'Closing Night' Courtesy of the Filmmakers Cody Fern knows he needs to rip the Band-Aid off. “I guess I’m going to have to talk about it at some point,” he says. The Australian actor and filmmaker, preparing to premiere his feature directorial debut Closing Night at the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday night, is sitting for his first interview about the project, which he describes as “emotionally autobiographical, but narratively fictional.” Those memoiristic strands remain intensely exposing all the same.
The film, seeking distribution, took initial inspiration from a key moment in Fern’s upbringing, in the tiny town of Southern Cross in western Australia. When he was young, his “wayward” aunt dropped a bomb on him. “She revealed to me that my mom had been denied an abortion while she was pregnant with me,” Fern says. “That was strange information to learn so young.” He then grew up with his mother as well as his stepmother — “two remarkable women who raised me,” he says, whom he yearned to understand better in adulthood. So he started writing a script: “When I wrote it, it was a very strange little bird — it was a very personal piece and I didn’t know how to feel about it. It was quite raw and sensitive.”
Related Stories
Telluride Exclusive Johnny Flynn and Aimee Lou Wood on "Getting Whipped Naked" and "Embracing the Madness" of Their Deranged Literary Biopic
Movies Liam Neeson-Produced 'The Lost Children of Tuam,' About Secret Mass Burial of Irish Kids, Confronts a Painful Historical Chapter (Exclusive Trailer)
Same goes for the finished product, even though, through several rounds of revisions with Fern’s longtime co-writer Devon Bostick, Closing Night took on a life entirely of its own. This movie marks a striking introduction behind the camera for Fern, who broke out as an actor in Ryan Murphy franchises like American Crime Story and American Horror Story before most recently starring in the third season of Foundation. He helmed his first short, Pisces, about a decade ago, and had intended to pursue filmmaking before his acting career took off. Now, he’s come full circle.
Even his personal admission, from early in our interview, signals that Fern approaches his art with a transparent vulnerability. In Closing Night, this makes for visceral family drama. The movie centers on the relationship between 30-ish Theo (Toby Wallace), his troubled mother April (Naomi Watts) who comes to visit him in New York, and her estranged sister, Sandra (Sarah Paulson), a decorated actress in the midst of a demanding Broadway run of Mother Courage. Trust that Fern’s personal confession makes its way, in some fictionalized form, into the film — as does what happened after Fern started writing it: His mother informed him of a frightening diagnosis after a long period of no contact between them. This, too, gets reimagined.
To say much more would be to give away the script’s many twists and turns, or its surprisingly clear-eyed denouement. Fern proves himself as a true actor’s director, offering plum roles to Paulson, Watts and two-time Oscar winner Dianne Wiest as their chaotic and domineering mother. “The filmmaker who is always at the center of my mind is Mike Nichols,” says Fern, who has watched Postcards From the Edge “several thousand times” going back to childhood. “I knew we needed to build a family and a safe place and a zone where everybody could push themselves and go deeper.”
“He makes these characters dynamic, interesting, funny, hopeful, tragic — all those things at once, but beautiful humans in the process,” says Watts. “That’s how he spoke about his family — flawed and flamboyant and wild.”
Naomi Watts and Sarah Paulson in Closing Night. **
Sarah Paulson has won lead-actress Emmy and Tony Awards, but she’s never been given the chance to play a role like Sandra on the big screen. “That was not lost on me,” says Fern. “I was like, ‘Why is Sarah Paulson not a bona fide movie star? Why is she not given these roles?’ At a certain point in time it was like, ‘Well, give her one, Cody. Write something for her.’”
Sure enough: Sandra, whose abrupt diagnosis (which we won’t spoil here) tenuously reunites the family that’s been separated for decades, emerges as the film’s wounded and volatile heart.
Fern met Paulson on the set of American Horror Story: Apocalypse, and they bonded instantly. “We would sit down and talk about Gena Rowlands and Kim Stanley, think about Stella Adler versus Uta Hagen — we were just acting nerds,” Fern says. (Turns out, Postcards From the Edge was also Paulson’s favorite movie.) Fern wrote Sandra for her without telling her and, despite having been friends for a number of years by this point, sent the script to her agent to keep matters formal and respectful. Paulson cried when she read it. Then she felt terrorized by the demands of the part — of pulling off a towering Mother Courage as Sandra does, of tracing the effects of a debilitating disease, of throwing herself into damn ugly family outbursts.
Yet Closing Night also presented the opportunity that Paulson, who’s about to have a big fall on TV with new installments of American Horror Story and Monster, had long been waiting for.
“Totally transparently, I didn’t ever think it was going to happen just because I’ve been down the road so many times with people I love and admire, scripts that have moved me and they just don’t get made,” she says. “I haven’t been provided as many opportunities to do something like this as I’d like in the film space. That is also why I didn’t think it would ever happen. I was like, ‘Nobody lets me do this. Why are they going to let me do this now? They’re not going to let me do this. Cate Blanchett wants to do this part, I’m sure.’”
Paulson and Dianne Wiest in Closing Night. And yet the project hurtled forward, with Watts cast on Paulson’s recommendation — they’d just starred together in All’s Fair — and Fern’s Aussie buddy Wallace joining the company alongside rising star Odessa A’zion (Marty Supreme) as his girlfriend. This only made Paulson panic more. “I was like, ‘It’s going to fall apart. It’s going to fall apart!’” she says. “This gives you more insight into my psychology than you need, but I just was like: ‘I’m not going to get to do this.’”
But she and the rest of her ensemble did. Fern built the independent shoot around supporting his actors. “I remember working a scene with Sarah and looking over at Cody and he was bawling — you could tell he was obviously, fully invested,” says Watts. Despite the tight budget restrictions of the production, Fern set aside an entire day for an explosive scene between Paulson and Wiest, to let them play around. He set aside two days for a pivotal turning point involving the core ensemble. “He really created time,” Paulson says. “He was very smart about that.”
“That’s really what I wanted to do: allow these actors to breathe and not pull away from a moment because it was convenient for a cut,” Fern explains. “Each of the five actors playing the core family members have totally different processes. They’re wildly different. Getting them in a room together was like wrestling mythological beasts. All of them are capable of giving great performances, but it was about: What can we draw out of each other?”
Paulson brought movement and performance coach Julia Crockett to set to help build Sandra’s delicate arc, and found something special in that process. Her Sandra is a study in contradictions — imposing and fragile, brilliant and naive, independent and isolated. “I probably will never see the movie — I did this with [The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story] too, where I never watched it, because my experience making it was so special that I didn’t want to ruin it by taking it apart with my own critical brain,” she says. “It sounds so corny, but I really feel like no matter what, I got to do this — and nobody can take that away from me. That was because of Cody.”
Watts and Wiest in Closing Night. **
In Closing Night, Fern was surrounded by his icons. Watts, to him, is “the burning light on the horizon when you grow up in Australia.” He went to therapy because of Wiest’s Emmy-winning turn in In Treatment and counts Hannah and Her Sisters as an all-time favorite. He wanted to write them roles befitting their imprint on his own artistic identity.
“I have three women of a certain age in the film, and even as I worked with them, the stories and experiences that they would share with one another and the things that I would hear and learn — that’s really what I’ll take away,” he says.
In early drafts, Theo — something of a stand-in for Fern — was much more of the protagonist. But Fern found even deeper, more painful truth in letting that go, allowing this relatively original story centered on complicated sisters and their very complicated mother to take flight. “I wanted to look at the ways in which my mom’s life had been warped or stolen or taken away from her at the same time as examining this amazing life that I had,” he says. “This big choice that she was denied had affected her and her dreams, even as I was pursuing my own.”
The movie progresses in ambitious, even political directions — Closing Night is no ordinary, outrageous family drama. In many ways, this becomes a movie about death — how we think about it individually, within families, societally. Paulson, particularly, fearlessly embodies that inquiry in her characterization. Fern very intentionally, and again very personally, brings the subject to the fore.
“I don’t think a day goes by in my life where I don’t think about death — to the point where my partner is uncomfortable,” Fern says. “I’m constantly looking at our dog who is seven, like, ‘He’s only going to be around for seven more years…’ I’m not sure why that is. I guess it’s just a part of my makeup, but life and death have walked hand in hand for me.” In the process of making Closing Night, he didn’t come to answers, exactly, about these preoccupations, or about his past, but says he did learn: “Let go of the past. Choose love.”
Over the course of her 40 years onscreen, two-time Oscar-nominated Watts has had the chance to make meals of legendary roles like Mulholland Drive’s Betty/Diane. But she echoes Paulson in noting how unusual the opportunity of this movie felt at this stage in her career. Indeed, it’s in that fact that she hopes Closing Night marks a new beginning for Fern — behind the camera, taking the unexpected route.
“It’s not always the case that you find three delicious female roles, for women at this age, and in one story — it’s wonderful,” Watts says. “More of that, please. Keep writing, Cody.”
THR Newsletters
Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day
Subscribe Sign Up
