Failure to Launch - Sarah Jessica Parker interview
Interview by Rob Carnevale
SARAH Jessica Parker talks about her new role in romantic comedy Failure To Launch, which is based the problems some US parents are having in making their children leave home. She also discusses her career and why she has no regrets about continued associations with Sex & The City.
Q. Can you tell us a little bit about Failure To Launch, as both a film and a cultural syndrome?
A. Failure to launch describes a growing phenomenon, or syndrome of our country, where men are living at home long past what is considered an appropriate age.
Q. Would you seek to change a man in any way once you’re attracted to him?
A. I would say that anyone who thinks they can change another person, let alone a man, is slightly misguided. I have so many single women friends who date men who have big warning signs all over them, and they really feel that they are uniquely gifted, or skilled in some way, that they will be the person that finally fixes all these flaws that I guess are so objectionable. But I feel men far more complicated and interesting than that!
Q. How did you know Matthew [Broderick] was the man for you?
A. I’m not certain that, especially at such a tender age, one is certain of those things. I definitely recognised a lot of qualities that I thought were wonderful, and that I probably didn’t even know I was looking for until they were right in front of me.
I think they were similar qualities to what my mother saw in my father, strangely enough. We don’t pretend to hold our marriage up as a standard. In fact, we decided not to ever suggest that it’s a model by which everybody else should judge theirs – maybe that’s why it’s lasted, because we don’t really open it up for conversation.
Q. You were making your way in the world at a relatively young age, so the failure to launch doesn’t apply to you – can you understand why men want to maintain a lifestyle where they have everything done for them?
A. I think there are real issues that are legitimate that keep a man at home. Some of them are cultural, some of them are financial, some of them have to do with ailing parents. But this is just an illustration of simple convenience and laziness, in our movie, and it provides for comedy.
Q. Do you anticipate having any such feelings when it comes to your son?
A. Listen, I hope I’m providing my son with a beautiful home, that he feels really safe and comfortable in it. It’s going to be a pretty tough pill to go out into the world and live in a studio apartment, but that is one of the beautiful challenges of being an adult and being independent. So, yes I can see why it’s very appealing to live at home, but only because I’ve been asked this question a lot. I’d say that it’s also equally thrilling to be an adult and stand on your own and grapple with difficult and complex situations.
Q. Will there come a time when you can give your son a DVD of this…?
A. Wow, that means I never have to have the conversation. Is there one on sex as well? Listen, at the age of three years old, it’s hard for me even to imagine wanting him to leave the house, let alone forcing him out of the door with a DVD of mine. But I hope that we’re raising in the end an independent young man who feels confident that he can go into the world. He can always come home and always bring his laundry. He already knows that he’s supposed to come home when he’s married every Friday, no matter what his wife says, and have dinner with me. His wife is named Mary, we’ve already decided.
Q. Was there a concern that your character in the film may come across as being a little callous?
A. I think it was a concern. She is and I think that’s part of the story. One of the things that Tripp [Matthew McConaughey] sort of presses her about at the end is, how do you make the choices you’ve made, when she chastises him for being a juvenile for so long. I also think she isn’t without revelation. My basic feeling about her is that she must have been hurt pretty badly at a time that it just seemed easier for her to be constructive about other people, helpful, and deflect from her own deficits in the romance department. It was a concern, but I’m hoping she redeems herself somewhat.
Do you think that the public perception of you is changing with this film and The Family Stone?
A. I can’t really do much about the public’s perception of me. I can only try to make the best choices given the opportunities that I have. But it’s been nice that both films have really found audiences and had some success, either commercially or critically. And I guess I’ll know later on how definitive it was.
Q. Are you ever worried that being associated with something like Sex & The City for so long might have a damaging effect? That the show is all you’ll be remembered for?
A. I’m very comfortable with the association of Sex & The City. In fact, I feel very privileged to have had that extraordinary experience. I also recognise the strong identification but I don’t feel it’s defining me because I’ve had so many interesting opportunities since the show ended. I feel like I can be really nostalgic about the experience, very comfortable with the association and also get to be an actor and do different things.
Q. Your co-star, Matthew McConaughey, seems like something of an arenaline junkie? Did you find you had a lot of common going in?
A. He’s very athletic and really skilled. He’s a real outdoors person and I’m a real city person. I love concrete, architecture and the sounds of cabs. I’m uncomfortable when it’s quiet, I find it unnerving and unsettling. But we’ve worked together before. He’d been on Sex & The City once and he was pretty generous in spirit because he played a really vulgar version of a movie star called Matthew McConaughey on the show. So I already held him in pretty high regard.
As different as we are and as differently as we work – he loves improvising, whereas I’m pretty much a script person from being raised in the theatre – we did work very easily together.
I don’t think it’s anything you plan. I’ve played opposite a lot of people I’ve really liked, and I’ve seen nothing on screen – it just doesn’t cross the footlights, or translate or screen. But Matthew is extremely comfortable in front of the camera and this part really suits him, so it was a very easy process. We didn’t really know what story we were telling, so we were allies in a lot of ways.
Q. If you met a stay-at-home man would you date him depending on how hot he was?
A. It’s very hard to imagine being single again. I would really not want to charter those waters any more. But I tend not to be someone who bases my opinion on anything as superficial as being hot. So if somebody were still living at home and they were really funny, smart and interesting, and there was a legitimate reason for them to be there, I would feel comfortable dating them. I don’t know if I would feel comfortable going into the bedroom and closing the door – I think that would make me feel weird if the parents were present.
Q. Does failure to launch apply to women in America?
A. I don’t think so. I don’t know that there’s the same growing number of women who are living at home at 35. So I think that’s what distinguishes the men from the women in this case.
Q. If you could go back in time and offer your teenage self some advice, what would it be?
A. I wish I could because it would probably be the same useless advice I give every teenager that I meet and am privileged enough to talk to – which is, do not worry so much about being like everyone else, because when you’re older all you’re going to want is not to be like everybody else. So try and distinguish yourself in some other way.
Q. Failure to Launch is a rom-com written and directed by men? Was that ever a concern? Were you surprised by that after being given the script?
A. I definitely saw there was a lot of male energy in this movie, which is unusual for American rom-coms. But it is equally as interesting that the romantic storyline was as strong as it is in the more formulaic rom-coms. A lot of the rom-com scripts I’ve read recently have been by men. I don’t know if that’s because it’s potentially such a lucrative thing – but I do know we had a lot of male writers on our show, and it didn’t distance them from the stories we wanted to tell, even the emotional lives of women.
Q. What criteria do you go for with scripts?
A. In really simple terms, if I feel I can’t do this, that’s exactly why I should. But also just simply what is new, what seems challenging to me, what story haven’t I told, what person haven’t I played? And what are the other elements? The director, the cast and some things you can’t answer right away. I like the idea very much of playing people I haven’t played before, in unfamiliar environments, with new people.
Q. Do you ever worry that you’ll have the Carrie Bradshaw stigma attached and are you moving more into production?
A. No, I’m not moving more into production than acting. I’ve done three movies back to back. I don’t think that Meredith Morton in The Family Stone was anything like Carrie Bradshaw. I don’t think that Paula is anything like Carre and I don’t think that the part I play in Spinning to Butter, a dean of students at an arts collge, is anything like Carrie either.
I feel very lucky right now. If anything, it’s incumbent upon me to make smart choices. I have plenty of lucrative opportunities to play the redux or the mediocre version of this story that we told for so long, but I don’t have any interest in that. To me, I don’t feel the word stigma applies. It just feels like an extraordinary honeymoon period.
Q. Is there anyone you’d like to work with as an actress?
A. There’s so many. Catherine Keener. We worked together about 30 years ago but I’m sure she doesn’t remember. There’s so many actresses I’d love to work with.