Screenwriter Peter Hedges shares secrets of the trade

Peter Hedges, the writer of What's Eating Gilbert Grape, has just written and directed his first film, Pieces of April, currently in theaters. The Daily recently had a chance to chat with Mr. Hedges about his thoughts on his new film as well as the subtle humor and human comedy he hopes audiences will find in this film.



Tufts Daily: [Pieces of April] is your directorial debut?

Peter Hedges: Well I've directed theater before.

TD: So your background is in the theater?

PH: Yeah - I trained as an actor. I was in a ton of plays as a kid and as a young man, and then I moved to New York and I started a theater company ... and I wrote plays for them. Basically what would happen is I would call them up and say, "Who's available?" I found a theater we can rent for cheap, and they'd say "we're available, I can do it" and then I would write a play for them based on the fact that we'd put a deposit down on a theater. SO in the early days it was just about making anything. Now as I get older, I don't want to just make anything...I want to make something.

TD: Did you direct in addition to writing?

PH: Well, I directed my own plays.

TD: Do you find it difficult to direct your own material?

PH: No, I love it. I mean the problem is that you sometimes might use the directing to fix problems in the writing. I found in my early plays, they worked if I directed them but they didn't work if someone else directed them and that's why I had to stop directing them. I realized that I could make them work but I wanted to make things that could work without me directing them. That said, for years I wanted to direct a film, so I looked a long time for a story that I felt that only I could tell, or that I could tell better than anyone, but in order to get the money for the movie to be made, the script had to be strong enough to attract people like Katie Holmes. So getting to direct this movie felt like a return to my early years as a person of the theater because we made the movie with very little money and with a lot of love and that was the same way we had made our plays.

TD: Where did you come with the idea for the movie? Are they from true life experience?

PH: They tend to be a collision of things. I had a great desire to tell a certain kind of story -- where a lot of people were thrown together that wouldn't normally be together. From just a writing standpoint, I wanted to do something a little different, even though people will look at this movie and say its another story about a family from Peter Hedges, who wrote What's Eating Gilbert Grape. I look at it as, yeah there's a family component but there's this whole other component of this building and all these other cultures colliding, which is something I have never done before. So there is a lot of newness to it too.... When [my mother] passed I realized that the great life isn't necessarily a life where you achieve everything you've set out to do, because she didn't finish everything she wanted to do in life. But one of the gifts she gave me was this kind of renewed determination to look at my own life and think about what I haven't done that I really need to do in order to feel like I lived a good full life. The one thing that I could definitely think I haven't done is write and direct a film. And if that movie could not be her story and my story but be a tribute to her then it would be a way to make some kind of meaning out of something that seemed devoid of meaning

TD:You spoke about the film as a human comedy, was that a conscious effort to make the humor kind of subtle?

PH:It's the kind of humor I like in a movie -- its human based. The humor needs to feel like it is born out of the situation, that I'm not trying to write jokes. And I feel like I'm almost ready to publish a book or shoot a movie when that kind of humor appears in the story. There are very few situations in the world that I can imagine where there can't be more humor, but I don't want there to be laughter at the expense of the characters, and the easiest and cheapest form of humor, as I see it, is the reductive humor where you diminish the people - you make fun of them, so is it possible to laugh with characters, instead of at them.

TD: Going back to that Catch-22, do you ever feel like there is commercial pressure put on you by producers so that you have to make artistic compromises?

PH: There are when you write the big movies. On this movie, there was pressure to write a big scene at the end. Yeah there's a lot of pressure - if someone gives you 10 million dollars...I am very interested in them not losing it. But at the same time I am also not interested in making a movie that violates what the movie wants to be about. I think that in the big commercial movie world there is a real fear of characters being unlikable. What I found out is that I want to write characters that I love or at least that I understand, but that doesn't mean they have to be likeable. I'm on another kind of mission to make movies about characters that are human...People who are sweet suddenly become very mean and people who were horrible people suddenly become loving...I want to make movies that seem real, where we see people at their best and at their worst.