Quote

I regard the 'Descendants' as a melodrama, and all scenes have been the trappings to increase the element of romance, I thought. In that sense, I am very satisfied and have great respect for the decisions of the writers.

For whatever reason, the films I gravitate towards do have these strange sort of tonal balances to them... I kind of realized on '50/ 50' why I liked these blending of tones, because I think it's kind of what life is like: funny one minute, sad the next, scary the next.

With the black and white films, one was concerned with tone.

We all liked the Descendants and stuff like that, so we started playing it. It's not that it was really hard, well, it does take skill to play fast and keep up your stamina. But it was something that just happened.

I think the father-son love story is a universal one which transcends color.

We're kind of the comic relief of this movie because most of the stories are very dark. And that's why these plays were so great, because it's such a dark, dark universe that it becomes funny because it's just too pathetic.

Once we got over the origin story, we could really delve deeper into their lives and characters and angst. So this movie actually has more heart, more humor.

A lot of times I think people, when they're doing a movie that's a family movie, they're worried about this being too esoteric or too dark or too weird.

When you read Chekhov, everything has an even gray tone. When you read 'Family Life', everything has an even white tone. It is almost like when you paint on paper, and you can see the paper through the paint.

Everything is so funny in the movie. The funniest thing about the movie is the transformations they were able to make with the characters.