Interview: ‘The Family Stone’ writer-director Thomas Bezucha
In Maker’s Dozen, we ask folks in and around the film industry 12 questions and have them ask one of us.
Thomas Bezucha is the writer/director behind Big Eden, Monte Carlo, Let Him Go, and The Family Stone, the 2005 holiday dramedy that made our Top 10 Christmas Movies.
We spoke with Thomas about the legacy of The Family Stone 20 years later, his favorite character to write, working with a deaf consultant, and that infamous dinner scene.
This interview has been slightly edited for content and clarity.
1. What’s the Thomas Bezucha origin story?
Well, I’m a child of an academic, so I was definitely a faculty brat. It sort of started in Evanston but ended up in Amherst, Massachusetts, for the formative years. That’s the town that The Family Stone most resembles. Then I came down to New York to go to Parsons School of Design for fashion and worked for Ralph Lauren for a decade. And then I wrote a screenplay for a small independent movie called Big Eden, which we made in Montana. When I was on the festival circuit with that I wrote The Family Stone, and here I am 20 years later.
2. Though The Family Stone got mixed reviews when it was released, it made nearly $100 million in theaters and has since become a Christmastime staple. It also made our Top 10 Christmas Movies. In the nearly 20 years since it came out, what have people told you about their relationship with the movie?
You know what, I don’t hear much. But then, like yesterday, randomly Dermot Mulroney was in town and we had lunch, and we were talking about it and how you make something and you hope what you’re doing is good. But we had so much fun making it that it sort of didn’t matter. The interior of that house was built on a sound stage in L.A., so Diane Keaton never left Los Angeles. The hours were reasonable, everybody liked each other. Just outside the sound stage was a parking lot where we had set up games and a putting green and darts. It was just like summer camp. And everybody treated it like a house in a way, so Rachel McAdams would be sitting in the living room reading a book while we were shooting in another room. Dermot plays the cello and he brought his instrument one day and he was playing in another room. So people liked to hang out together.
3. The Family Stone is the perfect title for this movie, but there’s a world where it would have been called its original title Fucking Hate Her. How would that movie have differed from the final version you ended up making, either with the story or the cast?
What made it to the screen is pretty much what I imagined originally. I don’t think I ever thought the title would stick, but it got read, which was a plus. The script would jump to the top of people’s piles. The entire time we were shooting we were trying to figure out what the title would be. It was almost like a drinking game. Everybody came with a new title every morning. I liked The Family Stone and I’m glad I won, but I think it was down to that and Sticks and Stones.
4. You said you went through the whole script with a deaf consultant to make sure the sign language would be natural. What’s something you learned in that experience?
I wanted to learn what it would be like in a house with a deaf family member. Jack Jason was our consultant, who is a producing partner with Marlee Matlin. I just wanted to be authentic. I didn’t want it to be that they were a family of interpreters. So he and I went through the script line by line figuring out what the characters would be able to follow without any sort of explicit signing—where they would make an effort and where they wouldn’t and who would be proficient and who couldn’t be bothered.
5. So, the dinner scene. What was the trickiest part of writing or filming it?
The tricky part of filming it was endurance. And not for me but for the actors because I think it was two and a half days. We just marched around moving the cameras. Everybody was great and happy to be there for each other. When they weren’t on camera, they were giving each other stuff to respond to that you don’t see. The person it would have been most challenging for was definitely Sarah Jessica Parker, who is, on top of being an excellent actress, a very sensitive person. It could feel icky sometimes for sure. But I think Diane loved it. She got to throw things and cuss and all that. And Luke had everybody in stitches. There’s a blooper reel and you can see we would just let him go and do things and he would experiment.
6. Who was your favorite character to write overall?
Sybil the most I think. They’re all kind of based on elements of people I know. I was privileged enough in my life to know a family, Sibyl and Kelly Wise from Andover, Massachusetts. In a lot of ways this is a love letter to them and their marriage. They were both magnificent people. He was incredibly supportive of me as a young person with an interest in the arts, and she was a real character with a great mouth. So there’s a real-life Sybil that informed Diane’s character, but also the character owes a lot to my grandmother, who would say things like “Tough shit.” She didn’t truck with stuff. And then the other character… I get why actors like to play villains, because it’s fun to be naughty. So the Amy character was really fun to write. I loved writing stuff where she was going up against Meredith.
7. What did your family think of the movie when it was released?
They tell me they were pleased, and I choose to believe them. The Wises lost Sibyl to cancer before the movie came out, but her three kids were at the premiere. I’m sure it was painful, but it was also clearly a celebration of the spirit of their mother, and it was great to share that with them. And then people who know me and my family pretty well are able to identify my sister. Not as she is in the present day, but as she was at a fiery time in her life.
8. For Meredith, it’s the breakfast strata. For Susannah, it’s watching Meet Me in St. Louis. For Ben and Kelly, maybe it’s getting stoned in the bleachers at the local high school. What are your Christmas traditions?
The strata. That’s where it came from. My grandmother had been making it every Christmas for forever, and then my mom took up the tradition. It was always the thing where you have to make it a day ahead because the bread has to soak and it’s in this wobbly pan. Invariably some kid—either myself or my sister—had to sit in the back of the car with this uncooked thing while we were driving to somebody’s house and it always spilled.
“I get why actors like to play villains, because it’s fun to be naughty. So the Amy character was really fun to write.”
9. What are some of your favorite Christmas movies?
It’s A Wonderful Life, and of course this one had the Christmas part of Meet Me in St. Louis. I can’t believe we got to use it. And it’s not a Christmas movie, but one I always associate with Christmas is The Sound of Music. There’s a little bit of that in The Family Stone. I think I associate it because, for me, when I’m writing something I have to find a song and it’s like the Rosetta Stone—as soon as I find it, I’m in. For The Family Stone it was “The Lonely Goatherd.” I think I played that song no less than 100,000 times while writing the movie. It just got me in the mode. It’s silly, it’s funny, but it’s beautiful in a way too. The orchestration is super complicated as this sort of waltz. So it was fun working with Michael Giacchino, who did the score, and he did a kind of Bavarian waltz for the opening credits as a riff on “The Lonely Goatherd” in a way.
10. You’ve worked with a lot of big-name actors, from Diane Keaton and Craig T. Nelson in The Family Stone to Kevin Costner and Diane Lane in Let Him Go. Who’s another you’d like to work with one day?
I mean, it just grows all the time. For me it’s the people that are kind of near the big people that I’m the most interested in. Barry Keoghan, for example, from Saltburn. He’s unbelievable. And he was great in The Killing of the Sacred Deer. There’s an actress in New York, Julianne Nicholson, who’s in the new Nicholas Cage movie Dream Scenario. She’s great. I just finished working on Fargo where I got to work with Juno Temple and Jon Hamm and Jennifer Jason Leigh and Joe Keery and Sam Spruell—I mean, it was just crazy lucky. I love working with actors.
11. How does someone come to design and install Sharon Stone’s screening room in Beverly Hills?
I was working at Ralph Lauren at the time in a department called Star Development, and it was to promote a new line of Ralph Lauren home furnishings. Sharon Stone had just bought a house in Beverly Hills and was decorating it, and she bumped into somebody from the company and they said, “Oh, we’ll do your screening room.” She was shooting Diabolique at the time. So that was an assignment. It’s an example of why I loved working for Mr. Lauren as much as I did. We would get great projects like that out of the blue, whether it was that or designing a store in Shanghai or Chicago. We worked a little with Audrey Hepburn on a Gardens of the World thing. It was such an organic organization where if you showed a facility in an area, it didn’t matter if you had a degree—it was just like, “Tom can read blueprints. Go oversee this renovation.” My best friends to this day are the people I worked with there.
12. What’s your go-to advice for aspiring filmmakers?
I did not go to film school, so I think maybe go to film school. But I think for anybody who wants to do anything that they’re not doing currently, get as near as you can to the people that are doing it and the sort of energy that comes from that. I don’t think there is one real path. You just have to pick up a machete and start chopping your way into the jungle. I was working at Ralph Lauren and had zero experience in film, but I wrote a screenplay. I got up at 4 am every morning and wrote for two hours before I went to a job. If you’re passionate about something, you weasel your way in.
+1. What’s your question for us?
If you were to make a movie, what kind of movie would it be?
Chad: That’s a great question. As a teenager I aspired to be a screenwriter and filmmaker, and my buddy and I made a bunch of stop-motion shorts, so that planted the seed very early and I’ve remained a huge movie fan ever since. In terms of the ones I’d actually want to make? Actually, where The Family Stone lands in that kind of dramedy zone that captures a pocket of real life and real people, honoring their lives and the hard situations they go through—dealing with their humanity and the messiness that comes with that. Anytime I see that sort of style of movie, I’m just sucked in. To me that’s the epitome of what movies can do as empathy machines and windows into other worlds and other people’s lives.