Lorene Scafaria has had an interesting history as a Hollywood screenwriter. After spending years toiling away on various screenplays, several of which were optioned (including the near-legendary and unmade MIGHTY FLYNN), her sweet, musically based romance NICK AND NORAH'S INFINITE PLAYLIST was produced in 2008. During her quieter times, she dabbled in acting and singing (a song of hers is featured in the Drew Barrymore film WHIP IT).
In 2012, Scafaria directed her first feature, the touching, end-of-the-world romantic-drama SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD, with Steve Carrell and Keira Knightley. Since then, she’s directed several episodes of “New Girl” and continued work on a screenplay that eventually became THE MEDDLER, a semi-autobiographical story about a screenwriter (played by Rose Bryne) in Los Angeles and her mother (Susan Sarandon), who recently moved from New Jersey to be near her daughter after Sarandon’s husband dies. On the surface, the film is about how interfering parents can be, even if it comes from a place of love and genuine concern. But what THE MEDDLER is really about is how different people grieve differently. It’s sweet, charming, funny and often quite moving as we watch these two navigate each other’s lives. It’s in limited release now, and should be expanding across the country soon.
I caught up with Scafaria last week in Chicago, and it was great to catch up with her again four years after SEEKING A FRIEND. In our first interview, she actually mentioned that she was working on a script that was something like a film noir, and it turns out that idea transformed into THE MEDDLER. Please enjoy my chat with Lorene Scafaria…
Capone: After about 10 minutes about watching these two characters together, you begin to realize that Marnie’s meddling is about 95 percent justified.
Lorene Scafaria: Yeah, because the daughter needs help.
Capone: Maybe not so much in the way she’s interfering in her romantic life, but everything else seems pretty justifiable. Was that important to make that clear right off the bat?
LS: Yeah, I wanted to just tell her side of the story. That was what was most important to me. It was so hard to get the film made for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest notes I got over the years was “Can you make the daughter part bigger? Can you make her as big, if not bigger than the mother role?” I feel like we’ve seen that before, but it also goes against the entire point of the movie, which is to change a little bit what a meddler means and to show how much of it comes from a good place and how much of it comes from worry and being a mom. Of course, you don’t have to be a mom to be a meddler.
Mostly, it’s about grief to me and about two people grieving in really different ways. I just wanted an audience to feel empathy for a character that they don't often feel empathy for. It’s so easy to just roll your eyes at this character or dismiss her. So yeah, we’re our worst selves around the people who love us unconditionally. We’re certainly our worst selves in grief , in a way, or we can be. I certainly was. It’s so much based on truth too that it came from wanting to treat my mother the way I think the other people she meddles with treat her. It’s so much easier for other people to appreciate your mother than you in a lot of ways. It was hugely important to me to at least stay on Marnie’s side of the story and understand her fully and to peal back all the meddling to realize how much loneliness there is underneath and obviously grief.
Capone: It did remind you of those people who warn you in advance about meeting their parents, and their parents are fine.
LS: Then they’re great. Exactly. They’re like, “My Dad is just the worst.”
Capone: It usually turns out that the person who warned you is the worst of the bunch. They are the ones that are reacting badly.
LS: Exactly. They’re dying inside.
Capone: This is the movie version of that.
LS: Yeah, exactly [laughs].
Capone: Turning these events in your life, which you said were fairly traumatizing, into a film, was that something you were just like “I have to get this out of me. I have to put this down on paper. Even if it doesn’t get made, I have to write it down”?
LS: Probably, in a way. At first,8 I was really just interested in my mom as a character. I didn't think I was going to get this personal with it. I didn’t necessarily think it was going to be a story about my mom and I mourning my father. I thought “My mom is so funny. She’s such a character moving from Jersey to L.A., finding her way around the Grove, and going to the Apple store. It all just cracked me up. And of course I was aware of the fact that both of us were grieving.
So things she would say where she would say things like, “Basically I feel great. Basically I feel great” just got in my head, and I was like “There’s something interesting happening here. There’s something beautiful and optimistic happening here.” And I wanted to capture that, but it didn’t know if it was going to be a noir film. I didn’t know if she was going to be solving crimes. I didn't really know how personal I wanted to get. I started writing it in 2010, a month after she moved there, and I made SEEKING A FIREND in 2012. So I had the beginnings and the makings of something, but I wasn’t totally sure what it was going to be. Then when I went back to it after SEEKING A FRIEND—and that was weirdly personal for me too even though it was high concept and a totally different story than my true life, it felt weirdly personal. So when it didn’t do that well, I thought “Do I swing the pendulum the other way and write this character study? What do I do?”
As a rebellion, I thought I’m going to get even more personal and see where it goes. Then I just really enjoyed that, in theory anyway, maybe people who are going through similar things will find empathy in each other and realize there’s no right or wrong way to grieve. It’s not a straight line exactly and change what a “meddler” means, in a way.
Capone: You made Lori a TV writer. Did you ever consider making her something else so you could have some degree of just separating yourself from the character a little bit?
LS: Absolutely I did. I also think writing about writers is kind of boring and trite. That’s another reason why I didn't want it to be Lori’s story or from my perspective. But I always loved how my mother viewed Hollywood and views Hollywood. So I wanted to break away from it, but it really felt like part of the mom’s story actually, that she’s experiencing everything in the daughter’s life differently, the same way that my mom is experiencing the movie coming out completely differently. She’s having the time of her life with her friends going, “Aren’t we nuts? Aren't moms fun?” And I’m sitting here stressed out, wondering if it’s going to do well. So I had to serve that part of the story. My mom thinks that when I have a meeting at Warner Brothers it’s like really cool and asks if she can keep my ticket stub. I’m like, “That’s not what it’s called.”
I thought it was so sweetly innocent to see this character—and certainly Susan Sarandon in character—walking onto a set and not really sure what it is or what to think. I like the idea that Lori is writing this sitcom version of her mom and dad, actually, but the version of this story in which dad lives, and it’s like “The Meddlers.” They’re both there driving her crazy, but it’s a completely different thing because the two of them are there. Once that happened and I really liked the idea of Marnie seeing her husband kind of embodied by this actor, I just had to go with it and tell this real L.A. story but through this outsider’s perspective.
Capone: Those are some of my favorite scenes where Marnie is figuring out the landscape. And getting fixated on certain parts of it like the Apple Store. Did your mom have something equivalent?
LS: It was The Grove. The Apple Store did provide her with the phone that she called me on a lot and texted, and now loves emojis, so I felt like the story started there, and that opening scene was always the same. But my mother was obsessed with the Grove. She moved across the street from it, and it became this place to feel less lonely, and certainly a phone becomes this source of friendship. I kept thinking of the phone is the volleyball in CASTAWAY or something [laughs]. It may as well have a name because it becomes your buddy that you have lunch with. So yeah, The Grove for her… I like this love letter to Los Angeles but though my mom’s tourist eyes. I liked seeing the parts of L.A. that for her are the quintessential spots.
Capone: That everybody else just kind of goes by every day and doesn’t notice.
LS: Yeah, or not appreciate. The same way you can walk past her and not really notice. She’s just a person in the crowd there.
Capone: Is your real mom also someone who makes friends with strangers and takes people in?
LS: Yes. That has happened. She didn’t make friends with an Apple Store genius, but those kids are based on people that my mom would take in when I was younger. Anyone with family troubles, my mom would let stay at the house. Sometimes it would work out and sometimes it wouldn’t. She is uncommonly generous. She is so generous to a fault and may go broke from giving it all away.
I think that’s twofold to me. One part of it is that it’s a beautiful way to cope and grieve. It’s a beautiful way to move through life to actually just give to other people and to realize other people are in need and to put your own life in perspective and find a purpose at a certain age rather than sink into the couch which I think is very easy to do once you don’t have anyone to dote on any more. It felt very natural for where she was going to go and what she was going to do, but also just feels like part of what people need in order to get through hard times, to help other people. I didn’t want to give her too many comeuppance or anything, where the lesson is don’t be a generous person. It’s the same in life as it is in the movie: some things work out and some things don’t.
Capone: I swore I could remember this but now I’ve forgotten—the name of the film that Jason Ritter is in that there are posters for everywhere…
LS: Oh, TIME WAR.
Capone: I’m like, “What is that movie about?”
LS: [laughs] We had so much fun. I was trying to come up with the tagline for the poster. What did we come up with that was so funny? It’s like, “When you only have minutes he’s there in seconds” or something like that. So stupid [laughs].
Capone: Have ex-boyfriends seen this movie? Are there guys that might recognize themselves in that character?
LS: Yeah. There’s really only one actor ex-boyfriend that I dated. He was the last person to meet my father, and it was all very surreal any way, and he was so nice and helped me through the whole thing. But he lives on and he is an actor, so being broken up from that person was not easy, but especially at first. I felt like I was grieving everything at once. You go though another loss, and suddenly it dredges up all the pain and loss of someone else. So it was a hard breakup for me, and I felt like it was important in this story to put Lori in this place. But also, it’s there to confuse you a little bit about where Lori’s head is at. It’s like, she’s concentrating on work, and she’s heartbroken about this guy, and it’s like yes, but it’s also how she’s grieving.
Capone: I’ve got to say that J.K. Simmons taking on the role of Sam Elliot, complete with the mustache. What made you think of him as a romantic lead?
LS: I mean…it does maybe take a girl with daddy issues to watch WHIPLASH and think “That guy is sexy.”
Capone: He looks good in a tight black t-shirt.
LS: That’s just it. I thought that was his black-hat cowboy and now we’re going to make him a white-hat cowboy and see his good guy version of this. But I also like the idea that he’s like a reformed asshole in a way. That he wasn’t the best dad, he was like a little more aggressive when he was younger. Now he’s reached this sort of zen, maybe too laid-back way that actually Susan’s character can have an affect on him too. But yeah, that was pure fiction. There’s no love interest in real life.
And of course, it’s a reluctant love story because she’s a widow, so it’s not THE story or anything. I didn’t want to make it a traditional mother-daughter movie, just as I didn’t want to make it some traditional romantic-comedy. I really wanted to tell her side of it. But he felt so essential to the larger theme of here’s this woman who’s so open hearted with absolutely everybody except for the idea of romantic love again in her life and how closed off she is to that.
I just started thinking, who would that guy be that would interest my mother? Who would that guy be that’s nonthreatening enough but also still cool and sexy and has a swagger? I think when I was coming up with her wandering onto the set and becoming an extra, it just felt right that that was the guy. You see these cops on sets. They’re so fascinating because they’re these retired guys who all ride Harley's and all have tans and all have mustaches, and you just know they’ve seen some shit, and here they are just with this perimeter that they have to protect. I knew a guy who had chickens and gave me eggs, so little things here and there that are coming from other people. For the most part, it was just who would this guy be? A very East Coast woman and this West Coast man—how will they click? I was excited to see him play a character too and not just play the straight man off of her whacky lead. So that was really fun that both of them could embody these people and click.
Capone: You just briefly mentioned that you planned on making this a noir? Three years ago, you said the thing you were writing was a noir. Was that this story?
LS: It was. And it never really evolved into that. It wasn’t like I had so many pages of a noir film or something like that. It was where I saw her going. The meddling felt like “Oh right, THE MEDDLER.” And then she just starts to get involved in like…
Capone: THE MEDDLING DETECTIVE.
LS: [laughs] Yes, exactly!
Capone: Well, it was great to see you again. Best of luck.
