Garcia, creating his film Mother and Child
took considerably longer. "In some ways,
Mother and Child is not representative of how
I work now. I was still learning how to write
back then, so there was a lot of stopping and
starting," recalls the writer-director, son of
Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez,
who labored with the screenplay for nearly a
decade. "I didn't reach the last page until the
ninth year," he says. According to Garcia, be-
cause the process took so long, the result ac-
tually reflects much of what he has learned
in his decade-long screenwriting career.
by Looking at Her. In Mother, 50-year-old
Karen (modeled on multiple actresses, but ul-
timately played by Annette Bening) is still
coping with the decision she made at age 14
to give her baby up for adoption, while Eliz-
abeth (Naomi Watts), her estranged and
fiercely independent daughter, now 36, still
faces echoes of that long-ago abandonment
when making her own life decisions.
ing for one another, but may never be to-
gether," explains Garcia, whose own children
were very young when he began writing.
abortion, biological vs. by marriage and so
on -- and wanted to explore that theme
from every angle. "You don't want to talk
about your ideas. You want to turn them into
story," he says. "It took me a long time to
dramatize who these women had become
through words and actions, finding behav-
ior for them that expressed what the last 36
years had been like without ever having to
resort to flashbacks."
him at first, but over time Garcia realized that
what interested him most was the story of
how Karen came to accept the things she
couldn't control. Garcia wrote the first act
(until Karen's mother dies), alternating
scenes between the two characters, but was-
n't happy with the claustrophobic way the
narrative seemed to ping-pong back and
forth. The structure troubled him, as did
what it implied about where the story was
might meet, and even though they're not ac-
tively looking for each other, the movie
promises a reunion," he says. "And I knew
there wasn't going to be a reunion, so I
needed more elements to complicate the
story."
ton and David Ramsey), an expectant teen
auditioning parents before offering her child
up for adoption (Shareeka Epps) and their re-
spective mothers (Lisa Gay Hamilton and S.
Epatha Merkerson), but this complicated an-
other element. "The three stories have dif-
ferent time frames, and they didn't
coincide," Garcia explains. Karen's story
takes two years, Elizabeth's story takes nine
months, and the new characters' story spans
a matter of weeks. "It was the structure that
drove me batty," he says. "The fact that the
stories were not running parallel to each
other -- that was the bulk of the work, trying
to figure out what was going on at what
point for whom."
In Nine Lives, they unfolded in real-time, 10-
or 12-minutes takes. "This was the longest
and most complicated time frame I had ever
worked with, so that took a long time," Gar-
cia says. "Once I reached the last page, there
was very little rewriting. Most of the scenes
in the script were only written once or twice,
but I did a lot of cutting and pasting, trying
to find the right order."
of the three things he now considers essen-
tial before starting a script. "I need to know
who the central character is and what the
central problem is. I also need to know how
it ends. I need a scene to drive to, and I did-
n't know that for a long time. That's what
slowed me down," he says. "And most im-
portantly, I need to know what the time span
of the story is."
the trial-and-error approach of Mother and
Child. "I came to learn these things along
the way. Now I do them all the time," he
says. "In fact, I started writing Mother and
Child such a long time ago that the movie
is ultimately, believe it or not, gentler than
it was before because I think you mellow
out with age."