Smart People In Love
The crusty veneer that surrounds Lawrence Wetherhold in SMART PEOPLE begins to crack apart when he does the one thing he never expected he would ever do again – fall in love, for the first time since his wife died ten years ago. The recipient of his affection is a former student who once had a school-girl crush on him back when he was her impossible-to-please professor. But now Janet Hartigan is very much an adult, a lonely Emergency Room doctor who finds herself boggled by a man who seems to have built impenetrable steel walls around himself. Their love story – awkward, eccentric and almost over before it starts – is the stuttering engine that drives the transformation of the Wetherhold family.
Golden Globe-winner Sarah Jessica Parker took on the role of Janet much to Dennis Quaid’s delight. “I thought she was amazing,” he says, “with a character that’s very different from anyone she’s played before. As Dr. Hartigan, she’s someone who’s also emotionally closed off, although not as much as Lawrence is. They’re really two people who don’t seem to have a clue, or a chance, to pull off this relationship, and yet they do.”
Parker had previously worked with producer Michael London on The Family Stone, which led to him sending her SMART PEOPLE. “Sarah just seemed like the right color for this film,” remarks London. “I knew she was looking for something challenging, and she has a wonderful gift for prickly characters. She can make them feel real and accessible in a way few actors can.”
It was the unusual turbulence in the romance between Lawrence and Janet that first attracted Parker. “I liked that it was a real adult story about two people doing their best version of attempting a relationship – one that neither of them is really well equipped to deal with,” she says.
Working with Quaid became the icing on the cake. “He has a quality that reminds me of people who are just starting out in the movie business. He seems so fresh and delighted by things, not cynical about the process,” Parker comments. “He’s really surprising and I grew very fond of him.”
Playing Smart
The casting of Lawrence Wetherhold was so key to SMART PEOPLE that it happened early on, while it was still in the earliest stages of development. It was always clear that the character Mark Poirier had so carefully crafted would require an actor of great versatility, as well as courage. After all, Wetherhold is not an easy man in any sense of the word. He can be devastatingly bright or overwhelmingly bitter, haughtily self-important or deeply vulnerable, an unapologetic curmudgeon or a fragile man in need of love- no easy group of characteristics to explore in a singular performance rife with both comedy and poignancy. But when Dennis Quaid’s name came up, everyone was intrigued by the idea, including Quaid.
Quaid’s roles have truly run the gamut — from a high school baseball coach in The Rookie to a high-powered attorney in Traffic to a 1950s husband hiding his homosexuality in Far From Heaven to an out-of-touch United States President in the comedy American Dreamz.
Yet, Lawrence Wetherhold was like no role he’d done before. And, despite his rather towering set of flaws, Quaid was rather touched by him. “He’s a true curmudgeon and a grouch,” Quaid readily admits. “But he’s also someone who’s really dead inside at the beginning of the story. He might be extremely intelligent by his own account, and by others, but at the same time, he’s an emotional idiot. He doesn’t know how to just live life, how to embrace life.”
“Lawrence is someone very different from myself, except for the grouch part,” Quaid jokes. “He’s very sedentary and lives entirely in his head and I’m much more of an extrovert, so it was hard at first to envision myself in the role. But the story was so good and that’s what really attracted me. It’s a very human comedy and it got to me.”
When Quaid later met with director Noam Murro, the actor still wasn’t quite sure if he was right for the role, but their conversation sparked his interest even more. “I listened to Noam’s ideas and they intrigued me. He really knows a lot about human behavior and in talking to him I started to think about how sometimes people do have very inappropriate reactions to life and I decided I wanted to explore that through Lawrence and not be at all conventional,” he explains.
Delving into both the humor and the heartache of Wetherhold’s emotional disasters ultimately became the M.O. of Quaid’s performance. His preparation included gaining 25 pounds to mirror Lawrence’s lumpy, gone-to-pot physique and even giving up smoking just prior to production so that he would arrive on the set as irritable and edgy as possible!
Once the character began to come to life on the set, the filmmakers were amazed that Quaid had ever balked at the role. “I thought it was really perfect casting,” says Michael London. “We could have cast a sort of obvious East Coast, Ivy League, snobby type but that would have been a lot less interesting because we’ve seen that so many times before. Instead, Dennis brings something new, a more populist American presence that broadens the scope of the film.”
Family Smarts
If Lawrence Wetherhold has a hard time relating to his students, he’s even more bamboozled when it comes to fatherhood and family. To make matters even more complicated, he’s just received another “surprise” visit from his slacker brother, Chuck, whom Lawrence makes a point of reminding everyone, especially Chuck, was adopted. The two couldn’t be more different – where Lawrence is pompous, uptight and officiously responsible, Chuck is a laid back, pleasure-seeking, unabashed flake – and yet they must come to rely deeply on one another.
To bring out the humor and unexpected humanity in a grown man who lives his life like a child, Michael London immediately thought of Thomas Haden Church, with whom he had worked on Sideways in a serio-comic role that garnered Church an Academy Award® nomination. “I was hearing Thomas’s voice in the role of Chuck the minute I began reading the script,” recalls London. “It turned out that Noam was equally excited and receptive to the idea.”
Church was lured in by the script. “I thought it was, well, very smart. I really liked the style and the story,” he says. “And I liked the way the character of Chuck evolved. He seems like this clueless, hapless bohemian, but then, as with Lawrence, you start to see the layers stripped off.”
The more he got to know Chuck, the more he began to see who he is and why this lackadaisical free spirit manages to spur changes in those around him. “What I like about Chuck is that he’s got nothing to hide, there’s no duplicity. He has a candor that I think the rest of the family are largely avoiding, and really needs,” Church explains.
Dennis Quaid notes that Church’s performance struck close to the bone for him. “He reminded me a little of my own little brother, and just the way brothers are in general, the way they can get under your skin and annoy you – yet how much they also make you laugh,” he explains. “Thomas is very creative and improvisational – I’d love to work with him again on anything.”
Unexpectedly, Chuck forms the closest bond in the Wetherhold family with his unusual niece, Vanessa, a prim and proper Young Republican who uses her lashing wit to withering effect. Vanessa may be a stunning master of extra-curricular activities and high test scores but when it comes to making even a single friend, she’s been a disheartening failure.
At once a desperately lonely, sheltered child and the whip-smart, world-weary head of her household, Vanessa turned out to be most challenging of all the roles to cast, sending the filmmakers off on a months-long search for the right young actress. “Vanessa is, for me, one of the significant chambers that pumps blood into the heart of this movie. The difficulty was in finding someone who had the spunk of a young girl who also possessing the soul of a 40 year old. That is a really complicated thing to pull off,” observes Murro.
Early on Murro thought of one actress who he thought had the right stuff for the role: Ellen Page — the young Nova Scotian who first came to the fore as a savvy teen who turns the tables on a pedophile in the indie drama Hard Candy and more recently has won hearts, accolades and awards for running away with the title role in Juno. But at first, Page was unavailable. Then, at the eleventh hour, her schedule shifted and she met with Murro. He knew instantly she was what he had been looking for all along.
He recalls: “Our meeting took place in a Burger King at Newark Airport. I came in from Pittsburgh and Ellen flew in from Canada. I saw her small figure and frame walking towards me and I just knew in that instant that she was the genius I was looking for. I feel very blessed to have had this chance to work with her.”
Page had found the Wetherhold family fascinating in Mark Porirer’s screenplay. “There’s so much passive-aggressive bitterness and child’s play in their interaction with each other. They have such a lapse in communication, and yet they all really want the same thing,” she says.
She also found a lot of empathy for what prickly, difficult Vanessa is going through. “She’s in the middle of this whole role reversal with her father, where she’s maintaining the household and doing the cooking, and all she does is clean and study and practice for her SAT’s. There’s no sense of normalcy or being a regular teenager in her life, which is what makes her such an arrogant and angry person,” she says. “I got where she’s coming from completely. It’s kind of heartbreaking, but I also believe she’ll get through it.”
Vanessa is forced into unexpected moments of fun and relaxation by her hedonistic Uncle Chuck, which results in a perilous misunderstanding between them. Page especially loved getting the chance to work so closely with Thomas Haden Church in creating their unusual, and unusually honest, rapport. “Thomas is hilarious, extremely smart and has fantastic instincts,” she says, “and he was always trying new things.”
Church was perhaps even more impressed by his young co-star. “Ellen is so gifted it’s hard to fully comprehend it,” says Church. “She has nuances to her performance that I think are very rare. I said to Dennis, `I think this must be what Leonardo DiCaprio was like as a teenager.’”
Meanwhile, for the role of Vanessa’s older brother, James, who keeps his well-adjusted life of remarkable accomplishments a secret, Noam Murro knew right off the bat who he wanted to cast: rising young star Ashton Holmes, whom David Cronenberg had cast as Viggo Mortensen’s son in A History of Violence. “When I saw `The History of Violence,’ I loved the film and I loved Ashton. I couldn’t see anyone else in this role,” says the director.
Holmes was excited to find that young James broke the mold; far from being the usual young male rebel, he is actually the one reasonably well-adjusted person in the Wetherhold family. “James is an intellectual but he doesn’t lack the emotional core that his dad lacks,” Holmes observes. “I think his mom must have given him some of that emotional fiber that he definitely didn’t get from his father.”
To navigate the tricky relationship between James and Lawrence, Holmes delved into long conversations with Dennis Quaid about the long-buried father-son bond between them. “Dennis envisioned Lawrence as someone who’s just really touchy and bitchy all the time. He’s very aloof as a dad and he isn’t as involved in his kid’s day-to-day life as a normal dad would be, but he still cares in his own way,” he says. “I was really impressed with Dennis’ commitment to that character.”
Each of the actors’ deep commitment added up to the essence of a real, complicated family of difficult but yearning individuals, notes Murro. “The key was that each of the cast really understood their characters,” he says, “and they understand that this is not one of those movies where there is a huge arc to each of them. What happens to the Wetherholds is what happens to a lot of us in real life – that is, we don’t change in really big ways.”
Land Of The Smart
To capture the very particular ambiance of a top shelf university, the production of SMART PEOPLE took place largely in and around the campus of Carnegie Mellon, which was recently named by Newsweek as one of the “New Ivies” and has long been one of America’s most selective leading colleges. The setting of Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburrgh, Pennsylvania was especially attractive to Michael London and Bruna Papandrea, who had developed a great affection for the Northeastern city when they shot a screen adaptation of Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh there earlier that year. London talked to Mark Poirier about incorporating the location into the screenplay, not just idly but weaving the school and the town into the very fabric of the story.
“I tend to gravitate towards movies that have a sense of place, that aren’t set in some generic `movieland,’” says London. “So it’s not just that we shot SMART PEOPLE in Pittsburgh; we reset the movie in Pittsburgh. We took Carnegie Mellon and we made Dennis’ character a teacher at Carnegie Mellon. Dennis really feels like a Pittsburgh character to me and that all becomes part of the experience.”
The filmmakers were also excited by the visual uniqueness of Pittsburgh, a city that Lawrence Wetherhold jokes is “the Paris of Western Pennsylvania.” “A great thing about shooting in Pittsburgh is that it’s a painting you haven’t seen before,” says Bruna Papandrea. “Up till now, not a lot of films have been shot here.”
Noam Murro was taken with the visual possibilities inherent to Carnegie Mellon’s campus, which sits on 140 acres about three miles outside of downtown Pittsburgh. “It’s not he traditional Ivy League campus, with red brick with ivy growing on the walls. It gave us a much fresher, more interesting look for the film,” he says. “Additionally, Carnegie has a strong English Department and is also renowned for their Drama and Engineering Departments, so that suited the storyline of SMART PEOPLE. Most of all, it felt like the University that Lawrence would teach at.”
The campus not only provided authentic locations, from offices to lecture halls, but a bevy of enthusiastic students who served as extras, production assistants and interns during the shoot. Production designer Patti Podesta, whose work has ranged from the backwards universe of Memento to recreating the Ambassador Hotel of 1968 in Bobby, worked closely with Murro to take full advantage of the rich academic atmosphere. Moving off campus, she especially enjoyed delving into the details of the Wetherholds’ on-hold lives to create their well-worn home. After scouring the city, Podesta chose a house in the area known as Friendship, drawn to its genteel neighborhood feel. Over a period of two weeks, the house was completely remodeled and refurnished in a manner befitting a family that has been stuck in a mire of grief and missed connections over the last decade. When cast and crew arrived in Pittsburgh, they hit the ground running, shooting the film in just 29 tightly scheduled days. Murro set an electrifying pace and kept things moving at a rapid-fire speed.
“Noam brought to the project an abundance of energy and was able to make very quick decisions on scenes and move through the schedule,” says Papandrea. “I worked with Sydney Pollack for years and what always amazed me was that, even though he had been making movies for 40 or 50 years, he still did it with the energy of a 30 year old. Noam has that same energy – no amount of work is too much. He has an amazing mind and it was incredible to watch him on set.”
Smart People (2008)
Directed by: Noam Murro
Starring: Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, Thomas Haden Church, Ellen Page, Ashton Holmes, Christine Lahti, Amanda Jane Cooper, Camille Mana, Aaron Bernard, Iva Jean Saraceni
Screenplay by: Mark Poirier
Production Design by: Patti Podesta
Cinematography by: Toby Irwin
Film Editing by: Robert Frazen, Yana Gorskaya
Costume Design by: Amy Westcott
Set Decoration by: Teresa Visinare
Art Direction by: Ron Mason
Music by: Nuno Bettencourt
MPAA Rating: R for language, brief teen drug and alcohol use and for some sexuality.
Distributed by: Miramax Films
Release Date: April 11, 2008
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