Tuning out critical voices
Justine Bateman drew from her own life experience for ‘Violet’
Justine Bateman is probably best known for playing the fashion-obsessed Mallory Keaton on the hit 1980s sitcom “Family Ties,” although she continued to act for three decades as well as write scripts and books. But the Golden Globe and Emmy nominee has something in common with the troubled protagonist of “Violet,” her feature directorial debut, which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The film stars Olivia Munn as a Los Angeles film executive who seems outwardly successful but constantly hears a critical voice inside her head that influences all the decisions she makes.
In a Zoom interview to promote the film, Bateman said she drew from her own life experience for the project. “I’m going to count myself as an expert on this whole journey, because years ago I did make a lot of fear-based decisions and I didn’t feel myself and then, when I got on the other side of it, I really disliked the amount of time that I had given to … making these fear-based decisions,” she said.
Asked to share some of those negative thoughts, Bateman said, “Oh, well, the classic, ‘You’re never going to work again,’ you know, which is an interesting one to live with. Because as you get work, you’re like, ‘Oh well, OK, that was a lie.’ But if you’re at a particular point in your life, where you have a question about that or concern about it, that kind of fear can really influence decisions that you don’t really want to make.”
The 55-year-old, born in Rye, N.Y., to a family that includes her actor/director brother Jason Bateman, has stepped back from acting but has been writing scripts for years and told the Los Angeles Times she has wanted to direct since she was 19.
She has released two short films, “Five Minutes” and “PUSH,” the former premiering at TIFF in 2017. She also wrote a bestselling book, “Fame: The Hijacking of Reality,” released in 2018, which detailed her experience as a teen starlet and what happened as her fame began to fade. “Face: One Square Foot of Skin,” released in April, is about how society reacts to aging.
She wrote the script for “Violet” in 2011.
Bateman said she hoped the movie’s themes of self-doubt and fear would resonate with audiences, and encourage viewers to examine how they lead their lives.
“Some people are sort of accustomed to the negative thoughts and then go see the film and say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, I’m being pushed around. I don’t like this,’” she said.
Being able to tune out the critical
voice in her own head allowed Bateman to look at her life objectively and turn things around.
“It’s almost a revenge film and I’d found a map rather (than) to get from one side to the other, to get from a fearbased decision life to an instinct-based decision life. I wanted to share that map with as many people as possible in case it’s useful for them, because I would have wanted to see this film in my teenage years, because I would have become myself faster than I did,” she said.
TIFF describes the movie as “formally daring (and) psychologically incisive.”
“Though she is best known as an actor, Justine Bateman’s feature debut as writer/director immediately distinguishes her as an indie auteur with an arrestingly original vision,” Diana Sanchez, the fest’s senior director of film, says in her introduction.
The film portrays Violet’s anxieties manifesting in three ways: as rapid-fire, almost subliminal images; as handwritten text on the screen and as a voice in her head that points out worst-case scenarios, and reminds Violet that she’s unlovable and that she should accept all the abuse that is hurled at her, most of which comes from her boss (Dennis Boutsikaris).
Actor Justin Theroux provides Violet’s inner voice.
Bateman said casting a male voice was important for the audience to distinguish between the two sides of the character.
“I wanted the critical thoughts to sound like something different than her own thoughts,” she said.
“How do you manage that in a film? Well, for me, I had to make it as different as possible from (Munn). I’m going to make it a different tone, I’m going to make it a different gender; I’m going to even have you hear it in a different place in the theatre than you can the rest of the actors … just everything about it in order to help the viewer to think of their own negative thoughts as coming from somewhere else, so that they could look at those thoughts objectively and see that they’re lies.”
She added the onscreen notes in editing.
“When I … got close to finishing, I knew that I had not really hit the target to my standards of this film. I hadn’t really made it as fully an immersive experience for the audience as I wanted to.
“I knew what I was missing was this sort of desperate, passionate need to get out of this situation. And then the solution I came up with was to just write it on the screen, not knowing if it would work. Then I did it and it did what I wanted it to do … The writing on the bottom is like these desperate notes to get out … of the situation (that) created this pressure cooker on (Munn’s) performance.”