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TALKING TO TODD SOLONDZ

In 1998, Todd Solondz's dysfunctional family comedy

Happiness

caused a minor cultural ripple due to its parade of pedophiles and depression. Now he's made a follow-up, rejoining the same family a decade later.

Life During Wartime

is a brilliant companion piece in which Solondz defies fans of the original by recasting every character. In the mix this time we get great turns by, among others, Charlotte Rampling, Michael Kenneth Williams (Omar from

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The Wire

), and Paul (Pee-wee Herman) Reubens. The film's in cinemas this June.

Vice: I saw Life During Wartime yesterday and coincidentally my girlfriend just bought me a Pee-wee Herman ventriloquist doll. It was great to see Paul Reubens in the film, I'm a fan and I loved how you used him.

Todd:

Yeah, like you, although I don't have a gift-wrapped Pee-wee Herman doll here in my home, I've always loved Pee-wee. I've always found Paul's backstory and baggage to be so sad and troubling and I thought that would add poignancy to his role in the film. I felt that nobody had really seen him do anything quite like this and I think it's quite touching.

Yeah, it made me want to see more of him. I think your film shows that he deserves a better acting career than he's had.

Yeah, I think it certainly proves that there's more within him than we've seen. But at the same time he's doing his live Pee-wee show at the moment. Maybe it will get to London.

I hope so. So did this follow-up just come out of the blue, or had you been thinking about the characters a lot over the years?

It's a hard question to answer, because I don't have any career plan, evidently. If I had one I would never have made

Happiness

in the first place. Writing this was scarier than

Happiness

as I knew that people would inevitably compare them. But I had to put that out of my head and this film was designed to stand on its own, even if you've never seen anything I've done.

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I've read you were disturbed that people thought your portrayal of Bill the pedophile in Happiness was a sympathetic one. I imagine everyone who got and liked Happiness didn't think that, but saw that you were just presenting a three-dimensional character study.

People have used words like "sympathetic" when characterizing my attitude towards this character, and while this wasn't the reason I made this film, making it was certainly an opportunity to clarify my attitude towards him. The difficulty with my material is that it rubs people in such different ways. Some people may appreciate it as a serious exploration of what it means to be human, but others see it as a misanthropic mind-game. The comedy and pathos are so intertwined in my films that it's hard to contain and control people's responses. It's too easy and reductive to call me misanthropic. It's easy to be a lover of mankind when you're able to take a character like Bill and demonize him, but it takes a lot more to be able to embrace mankind while including a character like Bill. It's a much greater test of what it means to be humanistic, to be able to fully accept what and who we are. These films do try to explore that, but these are questions that I think are beyond our ability.

Cultural taboos, especially in cinema, have changed a lot in the past ten years. Do you think Happiness would have caused less controversy if it came out today?

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I don't think

Happiness

could be made today unless some other kind of

Happiness

film had come out ten years ago. I do think the movie pushed certain buttons in people, and once those buttons have been pushed, you can't unpush them. We live in hysterical times, when I was a child growing up, if I went to the park the sign said, "No children allowed to enter unless accompanied by adults", and now it's "No adults allowed to enter unaccompanied by minors". It's a very different landscape. There's a certain kind of damage to the psyche when one has to look with something more than just caution when children and adults engage.

I was going to ask you if you could see yourself revisiting these characters again in ten years, but then I thought what I'd really like to see is Happiness: the TV series.

Ha! The problem is, I should be thinking about TV because that's how I could really be earning a living. But I think about movies and the experience of being in a big dark room with a big screen, and that's what I love. I have another script ready that doesn't involve any characters from pre-existing work, but I never say never. I would have been shocked ten years ago to know I would do a sequel to

Happines

s and I'd be even more shocked to find myself exploring it any further. But, I never say never. We'll see what happens in ten years. ALEX GODFREY