Monday, November 24, 1997
History, art, family join in ‘Picasso’
FILM:
Low-budget work explores sexual identity in untraditional
family
By Vanessa VanderZanden
Daily Bruin Staff
A struggling gay art student, living at home as he attempts to
find himself. His bisexual thespian mother, dating her son’s female
best friend.
Add to that a gay photographer uncle and a straight father, and
you’ve got the sexually diverse cast of Stephen Kijak’s debut film,
"Never Met Picasso."
"I want to represent a world of very free sexuality," Kijak
explains. "But with the film, that’s not the main issue. It’s about
history. It’s about family. It’s about art. Those are the more
important themes."
Shot for a mere $125,000 and written by Kijak over a 12-day
period at his parents’ house, "Never Met Picasso" began as a
submission for the Lifetime television station. When the story came
back with a note deeming it "too cinematic" for the tube, Kijak
opted to rework the draft into an even more film-friendly
rendition. Six years and seven scripts later, Kijak finally found
the funding and 23 days necessary to shoot the small indie.
"You’re only given so much in film school," the young director
concedes. "They can show you how to write. They can show you how to
pick a camera up and shoot and edit, but no one tells you a damn
thing about how to produce.
"You have your emotional distress and trauma and poverty and you
live through it and you just end up figuring out a lot of
stuff."
In much the same way, Margot Kidder, best known for her role as
Lois Lane in the "Superman" movies of the ’80s, has dealt with
quite a lot of stress since the culmination of "Never Met
Picasso."
The actress who was diagnosed with manic depression plays Genna
Magnus, the mother role in Kijak’s film. She suffered from a
strange medication-related episode which had her crawling through
neighbors’ backyards in Montana. Since that time, she has performed
in eight vastly varying roles, from a dog to an agoraphobic piano
teacher.
"Well, she certainly wasn’t Donna Reed or any of those other
moms from the ’50s or ’60s that all of our children want us to be
secretly," Kidder exclaims of her role in "Never Met Picasso." "I
think a lot of those families that show the ‘perfect mom’ were
really harmful to children because it gave them the expectation of
a mother that doesn’t exist."
However, she and her own married daughter live peacefully in the
same town. And Kidder’s depression is now balanced by the
introduction of a natural ginseng supplement. Attracted to the
script’s theme of uncovering family secrets, Kidder enjoyed the
chance to work in a role that brought out her motherly
instincts.
"When I do a character, generally what I do is I see it a bit
like a large pie that you slice up into pieces," she says. "You
look at the emotional arc and you look at the physicality and you
look at the inner angst and the moral issues that the character has
to deal with.
"And generally, in slicing up that pie, you’re going to find one
piece or two pieces that is not going to be too different from
something that you’ve gone through. So you hook that part of your
own center into the center of that character."
Similarly, while Kijak finds personal ties to the fictional
piece, they only go so far as his general artistic bent within his
"boring" family and his love of art history in college.
Yet his sexual tendencies do make their way on screen, though
the main character may not have "dressed up like Wonder Woman" when
he was 4 like Kijak did. And though Kidder herself may not connect
to the homosexual side of her role, she had no qualms about acting
out lesbian love scenes with her counterpart, played by Georgia
Ragsdale.
"It was very funny. Georgia was much more nervous than I was,"
Kidder boasts. "It was sort of just like kissing a guy without a
penis or something. I felt like her mom. Nobody ever likes to do
love scenes and it was actually sort of nice to do it with a woman
rather than a guy that you don’t know or feel awkward with, because
we could giggle about it."
The film provided Kijak with new experiences as well, having
moved from San Francisco to Boston for the duration of the film
(1993 through 1995). Now situated in New York, where the
independent-film scene flourishes, he will undoubtedly have a
clearer understanding of the processes at work in his next film.
Also, like his character, the 28-year-old movie-maker may have more
of his life figured out.
"I don’t think there are many kids in their 20s who aren’t
flailing around," Kidder proposes of Andrew Magnus, the movie’s
central figure. "I certainly was. It’s that period where that’s
what you do. You’re going ‘Who am I? What am I? How am I going to
earn a living? What am I meant to be doing?’ You have all these
options. It’s a period of exploration and confusion. I think that’s
very normal."
FILM: "Never Met Picasso" opens on Friday.Turbulent Arts
Alexis Arquette and Georgia Ragsdale in "Never Met Picasso."