“I think essentially, we’re pretty lazy when it comes to communication with each other and we need to be motivated.”
writer/director Kirk Jones (Waking Ned Devine)
Up until six years ago I had lived my entire life in Florida and California so I looked at moving to Iowa in 2003 as a great adventure. Similar to moving to L.A. when I was 21 or backpacking across Europe ten years ago. All opportunities to experience something new and different.
Writers are like sponges soaking in an overheard phrase here and a interesting face there, making up little stories of where people are heading and where they have been. They contemplate. They ponder. It’s not that non-writers don’t, it’s just that the writer takes a little longer look trying to scratch beneath the surface to find a layer of truth. To connect. And as they point with their pen they hope others will see what they have seen. An epiphany of sorts.
The movie Everybody’s Fine written and directed by Kirk Jones is about connecting. And while the movie is rooted in Guiseppe Tomatore’s 1990 film Stanno tuti Benne, it was a three-week road trip that Jones took from New York to Las Vegas that gave Everybody’s Fine it’s American authenticity.
Taking Greyhound buses, Amtrak trains, as well as driving gave the English filmmaker a taste of America that many Americans never experienced. Jones has spoken in many interviews of how the road trip helped him develop the main character of the film (Frank played by Robert DeNiro).
“It inspired a number of ideas in the film, Frank’s occupation, for example. I was very keen that his occupation had some relevance to his story. I was traveling from St. Louis to Kansas City and I looked out the window and I saw the telephone polls and the wires. And I just appreciated the irony thinking that Frank had spent his life protecting the line of communication, making these wires on the telephone poles and helping millions of people communicate with each other, but he was unable communicate with his own family. I don’t think I would have been inspired to have ideas like that if I hadn’t actually come and sat on the train and traveled. I also appreciated how important meeting, at times, pretty eccentric and wonderful characters. I appreciated how much that was part of the journey.”
Kirk Jones
Interview with Hannah Goodwyn
As I’ve said before, and many have proven before me, there is a lot of fertile land here in fly-over country. The key thing is you can’t just fly over it. Pictures of Jones’ trip can be see at Life.com in an article titled The Road Trip That Moved DeNiro.
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