Hi, I'm Ron Howard, and this
is The Breakdown.
First, I liked that it was a
conversation provoker, although
I wasn't interested in the
socio political aspect of it
in the sort of overt way
in which JD presented it, and I
found it interesting, but I
didn't see a movie story there.
But what I did see
was something that I'd been looking
for, which was an interesting,
complex family
story that featured
rural America, contemporary
rural America.
And when I read it
and then when I talked, more
importantly, I think when I talked
to JD Vance and heard his sound,
his cadence, it was so familiar to
me because between my family,
which hails from Oklahoma, small
town Oklahoma and agricultural
Oklahoma, and my
wife's family, which is
Wisconsin farm country and
Louisiana, I just recognized
the thought process, the
sensibility, the code,
the strengths, the weaknesses, the
foibles of a lot of
people who I knew, who I
felt comfortable around, who I know
well.
And I felt like that
the book wasn't exactly it.
But the combination of the family
as described in the book and what I
was learning through conversations
with J.D. and later with his family,
that that began to take shape
as a movie for me.
And Vanessa Taylor did a great job
of developing it further.
Things haven't exactly worked out
for your mama.
Well, it went pretty well for me
because I was very interested in
working with Glenn.
And I did a movie with her years ago
about New York journalism, tabloid
journalism called the paper We've
Stayed Friendly.
I went to see her in a play in New
York. It's great.
Afterwards, she said, I hear you're
working on hillbilly allergy.
I read that book and I'm really
fascinated by it.
So the fact that she flagged it, I
said, well, we're months away from
having a draft, but of course, I'd
love you to read it.
When she read it, she said, yeah,
I'd I'd really like to be mama.
Unfortunately, Netflix was
supportive of that.
So that was even though she's
nothing like Mama, you know,
it's not like she was drawing upon
any particular insights
to play mama.
It was really all about for her
discovery and creation.
And fortunately, J.D.
and his family made that possible
through conversation, through home
movies, through audiotapes, you
know, everything that they could
find. It wasn't a lot, but
it was enough that when they saw her
in character doing a scene, it
just blew them away.
I'll never forget it, as I like to
think of myself as an actor's
director.
And and they were so
thrilled and moved and appreciative
of what Glenn had done that it made
me made me feel great.
Now, Amy, I'd always wanted
to work with Amy better
a few times.
I didn't know her particularly well,
but just a great artist,
you know, has so much range.
And I looked at Bev younger.
Bev especially looked a little like
Amy and it just felt right to
me and she was reluctant.
And I couldn't quite figure out why
she was reluctant, she had some
thoughts about the script and
Vanessa made some changes that were
very astute.
Ideas and scenes got
better and richer.
We kept talking.
And finally she just admitted, she
said, I don't know if I want to go
there. This is really tough
for me. And I said, well, I, I have
to respect that.
But I think it's important.
To offer audiences
a character like this, because it
has a lot to say to a lot of people,
and it finally she said yes and
it was tough emotion.
She was pleasant as hell.
She's that kind of person.
She's just a great, great
teammate.
But she never really shared what
she was channeling beyond
the research.
Essentially, she
needed to occasionally
talk about sort of creating
the rationale that
kept Bhave going.
So we would talk about that, you
know, like what does bad think this
is happening right now?
What is what she upset about?
Why is she making this choice?
And I could help her come up with
a rationale that you could you could
accept somebody was basing their
behavior on. She's a she loves to
rehearse. She's a hard worker,
came up with some great ideas
that were her own, that motif
of the hand reaching out the hand,
so useful and meaningful.
And I love it when in
the collaboration yields those
kinds of really distinctive choices.
It's so exciting for me and
important for the film.
But I just trusted
her.
I didn't push it.
I knew she'd be there.
From the first time we had to face
one of these scenes. I saw that she
she could get there, you know, and
once in a while I'd
push her a little further or I draw
her back a little bit and just, you
know, that's what a director does,
is try to be that first audience
member and also create some
refinements just to take to the
editing room, which was a thing that
I've done in the past with actors
like De Niro or Russell Crowe,
where they're improvising.
You want to try a lot of different
things, and that's great.
Jim Carrey in The Grinch.
Try a whole you know, we
have a menu of possibilities now.
We didn't have time for that.
But in certain key places with both
the Marmol character and with Bev
Amy's character, in fact, jumping
to mamma, we had to dial Mama
back from everything that we heard
about her, everything that we
understood, all the language, all
the outrageous things that she did,
Glen and I, we just kind of looked
at each other and realized that no
one's going to believe this, that
they're just going to think that
Glen's overdoing it when, in fact,
Glen was under doing it.
So I trusted both of them.
But I really left
Amy kind of to her own devices
when it came to that those darker
moments. And she was so nuanced
about it that
I was really, really blown away.
So what did they do?
Well, they fired my ass.
What do you think they did?
Oh, Beverly was sick
of that place in gainful employment,
was cramping her style.
A lot of that began with
cinematographer night talking Morris
Albert, who's a
very experienced, talented
cinematographer, but she also
is a great documentarian.
Alex Gibney, he's worked with
Maries, I don't know, ten or eleven
times. And so I really wanted
a subtle unselfconscious
approach to the story, but
I did want to tell the story and
we experimented a lot with
different. It is digital, but film
stock grades, effusion levels,
color palettes and so forth,
and then coordinated that with Molly
Hughes, the production designer.
Very subtle things.
But just to help us recognize
when we're in one time and another
different camera style shooting
the Yale phase of Jade's
life, the camera was much more
traditional, steady,
straightforward compositions.
But then when the echoes of the
past would sort of
reach in and destabilize
him, then we would go back to the
more kinetic hand-held feel
that we used in the younger jades
sequences so that it was on a
subliminal level.
Hopefully you're kind of recalling
that period and what it meant to
him, what it was, how deep, how
destabilizing it was to
live through that.
You may notice how it turned out
that there were a lot of women in
key positions on this film.
I think on almost a subconscious
level, I felt the female characters
were so important and that I
understood the attitudes,
the cadences, the behavior
of the male characters.
But I, I just on a subtle level,
I wanted to get the details of
these women's lives to be
to be right, to ring true.
Mom, you just took it took from her
until she was practically bankrupt.
Yeah. She was a goddamn saint.
All she ever did was bail you out
when it mattered.
JD, in all of our
conversation was pretty clear that
he did not view this as a pull
yourself up by your bootstraps story
that sure, you have
to wake up and you have to take
agency if you're going to make
progress. But he
began to recognize that without
them, including Russia and
including his mother, it just
wouldn't have happened. And so
that idea of forgiveness
is something that in Jade's life
has been a long, slow, gradual
process. But it's so true
to that family story
that I wanted to I wanted
to bake it in.
And also at the end
of the movie, there's a key moment
where JD is really
feeling like between a rock and a
hard place. Has to his loyalty to
family and his mother and
his future and
in the most subtle way, Amy
does the right thing as best
you can almost miss it.
Hopefully you won't because he's
been shot and played so that you
wouldn't. But that also
comes from J.D., who's saying even
at her lowest point, he always knew
he was loved and he always
he always knew she really wanted
what was best for him.
So to me, I said, it's not
really it's not pull yourself up by
your bootstraps. It's a rescue and
survival story.
It's also a story
of kind of redemption, because
here are these people who
there aspects of their past that
they have real regrets about
real regrets.
Deservedly so,
but there also comes an opportunity
for them to
make another kind of decision that
really will matter in
this guy's life and somebody who
they they love, who they care about.
And it really changes the course of
the family. We now know that.
So I felt like that that
aspect of the story was very
important, but it had to be seated
in because we're dealing with this
period of crisis.
Everything is a shock
to the system for J.D.,
either as the young Yale
Law student coming back and his
whole life's almost threatening to
unravel, or the young boy
who's finding his way and doesn't
quite know how treacherous the
waters are.
So, again, in the way that their
family story acknowledges the
specifics of
the kind of trauma, the kind
of economic hardship, the special,
the specific brand of
addiction or cycles of dysfunction.
Great. The bigger idea to me was
this. These things happen to
families. And as individuals,
every family member,
I mean, this is just universal.
You've got to make decisions
about how you reconcile
the strengths and weaknesses of
the family you come from and those
things that influence them.
And I really think it wasn't
until Yale and this this crisis
that he really began to understand
that he had a major decision going
forward. And what I admire about it
and tried to deal with in the story
is that he chose
not to flatly, fully
reject it. Sometimes people do that
and it's a courageous decision.
But I'm not going to deal with those
people anymore. I'm going this way.
Well, that's not Jade's decision.
And I do admire it because it's
harder.
But why can't we let her clean her
own mess up for once?
Famously only thing that
means.