The Orpheus myth is my favorite myth, and the prodigal son is my favorite parable.
Peter Hedges
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.
I can go years without going to Los Angeles, but I think my living in Brooklyn is critical to my continuing to have a fairly happy life in the film industry.
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 feel cool when I say I live in Brooklyn.
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.
Maudlin scenes where people pour their heart out to one another? I don't want to see it.
When I go home to Iowa, people assume I live in this very big anonymous place where no one knows each other or wants to. Truth is, I know my neighbors better in Brooklyn than I ever did in Iowa.
Over the course of my creative life, I've trafficked in broken, heroic mothers.
You could cast nearly any movie in Brooklyn, and now you can film in Brooklyn - for you have studios.
So, yes, I wrote a script called 'Ben Is Back' that I got to make with a bunch of remarkable artists and craftspeople.
Let the story lead you. If the story needs to be dark, let it go dark. If it's a sweet, good-for-the-world story, that's what it is.
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.
There are very few topics where I can imagine that you might not find humor. And I was stunned at how much weird and dark humor there was when my mom died.
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 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.
Harold and Maude' is a film I just keep finding myself rewatching.
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've read both books that 'Beautiful Boy' is based on, and I can't wait to see that film. I root for that film.
If there's a photo of a roomful of kids I'm the one with the biggest smile or my hand over my face.
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.
I wanted to direct long before I'd even written a screenplay.
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.
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.
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.
A novel is challenging, because you have more story than you need and you have to select and narrow.
I completely hold on to the idea that people are eager if not desperate to be told a good story.
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.
I've always had an acute sense of mortality, maybe because my father's a minister.
One of the great kicks of having a movie made is that you envision this world.
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.
I don't know if a mother's love and a father's love is that different.
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 older son works in finance and private equity, which he loves, and Lucas works in film and theater.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
