Peter Hedges
If there's a photo of a roomful of kids I'm the one with the biggest smile or my hand over my face.Collection: Smile
My older son works in finance and private equity, which he loves, and Lucas works in film and theater.Collection: Finance
Family is paramount to me in my life, and my own comes first above everything, and that's something universal that people can relate to.
The Orpheus myth is my favorite myth, and the prodigal son is my favorite parable.
There's no reason that a writer, if they have some discipline and curiosities and passion, can't be vital for a long, long time.
My mother's sobriety - that's when I found the theater, that's when I moved from being a basketball player to being a musician, to being an actor, to then being a writer.
There are sections of the film that I don't love. There are moments that really lift and elevate, and then there are parts that feel clunkier to me. But the totality of 'Harold and Maude' is so much greater than maybe other films that are more perfect or look more beautiful or handle every moment more exquisitely.
Harold and Maude' is a film I just keep finding myself rewatching.
I don't know if a mother's love and a father's love is that different.
I've read both books that 'Beautiful Boy' is based on, and I can't wait to see that film. I root for that film.
In my family, if something were to have happened with one of my kids, I think my wife would be the tougher one.
I'm looking, often, towards younger people, listening to how they're working, at least they're trying, and some of the old greats, too. Just to try to remain relevant and off-balance, but hungry and eager.
If you get back into the beginner mindset, you can unearth an energy and a fire that I didn't know I could even still possess.
I'm the lucky father to two young men. When any of your kids, and your parents feel this way about you, clearly, when your kids find what they love to do and they throw themselves into it, and they find joy in the doing of it, and it's actually work that's honorable, and, you know, all of those things, it's a great feeling.
My formative years were all shaped by a mother who was very sad and had a drinking problem, while my father was lonely and angry. He was an Episcopal priest and raised four kids on his own.
I grew up in a very loving but very broken family, and I suppose that's why I'm drawn to telling stories about well-intentioned people who are doing their best - but are not always successful - in figuring out how to maneuver through this complicated, bumpy and broken world.
There are so many films I lean on and look toward and return to that give me some guidance on how to keep moving in the world, and that's what film does, at its best.
So much of writing is about what characters don't say, and in the early drafts, sometimes things get overwritten.
If you wanted John Gielgud to cry, he could say, 'Which eye?'
Lucas is living the life that I wanted, but I want to be clear, I don't feel there's been any pressure for him to live it.
Well, it made perfect sense that I originally wanted to be an actor because every Sunday, we walked into church and we acted like we were the happiest, most together family.
Over the course of my creative life, I've trafficked in broken, heroic mothers.
My mother, Carole Hedges, was my world until she walked out of our house when I was 7. Actually, she didn't walk out. Alcohol walked her out.
Everything good in my life can be traced back to my mother's sobriety. She showed me that broken people can - with the help of others - turn themselves around.
So, yes, I wrote a script called 'Ben Is Back' that I got to make with a bunch of remarkable artists and craftspeople.
There was a part of me that wanted to take my place next to, you know, Debra Granik. She's such a hero for me.
I try, in my films, to normalize things that maybe 20 or 30 years ago a film would have been about. 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' needed its own film, but now blended families you see all the time.
Black people are more likely to be incarcerated than white people. That's just a fact and it's regrettable and it's got to change.
One of the great kicks of having a movie made is that you envision this world.
Ultimately what I try to do is work on stories I love with people I admire, and sometimes they get made and sometimes they don't.
Writing a really good screenplay is not easy. It can be a very punishing form.
I make sure when I direct that it's a very joy-based set that hopefully is filled with a lot of respect.
Well, because my films are really about how people interact with each other, and the complexity, and the nuance, and the surprise of those moments I try to create a safe enough space that allows the actors to operate from their own instincts. My direction is more suggestions, prompts or questions.
I want to make a series of films of contemporary America that feel urgent and deal with sometimes-topical matters, but hopefully in a universal way.
The kinds of movies I make are not easy to get made.
I never try to think I have the answer to what people should do or not do.
I think the best dramas are as funny as possible and the best comedies have, underneath them, real substance.
The most autobiographical thing I've ever written is my second novel, called 'An Ocean in Iowa.' That is pretty close to my childhood.
I wanted to direct long before I'd even written a screenplay.
When I was a young lad just out of college at the North Carolina School of the Arts, I directed several plays that I wrote. It was essential theater, meaning we had no money, so our set may be six stools and two chairs and eight cream pies.
Pieces of April' was going to be a 3 to 7 million dollar film and we had three entities, two studios, and one wealthy man and they all backed out. It was quite a blow.
Something happened to me when I wrote female characters in my early plays; it was a real liberation.
When you have an intimate encounter with mortality as my family and I did with my mom's death, I took a long look at my life and I asked myself what was the one thing that I hadn't done that I had really wanted to do. And it was to write and direct a film.
A novel is challenging, because you have more story than you need and you have to select and narrow.
When I did 'Gilbert Grape,' Lasse Hallstrom let me be on the set with him and in the editing room and in the casting sessions and so on. And so I got a firsthand, rather intimate, high-pressure look at how to make a film.
I completely hold on to the idea that people are eager if not desperate to be told a good story.
And for better or worse, a story like 'Pieces of April' is the kind of story I'm supposed to tell. The kind of story that makes you laugh as much as possible but also breaks your heart.
I once heard a story, it's probably apocryphal, but I love the notion. That a car had flipped over and the baby was trapped underneath the car and the mother was thrown from the car. Then the mother lifted up the car to pull her child to safety. And I believe that my own strength comes from whom and what I love.
The greatest love I believe... the greatest love I have is for my children, but I think the greatest love probably universally is a mother's love for a child.
I used to find limitations frustrating, but I find them enormously liberating.