By Fred Topel | Image property of Sony Pictures Classics.
Preparation is important to Chris Cooper. For roles like John Laroche and Robert Hanssen, he is sure to do his homework. Even in creating fictional characters, he wants to be sure he's got it down, so he was careful about choosing a film like Married Life.
Chris Cooper Talks Married Life
"Personally for me early, early on, way before we started cameras rolling, I was working on another job in Mesa, Arizona," said Cooper. "[Director] Ira [Sachs] was kind enough to come down and this was for this particular script. It was a situation where I wanted to go line by line, a breakdown, make sure we were on the same track. My discipline that I learned early on is that time is money, and we had a tight budget on this film and a lot to accomplish. I realized the load that a director puts on his shoulders during production, so I don’t want to waste during set ups or before scenes to work out any problems. Over two different sessions we went over the script twice and found that we were very much thinking on the same lines."
Cooper plays Harry Allen, a man who decides to murder his wife, because he thinks she could not handle the news that he wants a divorce. "I can say that now that we’ve done the film, I think he was very naïve to assume that his wife wasn’t strong enough to handle the confrontation of the idea of a divorce."
Married Life
Married Life
Of course there are many twists and turns along the way, some of which border on humorous. "I don’t think it was hard in that way, we played the moments for real but when you put it together, and what I realized and what I saw when I saw it at the Toronto Film Festival for the first time with a theatre crowd, we’re not patting ourselves on the back, but it’s like the experience of watching this with a crowd is like when I went to the theatre in the fifties. People are very vocal and gasping and laughing. And the intensity of these scenes, there’s just a comic aspect to it that’s over the top."
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