So do you feel that you put your experiences into the story without even thinking about it, and then later you realized, My god, this makes perfect sense in the context of the stuff I went through.

Definitely. This morning someone reminded me of the scene where the dad and Walt are in the car together, and Walt asks his dad if he thinks Sophie, his girlfriend, is pretty, and his dad's like, "Sure. She's fine, but she's not the type I go for." This person said, "I felt like I was watching a child get scarred right there on the screen." And I thought, What a great thing! I guess that is what that scene is about, but in my mind, it was really more about how my father talked to me, and how I heard other kids' parents talk to them. So I was really focusing on the minutiae of the interchange, and it's great to hear it back the other way. I think throughout the movie, I wasn't always aware -- and it's probably good -- of what the impact of a scene might be to other people.

It might have made you self-conscious about revealing some of this stuff, if you knew how completely crazy it seems to some people.

Exactly. But on one hand, if I knew how fucked up it was, I might be afraid to put it down, and then on the other hand, realizing later how fucked up it is is great because I didn't know it was fucked up.

It just makes it more special! I had that experience watching "Election," when Reese Witherspoon's character loses the election and her mom says, "Well, maybe you should've made more posters." I thought it sounded like something my mom would say, and later a friend mentioned that she thought that remark was just devastating.

Yeah! People say, "God, what a dysfunctional family" -- using that term. And I think, Really? Isn't the point that they're not dysfunctional? But I think that's one -- of probably a million reasons -- why it took me a long time to deal with this territory. I didn't think it was unique or universal. I just thought it was boring parents-children divorce stuff.

There are so many times when the parents in your film are way, way too honest. When the dad tells the kids that the mom has been having affairs, and then the mom tells them that she slept with the father of a friend of theirs. How do you feel about this issue of parents being extremely frank about adult subjects?

Well, I think with a divorce, there's this issue of kids becoming companions with the parents in a way. They take the role of the other parent, and I think that's definitely true in the movie with Bernard and Walt. Walt in some ways becomes his new wife. He gets more attention. He's always his father's favorite, but he gets to hear more and when Bernard tells him about his mom's affair, it doesn't even occur to Bernard that Walt hasn't already heard it. I think it's interesting about it being generational -- I haven't thought about it in that way. I think it's tricky, though, particularly with articulate people. In some ways, what's nice about growing up that way is that everyone's taken seriously. But then, on the other hand, there's a burden there, to be let in on things that are probably not good for them to hear.

At the same time, so much is a mystery leading up to a divorce. There are all these secrets going on -- at least in my family and in the family in the movie -- before the divorce that the kids know about but they don't really know, they can't put their finger on it. It comes out in a tennis game. So, in a way, I think it's probably nice for the kids to hear these things because it puts facts to what they're feeling. But at the same time, how can they possibly handle those things? I don't know the answer to that, and it's probably really tough.

I remember that feeling, like all of a sudden everything adds up.

In some ways it's liberating because it's kind of like, Oh! That's why I'm so miserable!

Yeah! But I wonder if it makes you hardened, because you're given information that you have no way of really understanding. My dad used to talk to me about his girlfriends, and it was sort of cool, and I was gonna be on his side no matter what, but it was still strange.

Well, why wouldn't you be [on his side]? It's that thing where in some way, they're bragging to you about their conquests. It's really tricky, because it's so empowering to be brought up to their level. And it's always interesting with families with siblings. One kid has absorbed it and run with it and is the achiever, and the other one is living in the basement and is obese and depressed. I'm fascinated by that stuff. In the movie, Walt has clearly been chosen as the successor, which is, on the one hand, great for him, but if it means succeeding this guy who considers himself a failure, it's a hard mantle to inherit. And then there's Frank, who's not even really considered in the running, and I think that's why Frank acts out in more inarticulate ways. And he's also younger. It's endlessly fascinating to me, looking at families that way -- my own, certainly, but also other people's, and how technically the same parenting has different effects on different kids.

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