Interview: Writer, Director Derick Martini Turns Past Into Present in ‘Lymelife’

Submitted by BrianTT on May 7, 2009 - 1:28pm

CHICAGO – Derick Martini’s “Lymelife,” starring Rory Culkin, Kieran Culkin, Alec Baldwin, Jill Hennessy, Emma Roberts, Timothy Hutton, and Cynthia Nixon is a dramatic slice of nostalgia for its co-writer/director. The film brings the wounds of his parent’s divorce to the surface in this acclaimed comedy/drama.

Just last week, Martini’s wife gave birth to their first child, but Derick wanted to talk about his other baby, his new film, a drama based on his own childhood as a product of divorce. The production notes for the film quote Martini - “It’s about change: how people change, and how when faced with change how they initially resist but ultimately have to embrace change because that’s life.”

Lymelife
Photo credit: Screen Media Group

Martini expounded on the idea, noting that the baby last week was “the mother of all changes.”

“When you’re a product of divorce…you have a mother and a father,” Derick Martini told me. “One day, they’re sleeping the same bed and then suddenly they’re in different houses. In my life, it was a tremendous change. I was probably about the age that Scott is in the picture. 14 or 15. It was pretty sudden. I knew everything wasn’t hunky-dory but if you grew up with that tension, you just get used to it. “This is how it is.” When the breaking point comes, it’s pretty shocking. You start to form your own opinions about who’s right and who’s wrong.”

But audiences shouldn’t get the impression that “Lymelife” is a divorce picture. There are a lot of elements to the film but it is primarily a coming-of-age story. As Matrini says, “What I tried to do was take the typical coming-of-age story and turn it into what I see as an adult story from an innocent perspective. That was what got me excited about it. A lot of these people I knew growing up. I didn’t come of age in the ’70s. I came of age in the ’80s and ’90s. But I set it back in the late ’70s for other reasons. I knew a lot of these people.”

Martini, 33, grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, but moved the story back to the ’70s mostly for thematic reasons. Martini explains, “From my neck of the woods, it’s really during that time when a lot of men that I knew growing up were just becoming wealthy for the first time. I wanted to tell a story that was on the cusp of the ’80s, which, to me, was on the cusp of overindulgence. That’s why it was important to set it in ‘79. But I also wanted it to feel timeless in a sense. I didn’t want to make it That ’70s Show.”

Lymelife
Photo credit: Screen Media Group

It wasn’t just his past or the end of the disco era that inspired “Lymelife”. Martini revealed that a classic film, Francois Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows,” helped him trim a 150-page screenplay that felt episodic down to something manageable.

“I happened to watch the Criterion of The 400 Blows again. I remembered loving it and remembered it being about a family and a boy. It hit me in the head like a hammer - “What I’m missing here is that I need to tell this adult drama from an innocent perspective just like The 400 Blows.” That’s when the script wrote itself. Everything that I was fighting to keep and to fit into the story became very flagrantly, obviously superluous. They fell off. They just fell out of the script. And it just became a movie from this boy’s point of view. And playing against the sentiment was important to me. Again, you watch The 400 Blows and the brilliant part of that movie is that in other hands it would have been a complete sap-fest. It could have been overly sentimental. But if you watch the little details of Truffaut and the way he played against the emotion of the scene with the score was the thing that made it unsentimental. That’s what makes the movie really work and a classic. It doesn’t sentimentalize. That’s a waltz for a score. A twisted version of a waltz but it’s a happy tune. It was so enlightening and inspiring.”

Of course, laying your parents divorce on to celluloid is a daring prospect for a filmmaker, but it’s turned out well for Martini, who swears that not only do his parents not harbor any anger about the transformation of their home movies into drama but that they love it.

Lymelife
Photo credit: Screen Media Group

“My father thinks it’s great. He loves it. He’s really into it. My mother thought there were too many curses in it. She saw it when we played in Toronto. I remember her saying afterwards, “Did you get that King Farouk line from me?” There’s a line that Jill throws out - “What are you King Farouk because you got a couple of dollars in your pocket?” My mother used to say something like that to me when I was a kid so she made that connection. She says, “Did you take that line from me?” And I said, “Mom, the whole CHARACTER is based on you.” She says, “No. I never curse that much.” I said, “Mom, I actually toned it down.”(Laughs.) But she enjoyed the film very much. And then she would try and give me notes that I should cut out the curses. Typical mother stuff. “Okay mom.””

Both Culkins give the best performances of their career in “Lymelife” but the real star, someone who should be in the Best Supporting Actor performances of the year conversation at the end of 2009, is Alec Baldwin, an actor who Martini wrote the role for specifically. It turns out that Martini doesn’t even watch “30 Rock”. It was a Broadway performance years ago (one that coincidentally greatly influenced myself) that got Baldwin the part.

“I wrote the role with him in mind. I remember seeing him on Broadway as a kid in A Streetcar Named Desire and he blew everyone off the stage. He was un-f**king-believable. That’s my reference when I think about Alec. I don’t watch his show. I’ve seen it once. I’m sure he’s wonderful on it. He’s a gifted actor and a gifted man. But Streetcar is my reference for him when I think about his abilities. I know this guy has the range to do what I needed him to do in this picture - going from the confident Alec we all know to the guy who loses the respect of his son and is basically begging for it back. That vulnerability was something I was really after. I thought I’d see what he thought of it and he was immediately attracted to it. I knew he was going to deliver and he did in so many different ways. Forget about the performance for a minute. He was shooting 30 Rock around the movie. He would shoot 3 days for 30 Rock and 3 days for me. I don’t know many actors that can take…not every actor can actually chance their character to such an extent.”

Lymelife
Photo credit: Screen Media Group

With actors as talented as Alec Baldwin, a director can take risks. That’s what Martini did in a major, crucial fight scene when he took Jill Hennessy aside and advised her to improv.

He explains, “I pulled Jill aside and said, “Here are the lines. Forget about them. Here’s what you do. I want you to make this guy feel like the biggest bag of sh*t on Earth. He has humiliated you your whole life. You want him to suffer for what he’s done to you. F**k the lines. Say what you want to say. Tear him to shreds.”

“He wasn’t expecting it and she was BRILLIANT. I saw that light in eyes go off. And that is what set the scene on fire. He got so worked up. She was saying things like “I hate the way you smell, the way you brush your teeth, that stupid f**king grin.” Everything she said - it’s in the picture. I kept most of those lines in the picture. That’s what set that scene on fire.”

See that scene and many more in the very-good “Lymelife,” now playing at the Landmark Century and expanding wider in the coming weeks, including around the world.