![]() ![]() She was in the movie that started me down the comedy path. Tell me about getting to work with the beautiful and hilarious Julie Hagerty. Let's talk about casting! The supporting cast in this is just amazing. Related: Rumor: Justice League Producer Wanted Mark Wahlberg to Play Green Lantern That was just such an amazing moment for me. And at the end of the movie, they gave us a standing ovation, and they embraced the movie even harder than I ever could have dreamed of. Again, I was terrified to show it to that audience because, if they didn't like it, I would have felt like such a failure, but I could tell, within about ten minutes, that they were really on board. Instant family cast license#They were very kind, but they came in with a palpable sense of skepticism, because they feel like, when Hollywood movies are made on this topic, they always take so much license they'll have hints of reality in them, but it's usually just a way to tell a different story. It was the people the movie was made about. Instant family cast full#It was a packed theater full of social workers, people who work in the field, adoptive families, and people who grew up in foster care. It must be great to see something you've worked on for so long to come together and be what you wanted it to be!Īnd then we had another experience that was, I would say, maybe the best moment of my career, which was when we took the movie up to the NACAC conference up in St Paul. And from that very first screening, people reacted in such a wonderful and overwhelming way. But at the same time, if they come into it and they feel like the movie is overly tragic or sad or anything like that, I'm gonna realize I didn't do my job right. ![]() I thought, if people come into this and they feel like we're making fun of these kids or foster care, I'm gonna feel horrible. I didn't know for sure whether we had pulled it off until we screened it the first time. We were still tweaking that until the very last day, because we knew it was a fine line we had to walk. We tried to hone that balance of comedy and drama, of lightheartedness and seriousness, from the very first draft all the way to the final edit. Norman Lear is a great reference for that. He's so adorable in the movie, you just love him, you know? A lot of people have said to me that they find Mark surprising in this movie because he's the warmest they've ever seen him. The first time I worked with him in Daddy's Home, I realized that he played such a warm heart so well, even when he was playing this kind of tough, aloof guy. He had met a lot of kids in care over the years, so he said yes right away. I rewrote it, like, ten times, and I sent it to him, and he called me the very next morning, and he said "yes." He said, "ya know, I get up really early and I got your E-mail, and I've been waiting for a reasonable hour to call you back." And what meant the world to me was that he didn't say, "Yeah, let me talk to my agent, let me check my schedule." Movie stars don't just call you and say "yes." That just doesn't happen. I didn't know what his reaction would be. I wrote Mark an E-mail, a very impassioned E-mail, about how important this movie was to me, and about how much I really wanted him to do it. How did you get Mark Wahlberg to sign on to Instant Family, your third collaboration together? It was born out of tragedy, as every adoption story is, but there were so many laughs, and so much love, so much joy, that I wanted to tell a more complete story of a family that is built from those tumultuous beginnings but comes together as a real loving family. I got really excited about it because I thought, all of the movies I've seen on this topic, they mostly focus on the trauma and the tragedy, and there have been some great movies, but unfortunately, they leave people with these feelings of fear and pity and that kind of thing, and my own experience wasn't like that. And John said, right away, "Almost every story you've told me about your family and your situation was pretty funny, sometimes darkly funny." But we thought, yeah, what a great opportunity to tell this story through comedy. And then, when we started talking about whether we should make it a comedy. I just felt that people need to understand this whole system better. And when I would tell people about how it all worked, everybody had the same reaction: nobody knew anything about it. ![]() I had never seen it depicted in anything. The reason why is because, when I got involved in adoption, and I went to the orientation, and I went to the classes, and support group and all that stuff, I was unfamiliar with every step of that process. I don't remember exactly when, but it was my writing partner, John Morris, I think he was the one who suggested it first. When did the idea for Instant Family first enter your mind? ![]()
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