'Sleepwalking': A Family Affair

'Sleepwalking': A Family Affair
Charlize Theron, Nick Stahl and Dennis Hopper discuss family, abuse and hope.

By Deborah Day

Sleepwalking explores a dysfunctional working-class family and its abusive history. Joleen Reedy (Charlize Theron) is a crass, pot-dealing single mother and sister to barely-functional 30-year-old James (Nick Stahl). The siblings have long since escaped the Utah farm of their abusive father Frank (Dennis Hopper) but they haven't quite escaped the damage he's inflicted. When she loses her boyfriend and her home, Joleen skips town and leaves her surly 12-year-old daughter Tara (AnnaSophia Robb) with the "sleepwalking" James, who after some failures as a caregiver, eventually develops quite the familial instinct.

SPOLIER ALERT: The cast reveals some of the film's plot twists during their conversations below.

Charlize Theron

Joleen's daughter seems like she has a very active dream life, one that you don't necessarily always see onscreen.
Theron: I've done a lot of research on children who have never met a parent, whether it's the mother or the father, and there's beautiful innocence with children where their imagination always tends to go to a positive place, and the older they get, the more it goes to a negative place. [Adults] always expect the worst to happen. Whereas with kids, especially around her age, there's always this hope, there's this idea, that the parent that's missing is the answer to everything. [Younger children] don't care, they just want to know who their parents are then they know their own legacy and identity. [Tara's father] had no face. She had no idea who he was. And I think that was something that really drove Tara, because when things went bad at home there was always this hope, well there's this man out there and I don't know what he looks like but he's the answer to the problem here. He's the answer that will fix all of this. Most people who come from a lot of trauma tend to live in a very fantasy-orientated world. And when we developed the story, that was an element that we always hung onto. We actually had sequences like that in Monster. Aileen Wuornos very much lived in a fantasy world. You go to a fantasy place because it's the thing that gives you hope. And I think children do it more because their imaginations are still so raw.

It seems like Joleen's mother is missing from the picture.
The back story was pretty much that when she was around things were OK. And this is another thing that I've researched. When there's an abusive parent, things are OK if the other parent that's there is not abusive. Things started going really bad for Joleen and for James once their mother passed away. There was no solace anymore coming from anybody. And so we always had a back story that [Joleen was] around Tara's age when she lost her mom.

The allusions to her losing her mom are subtle.
It's always tricky when you deal with three generations of a family. At one point we really opened up the storyline of her father. And then when we started watching the movie, we realized you have to stay focused within a certain amount of characters, otherwise it can become very melodramatic. So to bring up my character's mother who we never see... we decided it should be about Tara so let's focus on her father. So it was just the idea of him — this idea of romance, this idea of a young girl meeting a man and wanting to run away with him. We're not saying if this was a good man or a good idea or anything like that. And we decided to do the same thing with my mother so we could maintain the focus on the main characters.

That said, [Tara's father] almost becomes a palpable presence in the room at the dinner table when her grandfather starts talking about him.
Theron: The thing that breaks Tara is the unexpectedness of hearing somebody talk about her father, this faceless man. But with Nick [Stahl] it was a little trickier because he came so wounded to that scene that we needed to show how [his character James] has gone through this trauma, just like Tara. I kept saying to [Nick]: "This is your dad, no matter what he's done to you, you still want his approval." And when you look at the dialogue, the subtext is "Look at me, Dad. Be proud of me. Look at what I've accomplished." And that might be the thing that's going to fix everything. That will make it all OK. So that was a really — I mean for me it's a heartbreaking scene, because it's the [father's] denial that just kills me. I think we're always hoping that our parents will approve of us.

Your film roles are so diverse. As an actress, do you seek out that diversity on purpose?
No. I wish I could say that there's a recipe, but there really isn't. I'm very much driven by material but I'm also very much driven by who I'm going to work with. If I'm going to go and do something like Hancock [Theron's upcoming movie about a homeless superhero, co-starring Will Smith], a) I need to feel like the material is going to carry, b) I absolutely love working with Will Smith. I think he's a phenomenal talent. We worked together in The Legend of Bagger Vance, and so that felt like going back to family. And the material was really challenging for the two of us. But I don't really live in a genre-driven mindset. And I think things kind of come to me; it's really very organic because this industry is so unpredictable. I think it's naive and somewhat egotistical to think that you can control the box office and that you can control what people are going to like. Time after time I have seen movies whose buzz starts to hit and the industry decides this is the big one for this year. And then it comes out and nobody gives a damn. I think that's the magic of filmmaking. I've learned very early on that since you can't control what's going to happen at the box office, the one thing that you can control is doing things that you really want to do. Not because you think it's going to be a hit and not because you think you're going to win an Academy Award. Boy, you're just going to live a life of disappointment. It's sometimes a little harsh when you work on something that you really believe in and it doesn't perform at the box office, but at the same time, you walk away with the satisfaction as an actor that you went and did something that you really wanted to do. That's the only thing you have control over at the end of the day. Michael Caine said this to me when I did Cider House Rules with him. He said, "I have at least 10 memories of every single one of the movies [I've made]. And when I'm on my death bed, I will remember those moments and I won't be able to tell you what any one of my movies made at the box office." And then you start to realize that life is important, and that you're going to go and dedicate yourself to 2 years onto a project, you better have some good memories. You better enjoy it.

One thing that I really appreciate about this role is Joleen's humanity. It is reminiscent of some of the other characters you've played.
Well, the human condition, especially as a female, is what interests me. I think female characters can be very black and white. And there's not a lot of room for the gray area, and I think that's problematic within our society. We want to believe that our women are nurturers. It's the Madonna-whore complex: we either want to see our women playing mothers, girlfriends, pretty wives, or we want to see them play prostitutes. I think women are the most complex human creatures and yet men get to play all those complex, conflicted roles. Directors and men's studios are sometimes concerned that if you play a female like that, the audience isn't going to like it. But you know what? Some people aren't necessarily likeable but if you play them truthfully, the best you can hope for is not sympathy but empathy and understanding. And if you're willing to show the pretty with the ugly, well that's a human being. That's all of us.

Have you thought about what happens to the characters after the credits roll?
When you're exposing an audience to a family that's deeply wounded and dealing with stuff that's not going to be fixed overnight, you can't then give them an end in the third act that ties everything up with a little bow. We never wanted Joleen to all of a sudden be a great mother, well-dressed and not loud, embarrassing and obnoxious. [Her relationship with Tara] was definitely going to have to evolve. And it's the same with James: I didn't necessarily want to see him go to jail, even though he commits a crime. I'm not saying he doesn't deserve to go; he did something illegal. But there was a feeling at the end of this movie: life is hard but you do have choices, free will. It doesn't mean that once you make that choice, everything is going to work out great. When James is driving down that road at the end, visually says that anything can happen. The road, symbolically, was him making a choice. And after watching the movie, I really just wanted to wish him good luck.

Dennis Hopper and Nick Stahl

The relationships in this movie are so complex, especially the father-son relationship. The killing scene is very much defined by the shot of Frank standing over his kneeling son.
Stahl: Telling him not to get up, with his eyes on the ground. You actually came up with that on your own, didn't you? The shovel and all that?

Hopper: Right. Actually killing [my character] with the shovel.

Stahl: Took it to another scary place. That was scary, too.

Hopper: Actually first we shot the death scene inside the house. And we went back and did a re-shoot. And we decided to do it in the barn, with a shovel. We all came up with various ideas and we put it together and it worked. The concern of the scene was that we protect AnnaSophia, who's 12 years old. She's a wonderful actress and was gung ho about it — we were probably overprotective. We blocked it out really well and tried to make our dramatic moments, and Nick and AnnaSophia were both really professional and really wonderful moment-to-moment actors.

Did you talk about back story any? Because there's not a lot of that about their relationship in the movie. You just see the repercussions.
Stahl: We didn't really talk too much about it.

Hopper: No, because it was written well — we knew our characters.

Stahl: You got a sense of their history. His abuse towards Tara was probably the exact same as it was towards Joleen. And the moment of him with his head bowed, looking at the ground, that encapsulates our relationship, encapsulates me being completely submissive to him. I've had the life sucked out of me a little bit. I think that was pretty understood in the writing. We didn't even go into details of my character's childhood.

Hopper: It really wasn't important. We focused on understanding the moment in our scene, rather than what had happened in the past. Because [my character's children] ran away from my abuse 10 years before. And in the scene with the killing, a switch is flipped [in James] and that's what causes him to attack.

Stahl: Yeah, he just snaps. He's pushed to the point where it's life or death.

Hopper: He wasn't going to see Tara be abused. He wasn't going to take it. And my [character is] saying to him, "I'm gonna break you. You think I can't break you? I'm gonna break you like I broke every horse on this farm." And him finally saying, "You never broke me," and coming out of this repressed thing, this fury. I think unfortunately a lot of murders come out of that place. And it's rather tragic for the person doing it, because the person doing the killing has actually been abused to the point that there's no other thing for them to do.

I was hopeful that he was going to turn himself in and get a good lawyer.
Stahl: Yeah, I don't think it matters as much, what happens to James, because what's really happened to him is that he's been set free of something. So whether he ends up in prison or not, he's finally living life for the first time in a way. And that's what's important.

Hopper: What is your line about sleepwalking, that you say to Tara in the truck?

Stahl: Before I was walking around like I was asleep. And now it's a new life. She woke me up.

Over the course of the film, James becomes more and more of a father figure to Tara.
Stahl: I think that's why it is so scary for him, becoming a father figure when his own was so abusive. He doesn't know what a healthy parent-child relationship is. I think ultimately he's a kind person. Different people react different ways to violence. Some people who get treated violently become violent themselves. And others just become weak and timid and I think James would fall more under that category.

Do you think the loss of his wife maybe made Frank bitter?
Hopper: I didn't dwell on it. But I think after the mother died, he probably changed. And this man has worked his entire life. I didn't think of him as a bad guy when I was playing him. I thought of him as a guy who had to run this ranch and there weren't going to be any loafers around, you know? Working a farm like that is a really, really tough life. And so I never play these guys as thinking they're bad guys, because they think they're correct in what they're doing. He only knows how to do things his way. And that becomes abusive if people don't do things his way, too. And if it takes violence to get them into shape, all right. I'm sure he's the kind of guy who says, "A velvet touch is fine, but a punch in the mouth is a lot quicker". I've known a lot of people with that kind of sensibility. I was raised on a wheat farm in Dodge City, Kansas and it's a tough life.

So any plans to do a role with the velvet touch?
Hopper: I hope I'm going to direct a movie this year some time. That's what I really need to do.