Feature
by Kevin Holmes
At once a blistering comedy and a
deeply moving human drama, Running
with Scissors is the
mesmerizing tale of a young man surving a nightmare childhood – while
keeping his sense of humour and his sense of forgiveness
intact.
The film is writer/director Ryan Murphy's interpretation
of Augusten Burrough's personal memoir. In the film, Murphy
not only tells the story of a warped, out-of-control '70s-era
coming of age, he has also crafted a strikingly universal
story about the strange power of families, the wonderment
of childhood, the madness of adulthood and the revelation
of finding your way in spite of it all. The film depicts
Burroughs' unsettling, humour-filled, and highly personal,
recollections of growing up under berserk and often shocking
circumstances.
Raised by a bright but barely functional mother given to
psychotic episodes, and an alcoholic father who left when
the going got rough, the film tells the story of how Augusten
was ultimately sent at 12 years old to live with his mother's
shrink and the doctor's family of outrageous eccentrics.
The story as seen through the eyes
of a child is a vivid mix of curiosity, compassion and
dismay and the film depicts a flurry of alternately bracing
and hilarious encounters with mental illness, sex, prescription
drugs and counter-culture therapy which left Augusten's
boyhood innocence in smithereens – and
it illustrates the way in which Augusten eventually broke
free of it all to become a lauded writer.
Burroughs says now of his childhood: “It
was definitely crazy and kind of awful and scary but it
was also thrilling because I knew it was a once in a lifetime
experience. And I paid very close attention when I was
living that experience. I knew that I was going through
something that if it didn't kill me would make me better
in the end.”
Writer/director Ryan Murphy found himself instantly drawn
to this project. Best known as the creator of the provocative
television drama Nip/Tuck, Murphy was struck with a vision
of how to create a screenplay that would tell an entertaining
but also transcendent cinematic experience right from the
start.
“What I love about this project is that even though
it was a very specific story about childhood, it's also very
much about the universal quest for family and identity,” says
Murphy. “I always thought the most important thing
is that this is a survival story. It says that, ultimately,
if you believe in yourself and in the idea that everybody
has something to say, you can endure dire circumstances.
It's also a story of forgiveness. Forgiving others is often
really about forgiving yourself – and when Augusten
decides to forgive his mother for giving him away and for
her mental illness, it allows him to go forward with hope.”
Murphy found that, in spite of the
bizarre circumstances, many elements of Burroughs' reminiscences
of growing up in the '70s resonated deeply with his own. “Augusten and
I are the same age so we have the same reference points,” Murphy
explains. “All the movies and television shows, record
albums, books and magazines that he loved, I loved. It's
interesting when you find somebody like that who is a real
soul mate on a creative level.”
When Murphy first met with Burroughs, he made it clear that
he intended to focus on the larger spirit and themes of the
film. The bottom line was that Murphy wanted to make absolutely
sure that none of the film's characters, no matter what their
failings or foibles, would come off on screen as villains.
“When people see the movie, they will see some things
that came through the personal discussions Ryan and I had,” says
Burroughs. “There's a lot of additional richness in
the screenplay that came from our talking together. At the
same time, Ryan was also very protective. He was never thinking
about wild, funny ideas he could use simply for the sake
of the film, or saying 'This would be cool.' There was none
of that. He wanted the film to be very emotionally honest,
and it is.”
Some decisions, including leaving out Augusten's older brother
and down-sizing the Finch household, were made in order to
condense the film into a tighter, more cinematic structure.
Burroughs allowed Murphy total freedom because he saw that
the means were focused on the end of bringing out the story's
emotional resonance for a film audience.
Burroughs comments: “What Ryan did is to focus the
film on the search for family and the yearning to find your
own place in the world. He took a lot of my internal dialogue – my
deepest feelings and anxieties – and somehow turned
it all into something wonderfully visual. I was really impressed
with what he did.”
“This is an epic tale, in so many ways,” Murphy
explains. It begins in 1972 and ends in 1980; and I felt
I needed to know the in-between parts, so that as a writer
and an artist I could figure out what tale I was telling.
Ultimately, I spent nearly a year interviewing Augusten about
his mother and his life. I practically wrote my own book
based on things Augusten and I discussed.”
Another thing Murphy and Burroughs
agreed upon was that the lynchpin of the film had to be
humour. “Humour
is a kind of life raft,” notes Burroughs. “When
life is terrible or scary, you can sort of float on it until
you reach higher ground. There's a lot of absurdity in life,
even in the darkest parts, and that's an important part of
how I see the world.”
Murphy was acutely aware that the
writing task that lay ahead would push him into many of
modern culture's most dangerous realms. “This is a movie that touches upon paedophilia,
drug addiction, homosexuality, mental health and creative
impulses – it's about all kinds of things that are
very difficult to translate in a responsible, artistic way,” he
notes.
But what continued to drive and inspire
him throughout the process was a deep sense of what the
story was truly about at its very centre. “I always had in my head that this
would be the story of how a boy makes a family,” summarises
the writer/director. “I wrote one word on a note card
and posted it by my computer: the word was 'family'.”
As he was writing, Ryan Murphy tried
to avoid the temptation of envisioning any particular actors
in the roles he was creating. “I wanted them to truly be their own people,” he
explains. But once he finished the script, Murphy and Burroughs
had fun sitting down together and coming up with a list of
their ultimate “dream” cast. Astonishingly, across
the board, each and every actor from that list eventually
said “Yes”.
Murphy knew there were no easy roles
in the bunch. Without exception, each character in the
film is rife with roiling emotions, flagrant contradictions
and deep-seated problems – so
he would need highly accomplished actors capable of embodying
both the weird and the wonderful simultaneously, with both
a comic tinge and a nuanced realism. “Usually characters
are either good guys or bad guys but in this story, they're
very much both. I think actors love to play that because
it's so challenging. But I also knew I had to be prepared
when I met with these actors,” he says. “I went
to each of them and begged for a meeting. Then I would tell
them why I thought they were perfect, why they couldn't turn
me down and why I wouldn't take no. The fact that I was able
to convince this incredibly talented group of people, whose
work I have long idolised, to be in my very first movie was
thrilling.”
The next challenge that lay in front
of Ryan Murphy was creating a wholly unique visual world
for the Burroughs and the Finches to inhabit. The idea
was to capture in the film's look the very essence of Augusten's
memories – an adolescent's
ultra-vivid take on an emotionally askew and mentally unhinged
universe set against the stylistic funk and spiritual yearning
of '70s America. Murphy knew it wouldn't be easy to nail
the film's tone or to get the exact right blend of the comically
macabre with the poignantly true. So he put together a trusted
team that includes cinematographer Christopher Baffa, production
designer Richard Sherman and costume designer Lou Eyrich – each
of whom he'd worked with on Nip/Tuck – and collaborated
closely with them in creating his vision of an American Gothic,
'70s style.
In the end, the re-creation of that
time and place jibed so well with the feelings that Augusten
Burroughs remembers from growing up that he found his visits
to the set felt like time warps. So, fittingly, let's leave
the final word to Burroughs himself: “When I walked into the set of
the Finch house for the first time, I actually for an instant
had this very strange sense of being home again. It's a different
house, of course, but it felt the same in spirit. It was
so funny to look around and see little tiny things – like
the China cabinet stuffed with fabric – that were exactly
the way they had been. It was exciting and it was a relief
because it was so deeply familiar.”
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