By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
In the mudroom: Todd Field on Little Children
There’s more than enough misunderstanding to go around ine arly reviews of Todd Field‘s ambitious second feature, Little Children. The writer-director articulates to Filmmaker’s Scott Macaulay, but does not explain: “It’s the basic rule of illusion. It’s like in the magicians’ union: If you sign into the Society of 
American Magicians or the International Brotherhood of Magicians, there are two rules. You work on something, and when you finally show it, you don’t do it again right away. And the second [rule] is that you don’t explain it. It’s the same thing with storytelling… Why would you go to all that trouble to do something that hopefully people are going to engage in enough to have a conversation about, and then get up and say, “What I really meant was…” Or, “Oh, and by the way, the characters you’ve been caught up in for two hours, they’re really actors, and here they are! … That’s why cinema is great. It’s a very democratic process, and it’s open to everyone. Why do we sit and watch Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s films that have no reflection of our culture at all? We’re not from Istanbul, yet we’re so profoundly moved. That’s why film, I think, is the closest form of expression to music. It doesn’t require that someone [be of] a particular background or gender or race or age.” Of adapting Tom Perotta’s novel, Field says, “What interested me about the book were its characters, its themes and, almost in an allegorical way, its sense of paranoia [and how that connected with] the state our country is in right now. Probably the only thing that made me take pause was the fact that it was set in this bedroom community and that it might be accused of being a send-up of suburbia, because I don’t believe that that’s what the story is. I think that would be a lazy way to perceive it.” [More at the link.]
