In his early, formative years in Hollywood, Larry Gross adapted a pair of Andre Dubus novellas into the screenplay for We Don't Live Here Anymore, only to see the project shelved as studios became more conservative and high-concept driven. While editing and contributing interviews, film criticism and analyses to Millimeter, Sight and Sound, and Film Comment, Larry made a name for himself with screenplays for director Walter Hill (48 Hours, Streets of Fire, Geronimo: An American Legend) and adaptations of such works as diverse as the teleplay for David and Jim Thompson's This World, then the Fireworks.

Recent years included the screenplays for Prozac Nation and Crime and Punishment in Suburbia. After the success of In the Bedroom, based on another of Andre Dubus' stories, We Don't Live Here Anymore was put into production under the direction of John (Praise) Curran and netted Gross the Waldo Salt screenwriting award at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. In the film, Jack and Terry (Mark Ruffalo, Laura Dern) and Hank and Edith (Naomi Watts, Peter Krause) are couples and best friends whose emotional limits are tested through their infidelities, though there is no way to "soundbite" the complexity and maturity of Dubus' story or Gross' screenplay.

Part two of our interview, part one can be found here.

Minor story spoilers below...

Adam Barnick: Other thoughts on (director) John Curran's film Praise and why you felt it was a fit for what We Don't Live Here Anymore needed?

Larry Gross: It was right tonally. Funny thing, Praise had done OK things for John, he had gotten a couple of development deals and people vaguely knew it was a good movie, but John was not having an easy time getting his next film made in Hollywood. The fit between what he had done as a director and this material was immediately so obvious, that people were more interested in him as a director all of a sudden. Naomi (Watts) knew him for years but the other actors, they looked at Praise, looked at the material, they looked at John, they just saw it. Instantly. Praise couldn't have been more suitable as a sample.

AB: In terms of the quartet of characters in W.D.L.H.A. do you consider one of them, or certain ones, to have been the hardest to translate to the screen?

Larry Gross: Well the hardest was Jack because Jack's behavior morphs from sympathetic to the unsympathetic, from decent to sort of wormy in this almost-it happens in sentences, it happens in seconds. Mark Ruffalo did an amazing job; you can't structure his scenes in a simple way, the progressions of what his intentions are in any given scene shift like jello, in this very hard way to track.. That makes you keep going back over and over these scenes trying to make them have a beginning, middle, and end logic that is going to be theatrically effective.

AB: One of the things that really stuck out for me in the film is the relationship of the adults to their kids…the awareness and clarity that the kids perceive the situation they're in, no facades or adult tricks in their makeup.

Larry Gross: That was really interesting to me because I didn't have kids when I first wrote it..That is the element in the script that has changed the least.

AB: That's all from the novel, right? Did the novel stress them?

Larry Gross: Totally from the novel. When I first wrote it, having children was probably the thing I was least interested in from the material. However, I could tell as a reader that the kids had to be in the script but I knew that in a purely 'craft' way. From the standpoint of rhythm.

You had to have some respite from these burning confrontations between the parents. I new back in 1979… as time has gone on, I've understood the power of the kids' scenes much more- John Curran went right to the kids when he read the script, and said 'this material is essential.' He didn't say let's do more of it, he did not make it more important than it was, he just said of all the things, we can't lose it. It's very subtle, he does something rhythmically with the kid's scenes, where they way in which they have a different feel from the rest of the movie, is so effective and just feels right.

What I love about it is that they are an intrinsic part of why what happens happens, and yet the movie's not about them. This is not a movie about the effect of infidelity on kids. Or people who stay together and are unhappy, just for the kids. The kids are in the structure as a component of the network of factors in the whole totality of the piece, but usually the way is this done is in one of two ways: they're either not there, or it's about them. And this film denies either of those roots but they're linked to the reality of this story. And I think that's really true to life.. it's really true to marriages in trouble (with kids involved). The kids are an element in the trouble and almost never the trouble.

AB: I appreciated that the kids don't settle for a pat answer and they know when their parents are dancing around the subject. And they recognize that Jack is in over his head. He can't explain it but they recognize his honesty about it.

Larry Gross: They recognize they're not going to get the answer they want. Which is they It's funny because I feel like in a brilliant way for Dubus, the dialogue with the kids is another layer of metaphor just about relationships in general which is that at the end of the day, there's what you want, and then there's what you need…and the kids need to be parented whether they're being told the truth or not. Kids bypass the truth while wanting it, and needing it, but they ultimately bypass it because they need their parents.

They're bound together by something more powerful than morality, certainly something more powerful than truth, or that bond of love is more primal and just like love itself- more powerful than any statement you make of your understanding of it. It's above the words. To me that comes through so strongly in the way John directed those scenes. His feelings for the kids were special and specific. I know he spent a long time casting them. Trying to find ones that he felt were the product of these people visually, their mannerisms..there's this feeling that the kids seem to have a strange kind of calm regardless of the intensity around them..some of that is in the script. Some was deliberate on my part.

AB: They can sort of step back a bit- Hank (Peter Krause)is burning his novel, the neighborhood kids are bewildered but his daughter has seen this all before and she remarks that he thinks his newest novel 'is shit.'

Larry Gross: One work that it reminds me of is where there's this incredible subplot involving the children in The Brothers Karamazov; I happened to reread it just after we finished shooting this, and I was stunned by the similarity in what Dostoevsky does with the kids; which is he just replicates all the big themes in the story on a child's level.

I think Dubus did something similar. The dynamics are the same and yet it's different… People's love of their children is separated from their childish selfishness. People are selfish when away from their children in a way they are not allowed to be when they're with their children. The same person, who's hopelessly selfish and childish in bed with their friend's wife, mutates into being an adult again when they're with their kids. And It's a completely involuntary process. Just as to some extant the passionate, sexual drive or the frustration that pulls you into infidelity is itself somewhat involuntary and automatic.

AB: One of the things you really captured with this, the psychological interiority of the adults during their fights- I can think of couples arguing in average Hollywood films which come out more like verbal non-subtextual tennis matches. Back and forth…there so much more being said here.

Like in the scene where Jack brings his kids to the waterfall near the end, there's so much being said by him and he doesn't open his mouth. As a writer, and especially since you're paring down prose into an economical screenplay format, how do you put that on the page?

Larry Gross: Interesting you bring up the waterfall, because one thing John created totally from scratch was the little conversation between the kids, that was not in the book or my script, that was something the kids improvised under John's supervision. There's this counterpoint between Jack's silence and the kids' talk..but what it boils down to, in a case like this, you just have this sense of a balance between all the elements. There needs to be silence. There needs to be dialogue…I don't do much physical description.

AB: As a writer in general?

Larry Gross: As a writer in general; in this particular case, that imagery of the water, and his feelings, and being on the verge where you don't know if he's going to kill his kids, or himself, or what he's going to do at that moment.. there is more detail at that moment in the script because that's the climax of the whole movie. So it's like in an action movie, when you get to the final chase, you do that in more detail because that's where the narrative is headed.

I guess for me what was really fun and challenging and exciting about it after this was how many opportunities it did give you to convey to the reader of the script that there's things going on under the surface that they're not talking about. You set up a situation where you're not producing regular closure or conflict of a regular kind. A lot of these scenes are structured by what they don't say to each other. What's not being said. The characters rarely assert what they really mean. They spend the bulk of the movie evading saying what's on their minds.

I brought up Altman before; Altman is a master of this, in my opinion, in his better movies. The dialogue that tells you a lot of things about the inner emotional reality of the characters without being an explicit statement of it. And I just saw that Dubus had that completely mastered.

And there was also the whole idea of the other points of view- a lot of the internal descriptions of Jack's feelings in the main story I relied on, involve these quite lengthy passages of him conflictingly analyzing his own motives. Justifying himself, celebrating his desire for the Edith character, justifying his anger at Terry, and I just felt it was my job to create the chain of images and events that would be equivalent to that analysis without doing the overt analysis.

What I discovered was with the right kind of editorial shaping, there was a progression here which when you left the analysis out, still progressed. And it was still enough of an event.

AB: On set, did the cast generally stick to the script without alterations?

Larry Gross: There were a few alterations, invariably, but the most consistent type of alteration was that one of the actors would want to put a line into the script that had been in the text that I had cut out, but had been in a previous draft. There was really nothing that they wanted to add in that I hadn't considered having in. I might have taken it out for length, thinking it was going on to long. Same thing with the cutting. A lot of the cutting is in the script, but John invented some new things, and it turned out they had been in earlier drafts of the script.

AB: If there's a scene, one thing you could choose to illustrate the whole nature of the film, what would you pick?

Larry Gross: I don't know whether I'd call it my favorite scene, but certainly the scene where we cut back and forth between the two (couples) making love. It includes an extensive amount of dialogue between Jack and Terry and a tiny amount between Hank and Edith, but that's a balance I love, I love the way John shot it, what the actors did, and I think it's something…I think it's both erotic and unsatisfactory in a way that is very true to life- but also the whole ambience of what's being expressed and unexpressed, the frustration that's going on there.

AB: Those are an expression about how they feel about each other, and just as complex as their emotional feelings for each other they way they're presented.

I would actually have picked- I always felt it was when Terry first returns from sleeping with Hank for the first time. He should really be devastated, and yet he has sort of waited for this moment so he can sort of out-intellectualize her…

Larry Gross: There's incredible conflict in that scene, that Mark Ruffalo does brilliantly, I mean Laura does it brilliantly too but Mark is playing these conflicted reactions where he's both totally delighted that this happened on one level, and totally horrified by it and humiliated. The revulsion comes out as the scene goes along.. that scene is a triumph for Mark… he walks this incredibly dangerous, difficult line.

I happen to also think visually, the scene where they quarrel about Sean (Jack's kid) wetting his bed..John did this amazing camera movement- that's one of those moments that could easily go TV-movie, and it's so spatially complex what he did. And the actors are so flexible with it, and so on it..that takes my breath away. When I talk about that other scene I suppose it simply accentuates my method as a screenwriter the most, so in that sense it's the essence of the movie's procedure. Having said that, those other two scenes, the one you just mentioned, are equally if not better scenes dramatically in terms of the way the actors meet the challenge of the material.

AB: Do you feel that scene where Terry comes back after her infidelity is sort of turning point for Jack where he sort of realizes it's really out of his control?

Larry Gross: I think he's out of control at the beginning. I don't think the movie has a turning point in that sense. I think it has a conclusion or rather a climax- to me the house of cards is teetering when we start. And at the end it collapses.

To me this is not a piece where the main character develops significantly. He makes a very minute journey. Jack has different moments of insight and intuition, but to me this is a situation where this is a regime that is going to collapse..that it is going to, is obvious to me. Somebody else whose movies are like this is Cassavetes. You're told the characters are facing an insoluble problem, at the beginning of all of this. And then you wait for the moment where it swallows them and then they come out the other side. Not 'is it going to break,' but more 'when and how'.

AB: Well it seems more at that moment I mentioned, it's where Jack realizes he thought he could handle this new level but he cannot. He likes to think he's ready but he isn't.

Larry Gross: To me that's a moment where he experiences the theme of the movie that we've been talking about, he simply experiences the reality of the thing that everything is out of his control, but he still hasn't figured out the practical consequences of that yet. That scene is an epitome of the emotional truth of the film…but interestingly, it doesn't elicit a change of action on his part. He doesn't "wake up" as a result of it, he experiences the essence of how things are at that moment. And that has its own special intensity, I would agree with that.

AB: I love that he sort of has to fight to keep the- he wants to go at this like an English or Philosophy debate, and even at the scene's end when it seems he has sort of been wounded and he's going to come back from it, he still clings to it. He criticizes her insights on what's happened as being inferior. "Your insights suck." "You think you know Hank or yourself?" I'm still stronger…

Larry Gross: But you also feel how tattered that statement is by the end of the scene. I mean he's holding on to it in a much more embattled state.

AB: We have these characters in this story that are struggling to gain an awareness of each other; maybe this isn't a question with an easy answer, but do you think Edith (Naomi Watts) is the one who has the major revelation, and that's why she removes herself from the situation?

Larry Gross: To me I don't look at it as a revelation in the sense of she now sees something that she didn't see before, what happens in a more effectively pragmatic sense, her regime collapsed.. and she experiences it, as I read it, as "I could do this under these circumstances, I can't do THIS under these circumstances." There's something about the accumulative weight of these deceptions. It's like she just can't get up on this horse anymore.

It's not based on this intellectual or moral insight; she knows everything that's wrong with the situation at the film's beginning. In her case the machinery of management has broken down.

AB: You don't see her finding a morality through adultery.

Larry Gross: I don't think she finds her morality, I think she finds a sort of dignity in a certain way. You could say she's the one in the ugliest situation. In other words everyone else has an excuse for continuing doing what they're doing. She just sees that what she's doing doesn't work. The other three could each make a case for going on. As it had been or is now. And her own experience of her own adultery juxtaposed against Hank's, has made the notion of going back to where it was- the adultery and the daily life…there's a distance, and a non-communication between Hank and Edith. That is much more important as a reason to break up than the fact that one of them cheated. People never leave because the other person cheats. They leave because of what they don't have in the relationship. And what she sees is what they don't have, not how wrong it was.

AB: Is that what the title's about? Hank and Edith inhabit the same house but it's not a "home."

Larry Gross: That could apply to both couples as well. That's interesting, I didn't look at it quite like that, I only looked at the title as the type of malapropism you say when you're drunk. It's like a mistake, a thing you say as you're leaving a party. I hear that as a murmured remark at a party said by accident. Like accidental slips of the tongue where you say what's really going on. It doesn't make any sense on a literal level, you'd only say it unintentionally.

AB: Your subconscious is talking...Would you say Hank is - I felt Hank likes to seem cool and collected, he's orchestrating everything but, really, he can't confront this anyway.

Larry Gross: He's the most defensive of the status quo - it's working for him, and because it's working for him, you can say he's the least prepared to face how rotten it is.

AB: Well he doesn't like it to get tough for him.

Larry Gross: There's a paradox to that, because he's the one who's enjoying the most, relatively speaking, success from the arrangement. Any of us who have an arrangement we like are the most resistant to questioning it. And the fact that there might be something wrong with it, someone will fight to the death to deny that if it's working for us, know what I mean?

I find Hank's resistance and denial totally understandable, and the way most of us would be. He's arranged it so it works for him, and you always persuade yourself that what works for you is ultimately in the interest of others, that's the game we all play with ourselves. And I think every guy who cheats who wants to stay married says. "I'm doing what I have to do to keep us going. And you secretly want me to be unfaithful to you, 'cause that way I'll never leave."

There was a lot more material we cut out like that, where he said essentially more of those things. He's sincere what he says, he doesn't see these things as the machinery to leave his wife. He sees it as the way to stay with his wife.

AB: From when you first adapted the script, to when it finally went into production, did you sort of "change it with the times?"

Larry Gross: No, didn't change it. It's odd to say this; there was more of an issue with the fact that Edith and Terry don't have professional careers-they stay home. There was more of a condemnation (of that) back when the stories were written, in 1979 then there was now. To me their not working was an incidental factor.

AB: The first time I saw the film, when Terry suggests "we can make this work" after Jack comes back from the rocks…to me that suggested, the first time I watched it, that they can find a way to keep their marriage going despite the stuff they've stumbled over…second time I watched that, I felt she's talking about how the dynamic of them being apart can work, for the sake of the kids. Did you intend that to be ambiguous?

Larry Gross: I never intended that to be ambiguous, what's ambiguous is what it means for something to "work." Meaning stay together. What I'm trying to say is there's some people who believe that the definition of success in life is to stay married. If 'we can make this work' means 'we can stay married no matter how miserable we are,' is that good? Or is 'we can make this work' mean we can make it more fulfilling and meaningful in a more legitimate way than it's been recently? You don't know. There's Absolutely no way of knowing which that is. And it's not clear which is the one Terry values the most.

Is Terry going to make more demands on the relationship to be more honest? Or is she simply going to do whatever she has to do to keep it going? I don't think being sexually monogamous with one person for 40 years is the highest achievement in life by itself. If you're fulfilled and love each other, if you're happy, it can be. But some people look at these issues like "If I stay for 40 years and I was miserable the entire time, that's OK because I won!"

To me that's a nightmarish view of relationships. While honoring one's commitments is important and good and admirable, and trying to make something work is good, you have to ask yourself what is the thing that you're valuing that works? Making something work, what is the value of it? And I don't think you have any way of knowing for sure what kind of value they're going to place on the new configuration. It's not explicitly clear, nor should it be, that it's going to be terrific.

AB:I know there's a third novella continuing Jack's story..is the outcome stated?

Larry Gross: In the final story, Jack makes a brief appearance. Making a favorable, but mutedly favorable characterization of his decision to stay with his wife. It leans on the affirmative without leaning very hard, if that makes sense

AB: What about Jack's voiceover? I notice we see a bit more of it in the beginning...

Larry Gross: And then we drop it out…

AB: Yeah there were two or three important moments where you had it and I felt 'it needs to be here' and it was interesting that we didn't see much of it after that.

Larry Gross: We cut most of it out, we restored a bit of it, played back and forth, I'm a big believer in not following the rules of these things. Meaning you do it when you feel like doing it, when it feels like the right thing to do. It somehow seemed valid to be inconsistent here.

AB: Do you feel any or all of them know themselves by the end?

Larry Gross: I think they do and they don't.

I suppose you could argue that Jack has gone the furthest distance in the sense that he's worked the hardest, and the most intricately at making this whole situation go, so he's experienced that being taken away from him.

AB: Did you stay involved through postproduction?

Larry Gross: I was involved in every step of post, on set I was there for about half the shoot. But I was deeply involved. John and his editor had an idea of how to cut the film that was absolutely correct but it was such a daring and complicated concept, that it took endless fine-tuning. I saw it finished the day he saw it finished.

AB: How has it been working with Warner Independent to get the film out there since Sundance?

Larry Gross: Great, I can't say enough good things about Mark Gill and Laura Kim.. They understood the material, they liked it, they supported us…

AB: Were you approached by them at Sundance?

Larry Gross: The morning after the first screening. Mark Gill really wanted it.

AB: What have you been working on lately?

Larry Gross: I just finished handing in a script to Sony, based on a tabloid murder in the Hollywood of the 20's, a few months after the Fatty Arbuckle scandal. A number of people involved in that situation became involved in a murder that time of a famous director of that time, William Desmond Taylor. Sort of a way to do a Chinatown, LA Confidential, two of my favorite movies. The other thing I'm working on is something for HBO; it's an adaptation of two novels by Richard Ford, Independence Day and The Sportswriter. Trying to squelch together into one movie.

AB: You've always been a fan of that period, hardboiled fiction? Like the (Jim) Thompson novels?

Larry Gross: Love it. Very much trying to do that.

Larry Gross will also be writing and directing his script Nothing Compares to You later this year.

We Don't Live Here Anymore is currently available on DVD.

All images are (c) Copyright 2004 Warner Independent Pictures. All rights reserved.

Adam Barnick