The Kids Are All Right

Hooray for "The Kids Are All Right" winning Best Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy at the Golden Globes tonight! Take a look back at my July interview with the the writer and director.

"Moms, I want to meet the sperm donor." It's a conversation that will take place in more and more households as children born with the help of science come of age. Lisa Cholodenko, the writer and director of The Kids Are All Right, explores it on the big screen. And, in the future, she and her partner will likely have the talk with their own son, who was born through artificial insemination. (Interestingly enough, Cholodenko's writing partner, Stuart Blumberg, was a sperm donor in college.) We had the opportunity to ask her a few questions at the San Francisco junket.

LilSugar: When creating Mark Ruffalo's character, Paul (the sperm donor), how did you decide to make him this man who gets the call (about meeting his kids) and says, OK? There weren't pinnacle moments in his decision making.

Lisa Cholodenko: I think at a certain point after you get the kind of basic idea, you have to figure out what stays and what goes. At a point in the writing process and long deliberation, he was a more favored character and took 20 pages instead of five pages to figure out and then you said, well let's get the show on the road — what's the plot? Where are we going with this? Is it about him deliberating or is it about the meeting and the impact on the family? You are sculpting this beast and you don't really know where it's going to go and slowly kind of the real story emerges and you realize how much you have to trim here and there to get it moving. So it was get the show on the road, what's the shorthand of this guy, how can we get there, and say enough about him and give him the due diligence that he needs to get sympathy for the character.

LS: Wine is sort of seen as an acceptable way for a mother to drink. What made you decide to write Nic's drinking in and have wine be her vice?

LC: It just seemed like something that would be a good detail for that character. This person (Nic) who is really trying to keep things together — like suffocating and choking herself, and self-control and what not, and also felt like it was funny because it gave us a lot of for comedic moments and also played into the kind of irony. It's a drug like anything if you get sauced every night. But, also that it was a kind of a shorthand to show that here's this person who's probably actually really having a lot of feeling and anxieties that she's trying to clamp down and in a certain way have her be kind of an acceptable lush or whatever was a way to show that she's pretty vulnerable.

Congratulations to Annette Bening for winning Best Actress in a Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical for "The Kids Are All Right" at the Golden Globes tonight! Take a look back at our July interview with the actress!

Annette Bening is better than "all right" in her latest film about family dynamics. In fact, her portrayal of Nic, a lesbian head of household in The Kids Are All Right is brilliant. Playing opposite her partner Jules (Julianne Moore), Nic copes with familial transitions (and her loss of control) as her children, Joni and Laser (Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson) contact and embark on a relationship with their dad, sperm donor Paul (Mark Ruffalo). While the subject matter is heavy, laughter is also doled out in hearty doses. At the center of the story is a typical family dealing with life. We had the opportunity to interview Bening, a real life mother of four, when she was at the San Francisco junket.

LilSugar: In the movie, the kids want to meet their sperm donor. This is a real issue for people and will continue to be as parents use alternative methods to have children. What appealed to you about the film?

Annette Bening: We’re seeing the children of all kinds of different combinations of people, adoptions and international adoptions, and in vitro, and sperm donors and all of that. I certainly am no expert on all of these subjects, but I think that the movie is very much in the mix of all that and trying to talk about it in a contemporary way. From a very simple standpoint, I just loved the story when I read it and thought it was so beautifully written and thoughtful and very specific about this particular family. It really is a very classic family, what’s going on in the movie — the parents and the kids, and the partners, and betrayal and infidelity and what happens — are all really classic issues. But I think that the writing, the questions that the children have about where they’re from, what is biology, and what is your environment and then also the attachment that the moms have to their kids as well as the sperm donor, which is a horrible way to describe Mark Ruffalo [laughs] but Mark Ruffalo’s character, then his experience and story and what happens to him. All of that – I find really interesting and trying to talk about what is going on right now and dramatize what is in the hearts of a lot of people who are in these families.

To see what the actress said about humor's role in the film, read more