C’mon C’mon was built to resonate with parents. Mike Mills’s film stars Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny and newcomer Woody Norman as his nephew Jesse, brought together when the boy’s mother, Viv (Gaby Hoffmann), must help his father through mental health struggles. But Hoffmann tells Vanity Fair she takes pleasure in meeting the movie’s more unexpected fans.
“One of the best moments was when we walked out of the first screening at Telluride and a probably 65-year-old, huge, like six-foot-five man who looked like he belonged at a football game collapsed into my arms sobbing,” she tells Little Gold Men’s Katey Rich. “He was crying so hard, he could not form a sentence. And we just held each other for a while. Then we walked around the corner, Mike and I were talking and two like 16-year-old girls came up also with tears in their eyes. So, it’s really getting everyone.”
On this week’s LGM, Hoffmann opens up about her first film following years spent on TV shows from Transparent to Girls, and what pulled her to the project. Elsewhere on the podcast, Katey Rich and Richard Lawson analyze the recent Gotham Awards, before discussing new awards-favorite West Side Story and Lawson’s yearly top-10 movies list. Later, David Canfield and Rebecca Ford jump in to talk about Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, and Chris Murphy speaks with Halle Berry about her directorial debut, Bruised.
Give a listen to the episode above, and find Little Gold Men on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you get your podcasts. You can also sign up to text with us at Subtext—we’d love to hear from you.
Read a partial transcript of the Gaby Hoffmann interview below.
Vanity Fair: You’ve talked about reading the script being an out-of-body experience and I was curious what that meant, exactly?
Gaby Hoffmann: I had this long, lovely dinner with Mike where we talked about everything, a little bit about the movie, but just about life and parenting and art and filmmaking and each other and so I knew I wanted to keep having that conversation with him and collaborate with him on this. Then I read the screenplay. And I think what I meant by out-of-body was that it felt in the sort of, like emotional brush strokes sort of way, like a dreamlike version of something that I had been thinking about writing.
So, I’m a parent—it is what I do with 99% of my time, every day, all year long. And it’s the most interesting, rewarding, frustrating, wonderful thing I can ever imagine doing. So it is what I think about all the time, and I’ve tried to write a little bit about it. And then this beautiful screenplay lands in my lap, that has so many of those colors and notes and ideas and feelings and questions and themes. It was bizarre almost, because I don’t really ever get screenplays that are about the things in life that I’m thinking about. It was like some incredibly well-done cousin of something that you know, maybe existed somewhere deep in the recesses of my heart.
Is writing a screenplay something you’ve been pursuing?
Definitely nothing I’m pursuing presently. I’m very, very happy these days to just show up on set and do this one job and go home and not feel responsible for anything else outside of my own household. But I’m just always interested in recording through writing what’s happening in life. I’m very bad at doing it because I can’t ever find the time but one day I imagine I may have the mind and heart space to sit down and try to write something. But oh, I can’t imagine when that will be.
Something that a writer who I work with pointed out to me about C’Mon C’Mon is that you’ve got [your character] Viv in this really nightmare situation with her ex-husband, but there’s a freedom in not being in the day-to-day involvement of her son’s life. Did that hit you on any level to have that break from it also being an important part of motherhood?
Yes, I get a lot out of working. And I get a lot out of being in a creative, collaborative space with the likes of people like Mike Mills and Joaquin and Woody. I love being around people who are interested in what we’re doing here, right? I am kind of forever turned on by the questioning that making movies ultimately is, and the investigative nature of trying to find something that is real and honest with other people; that is thrilling. And that is very different—doing it in that way on a set making something, then doing it in other ways of one’s life. So, yes, I get the most out of it. I get the most out of it. I also just can’t bear to miss too much of the other stuff.
The thing about Viv is, this comes up a lot, like, “Oh’s she’s not there.” Somebody said [to me], “The whole time I’m thinking, is she a good mother? Because it kind of seems like she might not be a great mom. She’s not with her kid.” And I thought, hmm, wow, you must not have kids. Because so much of what I experience is there are these contradicting needs, even just for your own kid, right? Like in this example of Viv, she needs to go take care of her son’s father. She’s not doing that because she doesn’t want to be with her kids. She is doing that to make sure that her kid has a dad who can be a part of his life. So, that is essential.
But it’s also true in the smallest ways. Like, my daughter wants me to sit down and watch what she’s drawing and she needs me to be present in that moment. And I want to be, but if I don’t finish making her dinner, she’s going to be starving and have a meltdown in 20 minutes, and then she’s not going to get to bed on time, and she’s going to be a fucking wreck the next day. So, we’re constantly as parents, it’s such a cliche, I fucking hate this word, but juggling, desperately trying to create this sort of balanced, harmonious environment for our kid, but then that really means for the whole family. It’s the trickiest thing in the world and I don’t think there’s a right way to do it all. There’s just the way that feels most comfortable to each of us.
You say you don’t like thinking that far into the future. So when you look ahead, is there a slight shape of the future, when you think of it?
Well, I chose to have kids, right? So I have to be hopeful about the future. There’s no other route for me, otherwise I’ll go insane. So I see this period of time…I sort of will myself to see this period of time that we’re in—the incredibly uncomfortable, painful, destructive phase of this iteration of this world and this population—as moving toward something that works a lot better for everyone. So I try to imagine my kids, maybe I’ll still be around, but my kids living in a sort of new world. That is one that values all the right things instead of seemingly all the wrong things. At times, it’s hard to see that given what’s happening. But I know it’s possible. And I choose to believe that that is where we’re headed.
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