The new film “A Little Prayer” is set in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Veteran actor David Strathairn plays Bill, a soft-spoken Vietnam War veteran who loves his wife and owns his own metal business, which he runs with his son David. But Bill is having difficulty dealing with his grown children’s struggles, though he finds a kindred spirit in David’s wife Tammy, played by Jane Levy.
Here & Now’s Robin Young spoke with “A Little Prayer” stars Strathairn, Levy, Celia Weston, who plays Bill’s wife Venita, and writer-director Angus MacLachlan.
Angus MacLachlan, you have said that the kernel of this film is your own relationship with your daughter. How so?
Angus MacLachlan: “Well, it’s taken 9 years to make this [film], and I started it when she was 15, and she’s now 24. And I have found in retrospect that I was writing about parenting adult children and how you have to let them go. I was writing unconsciously about my child growing up and going away to college and living on her own, and you still want to tell them what to do and protect them, and you can’t.”
David Strathairn, tell us what drew you to this film.
David Strathairn: “The beauty of this film is that a lot of stuff bubbles up, and it confronts everyone with issues that may be just below the surface, and they somehow have to navigate their way through it.
“And the way they navigate their way through it has very universal resonances to most families having to deal with things. And I thought it’s a very gentle sort of revelation and kind of a compassionate insight. You know, you take the roof off of any house and you’re going to see similar situations.”
Jane Levy, you were born and raised in Northern California, but I thought you had such an authentic Southern voice in the film. What drew you to the role?
Jane Levy: “I’m so honored to hear that after people watch it, they feel like it was so authentic. That was all Angus, and it was all in the script. I was attracted to Tammy because of her heart and her courage. And I was really excited about playing someone different than myself.
“I had just wrapped ‘Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist,’ which…was a big NBC musical, magical, realistic show and this movie was just pared down human relationships, and I was really excited about doing something like that after doing something much bigger.”
Celia Weston, you star as Bill’s wife Venita. You are from the South. Writer-director MacLachlan has said he didn’t want “A Little Prayer” referred to as a Southern film. But there’s an authenticity there. Did it feel like that to you?
Celia Weston: “That’s the word … Angus and I have even had this conversation recently that that’s what we really respected and loved about each other is the authenticity of the work.”
But what does “Southern authenticity” mean to you? You’ve lived it.
Weston: “It’s a way of communicating. It’s the language. It’s the sound and the specificity of the sound and the accents. It’s just informative about the specifics of who these people are and where they came from, what they’ve achieved. All of that is in the language.
“Angus and I, both being native to the Carolinas, have that acuity for finding it and hearing it and portraying it in a way that’s true, certainly to the people who are from there. It’s not just a generic ‘hee-haw’ kind of Southern.”
Angus McLaughlin, you don’t want “A Little Prayer” to be called a Southern film, but isn’t there something lovely about the fact that the movie has, as David Strathairn says, feelings that are universal, but also has a sense of place?
McLaughlin: “Yes, I want to be specific and have a sense of place… I just kind of think there’s so many independent films that are set in Brooklyn, and we don’t say, ‘Well, it’s a northern film.’ And Southerners are often portrayed pejoratively. It’s kind of like, ‘women directors,’ you know, they’re just directors who happen to be women. This is a story that happens to be set in the South.
“But it was very important for me to film it here in Winston-Salem and to try to portray the specifics of this area and the people and how they live.”
David Strathairn, there are so many issues that kind of float through this film without heavy-handed political commentary. We were thinking that a lot of people from both sides of the aisle are going to watch the movie and think, “That’s my family,” even though there’s a character who chooses to have an abortion and another who chooses to raise the child without the father’s participation.
Strathairn: “I hope so. I think that’s one of the gracious qualities of this film is that it respects that phenomenon that we are all connected by similar experiences, but much like Bill, a man who comes from an aesthetic of holding things in on a need-to-know basis… We often don’t confront these things directly because we may not have the words. We may not have the wherewithal to unpack our things that are bubbling below our surface, and Bill is one of those guys.
“But what’s beautiful about this film is that these people don’t cut to the chase and come up with some kind of knee-jerk reaction or response. They approach each and every one of these issues with a caution, with a confusion, but also with an open heart and mind and say, ‘How do we navigate this minefield?’
“And I think that’s [a] really wonderful thing [for] people [to] walk away with, and say, ‘Let’s not make preconceived judgments about what we’re feeling.’”
Emiko Tamagawa produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Tamagawa adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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