A comedy with something to say
Director Anders brings first-hand experience to a family story about multiple adoption
There’s a scene in Sean Anders’ film Instant Family where a foster child accidentally is hit in the face with a basketball thrown by Mark Wahlberg’s befuddled dad-intraining Pete.
It’s played as slapstick comedy, an example of how the sensitive, accident-prone middle child Juan (played by Gustavo Quiroz) in instant family tends to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
But, here’s the thing: It actually happened. No comedic exaggeration necessary.
“It was a soccer ball,” says Anders, who wrote the comedy-drama based on his own experiences adopting three foster children with his wife. “I did accidentally drill my son Johnny in the face with a ball on the very first day that I met him.”
Anders is probably best known for broad comedy, having directed the Mark Wahlberg-Will Ferrell film Daddy’s Home and its sequel, as well as Horrible Bosses II and the Andy Samberg-Adam Sandler vehicle That’s My Boy. He also wrote raunchy screenplays for Hot Tub Time Machine and We’re the Millers.
But while Instant Family is full of laughs, it also is poignant and informative and explores a system that long has been misunderstood.
“It’s a topic that not many people know about, how the actual process works,” Anders says. “I didn’t know anything about it. So I wanted to shed a little more light on that process and tell an interesting story in that world and, in the end, hopefully give people a better understanding of who these kids are in the system and how these families come into being.”
This is not to say that Instant Family plays like an issue-driven after-school special. It actually was his writing partner, John Morris, who saw it as an area well-suited for comedy after hearing Anders’ surreal stories about his early struggles as the sudden patriarch of a three-child family.
Still, education is clearly a main thrust for the film. To that end, Anders is doing media interviews alongside Maraide Green, a consultant and production assistant on the film who was herself adopted from the foster-care system at the age of 13.
In the film, Pete and his wife Ellie (Rose Byrne) have a comfortable life and thriving business renovating homes. But they are taken aback when a family member predicts they will probably never have children. This leads Ellie to look into foster children and, eventually, a surreal adoption fair where would-be parents seek out potential matches. That’s where they come across headstrong teenager Lizzy (Isabela Moner), who has become a surrogate parent to her younger siblings Juan and Lita (Julianna Gamiz) after their drug-addicted mother is sent to prison.
In real life, Anders and his wife did meet a teenage foster child at one of those fairs and were interested in adopting her and her younger brother and sister. They were matched, but the teen girl ultimately decided to refuse the placement because she was holding out hope her birth mother would return.
So Anders and his wife ended up adopting three younger siblings, who were six, three and 18 months at the time. Still, Anders found the teen side of the story compelling and wanted it to be a part of the movie. Through the agency that arranged his children’s adoption, Anders was put in touch with Green. She was sent a first draft of the screenplay and sent Anders notes on how to make it more authentic.
“The film is really important to me because it shows foster care and kids growing up in foster care in a different light,” she says. “It’s a lot more positive and without these negative stereotypes that are often associated with them. It shows them as really strong individuals who have a lot more to offer than one would assume.”