Julianne Moore and Eddie Redmayne in Savage Grace Courtesy of IFC Films

READ MORE: Cannes 2007

It has been almost a year since Tom Kalin's (Swoon) Savage Grace premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, and yet even in the wake of subsequent bowings at both the Sundance and Tribeca Film Festivals, reactions to the controversial themes of incest and matricide continue to overshadow the powerful performances by Julianne Moore, Eddie Redmayne and Stephen Dillane.

Based on the award-winning book, Savage Grace focuses on the true story of Barbara Daly Baekeland (Moore), the C-list beauty who gave up her Hollywood aspirations to marry into the fabulous wealth of the Baekeland empire. As the grandson of the inventor of Bakelite plastics, Brooks Baekeland (Dillane), a dashing arrogant fixture amongst the international elite, had unfortunately not inherited his grandfather's business acumen. Locked in a bitter co-dependent relationship with his charismatic yet volatile wife (once ranked one of the ten most beautiful women in New York), their marriage was a tempestuous one, exacerbated by Barbara's overly possessive and close relationship to their only child, Tony (Redmayne). As Tony grows from a precocious teenager into a reclusive young adult, he rebels, and falls into an underground world of drugs and free sex with both men and women. When a girlfriend leaves him for his father, Tony is pulled into his lonely mother's darkly glittering orbit.

But the increasingly unstable intertwined mother-son relationship reached a climax in November 1972. Tony, then 25, stabbed his mother to death in their London home. Tony was found ordering Chinese food when the police arrived. Mistakenly released from prison years later, he fled to New York where he stabbed his grandmother before being ultimately incarcerated at Rikers Island.

Spanning a period of over a quarter of a century, Kalin's film uncoils to reveal a deeply dysfunctional family reveling in their own narcissism and drowning in deep emotional insecurities. Obviously recalling the myth of Oedipus, Kalin explores the several cultural taboos, including class and gender in aristocratic society and the moral decay of modern America. In this exclusive premiere.com interview, Tom Kalin riffs on, amongst other things, creating an atmosphere of trust on a closed sex-scene set and Eddie Redmayne talks about his being constantly cast as "gay New Yorkers with incestuous tendencies."

The film is an adaptation of a book by Natalie Robins and Steven Aronson. Tell us about the source material.
TK: It is basically a non-fiction book called Savage Grace that came out in the 1980s. It is a classy version of the true-crime book that has pictures in the middle. In the States there are these cheap paperbacks that tell us of lurid tales of crime. And always in the middle there are photographs of the main characters. This book was of a different caliber. The writing is much better and it tells the story not just as you see in the film but of the Baekeland family. It covers about a hundred years, and it follows the themes [of] the film but in a much more sprawling way. It is both a shockingly tabloid book that covers madness and matricide but is also something much deeper. It has resonance with Greek tragedy. It is incredible material for actors.

ER: It has a lot of source material: letters and psychological reports and photographs. So for us — Julianne, Stephen and myself — it was a complete dream because the research is all there for you and you can rigorously pursue that and have something to base it all on.

Julianne Moore in Savage Grace Courtesy of IFC Films

What was the challenge of spanning such a huge period of time? Not only stylistically but also for the actors.
TK: They're interrelated. The questions the actors had to deal with were about what you leave on screen and what you leave off screen. So, you go from 1946 to 1959, thirteen years have passed. The audience automatically has to guess: "Okay this is what has changed." The ideas are moving forward episodically in the film. It is hard for performers; the actor works moment-by-moment in scenes out of sequence. And so we [wanted] to make [sure certain questions were addressed]: Is Tony's decline being tracked effectively or are those changes happening? I wanted to make choices not [typical] of a traditional period drama, to make some things more minimalist in terms of the way it is structured and bolder in terms of the story.

ER: And also [there is] this idea that make-up and prosthetics and all that kind of stuff [are essential]. Often it was more stylized in this film in the sense that there wasn't a huge effort [to make me look] super old, or for me to look like [I was] in my late twenties. I have done films where that fails and distracts. But what was important here was the human relationship rather than the physical aging process.