay on course. Even the plot-driven scenes, maybe especially the plot-driven scenes, find a way to meander inside their dramaturgical duties: gangsters talk about wearing women’s underwear while kidnapping our heroes, lovers talk about getting good deals on underwear while undressing, a stranger talks intimately about his marriage after helping a thug come back to consciousness. And then, every once and a while out of nowhere comes an over-the-top narrator that speaks to Charles Aznavour’s character Charlie, telling him to not be shy, not look at her legs, to list athletes’ names as a way to stay calm. It’s as if all the characters are grabbing at what amuses them as they unwillingly perform the requirements of this faux-gangster plot. And maybe that’s what I love the most, and relates to my experiences with my dad’s illness, the sadness and pain that came with it, the hospitals and the whole complicated web of health care you enter. You’re on a ride you can’t control, a ride you all know is going to get nothing but worse, and all you have are the little jokes, little moments of grace where you remember yourself, some absurdist digressions that break everything open, a few glimpses of your old free life along the way. And these little grabs at what makes you happy while the prison guards aren’t looking are your only way of re-claiming yourself in a world (or hospital, or plot) that is the last plot you want to be in. Both my parents were actually very good at this, and Christopher Plummer for reasons I don’t know has deep, deep access to this comic subversiveness. Maybe it comes from growing up and finding yourself during the Depression and World War II and the emotionally repressive post-war America? Maybe it’s just that they’re deeply funny people.

And of course Shoot The Piano Player has the most romantic score created by Georges Delerue. As Henry Rollins would say “If you haven’t heard it, you’re gonna dig it, you’re gonna dig it with a big shovel”. (Did anyone hear his amazing show on February 12 celebrating Abe Lincoln’s birthday?) The “honky-tonk” piano piece that Charlie plays through the movie is one of my favorite pieces of music ever (yes I have lots of favorite things), the happy-sad tone of the lone piano, like the characters in the film, sort of cheerily trots along in the midst of a storm. That tone did really influence our score, and me in general. You can hear a sample in the clip above, immediately after the studio credits.

As I was writing the script I kept a file of things that felt like what I hoped the film would be. Little clues or reminders or signs in the forest that said “the world you want is this way”. Some of these things were obvious, a William Eggleston photo, a Robert Adams photo, but the things that weren’t so directly related to film or photography were often the richest for me. Often, I didn't know why I picked it, and wouldn't question it too much, just stick it in the file. I just looked through the file and came across this bit of rug, I think I got off of fffound or some site like that. Oh lord, this is a beautiful thing no? It’s not that I wanted my film to look like this; borrow its colors or design, but it gets at what I wanted my film to feel like: Dense, unpredictable, heterogeneous, emotionally vivid, like some strange dense bouquet of many elements.