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PETER PAIGE and KATHY NAJIMY on 'SAY UNCLE'
Interview by Michael J. Lee, Executive Editor
for Radio Free Entertainment
June 2, 2006
In the dark comedy Say Uncle, artist Paul Johnson (Peter Paige) is emotionally devastated when his close friends relocate to Japan, taking his two-year-old godson with them. Longing to replace that relationship, he begins playing with children at a local park. And even though he is great with kids and his intentions are completely innocent, he catches the attention of local mother Maggie Butler (Kathy Najimy), who automatically fears that he is a child molester. The fact that Paul is gay gives the misguided Maggie more reason to believe he is a threat, and she quickly organizes a neighborhood witchhunt against him.
Peter Paige, who is perhaps best known for his role on TV's Queer as Folk, pulls quadruple duty on Say Uncle, serving as actor writer, director, and producer. In this exclusive interview, he and Kathy Najimy (who is able to join us midway through our Q&A) talk about the making of the movie.
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The Interview
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RadioFree.com: As a godfather yourself, what responsibilities do you think being a godparent entails?
PETER: I think my responsibility is to be there. My responsibility is to show up with some great presents, my responsibility is to have a good time, my responsibility is to witness his life.
What personal experiences proved to be the basis for this film?
PETER: My godson's one of the most important people in my life. For the first year of his life, I was one of his primary caregivers. About a month before I moved to LA, his family left and moved to San Francisco. Not Japan, but San Francisco. And that horrible day, sort of through my tears, I kept joking that I was going to keep coming to the house and pretending the baby was asleep in the other room, that the new tenants were babysitters, and I wasn't going to deal with it. And out of that came this character who wouldn't deal, and out of that character came this movie.
Kids and babies can be difficult to work with, but you said they were very cooperative on this project...
PETER: All except for one. There was one little girl that just tortured us. [laughs]
The baby that played Andrea looked like the happiest baby on earth. Does a shot like that require a million takes to get a usable scene?
PETER: No. This is an independent movie. We made [it] in 18 days. We didn't do a million takes of anything. I think the most we did...We did seven takes of one thing, and that was it. Generally, we did two takes and we moved on. That's it, that's the kid. It's just a happy baby. What happened is...Her mother came in to audition, and had her with her. And I was like, "Uh, that baby's going in my movie!" She was like, "Okay," and I was like, "Deal!" The mother in that scene is her mother.
This is your feature film debut as a director, and you mentioned that the first scene you shot was the large rally at the end of the story. Were there directors who offered you advice going into this undertaking?
PETER: All the directors on Queer as Folk...I picked up something from all of them. Some of them I picked up a lot from. There were a couple in particular--Kelly Makin, who really just kind of took me under his wing and helped me understand how he worked, and Alex Chapple. I so respected their work that it was just invaluable. I remember Kelly, very vividly, saying to me, "You don't have to shoot every scene special...Sometimes you can just tell the story. Pick your moments." And when you're shooting something as fast and furious as we were, "pick your moments, pick the scenes where the story turns, and shoot the hell out of those. And that's where you use your trick shots, and that's where you really investigate time and angles and all that kind of stuff...The film will have a distinct style and a distinct visual look. Not every moment has to be a crane shot."
There is an interesting shot of a car at the beginning of the movie--through forced perspective, it looks like a real car in a driveway, but then Paul steps on it and we realize it's just a toy. What's the significance of that shot (other than being kind of neat)?
PETER: I'm really proud of this: none of the trick shots in the movie, none of the stylized stuff, none of it is just random. It's all there to reinforce metaphorically the theme of the film. And I wanted to do something that taught the audience, very early on, things are not always what they seem. And so that's what I did. I wanted you to believe that was a red car, and I wanted Paul to walk in and step right the hell on it!
Childlike, painted pictures are occasionally superimposed on scenes in the movie. What were you hoping to accomplish with that, and where did the idea come from?
PETER: Well, I wanted people to understand why Paul wasn't grasping information, or to be very clear that he wasn't grasping it--that even though he was being given information, it wasn't landing. So I needed to create a kind of visual metaphor for that. And Paul has a real psychological disorder. It's called cognitive dissonance, which means, when faced with information you don't want, you shut down and you just don't absorb it. And I thought, "What does somebody with cognitive dissonance, who's a painter, do when he checks out?" Well, he paints. So I just started imagining these different things. They're all inspired by children's art and children's books in keeping with Paul's own artwork and Paul's sensibilities. And so it's there to help you see the world as Paul sees it.
Did you do those paintings?
PETER: No. I did a lot of things in this movie, I did not do the paintings. [laughs] I have many talents, visual arts is not one of them.
You joked earlier that you were the only actor you could afford to be in your movie. Did you have to break the news to yourself that you'd be taking a big pay cut?
PETER: Are you kidding? Everyone took a huge pay cut. I mean, Kathy Najimy's never worked for scale in her life. When Kathy agreed to do the movie, we said, "All we can afford is scale." And Kathy was like, "Fine." And then she found out what scale was. [laughs] And she called back, "That's ridiculous! You're kidding, right?"
[Kathy Najimy enters the room and joins the interview]
Kathy was noting that child molesters, statistically, are overwhelmingly classified as straight males. Do you think the movie would have been fundamentally different if Paul were not gay?
PETER: It's certainly something I talked about and thought about. I knew that [Kathy's character's] perceptions are commonly held misperceptions, so I was happy to throw that into the fire. I think we could have made the same film, or a very similar film, without that in there.
Kathy, do you think making Paul heterosexual would have changed the movie drastically?
KATHY: No. I mean, I think the interesting thing was to throw [my character's] homophobia in there, which represents a big part of the country. So I think it's just a dollop of extra fire behind her misguided fuel.
PETER: But what I loved about that was how she didn't believe she had homophobia. And you made a really good choice with that. You actually improvised a line in the film where you say, when [Paul] says he's gay, "That's fine. I'm fine with gay people," [then implied], "I'm not fine with them playing with my children, but I'm fine with gay people." [laughs]
KATHY: I was saying in all the interviews how it's always so amusing to me when people say, "Oh, you're a gay rights activist? You know what? I love gay people. I have a lot of gay friends. I just don't want them to come on to me." And I say, "What makes you think that they're attracted to you, first of all?"
PETER: [laughs] And why would it be so horrible?
KATHY: It's the assumption that if you're gay, there's this uncontrollable urge to have sex with every moving penis in the world. And it's hilarious to me.
Kathy, your character Maggie leads a witchhunt against Paul under the pretense of wanting to protect children. Do you feel she also had less altruistic motives, like a desire for fame?
KATHY: It's really interesting because I think she does think of herself as sort of a celebrity and a hero. And in her boring life, bingo is exciting. That being said, she really believed in what she was doing, I feel. And I feel she had a lot of good evidence to react like she did. There are a lot of things that come into play for an activist. It isn't all just humanitarian. You get a lot of positive feedback. It feeds your ego to try to change the world. Even though she was misguided, she had her seven ladies in her neighborhood applauding for her. That never happens. She goes to the K-Mart and comes home and makes dinner. So yes, I think there was a lot of extra little [motives].
Peter, what does the character of Maggie mean to you?
PETER: Everybody thinks I'm Paul, because I play Paul. But I am no more Paul than I am Maggie. Maggie came out of me, too--I'm afraid, I'm judgmental, I have a need to be heard, I'm quick to jump to conclusions. I'm tired of being all those things. I wrote Maggie to exorcise those things from me. So I really get that. I totally do.
KATHY: [jokes] When people ask me, "What's the message of the film?", I say, "Ask Peter, I didn't write it." And then I say I got to be in the skin of someone who I absolutely am against and would march against and would sign a petition against, and felt her. You know what I mean? It's like there's no black and white...There's not just hateful, bad people, and right people.
PETER: I love Maggie. I believe in Maggie...As we discussed in our very first conversation about the film, I wanted to make a movie about complicated, flawed, f*cked up people on a collision course. And that's what we did.
Thank you both for your time.
PETER: Thank you so much.
KATHY: Thank you.
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