The first thing I want to ask Kent Jones is about his love of actress and singer Andrea Martin. SCTV, of which she was a cast member, was an essential part of my youth; my parents had it on all the time. It's not simply that I want a chance to share a common obsession, but rather there is something in the cozy, shot-on-tape homemade glow of the Canadian sketch show that provides a window into the film Jones has directed, his first fiction feature after years as a critic, programmer, and non-fiction filmmaker. It's only something that can be part of our past now. The film, Diane, is about a woman in a forgotten corridor of Massachusetts, the place where Jones grew up, who is stuck in a rut of routine, anger, and disappointment. It's based on his memories, of his mother, his home, his relatives, a friend, and the movies and television he used to watch. Diane, played by Mary Kay Place, volunteers, she sees her old friends (including a woman played by Martin), and she checks in on her son (Jake Lacy), who suffers from addiction. Nothing she does ever seems to make her feel better, she always wants more from everyone around her, and she grits her teeth through social slights and minor injustices. I save my question about Jones' favorite SCTV sketches until the end of our conversation because it seems flippant, but to me it's important. SCTV is exactly what we watch when we want to forget what life is withholding from us.
Jones recites a bit of “The Whisper of the Wolf,” a sketch in which monster movie host Count Floyd (Joe Flaherty) accidentally plays an Ingmar Bergman (or Burgman, as they call him) film on his horror show. Jones even does Flaherty's howling. He then goes into Martin's impression of singer Connie Francis in a bit called Connie Franklin's “20 Depressing Hits.” For a second we sing "I'm losing my hearing, I've lost sight in one eye," together. He tells me Martin sang that song at Harold Ramis's funeral, as he'd written the lyrics. It's so beautiful an image, so silly and also so tragic, that hearing it from Jones, the director of the New York Film Festival, feels a little incongruous. He's made several very serious documentaries with Martin Scorsese, and Diane is as serious-minded and painful as American cinema gets. But it's in tapping into a healthy desire to see the culture he loved and grew up with lampooned that a clearer image of Jones emerges. He can love Bergman and Burgman; he can show the stultifying life of a woman trapped by her own prejudices and mistrust and still find great stores of understanding and affection for her; he can show her going to church and rejecting religion; he can love his corner of Massachusetts and live in New York. The contradictions and counterpoints are an essential part of his voice as a filmmaker, and Diane is about being torn apart by what you were, what you couldn't change, who you've become. Jones saw a lot of that firsthand.
NOTEBOOK: I was recently in Belchertown and Palmer, Massachusetts, and I couldn't help but notice that, differently from a lot of suburbs, people seemed like they'd gone there to settle into life, settle for having a few things and rejecting a lot of what's in the world. Your movie is very carefully attuned to the lives people live in that part of America.
KENT JONES: It's the world that I grew up in. I grew up in the Berkshires. The Berkshires is unusual because when I was a kid it was the forgotten part of Massachusetts. The center is the real forgotten part of Massachusetts, apart from Deerfield and Greenfield. But if you're talking about Palmer and Three Rivers and Monson, that's a different story. I think Belchertown in particular—that's where the kitchen where the family gets together was shot, at the end of a very, very, very long dirt road, bottom of it there's a stone wall my uncle Les built, ya know? The Berkshires is where you've got North Adams and all that. MASS MoCA [Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art] didn't exist when I was growing up, North Adams was just a dying factory town. And then to the south you have Great Barrington, which is now a bustling mini-metropolis, and Stockbridge, that's Norman Rockwell and the Red Lion Inn, and Lenox, where Tanglewood and the Berkshire Theatre Festival is. Within that there's Pittsfield and Lee, which are more working class towns. Pittsfield was a bigger city, but it really got gutted when G.E. moved out, just gutted. Then there was the problem of cleaning up the PCBs [polychlorinated biphenyl] in the Housatonic River. I remember the smell of it during the summer when I was growing up.
More to the point, that part of the world is where you're sandwiched between these kinds of worlds, the working class world and the arts and culture world, but they were very fluid. There wasn't a stark divide. By the same token, out in the country it was a little different, people were more isolated but in the Berkshires you're isolated, too. The kind of driving that happens in the movie, which becomes different things as the movie goes along, is very important to the experience because you become one with the car and the road and it's very much like that out in Palmer and Belchertown. I don't know what they're like now, it's been a long time since I've been there. I can't imagine it's changed a whole lot. That was the world I grew up in, so that's why it was important to me to show how people congregated happily in a small space without thinking for a minute that it was a small space, because it isn't. It's just where they go. How the room felt, so that's reflected the lighting. I told the costume designer I always wanted a pop of color, I showed the production designer and costume designer family photographs. I wanted depth, that's the way I remembered it, there was real depth, rooms with people in them with a warmth to them. The structure of the film is to move, move, move, move forward that reflects the other side of life there.
NOTEBOOK: One of the film’s through lines is the language of aggrievement: both the way Diane always feels like she's being attacked by her son, especially during the discussion of religion, and the way the son, when he's still in the throes of his addiction, puts the blame back on his mother. He does have a moment of clarity and is able to admit that he’s doing it, but it feels fraught, as if he knows he’ll forget it the minute he leaves and she might, too, because they’re very similar. The closest parallel I can think of is Brad Pitt's character in The Tree of Life, who suffers from the idea of having been promised something that never arrives. It's talked about more in sociology than in film.
JONES: It's one of the many reasons I admire The Tree of Life, and that's another movie that deals with memory. That particular aspect you're zeroing in on is quite correct. I can only work from what I know. And I know what I saw in the friend who [Jake Lacy's character] is based on: it's always about what they're owed. I knew other people like that, and he's not like that all the time, or he wasn't like that all the time—just at certain moments. That's why when he arrives at the end, it's like "Ok I had this thing I had to share with you, you can do with it what you will." That's another side, ya know? Is it another side of everybody? I don't know about that. I think the way we tend to read what's happened in the country, for instance, seems to be a reflection of that aggrievement. To a certain extent I get it. I didn't like seeing an entire way of life knocked out in my home town, when factories left and nobody talked about it on a national level. Not in the Reagan White House and not in the Clinton White House, or the Bush 1 White House. By the time Clinton was gone and Bush 2 got in it was a done deal. There are many reasons and many kinds of aggrievement. I know from personal experience, from people I've shared my life with in the past that there can be that kind of, "This wasn't the way it was supposed to be for me." It's a rough one.
NOTEBOOK: You've talked about how Diane is supposed to be, at least in her core, your mother…
JONES: Here and there. But yes.
NOTEBOOK: The scene with Matías Piñeiro is very interesting because you're gifting her with an interioriority, and knowing what I know about people from that part of Massachusetts, I'm guessing your mother didn't make a habit of sharing that part of her emotional life with you. And yet here is this very moving, tender scene that could be a dream or a memory or a reverie where a handsome man, who clearly doesn’t come from the Berkshires, provides her with drugs. What motivated you to pull the movie from the momentum you describe and show us that part of her?
JONES: Well, because dreams and reality they're like [puts his hands together, knuckle to knuckle], right? And…there are things that she shares with her son—her first instinct after everything flips is to go into the woods, and he comes to visit her at the end after he's just gone to the woods. But also she goes to the bar to release herself and that's something that my mother…[shakes his head and smiles remembering], no. In a dream…ya know it's interesting sometimes I get that question, "is that really a dream?" It's a dream but that's not very helpful but it's not supposed to be helpful, it is a dream and you can put the dream logic together. But in a dream crazy things happen. Things you would deem to be crazy. Consider the fact that you're taking care of someone who's in and out of rehab, on and off the wagon, stopping and starting for years, but you never see them actually shooting up—the image is going to be in your mind. So is the sense of release. It's not that the scene disrupts the momentum of the film I think, so much as it moves into another area and the momentum returns in a different way. Because what happens in that montage is perhaps a dream and perhaps not.
NOTEBOOK: The interior lives of American women over 50 is frequently kept out of the cinema unless it's the Hollywood romantic view of things, like Blythe Danner falling for Sam Elliott very gently in I'll See You In My Dreams. How did you decide to approach the subject that doesn't have much in the way of precedent in drama?
JONES: First of all, I'd never want to make one of those movies; not that some of them aren't good, I was just thinking the other day about Something's Gotta Give, and that's a very good movie. It's very good because there's an honesty to it and it satisfies the conventions of romantic comedy. Fulfillment is perfectly terrific to make movies about, but if I think of a movie about fulfillment that really means something to me it's Dodsworth. Dodsworth, he's almost ready to drop it. Mary Astor says, "I know you shrink every time you're around her," and he says, "I know that, but what can I do? A man's habits grow hard." And he gets on that boat and he's almost ready to leave but he stops and says, "I'm not leaving you because love has to stop somewhere short of suicide." That to me, that's fulfillment: he's making a choice. I think Blythe Danner is one of the great actresses I've ever seen and it's great that within the form of those movies people are able to find truth. I myself wouldn't want to make one of those films. What I wanted to make was something that reflected a sense of fragility. Powerlessness, then finding power in a different way. The way that people hear things, it's not like they hear something and go, "Oh my understanding has changed!" That's not the way I've ever experienced anything; it's different. You must listen to something else besides words. The words begin things. When [Diane’s] son tells her that important revelation at the end, does she hear it? Yeah, but what else is she gonna do? She's gonna go to bed.
Mary Kay talked about this project for years, when we met I told her what I had in mind. She said to me at one point right before we started shooting, "You know everybody else gets to be funny in this. I'm funny! You could get that for free." I said, "I know. I want to take that and move it in another direction." Same thing with Andrea! In a way, the energy that the two of them in particular, geniuses at comedy among many other things, the energy that they bring, the focus they bring to comedy in the character is translated into something else, like when Jake says, "I just need you to trust me," and Diane says, "OK!" Because she's angry at herself. She's saying, "Ok I'm gonna lie to myself again, I'm gonna pretend you're trustworthy and that you've got a cold, that you've got bronchitis, and I'm gonna walk out the door and I'm gonna come back and find whatever the fuck." Or there's that moment with Andrea when Mary Kay snaps at her and she has to figure out how to get to the next moment. Or when Mary Kay slaps Jake and then looks back but thinks better of it. Those guys wanted to be funny, matter of fact there's one thing they did that was hilarious, but I just couldn't do it. The pie is about as far as we could go. I wanted to channel that into something more along the lines of life as people live it.