The Stanford graduate who confesses that he still has the Bay Area's local Peet's Coffee delivered to his home in New York and Evening's Hungarian director Lajos Koltai are in San Francisco to promote the movie. It is a bright summer's day outside the window of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel but on the dark side in this basement meeting room, the perfect duality for the film under discussion.
The movie is very much concerned with death and dying, but Cunningham insists that it is, nevertheless, far more optimistic than the topic would imply. His own mother was ill when producer Jeff Sharp first approached him about working on the project and died a year later.
"One of the things that I experienced when my mother died and [that I] tried to put in the movie was the sense that it was a huge experience, of course, for all of us, but in the end, it was not only cathartic but quintessential. I felt like I was able to help her out of the world in ways that resembled the way she helped me into the world," he reveals.
He adds, "Watching her leave, I acquired a less dark sense of what it is at the end. There's a moment in the movie when the character played by Vanessa Redgrave comes back in this radiance and is just so happy and so well and that's almost exactly what happened to my mother. I wanted to put that into the movie. We are so terrified of mortality and I think the more experience you have of it, the less afraid you are."
Koltai, a cinematographer by trade who was Oscar nominated for his work on 2000's Malena and made his feature directing debut two years ago with the Holocaust drama Fateless, agrees. He had his first experience with mortality at 12 when his grandmother died in his arms. More recently, in 1991, his mentor, the man who taught him cinematography passed away. Much like the scene that Cunningham described in the film with Redgrave, Koltai's teacher's family called him to say he was feeling much better. The man died two hours later.
"He was a cinematographer and I was thinking about light," says Koltai. "There is that light [at the end of the day] called the magic hour. Then just at the end of the magic hour before it gets totally dark, the light comes up—I don't know why and I still don't understand it—for 10 seconds, much brighter, before it grows dark. That's what happens; the last breath."
Koltai met Redgrave for the first time in London. "She took to me immediately like a best friend," remembers the director. The actress had seen Fateless the night before and loved it. Taking Koltai's hand, she peppered him with questions about that film and about Evening. She wanted to know how he worked with actors and also all about Ann Grant. What is her illness? How much pain is she in? What is her posture in bed? Sharp and fellow producer Luke Parker Bowles attended the meeting, meaning to observe, but quickly beat a retreat, telling Koltai later that he and Redgrave looked like they had known each forever and the producers felt that they couldn't intrude on this meeting between brother and sister.
His first encounter with Richardson was similarly warm and the two of them realized that there was still a scene to be written, a one-on-one encounter between Ann and Richardson's character Constance. "It is such a beautiful thing, how they say goodbye," Koltai says. "She wants to say goodbye to her mother."
"We made [the scene] for them, because how can you not use this unbelievable blood relationship between two people? How can you not do the scene where somebody's talking to the mother, not just an actor? It's just beautiful. We tried to focus on this emotional moment," he adds.
Certainly, Richardson has already been through a similar situation in real life when her father, director Tony Richardson lost his battle with AIDS in 1991. Cunningham remembers that during the Evening shoot, the subject of mortality arose between mother and daughter one afternoon as the three of them unwound in Richardson's trailer. "Vanessa said, 'If it gets really bad, I'm just going to take pills.' And Natasha said, 'Don't you dare!' And her mother said, 'Well, of course, I don't want to linger. That would be terrible.' And Natasha said, 'I will kill you if you kill yourself!' And Vanessa said, 'Let's finish this conversation another time.'
"I had had a similar conversation with my own mother before she got sick. You realize that everybody's experience is different, but most of us, if we live our full span, have these similar experiences," he observes. "I really understand the desire to escape, the desire for romantic comedies and to see cute boys blowing things up. I love those movies, too, and I go to them all the time. But it also feels that we need consolation and we need to be reminded that there are certain universal human experiences, which we survive and which we share with others, and which, in the long run, are sort of a beautiful and terrible part of our lives."
But writing Evening was not all about death and dying. Cunningham even got to play God when it came to Dancy's character, Buddy. In the novel, Buddy is a minor character, but in the movie he is pivotal, the charming, troubled brother of Ann's best friend Lila. He is in love with Ann and probably also with Wilson's character, old family friend Harris.
"One of the most prominent practical difficulties in adapting this novel for the movies was population control," Cunningham explains. "There are 30 characters in the novel, all beautifully drawn, all important in their way. A movie couldn't possibly carry 30 plus characters, so with each draft, I winnow it down and winnow it down and winnow it down. So, of course, if you have a party of 30 people and you ask 23 of them to leave, the seven you are left with may not make such a good party. You look at who's left and you go, 'Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm, what are we going to talk about now?' I just had a feeling about this character named Buddy, this sort of reckless, wanton rich boy. I just had a feeling if he were more prominent, there would be some dramatic possibilities there, so I gave Buddy a big promotion."
In so doing, he wrote another juicy male role to go along with Harris. Evening's advertising is all about the women. It is a powerhouse sorority, but these men in young Ann's life are just as essential. Cunningham and Koltai are delighted with their leading men. "The men are spectacular," says Cunningham.
He and Koltai are in awe that Englishman Dancy effortlessly mastered the accent of an upper class Newport, Rhode Island, scion without even the aid of a dialect coach. The director does not think that the actor's importance to the film can be overstated. "Buddy was such a fragile question. Who could be Buddy? He's a complicated character and he has to have a full life in the film. And he is this person you have to love from the first moment."
Both men agree that Wilson is the current generation's Paul Newman. "Patrick is, first and foremost, Patrick Wilson, an impossibly gifted, beautiful boy," raves Cunningham. "It's something that we talked about before we cast him, the notion that you don't have much time in any movie—and this one, we're telling two stories at once—and we knew that whoever played Harris had to have the movie star thing where the minute you see him, you go, 'Ooh!' It was all the better that Patrick isn't so widely known, he isn't yet as famous as Brad Pitt, so there is the sense—some people are seeing him for the first time—of, 'Where has he been all this time?' That's pretty much what Ann Grant, the character, feels when she sees him."
Noting that there is a scene where Wilson comes on like a young Chet Baker when he joins Danes to sing the standard "Time after Time," Cunningham laughs, "If Chet Baker and Paul Newman had had a child, it would have been Patrick Wilson."
Evening may be a tearjerker, but making it was a happy experience. Koltai's sophomore effort has him over the moon. He beams, "I've seen the movie about 100 times so far, and I still don't have any bad feelings about it. They're just right; they're just right for it. Everybody's right."