A lot of indie filmmakers bring up Ordinary People nowadays. Why is that?
MM: I dunno. I think it’s just a really amazing, a really subversive film. So much of it, structurally, I stole for Thumbsucker, the idea of the parents going through a regressive discovery at the same time as the kid is going through this journey. It’s really hard to do that, to have these multiple storylines, and in watching that film I saw that it’s possible for the parents to have a private conversation so long as they’re talking about the kid. It’s just as simple as that–and on top of all that, I find Ordinary People to be an amazingly subversive, challenging film. I ask that by way of asking if you’re worried about the charge that your picture is over-familiar and derivative. MM: That’s hard because I’ve been working on this for so long and in the meantime so many movies have come out that try to deal with a lot of the same things that we were trying to work out along the way. It’s been frustrating, I’ll say that. Let me approach that question by saying that I wanted desperately
