“I’m chuffed to have been a part of it,” director Julian Farino says of The Oranges, which opens in theaters today. The film is a poignant, humorous look at life in suburbia, and examines the consequences when 24-year-old Nina (Leighton Meester) begins a romance with David (Hugh Laurie), a man more than twice her age who also happens to be the lifelong best friend of her father, Terry (Oliver Platt).
While there have been many films over the year that have dealt with similar themes, Farino was keen to approach the material from a different perspective. “The whole idea was that the movie was a sort of honest response to things that were happening,” he said in a recent telephone interview. “Call it a dark premise if you like, but the movie isn’t remotely dark.”
Farino took great care not to skew the narrative in any particular direction, opting instead to adopt a neutral point of view and allow audiences to make up their own mind about the characters and their decisions.
“There’s a relationship that happens and it breaks up two families, but we’re not sitting in judgment on it,” he says. “There has to be some emotional fallout that’s difficult, but it’s being handled in a warm and light-hearted way. The whole idea was that the movie was a sort of honest response to things that were happening. It’s meant to be forgiving, it’s supposed to be the pursuit of honest things rather than a darker, more troubled perspective. Overall, it was that spirit of non-judgment that seemed to make the film worthwhile.”
Indeed, there’s plenty of humor to be found in The Oranges, as well as plenty of warmth. Rather than play up the sexuality of the relationship between Nina and David, Farino decided to build the film around their emotional bond.
“If they had met under other circumstances and it wasn’t just that critical moment, you have to assume they may not have gotten together,” he says. “The whole trick of the movie was not to have the feeling that [David] was in any sense predatory in his pursuit of a younger woman who happens to be really good looking. Obviously, you want to get chemistry, but you also want to get a genuine emotional connection. It’s not about a grubby relationship being handled clandestinely… they’re out there and they’re trying to achieve some honesty with it.”
Part of finding that balance between physical and emotional chemistry was casting the perfect actor in the leading role, and despite the fact that producers wanted a major film star, Farino had his eye on Laurie from the very beginning. “his character needed to have some essential kind of decency,” he explains, which allows the story to play out as “a kind of honest endeavor, rather than a kind of mid-life crisis [about] reassessing your sexuality.”
But David and Nina aren’t the only characters that share great onscreen chemistry, and Farino points to the friendship between David and Terry as the “great love story” of The Oranges. “They clearly enjoyed each other’s company on set, and hopefully that shines through. I have my own favorite scene in the movie, when their cars come opposite each other and they stop, and their windows go down and they have that conversation. Their relationship became the heart of the movie, in many ways.”
The Oranges is currently playing in theaters nationwide. Check out our review here.