Unscripted moments fill ‘Junebug,’ director, actor say

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, August 11, 2005

The indie film “Junebug” was one of the highlights of the Seattle International Film Festival in May, and with it arrived two of the principals involved: director Phil Morrison and actor Ben McKenzie.

Morrison hails from North Carolina, and his film is about the awkwardness of a couple visiting the South from Chicago. McKenzie plays a resentful son, still living with his parents, whose perky wife (Amy Adams) is about to give birth to an unwelcome child.

The director is not well known, although he’s had steady work in TV. McKenzie’s done TV, too – in the last two years, he’s become a huge youth-market star thanks to his leading role on the series “The O.C.” “Junebug” was the first feature film for both, shot in a mere 20 days. I talked to the pair during their stay.

Q: This film has many quiet observations, like the scene of a woman watching from her front lawn, and a man gazing at his air mattress as it inflates. Are those written in the script or do they emerge doing shooting?

Phil Morrison: We decided in advance we would be open for them to happen. … To me it was about not trying to plan the movie exactly, but plan a process, and then believing in alchemy. Believing that we can do all this planning in advance, and it still might lead to something we never could have imagined. And that’s ultimately what it was.

Ben McKenzie: I didn’t see (the film) till Sundance. And it took on a much more contemplative tone that was originally in the source material. All of these points of view, like the woman standing on her front lawn, weren’t necessarily written down in the script, but it’s a blessing that we have them. That saved the material from meandering into stereotypical Southern comedy or drama.

Morrison: The first day of shooting, I swear to God, the junebugs arrived, and covered the lawns. ‘Cause they hover, you know, a foot or so above the lawns in June. And so a lot of that stuff, like the neighbor standing in the yard, was just about gettin’ that feeling that we felt there every morning. Like more about a vibe than a story.

McKenzie: All these things have a weird way of adding up. These moments of – I guess they’re not really introspection – but just seeing these characters exist and breathe. They add up in a way that’s not maybe logical, but you sort of understand enormous amounts about the characters before they even have to speak.

Morrison: There were things in the movie originally that did tie up more, that made good sense. And it was only after the movie (was shot) that we realized we could pull back. We discovered what the movie was as we were making it, including the editing process. My grandfather says this joke, he says, “Philip, you know how to whittle a squirrel?” And he says, “Well, you get a piece of wood, and you carve away everything that doesn’t look like a squirrel.” And that was kind of what we did.

McKenzie: Except, did you know you were carving a squirrel?

Morrison: Well, that’s the thing. You keep staring at it trying to figure out what it is. And this piece turns out not to be what it is, and this piece turns out to be more what it is than we thought. So let’s carve away that one and put in more of this one.

Q: Ben, was there a particular scene that convinced you about this script?

McKenzie: The phone call near the end … that was the point when I was reading the script initially, that I literally broke down in tears reading it.

Morrison: Oh?

McKenzie: I told you this, right?

Morrison: No!

McKenzie: Literally like, on the page. Which doesn’t ever happen. It got to me. It’s nice when you see a character go through a change that actually seems real. So much is forced in narratives – there’s going to be an arc, and the character is going to grow and change in good ways, and the bad guys are going to get what’s coming to them, and that sort of thing. And when it actually feels organic, it’s a pretty wonderful feeling, both for the actor and potentially for the piece.

Q: The film avoids stereotyping its characters, or making them predictable.

Morrison: I wonder if sometimes our inclination in drama is to make people more rational than they really are, for the sake of the audience following things. We tried not to do that. That was what was amazing about Amy Adams. So many people that I talked to about her character, Ashley, said about one of her early scenes, “Well no one would ask nine questions in a row without getting an answer, so we’re going to have to do something about that.” Amy approached it as, “Gosh, I guess I’m playing a character who would ask nine questions in a row – so what does that mean?” I admit, there are people who see the movie and say, “There’s nobody like Ashley.” But even more people say, “Oh my God, I know so many people just like her.” So that’s really fascinating.