the real instant family
Director Sean Anders got the idea for Instant Family after he and his wife adopted their three kids in 2012, growing to a family of five in a single afternoon. He tells TF just how painfully, hilariously realistic the film really is… “I’m embarrassed to say it was exactly like the movie. Me and my wife had been talking off and on for a long time about kids, but we felt like we just couldn’t afford it. When my movie career finally started to blossom a little bit, I made a joke, saying, ‘I don’t want to be one of those old dads, let’s just adopt a five-year-old and it’ll be like we got started years ago!’ I was totally kidding, but we both started actually thinking about it.
“People did worry when we told them. Some of those tough lines that are said in the Thanksgiving scene in the movie were actually said to us. People get scared for you, because they don’t know much about it. They make this assumption that difficult things are coming your way. And the truth is, they are… But the same can be said for biological kids. When you announce to your family and friends that you’re pregnant, nobody says, ‘Ooh, I don’t know, what if that kid turns into a drug dealer at 16?’ and that can happen.
“We went to an adoption fair, just like in the movie – that’s a real thing, believe it or not – and the teenagers were off to the side. Everyone was afraid of them, including us. The kids we met there ended up not working out for us, but the next day our social worker called and said, ‘Oh, we have these three other kids…’ and they ended up becoming our family. That’s how random it all is. It does seem so strange and wrong to go ‘shopping for children’, so when it happens randomly like that it gives you more of a feeling of destiny and fate.
“Even with all the preparation, when the kids first come into your home for the first time it’s just so bizarre. We had this incredibly fun sweet first day when we were making lunch for them and they were playing with new toys in their room, and that honeymoon period lasted for about four hours…
“The tantrum scene in the movie seems like a heightened comedy version of what it might be like, but it’s not. Our daughter started throwing
Exorcist-level tantrums on the first evening. By the time we survived that, and by the time we finally got the kids to bed, we went into our own bedroom and we had this feeling of, ‘Oh wow, this is so much harder than we thought it was going to be.’ Any kid having a screaming freak out makes you crazy, but what biological parents generally have going for them is that they love that kid.
When you don’t love that kid yet, because you’ve just met them, it’s really difficult to deal with.
“We got pretty low after that. My wife and I would volley between who was struggling, so one of us would be talking the other one off the ledge, but there was definitely a period a few months in where we felt really lost and outmanned. We also felt a bit petulant about it, like, ‘Man, we had such a great life before all this! We had all this freedom. We intentionally threw all of that away – what were we thinking?!’ But then you get this incredible experience of falling in love with your own kids, and when that happens, everything is worth it, and then some. It becomes this really incredible wonderful thing that’s still not easy, but it’s beautiful.
“I think whatever [film] I do next is going to be a little bit difficult. The truth is though, this is all I’ve got. This is the part of my life that is worth a movie. I don’t have a battle with alcoholism or anything like that. I’ve told the bit that’s worth telling. I do know that I don’t want to go back to straight-up balls to the wall comedy anymore. I want to make sure that whatever I do has something more in it, like this one. I liked telling a story that needs to be told.” PB some dark places,” says Anders, who pushed the tough stuff to the end of the schedule, but ended up shooting it early because Moner felt so ready to jump in.
“It’s all down to Sean,” smiles Moner. “Even the scenes I’m bawling my eyes out in – where I’m literally dehydrated because I cried so much – it’s all good. Sean is amazing at making that all feel natural and comfortable.”
Crying your way through a family comedy isn’t something anyone expects to do – but then neither is making a comedy about an adoption crisis in the first place. For everyone involved, threading the needle between laughter and tears was the hardest part of the whole process. “Finding the tone is tough,” admits Byrne. “We’re doing different versions of a lot of scenes – pushing the comedy and then pushing the drama. Some scenes are so split down the middle.”
Fostering support
When TF caught up with Anders in New York after the film was finished, he admitted a lot of the toughest decisions were made in the edit – timing jokes to come straight after emotional beats.
“The hardest part was definitely trusting it,” he says. “But here’s the thing, I’m a big John Hughes fan. Early on in my career I got to spend about two hours on the phone with him, and the main thing I remember him saying was, ‘It’s not the size of the laugh that counts, it’s how it makes you feel.’ He talked about how you can draw people in emotionally, make them feel something, then turn that into a laugh. So I thought about that a lot on this movie. Every time things got heavy, we tried to bring it back to the laughter because that felt really honest to me. That’s how my wife and I dealt with it.”
Admitting he doesn’t usually read reviews of his own films, there’s one set of opinions that Anders did care about hearing for Instant Family. Taking an early print to an adoption conference in Minnesota, Anders first screened the film for a roomful of hostile social workers and adoptive families. “There was this palpable sense of, ‘OK, here comes the guy who made Hot Tub Time Machine to take a swing at foster care.’ How could he possibly take this seriously?” Anders laughs. “When the movie finished, they gave us a standing ovation. That was one of the most amazing moments of my life.”
Instant FamIly opens on 14 February.