We caught up with filmmaker Michael Glover Smith to talk about his latest film, Relative, now screening at festivals
It’s not remarkable that Michael Glover Smith’s latest film, Relative, reflects an intimate appreciation for its Midwestern setting. Smith is a long-time Chicagoan who has set previous films there and even published a book on the city’s silent cinematic history. What is remarkable, and what speaks to his talent as both a screenwriter and a director of actors, is the sense of familiarity and sometimes grudging appreciation Relative’s central family shows for one another and the beautiful Victorian home they share in the Rogers Park neighborhood.
David (Francis Guinan) and Karen Frank (Wendy Robie) have occupied this house for three decades and raised four children there. Benji (Cameron Scott Roberts), a soon-to-be college grad and Rod (Keith D. Gallagher), a depressive, unemployed veteran, both still live at home. A graduation party brings Evonne (Clare Cooney), Norma (Emily Lape), and more members of the extended family back to the half-empty (or is it half-full?) nest. Though the festivities prove predictably charged, Smith’s approach and Relative’s conclusions are anything but predictable. The film’s final moments in particular not only reframe what we’ve seen previously, but suggest an entire unspoken narrative beneath Relative’s surface.
When Smith and I first spoke, Relative was in the early throes of COVID-related delays. Almost two years later, the film recently had its world premiere at the Gasparilla Film Festival and played to a hometown audience at the Gene Siskel Film Center. We discussed his latest Windy City-set reflection on relationships just before that screening. Relative will next screen at the Julien Dubuque International Film Festival on April 22. If you see the film, listen up for an inside baseball reference to one of Siskel and Roger Ebert’s most famous spats.
Read our 2020 conversation with Michael Glover Smith
Split Tooth Media: In the past your films have focused on romantic relationships. There are plenty of couples in Relative, but the emphasis is on family ties this time around. What inspired that change of perspective?
Michael Glover Smith: Well, when I was making Relative, I realized for the first time that all of my films are really about love, which I think is the only subject that really interests me. Family relationships are a lot more complicated than the ones you have with a friend or a romantic partner. I wanted to look at these trickier bonds. My favorite line in the whole film is when David says, ‘Maybe if I didn’t ignore the shortcomings of our children, they might’ve turned out better.’ I think that’s the kind of line I couldn’t have come up with without having already written a few scripts. It’s harsh, but it comes from a place of love and I think that’s true to the way we express frustration with family members. I was very lucky to have an actor like Francis Guinan deliver that line in such a magnificent, understated way.
Would you say the film and its relationships were a kind of challenge for yourself?
Without a doubt. With every film I make, I always try to stretch myself a little bit and do something that I haven’t done before because that just keeps it interesting. One thing I was especially excited about this time around was filming a party. One of the goals was to execute a party sequence and get 12 people on screen at one time.
What made a graduation ceremony particularly appealing as an excuse for bringing those people together?
I knew I wanted to make a film about a family and thought it’d be interesting if it were a family where the kids were kind of scattered throughout the Midwest. I didn’t want to make a Christmas movie, though, ’cause it’s been done; Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale specifically was an influence on this film. I didn’t want to make a film about a birthday party because that’s been done too, even recently in Chicago with Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party by Stephen Cone. Funerals have been done. All the big occasions have been done. I settled on a graduation party because there’s never been a movie about one and I think that’s because it’s a completely forgettable event. Graduating from college is ultimately a pretty unmemorable experience. You work for four years and then you have to sit through this long, boring-ass ceremony that nobody wants to attend. The original script for Relative was a lot longer and featured a scene where Benji actually graduated. He walks across the stage, collects a diploma, and you see his family in the audience cheering. I cut it for two reasons. First of all, it would have been too expensive to find a college auditorium and hire all of the extras we needed. But I also realized that the graduation itself wasn’t what the film was about, that it was just an excuse for everybody coming together. Benji himself even says, when Hekla asks him about the ceremony, that it was ‘perfunctory.’ That’s how everybody feels. You have to sit through hundreds of names being called and it’s torturous.
That brings me to my favorite shot in the film, which stands in for the graduation ceremony. Everyone leaves and the camera stays behind to complete a 360-degree pan in the living room. Could you talk about that shot?
That was the first shot that we did on the first day. I had an incredible cinematographer named Olivia Aquilina, who’s going to be a star. She had done a lot of short films and commercials, but this was her first feature. Right before Relative, she was shooting Serena Williams in Paris for a Nike commercial. Before the first day of shooting, we met to talk about the shot list. I’d originally planned to have the camera just pan over to the window and back to the front door to catch the family leaving and returning as a clever way of showing the passage of time without a cut. Olivia suggested the circular 360-degree pan and I knew it was better than my initial plan. The room itself is circular, so the pan follows the natural contours of the wall. I also thought it would be reminiscent of the hands on a clock moving around a clock face.
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It does a great job of situating you in the house and quickly making it familiar. I imagine it must’ve helped you, Olivia, and even the camera get more comfortable.
The actors too. It was our first time being in the house, the first time the actors had gotten to move around in that space. I had to tell the cast, ‘This isn’t just a nice house. It’s your house. That’s not just the fireplace, it’s the hearth where your Christmas stockings have hung for the past 30 years.’ Just relaxing in that space was a helpful icebreaker.
How did you create such a lived-in sense of familiarity between the actors?
Casting was everything. The right chemistry between the actors was crucial, as was their physical resemblance to one another. Clare Cooney, who plays Evonne and who I’ve worked with before, was the first person I cast. I wrote that part specifically for her. Next, I cast Wendy Robie, who is of course incredible in Twin Peaks and Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs. I sent her the script through her agents and she loved it. We were on the same page right away and she had great ideas for the character. I realized I had a problem though: Clare’s about six-feet tall and Wendy is considerably shorter. I knew I’d need someone tall to play the father or else Clare would be towering over both of her parents and it’d look ridiculous. Before I offered the part of David to Francis Guinan, I actually Google-searched his height and, thankfully, discovered that he’s also six-feet tall. One of the reasons Cameron Roberts was cast as Benji is that he and Keith Gallagher, who plays Rod, both have curly brown hair and blue eyes. They actually looked like brothers when they read together. The thing about their relationship is that I saw Benji and Rod as doppelgangers in a way: the same but somehow also opposite. Benji might behave in a more socially acceptable way, but he and Rod are both selfish characters. Every decision Benji makes is with his own self-interest in mind.
I think they’re especially great as siblings. There’s a lot of authentic resentment and exasperation in their big fight.
Sometimes directing a scene like that is just a matter of talking through a character with an actor, but this was a case where it took some psyching up. Cameron is the nicest, most polite person in the world and that kind of anger didn’t come easily. I really had to talk those guys into being super pissed off with each other. I had to say to Cameron, ‘Look, that guy up there is a piece of shit. He’s hurting your parents. You see the pain he’s causing?’ and we got there.
How do you create a cinematic family? Did you start with the parents or did one of the children come to mind first?
Here, it started with the parents. I was interested in the idea of inheritance, the positive and negative things you get from your parents, whether or not you like it and whether or not you realize it. I’ve always said that as a kid I felt like I was switched at birth. I didn’t think I had anything in common with either of my parents, but with age I came to realize that I’ve inherited an exact combination of their qualities. It was a lot of fun creating Relative’s children and thinking about what they might have each gotten from their parents. You know, who’s an extrovert? Who’s an introvert? Who suffers from depression? It was helpful to cast actors like Francis Guinan and Wendy Robie who are revered figures in the Chicago theater scene. All of the actors playing their children already looked up to them so there was a built-in sense of shared history.
Tell me a little about working with Wendy Robie. What was it like to direct a familiar actor to play so definitively against type?
Oh, it was a dream come true. As you suggest, she’s known for playing very neurotic characters. When I first met her she told me that a friend of hers said that she’s been typecast as a ‘psycho bitch.’ We both thought it’d be exciting for her to play a different type of character in Relative. I knew she would be able to do it because even in Twin Peaks I think she’s really sympathetic and kind of misunderstood. Nadine Hurley is a very vulnerable character who loves her husband but knows that he’s in love with someone else. Your heart really goes out to her. So, yeah, I think Wendy saw this as a great change of pace from the kind of roles for which she’s best known. It was a perfect match.
How much of your own family dynamic informs the relationships between the Franks?
I was thinking about my own family when I created the Franks, but I completely inverted the dynamic. I’m from North Carolina and, growing up, my parents were fairly conservative, southern Christian people. You know, they voted for Reagan and Bush in the ’80s and ’90s. So, that’s the world I grew up in and, of course, rebelled against. My dad tried to push me into sports as a kid, so I naturally got into theater and started smoking cigarettes at 15! There’s always some rebellion growing up because your parents just aren’t cool – no matter how well you get along. You can’t really escape their influence though and there’s some of that in how the Frank children relate to art. Evonne still has piano skills from taking lessons as a kid and Benji has this secret affinity for the arts. That’s part of what attracts him to Elizabeth Stam’s character, Hekla.
Hekla’s a crucial character. Tell me more about how you wrote and cast her.
She was the only other character I wrote with a specific actor in mind, though I did ask Liz to audition. Meeting her altered the nature of the script fairly dramatically. I knew the film was going to be about a kid who is late to his own graduation party because he’s on a date, but I didn’t know who the date was with. I met Liz at a film festival in Florence, Alabama, where she was promoting a film called Bleed American. Within five minutes of talking to her, I knew I had to work with her because I thought she was the funniest person I’d ever met. I immediately started writing the part with her specific speech patterns and energy in mind and worked from there. She was also the only cast member who I asked to watch films as homework. I had her look at performances from great actresses of the ’30s and ’40s like Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth and Jean Arthur in The More the Merrier. It wasn’t that I wanted her to imitate those performances though. Liz is like a real-life screwball heroine and I just wanted to encourage her that it was OK for her to be as goofy on screen as she is in life.
Other than A Christmas Tale, what were some family dramas that informed your approach?
One of my biggest influences was the Rainer Werner Fassbinder miniseries Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day. I love Fassbinder and I’ve seen most of his films, but I think we’ve got pretty different outlooks on life. His worldview is very pessimistic and the people in his films often use love as an excuse to manipulate and abuse each other. Ultimately, he’s interested in the relationship between love and power and he’s very cynical. I think Eight Hours Don’t Make A Day is probably the warmest thing he ever directed. It’s very gentle and funny and there’s a wedding-party sequence that mesmerized me the first time I saw it. I think my own worldview is more bittersweet, closer to, say, Ozu or John Ford. How Green Was My Valley, one of the best movies ever about intergenerational conflict, was definitely an influence. There’s an amazing scene where Donald Crisp says something like, ‘I never thought I’d see the day where my own sons talk socialist nonsense!’ It’s a really painful scene and I kind of flip that dynamic in Relative. Francis Guinan’s attitude is more like, ‘Why aren’t my children socialists?’ (laughs)
And how’d you cast the house? It’s a cliche to say that locations are characters, but what a house.
It’s a cliche, but it’s often true. We really lucked out in being able to use that particular house. When I first wrote the script, I didn’t know where we were going to shoot it. I had a lot of Victorian homes in mind because that type of house is not uncommon in my neighborhood. A friend of mine met one of the owners and asked if they’d be open to letting us shoot there. They said yes, absolutely, and so she sent me some pictures. I couldn’t believe it because it was exactly the kind of house that we needed. I later learned that it’s actually a very historic building. The guy who built it was the electrical contractor who provided power to the World’s Fair in 1893. He was a Norwegian immigrant named Henry Nygard who was literally the only electrical contractor in Illinois at the time. He built the house for his daughter, and the street that it’s on, Newgard Avenue, is named for him. I had to go back and make some changes to the script once I knew where we were shooting, but those were fun changes to make.
When we first spoke, the pandemic was just beginning. How did it affect the shoot for Relative?
I originally wrote the script for Relative in the spring of 2019 and had hoped to shoot it before the year was over. I was working with a set of producers with whom I ultimately parted ways. They were convinced that we would need twice as much money as we had and that we should delay for more fundraising. I realized that if we kept waiting the film would never get made. What I needed was a great line producer to help me figure out how to spend the money that we did have in order to make the best possible film. I hired Aarron Wertheimer who I knew could do that. Then, we were set to shoot in May of 2020. When I cast Wendy Robie it was December of 2019 and we thought we were six months away from shooting. We got delayed 13 months altogether and ended up shooting in June of 2021. Fortunately, that was after vaccinations had become widely available and before the Delta variant arrived.
When it looked like we might be out of the woods.
Everybody thought it was over. In fact, I almost delayed shooting again because I thought it could only get better and that COVID protocols might get lifted within a few months. We had to pay a COVID safety officer, for example, and get tested every three days. What kept me from delaying the shoot was talking to Wendy Robie. She told me how excited she was to shoot in June because she hadn’t acted in over a year. She wasn’t the only one either. Francis Guinan also hadn’t acted in over a year. A lot of people were really excited to finally be doing something. I also thought this was gonna be our last chance with this cast: Cameron Roberts can’t play a 22-year-old forever.
Was there an added poignancy, a sense that the family was getting together despite the odds?
Without a doubt. Everybody was super excited and laser focused. I can say that it was, absolutely, the most positive experience I’ve ever had in terms of bonding with a cast and crew. There was a real sense that we were in it together and that we were all going to pour our hearts and souls into it. It was also the first time I’ve ever gotten depressed at the end of a shoot because I didn’t want it to be over. If it were up to me, I’d still be shooting it.
Something Melissa DuPrey’s character says reminded me of our Bronco Billy conversation. When it comes to charged discussions, she says, ‘it’s all relative.’ She’ll handle a conversation with the Frank family differently than with a co-worker or a stranger. Would you agree that she could be describing directing?
It 100 percent applies to the process of filmmaking because almost every member of the cast and crew requires a different approach. I think directing actors is a matter of realizing what each actor needs and then trying to be that or trying to provide that for them. You have to recognize that they all probably require something different from you as a director.
In Relative, filmmaking is implicitly related to raising a family. Do you have a preferred metaphor for the process, maybe something you use to describe it to family members?
When this movie premiered last month, in Tampa, all of the members of my immediate family were there. Both of my brothers and both of my parents were there, even though my parents have been divorced for almost 30 years. So, it was an interesting experience. Before the film screened, I introduced it by saying that my film family was there and my real family was there. And, I said, in some ways, there’s no difference between the two. I don’t know if that answers your question about a metaphor, but I know there were two families at the premiere and I loved them both equally.
One of the film’s last shots shows the family on the porch sharing cigars. Was this a way of giving the Frank family one of your own traditions?
I guess it’s something of a trademark because there’s the cigar-and-book club in Mercury in Retrograde and I show up smoking a cigarillo in Rendezvous in Chicago. My father and my younger brother both smoke cigars; in fact, we smoked cigars together right before the world premiere. So, for me, it was pretty natural to have a bonding scene revolve around cigars. Smoking and drinking are, in my opinion, two of the greatest pleasures in life. But it’s not really about the smoking and the drinking, it’s about who you’re doing it with, you know what I mean? Having said that, I didn’t want the porch scene to be the final scene in the film because I’m averse to sentimentality. I didn’t want the ending to suggest that everything was resolved between the characters, that we’d seen the last fight between Rod and Benji, etc. That’s why I wanted to end the film with Norma going back to her own family. There’s a strain of melancholy throughout the film and I thought that ending it on a more ambiguous note would be the more truthful ending.
It occurred to me that, though we’ve spent time with her, we’ve heard comparatively little from Norma up to this point. I had to go back to confirm we even knew she had kids.
She’s the most selfless character. She’s the one who goes along with whatever anybody else wants to do. She goes to the potluck dinner, she goes to pick up Evonne at the train station, and she’s the only one who asks the parents what they’re going to do after they sell the house. I thought of her as someone who was quietly suffering in comparison to her siblings, who are all pretty vocal about the drama going on in their lives. I thought it would be interesting to have one sibling who didn’t vocalize what was going on with them. In some ways, I think of Norma as the secret heart of the film.
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