INSTANT FAMILY
Mark Wahlberg adopts a softer side for this dramedy; we went on set to look through his family album.
On the surface, it looks like a generic family film, but Instant Family is a heartfelt dramedy ripped from real life. Total Film joins Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne on the set to find tears, tantrums and a serious adoption comedy with something to say.
mutters a tiny five-year-old girl, peering up at Rose Byrne from under a kitchen table. Byrne smiles softly and shakes her head: “No, honey, it’s Nazi bitch, not nasty bitch. Try it again, and remember to be mean.”
“STOP BEING A NAZI BITCH!” The little girl screams loud enough to knock the sound guy back a few steps – her face full of anger and pain – before instantly bursting out laughing and running over to Mark Wahlberg to show him her new squishie toy.
The director calls cut and TF is free to step out from behind the front porch of the fake house built inside a soundstage at the Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta. This is Instant Family, an honest, heartfelt comedy about a couple who adopt three grown children at once, but it’s also a pretty good name for the cast and crew on set – already looking like a loving, bickering, tight-knit group of kids, parents, siblings and weird uncles.
When the cameras aren’t rolling, Byrne and Wahlberg are still mum and dad, little Julianna Gamiz is still their annoying, cute little girl and it almost looks like the nice suburban neighbourhood outside the window isn’t painted on a big sheet of canvas. But there’s a reason this all feels so real – and that’s because it is. Sort of.
“Yep, this is pretty much how it always is at home,” laughs director Sean Anders, walking over to Total Film holding a lens viewer in one hand and a Barbie doll in the other. “My wife and I adopted our own three children a few years ago, so this is all sort of based on some of my own experiences. There’s been a lot of movies about adoption where the focus is all on the trauma and the tragedy, but we hadn’t really seen it from the parents’ point of view before – going through the system, learning how it works, meeting kids for the first time, bringing them into your home and then slightly regretting it. All of that was so new that it just felt like a story worth telling.”
For Anders, best known for writing red-band comedies such as Hot Tub Time Machine and We’re The Millers – and for directing sappy screwballs like Daddy’s Home – it’s a big leap into the unknown. There’s a lot of sweetness in the script, and there’s even a few sex jokes, but most of Instant Family walks a fine line between personal comedy and heartbreaking drama, made even more delicate by being about something that actually matters.
“At first, I thought that the most obvious way to make this film would be to tell my story exactly as it happened,” says Anders. “But when I started talking to other families who had adopted kids, my office started looking like the Zodiac killer’s lair – it was just covered in index cards with all these thoughts and emotions on them. I wound up writing an outline for the movie that was more about feelings than scenes.”
With close to half a million children currently awaiting adoption in the
US – with most of them statistically destined to “age out” of the system and end up at the bottom of the social heap – the crisis is frighteningly real. “I thought if we could make a movie about this – a movie that doesn’t feel like this heartbreaking drama – we might actually be able to put a tiny dent in this huge problem,” says Anders. “But can the guy who bought you Hot Tub Time Machine really do it?!”
According to Anders, convincing his cast that he was serious about making a comedy was half the problem. Needing a star capable of playing hard drama and light slapstick – sometimes in the same scene – the first name on his wishlist was Byrne. Knowing the character of Ellie was based on himself, Anders phoned Byrne and talked her through one key scene – a Thanksgiving
“Stop being a nasty bitch!”