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Just good Hinesight
Best known for playing Larry David's wife on Curb Your Enthusiasm, actress Cheryl Hines takes the helm for a black comedy Serious Moonlight
- PUBLISHED: Mon 4 Jan 2010, 9:50 PM UPDATED: Mon 6 Apr 2015, 12:30 PM
Cheryl Hines stepped onto the set of Serious Moonlight, and there it was: a director’s chair with her name on it. Yes, Hines – best known as a comic actress and famous for playing Larry David’s long-suffering wife on the long-running cable-television series Curb Your Enthusiasm – makes her feature-directing debut with Serious Moonlight, a black comedy starring Kristen Bell, Timothy Hutton and Meg Ryan.
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“The best thing about directing is being a part of putting all the different talents together and then watching everybody do what they’ve been trained to do and what they’re really great at doing,” Hines says, “even down to the boom guy holding that microphone in the air for a 10-minute take while the actors do their thing with great dialogue. I love being a part of that. And then there’s the part that comes later, the editing and music and sound design. You pick out the crickets and the birds, and I find all of that very exciting.
“A director’s challenge is the unpredictability of it,” she says. “Every day something happens that you cannot foresee, that you can’t control, that you can’t imagine is going to happen. It might be raining when you need to be outside, or you might be inside, but the sound of the rain hitting the roof is causing problems, or there’s a leak and you’ve got dripping water. An actor might come down with the flu.
“There are just so many variables that are impossible to plan for, and that makes it difficult and exciting.”
The film hit home in a deeply personal way for Hines, who previously had directed only an episode of Campus Ladies (2006-2007), a sitcom she also had produced for the Oxygen network. Serious Moonlight was written by Adrienne Shelly, with whom Hines had worked on Waitress (2007), which Shelly wrote, produced, directed and co-starred in alongside Hines and Keri Russell. Waitress received warm reviews and did nicely at the box office, but Shelly couldn’t follow it up: She had been murdered the previous year, shortly after completing the film.
Shelly left behind several screenplays, however, including Serious Moonlight.
Speaking by telephone outside a Los Angeles coffee shop after a lunch date with her husband, Paul Young, the 44-year-old Hines says that she never put her hat in the ring to direct Serious Moonlight. Instead Andy Ostroy – the film’s producer and Shelly’s widower – approached her about the possibility.
“Andy and Michael Roiff, who produced Waitress and worked very closely with Adrienne, were looking for the right person to direct this film,” Hines says. “Apparently they had interviewed several directors, but they felt some of the people they were talking to wanted to change Adrienne’s script. And they thought of me because they knew that I appreciated Adrienne’s writing, that I’d worked with Adrienne and had a relationship with her, and they knew that I’d been directing.
“I think they felt my connection with Adrienne would be important on this project,” she continues, “so they asked me if I was interested in directing it, and that caught me off guard. And it was important to Andy to shoot it word for word – but, that being said, we did make some changes. The changes were taken very seriously and they were deliberate, and there were lots of conversations before we made any changes. Because Adrienne is no longer with us, we wanted to honour her writing, so we tried to make as few changes as possible.”
Serious Moonlight follows the travails of Louise (Ryan) and Ian (Hutton), whose long-established marriage is rocked when Ian reveals that he plans to leave Louise, a hard-charging attorney, for a much younger, more carefree woman, Sara (Bell). Desperate to talk sense into him, Louise duct-tapes Ian to the toilet in their bathroom – only to have a gang of home invaders arrive on the scene and tie up Louise and Sara as well. The criminals party downstairs while Louise, Ian and Sara sit helpless upstairs and try to sort out their differences.
It’s a quintessentially low-budget film, in short, with a small cast, a tight shooting schedule, only one primary set and, well, more than a little risk to claustrophobic audience members.
“I thought all that was actually helpful with our shoot,” Hines says. “We used all of it to our advantage. Only being in a few rooms, visually, that could be limiting. You’re in a bathroom for a lot of it, and a bathroom is only so big. So, no matter how you slice it, it comes up a bathroom. And you’ve got somebody tied up and you’re shooting from that person’s perspective, which isn’t going to change because he’s not going anywhere.
“That is challenging,” she concedes, “but it also tells the story, because it helps you feel what he’s feeling. I did a lot of tight shots, to make you feel closed in a little bit. But it was tough.”
Fortunately Hines had at her disposal a couple of veteran stars.
“Meg and Tim are such great actors,” the director says, “and they brought a huge body of work with them, a lifetime of experience working in this business. It made for a very collaborative experience. Tim was such a professional about being tied up. He never once complained, which was shocking. I complain if the temperature changes. If it changes one degree, I like to tell everybody how uncomfortable I am.
“So the fact that he was tied up for hours on end, and was a sport about it, is still amazing to me.”
The film will reach theaters soon after the conclusion of the seventh season of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. A large chunk of the season was devoted to the fictional version of Larry David resurrecting Seinfeld (1990-1998) in a bid to win back his estranged wife. It was a winsome arc, a reunion without a reunion show, and Hines says that she didn’t mind sharing the spotlight with Jason Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Michael Richards and, of course, Jerry Seinfeld.
“I call Larry every week and say, ‘You make me laugh every second of that show,’” Hines says. “He’s just so funny. I don’t know how he’s getting funnier, but he is. I think the show is still great, and I loved having the Seinfeld actors together with us. I feel like it was such an extraordinary circumstance, being able to get them together, that Larry did the right thing by having it be a story arc. I think people would probably have been disappointed if it had been just one episode.”
Through the years David has often hinted that he was on the verge of calling it a day with Curb Your Enthusiasm. Though occasionally he has let long periods of time slip by without fresh episodes, however, eventually he always has returned for more. Speaking almost giddily, Hines says that she thinks that will likely be the case again.
“I don’t think he’s quite there yet,” she says. “He certainly hasn’t said, ‘It’s over.’ So, if he hasn’t said that, then there’s hope that there will be more episodes.”
Until that happens Hines will concentrate on several other projects, including a few upcoming episodes of the television drama Brothers & Sisters and a show that she’s hoping to produce but can’t yet discuss. She is quick to say, though, that she will be ready to return to Curb Your Enthusiasm anytime David is.
So what would Hines like to do as Cheryl David before it really is over?
“I would say that I want Cheryl to be a part of Larry’s scheming,” Hines says, “but I don’t think that would actually work for the show, so I can’t say that. For me, Cheryl the actor, that would be fun, but I think Cheryl David is supposed to be the voice of reason.”
