Tamara Jenkins at the Toronto Film Festival 2007 Photo by Matt Carr

TAMARA JENKINS

READ MORE: The Savages Star Laura Linney

After the success of The Slums of Beverly Hills, writer-director Tamara Jenkins was given a blind deal for a new script. It had to be contemporary. There had to be humor.

Scenes involving adult, but emotionally arrested, siblings forced to come face-to-face with mortality had preoccupied her thoughts for several years and eventually formed the heart-and-soul of The Savages, a darkly funny glimpse into death, dementia and the endearing eccentricities of a splintered family.

This is not an issue movie about illness, but for those who have not seen it and know the film touches on dementia, they may question if this film is not another movie like Judy Dench in Iris?
No, no. It is a very irreverent portrait of a brother and sister who have an estranged relationship with their father and who are suddenly forced to take care of this man who never took care of them. But it is really not a movie that is tracking the disrepair of a person as he is failing. It is really about the human dynamics between these people and sort of the Petri dish of that situation; it is like this greenhouse where we [see] the characters Jon and Wendy, grown-up children who are arrested in various ways, behaving in this primal situation. They are in the presence of their father, whom they are estranged from, and there is no real reaching him. [But] there is no sappy resolution in terms of their relationship with their father — which always happens in movies. But how often does it happen in real life that you actually have that conversation with someone before they go?

But the film is just as much about the relationship between the brother and sister and the fact that they're arrested in their own development. You've referred to their journey as being similar to that of Hansel and Gretel, and you have noted that were reading Bruno Bettleheim's The Uses of Enchantment.
That is such a great book … it is such a great psychological source. It is a book that has probably sat on my desk for my whole life, and I just pull it out once in a while. It is really old. It is a very ancient paperback edition. It is very yellowed. I should get a new one. And so somewhere in the process of writing [the screenplay], I remember thinking that there are these two siblings and they are going on this journey through Old Age Land, and I started putting it in this fairy tale mode. It is hard to say where that happens but I do remember pulling it off the shelf and opening it up to Hansel and Gretel and thinking: "Oh, yeah! Jon and Wendy!" Because I think in an early draft of the script, there might have been more siblings. I worked on it for a long time and it sort of grows and then you distill it. So in the distillation part, [it became] just this boy-girl-father [relationship of] essential ingredients. Pulling up Hansel and Gretel and reading it, I thought it is really about children confronting mortality. That is where Jon and Wendy are: they are adults but they have been thrown into the woods, and they have to fend for themselves and make their way through and confront mortality and [we see] how that affects them.