Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Savages Courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures

After The Slums of Beverly Hills, how did you decide this is the sort of projecting you wanted to do and how did you start honing it down?
I think that I wrote one of the scenes in the movie maybe ten years ago. It was a spare, stripped-down [idea like for] a Pinter play. It was just boy-girl, brother-sister. No names. But it was the scene where the sister calls the brother up in the middle of the night, and this very Gothic thing had happened with the father that she had found out about and she is spewing and flipping. She is highly reactive and the Jon character is like: "Look, it is not a big deal. It is not an emergency. It is not a crisis, it is just a situation." There was something about that dynamic that I had written ten years ago that I was always interested in. It had to do with these two people who had grown up under the same circumstances but had adapted differently. There systems of survival were the opposite, how they reacted to their troubled family. They just came out different. Their styles of survival are completely opposed.

Surely you must be drawing on something autobiographical?
If I published it like a memoir, I would feel like James Frey or whatever his name is; I would get into a lot of trouble because it is not true, and it is not the facts, so it is not a strict autobiography. But it is an emotional autobiography in certain sorts of ways in that I have been in nursing homes. Once you are over 40, you have probably stepped into a nursing home with a grandparent or a parent so my grandmother was in a nursing home and she had dementia. My father was in a nursing home and he had dementia. But it is not a strict retelling or account of that, but it certainly draws on personal stuff. And, at least in the United States, there are a lot of people who are my age that are dealing with their parents, the Baby Boom generation. It was just swirling around me because of my age. There are some details in the movie that are lifted from things that someone told me. And I live around the corner from a nursing home, and I pass by it all the time as I walk my dog. So, there is just all of this stuff — there is an autobiographical impulse. But it is not an autobiography.

Once you had the fully formed character in your mind, how did you come to associate Laura [Linney] and Philip [Seymour Hoffman] with the two leads?
It is sort of like a love story in certain ways. The heart of the movie is the dynamic and the chemistry between these two people. And they spar and there is this kind of resolve that has to exist. So it is scary. Because sometimes it feels like you are taking this ingredient and taking this other ingredient and you are throwing it into the pot and crossing your fingers that it tastes good. So, I had a bulletin board and was sticking faces up on it and really channeling it and trying to go there. And then I met Laura and I thought it would be interesting for her to play this. It is a slightly more unhinged [role] than maybe some things that I had seen her do in a certain sort of way. The character is like a girl-woman. She is a grown-up. She is 39 but she is like a girl-woman and not a woman-woman. I met Laura and I liked Laura. I saw her doing it, but it had to be the right counterpoint or it would be wrong. It is matter of the puzzle working and the chemistry working and schedules working. And then I met Phil for coffee, and I just knew that they were going to be perfect together. The characters are opposite, and they are opposite as people. There were all these signs pointing me there.

Were you very much involved in developing a backstory for each of the characters?
I think there is a lot of subtext in the film. There is no exposition or explaining. It is like when you go to a friend's house for the holidays; you might not know any of the history. but from the way that they are having dinner, you learn the dynamics immediately. That is something I am very interested in: the way that the past informs behavior. I think all the backstory is built into the dynamics of what is happening, between the lines. The way that they behave together is very revealing.