MTV News: What was it that attracted you to the script originally?
Chris Pine: What attracted me to the film was just the quality of the writing. I was really interested in doing a film that was smaller scope than the films that I had done previously in the past couple years. This one was an intimate family drama, and I thought even the anomalous experience of someone finding out that their father had a completely separate family, everybody’s got family dramas of their own. Certainly, though I can’t relate to that specific experience, I can relate to having stuff in the family. This one takes place in the moment where all the stuff that’s been brewing for years and years and years finally comes to a head and has to be dealt with.
MTV: How does making the film’s central relationship a brother-sister one affect the overall movie?
Pine: Clearly it’s going to progress in a way that can’t be a love story between a sister and brother. It is in a sense that these two people get to know one another and find that they love one another because they’re the only two people that can relate and understand the experience of living in that family with that father and that mother. And because they’ve been so traumatized by the lies that their family has told for so many years, they find solace in one another’s mutual understanding. I think it’s refreshing because I don’t think people have seen something like this specific story in cinema before, at least in the States. There’s a quality of the film that kind of reminded me of one of my favorite films, “Kramer vs. Kramer,” and it kind of has the depth of something like “Ordinary People” and the humor of a comedy. It’s just — for the lack of a better term — very human.
