How was it for Ellen Barkin, who plays the mother, playing off all the different “Avivas”?
One thing she said was that it didn’t matter whether she was playing to the Latino or the redhead or Jennifer Jason Leigh – that it was all as if it were one person. There was a kind of quality that I was extracting or highlighting from each of these performers, which was a kind of fragility, vulnerability, an innocence that provided a kind of glue, cohesion, for all of them. So for Ellen it all fell to a piece for her. Were you ever tempted to hit Barkin up for money [given she’s married to Revlon head Ron Perelman]? [Laughs] Tempted? Hmm… Actually, I was very respectful and that subject never came up. I was thinking of how, in the current political climate, how hard it must be to raise funds for a potentially controversial independent film… Well, look, we live in a country that is the driving force of capitalism, and if I were a filmmaker that lived in Europe or Canada, I would have a system set up by the government subsidies to sustain a career like mine. But in this country, th
