Matt Ross is best known as an actor who plays creepy bad guys or, at the very least, people you cannot trust. He began his career in a series of supporting film roles and one-off television appearances in such works as TWELVE MONKEYS, FACE/OFF, THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO, PUSHING TIN, AMERICAN PSYCHO (he’s the guy Christian Bale almost strangles at the urinal), COMPANY MAN, THE AVIATOR, and LAST HOLIDAY. But his profile grew considerably about 10 years ago thanks to the HBO series “Big Love,” in which he plays the sociopathic, closeted gay church leader Alby Grant, the heir apparent to Harry Dean Stanton’s Roman Grant.
In the years that followed, Ross had much larger roles on such series as “Magic City,” “Revolution,” and “American Horror Story,” in which he plays a demented doctor in the first season of the show (he brought the good doctor back to the show in its most recent season). Bug more than likely, you know Matt Ross best as the tech giant Gavin Belson on HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” a man who will never be satisfied until he’s crushed our nerdy heroes under his corporate boot.
What you may not know about Ross is that he is also a burgeoning writer-director, first of two shorts and then his first feature, 2012’s HOTEL ROOMS, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. His latest work, CAPTAIN FANTASTIC, also debuted at Sundance and has gotten a whole lot of attention for both Ross and the film’s star, Viggo Mortensen, as the father of six children, all of whom live on the fringe of society, in the wilderness, where Mortensen’s Ben educates them, teaches them how to survive in the wild, but never quite prepares them to live in the world in which the rest of us live. A tragedy forces the family out of the woods and into the real world where they must face Ben’s disapproving father-in-law, played by Frank Langella.
I had a chance to sit down with Ross recently in Chicago, and we got to dig a little deeper into how CAPTAIN FANTASTIC reflects his own fears as a parent and a whole lot more. He’s genuinely one of the most interesting and wonderfully self-reflective filmmakers I’ve ever spoken to, and even if you don’t end up liking the film, I think what he has to say about it is exceedingly interesting. With that, please enjoy my talk with Matt Ross…
Matt Ross: Hello.
Capone: How are you? Nice to meet you.
MR: Good to meet you.
Capone: I might be the only person you talk to today who saw the film at Sundance at the premiere.
MR: Oh, wow. At the Eccles [Theatre].
Capone: Yes, exactly. Then I saw it again last week as a refresher.
MR: Good I’m glad, because I can’t remember what I ate for breakfast last week let alone what movie I saw.
Capone: If I’m doing an interview, I always try and see the film a second time.
MR: Bless you. I appreciate that.
Capone: Where did the germ of this idea came from?
MR: For me, the genesis was really being a father. I have two kids, and I think I was really grappling with being a parent. There’s no guidebook as we all know. Are you a parent?
Capone: No.
MR: Ok, but you know there’s no guidebook anyway. We all go in blind and we all make it up as we go along. And I was thinking a great deal about what my values are and what I wanted to pass to my children. On some level, one thing we all do is we just try and make sure our children don’t make the same mistakes in life we did, but also there’s more than just that. I’ve said this many times, but you begin to curate someone else’s life. Right now, you curate your own life. When I met my wife, when she was my girlfriend, I curated her life a little bit. I said, “You smoke, and I don’t think that’s great.” And we had that conversation. But generally speaking we all just curate our own life.
But when you have kids, you start deciding, what are we eating? Is it okay to eat a candy bar in the morning? What are you reading and why? What are we watching? Should we allow the children to watch TV? If so, how much? If not, why? What? All this stuff. And I was seeing my friends begin to have kids and how they were parenting. I was just thinking a lot about it and I had a lot of questions about being a father, and in some ways, Ben Cash played by Viggo Mortensen is aspirational, is the father I wish I could be, someone who’s given up his professional ambitions to make his life’s work raising his children.
There’s something very beautiful about that and something that maybe existed in primal cultures more. Maybe you were around your children all day long. So now most people, we go off to work and you come back, and you see your kids in the morning as you send them off to school and maybe take them back and forth from football practice and make them dinner and do some homework with them, and send them back. So I was thinking a lot about that, and I think because I’m not a songwriter or a poet, I contextualize these questions into a narrative.
Capone: This story is the extreme version of what you’re talking about. I know lots of people my age who have kids that say “I want to prepare my kids for the ugliness of the world but I don’t wanna expose them to it,” but you have to, don’t you? Ben’s biggest flaw is that he forgets to do that.
MR: You do have to. This is not your question, but I think about this a lot, why is it that so many kids are angry? I was thinking about why was I angry, and I think it’s because we lie to our children. We present this Disney bullshit world where there’s no violence, and everything’s happy, and everything looks like this, and at some point they’re like 14 and they say, “You’ve been lying to me for years,” and so they want to smoke pot and listen to punk music, which is what I did. You become so angry.
Now that’s a very reduced and inaccurate analysis of what it is to be a teenager, but I think on some level, we do that, so we shelter our children from the reality. Now of course I’m not suggesting that you show a kid who’s four what happened in Orlando. Every parent has to make their own choices about how they expose their children to the outside world. I’m not saying you show them graphic footage of what’s going on in Afghanistan, or the Taliban or ISIS or whatever. I’m not suggesting that at all. But I’m saying, there must be a balance between treating our children like they’re thinking human beings and infantilize them.
Capone: We don’t show them that footage of Orlando, but at the same time, now every school has an intruder drill in place.
MR: Yeah, well I can only speak for myself, and my answer and my wife’s answer is, we try and be honest. As Kathryn Hahn in the movie says, “protecting children from certain concepts they’re too young to understand is not lying to them.” Well that’s one way you can do it, and the other way you can do it is you can try and chose to answer certain questions.
My son, the other day, he heard the word sperm. It was on the radio, on NPR. And he said, “What’s sperm?” Now I could have lied to him, and I could have said, “You know what sex is?” He’s nine. I haven't talked to him about sex yet. And he’s like, “Yeah.” And I think because his older sister had mentioned it or someone had mentioned it. He lives in the modern world. And I explained to him it’s how a baby is formed in mammals. We talked about it, and he was not flummoxed, he was not upset, he was not freaked out, he was like, “Oh.”
He’s asked me about drugs before. He heard someone say “pot.” He said, “What’s pot?” I said, “It’s marijuana. Do you know what marijuana is?” “No.” “It’s a drug. People smoke it.” “Why do they smoke it?” “Well, because it makes you high, and some people think that’s fun. Have you seen mommy and daddy drink wine and have beer? Well, it makes you feel good, and it’s a digestive.” It becomes a conversation with your children. If you don’t say these words, like swearing, you eroticize them and you make them forbidden fruit, and it becomes something beyond its weight. You give them power and weight.
Capone: One of the things I found really fascinating—I especially noticed it more the second time I saw it—is you allow us to change allegiances here. We’re with Ben in the beginning because we think “This is an interesting way of living and the kids seem smart and fortified.” But we’re not switching over to the in-laws; we’re switching to the wife’s. She’s not even a presence in the film physically, but she’s there every step of this movie.
MR: Some people think you switch to the grandfather, even.
Capone: Well, that’s what I’m saying. I didn't go that far, but then when we find out what the wife’s intentions were, I thought “That’s where I’m at too.” You’re not promoting a lifestyle, you’re just saying this is someone who went to this extreme, and here’s the extreme we’re probably used to.
MR: I believe that we all exist in shades of grey, and that nothing is black and white, and I like movies that do that as well. No one wears the black hat, no one wears the white hat. We all wear both hats. What’s the famous cliche? “Everyone’s the hero of their own movie,” and I think that all the characters are flawed. To really answer your question, baked into the narrative of the script I wrote was the hope that you’d be following this character thinking he’s the hero and then at some point question who he is. And Frank Langella and I talked about this—I also talked about this with Viggo—wouldn’t it be great when you got to the third act, you start to think “Oh my god, the man that I thought was right is wrong”? I like movies that do that.
Capone: The directing style on this film, I have to imagine it was loose. It feels like it was free form. You’ve made a couple of features now and a couple of shorts. Is that how you always are? Or do you adapt your style to the material?
MR: I think form needs to follow function. My last movie was also similar handheld vérité. I think my next movie is going to be the polar opposite because of the script. But I think what I was worried about is if it was elegant, presentational, elegant dolly shots, elegant steadicams, it would feel stayed or tight, or it wouldn’t feel real. It wouldn’t breathe. I wanted it to feel messy, like life, and tactile in some way. So I have the DP, Stéphane Fontaine, he shot RUST AND BONE, which was a beautiful film, and A PROPHET. We talked about that a lot. In fact, at one point, we planned to have the first half of the movie all handheld, and the second half when they get to Kathryn Hahn and Steve Zahn’s house, slowly mix handheld and locked-off tripod shots. And by the time we get to the grandparents, it’d all be more elegant photography, much more presentational, everything locked off. We experimented with that.
Capone: That would have been pretty bold.
MR: We tried that, but it didn’t breathe the same way. You know what it is? It’s not just messy, it’s intimacy. There’s something about that form following function that it felt intimate to me, and I wanted that. To get to your question, when people read the script, sometimes they were questioning the tone. They thought “Is it like a Wes Anderson movie?” That was one of my fears. I love Wes Anderson. I’m actually a big fan of his. He has very specific ways of framing. His composition is very specific, and that in conjunction with his costume and set design, which is very curated, he creates a hyper-realistic tone. A tone that’s not set in this world. What I was afraid of if we had locked off shots is it would feel like it’s not the real world, and there’s something about the vérité photography that, to my mind and my eye, replicated the real world, and this movie takes place in the real world. These are real people. So I wanted to do that.
Capone: It would have been fun, though, to see who noticed you were making those adjustments.
MR: That’s true. It would have been a subliminal thing. probably.
Capone: Was Viggo the first guy that you built the family around in the casting process?
MR: Yes. When I wrote it, I didn’t have an actor in mind. I think that’s a little bit of a fool’s errand because you don’t know what people’s schedule is, and Lynette Howell Taylor, who’s my creative producer, she asked me when I gave her the script"Who do you want to cast?” And my first thought was Viggo. When I was writing it, I think I had a younger Harrison Ford in mind.
Capone: I remember you saying that at Sundance.
MR: I grew up on WITNESS, and as a kid, I remember seeing him and he was in his 40s then, probably, and I had that kind of man in mind who’s very articulate, he’s masculine and yet he’s vulnerable. He’s not a cliche of a macho man, I should say. He’s a complex man, a nuanced man. So I had that idea, and Viggo was my first choice. His face and his energy becomes the template, and you cast the kids around him. You cast the two girls, so then you have red hair, so then you cast the mom [who also had red hair] to see that bloodline. One piece of casting affects another piece of casting. We see movies frequently with famous people who are cast as siblings who look nothing like each other, and because I didn’t have to cast famous people for the kids, I wanted them to actually look like they were actually from the same gene pool.
Capone: George MacKay was the only young actor I’d seen before.
MR: He’s the oldest. He’s been in HOW I LIVE NOW, that movie with Saoirse Ronan. He was in a movie called PRIDE. He was just in the Stephen King series “11.22.63”. He’s an amazing young actor.
Capone: He has the line that sums up the whole film, about the kids. “I don’t know anything I didn’t learn out of a book.” That’s a slap in the face. To us and to him.
MR: Yeah, that’s right. I don’t know if it’s still in the script, but at one point he says, “We’re not all just going to live with you forever.” That’s the other thing. He’s the first one to leave the nest.
Capone: The other thing I remember you saying at Sundance, which came back to haunt me when I saw the “Sweet Child of Mine” scene last week, was that you originally had a Prince song in there instead of Guns n’ Roses. Dammit, don’t you wish you still had that?
MR: In the script, the first song they sing around the campfire, which now is just instrumental, was “Little Red Corvette.” I love Prince, and there’s something just incongruous about that Minneapolis funk tone in the forest. There’s two cultures butting up against each other. I also love it. It’s funky and great. At the time, Prince was alive, and he was releasing his music for movies and TV except for two songs. He wouldn’t release “Little Red Corvette” and he wouldn’t release “When Doves Cry,” and so the ending piece was going to originally be “When Doves Cry” but I think we found a good song. It would have been a different thing, yes.
Capone: I was going to ask the kids’ names. You wanted to give them unique names.
MR: Yeah. I just made them up.
Capone: That had to be the hardest part of writing the script, coming up with six names.
MR: I just wrote down a bunch of crazy names and tried to think of crazy names. I just made them up. “Does that sound cool? Should it be Bodalyn, Bodavyne, Bodavan, Bodalawn?” I almost named my daughter Vesper. I love that name. We spelled it differently in this [Vespyr], so I just played around. Again, it’s just me. It’s my fantasy.
Capone: I seem to remember you also saying that you have some history in your childhood of growing up on a commune.
MR: Yeah. My mom was a part of starting a bunch of alternative-living communities. They are communes. I hesitate always to say the word commune, because it implies a hippie commune, and that’s a 1960s or ’70s thing. This was the ’80s. They weren’t hippie communes. They were artisans. They wanted to live in harmony with nature. They wanted to live in a natural environment, so they collectively bought a bunch of land, and people had homes up in the woods in different place. We owned land. Sometimes at one place we lived, there was a communal dining hall.
Capone: It was self sustained?
MR: Yeah, it was self sustained. And at one point, we had a teepee, and in the summer we slept in the teepee. That’s autobiographical. Noam Chomsky Day is autobiographical. I started Noam Chomsky Day.
Capone: I believe that.
MR: [laughs] Everyone should celebrate that. I think the other thing that’s autobiographical is George MacKay’s character’s journey is, I think, autobiographical. There was a point in my life when you become interested in the opposite sex, or at least I did, and I wanted to be around kids my own age, and feeling like I was so secluded. We were in the middle of nowhere, and that was painful a little bit. I needed to not just be in the middle of the forest.
Capone: This is a uniquely American film, I think.
MR: I think that’s true. I’m glad you said that. It was important for me to cast an American actor. A lot of our great actors are Brits and Aussies, and they’re great actors, but I wanted someone who was American for that reason. Part of the story reflects on our contemporary culture and asks many questions about our country. I love our country. I love the United States of America. I think it’s one of the great promises of social democracy and the history of the world, which is said in the movie, and it’s true and I believe that. But I think that to be a great American also means to question its rules and how it functions and wether it does function.
I think that perhaps the two-party democracy isn’t the most effective democracy. That may never change. How we elect our presidents, the delegates verse the popular vote. I think that all these things should be up for debate and up for discussion. We live in a very contentious time right now where the right is not talking to the left and the left is not talking to the right, and there’s a lot of in-fighting. I heard some politician, and I’m going to misquote it if I say the name because I’m not sure who it was, but he said he’s been in the government for 50 years and he’s never seen it be so divisive, and it’s scary.
I want to be clear, the movie is a fiction and it’s an entertainment, and hopefully it’s emotionally moving and intellectually stimulating, and I hope it has some effect as a piece of art, but I’m not running for office, and the movie is not delivering an ideological or political message. I really hope it’s not. I hope it’s asking a lot of questions about our country and I hope wherever you fall on the political spectrum, you can find some wisdom in it or something to reflect on your own life.
Capone: And you do a great job of not demonizing the conservative grandparents, which you might expect since Frank Langella has played heavies before.
MR: He has played heavies. He and I talked about it a lot. He didn’t want to play the bad guy, and I didn’t want him to play the bad guy. In the first letter I wrote to him, I said, “This is not the bad guy. He’s not the antagonist. I think your job as the actor is to make sure he’s not as well. I’ll support you as the director in terms of the editing and the writing, but I don't want him to be portrayed as the villain of the movie.” He’s not the villain. He has his own parenting style. In fact, the movie shows three Americas, going back to your question before within the United States of America. One is the rural America; suburban America, where most of us live; and a wealthy enclave of golf club communities or gated communities, and they all have their own values and they all have their own parenting style.
Capone: Do you have another script waiting in the drawer, ready to go?
MR: I wish I did. I’m writing three movies right now. I’m writing three of my own stories.
Capone: I was going to say could you ever see yourself directing something that you didn’t start from scratch?
MR: Yes and no. After Sundance, I’ve had the great fortune of having people say, “Hey, could you do this, could you do that?” And that’s lovely. I think I’m a veracious reader, and there are some books I’d like to turn into movies, but for the time being, I’m a little obsessed with something that’s so-called original. I don’t think anything is actually original. There are only so many stories in the human condition, but I want to write it myself. I think baked into the DNA of the script is the way you want to tell it, and if you give me a script you wrote, then it always has a point of view directorially and thematically, and I want to start from scratch, if that makes sense.
Capone: Well thank you very much. It was great to meet you.
