Family dysfunction and the holidays go together like Thanksgiving turkey and cranberry sauce, all of which are found in Pieces of April. In a break from the apple-cheeked, girl-next-door types for which she is best known, Katie Holmes plays April, the family outcast trying to make amends with her dying mother Joy (Patricia Clarkson). April invites the family to her New York apartment for Thanksgiving. It's a goodwill gesture and an opportunity to introduce her boyfriend Bobby (Derek Luke).

She intends to make the entire meal, including favorite family recipes; however, April isn't an experienced cook-her oven doubles as a storage cabinet-and the stove breaks on the holiday morning. Determined not to disappoint her mother again, she traipses up and down the stairs looking for someone in the apartment building willing to loan her some oven time. Meanwhile, April's father, mother, sister, brother, and grandmother make the drive, biding their time wondering how much of a disaster the meal will be.

The tense family dynamics are mined for much of Pieces of April's humor, but writer-director Peter Hedges also finds room for the genuine love underneath all the sniping among family members. Pieces of April marks Hedges' debut as a film director. His screenwriting credits include the adaptations of Nick Hornby's novel About a Boy, Jane Hamilton's A Map of the World, and his own book What's Eating Gilbert Grape. Hedges visited Columbus, Ohio on October 28 for a benefit screening of Pieces of April. I met with the writer-director.

Mark Pfeiffer: Where did you get the idea for the film?

Peter Hedges: I'd heard about a group of young people who went to cook a turkey, and their oven didn't work. They were in New York City. It was Thanksgiving. They'd bought an apartment. So they had to go around the building and ask other people to use their ovens. I thought that would be a terrific way to throw people together who would normally not be together.

MP: Family interaction is a part of the screenplays that you've written. That's certainly the case in this movie. What is it about the way families communicate and don't communicate that interests you so much?

PH: Family is our first community, and maybe it's because I came from a very interesting, volatile family, although I've never rendered them in any of the stories I've written, and because I grew up around so many interesting families. Most of the stories I love, from Glass Menagerie and Long Day's Journey Into Night, and many of the movies I love are about family. I'm drawn to families as that first community that we need to navigate. How do we emerge from our family and then find a family? A lot of Pieces of April to me is about the family you're born into but also the family you find, and it was the family you find that really compelled me to write this particular story.

MP: It's interesting you say that because About a Boy has a lot of the same things with the Will character.

PH: That's correct, the family he finds. That, of course, is from the Nick Hornby novel. I was one of the adapters of that book, but I know I was drawn to it for that reason, the idea that if you don't have a family, it's incumbent upon you to make one or to find one.

MP: What's striking about the film is what people say by not saying something, whether it's by omission or inflection or even through action in the end of the picture. How do you get the cast to be able to do something like that where a lot of what's said really isn't spoken?

PH: I love your question because increasingly for me film is about what you don't say and what you don't see. In this case, it wasn't difficult to get the cast to not say lines and not do certain actions because they understood that the power of the movie was going to come from the absence of certain moments and also that other moments be seized and grabbed and embraced. They're smart actors, and they realized, I think, that they would have to bring their A game to the set every day to make these scenes work. It also meant that the writer had faith in them as actors. If you don't trust your actors, you're going to overwrite everything, you're going to explain everything so that an audience gets it. In this case, we don't do that because we want to treat the audience with the same respect that any person wants to be treated in any conversation they have as an adult, which is you have a brain and you will be able to figure out what you need to figure out.

MP: As the writer and the director, did you have any problem balancing the humor, which can be pretty biting at times, with the softer elements of the picture?

PH: To straddle the comedy and the drama feels human to me, feels natural to me. From the beginning of my writing career I've always written dramatic scenes with lots of humor and funny scenes with lots of undercurrent, so it isn't difficult for me to do. I only know that if I've written something and it's without humor-there's no comedy in it-I probably haven't gone deep enough.

MP: First time directing for you. What led you to want to get involved as more than just a writer?

PH: I've wanted to direct long before I started writing films, so it wasn't born out of any disappointment from About a Boy or A Map of the World or What's Eating Gilbert Grape. It was very much that I view screenwriting as preparing a party and directing as getting to actually host the party, and I just wanted to be at the party.

MP: You made it through InDigEnt. How did you become connected with them?

PH: I've known Gary Winick, who founded InDigEnt, for years. He had been calling me for some time and asking me to come up with a project that I could do with InDigEnt. During that time I'd been writing Pieces of April, which I thought was too big of a project for InDigEnt because of 35 actors, lots of locations, and they make their films with a limited budget. My movie kept falling apart. Set up with a budget of seven million dollars three times, fell apart all three times. We called Gary in a last ditch effort. He and his team at InDigEnt read the script, and in twenty-four hours they said yes.

MP: What did you think of working with digital?

PH: For this story, which takes place over five hours, for a movie that wanted to feel as intensely human as it could, to get that feel of it being almost a home movie, that we're peeking in, peering in on life, it was a fantastic way to tell this story. I wouldn't have made Gilbert Grape or About a Boy or A Map of the World-not that I directed them-but if I were directing them and that was the only option, I would not have shot them on digital video. But this story, actually, I think, is enhanced by digital video.

MP: How did Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields get involved with the picture?

PH: I'd written this movie to end with the Three Dog Night song "Pieces of April". My producer said, "You really need to have someone write a piece of music," but I felt he was trying to get me to score the movie, so I was reluctant. What ended up happening was we started bringing in composers, and I said, "Why don't we bring in my favorite composer in the entire world, Stephin Merritt," who I'd never met. He came to see the movie. He loved the movie, hated the last song, and he agreed to write something, which he did. We only scored five moments prior to that ending moment-the ending montage-and then he also allowed me to use four of his songs as source music for April during the movie. We added a fifth song for the credits. He's my favorite musician in the world, and since I was working with some of my favorite actors, why not just have more favorite people around?

MP: What's next on your schedule?

PH: I'm finishing a novel that I've been writing since 1998, and then I have an idea for a movie that I can't wait to write.

MP: Thanks for your time.

PH: Thank a lot.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002