‘About that wife of yours...’
Husband creates the part of unfaithful wife specifically for his partner
Peter Vesuwalla

It’s a little weird to watch Molly Parker play an unapologetic, unfaithful wife in Who Loves the Sun knowing that the part was written specifically for her by her husband, writer/director Matt Bissonnette.

One can only imagine her initial reaction after reading the script and learning the character she largely inspired is caught having sex with her husband’s best friend, prompting the husband to disappear for five years and return with no explanation.

What conversations did the pair have about the incident? What deep-seated psychological insecurities drove the writer to stick it in the screenplay in the first place?

Unfortunately for scandal buffs — but fortunately for the husband-and-wife team — there’s nothing sinister behind it all, and the prolific star says she had no initial reaction because she had been watching the script evolve for so long. She says the affair became just one more element of the movie, which opens in Winnipeg this Friday.

“For me it was a really long process,” the B.C. native says on the phone from her L.A. home. “Usually I get hired to do something and that’s it, but I was involved with this film since its conception, which is different for me.

“The shooting part of it was one small part of a much longer deal, but we had such a great time. I really had fun making this movie. I love making little independent films.

“The process was completely different for me because I know the character. I’ve read so many drafts of the script, and I watched Matt conceive the idea and write many, many drafts of it over a couple of years.”

“The setup I lifted from a book I like called Leviathan, the Paul Auster novel,” Bissonnette says. “So, a particularly interesting thing to do with people you know is lift the setup, so you completely take it out of the context of your life, and then you have a certain kind of freedom to work with characters.

“So I lifted that initial setup, and in that book the person disappears and never comes back, so I had him come back as my starting point. And then I put it in a location I understood and with characters that are more like my peers and whatnot.

“If you look at the tradition of the love triangle in cinema — Philadelphia Story, Jules et Jim — it’s a real tradition within cinema and also literature. In my opinion it doesn’t really have to do so much with the particular cheating dynamic.

“Every human being understands romantic choice. That’s actually what people respond to when they watch these films. The same way a man and a woman can identify with Molly’s character or have all experienced those kinds of inclinations or thoughts or whatever, that’s sort of the point of a work of art, as opposed to working out any true-life personal problem of mine. Seen from the outside it might be different.”

“I think Matt was interested in examining a non-hysterical look at sexual betrayal,” Parker says, “partly in response to a lot of very moral stories in films.

“Generally now, if a woman strays outside of the family unit, in most films she needs to be punished. We expect that she’ll be punished in some way and in... what was the film? The remake of the French…”

Unfaithful?

“Unfaithful. She loses everything, her lover and her husband, and her family’s destroyed. I think Matt was interested in a less hysterical examination of that.

“And the character of Maggie, I would say by the time we start this story Maggie has lived with the guilt of what she’s done for a long time. But she has not forgiven her ex-husband for disappearing, and in her view that betrayal and abandonment and never telling her where he’s gone or if he’s even alive is so much worse.”

Bissonnette laughs when I remind him that William H. Macy once produced a film in which his own wife, Felicity Huffman, plays a pre-op transsexual.

“And it’s probably not based on fact,” he says. “Also, when you make them, because you’re taking it apart so much, you’re not even aware sometimes that somebody looking at it from the outside might go, ‘Oh, maybe this bit’s true.’”

The film, shot two summers ago around Kenora, Falcon Lake and Winnipeg Beach — and produced by Winnipeggers Corey Marr and Brendon Sawatzky — provided the couple a work environment that is, in a way, unique to both of them. This is the second film they’ve done together. The first, Looking For Leonard (2002) was shot when they were still dating. Parker says this is the first time anyone’s ever actually written a part specifically for her.

“There’s something sweet and wonderful about that,” she says. “But there’s also something very daunting about playing a part that was written for you. I always want to bring something to it outside of myself or my own experience, and certainly this is a work of fiction, but probably the character…”

She pauses a moment.

“Well, I suppose, the truth is you sort of see how the person might see you, in some ways. It’s also challenging.

“The great part about working with Matt is once we get to the shooting part we don’t need to talk about it that much. He knows I understand what he’s doing, and so the direction happens almost intuitively. There’s not a lot of talking about it, but it’ll happen with a look.

“On the other hand, the challenge of working with someone who knows you so well is you can’t get anything by them. Where everyone else is able to act, he could perceive my putting on a character as being untruthful, just in terms of the role. So he was definitely looking for something very familiar, and that was a little bit challenging. Sometimes it’s easier to play someone unlike yourself.”

“I think it was very easy for us because Molly’s a consummate professional,” Bissonnette says. “She’s very focused when she’s working. Also, when we do films at this budget level we’re moving very, very fast, so there really isn’t any room for your particular domestic concerns during the workday. You’re very focused on what you’re doing and you’re working with a lot of professional actors.

“At the end of the day, you know in that Road Runner cartoon where the coyote’s chasing the roadrunner all day, and then they punch the clock, and they step right out of it and have a drink together? It’s very much like that.”

Peter Vesuwalla talks movies with Terry MacLeod every Friday at 7:45 a.m. on CBC Radio One 990.