In Julianne Moore's new movie, "Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio," Moore fills the role of the 1950s suburban housewife. How, then, does a director from New York who calls herself "a middle-aged menopausal broad" identify with Moore's character, Evelyn Ryan?
First-time director Jane Anderson worked with Moore and Woody Harrelson, who played Evelyn's alcoholic husband Kelly, on a film that celebrates the independence of the stay-at-home mother. With ten children and a husband who spends his paycheck at the liquor store, Moore's character single-handedly supports her family by entering ad-writing contests.
Anderson adapted the screenplay for the movie from the nonfiction memoir by one of the Ryan children, Terry "Tuff" Ryan. The Daily sat down with Anderson to discuss the unique point of view she brought to the film.
Question: Julianne Moore's and Woody Harrelson's characters both have very extreme personalities in the film as an eternal optimist and as an angry alcoholic, respectively. How did you make these characters believable or likable for the audience?
Jane Anderson: It's a very delicate line all of us were walking. All of us who are urban and artistic and consider ourselves sophisticated make the assumption that optimism is linked to naivete I was like that; I lived in New York... So I always equated art in the intellectual world with darkness...The older I got, and then when I became a mother, I found that way of life very, very exhausting, and it didn't serve either my family or my art.
Julianne Moore did such a brilliant job in balancing the intelligence with the insistence of seeing the world through rose-colored glasses. You can see her actively deliberating, deciding not to go to the dark place, and that's what saves the film and her character from being shallow.
Woody [Harrelson] did the same thing on his end. He showed the tenderness in that poor beaten man's heart. And how does it end? Does he take over with his doom? No, she laughs at him. The power of laughter is so enormous ...
So I follow the Evelyn Ryan way of life, which is very strong. She never let Kelly walk over her. She was clear, she was strong, she was decisive, but she was compassionate. It's the only way to get through this life.
Q: Was the Evelyn Ryan school of thought what drew you to the project?
JA: [Nods] And also I'd never seen a story about a housewife that was heroic. In our post-feminist times, as someone who grew up in the feminist era, I accepted the premise that staying at home was wrong and oppressive and a bad thing to do.
But to read about Evelyn Ryan who was intelligent and knew how to work the advertising system and always kept her brain alive and actually enjoyed her life and had no regrets, that's what attracted me to this story. I'm interested in characters with no regrets because my objective is to live a life [where,] when I'm an old lady on my way out, I want to know that I've lived my life and even the bad stuff that's happened to me I have no regrets about.
What I found was that any nasty turn of events that ever happened to me always led me to something better, and that's what Evelyn understood. That's what you start to get when you're a middle-aged menopausal broad. Nothing is bad. That's Buddhist as well; you observe what's happening to you. It is what it is.
Q: What was it like working on a true story? Did you feel that your creativity was limited and that it was harder to follow the guidelines?
JA: It is always hard, especially if you like the people you're writing about. At the beginning I felt like I had a lot of responsibility to Terry Ryan...It gave me a degree of writers' block, and my first draft wasn't very good. When you're writing true stories you usually write a crappy first draft that just gets the facts down, and then you give yourself permission to be an artist and give your interpretation to it.
Q: What struck me was that the title of the movie brings the focus to the contesting and prize-winning aspects of the film. Is that really the main point of the movie though?
JA: No, the main point of the movie is this; the premise for the film for me is that pain is inevitable but suffering is an option. Early on, [producer Robert] Zemeckis and I talked about the fact that we didn't want this to be a film [in which] the end is "Yay, they won!" It could have been just a very ordinary sports film structure where the whole film is about the winning, where that's the end and that's the goal, but it isn't.
