"This is Jane Anderson." "I wrote and directed this film," "The Prize Winner Of Defiance, Ohio." "I'm here to sit in on this analog part and give you a little tour of what went on during the shooting and what the choices were." "If any of you out there are cinephiles or directors in training," "I'll try to be fairly cogent here." "You're hearing a wonderful theme that my composer, John Frizzell, composed." "I think that the score is such a vital part of the film." "And the instruments that you choose are really important." "I heard a lot of plunking kind of sounds for the score." "Violins, guitar, there's a little ukulele in there." "Because I heard that kind of light, old-fashioned sound for the character of Evelyn Ryan." "That violin you hear is the wonderful Sara Watkins, and the guitar is Sean Watkins, her brother." "They're part of a great band called Nickel Oreek." "We had the honor of using them." "All these images you see here in the title sequence, the "Win a Gift for Dad" contest," "all these entry blanks are actually from Evelyn Ryan's drawers." "Betsy Ryan, who's one of the original Ryan kids, was kind enough to get us some of her original entry blanks, so we can smack them into the titles here, and also use them as props." "This is a fabulous piece of archival footage that I found when I was still writing the screenplay, trying to figure out how to solve this." "The style of the film really is inspired by these wacky commercials of the time." "You see Evelyn Ryan talking directly to camera." "I watched a whole bunch of commercials from the time." "They were quite primitive, and they always showed a perky housewife talking directly to camera like this, kind of giving us a little commentary on her life." "And I thought to myself, instead of using voice-over, which has been used a million times, why don't I allow Evelyn Ryan to talk directly into the camera like those old commercials?" "But it gave it a kind of ironic flip to it." "Here again are... is a little riff off of the commercials of the time." "The kids in black and white." "This little jingle you're hearing here is an actual Evelyn Ryan jingle." "She was a real lady, a regular housewife, who had this extraordinary gift with words." "And in another era, in another life, she probably would have been a journalist, even a novelist." "But because she didn't have any alternatives at the time, she found writing as an ideal writing jingles as an ideal medium for her life, because when you're a housewife with ten kids and you have to cook and clean" "and do all this crazy stuff to support your family, the only time she had to write was between ironing a blouse or washing a dish, and these little ridiculous jingles, these Ogden Nash-like rhymes, were the perfect medium for her because they were fast and quick." "And she could write one in between her many household jobs." "Here's Woody Harrelson playing Kelly Ryan," "who was an alcoholic at a time when there wasn't much support for alcoholics." "And he, in real life, drank a bottle of whisky a pint of whisky and a pack of beer every night when he got home." "We'll see more of him later." "A lot of people have asked me what's real, what's made up in this film." "This little scene is absolutely true." "What's remarkable about this time, back in the '50s, is that these contests enabled women like Evelyn Ryan to actually support a family." "Five thousand dollars was huge back then." "And she was able to put down the money for a house." "This is one of my favorite scenes." "Julianne Moore's performance is really interesting, really subtle here." "It's all about handing power over to your husband." "Take a look at her glove work there." "This is a wonderful bit that Julianne came up with." "And we ran through it once, and I grabbed my B-camera and I said "Quick"." "Told the B-camera to quickly cover the glove bit there." "These simple, visual cues that characters can give you onscreen can tell more than words." "The fact that she was set to take her gloves off to sign the paper, and to sign the mortgage of the house, and to get a little bit of power over her life." "It's quite a moving moment that Julianne came up with, the fact that she had to put her gloves back on because she wasn't allowed to sign the papers." "It's just a lovely symbol of what went on at the time to women." "But here we have all the enormous things that she just won." "And she's bringing it in, and what's really lovely, visually, is that the appliances are just so white, and bright, and shiny, and I thought it was just such a great contrast to this raggedy couch with the flapping cloth" "that Kelly is holding." "And again, it's all these visual things that you throw in that are much more powerful than words." "Just to show that this man is feeling like he doesn't have a lot of power." "There are no villains in this film." "Kelly doesn't drink out of spite, he drinks because he feels that he can't quite live up to the image of a man." "Men, especially back then, need to feel that they're able to take care of their family and their wives." "And they're able to earn enough money." "Again, we just put that liquor bottle there." "Didn't need a close-up on it, just wanted to have it around." "Keep it subtle." "Let us know what's important to him." "If you take a look at the set-up of the house here, one thing you have to think about when you have bunches of characters onstage..." "I like to say stage, but onscreen." "...is how do you cram all of them in the picture?" "How do you tell the story without having to make "cut, cut, cut"?" "What our production designer, Ed McAvoy, and I talked about was having the kitchen and the living room in the same visual plane." "The kitchen was always Kelly's place to get drunk, to rage, to have his darkness." "And the living room is where all the kids and Evelyn hung out, did their homework." "It was this place of peace." "Now you see that his raging is intruding on their space." "This is something you have to think about when you're designing the set, thinking about your camera set-up." "So what we did was, normally you see that door is quite wide, in a house like this it would actually be the size of a regular door." "But we widened the door to give us access, visual access to both rooms." "Here's a really interesting use of score that John Frizzell came up with." "Kelly is raging and doing all these terrible things, and I played this scene for the studio on my director's cut without music, and everybody said we just can't sympathize with Kelly." "In fact, it affected their view of the character for the entire movie." "And they almost wanted me to cut the scene, because it seemed too harsh." "Then my composer said to me, what if I put music under it?" "What if I play Kelly's pain?" "And if you notice, it's quite beautiful, it's quite moving and heartbreaking, and it completely changes the scene around." "Here's a little bit that I wrote after talking to Terry Ryan, who's the middle daughter in this family." "She said that her father, after his rages, would always feel so terrible, that he'd fix her a little cup of tea," "and put it in her best china cup." "And I found that so touching." "And again, it shows Kelly's humanity." "That he really, truly adored Evelyn." "But it's very hard to love someone who outshines you." "Here's the Oatholic Ohurch." "I'm doing my best not to show the priest in a terrible light, but, oh heck, can't help myself." "They were good Oatholics." "But Evelyn, being the highly intelligent, insightful woman that she was," "did see the hypocrisy of the Ohurch." "One time, when they were really strapped for money and suffering," "a nun came up to her in church and said," ""Mrs. Ryan, why don't you take in laundry?"" "This is something remarkable about Julianne's performance" "This is something remarkable about Julianne's performance in that she takes in the darkness of the situation," "and there's no denial in her character's dealing with her family life." "But then she's able to go to the optimistic place." "I call Evelyn Ryan's philosophy of life "Midwest Zen"." "Which is, if life is hard, you don't sit and cry about it, you just get back on the tractor and you plow on." "Evelyn Ryan really had this gift for seeing the beauty of life." "She was able to cherish the day." "And isn't that how any of us can..." "This flashback was a way to clue you into their marriage, basically." "To, again, let you see Kelly's humanity." "I think it's very hard to watch an abusive relationship onscreen, unless you really know what was behind the pain of the abuser." "I didn't want anybody to ever hate Kelly." "It's hard not to, but again, here he is." "He's back, he's bounced back from his drunk, and he's cheerful as ever." "And Woody Harrelson just does a beautiful job of showing this man's basic sweetness." "You see him trying so desperately to make up for the fact that he wrecked the house the night before, and put his family in a tailspin." "Again, the use of that wacky piece of radio music in the background is a nice contrast to the scene." "I like to do that, especially with a piece like this, where the era gives you a lot of funky choices." "I often prefer found music to score." "It's less obvious, makes for a nice contrast." "Another little visual cue is the milk." "Mother's milk." "Food was always an issue in this family, so I keep bringing back the theme of running out of milk, milk money." "That was really your basic protein back then, if you didn't have much." "In a minute, you'll see the milkman scene." "Queen For A Day." "Queen For A Day." "I used to watch this show when I was a kid." "It was basically a sob festival." "They would have three women sit on stage, and just tell the most horrible stories about their lives, and whoever was the most wretched won all these prizes." "I love this as a contrast to Evelyn, because she refused to complain about her life." "She refused to be a victim." "Again, this incredible patience that she had as a mother of dealing with constant mess, and being stuck in a house, really with no stimulation." "This little bit with the wiping the hands, the kids came up with that." "It's quite wonderful." "This milkman is actually one of the only fictional characters." "When Robert Zemeckis and I were developing the script," "Bob said to me," ""Why don't you make the milkman a real bastard?"" "I thought it was just such a great idea to have this one person, especially the man who provides the milk," "to always be there to remind her of her poverty status." "Of course, he's just as wretched as she is." "It's an example of another working-class person putting down another working-class person." "But Evelyn never, never bites." "Here's another example of that Midwest Zen." "If this bad thing didn't happen, the good thing wouldn't happen." "It's one of those Buddha sayings." "This whole sequence was inspired by a documentary from the 1950's on contesting" "and also, again, by the commercials." "In those commercials of the time," "I noticed there were always little tiny housewives perched on sinks or pans, and these diminutive women who were flying in and out of the screen, and I decided to use that device for this." "My cinematographer, Jonathan Freeman, and I had a wonderful time recreating the look." "This is also another one of those absolutely true things." "This is also another one of those absolutely true things." "You could win shopping sprees at that time." "But the brilliance about Evelyn Ryan was that she didn'tjust show up at the market and grab stuff." "She planned it." "She knew she had only one chance, one chance to grab all these wonderful items, and she knew that she didn't want to get canned food or fish sticks or any of that, the ordinary stuff that her family's always had." "This made her unique." "She was always wanting her kids to try new things." "So she saw this shopping spree as an opportunity to get the most expensive things." "There are those fish sticks." "I remember those." "God, they were bad." "Again, another lovely moment from Woody here." "Here's a man who's been resigned to eating out of cans for the rest of his life," "and the thought of getting to have a wonderful treat just is too much for him to handle." "There's a real sweetness to his performance." "If you notice, the shopping carts were quite small, and that's why Evelyn came up with this plan with the butcher to build up the sides of the cart." "They weren't like carts that we have now." "We shot this film up in Oanada." "As you all probably know, we have to..." "A lot of filmmakers have to go up there to save money." "But the great thing about Oanada is that you can really reproduce the 1950's up there because there are still a lot of landscapes, and buildings and stores that haven't been taken over by franchises." "This is a great location." "In fact, half of the stuff on these shelves were already there." "I think this could be among my favorite scenes." "It's a really joyful scene." "And especially when you make a film that has so many dreary sections, you have to pop in a scene like this once in a while" "to give the audience a relief." "Again, the visual cue of the freezer." "When I was writing the screenplay," "I discovered that this freezer was just a wonderful..." "It's like a third character that keeps popping up, 'cause it's Kelly's constant reminder that he can't provide." "Again, this is a scene inspired directly from the memoir." "After the spree, Evelyn sat down with the kids and all these marvelous gourmet items that actually nobody wanted to try because they were too exotic." "But Kelly got drunk, and he actually threw the meat out the back door." "And he actually swiped up all of these cans and threw those out the back door, but watch what Julianne does." "You know, we all have a choice in those moments when somebody is doing something to us that is agonizing and maddening." "We have a choice between exploding or moving on." "Evelyn Ryan constantly made that choice." "She was not going to let his depression affect her good time." "I added the little Spam bit." "I just love the contrast between caviar and canned meat." "And, again, framing a scene is really important." "I tend to love master shots" "'cause it's almost like a stage play where you get to see both characters," "she in the foreground, he in the back." "It's like a little duet here, and then in editing you just pop in the close-ups for accent." "By the way, Woody is a strict vegan." "In fact, he only eats raw foods." "He had his raw-food chef create some Spam for him that wasn't meat." "They stuffed it into the Spam can, and Woody was able to eat it." "It was hard making Woody look like an alcoholic, because he's in such great shape." "He added plumpers in his cheeks." "You notice he's a little full there around the mouth." "Our makeup man, Jordan Samuel, just did a wonderful job on Woody, giving him his broken veins, aging him." "This little spot here is just wonderful." "The actors started to improvise." "This little spot here." "Julianne just decided to call Kelly over, and all the kids, they were such wonderful young actors." "They just kept going with the improvisation, and I kept the cameras rolling." "I think this was the second take of the improv, because by then the cameraman realized what goal this was so that he did that little sneak, that little slight pan." "But that's gold, when your actors are so connected to the work that they can just keep going." "I always keep the cameras rolling way beyond the script," "I always keep the cameras rolling way beyond the script, just to see if anything happens that's even more interesting than what I've written." "This was a really fun sequence to do." "I had the problem of exposition here." "How do I make it clear that time's passed, she's won a whole bunch of prizes, the kids are growing up." "It's almost, again, in the stylistic vein of what's been going on, like almost a little commercial break in the middle of the film." "This next scene, I call a little mini-operatic duet" "This next scene, I call a little mini-operatic duet between Kelly and Evelyn." "And it's inspired by this contest, again, that actually happened." "It was a contest where you had to fill in the words of a song." "And I was so interested by the fact that Evelyn and the kids were able to carry on with their life in the living room, with their homework and their little playing and tasks and watching TV, that over the years Kelly became white noise." "And, in a way, this is the only way Kelly in his drunken state can really relate to his wife." "Terry Ryan told me that living with her dad, in order to survive, they all just tuned him out." "And when he would come up with things like, "You're too damn happy", all they could do was laugh, because it was just so patently absurd." "And this is how they survived his alcoholism, with humor." "And their mother taught them that." "What else are you going to do?" "This is beautiful lighting by Jonathan Freeman, just beautiful." "That end of the day, warm, tungsteny and somewhat oppressive lighting with that..." "I don't know if you saw that beautiful half shadow over Kelly." "Here's our milkman again," "which is a nice character for her to bump up against afterjust having this tension with her husband, because it's going to send her back into the house even more unhappy." "That's what you have to think about when you structure your screenplay." "How can I beat up my hero and my heroine enough so that they're propelled into the next moment?" "This, needless to say, was a fairly complicated scene to shoot." "We had to use a double, quite naturally, for this fall." "And we had this milk all over the set for about three days." "They cleaned it up, but it all dripped down underneath and turned into yogurt, and then into rotting a rotting kind of cheese-like mass." "This set was fairly uninhabitable until they finally dug all that curdled milk product out from underneath." "This actually happened," "Evelyn falling with all the milk bottles." "I chose to put this in the film, again, because of the visual of milk and blood." "What could be more mother-like than that?" "In Terry's memoir, there was this marvelous description of the milk and blood mixing on the floor and pouring down the heat register." "And I was so struck by that image that I made sure to put it in." "You'll see it in a minute." "There." "There's Evelyn." "This is just a priceless clip." "I had a feeling I would find some great material on old Miss America shows." "I found this little piece." "I put that in 'cause it's a nice shorthand for a contemporary audience to see what the culture was like back then." "Robert Zemeckis and I were concerned when I was writing this script that young women and young men in their 20's, early 30's," "would have no concept of what the '50s were like and what the social mores were." "And he actually suggested that I start looking into old TV clips to give those cues." "I have very few scenes where Evelyn and Kelly are alone together, mostly because when you live with an alcoholic, they usually pass out before you get to bed." "And I thought this would be such an intimate way of showing their relationship, of him removing her milk-sodden girdle." "And also we get a chance to see Evelyn in a really raw emotional state," "because she couldn't afford to show this to her kids." "Herjob, her entire life, was to make sure every one of those kids got out of that house emotionally whole." "And if she fell apart in front of them," "they would have been shattered." "I didn't put this in the film, but after Evelyn fell on the glass, there were still hundreds of tiny pieces of splinters of glass there were still hundreds of tiny pieces of splinters of glass left in her hands that the doctors couldn't take out." "So Kelly went to his shop and created these..." "He actually made tweezers for her." "These goofy little tiny women I have prancing across the stage, the screen here, which, originally you see them in the sandwich contest." "Again, that's a riff off of the commercials of the time." "This actually did happen." "Rog stole money, 'cause he was sick of not having enough," "and he did go off to the Army." "And I'm pleased to report that he's a very happy man today." "This is one little piece of fiction I put in." "Actually, Evelyn did get to go to New York." "But I thought it would be dramatically much more effective if she was stuck." "Because later on, she's going to be going to the Affadaisies." "And I wanted that to be the very first time she actually got out of the house." "This is why when you watch films about historic events, you should never completely believe them." "'Oause as filmmakers, we have to kind of mess with the facts a little bit, just to make the film dramatic," "just to make it a piece of art instead of a documentary." "Here's the wonderful Laura Dern, who has a cameo in this film." "She's just perfect for this, because she has this immediately readable warmth" "and wholesomeness and irony, too." "I deliberately gave her kind of a palette that was in the blues." "You notice Evelyn's always wearing pink." "But they're visually a great contrast." "Here are our girls again." "You can also see immediately that Dortha's economically a little better off than Evelyn." "Dortha's lighting is much brighter." "Her kitchen larger, cleaner." "She has all the latest things, you know, that snazzy, light-blue Singer sewing machine." "The party pork barbecue is real." "Oh, my God." "Here is the iron lung, which again," "I'm not sure how many people who are in their 20s know what this is." "But this lady got polio, I think, as a young woman, and was consigned to an iron lung the rest of her life." "But, like Evelyn, she was cheerful." "Again, it's that Midwest Zen, make the best of what you have." "I loved shooting this scene, because it's a oner." "I love oners." "Oners are where you don't do any coverage." "You just basically let your camera cover it all in one move." "That's just so that could set up a wide, but oners, they're dangerous, because you never know if it's gonna work, and you might get hurt in the editing room." "But they did such a beautiful job, Woody and Julianne," "I was in good shape." "Don't try oners at home." "Again, this really did happen." "There were so many ways that people could contest back then." "When you look at a scene like this that goes by so quickly, no one really realizes how hard it is to cover." "And also the choreography of the kids." "I always brought the kids on set early before the principal actors and got their blocking down so they could rehearse it over and over." "This happened." "Young Davey actually did clip off all the tulips in the neighbors' yards, which prevented Evelyn from going because she had to do the honorable thing and stay and take care of this situation." "But I included this scene, because of the paradox between Evelyn's crushing disappointment that she can't go," "and the fact that Davey actually created quite a beautiful art piece." "Oall it the tulip installation." "And again, there's Evelyn acknowledging that they are beautiful." "He did create something beautiful." "Again, isn't that what we do as parents, is that we try to teach our kids to be responsible." "But then again, we can't crush their impulses." "Evelyn was brilliant at that." "This car, I also consider a character." "We had a great time in post, adding all kinds of terrible, rusty, enginey sounds to this car," "'cause again, it symbolizes their poverty." "There's Emma Hartzler again in her lung." "That car door sound, we added that in post." "You don't realize how important sounds are to giving the audience cues about character and situation." "Hopefully as an audience, you don't even notice it, that it's just sitting there in your subconscious." "I went to Defiance," "I guess about two years before we even shot this, when I was writing the screenplay." "I wanted to see what the town looked like." "And they had that sign, "Defiance, A Nice Place to Live"." "I took a photograph of it, showed it to my production designer and said, "We have to have this"." "That's a little Les Paul/Mary Ford tune playing on the radio." "I used Bye-Bye Blues earlier when they were moving into their house." "Les Paul, Mary Ford." "One of Evelyn Ryan's favorite recording artists at the time." "I loved them." "They're sophisticated yet corny, which is really who Evelyn was." "Again, this is something that happened to Evelyn and Tuff on the way to the Affadaisies." "Kelly's car broke down on them," "just such a wonderful, dramatic device, because it means that even when he's not there, Kelly was holding Evelyn back." "He was always this obstacle." "This lovely gas station in the middle of nowhere we recreated." "But there was a freeway right next a very busy road right next to us, so we had cops holding up traffic, and we would madly shoot and then let the traffic go." "One of the hazards of filmmaking." "That little cow sound that we added in cues you in," ""We're out in the country"." "Little do you know that there was a big shopping mall across the street." "This is the author Terry Ryan, portrayed as a young teenage girl, wonderfully played by Ellary Porterfield." "Ellary as an actress has this lovely quality of being responsible and thoughtful and a little bit moody and intelligent." "And you can believe that she would grow up to be a writer." "And Terry Ryan did question her mother on this trip about her life." "This was the early '60s, and I think that feminism was just starting to creep into people's consciousness." "And she just couldn't believe that her mother could possibly be happy." "And she just couldn't believe that her mother could possibly be happy." "And remarkably, Evelyn was, because she made her own happiness." "Another one of my favorite scenes to shoot, this was just so glorious." "All these ladies like Easter eggs coming to greet Evelyn." "Our costume designer, Hala Bahmet, just did a wonderful job," "popping up their colors and showing that they were, again, better off than Evelyn." "And the fact that they all dressed up for each other." "What's great about the iron lung thing is that no one really seemed to notice." "They just took it in stride, including Emma." "She didn't have her body but she had her wit." "Evelyn used to say to Terry," ""There's always someone worse off than you"." "And whenever there was an electrical storm she would think about Emma in her iron lung, and worry about the fact that the electricity would go out and she wouldn't be able to breathe." "I love this scene." "It's like a grand salon." "They're housewives, but they're exchanging these literary ideas." "And this is very important." "This was the turning point where contests of wit were replaced by contests of chance." "And that's what we have today." "The sweepstakes where all you have to do is mail in your name and pray, or the lottery is the same thing." "This Dr Pepper contest was basically the last contest of its kind." "It got too expensive for the companies to hire all those judges to go through all the entry blanks." "It's also remarkable that these women who got together, they were basically competing with each other for the same prizes, they were basically competing with each other for the same prizes, but they shared blanks, they shared ideas." "They helped each other improve their writing." "They were stunningly supportive." "It was quite a lovely thing back then." "This is the Jell-O scene." "When Terry Ryan and her mom came back, her father did indeed lock all the kids out of the house." "This is the Jell-O scene." "And Evelyn really did throw Jell-O at Kelly." "This was the turning point in the family dynamic." "It was the first time that everybody said to Kelly," ""No more"." "The fact that the kids had the nerve to jump on him and hold him back, that had never happened before." "In the book, Terry Ryan describes the fact that it gave them all this feeling of empowerment." "Again, a really complex scene to shoot." "It took months first to perfect a throwable Jell-O formula." "Many camera tests." "Again, here's a little theme of the freezer and Kelly trying to provide." "He had made that vow years ago to fill that damn freezer up." "And now he's bought a few steaks." "You know, that constant, sad, pathetic attempt to provide." "But little do we know that the reason he's been able to buy these steaks, and buy this lovely desk for her, is that he took out a second mortgage on the house." "This, I suppose you could call the third act of the film." "And Hala, my costume designer and I, discussed the palette of Julianne's wardrobe changing slightly." "It's still bright here, but as you watch the scenes that are coming up, you'll notice that her dresses just very subtly get darker and darker." "She goes from those lovely, bright, rosy, optimistic pinks to just more maroons, browns." "Those are those subtle cues that hopefully, nobody really notices, but will just work on you subconsciously, just to cue you in on what's happening internally to the character." "It's beautiful work between Woody and Julianne here." "This is really a breaking point in the marriage." "Evelyn never left her husband." "She always hung in there because that's what you did back then." "But he really took away what..." "He almost took her heart away by mortgaging off the house." "And it wasn't out of malice." "As Woody's saying here, it's all about wanting to have a little money in his pocket." "That's the grind of poverty." "Kelly really was Evelyn's 11th child." "He probably stopped at the age of 10." "He was a man who didn't know how to be responsible." "He wanted her to fix everything." "Quite a burden." "This is another oner." "Oners are very hard to set up" "because the camerawork has to be absolutely precise." "The movement has to be precise, so that the camera's angled on the characters at the right moment when they're talking." "You see how Evelyn is framed between the heads of the two kids." "And the girl on the right is starting to cry." "She lays her head down, which reveals, allows us to see Evelyn in frame." "Took a long time to rehearse that baby." "And the final appearance of the freezer, with the fish sticks on the bottom, and pulling the plug to save electricity." "That freezer that she was so proud of now has become a burden." "This actually happened, too." "I love this." "This was part of their Oatholic upbringing, to use their rosaries to pray for a big win." "Our kid wrangler, Maria Ricossa," "who was an actress that we hired, who was a wonderful coach for the kids," "I had her teach the kids the rosary." "And you have to say it very fast." "And you have to say it very fast." "We had a rosary contest to see who could say the rosary the fastest, because that's what a good Oatholic kid does." "This scene with the milkman, where he suggests that she take in laundry..." "In real life, a nun at the church went up to Evelyn and said, "Why are you doing all those contests?" "They're irresponsible." "You should take in laundry"." "And Evelyn said to her, "I'm sorry, but I don't take in laundry", which is such a marvelous, dignified response." "But I thought I'd give that little bit to the milkman." "They used to have detectives come out to check up on the contestants for the finalists." "The companies hired private detectives who would drive all over the Midwest or the United States and meet the contestant and interview her," "make sure that this person is real and on the up-and-up." "It doesn't mean you've won, just that you're a finalist." "That's why they're so excited here." "This was basically a two-shotter." "Had a Steadicam on Julianne for the whole scene, and a Steadicam on Woody, and we cut the two together." "There's what I'm talking about, the palette, Julianne's dress there." "It's maroon." "Here's one of the themes of this film, which is, what's the difference between effort and luck?" "The fact is no matter how hard you work, fate can still deny you a win, or deny you a paycheck," "and this is where it all comes back to the family, that no matter how hard Evelyn tries or maybe how gifted she is as a contester," "she could still lose." "And it's a crisis of faith for all of them." "And here, Kelly, being the 11th child of the family, still wants Evelyn to make him feel OK, and for her to make things better." "And this is where finally we get to see Evelyn's character break apart." "I love what Jonathan Freeman did with the lighting here, that patch of cold green light above her head, coming in from the window." "It's almost like a Rothko painting, isn't it?" "It's a beautiful way to show the oppressiveness of the moment." "Here's where you try to keep your camera invisible." "That was another one-shot." "But you don't wanna show off with your camera in moments like that." "You want the movement to almost be invisible, and that was just a slight push-in, and just leaving the camera on Evelyn and let Julianne do her work." "This was an incident that I borrowed from a different part of the book." "But I decided to slam it into this section," "which is, they were very poor at one point, and didn't have enough food." "And Evelyn got a buggy piece an envelope of buggy soup that had been in the cupboard for months and months," "and served it to the kids, 'cause that's all she had." "This is really the one point where she just out-and-out lies to them." "Here's the horror of getting all those dinner-time sales calls," "that horrible feeling of waiting for the phone call to save the house." "And it doesn't come." "Now as you know, she does win the prize here." "And I know one film critic who actually liked the film" "And I know one film critic who actually liked the film but said the only problem with the film was that the ending seemed much too convenient." "It seemed much too pat, that she would win in the end." "It actually did happen." "That's the problem with this piece, because Evelyn actually did pull off a miracle." "And I decided when I wrote the film that the film couldn't be about winning..." "There's the phone call." "...because if the whole ending of the film was she won, and isn't this wonderful, then it would be just another one of those films, those contests, those sports films, where they win the big game and that's it." "This film had to be about something much more." "And yes, they win and it's thrilling." "And it is a miracle and she does save the house." "But then you see, we'll see in a minute that Tuff falls apart" "because she sees that this win is not the solution," "that the horror could happen all over again." "Here we go." "We found this wonderful piece of music, Wheel Of Fortune, that we combined with the score." "But you see, the scene suddenly turns." "And this is what happens in real life." "You have these incredible victories, but they come after such effort and such pain that the victory isn't always sweet." "And this is really what the film is about." "I got this phrase in my head when I was writing the piece." "And I think Robert Zemeckis even said this to me once." "He said, "Pain is inevitable, but suffering is an option"." "And that's what every scene in this film has been about, which is life is always going to hand you something miserable," "but you don't need to define yourself by either your failure or your pain or by whatever terrible thing someone has done to you." "And this is a message that Evelyn's trying to tell Tuff right now," "that no matter where you come from, what is done to you, you have the option to thrive." "And forgiving." ""Forgive him so you can embrace this beautiful day."" "You know, that's the other big message." "If you live with an alcoholic father," "how do you grow up and not define yourself as a child of an alcoholic, or whatever other terrible thing happens to you?" "How do you transcend that?" "You forgive and you move on, and you cherish this day." "You forgive and you move on, and you cherish this day." "When I first was writing the screenplay," "I visited Terry Ryan in San Francisco." "I'd never met her before." "And she was the mostjoyful, funniest, wittiest person" "I had met in a long time." "She had a light." "She has this light in her eyes, and she got it directly from her mother." "And I said to her, how did you survive this life?" "How did you survive?" "And she said "Oh, Dad, he was just Dad."" "I said, "Well, didn't he ever go to a shrink?" "Didn't he ever get really angry?" "Did you ever go through years of depression?"" "She said, "No"." "It was all because of her mom." "It was all because of what her mother taught her and her brothers and sisters," "that you can move on from misery, and that you need never feel sorry for yourself," "or define yourself by your parents' flaws." "And this sequence is so important to the film, which is they all move on." "Evelyn didn't have a career." "But she still was with this man who would..." "She'd be fairly miserable with him through the rest of his life." "He finally did die." "She started actually traveling a lot." "But she accomplished what she set out to accomplish, which was to get every one of her children out of that house intact." "Not only functioning, but traveling the world, finding careers." "And these are the Ryans." "This was a beautiful day." "This was towards the end of the shoot." "They all showed up in Toronto." "It was the first time they'd all been together since their mother had died." "And that's Terry Ryan standing at the typewriter, Betsy Ryan." "If you look at Terry, just look at her face, there is just a glow about her, and it's notjust my lighting." "Going back to the fact that Evelyn Ryan actually won the Dr Pepper contest in time to save the house, and got the call two days before they were about to leave," "Terry told me that she truly believes in this concept called luck." "And she thinks that luck is an actual force, because her mother possessed it." "Evelyn wasn'tjust this hard-working housewife with great intelligence and wit." "She also had almost a paranormal connection to..." "I don't know if you wanna call it the God-force, or fate or destiny." "But it was an actual miracle she pulled off, winning that contest, because there were millions of people entering that thing." "Because there were millions of people entering that thing." "And Terry told me throughout the making of this film that her mother was up there, watching over us, making sure everything was going all right." "And I tend to believe that." "It was a miracle this film ever got made." "It was shut down in pre-production." "It's not the kind of film that studios normally make." "And I believe Evelyn was probably up there, whispering in a few ears, making sure this would happen." "Getting any movie made is a miracle." "Getting through it is a miracle." "And I came away from this project with this whole new way of viewing the world." "And you really can't say that for a lot of your projects." "For some reason, just being around the Evelyn Ryan way of life has changed me as a person, and I know that sounds wildly corny." "But she helped knock out a lot of the cynicism" "I was building up about this business." "Made me believe in following a dream." "And as tough as this movie was to make, she's taught me never to give up." "And I'll leave you with that thought." "I'm signing off now, as you enjoy the dulcet tones of k.d. Lang, who recorded this last song just for this film." "Who recorded this last song just for this film." "Just sit back and enjoy." "It's been a pleasure talking to you, and I'll see you on the next one."