Louis C.K. film rooted in fascination with men in sex scandals
Louis C.K.’s I Love You, Daddy looks at relationships between older men, teenage girls
Comedy star Louis C.K. says the seed for his controversial new film, I Love You, Daddy, began with a Woody Allen-type character and the fascination with “people that have these scandalous things.”
C.K. directs and stars as Glen, a hit TV creator in New York struggling to develop a new show and control his spoiled 17-year-old daughter (Chloe Grace Moretz), who gets uncomfortably close to a 68-year-old film director he idolizes, played by John Malkovich.
Malkovich’s eccentric character has a reputation for dating young women and is marred by a rumour that he once molested a girl. Initially, Glen suggests it’s not up to him and others to judge the director, but as his daughter begins a relationship with him, he waffles on that point.
“In a conversation with my buddy Vernon [Chatman] that wrote the story with me, it was the thrill of the nightmare of, ‘What if he dated my daughter?’ ” C.K. said in an interview, a day after the audacious comedy made its world première at the Toronto International Film Festival.
“It was a thing I said to make Vernon laugh and I felt a chill when I said it and I was like, ‘I don’t know what … I would do. I don’t know what I would do,”’ he continued, using an unprintable expletive for emphasis.
“In my experience, every time I think of a story where the answer is ‘I don’t know how I would handle it,’ I know there’s a story, I know that that’s fodder for a movie, I know that other people probably feel that way.”
The black-and-white story features an old-Hollywood style score and is reminiscent of Allen’s 1979 film Manhattan, in which the director plays a 42-year-old who dates a 17-year-old girl (Mariel Hemingway).
]The cast of I Love You, Daddy also includes Helen Hunt, Edie Falco, Rose Byrne and Charlie Day.
C.K., a two-time Golden Globe nominee for Louie who also costarred in Allen’s Blue Jasmine, said he wanted to explore “the uncomfortability of not knowing which way to go” when it comes to judging people.
“To me, if there’s anything the movie says to me clearly is that you don’t know — you don’t know anybody. You don’t know people that you admire … . You don’t know them. You don’t know your own kid, your kid doesn’t know you. You think you’re falling in love with somebody? You have no … idea who you’re talking to,” said C.K. with pops of salty language.
“So if you love their work and you love them and you love what you know about them, you close the gap. Because people are uncomfortable not knowing, they’re uncomfortable not being sure, so you close the gap with your admiration: ‘Those are rumours, I’m not going to talk about it, because I love the work.’ But if they date your daughter, you close the gap in the other direction or your fear closes the gap.”
C.K. self-funded the movie and shot it under the radar in June. He kept its storyline a secret until Saturday’s première.
Asked whether the film is a response to C.K.’s own controversies surrounding allegations of questionable sexual behaviour, he said “those are rumours.”
“To me, rumours is a different thing. Rumours is just rumours,” added C.K.
“But yeah, being a public person and having a bunch of different things said about you, it does give you a perspective on that side of it. But the movie is not from that guy’s point of view … more about Malkovich and more about his life. This is about the guy on the other side.
“But it is interesting to me — what is it like for people when they’re trying to decide about one person or another.”