The drama follows an 11-year-old girl’s struggle to come to terms with her mother’s abandonment. Joleen needs a place to stay so she turns to her younger brother, James. Joleen and her daughter, Tara, move in but soon after Joleen leads with another man. James tries to make his niece happy but things spin out of control, he loses his job and Tara is put into foster care. James decides to take off with Tara and try to make a better life for her.
Forced out of her home after her boyfriend is arrested, Joleen Reedy (Charlize Theron) needs a place to stay with her 11-year-old daughter, Tara (AnnaSophia Robb). She turns for help to her younger brother, James (Nick Stahl) — a simple and overly trusting man who doesn’t hesitate to welcome them into his modest rental apartment.
Almost as soon as she moves in, however, Joleen hits the road with another man. Utterly ill-equipped to be the sole guardian of an adolescent girl, James does his best to make his distraught niece happy. But before long, things spin out of control: he loses his road crew job and Tara is put into foster care. Additionally, old wounds from his emotionally abusive and sometimes violent father (Dennis Hopper) begin to reopen as James is forced to re-examine his life. That’s when James makes a fateful decision that will bring his life full circle and force him to face his demons. He takes off with Tara and the pair assumes new identities as father and daughter. What starts out as a ploy to evade authorities takes on a deeper significance as James strives to become the dad Tara never had, and for the first time finds a true purpose in life.
About the Production
After screenwriter Zac Stanford completed the first draft of his original screenplay Sleepwalking, he put it in a drawer and forgot about it. That was about six years ago. At the time, Stanford didn’t know anyone in the movie industry and despaired of ever getting the script produced. “I wrote it for the pure pleasure of writing it because I just love writing and for some reason I wanted to tell the story,” he says. “But when you finish writing, you realize you have no chance in hell of getting this made. You’re just crushed by the uphill task ahead of you.”
But when another of Stanford’s scripts generated interest in Hollywood, he met William Maher, who would go on to make his directorial debut with Sleepwalking. Maher had been working in visual effects for a number of years, with credits on such blockbusters as X-Men, Lethal Weapon 4 and Mars Attacks, and was stretching his creative wings by trying to develop projects of his own. When he met Stanford, the two formed a friendship and realized they shared similar tastes in films and stories. “One day, Zac produced this script that he’d kept hidden in a drawer for years and he said, ‘Take a read of that,’” Maher recalls. “That was the genesis for me.”
Maher still remembers the powerful impact Sleepwalking had on him when he read it for the first time. “It was one of the most honest pieces of writing I’d ever come across,” he says. “It was brutally honest. It hurt in all the right places. It was funny in all the right places. It had a blend of characters that fired off each other brilliantly. It was like gold. You just read it and you go, ‘This is really pure.’ And that’s a very rare thing. From the moment Zac handed it to me I knew I wouldn’t let this thing go until it was made.”
Stanford based the script in part on memories from his own past. “I know about these characters from growing up in a more rural area,” he explains. The experience of fatherhood was also a major impetus for the story, though not in any autobiographical sense: “I wrote this when my daughter was a toddler and it probably is an expression of a feeling that I felt very poignantly at that time, which is, why don’t we take care of our kids? How is it that people actually don’t take care of their kids? Nick Stahl’s character, James, is the person least able to take care of a child, and the person least able to be responsible, and yet he does it.”
The filmmakers knew from the start that getting Sleepwalking made would be difficult, in part because the material is far from typical Hollywood fare. Enter Academy Award® winning actress and producer Charlize Theron, who played the pivotal role in getting Sleepwalking to the screen. “My initial reaction to the script was that it was powerful, unusual and original,” the actress says. “I was moved to tears when I read it. It spoke loudly to something I haven’t really seen in film—the idea that we can own our own lives. That we don’t have to live in the darkness or the shadow, or be haunted in any way by our legacy or by our family. Just because we have the same blood flowing in our veins, we don’t have to make the same mistakes.”
With Theron on board, the difficulties the filmmakers had encountered getting the project off the ground began to dissolve. While moving into the new production offices of her company, Denver and Delilah Films, Theron had a chance meeting with one of her neighbors, WJS Productions president and co-founder A.J. Dix. She urged Dix to read the script, and shortly thereafter found WJS Productions to be a willing partner in the project. “I already knew that Charlize was a woman of great taste,” says Dix. “We read the script right away and loved it. It was unusual, and it hit all the right heartstrings for me..”
The combination of Theron’s cachet among fellow actors and friends in the industry and the quality of the script eventually attracted what Maher calls a “little cyclone of talent,” including such acclaimed, big name actors as Woody Harrelson and Dennis Hopper. “It became this thing that started to attract people because they understood why it was being made,” Maher says. “There was just something about it that was interesting.”
All told, Stanford says about five years elapsed from the time he closed the drawer on the first draft of the script to the time shooting began in October 2006. That gave the filmmakers a lot of time to think about how to approach the project. While the extra time didn’t eliminate that many surprises it did have its benefits. “I had a lot of preparation done, and I think that gave me a sense of confidence in the material,” Maher says. “So all of those things came into play as soon as I got a chance to make the film.”
“When I sat down with him at the start of the film, he explained to me in very great detail what his vision was,” says producer Rob Merilees. “He also brought about an hour’s worth of visuals to show me on video. It blew me away. Bill had been thinking about this film for years and years, and had everything mapped out in his mind.”
Theron concurs: “He spent so much time with this material, he knew it inside and out, and there really wasn’t anything he hadn’t thought about. That’s what you want from your director.”
For his part, Maher says the skills of the cast and crew took a lot of pressure off him. For instance, seeing the work of cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchía was immediately reassuring. “When I started to see what he was doing with the dailies that was a pretty extraordinary thing, because we were sitting around going, ‘Wait a second, this is our film. Wow, this looks good!’” Maher recalls. “So that meant I could just focus all of my time with the actors, which is great.”
It’s not the first time Theron has worked with a first-time director: Patty Jenkins made her directorial debut on Monster, for which Theron won the Oscar® for best actress. Theron says she feels a certain affinity with first-timers. “I wasn’t a trained actor when I started out, and somebody gave me a shot and believed in me. You have to be willing to jump off that cliff and believe in somebody who is obsessed with a particular piece of material and gets you all excited about it. Bill was very much that way about this script.”
Cast, crew and others were equally impressed with Theron’s consummate skills as a producer. A.J. Dix recalls arriving at the production office in Canada one cold morning to find Theron sitting on the stairs at 8 a.m., already hard at work. “I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “It was about negative eight, negative twelve; just freezing, and she was prepping this movie, working with Bill, going on scouts. She was a harder worker than I’ve ever worked with before. She didn’t miss a day. Everything I was promised when we set out to make this movie together she delivered on, and so much more.”
About The Casting
Once Theron signed on to produce, Sleepwalking quickly attracted an impressive cast of Hollywood heavyweights. “We just really lucked out with the cast,” Theron says. “I can’t take that for granted, because a huge part of making a film is getting the right cast. … Bill and I both felt like there was never a compromise in that part.”
In addition to producing, Theron took on the role Joleen, a single mom who abandons her young daughter, Tara, after she takes up with the latest in a string of boyfriends. Theron relished the part, which shared common elements with two memorable characters she has played in recent years— Aileen Wuornos in Monster and Josey Aimes in North Country.
“I wanted to play Joleen because it’s rare that actresses get a chance to play flawed women,” Theron explains. “We like to keep our women as mothers and nurturers and rarely do we get to see a woman in conflict. … We’re not all suited for motherhood, and I thought this was a great chance to show a woman like that, and not ask for sympathy, but perhaps for empathy—some kind of understanding, because I don’t think you can hate her.”
Surprisingly, Theron says that juggling her dual roles as producer and actor actually helped her performance. Having to focus on the practical aspects of getting the film made meant she could switch off the creative part of her brain so when it came time to get in front of the camera, she approached the part fresher. “I’m one of those actors whose head goes 5,000 miles an hour, so if you leave me alone I’ll over-think everything,” she says. “And I think it’s dangerous for an actor to do that. I think that gut reaction and that initial response really disappear.”
While Dix was impressed by Theron’s producing skills, he was blown away by her acting. “You sit behind the monitors and you watch her light up the screen and you just know that you’re making something really incredible,” he says. “Just watching it raw, watching the energy that’s brought in the room when she’s on screen, I know exactly why I made this movie.”
For the lead role of James, who does his best to rise to the challenge of parenting young Tara in her mother’s absence despite his all too apparent shortcomings, Nick Stahl was the unanimous choice. “You can have great material and a good director but unless you have an actor who is completely and utterly willing to give himself to the role, you don’t have a movie,” says Theron. “I’ve been a fan of Nick’s for a really long time. I’ve also worked with and talked to actors who have worked with him and always heard incredible things about him. I’ve always liked watching him on the screen and felt that someone should give him something gut wrenching and challenging for an actor.”
Stahl, who made his big-screen debut at age 12 in Mel Gibson’s directorial debut The Man Without a Face and went on to star in such blockbuster films such as Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and Frank Miller’s Sin City, says the role of James is deceptively complex. “At first glance, he reads somewhat simple and has a simple view of the world. And as you get to know him through the story, you see that where he came from, both he and his sister, is a place that complicated his present-day life. James is a wounded man … he’s been beaten down and suffered a lot of tough breaks, so everything he deals with in the story he views through those lenses.”
To play Joleen’s 11-year-old daughter, the world-weary Tara, the filmmakers chose AnnaSophia Robb, who despite her youth had impressed them with her large and diverse body of performances. Robb made her motion picture debut opposite Jeff Daniels in Wayne Wang’s Because of Winn-Dixie, and more recently starred in Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and features such as Bridge to Terabithia, Doubting Thomas and The Reaping.
“I’ve never really played a character like Tara before,” says the actress of her Sleepwalking role. “Her mother hasn’t set a very good example for her, so she’s always had to take care of herself and become an adult at a very young age. She doesn’t trust anybody because any time she hopes for something, or her mom makes promises to her, it turns out to be a lie. … But deep down, she’s not as tough as she would have you believe. She’s had to develop a thick shell, but the right person can get through it, like her uncle, James. She’s very deep.”
The young actress more than lived up to everyone’s expectations with her performance. “AnnaSophia has an innocence that reflects her age, but at the same time has a great sense of humor,” says Stahl, a former child actor himself. “She’s very sharp and as an actress does simple things that are a challenge to other actors. She listens.”
William Shively, owner of WJS Productions, says Robb’s performance in a reading of the script at Theron’s office was what finally persuaded him to jump in as a producer. “Watching her and Charlize bring it to life, it was crazy powerful,” he says. “Her understanding of this really mature material is so unique. We didn’t know that we’d ever be able to find that. And not only did we find it, we found the perfect Tara. When you work with young talent you’re always taking a gamble.”
Theron agrees. “As a child actress, she still has the ability to use her imagination, which as we get older, I think we tend to lose. I think the amazing thing about young actors like AnnaSophia is that every decision and emotional choice that they make is so real and raw. They haven’t had time to learn to manipulate the things that have gone on in their lives. It’s unbelievable to watch Bill direct her and see her instantly get it. She already comes to the scene with a solid foundation, and then takes it to the next level. There are days when I watch her and think ‘I gotta pull my socks up as an actor. There’s no slacking in this one.’”
In one tough scene, Robb’s character is struck across the face by her grandfather (played by Dennis Hopper). But the scene went off without a hitch, helped by Hopper’s kindness toward his young co-star. “He taught me how to fall without hurting myself when he hits me across the face,” says Robb. After the shot, Hopper immediately asked Robb if she was okay and went to reassure her. “I’ve been an actor since I was 18 years old; I’m 70 years old now,” says Hopper. “Whether you’re hitting a child or whether you’re hitting an adult, when you do stunts you want to know that the other person’s okay. That’s my first instinct anyway.”
For the role of James’ friend and co-worker Randall, Theron and Maher always had in mind Theron’s North Country co-star Woody Harrelson. Harrelson, who first endeared himself to millions of viewers as the affable bartender Woody Boyd in NBC’s long-running ensemble hit comedy, “Cheers,” has starred in such movies as Natural Born Killers and The People vs. Larry Flynt, for which he received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. A friend of Theron’s, Harrelson loved the script and immediately agreed to play the role. “It’s a pretty intense story, and I feel good about the fact that I get to be a little bit of the comic relief,” says Harrelson. “But more than anything, I just think it’s a beautiful story and I am more than happy to be a part of it.”
Deborra-Lee Furness, who plays James’ co-worker Danni, says she was impressed by Harrelson’s style, “He’s the kind of actor I love to work with, completely present, in the moment and courageous in his choices. He demands that you play ball with him, you have to stay on your toes; you never know what’s coming. It’s like a great game of tennis.”
Theron says Harrelson called her after reading the script, and the two ended up talking about it for over three hours. “He’s great in it,” she says. “I watch him now and there’s no way anybody else could have done it. And it’s not manufactured. It comes from a real and endearing place that I just love about Woody.”
Another actor who responded to Theron’s personal appeal to read the script was acting legend and Academy Award nominee Dennis Hopper.
“Independent films take chances,” says Hopper, who directed and starred in the classic Easy Rider almost 40 years ago and has remained faithful to his love of independent filmmaking ever since. “You have to take a chance to make a great movie. But when you have a choice script like this, and wonderful people involved, it would be silly not to do it.”
Hopper committed to the role of James and Joleen’s abusive father, Mr. Reedy, within hours of being contacted by Theron. “I loved the script and I believe in Charlize,” he says “I admire her work tremendously and I was just honored that she asked me.”
His fellow actors were equally enthusiastic to be working with Hopper, despite some initial trepidation. “Dennis is horribly intimidating when you first meet him,” says Stahl. “That goes away very quickly, because he approaches you and talks to you, and is just a really warm person. He’s such an amazing actor to watch. … He did an incredible job.”
According to Maher and Theron, Hopper became Mr. Reedy from the moment he put on a cowboy hat that he had chosen. He even voluntarily shaved his beard off for the part. “He had me in tears two days in a row watching him perform,” Theron says. “It was so incredible to see somebody who has gone through such an intense career and life. He’s been in this business forever and for him it’s still all about the craft. He said to me at one point, ‘I love this part. I love acting.’ There’s an honest truth about it that was amazing for me to hear. The camera just cannot get enough of him.”
For the role of Danni, James’ slightly older co-worker who takes a romantic interest in him, the casting team wanted someone who could portray a resilient woman who had experienced her share of tough times but maintained her integrity and dignity. They chose Deborra-Lee Furness, an Australian actress whose film credits include Shame and Jindabyne. “It could seem quite perverse that this older woman is very attracted to this young guy, who’s obviously in a lot of pain and needs nurturing,” Furness says. “But I see the purity in it. It’s people needing love, just sort of knocking into each other and trying to heal or fill that gap that is within them.”
Theron says despite the fact that Furness had just had a baby, she accepted the part readily and was committed to finding a way to make it work out. “She reminds me so much of my mother,” Theron says. “She has this strength that my mother has that I just really love.”
About The Location
Sleepwalking’s story is divided roughly into three sections, each of which takes place in a different environment. The first part of the film is set in James’ hometown in Northern California; the second is the road trip James and Tara take as they flee the authorities and the third takes place on the Utah farm where James spent his childhood. The multiple locations combined with the production’s shoestring budget and tight 29-day shooting schedule presented the filmmakers with some unique challenges.
To get the highest production values for their money, the filmmakers traveled to Regina in the Western Canadian province of Saskatchewan, north of Montana, to shoot the film. Once shooting began in October 2006, cast and crew braved sub-zero temperatures and more than one blizzard. “It was brutal,” says Maher of the shoot, adding that the filmmakers endured their share of ribbing from the hardy local crew for having come from sunny California.
Producer Rob Merilees recalls that the first day of shooting was the coldest, at minus 35 degrees with wind chill to boot. “Everybody was turning to me and going, ‘What a jerk! You brought us here. It’s your fault,’” he laughs.
Making matters more difficult was the speed with which everyone had to work, given the tight schedule and the fact that some actors had very limited availability. Hopper had to cram two weeks’ work into six day periods in order to meet another obligation; Harrelson did all his scenes in just two days.
Getting actors to fly to such a remote place to work for scale for such short periods was a further testament to their commitment to the project, Theron says. “When you have absolutely no money and you’re dragging people all the way out into Regina, which is a place that nobody’s ever heard of, it’s asking a lot of somebody,” she says. “I think we realized how lucky we were to get the cast that we did.”
Challenges aside, both filmmakers and actors agree Saskatchewan’s landscape helped establish the right mood and tone for the piece. “When we came here and started location scouting, it was unbelievable what we found,” says Theron. “So many of the locations felt like they were especially built for our story. We didn’t have to compromise at all, especially when it came to the Reedy farm. We had seen so many farms, and when Bill and I saw it, we just lost it and were like two little kids jumping up and down.”
“I think Regina brings a very special quality to the film,” says AnnaSophia Robb. “When I first got to the farm, it was exactly how I had envisioned it when I read the story. It was cold and desolate, but it’s also beautiful at the same time. You can look at it in two different ways, which relates to the characters as well.”
“The location’s just great,” Hopper says. “I was born in Dodge City, Kansas, and I was raised on a wheat farm, so this is very much like the kind of country that I was raised in.”
Cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchía says he got lucky with the weather, which ranged from extremes of cloudy, sunny, rainy and mostly snowy. That worked perfectly with the filmmakers’ plan to have the movie progress from a more cheerful, colorful look in the beginning to a colder, greyer look in the final act to reflect the rising drama. “Somehow we started shooting the ending first and it was snowing, it was overcast and bad weather,” Anchía recalls. “And when we shot the beginning of the story at the end of the shoot, it was sunnier.”
Production notes provided by Overture Films.
Sleepwalking
Starring: Nick Stahl, AnnaSophia Robb, Charlize Theron, Deborra-Lee Furness, Woody Harrelson, Dennis Hopper
Directed by: William Maher
Screenplay by: Zac Stanford
Release Date: March 14th, 2008
MPAA Rating: R for Language and a scene of violence.
Studio: Overture Films
Box Office Totals
Domestic: $166,057 (80.7%)
Foreign: $39,759 (19.3%)
Total: $205,816 (Worldwide)