You’re going to be see Jonathan Tolins and Seth Bass’s names together a lot in the future; the partners have four scripts in the works at the moment. Martian Child, however, is one of their first, a deeply personal tale about family and acceptance that each admits contains elements of their lives. They also want to make sure you know that, even though this story isn’t big on the adult love drama, it is most definitely still a romance.
How did this story come to your attention?
Jon: We immediately loved the story and thought it would be a beautiful movie.
Seth: It was magical.
Jon: We’re not science-fiction people, Which may have been one of the things that I thought actually helped in this movie.
Seth: It helped us appreciate the story. There definitely was a science-fiction element. The human side of that was so beautiful in the short story that it captivated us.
Did you find it easy or difficult to draw from your own experiences?
Jon: For me it really does capture what it was like to be a lonely kid. Everyone’s a lonely kid at some point.
Seth: Beyond the loneliness there were things I got to draw from my own kids. You watch kids do these things, you think that’s really weird. My son was the vacuum cleaner—when he grew up he was going to be a dump truck. I love that stuff in kids.
Jon: [The line I was] most inspired by—“As far as I’m concerned, they’re all from Mars. Yours is the only one who’s willing to admit it.”
Did you really want to emphasize that it’s ambiguous whether or not he’s from Mars?
Jon: We didn’t want to come down too hard either way. We wanted the audience to feel, you know what, it doesn’t matter. He’s here now, he’s decided to stay, and they’re going to make a little unorthodox family, and that’s great.
Seth: The studio came up with that line, ‘It doesn’t matter where you from as long as you find where you belong.’
Why did you have John Cusack in mind?
Jon: We didn’t know another actor who could do this without it being sappy at all, and who could bring the right kind of interesting dark cloud over this character. You believe the character is grieving and needs to find a way to love again. Also, what a fantasy to have John Cusack be your dad. He’s just so cool and smart and funny and interesting. And he has a real curiosity. You want to know what he’s thinking. The story is also the mystery of him trying to puzzle out this kid, so you follow that. But mostly it was his lack of sentimentality.
And Joan?
Jon: Well we thought, who could play his sister? And it’s so fun to see their relationship onscreen. The movie is being marketed as a romantic drama, but the romantic element is small.
Seth: Oh no it is [romantic].
Jon: You’re looking at the wrong two characters.
Seth: It is absolutely a romantic drama. The David-Harlee relationship is definitely second to David-Dennis.
Jon: The relationship with Dennis makes it possible that something could happen romantically.
Did you put anything from your own lives into the film?
Jon: I was actually not a parent when we wrote this film, and I am now—I adopted my own child, from Earth. The answer is yes, but it’s not always conscious. Then you sort of realize it later.
In the film David tells Dennis he should be himself, but it’s hard, because you also want him to be like everybody else. How did you pull off making that internal conflict?
Seth: Because the way it works in real life, you are that conflicted. That’s how my wife and I with our kids, trying to support what’s strange and what is expected at the same time. Hoping that you don’t steer them too far in one way or the other.
Jon: I feel like when you’re writing it you have to feel that.
Jon, you write plays as well. How do you write a screenplay and not a play?
Jon: Well, I’ll be pretentious and quote someone. David Mamet says ‘Plays are about dialogue, movies are about plot.’ I think they help each other. From writing plays for years and years, I’m good at turning dialogue to get—the key to writing dialogue is getting the audience to think something that you’re not saying. Screenwriting has really helped me in my economy in plays. I read something recently, when you’re writing a movie or TV, you have to start the scene as close to the end as possible. And in plays you have someone walk in, you’ve got the time, because it’s all about what the words are. And we get paid to write screenplays, so that’s nice.
We’ve been told there was a lot of improvisation on set for this film. Do you feel like the bulk of your original dialogue survived?
Jon: Watching the movie for a long time for me was always hard, because I remember every single change and every argument. But seeing it last night, it’s very true to the spirit and mostly the letter of what we wrote. We can’t complain too much.
Is there anything extra they added to it?
Jon: Menno, the director, on set one day came up with the Martian Dance. It’s a great addition.
What did you think of Bobby Coleman?
Jon: He was a real find. He’s nothing like that kid, but he really would become this kid. He understood it, that Dennis is internal and is sad. We’d say to him, what do you think about Dennis? He’s say, I really like him, but I feel sad for him. He really became protective of the character.
Seth: But he’s not precocious. He was a very real little kid with very normal interests, so it was fascinating to watch. A kid who in any other regard would just seem like a little kid who lived next door, and then who could instantly become someone so completely unlike him.
Jon: I think it’s a very honest performance. He is actually so willing to go to a sad place that he has and expose it.
How did the character of Harlee come about, and why?
Jon: In the short story there was nothing about his personal life. I said I just think we want to know why this single man, he’s John Cusack, he’s attractive, he’s not too old—why isn’t he getting married or something? We actually entertained the notion, what if he was gay, but there were issues we would have to deal with that actually are not dealt with in the book, and the book doesn’t have to for whatever reason. But for the movie we would have to answer a lot of questions that would lead us another way. We didn’t want it to be about the acceptance of David, we wanted it to be about the acceptance of Dennis. So we wanted there to be another female presence. We started thinking about the kind of role that Jane Alexander played in Kramer vs. Kramer, which is a female source for Dustin Hoffman to have. We already had Liz, who was the practical, not to say negative, but could see all the problems that were coming down the pike. We wanted there to be someone on his other shoulder saying this could actually be really beautiful.
