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GRACE IS GONE
By Claiborne Smith
James Strouse's debut feature Grace is Gone is an observant, witty, elegantly concise, and intimate marvel of a movie. It is also strangely gripping: John Cusack plays the father of two young daughters who has to find a way to let them know that their mother has died in battle in Iraq. He has to drive halfway across the country with them before he figures it out. After the premiere on Saturday, January 20 at the Racquet Club Theatre, Cusack joined Strouse and Alessandro Nivola, who plays Cusack's brother, along with Gracie Bednarczyk, who plays Cusack's youngest daughter, to answer the audience's questions.
Q: How did the script change from when you first started writing it to what we saw on the screen?
Strouse: Well, I worked on it for a long time with my wife, maybe two or two-and-a-half years, and it went through a lot of changes and then once we had it locked, it changed in what these people [the actors] brought to it. They were really filling the shoes of these people and they surprised me with their choices. When we were making this, we agreed to try and find the truth as powerfully as we could and I tried to give everyone as much space as I could - especially Gracie and Shelan - just let them know there was nothing wrong with what they could do; there was no right or wrong answer.
Q: What was the inspiration for the script?
Strouse: The inspiration came from a lot of places. It just formed organically; there are a lot of personal family stories. But what I love about fiction is that you can really pull from everywhere, and you can pull from your family and you can invent things and you can pull from the news and you can research and invent and that's what I love about it. This represents every part of me and my imagination and maybe the inspiration, and the thing that really drove me is the feeling of this character having this dilemma. It just seemed so dramatic and I thought, once the idea came into my head, I just had to follow it.
Cusack: I remember that Grace, my producing partner, told me that she had found an interesting script and it was just about the time the White House had banned photographs of the coffins that were coming home. And I told Grace, 'We've got to find something that tells this story.' I wanted to do a very smart and poignant story about the human cost of the war, and just as that was happening, this script came in so it was kind of kismet that way.
Q: Did you have to do research on the casualty officer and the chaplain coming to the house [to tell Cusack's character that his wife has died]?
Strouse: Yeah, I talked to a lot of people. I tried to honor the situation. There's a lot of invention in it but you don't want to invent the protocol. Talking to the families [of the dead soldiers] did inform the story and it informed some of my decisions because the more I talked to the families... I just thought there's only one thing to do, which is to try to tell the story as the characters would live it and just follow that.
Q: I had a question for John Cusack. The character of Stanley had such a very distinct walk and I was wondering what you were trying to convey in that.
Cusack: I don't know! I don't approach it that way but just sort of try to work it out from the inside out, I guess, and it was nice to do a character where you didn't have to worry about vanity as a prerequisite. I thought about Willy Loman a lot... I thought about somebody whose physical expression had so much belief poured into a certain kind of ideology... and he felt kind of curled into himself as a sense of protection. But that's a Bravo Channel answer - mostly I just make it up.
