We touched on this earlier, but I'm wondering: What did you dislike about joint custody?

I was told that I was just upset about the divorce and I was transferring it onto something else. But when I look back, I really just didn't like moving back and forth between the houses. My mom's house, like in the movie, was the place where I had my room, and I had grown up, and I just wanted a base, because at that point I was a teenager and I wanted to go have a social life. To have my home keep switching -- it sounds silly, but it was almost the hassle of it that became a huge deal to me.

Especially when you're a teenager and you hate hassles and you want to spend all your time with your friends anyway.

I kept being told the same thing the kids are told in the movie. When they announce the divorce, Walt says, "Why are you doing it this way?" and the father says, "Because I love you and I want to see you as much as your mother does." And on the surface, that's a nice thing to hear. If you told that story to someone, they might say, "That's so great! He loves you and he wants to see you as much!" But it's more complicated than that. Not that he doesn't love him, but there is this weird competitive angle also of each parent getting the same amount out of it.

What I also found interesting about divorce with two parents and two kids, they all share the same thing, but they can't be there for each other at all. So everyone's having this kind of isolated experience with people who are going through the same thing, but nobody can connect to each other -- appropriately, anyway. There's something really sad about that.

That is sad! It makes sense, though, when the dynamics in your family are such that you have to call a family conference in order to have an important conversation [as they do in the movie]! When your parents are ashamed of having those conversations, it teaches you to be ashamed, too. That's why I love that shot at the beginning of the family conference, where the two boys and the dad are waiting for mom to come out of the bathroom so they can begin. You hear the toilet flushing and everyone's all awkward and silent. If that's the sort of torture that surrounds any serious talk about how you feel, of course the kids aren't going to turn to each other and say, "Hey, how do you feel about all of this anyway?" Instead you're up in your room, sorting it out alone.

And there's the illusion that you are kind of there for each other. There's a lot of analyzing why it happened, and saying, technically, all the right things: "I love you, I want to see you as much, it's not your fault." All those things that are kind of standard.

Well, most parents aren't heartless or stupid, so they're going to run down the bullet points.

That's something I became in tune with by writing it -- those things that were said to me then that I still believed at some level, like with your dad and his girlfriend. I still felt that joint custody was better. Even as I'm stripping away all this crap and telling the story of how unhappy a time it was, I'm still believing that certain things were best.

That's the danger of having parents who can expertly rationalize their emotions. You get a treatise, you get this Parental Manifesto that you learn by heart. It takes so long to unearth which ideas are true for you and which ideas or beliefs came from the accepted parental text. Then again, it's not like there's not a lot of wisdom and cleverness in that text, too.

There's a scene with Laura [Linney] and Jeff [Daniels] where he drops the cat off, and they talk in the doorway. I wrote that scene later. When I started writing the script, I really came at it from the kids' perspective, and as I shaped it more and rewrote it, I entered the parents' side as well. I really love watching that scene partly because I think Laura and Jeff are so good in it. It was a real pleasure to cut that scene, because there were four takes on each side, and they gave me such great variations each time, it was such a feeling of making a movie with real actors.

But, at the same time, what I really like about that scene is that I have a lot of sympathy for the parents, and how hard it is and sad it is for them. I can see why they cling to the kids and unintentionally brainwash them with their ideas. I do have a lot of sympathy for why they'd want to involve them in their lives so much and tell them too much, because it must be incredibly painful for them.

Do you feel more inspired to write now, after creating something that's this personal and that you're this proud of?

I do. This movie has been so all-encompassing for the last year and a half, and then what was great was, I was able to co-write "The Life Aquatic" with Wes [Anderson] while I struggled to get this movie made. So it was a great way to also use another part of my brain and do something so different, but also a movie about fathers and family and failure. It was like being able to play in a world that I would never have made on my own. I love Wes' filmmaking and I love that movie, so it was a great way to write, and write in a different way. But to answer your question, yeah, I do feel much more connected to the kind of movies I want to make now.

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