Augusten Burroughs and Joseph Cross Interview

“Running with Scissors,” produced, directed, and written for the screen by Ryan Murphy (creator of the provocative television drama “Nip/Tuck”), is a blistering comedy and deeply moving, mesmerizing tale of how one young man survived a nightmare childhood while keeping his sense of humor and his sense of forgiveness intact.  Based on Augusten Burroughs’ harrowing personal memoir of the same name, the film depicts Burroughs’ unsettling, humor-filled and highly personal recollections of growing up under the most berserk and often shocking circumstances.

In this warped, out-of-control, 70s-era coming of age tale, Murphy has crafted a strikingly universal story about the strange power of families, the wonderment of childhood, the madness of adulthood, and the revelation of finding your way in spite of it all. The film stars Annette Bening, Brian Cox, Joseph Fiennes, Alec Baldwin, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jill Clayburgh, Evan Rachel Wood, and Joseph Cross.

Raised by a bright but barely functional mother given to psychotic episodes, and an alcoholic father who left when the going got rough, “Running with Scissors” tells the story of how Augusten was ultimately sent at 13 years old to live with his mother’s shrink and the doctor’s family of outrageous eccentrics.  Seen through the eyes of a child’s vivid mix of curiosity, compassion and dismay, the film depicts a flurry of alternately bracing and hilarious encounters with mental illness, sex, prescription drugs and counter-culture therapy that left Augusten’s boyhood innocence in tatters -- and illustrates the way in which Augusten eventually broke free of it all to become a lauded writer.

Burroughs says now of his childhood: “It was definitely crazy and kind of awful and scary but it was also thrilling because I knew it was a once in a life time experience. And I paid very close attention when I was living that experience. I knew that I was going through something that if it didn’t kill me would make me better in the end.”

Joseph Cross, who plays Augusten Burroughs in the film, had just started his Freshman year at Trinity College in Connecticut when he received the script.  He stayed up until three in the morning finishing it and was completely riveted by the role of Augusten. “I thought it was one of the best parts for someone my age I had ever seen,” he says. “But it was also quite daunting because I knew I would want to do justice to him and to the screenplay.”

Once cast, Cross faced the enormous task of taking his character through a 180 degree transformation from shocked, repressed child to humor-fueled survivor of a whole slew of life’s most devastating problems. “Augusten changes drastically,” he notes. “At the beginning of the film, he’s just an innocent child but then he has to deal with all these very adult situations: his mother’s psychosis, his father’s alcoholism, his parents’ separation, the involvement of the Finches in his life and then, his relationship with Neil Bookman. What’s so interesting is that Augusten is someone who so craves normalcy but he winds up in absolute bedlam and has to find his way through.”

Cross began by meeting at length with the grown up Augusten Burroughs, who openly shared his innermost perspective with the actor. “I really tried to explain to Joe where I was coming from,” recalls Burroughs, “that I was very shy and kind of uptight and concerned about my hair and my nice polyester clothes being lint free – and then I walked into the Finch’s house and realized it was sink or swim. If I was going to survive, I had to embrace my surroundings.”

At the Los Angeles press day to promote “Running with Scissors,” Augusten Burroughs and Joseph Cross sat down with Movies Online to discuss what it was like collaborating together on “Running with Scissors” with director Ryan Murphy and the film’s impressive ensemble cast. Here’s what they had to say:

Q: Augusten, in the beginning of the story you’re doing some eccentric things yourself like boiling your allowance, at what point did you snap out of that and see maybe there’s something wrong here?

AB: It was as I snapped out of it. (laughs) Oh, I still do weird things. I’m one of those people who turns the stove off and on a thousand times. But then things happen to me like floods and fires so. I understood that my behavior was odd once I got out into the real world. Once I was 19 and 20 working that’s when I understood just how peculiar my life had been up to that point and just how I had a range of experiences that other people didn’t have. I spoke a language other people hadn’t even heard of. That’s when I realized.

Q: But you recognized something was wrong with the Finches?

AB: Oh yeah, while I was there. While I was going through it, I knew that this was not… I didn’t really know the way things really should be but I knew that this was not it.

Q: When you decided to tell your story, were you worried that people wouldn’t be able to understand where you were coming from because it was so distinctive to your experience?

AB: No, I actually had anxiety that it would be boring, and I remember reading, after it was typeset, going through the galleys, reading it a few times, thinking why is anyone going to even care about this, and my agent had to be the one to tell me, ‘Look, most people have never experienced anything like this. It’s going to be very unusual to other people.’ So I had to trust him on that.

Q: Was it fun to kind of see your past come to life on a movie set? Was it bizarre?

AB: Oh yeah, it was very fun, it was bizarre, it was surreal. It’s just out of our normal daily experience to see a movie of your life while you’re still in the middle of living it. It’s just a very odd experience. The one thing I wasn’t prepared for was to be so emotionally impacted by the film when I saw it. I mean I was relieved first that it didn’t suck. You know, there was this sort of, ‘Oh good, it’s not horrible.’ But then to be so emotionally affected by it was surprising because I had gone through it once and then wrote about it and did a book tour, so I just didn’t expect that. I just felt like it wouldn’t affect me emotionally but it did and I was very happy and relieved. I feel very good that there’s a document… Part of me has always felt – well earlier, not so much now – what’s the point of going through such a life if no one ever knows and no one ever cares. I mean I felt like I slipped through the cracks my whole life. With school I slipped through the cracks. There was no one ever there to stop it from happening and so now I feel like at least it exists as a movie. So in that sense it was a profound relief.

Q: So how surprised were you when you were approached for the rights to your book for them to make a movie out of it?

AB: Well I was approached and then I knew it would be more and more people would want it because the book was selling really well and I made a decision early on that I was not going to option it. It would never be a movie because I felt it would be too easy to make a terrible movie out of it. But Ryan was so, so, so persistent that I finally decided to give him the respect of meeting him in person to explain my reasoning why it would never happen. And during that meeting Ryan showed that he had such a profound understanding of the book as though he had written it himself. His mother was so similar in so many ways. I just changed. I mean I did a 180. I decided I wanted him to make the movie. It was a gut instinct. He hadn’t done “Nip/Tuck” at that point. He hadn’t done a movie and it just … my gut said, ‘do it’ and all through the process of developing, Ryan never let me forget that he knew and knows that it’s not just a book, it’s *my* life. So he took enormous care to make sure that there was never anything that I was unhappy with or that I was uncomfortable with. I never felt like it was taken out of my hands, taken away by Hollywood quote unquote. You know, that never happened. That experience never happened and it was great.

Q: Joseph, what was it like for you knowing that you were playing a real life person who you could call at any moment and ask about a certain event or scene in the movie?
 
JC: Well, at first the idea was really daunting because I wanted to do Augusten justice and I wanted to do the book justice. The people that liked the book loved the book. I mean *loved* the book and can recite passages and so I knew people would be very critical of who they got to play the memoirs. And so it was a little scary for me at first and I didn’t know what Augusten was going to think of me or whether he was going to think I even looked the part or could do it because I haven’t really done anything before this that would have shown that I could do it except for the auditions I did for Ryan. But when I met Augusten, he was so kind and so encouraging and gracious and sweet that I think that was really…that was the moment where I was like, ‘OK, I can do this.’ It was really scary up until then and then to have his blessing was sort of like … it was like setting me free to go and do it.

Q: Were you familiar with the story before?

JC: I read the script first. I read the script, learned the lines, and the next day I met with Ryan, read for him. He asked me if I would fly out to L.A. to read with Evan actually which didn’t end up happening. I ended up reading for Dede who’s the producer, Dede Gardner who produced with Brad Pitt, and so then I read the book before that, and so I read it once then and then I ended up reading it a couple more times before we started shooting.

Q: Was there one key piece of information that you got from him while you were working on the movie that made you go, ‘Oh, OK. I know where to take this.’?

JC: What I got from Augusten …When I was reading for Ryan and for Dede, there was… He’s not getting the humor of it. He’s making it so dark. And I couldn’t bring myself to give humor to it because I thought that they wanted to make it cheesier, they want to make it cheap because it didn’t seem right to be funny because it wasn’t funny to me. It was so dark, so sad. But when I met with Augusten, the way that Augusten tells stories from the time it’s with such a wonderful sense of humor and wit that I understood that that was the defense mechanism, that was his saving grace. It was to be able to step back and laugh at the absurdity of it so that was really. Meeting with Augusten was where I understood that I needed that little hook, that comic edge for the character.

Q: What I got out of it is these are people who need help but instead they just find enablers who let them keep acting in a certain way. Do you think that happens to a larger degree today? There’s all sorts of alternative medicines out there to treat things.

AB: That’s an interesting question. It probably does happen. I think that … I also think there are a lot of very good therapists out there. In my particular case, it was a bit of the blind leading the blinder. It’s hard for me to generalize though. I think that … One thing I can tell you is that from traveling around the world for this book, I’ve…  The one thing I’ve learned is that there are so many people who have had the exact same childhood and there’s another layer of people who have had not the exact same childhood but felt the same feelings that childhood brought up. But I’ve learned that my childhood is not as unique as I thought it was. I really thought I was the only person who had anything remotely like this, but it’s not the case. There are a lot of people that went through that. I think that there was a lot of enabling as you say. There was definitely a lot of enabling and I guess that certainly goes on now otherwise there wouldn’t be a successful therapy community training people out of that behavior.

Q: And now people in the media debate psychiatry all the time. When you hear things like ‘There’s no such thing as a chemical imbalance,’ stuff like that, what does it make you think about today’s climate regarding psychiatry.

AB: I know there is such a thing as a chemical imbalance because my mother used to go psychotic every single year, sometimes once, sometimes twice, but every year and in the fall she would go psychotic, and I’ve seen it first hand and I know what it looks like, and then she had a stroke and it never happened again. So I’ve witnessed it with my own eyes.

Q: Why once a year?

AB: I don’t know. I don’t know why. Maybe something… I don’t know. I don’t even want to speculate. I don’t know but I know it tended to happen around her birthday so it was a very emotional time for her I think. Maybe there was something in her own past that happened during that time, but it was like clockwork. Every year I would think that would be the last time and she’d spend the rest of the year fine and I would think it would not happen and then it would happen but they’d get worse, they’d get bigger. They’d get bigger, bigger breaks and it was just so exhausting. It was awful and then she had a stroke and it never happened.

Q: How did you get through these experiences?

AB: I was unrealistic in a lot of ways. I believed that tomorrow, literally tomorrow, could be completely different than today. I believed that I might meet someone who would change my life and I believed that just because it’s hideous now doesn’t mean that it’s going to have to be hideous always. I was very ambitious and I wanted to be -- I don’t mean commercially – I mean I wanted to be happy. I wanted to be happy and I just felt like I was determined to get that. So I never was a victim. My mother was a victim and that used to embarrass me when I was little to see her blame the world and blame others and blame, blame, blame, and it used to make me feel ashamed. I used to wear that shame. It was awful and I never wanted to be like that. Never, never, never. So I was always determined to take responsibility for everything myself. You know, I’m sort of the opposite. I’m the other extreme.

Q: In the ending credits, it says that you’ve rekindled your relationship with your father recently. Is there a lot of guilt on his side that he didn’t come in and try to help you escape from this or he didn’t really understand what was going on?

AB: No, my father didn’t have any guilt over that -- he’s dead now – that I could detect. He didn’t seem to have any guilt. We did get closer. I forced it. I wanted a relationship because I wanted answers. I wanted to know how he let it happen. But I could never confront him with that directly because my father would shut down. You know, hang up the phone, shut down, turn away. Very complex relationship. He never read any of the books, for example. His wife, my stepmother, always said that he didn’t want to read “Running with Scissors” because she was afraid it would bring up painful memories, but I always kind of doubted that. It didn’t seem like he would have those memories. I never felt that he would feel that responsibility.

Q: Brian (Cox) said there were actually worse stories than what are in the book so why did you censor anything?

AB: Some stories… I wanted the book to be read and in order for that to happen, I wanted to focus on what was funny or came off funny to me. Not everyone thinks “Running with Scissors” is funny. But I focused on the stories that I liked, the things that were funny for me. And there were things I just didn’t want to write about and there were stories that didn’t feel like they were mine. They weren’t directly my stories. They were more other people’s stories so I didn’t feel like writing them because they weren’t mine. They weren’t specifically mine. It’s also a matter of …how can I explain it… it’s a weird kind of triage. When I wrote “Running with Scissors,” I’d written one book, “Sellevision.” It’s hard to write a memoir of your life because it’s so big. It’s so big. It feels overwhelmingly daunting and it’s just the most overwhelming experience to have to sit down and write your life story. You have to really sort of triage it and pick and choose and a lot falls away. You know, I look back on it now and that are things I wish I’d put in, stories I wish I’d put in, and some things I didn’t even think about until more recent.

Q: What would you like an audience to take from your book and the film?

AB: Well, the one thing I feel like it’s important for young people to know that even if you’ve got a lousy life and your parents are not raising you well and you know it that, believe it or not, it’s OK. You can come out the other end OK and happy. It is better when you have all the support and you have loving parents but it’s much more… for you, in the long run, it’s better for you to face the truth of your parents early. If they’re terrible, you need to face it and realize it is possible that they’re not good parents and you can be happy later in life. You can have a fully successful, accomplished life by making it yourself and later on cobbling together the family that you need in order to do that. It’s very scary to be left alone in the world but it’s not life threatening necessarily. And to know that there’s no perfectly normal family, that there are so many more people out there that had untraditional lives, that you’re not alone.

Q: Joseph, there are so many accomplished actors in this film and you share scenes with virtually everybody. What did you take away from that experience, working with someone from Evan’s age all the way to Brian’s age? That’s a lot of experience there.

JC: I was really happy to be able do that because you really get to see the way that people work. I mean I worked with some of the best, just some of the top level people in this film and so for me it was just a tremendous learning experience, better than any academy that you could attend or anything like that because you get to watch it all first hand and see the way that people work.

Q: Was there any one consistent factor that you saw in everybody or was everybody coming at it from a difference place?

JC: Just raw talent.

Q: What was the contribution like going from “Running with Scissors” to “Flags of our Fathers”?

JC: Oh, tremendously different in every way. “Running with Scissors” was a lot about me internalizing and me reacting and processing things. That was a character that was very thoughtful, very introspective, and very bright in a movie that was very character driven and smaller. The budget was smaller and the days were very different and to go from that to “Flags” which was this … It feels epic to me when I see it and when we were doing it, there were days when we would have with 800 extras and 20 tanks on a beach in Iceland and I was with these like eight other lead guys all dressed in military garb with these real guns that we were handed that we had to learn how to shoot and everything. That character was about putting everything out there at every moment. You know he’s very, very outspoken and he’s never afraid to share what he thinks which is what makes people laugh at him all the time because a lot of what he says is silly and just not very well thought out. There’s no filter on him. So they’re two tremendously different movies and tremendously different characters. It was perfect for me to follow “Scissors” with that because I was able to really just get rid of all this, (turns to August, laughs) no offense, completely out of me and pull something else in.

Q: Have you noticed things changed for you since you have a starring movie now and you’re in a Clint Eastwood movie?

JC: No, not really, because the people that I keep close to me are the people that I’ll always keep close to me and they’re good friends from high school, and even middle school and elementary school, and family. I don’t live here so I’m not that tempted to be like going out and making the cool celebrity friends and getting your picture taken with whoever is important at the moment. For me, it’s just about going and doing good work with people that I want to work with in films that I would enjoy watching, then going home.

Q: Do you know what you’re doing next?

JC: No, I don’t know what I’m doing next. I want to find something that’s different but it has to be on par with these two movies. I can’t do anything that’s not.

Q: Thank you.

Joseph Cross will be seen next in Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers.” Augusten Burroughs’ #1 New York Times bestseller, “Running with Scissors,” has remained on the New York Times bestseller list for over two-and-a-half consecutive years and recently reached #1 again. Burroughs is also the author of the novel, “Sellevision,” which is currently in development for film. “Running with Scissors” opens in theaters on October 20th.