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2003 News & Press Releases > CASA de los BABYS A Message from John Sayles [Acclaimed American indie director JOHN SAYLES' new film, CASA de los BABYS, opens in New York City and Los Angeles on Friday, September 19, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, Daryl Hannah, Marcia Gay Harden, Susan Lynch, Mary Steenburgen and Lili Taylor. In his own words he shares what inspired him to write, direct and edit this film.]The story for Casa de los Babys came from two separate incidents, which occurred several years apart. The first was in my 20s, boarding with and working as a carpenter for a couple on the day they got the phone call to pick up their first adopted child. They had been through quite a few medical adventures and had a long haul with the adoption agency and weren't totally certain the whole deal wasn't going to fall apart at the last moment. I remember both their excitement and the abrupt change in lifestyle - the mother realizing that there was no such thing as a 'simple errand' anymore, the couple with a totally new, living focus to their days. I was struck by the suddenness of it compared to the nine-month hormonal preparation other friends of mine had had. And I remember the intensity of the waiting, the nagging doubt that this time it was really going to happen. The second incident was some twenty years later, as I was sitting in a waiting room at a Hollywood studio. I overheard a young producer complaining about the enormous amount of red tape he and his wife were wading through in their quest to adopt a child in a South American country. There was a residency requirement, which his wife had been fulfilling for over two months now, and she felt stranded there with several other American women going through the same thing. 'Let's face it,' he said, 'one way or another we're buying a kid. I just wish the service was a little quicker'. It made me think of all my friends who were adopted, who have adopted children (or both), and their experiences on the way to becoming families. I also had traveled in Mexico and Central America and knew of the somewhat uneasy accommodation people there had made with the phenomenon of 'foreign adoption'. And I'd seen kids living in the streets that had slipped through the cracks, ignored, exploited or feared by the adult world around them. For me adoption, especially cross-cultural adoption, is also a metaphor for something I've dealt in a lot of our films-how inclusive is the concept of 'we'? How much of our heritage, genetic or cultural, do we really want to claim? As I've observed my friends' children grow - the success stories and the tragedies - it has also been apparent what a big crap shoot the whole thing is, whether children are related by blood or adopted, that the 'chemistry' of human relations is so incredibly complex. The number of possible genetic combinations, the impossibility of truly 'matching' parents and children who have only been on the planet for a few months- it all makes for a very dramatic and volatile situation. We human beings resist the idea of accident playing a huge role in our lives, but it does, and we can only deal with those accidents, happy or unhappy, and try to make the best of them. For more information on CASA de los BABYS, go to www.ifcfilms.com/casa |
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