Kansas City, MO. -- There are relatively few movies about healthy mother-son relationships. Maybe the most famous cinematic depiction of maternity involves the woman who raised Norman Bates.
Veteran screenwriter Cindy Chupack, whose credits include Sex and the City, Everybody Loves Raymond, Divorce, Modern Family and I'm Dying Up Here, may be exploring relatively uncharted territory with her directorial debut Otherhood, which stars Patricia Arquette, Angela Bassett and Felicity Huffman as a trio of moms who take matters into their own hands when their sons forget to call or write them on Mother's Day.
All three men are living in Manhattan, and their mothers barge in on their offspring and make themselves at home in the Big Apple. The movie debuts on Netflix today.
"It was based on a British novel called Whatever Makes You Happy by William Sutcliffe, and he felt there wasn't very much written about mothers and adult sons, and if there was something, it was usually a negative, like the guy's a Mama's boy or something. And he really wanted to explore that relationship," Chupack says during a promotional tour stop.
"I feel like there's not very much in this area. It was really interesting to me to get a behind the curtain look at how the men might be feeling, not about their mothers and their relationships, their relationships with their dads and each other. With the female characters, I'm about their age even though my daughter's younger."
If having Arquette's Gillian hound her son into dating a young woman who speaks of relationships in a manner that just about guarantees both will remain single for the rest of their lives, the Three Amigas discover that their sons, while being mostly functional adults, still have problems that need a mother's touch. One is making a career out of doing layout of sleazy lad mags, and another has not had the guts to tell his mother Helen (Huffman) that -- even though he's gay-- she's about to become a grandmother.
"Their moms aren't wrong. It's kind of like everybody is right and everybody is wrong in this film. I like that there are some dramatic and vulnerable moments in addition to the comedy. The boys, for different reasons, get something from their visits from their moms, and the moms definitely get something from their visits with the boys," explains Chupack.
The director may be reworking material that Sutcliffe and her co-screenwriter Mark Andrus (As Good as It Gets) started, but much of the new film is loaded with her own observations and experiences. Some of her inspiration came from her relationship with her own mother, and Arquette's character Gillian behaves like one of her friends.
She's adamant that Daniel (Jake Hoffman) marry another Jew, in part because she converted to the faith when she married his father.
Chupack explains, "We have a friend who converted to Judaism, and she does the Sabbath every Friday. She has a sukkah (a vegetation covered booth used for the holiday Sukkot, which comes five days after Yom Kippur). I don't even know how to explain it, and I was raised Jewish. She's more Jewish than me, and I was raised Jewish. I thought that was fun about Patricia's character that she embraced it even more."
The director also remade her other leading ladies as the story progresses. "You don't have to do much of a makeover on Angela, but she does get one in the film. She goes from having one look to finding herself," she says.
"I love that (Helen's) journey starts where she's plucking every eyebrow. She always looks just perfect. She's one of those women who dresses perfectly, has perfect hair. Her makeup is perfect. She says in the beginning, 'I don't want to be a grandma.' She has a fear of aging. She doesn't know what to do when when's not young and beautiful anymore. So she gets sort of a 'makeunder' when she discovers she has a grandchild. She becomes more natural."
Because both Otherhood and Sex and the City are quintessential New York stories, it would be easy to assume that Chupack herself came from there.
If you did, you'd be wrong.
She credits her roots in Oklahoma with helping her to make stories set in America's biggest city relatable to the world.
"I remember when I read The Shipping News there was something that that author (Annie Proulx) said that when you're an outsider you see things that people take for granted who live there," she says. "When I first moved to New York out of college and then I wrote about it for Sex and the City, I had read Candace Bushnell's book, and I thought this doesn't even exist because I wasn't invited to all of these parties and premieres, but it does exist. My perspective on it kind of helped because I was not making something that was only relatable to New Yorkers but was just relatable. It was just about the friendships and the people."
An Overdue Debut
Despite decades of experience, Chupack has only recently taken up directing. She has a producing credit on many of the televisions shows she has written for and is no stranger to a set. She'd only started directing her own material when she helmed an episode of I'm Dying Up Here last year.
"Just because I didn't know the camera part, that's what kept me from doing it for so long," she explains, "I've always sort of been in the 'video village' looking at the screen and trying to be the guardian of 'the script.' I hadn't really been on the other side of the set and saw, oh, this is where the cameras need to be to set up the shoot that I'm looking at. So, I started more recently making a point of understanding the relationship between where the cameras are and how they moved and what I was watching on the screen. But also I needed to realize that so much of what I knew from being involved with casting, working with department heads, from doing post and editing on TV shows and just telling stories was so much of directing."
It doesn't hurt that her three leading ladies include two Oscar-nominees (Bassett and Huffman) and one Academy Award winner (Arquette). Similarly, producer Cathy Schulman, who has supported Chupack throughout the process, won an Oscar for Crash.
A few years ago, it might have seemed surprising that a streaming service like Netflix would attract A-list talent, but Chupack says that receiving both backing and distribution from the company helps her to get her film made and to reach viewers who might not see it otherwise.
"I feel like I've watched that transition between people feeling like it was something different or my Mom feeling like you had to watch it on your computer," she says. "We have Netflix on our home TV, so now we're watching (Netflix) movies the way you'd watch any movie. It doesn't seem that different to me, but it did take a while for actors to realize that they could do some really great work in streaming.
"[This is] for people who live in towns that don't have a theater or can't afford to go to the theater. It drops worldwide at the same times. So, I feel like it brings people together because we're getting movies and TV shows from all over. Even right now in our country, we're so divided, but these issues of motherhood and friendship, these are universal issues that will not only hopefully unite us but will remind us that we have a lot in common."
MovieStyle on 08/02/2019