Charlize Theron and Nick Stahl in Sleepwalking Courtesy of Overture Films Read ELLE's interview with Theron for their Smart Women 2008 issue.

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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.