Speaking of that whole adaptation process, your choice to focus specifically on the boys’ childhoods is very interesting. How did you land there?
That’s the really unique, wonderful thing about the novel is that you can imagine them as adults, but you can’t do that in film very easily. I mean, they did it in “Moonlight,” which is the only film I’ve ever seen it work in, but, you know. You have an emotional connection to Evan [Rosado, who plays Jonah]. And we really knew that the whole film was going to rest on your emotional connection to Evan, and as soon as you left Evan it wasn’t gonna work. So we were like, how do you take the emotional content and put it into these years, and how do you have the brothers grow up—which they do in the book—without having them grow up, you know what I mean? That was sort of how we ended up translating the novel to the screen; that was the biggest change. And we did it in a way that I think works. The reason I know it works is because Justin is proud of it. That’s the testament of what we did. And I think you feel the power of transcendence of this young man at a young age, and though you don’t know what’s gonna happen to him or where he’s gonna go, you have hope for him. And that was the key for us.
It’s funny, though, because his adulthood is pretty dour in the novel.
So the difference between the book and the movie is the book ends with him in an institution looking towards the future. It still ends with, “Upright, upright I pray, I swear, I swear, I pray…” you know. So it ends on the same note, but the part just before the end is really brutal. We couldn’t get there. I mean, the film I think is really heavy anyway, but we couldn’t get there with a young man in that way. You would never take a young man to an institution in that way. We tried that. We tried to bring him to an institution, but we couldn’t justify it emotionally. We couldn’t get the parents there. It just didn’t make sense.
His institutionalization in the book is so tied to his anguish over being gay, and I think your decision to distill the character into his childhood brings that turmoil into a very unique place. It’s refreshing, too, because it’s still taboo to depict children as gay. How do you navigate having child actors in some of these incredibly adult situations?
Well, the kids in our movie are incredible. They’re incredible actors, they’re incredible young men, and they have incredible parents. So those things are important. And then we had an acting coach who sort of walked them through every step of that process. And there was a constant desire and emphasis on honoring the spirit of the book and of the script, so because the young men in this movie are so incredible, they sort of internalized that mission as professionally as possible. They weren’t kids when they thought about that stuff. It felt like they were dealing with it as adults. And I think we don’t always give young people the credit that they can listen, understand, and emotionally process really difficult things if we give them the opportunity to rise to the occasion. And that’s really all we did, was give these young men the opportunity to rise to the occasion. And they just did. They just nailed it every single time.
I mean, you have this very immersive fictional experience about family, and your first full-length film, “In a Dream,” was a documentary about your own family. Why does the theme of family speak to you?
You know what’s interesting? When you look at a movie like ”King Lear,” like this giant, political epic, it’s really just about family. Real epics are all about family—family is the most epic theme we have. It has everything. It has love and intrigue and desire and sex and pain and hope and fear. Families are epic. They last forever. When there are kings and queens we call them dynasties, but really they’re just families that go on a long time. I’m interested in families that are not kings and queens. I don’t care about kings and queens! I love the epic nature of what people would otherwise consider small. The epic nature of everyday life. That’s what I loved about the book; Justin got that. He elevated his family to the level of myth, and I just believe in that. That’s what my first film is about, and I just love that.
Are there any other films that inspire you to work in that vein?
The most important film in terms of, stylistically, emotionally, sexually, was a movie called “Ratcatcher” by Lynne Ramsay. You love that movie?
I love her.
Me, too. I think she’s, like, the greatest filmmaker, one of them, alive, for sure. She’s probably the most influential on me.