Mary Stuart Masterson Interview, The Cake Eaters

MoviesOnline sat down with director Mary Stuart Masterson & screenwriter/actor Jayce Bartok to talk about their new movie, “The Cake Eaters,” a light-hearted, bittersweet story about two interconnected families coming to terms with love in the face of devastating loss. The quirky, small town, ensemble drama features a brilliant ensemble cast including Kristen Stewart, Aaron Stanford, Bruce Dern, Elizabeth Ashley, Jayce Bartok, Miriam Shor, Talia Balsam, Jesse L. Martin and Melissa Leo.

The daughter of screenwriter, director and actor Peter Masterson and Tony Award-winning actress Carlin Glynn, Mary Stuart Masterson was raised in New York City and made her film debut as an actress in “The Stepford Wives” (1975) with her father.

At the age of 16, she appeared on Broadway in Eva LeGallienne’s version of “Alice in Wonderland.” Her first teenage film role was in “Heaven Help Us” (1985) followed by roles in “Some Kind of Wonderful” (1987), “Immediate Family” for which she received a National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress, “Fried Green Tomatoes” (1991) and Benny & Joon (1993). Mary Stuart has starred in over 25 films including “At Close Range,” and numerous plays including “National Anthems” with Kevin Spacey and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

In 2000, Masterson wrote and directed the science fiction short “The Other Side” for Showtime. In 2003, Mary Stuart made her musical debut on Broadway in a revival of “Nine,” which was inspired by Fellini’s film “8 1/2.” This role earned her the Theatre World Award and a Tony Award nomination.

Recently, she wrote and optioned a pilot to Fox TV called “Community Property.” Additionally, along with her brother, Peter C.B. Masterson and long time collaborator, Steven Weisman, Mary Stuart recently formed Barn Door Pictures and is currently in post production on their first narrative feature, “Tickling Leo.” “The Cake Eaters” is her narrative feature directorial debut.

After appearing in numerous films and television shows as an actor, most notably Richard Linklater’s “Suburbia,” John Frankenheimer’s “Andersonville,” Tom McCarthy’s “The Station Agent” and Georgia Lee’s “Red Doors,” Jayce Bartok was inspired to write and direct “Stricken,” a short film starring Hayley Mills which made its world premiere at the 2005 Vail Film Festival. Eager to embark on a larger project, he produced and directed with his wife Tiffany, “Altered by Elvis,” an award winning, feature length documentary about lives permanently changed, for better or worse, by the King of Rock ‘n Roll. “Altered by Elvis” premiered at the 2006 Memphis Film Festival and has received worldwide distribution.

“The Cake Eaters” is Jayce’s deeply personal feature screenplay debut. It premiered at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival and has since gone on to win several jury and audience awards at film festivals all over the world. Jayce’s latest screenplays, “Livingston Avenue,” “Tiny Dancer” and “Dream Country,” adapted from the New York Times’ Best Selling novel by Luanne Rice, are currently in development. With one produced feature script and an acclaimed documentary under his belt, Jayce steps into the realm of feature directing with his latest screenplay, “Red River,” a dark thriller set in Wisconsin about a seemingly normal family involved in a series of strange drownings.

Mary Stuart Masterson and Jayce Bartok are fabulous people and we really appreciated their time. Here’s what they had to tell us about “The Cake Eaters”:

Jayce: (teleconferencing with us from New York) I wish I could be there. I’m hoping my wife doesn’t have the baby at any minute. She probably won’t. That’s why I’m not there. So thank you for doing this.

Q: Where did this story start with each of you? What was the genesis of this project?

Jayce: Basically my mom was confined in a wheel chair for the last couple years of her life and when I was looking to write a script, I wanted to focus on a character that was sort of incapacitated physically but emotionally had this extremely rich life and love and desire to want to live. I literally went to the New York Public Library and I wish I could say FA, Friedreich’s Ataxia, was in my family but I looked up disorders that mimicked what my mom was going through which was sort of like a neuropathy and neurological disorders and being incapacitated. And I found FA and I thought well, this is something that nobody knows about and would be interesting to write about and explore. Also, to me, it was like something somebody has that you run into somebody in a small town and they’re like, “Oh, my daughter has this disorder,” and you’ve never heard of it and it’s mysterious and you really don’t have any preconceived notions attached to it.

Q: Where did the title come from?

Jayce: This is like the number one question. This is the greatest hits of questions. It’s a term I grew up with in Pennsylvania used to describe those who have their life mapped out for them. They’re like the people that live up on the hill that you hear about that are going to become doctors and engineers and go to Harvard and Yale. They sort of have their cake and eat it too. I thought it was an interesting comparison for this group of ragtag people who have no cake and through the course of these couple of days they sort of find some love, some cake to eat.

Q: Having such a great body of work and having worked with so many great directors, is there anybody who inspired you to direct or that you drew upon as a director?

Mary: It’s funny, I have worked with so many great people and I probably learned as much from them as I learned from the people who are not so great. It’s hard to pinpoint any one person but my father is also a director, so I grew up with that in the house. Coming from it as an actress, I think I’ve always been acutely aware of wanting to create the right environment for people to do their best work and not tell them how I would do it certainly, but give them the room to do the best work that they can do and really trust them because a lot of times, especially first time directors make the mistake of trying to tell everybody what to do and trying to have the answers so they don’t look like they don’t know anything. Really the best thing that you can do, and this is something that Elia Kazan used to say, is “Give the actors homework assignments and then get them to bring you presents and then take credit.” (laughs) I have worked with amazing people and I think Francis Coppola was obviously an amazing person to be around and watch him work, and again my father and loads of great people, Jonathan Kaplan was amazing, and a lot of different experiences on stage as an actor that helped you learn to direct. Writing helps you learn to direct, acting certainly. It’s really about multi-tasking and telling a story.

Q: How long has this desire to direct been gestating?

Mary: I’m embarrassed to say how long, but it’s been a really long time. I guess I could say since the time I studied choreography when I was 17 or 18 because they’re connected, the two disciplines. Since 1992 when I wrote the first draft of the script that I was going to direct and I think in ’94 it was financed and in ’98 it was financed and cast. At so many different times things almost happened. Another script that someone else wrote that was wonderful. I developed the script with this wonderful writer for a year and a half and Marc Platt was producing. We were about to do it and then we didn’t have the money yet and I went and did Nine for a year in New York and that fell apart, so it’s just so many years of really wanting to get behind the camera and just for whatever reason projects have not come to fruition and this one did which is incredible. I’m still amazed that it happened as quickly as it did. It seems like not so quick because we completed it in early 2007 and this is two years later, but that’s pretty quick in the life of an independent film. It’s sort of like a grass roots city council person campaign or something, like you have to go to every household and shake everybody’s hand (laughs) and it takes time.

Q: Why did you choose this particular film for your feature directorial debut?

Mary: Well, Jayce and I share an agent, David Lewis, who sent it to me and I thought it was an acting inquiry and I was surprised that it was coming to me to direct. I felt like what Jayce had at its heart was this really unique and very specific sense of place and the characters, especially Beagle and Georgia, were so well drawn and so unique that it had a beating heart at the center of it. That’s something that you don’t see every day. There’s also something about it thought that’s naïve in its surface. I felt like wow, these characters don’t have cell phones and computers and they’re kind of disconnected from time as 2007 or 2006. I thought that was really interesting and, instead of trying to change that, I wanted to know why that was and I think that’s sort of at the root of what makes it ultimately timeless and sweet in a way. I liked the characters and I felt like there’s a lot of cynicism out there and it’s just refreshingly different from that.

Q: You worked with your brother as DP?

Mary: Yeah. He’s a baby brother. We have what the designer calls “twin-speak.” You know how twins grow up and they invent their own language? My brother and I would sort of go, “Uh, well…” “Oh yeah! Totally!” and the designer would say, “Can you please rewind and actually fill in the 45 minutes of whatever that was. What happened just now?” And I was like, “You don’t speak our language. We were talking about the brick wall and using the hallway and a long dolly track and combining these three scenes into one.” And he’s like, “Oh…” So that’s twin-speak. That worked out great. My brother and I, as much as we do get along really well, we also have a really similar aesthetic so we did have that a kind of shorthand pretty easily in terms of certainly the look and the feel and there’s a little Norman Rockwell referencing going on and very formal compositions sometimes too which is part of that intentional…like this town that is not touched, like the train goes by and it doesn’t stop. It’s very deliberate in terms of all those things and he was right on board with that.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about the casting and how that came about?

Mary: Well Jayce did an audition. (laughs) I guess Kristen was somebody Jayce and I were both interested in from the beginning. I flew out here and met with her about 4 months before we started shooting and was instantly struck with her tremendous intelligence and also her sense of herself. She was truly grounded and has kind of a power and ferocity about her that is so perfect for Georgia and yet, in this delicate body that was also necessary to play the role. I met her and I just knew. That was the process there. She said yes which was nice. She loved the role. And then Aaron, same thing, I met Aaron, I loved his work, and I just thought he’d be perfect for Beagle. He’s the only person I met and he agreed to it, same as with the role of Georgia. And then Bruce Dern, I wrote him a letter and he agreed to do the movie which is really very generous of him. He basically called himself a cantankerous old fuck in his initial phone call to me and I was like, this is going to be fun. He was great. Again, it was just a good fit and Elizabeth Ashley, the legend, I went to her apartment and sat with her and her dog, Che Guevara, and we talked for hours about the script and she was really excited by it I think but was reluctant for a number of reasons. In particular, she didn’t want the sexuality of these characters to be made fun of and I completely agreed with that. If anything, I really hate how American movies don’t seem to have anybody over 40 having sex or having a good time at it. They always seem to be turned into clowns. So, I was like, “You have my word. This isn’t going to be…” And she’s sexy, man. She’s just amazing so there’s no way she could ever look like a fool. I think she’s just tremendous. I feel really lucky about that. And then, there were people who came in and auditioned. We had auditions and that’s how I found Miriam Shor who I think is a tremendous actor. Again, it was just obvious right away. A number of persons came in that they’d set up auditions for and I’d go, “I know that person. You don’t have to audition for me. This is embarrassing.” Because I know them and I’ve worked with them and I didn’t know they were on the schedule. So there was that kind of thing. Occasionally, that was a little awkward with friends coming in.

Q: Jayce, when you’re writing a role that you know you’re going to be performing, what is your process like? Do you try to drop yourself into the background or do you just give yourself all the best lines?

Jayce: (laughs) It was terrifying. I think Mary Stuart and I had the hardest time figuring that out. I definitely realized pretty quickly that it was much easier to write for other people that for yourself. I guess because the script is sort of semi-autobiographical, it made it even more complicated for me and Mary Stuart because it was hilarious. She was always afraid to ask me questions in fear that I might fall over and start weeping. So she was like, “This thing, well we’ll get into that later,” you know, because I have brothers and there was all kind of drama. I always knew there was something so enticing about Georgia and Beagle and I had this desire to sort of be present but also step back a bit, I guess. I don’t know. I knew that the world had to work and it was tricky. I don’t know if I would run to do it again – to write and be in something. It was crazy.

Q: When Beagle and his dad make up toward the end, there’s just a hug and no words which I thought was wonderful because it says it all. I wondered did you write words and Mary didn’t use them or how did that work?

Jayce: That’s something that was actually involved in a re-shoot that Mary Stuart had come up with and it was just a beautiful moment, so I have to give credit to Mary Stuart for that. It was really nice.

Mary: To his point about not knowing his personal connection to some of the material, it was really deliberate to not know, especially since we did a lot of work on the script, to not know too much personal stuff because as a writer myself I also know how hard it is when you’re that close to something to be objective about it. I thought at least one of us…I didn’t assume that he didn’t have objectivity, but I knew that if I didn’t have objectivity, that I wouldn’t be of service to him or the story. So it was really hard sometimes to not find out some answers to some questions. I worried that I would actually send him into fits of tears because I was being so callous. I wasn’t being sensitive but I was worried that I would be overly sensitive if I did know too much.

Jayce: We will go out and get drunk, Mary Stuart, and I will tell you everything.

Mary: (laughs) It’s about time! The baby is going to college.

Jayce: Like three years later, you’ll find out the whole story and you’ll be like, “Thank God I didn’t know any of that.”

Mary: I know. Or I’ll probably be like, “Why didn’t you tell me?! That would have helped me.” What can we do? Nothing!

Q: Has this experience whetted your appetite for more directing?

Mary: Oh yeah. Definitely. It’s taken so long that it hasn’t really provided me much time to direct anything else in the last three years, but yes, absolutely. I have a few projects that I’m developing and I’ve started a production company, Barn Door Pictures, and we’re trying to do other projects. We’ve just produced a film that my husband wrote and directed called “Tickling Leo.” That’s about to be the next festival circuit movie.

Jayce: I just saw the trailer and it’s a lovely trailer.

Mary: Do you like it?

Jayce: I did like it very much. I got choked up.

Mary: I’m glad you liked it. The trailer is on You Tube.

Q: Did the interest in picking up this film for distribution suddenly increase when Kristen was cast in Twilight?

Mary: Oh yeah, definitely, absolutely, without question. I don’t know if that’s 100 per cent but it certainly helps a lot because she’s got such a huge fan base now.

Q: What sort of work did she do on the character and how did you direct her?

Mary: Well fortunately we did meet months before. Jayce had met some people through curefa.org which is a really good organization that’s all about research and development of funds for Friedrich’s Ataxia treatment and for family of people with Friedrich’s Ataxia. There was this great culture out there of people who were willing to talk and I interviewed Mary Caruso and Sam and Alex Bode, her two daughters, both of whom have Friedrich’s Ataxia, at my home. We did long interviews and I sent those out to Kristen who was out here. I was in New York. She used those to study. And then, I introduced her to somebody through that same website out here that she could spend time with. But, all these people were far more progressed in the disease. They were all in wheelchairs and this man, Paul Conance, who is one of those people that we met through Cure FA, he had taken video of people at the FA conference so we could see people in different states of progression of the disease – people who are still walking, who just barely had a slur in their voice, all the way to people who could barely drink a glass of water. That was really, really useful. But then, when it came to actually implementing all of this, Kristen was like, “I’ve never done this before, this kind of technical work,” and we just talked through it. My sense of it was, she has everything that she needs to play the role and that’s the important thing. I knew that it was right and that she was on it when I would check in with her periodically and say, “How’s it going? How’s the voice going, the walk, this and that?” and she said, “I’m starting to freak myself out.” So I said, “Great, great. You’re in good shape.” I just thought if emotionally she’s there and she believes herself and she feels that kind of sense of responsibility that you feel when you play someone with a real disability, that even if it didn’t look or sound just right, it would still be right for the film and then it just so happened that everything was amazing. I mean, every screening I’ve gone to, somebody says, “Where did you find this girl with this disease?,” until Twilight, and then they knew she was an actress. (laughs) So yeah, it’s amazing. She did a beautiful job.

Q: You used to be a child actress that grew into adult roles and she’s had a similar experience. Did you talk about the transformation?

Mary: We didn’t necessarily talk that much about it, but I think there was definitely an understanding between us because of it, because I do understand her experience. But at the time, all this crazy stuff that has happened lately hadn’t happened yet. She was a working actor who started very young like I did, so we definitely had that in common. I think she’s going to be fine. I think she’s strong and lovely and smart as hell and will choose her roles carefully and will do fantastically well for many, many, many years. In terms of the transition later into womanhood, God help anyone trying to do that. It’s really hard to do. So, I don’t know. I don’t know how anyone does it. This is sort of an inarticulate thought but there was one moment when we were shooting Kristen and Elizabeth Ashley’s scene together in the car and we pulled over and got off the process trailer and we were just all three standing there. It was just this moment of, you know, there was Kristen, there was me, and there was Elizabeth, I just felt this…it was like a weird spiritual moment. I can’t even articulate it but it was like oh wow, this is the life of an actress. This is right here like Darwin’s The Ascent of Man. (laughs) It was really cool and it wasn’t anything necessarily being said that was passed along or any advice, but you could see we were all really soaking up each other’s experience and talent. It was kind of a privileged moment.

Q: Jayce, initially Kristen’s character just wants to lose it, but then there’s sensitivity in it and a parting scene where you sense maybe there’s a connection between the two. I’m curious what your interpretation of it was when you wrote it, when you saw it, and how you see that relationship going in the future?

Jayce: It’s a good question. The Georgia and Beagle stuff, Mary Stuart and I were remarking, was remarkably unchanged from the beginning of our development to the end. I see the beginning of a relationship but also the reality of the fact that she’s accomplished this milestone but yeah, I would hope… We talked occasionally about, okay, Beagle’s working there in the cafeteria but where’s it going to go? Are they going to keep dating? Yeah, I think they are. I think that they’ve accomplished this huge thing and now they’ve carved out this sort of little cocoon and they’ve got this support group and they’re going to keep staying together I hope.

Mary: What do you think? I’m curious.

Q: Well, the way she ended it, yes, I think it changed for her. That’s my sense of it.

Mary: I didn’t want to shoot that with coverage. I didn’t want to shoot it from the other side and see both of their faces. Just get the sense of her walking away because the whole film is about, in a way, grief and risking love in the face of the possibility of loss that we all face whether our mother has died or husband or wife or somebody that we’re meeting for the first time. If you really love someone, you’re risking annihilation because you love them so much and your mortality comes up when you really fall in love. That shot was all about expressing the Cake Eaters theme of everything being slightly out of your reach and the light at the end of the tunnel, all that, and that’s a recurring theme visually. I definitely think that they… My take on it was it doesn’t matter necessarily where it’s going because it isn’t for keeps. It’s for the moment and hopefully that means that they will have lots of moments. Their time together was ultimately about both of them transcending loss for a moment and they did that and they will always have Paris. You know what I mean? They will always have that regardless of what happens next. That’s why I wanted to be behind them. And I think Aaron also played that moment. Every time I see it I get choked up because of the way he just takes in letting her go and letting her walk without help, like trying to help her and then letting her go. It expresses so much about grief and about love at the same time. I think he was just awesome at that moment.

Jayce: …and his respect for her. Initially I think I was really interested in this issue of disability and sexuality. In talking with people with FA, I was so surprised by their candor, like “I just want to get out and meet somebody and do it,” like completely opposite of this preconceived notion that somebody with disability is completely asexual. And I thought Kristen and that character, it’s so true of somebody that really has these raw desires and they’re just up front about it and there’s no “I can’t do this” kind of thing.

Q: You talked about showing people over 40 having a healthy sex life. What about showing people under 20 having a sex life that is something special and not just “I want to get laid”?

Mary: Yeah, well I’m all for that. (laughs) I think something about us in this country is we’re a little puritanical still. It’s so extreme. It’s like either porn or soft core porn in Hollywood movies or you get an R rating if somebody smokes a cigarette. I don’t understand it. People are sexual beings no matter what stage of life. If they can breathe, they want to have sex. You know what I mean? So, I think appropriate, non-exploitive sex has a place in every movie. It kind of drives a lot of movies anyway.

Jayce: It was interesting when we put it out to the FA community, when I wrote the first draft and I sent it to these message boards and my wife was like, “What are you doing? You’re going to get… They’re going to run you out of town. Georgia is a teenager, Beagle’s older. What mother is going to be like, ‘Yes, I loved your little script about my daughter losing her virginity with this older guy’? And, I have to say, I don’t know what I was thinking but people just embraced it and in our screenings and everything, I think people have been really receptive to that idea even though it is …on paper, you’re like uh, oh, this is not good.

Mary: I haven’t once gotten “Oh my God, she’s 15.” Not once. And I expected to, especially with people who have a strong faith in different Gods that would have a problem with that. It’s premarital. People are always going to have an issue but I think people just see it for what it is. She’s not in danger, she’s in the best hands possible, and they really need each other, and nobody’s getting hurt. I don’t think anybody can have too much of an issue with that except maybe the ratings board.

Q: Is that legal?

Mary: No, it’s not legal.

Jayce: Not legal, definitely not legal.

Mary: Hence the R rating.

Q: My friend called it the best movie about statutory rape he’d ever seen.

Mary: We had discussions about that too. It is statutory rape.

Jayce: Can we get that on the poster?

Q: Mary, would you direct a film that you are also in?

Mary: You know, I always swore that I would never, ever do that. I still think that that’s just insane. I mean, I think that I would not be as good a director or as good an actor as I’m capable of if I was doing both. For one thing, I’m a girl and hair and make-up take so long. But, if I played someone who doesn’t wear any make-up and looks haggard and exhausted, maybe it would work. I don’t know. People do it. There is actually a project that I am going to direct that has a role in it that is right for me to play. It is not the lead. I’ve thought about it and I think it’s possible if I was with the right team of people. It’s something my husband wrote and he directed the film that I just produced so I could be directed by him maybe in those scenes and then maybe [I could] direct the rest of the movie. But I don’t know. I think it‘s probably not advised.

“The Cake Eaters” opens in theaters on March 13th.