Talking Pictures: Trust The Man’s Bart Freundlich
by Brad Balfour
Native New Yorker Bart Freundlich has created and directed a quintessential big city romantic comedy, Trust the Man. Actress Rebecca (Julianne Moore — Freundlich's real-life wife), and husband Tom (David Duchovny) find their marriage is falling apart. Simultaneously, her brother Tobey (Billy Crudup) has a long-term relationship with Elaine (Maggie Gyllenhaal) that's turning sour as well. Both men discover how much they need their mates but have to prove it to them first working around the twists and turn of life in the Big Apple.
The L Magazine: How long did it take to put this project together?
Bart Freundlich: It was definitely the shortest it had taken me to write it and to get it together. It was six months to write it and another six monthsto get it financed. But it was surprising to me that based on the fact that we didn't want a big budget, the movie cost $5 million that it was hard to get it together and with these actors I felt like oh this will be an easy one. It never is.
Sidney Kimmel financed it — he's a big philanthropist who has his own phone company — and is doing a lot of different projects, but they were really the only ones interested in it at that point. And they were fantastic because they were like, "We love the script, here's the money, go do it." Then we took it to Toronto and Fox Searchlight bought it. The only disadvantage to doing that stuff is that it takes a year to come out [afterwards] because they have to get their marketing all lined up. It feels like it's been a long time since we made the movie.
The L: Was it really that much to pull you along to do a comedy?
BF: It was only because I guess I felt that the movie is so much work to make that it should really be something that really says something or attempts to say something or just something that is personally very important and doesn't seem frivolous, but and I think that also my kind of persona is very light hearted and comedic and I get all my dark stuff out through my movies.
David was one of the people who really encouraged me but our friend Peter Berg a director who actually stood up at our wedding and was like this guy has got to write a comedy, OK, everyone tell him. I think also he didn't want me to struggle as much on every movie made. I did. It was something I had to say consciously I'm going to sit down and try to do this. And as I did it I started to find more meaning in it, I didn't need to write something just total slapstick and stupid.
The L: Why did you write the part of Tom for David Duchovny?
BF: Well, I saw him on Larry Sanders Show. And I know him pretty well. I met him through my wife when they were making Evolution and he is just such a funny guy and has that kind of dry ironic quality that works so well on The X Files for the mysterious drama of it, which I think works even better with comedy when he has the right thing to do. He has such a sharp wit and I was privy to that as a friend and seeing him doing it with Gary [Shandling] was fantastic. So I wrote it just thinking about how I could hear his voice in my head when I was writing his lines — he makes them bigger.
The L: What do you mean by bigger?
BF: I guess like scenes in the movie that were designed to be funny primarily to get to a joke rather than to forward the plot along. Like, for instance, with Julie, I mean, Rebecca choking on the cake, which I really started out saying I want to use the scene where she chokes on the cake and he's giving her the Heimlich maneuver and
they're jumping toward the camera.
That was my primary goal with that scene and than later I was able to work into it, "Oh it will be really good if they're coming home to have sex and they haven't had it in a while." I had to work backwards. Or when David's character is at the sex addicts meeting, where I had a few jokes in there that I wanted to get in. Obviously it's not
Wedding Crashers in that it's so broad. But they were primarily scenes that were supposed to just be funny.
The L: Where did some of those scenes come from?
BF: The cake choking comes from a real life incident with Julie whereshe actually choked, I didn't give her the Heimlich maneuver, but she was choking on cake after the Golden Globes. I came into the room and she was stuffing a piece of cake in her mouth — my birthday cake. My birthday is right around there. I just looked at her and she was like [whispers... can't talk] and I thought afterwards with her in the dress and she had this $100,000 necklace on, that it would be, if I had to give her the Heimlich maneuver, it would even have been funnier.
The L: How do you direct your wife and friend in a kissing scene and decide how much tongue?
BF: We didn't discuss that. I left the tongue thing up to them. We would joke about that I would just kiss Tea [Leoni--Duchovny's wife] every time that they did it. Tea would be on the set and we would just make out and than we would do the scene. So it feels like it balanced out.
The L: So you don't mind your wife doing love scenes with other men?
BF: The truth of the matter is it's exactly what you think — it's never the most comfortable thing and it's never a really big deal either. I think it's better in a way that David's one of my best friends. I had to have Billy kiss Julie in World Traveler. She's kissed all my friends. Julie is so compartmentalized about her work almost to the point where I'm amazed by the fact that she doesn't bring any of it home. It's not a big deal. It's only in the moment, that mild, kind of uncomfortable quality of it. And someone else suggested that's why I hadn't written more sex scenes because I knew she was going to be in the movie. No. I didn't know she was going to be in the movie.
The L: Why didn't you write in sex scenes?
BF: I felt like maybe it wasn't the appropriate movie for it. There was a lot of frank talk about sex but so much of the movie is about the fact that they're at this point in their relationship where they are not having sex.
The L: New York is very much a character in and of itself in this. Was that conscious?
BF: Yeah absolutely. I just thought even though I grew up in New York and I love Woody Allen movies his neighborhood is not my neighborhood and I don't know the Upper East Side really. I felt like I wanted to uh, so much of my life takes place in those restaurants like Tartine or Pastis.
The L: Or the Magnolia Bakery.
BF: Or the Magnolia Bakery, right. That I just wanted to be in a place where I felt like I knew it, I knew how to shoot it in a way that felt very true and very familiar so even for people who weren't in New York it kind of felt like a small town or like a village. I ended getting lucky in getting a lot of these people to let us shoot there, mostly just because we come there all the time. And I didn't want to make it too much of a statement, but I just wanted to have the place where they lived feel real and feel. New York has been shot so many times to just make it feel slightly different ultimately.
The L Magazine: How long did it take to put this project together?
Bart Freundlich: It was definitely the shortest it had taken me to write it and to get it together. It was six months to write it and another six monthsto get it financed. But it was surprising to me that based on the fact that we didn't want a big budget, the movie cost $5 million that it was hard to get it together and with these actors I felt like oh this will be an easy one. It never is.
Sidney Kimmel financed it — he's a big philanthropist who has his own phone company — and is doing a lot of different projects, but they were really the only ones interested in it at that point. And they were fantastic because they were like, "We love the script, here's the money, go do it." Then we took it to Toronto and Fox Searchlight bought it. The only disadvantage to doing that stuff is that it takes a year to come out [afterwards] because they have to get their marketing all lined up. It feels like it's been a long time since we made the movie.
The L: Was it really that much to pull you along to do a comedy?
BF: It was only because I guess I felt that the movie is so much work to make that it should really be something that really says something or attempts to say something or just something that is personally very important and doesn't seem frivolous, but and I think that also my kind of persona is very light hearted and comedic and I get all my dark stuff out through my movies.
David was one of the people who really encouraged me but our friend Peter Berg a director who actually stood up at our wedding and was like this guy has got to write a comedy, OK, everyone tell him. I think also he didn't want me to struggle as much on every movie made. I did. It was something I had to say consciously I'm going to sit down and try to do this. And as I did it I started to find more meaning in it, I didn't need to write something just total slapstick and stupid.
The L: Why did you write the part of Tom for David Duchovny?
BF: Well, I saw him on Larry Sanders Show. And I know him pretty well. I met him through my wife when they were making Evolution and he is just such a funny guy and has that kind of dry ironic quality that works so well on The X Files for the mysterious drama of it, which I think works even better with comedy when he has the right thing to do. He has such a sharp wit and I was privy to that as a friend and seeing him doing it with Gary [Shandling] was fantastic. So I wrote it just thinking about how I could hear his voice in my head when I was writing his lines — he makes them bigger.
The L: What do you mean by bigger?
BF: I guess like scenes in the movie that were designed to be funny primarily to get to a joke rather than to forward the plot along. Like, for instance, with Julie, I mean, Rebecca choking on the cake, which I really started out saying I want to use the scene where she chokes on the cake and he's giving her the Heimlich maneuver and
they're jumping toward the camera.
That was my primary goal with that scene and than later I was able to work into it, "Oh it will be really good if they're coming home to have sex and they haven't had it in a while." I had to work backwards. Or when David's character is at the sex addicts meeting, where I had a few jokes in there that I wanted to get in. Obviously it's not
Wedding Crashers in that it's so broad. But they were primarily scenes that were supposed to just be funny.
The L: Where did some of those scenes come from?
BF: The cake choking comes from a real life incident with Julie whereshe actually choked, I didn't give her the Heimlich maneuver, but she was choking on cake after the Golden Globes. I came into the room and she was stuffing a piece of cake in her mouth — my birthday cake. My birthday is right around there. I just looked at her and she was like [whispers... can't talk] and I thought afterwards with her in the dress and she had this $100,000 necklace on, that it would be, if I had to give her the Heimlich maneuver, it would even have been funnier.
The L: How do you direct your wife and friend in a kissing scene and decide how much tongue?
BF: We didn't discuss that. I left the tongue thing up to them. We would joke about that I would just kiss Tea [Leoni--Duchovny's wife] every time that they did it. Tea would be on the set and we would just make out and than we would do the scene. So it feels like it balanced out.
The L: So you don't mind your wife doing love scenes with other men?
BF: The truth of the matter is it's exactly what you think — it's never the most comfortable thing and it's never a really big deal either. I think it's better in a way that David's one of my best friends. I had to have Billy kiss Julie in World Traveler. She's kissed all my friends. Julie is so compartmentalized about her work almost to the point where I'm amazed by the fact that she doesn't bring any of it home. It's not a big deal. It's only in the moment, that mild, kind of uncomfortable quality of it. And someone else suggested that's why I hadn't written more sex scenes because I knew she was going to be in the movie. No. I didn't know she was going to be in the movie.
The L: Why didn't you write in sex scenes?
BF: I felt like maybe it wasn't the appropriate movie for it. There was a lot of frank talk about sex but so much of the movie is about the fact that they're at this point in their relationship where they are not having sex.
The L: New York is very much a character in and of itself in this. Was that conscious?
BF: Yeah absolutely. I just thought even though I grew up in New York and I love Woody Allen movies his neighborhood is not my neighborhood and I don't know the Upper East Side really. I felt like I wanted to uh, so much of my life takes place in those restaurants like Tartine or Pastis.
The L: Or the Magnolia Bakery.
BF: Or the Magnolia Bakery, right. That I just wanted to be in a place where I felt like I knew it, I knew how to shoot it in a way that felt very true and very familiar so even for people who weren't in New York it kind of felt like a small town or like a village. I ended getting lucky in getting a lot of these people to let us shoot there, mostly just because we come there all the time. And I didn't want to make it too much of a statement, but I just wanted to have the place where they lived feel real and feel. New York has been shot so many times to just make it feel slightly different ultimately.
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