LENS ON WOMEN & FAMILIES
Director ‘ready’ for ‘Bernadette’
Before he was “Dazed and Confused” — and before his “Before” trilogy — director Richard Linklater was an observer of female family dynamics.
So while his new film, “Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” starring Cate Blanchett, may seem like a departure for him, the director says it’s a natural.
“I was just ready to make a mother-daughter movie. … I’ve had a front-row seat to mother-daughter my whole life,” Linklater told the Daily News, noting he has two older sisters and three daughters.
Blanchett, he says, follows in the tradition of strong female characters in his films, such as Julie Delpy in “Before Sunrise,” “Before Sunset” and “Before Midnight,” and Patricia Arquette in “Boyhood.”
“I didn’t really think this is any more female or anything than other things I’ve done,” he said. “Obviously it is, if you think about it, but … what can you do? You’re just trying to tell your story, bring your own sensibilities, discover Bernadette. We want to understand Bernadette, that was our mission here.”
The film, which opened Friday and is based on a 2012 novel by Maria Semple, is not your typical comedy, or drama, or mystery — though it’s marketed as a combination of all three genres.
Blanchett stars as a former up-and-coming architect whose lack of a current creative outlet renders her a “menace,” namely to her nosy neighbor (Kristen Wiig).
Concerned about her erratic behavior, Bernadette’s husband, Elgin (Billy Crudup), enlists a therapist and attempts an intervention, which Bernadette escapes through the bathroom window.
After she goes missing, Elgin and their daughter follow her “to the end of the Earth,” as Linklater put it, to make things right.
“My whole thing is Bernadette’s not crazy,” Linklater, 59, told The News. “She might be a little prickly, but she’s not insane. … I’m slow to pathologize people, I think, so I was very forgiving of her … quirks, let’s say. I give artists their quirks.”
Ultimately, y Linklater hopes audiences will learn to “let creative people be creative.”
“The more I do this, what you think is your calling in life, to be creative, I kind of see now more as, ‘Oh that’s just a necessary therapy,’ ” chuckled Linklater, who brought the film world Matthew McConaughey’s “all right, all right, all right” film debut in the Austin, Texas-based coming-of-age comedy “Dazed and Confused” in 1993.
“Coping mechanisms, you know? … It’s like, people should be able to follow their creative muses, should be encouraged.”
Linklater, of course, can speak to artistry, having released more than a dozen projects (including box-office success “School of Rock” and Oscar-nominee “Before Midnight”) during the 12 years he spent writing and directing “Boyhood,” nominated for six Academy Awards, including best picture, director and original screenplay.
The film, shot from 2001 to 2013, centers on the childhood and adolescence of Mason Evans Jr. (Ellar Coltrane, who was 6 when filming began), and his relationship with his sister (Linklater’s daughter Lorelei) and divorced parents (Ethan Hawke and Arquette, who won an Oscar for best supporting actress).
“That was very processoriented, very structural,” Linklater says of the filming. “First through 12th grade, I knew it’d take 12 years. I knew the ending. It was all set, we just had to collaborate with time for 12 years,” he laughed.
Artists, to Linklater, are “the most trustworthy group of people,” so he had no doubt they would stick with the project despite the years-long commitment.
“The whole world, community theater, everywhere, all these arts organizations, those are driven people, who actually care. It means a lot in their lives,” he explained. “So when an artist says they’ll be there 12 years from now, I believe them more than a businessperson or someone in some other field. And, because I knew it would be a creative, fun experience too, and it was.”