In the first significant screen role of his career, Jeff Daniels played a spectacularly unreliable husband and father in “Terms of Endearment,” the beautifully balanced blend of comedy and tragedy that won the Best Picture Oscar in 1983. As Flap Horton, Daniels embodied the befuddlement implied by his name, and confirmed by his mother-in-law, who liked to remind him that he would never be special.
Now Daniels returns to the role of unreliable patriarch – older but not necessarily wiser – as Bernard Berkman in “The Squid and the Whale,” which opens Friday in Denver. Bernard is a novelist who never quite lived up to the promises his talent made, and is trying to cope with the disintegration of his marriage and the fact that his wife (played by Laura Linney) has a book deal and a story in The New Yorker.
Noah Baumbach wrote and directed “The Squid and the Whale” as a thinly disguised memoir of his own childhood, growing up in the shadow of his father, novelist Jonathan Baumbach, in Brooklyn Heights.
Daniels was not his first choice to play Bernard, but the performance already has generated talk of a possible Oscar nomination for the actor.
Daniels has specialized in movies featuring kids and animals, such as “Fly Away Home,” “101 Dalmatians,” “Pleasantville” and “Arachnophobia,” so his triumph in “The Squid and the Whale” should come as no surprise. Daniels talked about his career while sitting next to the guitar he plays on his CD, “Jeff Daniels Live and Unplugged.”
Q: So. Did somebody just send you the script for “The Squid and the Whale”?
A: To get a good part in a good script, you’ve got to battle. There were a couple of other guys who have been attached over the years, but my agent told me, “If you meet with Noah, you might be able to steal this.” Among the things Bernard and his wife are at war over is custody – and the affections – of their two sons, played by Jesse Eisenberg (as Walt) and Owen Kline (as Frank).
Kids and animals, I’m the guy you call. I’ve done a lot of movies with kids, and you develop a trust with them off-camera so you can get them to have that on-camera. The less they have to act, the better. You want them talking to you, not acting like they’re talking to you.
Q: You started out playing a dad in “Terms of Endearment.”
A: Yes. I got out of the gate in a very weak way.
Q: Then you played Anna Paquin’s father in “Fly Away Home,” when she was 14. In “Squid,” she plays Bernard’s girlfriend, and you have sex with her. Did that feel incestuous?
A: Sort of. I’ve had to do some strange things in my career, and this ranks up there as one of the strangest. Thankfully, Anna is 23 now, and a completely different person than she was when we did “Fly Away Home.” You can’t be thinking about geese when you’re shooting a couple of these scenes. You just can’t.
Q: What attracted you to Bernard?
A: I had a feeling I could pull it off, but I didn’t know how. I don’t get these kinds of roles, opposite people like Laura, anymore, so I was very aware of the opportunity. But there was a huge chance of failure.
Q: These characters are based on Noah’s family. How much did he want to help you shape Bernard? Or did he leave you alone?
A: He was very aware that he couldn’t dictate what he had in his head to us. It was hard for him, but you could see him working on that. Early on, he said, “Let’s go meet my dad.” So we went to Brooklyn and met Jonathan Baumbach, who was aware of the screenplay.
The trap was, after meeting Jonathan, I came back to rehearsal and started doing an impression of him. It was false, and it wasn’t working. The next day, Noah and I sat in a room and said, “How are we going to do this?” I needed to personalize it somehow, and make it true to me. I’ve worked with a lot of friends who make $20 million a movie on the same movie I’m doing, and, if anything, I’m making far less than I usually do because so much is going to them. So it’s there, that feeling. I kind of poured gas on that, lit it, and I had Bernard.
