We have friends who have been through the struggles of addiction
quic quick that it was like, ‘I had better get this on o paper now becau because I don’t want you to lose it!’
“And when w you get the rights to something you only have them for a small period of time, t you only have them for like two years, so w we just decided, ‘Let’s just stop s everything and give it our all’ and it has been a ride. It’s been amazing.”
Once they decided to jump in with both feet, they had to navigate navig the process of writing wh while not only parenting the their two young children but also with two different styles style of working.
“For Aaron, it’s a big pot of coffee and 10 hours straight,” Sam says with a laugh.
“Then I would wou just come in every 20 minu minutes or so, just like, ‘I’ve got a an idea’ and then I would wander w off, but Aaron has th that focus and concentration.”
But for the Avengers star, the input from his director wife was invaluable. “The luxury was having the filmmaker already attached with all the ideas and the vision and what she wanted to get out of it,” he says.
“And then once you’ve got that, you kind of have somewhere to go, plus the fact we had the book.
“We just dissected the book, broke it up into the three-act structure and went from there, and it was a process and I loved it.
“It was one of the most interesting experiences of making the movie, the 18 months we spent on it.”
They also had to debate how they would deal with the controversy that surrounded the book, which left many of its readers and champions, including Oprah Winfrey, feeling cheated or deceived.
“We had a lot of discussions about what was right,” Sam says. “Should we incorporate the controversy around it in the film?
“And we decided absolutely not because when we spoke to James, he said, ‘I wrote it in the spirit of art and I wanted it to be the best book and the best account of my experiences’ and so we just focused in on that and just stayed true to the book.”
Instead, the film merely hints at it with an opening quote from Mark Twain – “I lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”
“The core of that truth is really James,” Sam adds, “and James is now 26 years sober and so our understanding of his journey through his account, as well as the book, was really our guiding star.”
It was in that spirit that they went with James to visit the rehab centre where he was treated, to make the story as intimate as possible.
“We have friends who have been through the struggles of addiction, and have relapsed,” Aaron says.
“There are some that have been years sober and celebrating that and we spent some time at the facility that James went to and with the counsellors and with his friends and his brother.
“We really wanted to make it more of a personal story than the book.”
But that put pressure on Aaron as an actor, as he carries much of the film, including a scene which sees him dancing nude in a crack house before tumbling out of a window.
“I was wearing different hats,” he says, “and it was funny that by the time it came to making the movie I thought, ‘Oh, we have got to do everything we set out to do now’.
“And in front of me I had Billy Bob Thornton, Juliette Lewis, Charlie Hunnam, Giovanni Ribisi, we had a full, great cast, so I felt a little bit of pressure then to deliver and go, ‘Right, I had better hold this all together because if I suck, that would be awful’.”
Now they have come out the other side of this challenge, is this the beginning of a long collaborative relationship, on screen as well as off?
“In the dream, ideally yeah,” Sam says. “While talking about the film I am just thinking, ‘What shall we do next? We should really do something next’.”