A few questions with 'Infinitely Polar Bear' star Mark Ruffalo and writer/director Maya Forbes

Zoe Saldana, Mark Ruffalo and director Maya Forbes are pictured on the set of "Infinitely Polar Bear." Image courtesy Sony Pictures Classic.

Nothing comes easy for the Boston-based Stuart family in “Infinitely Polar Bear.” The father, Cam Stuart (Mark Ruffalo), has bipolar disorder and struggles to maintain control of his life. The mother, Maggie (Zoe Saldana), moves to New York to pursue an MBA so she can improve her family’s situation. And the children, Amelia (Imogene Wolodarsky) and Faith (Ashley Aufderheide), are trying to make the best of the situation after an abrupt move to an impoverished neighborhood and dealing with their father’s eccentricities. The events depicted in “Infinitely Polar Bear” are based on the life of writer/director Maya Forbes, who uses the film as a means of investigating her past and measuring how how her childhood shaped her adulthood.

Ruffalo and Forbes sat down recently for a group interview to discuss the film and a slew of topics ranging from depicting bipolar disorder on screen and the way people see their memories to the difficulties of pretending to be a blue-blooded Bostonian. Audio from the interview is available here.

Q: With your past medical issues, do you think it's easier to relate to your character?

Mark Ruffalo: Probably. I hadn't really thought of it like that, but I definitely understand what it is to be fearful and out of control of things that are way outside of your purview and are existential.

Q: What made you finally want to share this story?

Maya Forbes: I like personal stories – a movie like “The Squid and the Whale” was a movie I loved. When I saw it, I thought “I love this kind of movie, so why don't I write this kind of movie?” And when my daughters got to be about the age I was when my father had his really big breakdown that sort of changed our lives, in seeing these two little girls interacting with each other, what it was like taking care of them, I was sort of catapulted back into my memories. And one thing that was notable for me is the culture my girls were growing up in, parents today get a lot of fear pushed on them. Everything's going to crush your children, they can't go outside alone, they can't do anything. It's like fear is lurking all around and kids need to be protected constantly.

And when writing it, I was sort of revisiting this idea that kids are actually very resilient and they're very capable. And looking at the gifts I received from a hard period of my life – and it was certainly a hard period, it was hard for everyone – I felt that I had grown a lot, I'd become a more self-reliant person, I'd become a compassionate person, I became a person very interested in people and things they do. The hard times made me who I am today, and I wanted to write a movie where people reconnect with their past, re-evaluate their past. Just reconnect with your own memories and reflect on your family and what made you who you are, the good times, the bad times, the flawed people in your life who you love, those ambivalent feelings. That's what made me want to do it.

Q: Did you feel creative risk while making this?

Forbes: I felt I had avoided for a long time writing something I was really powerfully, emotionally connected to. I like the work I do in Hollywood, but writing “Monsters vs. Aliens” is much less risky than writing something very personal about people you love. I felt like I'd been avoiding writing movies that I really cared about and taking that risk. And in terms of the directing, I felt I was always telling my daughters to be bold and to try to be the boss. We know there are very few women directors, and I felt like why am I not doing this? I'm telling my daughters to go do it, I have to be a good parent and show them. I can't keep saying it if I'm not going to try it.

It was definitely leaping off into a place where I was taking these emotional risks, the risk of offending everyone I know, of offending people, of making a terrible film about an issue I feel very strongly about. I wanted to humanize this issue and show when you have a bipolar family member – whether its a father, mother, child or sibling – it becomes a family issue, it's not solo. Everyone's involved in this. So that was a risk I didn't think about, until it comes out to the world and you start thinking, “Oh my God, I hope I did this right, that I connected with people.”

My family was very understanding; they're used to me writing about things that are personal, outside of Hollywood things; I've always done that. My father died in 1998, but my mother, who started out in the theater before she went and got her MBA and worked in finance, she loves drama and art and so she saw it as my story. She embraced it.

Q. What about the pressure of playing your director's father?

Ruffalo: I think it could have been a lot worse if Maya wasn't so charming and smart and talented and equanimical in the way she saw her father and even herself as a young girl. My job was to be as honest as I possibly could to her dad and who he was, warts and all. That's what I knew Maya was asking of me, and so the risk was the easy part because the further I played from myself, the riskier it was, but that's exactly what she was asking of me. So the risk all of a sudden wasn't so much a risk in our relationship, but more would people buy me in this part and would the bipolar stuff work. I have family members who are bipolar, and there's mental illness and depression as well, so I felt like I knew that part. But what was more difficult for me was the brahmin, blue-blood Bostonian. Maya's family came over in the Mayflower a couple of hundred years ago, and my family basically rowed a boat here like 40 years ago.

Q: With or without oars?

Ruffalo: More like paddle boards. That part was really different for me.

Forbes: But, to that, a great thing happened in that Mark started to tell me things that are true. The scene where he picks up Zoe Saldana at the bus station, he was like, “I'm not sitting in the car watching her come here. I'm getting out of the car. Cam would never sit in the car; he's a gentleman, he's going to get out of the car.” And I was like, “You did it! You are correct!”

Ruffalo: That was a great day.

Q: Was that your father he got or was it the character?

Forbes: It was my father. My father always brought flowers, he was always romantic. He was thinking of the character and he bested me.

Ruffalo: No I didn't; I came into alignment with your vision.

Forbes: I should have worded it that way.

Ruffalo: We did have one disagreement. It was a scene and she came over and said “I think it's great.” And I said “yeah, but?” She's like “Well, I just have one note.” And I said “what?” And she said “I think you need a cigarette.” I was like, “Maya, I had a cigarette in the last scene and the scene before that.” She's like “I know, but it's right.” And you were right again.

Q: Mental health issues aren't the only topics you tackled. There's disparity in class roles, reversal of gender roles, and race. What was the key to portraying all these issues so it remained authentic?

Forbes: I guess just relying on my childhood and the truth. I was trying to tell the truth and I wanted to put all these things in because those are all issues families deal with. My mother is black, and I don't look black ... I wanted to show as a little kid you don't think about it, and then as you get older the world tells you it matters and then you wrestle with that. Especially because the mom has gone away, there's something very poignant with me in that the daughter is wondering how much am I identifying with my mother and how much am I identifying with my father. What is the mother giving up in terms of connection with her daughter about this subject? It's part of life, so I wanted to have these things be part of the life of this movie without becoming an issue movie. For me, it was always I wanted to tell a family story and all the different things people struggle with while being authentic.

Ruffalo: If you know bipolar, it's something like 3 percent of Americans are bipolar (editor's note: a really good estimate, as the National Institute of Mental Health's estimate is 2.6 percent), and that's supposedly a very low estimate. That means three out of 100 people, which is a good chance that any one of us at any given time has probably come across a bipolar person. Do we necessarily know they're bipolar? No, because it's not like a light switch turns on and off and they're not acting zany; it's an intensification of already certain qualities in who they are. The most important thing was finding out who Cam was and just stay as honest to that as possible. I knew the stories, it was written into the script how far out he'd go in one direction or another. So take it that far out but stay tethered to some reality even if I wanted to go farther as a performer because it would be more fun to do or it would be more flashy to do at times. It just wasn't honest. I think that's what we set out to do was to keep it honest and the rest would take care of itself.

Q: The film is a documentation about how we see memories, whether they're positive or negative. What do you think of the view of your memories?

Forbes: What's important to me is the story you tell about your life. You get to tell your version, and you can tell whatever version you want. You can tell them the bad version or you can tell the good version. I didn't want to tell the good version, but I wanted to tell the real version which is that I'm grateful for my childhood, I love my parents. We've been through some really hard times; my father was a very difficult person, very flawed, also a wonderful father. So how do you take all of those things and make them into a story?

Yes, it's how are you going to look at your life. Are you going to look at it in a way that makes you grateful for who you are and excited to move forward? Or you can look at it in a different way. I feel like my sister and I, we both got a lot out of our childhoods. My father had a lot to do with what I do for a living and for what my sister does for a living, but even more important than that I think we have loving relationships in our lives. So I think that's the real measure of my childhood, I guess, that I have a lot of people in my life that I love.

Q: You seem to be a very optimistic person.

Forbes: I am optimistic. I guess I'm a happy person. Maybe I'm just wired that way.

Ruffalo: You're lucky.

Forbes: Aww … I have down moments, believe me.

Ruffalo: Yes, I know.

Forbes: I like to cry a lot. I cry a lot, but I'm comfortable crying, so I experience the sadness.

Ruffalo: It's nice when you cry.

Forbes: I appreciate feeling connected emotionally to the world.

Ruffalo: I'd known I did a good job when I looked over at the monitor and see you crying.

Forbes: Oh yes.

Ruffalo: Or laughing. That's a great laugh.

Q: You talked a lot about playing Cam as honest as possible. How did you want Maggie (Saldana's character) to be portrayed?

Forbes: I wanted her not to be crushed by these circumstances. She is a fighter – I guess I would say maybe I get some of that from her, because she's an optimist – and these were really hard times for her. Now that I have three children of my own, my feelings about my mother changed because I recognized how hard it was for her to come every weekend from New York with work and all the stuff she was doing. She came, and she came with a good attitude, and she never was complaining about her situation. She came and participated in the family and then she left and went back to work. It was really hard, but she always maintained this positive attitude. Both my parents I would say are feminists. My father was always wanting us to fight with everybody. Obviously, he was a combative person himself, but he encouraged us to get out there and fight, as did my mother in her own, much more charming way.

The most important thing to me was that she be a person with a lot of spirit, and that's what drew me to Zoe Saldana. She's so strong, and she's such a feminist, and she has a great laugh and a great smile.

Ruffalo: (She’s) Indomitable.

Q: How do you feel about the portrayal of bipolar disorder by other media, like “Homeland”?

Forbes: I like “Homeland.” I've only seen the first season I think … I like the way it's done in “Homeland.” It's just an interesting milieu to put a  bipolar person into. Tom Wilkinson in “Michael Clayton” I think does a great job.

But it's a tricky thing. I don't like crazy when it's kind of cute, but I think it's funny when Cam is so annoying. I mean, he's annoying. It's a hard thing to portray, I guess, it's a tricky thing to get right. So I try to draw it from my own experience; it's not just my father, I have more bipolar people in my family, so I got to see it as a little kid and as an adult. It's definitely different as an adult; as a kid, it seemed just often very annoying. Sad too, when he was hospitalized and heavily medicated; those were like horror movies as a child. But it has been interesting to see.

When someone's getting manic, you don't always know if they're just in a great mood or if they're just having a great day. And you don't want to come down on them and say you're crazy right now. But it's like I'm happy for the first time in weeks, now you're going to say there's something wrong with me.

It's a really delicate thing because it's confusing; it's confusing to know where the line is for people. I think that was something everyone was always wrestling with my father; is he just in a good space right now or is he heading somewhere that's more disturbing?

Q: Why did you have to shoot in Providence instead of Boston?

Forbes: I really couldn't shoot in Boston because it was expensive.

Q: But you used a lot of Boston actors and talent though.

Forbes: And crew. We were very Boston-centric, but Providence looked very much like Cambridge of that era. It looked more like it than any place I could find here.

Q: It's Boston adjacent.

Forbes: It's Boston adjacent. It was evocative of that era. And they have very good food.

Ruffalo: You could walk to each restaurant in Providence. I got to walk to work every day.

Forbes: I'm pro New England.

Q: What is it about being a Boston person you have trouble playing?

Ruffalo: The blue collar part of Boston I feel very comfortable in. It's the blue blood part that I don't. Other than Maya and several generations away, I haven't really come in contact with. I never went to college – I'm not proud to say that – so I never had that preparatory or even scholastic or collegiate kind of influence. It was so far from what I knew, and that's only because I just didn't come into contact with it. But if I could spend a little time with it, I could pretty much pick it up pretty quickly; I'm a pretty good mimic that way, and that works well for me as an actor. Really, it's a matter of not being in contact with it in any way I could soak it up. I was playing catch up … it's just a whole way of looking at the world that's very alien to me. There's a lot of weird, strange rules, and seeing the world through a filter of class that I just didn't understand. Only looking up I could understand, but I couldn't understand the looking down part.

But I think Cam, funny enough, he can play in that. He can go from changing the oil on a broken-down car in one moment and then walk into a very posh restaurant and put on his bow tie while having an argument in another. That, I thought, was very exciting; I think Cam was somebody who didn't really feel comfortable in that world, and that put a lot of pressure on him. I would even go so far to say it was triggering him in a lot of ways.

Forbes: Yes. He knows my father better than me.

Ruffalo: No I don't.

Q: You've had a very diverse career. Do films like this keep you grounded as an actor? Is that why you come back to smaller indie films.

Ruffalo: I feel like you're doing the same thing whether it's a big movie or a small movie. Little movies, the energy stays really compact.

Forbes: You have to keep moving; you can't get bogged down.

Ruffalo: I like the familial, intense, really vulnerable feeling of making small movies. I like that kind of experience more. But, I mean, the creature comforts of a big movie; there's a lot of pros in that world too that are nice to move between.

Q: Is it a relief to see it finally going into theaters since you've been working on it for so long?

Forbes: Yes, yes. We shot it in 2013, so it's been two years since we shot it. It's been a huge relief. It kind of feels like it's hard to move on; you know it's coming, and it sort of just has to do whatever it's going to do. It'll have its life, whatever it is. But yes, it's a huge relief.

Q: What advice would you give to young, female directors?

Forbes: For years, I tried to write what I thought would work in Hollywood, you know what I mean? I wasn't trying to put out my specific and unique vision. I could always get jobs and work in the studio system, but I wasn't moving forward with my own personal stuff.

First you try to write something for you, and then you share it with some people and get some feedback. You're not ever going to write it just for you; you want to be open to the creative process with other people. But start with that, because there's an audience. I feel like every time a movie with a female protagonist opens and it does well people are like, “Oh my God, women want to see movies.” And of course they do; it's insane. I just wish I started 20 years ago writing. I did write a couple of early ones, and don't give up. But do be specific to your unique vision and what you want to see, because there is an audience for that.

As for the directing, the great thing about directing is there really aren't rules. When you're running a set, you get to make it how you want it. Early on, when I was meeting with various people for finance things … are you going to be able to fire people, you know? That's not the right way to look at it. Can I communicate my vision to people and can I make decisions? And yes I can fire people.

Ruffalo: That's totally a misogynistic question, by the way. They'd never ask a guy if he'd be able to fire people.

Forbes: If you want to make a movie, put that down as a goal and do whatever you have to do to get to that. Don't think about anything else. I didn't think about what would it be like if I cast my daughter, if that would be a nightmare. What it would be like for my family if I have to leave one daughter in L.A. And bring the rest of the family, and how's that going to work? For me, it was so chaotic from a family point, but I knew I wanted to make a movie, and that stuff worked itself out. It's sort of like the lean-in argument; just keep going for the goal and the other stuff you'll figure out as you go.