What interested me most was this girl cooking the turkey 
Actor turned screenwriter Peter Hedges makes his directorial debut with Pieces Of April. He wrote the novel What's Eating Gilbert Grape, and adapted it for the screen. Other screenplay adaptations include A Map Of The World and About A Boy. In addition he is a renowned teacher and playwright.
What was the inspiration for Pieces Of April?
I'd heard about this group of young people who tried to cook a turkey, but their oven didn't work so they went around the building getting other people to help them out. That's what drew me to do the story. I thought it would be an organic and believable way to throw together people who normally wouldn't be together.
American movies set at Thanksgiving invariably focus on some disaster or other, don't they?
Well, my first impulse was not to set it at Thanksgiving, because I didn't want to inherit all the baggage - good and bad - from the preceding history of Thanksgiving films. But when I tried to set it on any other day, I had to devote so much of my storytelling time to explaining the background. In America you share a meal with the people you're supposed to love, and it's also the day when you travel great distances to be in the room with people who you're supposed to love but you may not even like. So as much as I might want to set it on another day, what interested me most was this girl cooking the turkey.
There was also a more personal echo with the story, wasn't there?
When I was preparing it I rediscovered some story notes I'd made years before. And in them the reason for this girl cooking the turkey for her family was that her mother had cancer. By the time I re-read them my own mother had been diagnosed with cancer. I was spending days in my office trying to write, and as she got sicker she insisted we all get on with our lives and don't stop living to take care of her. I called my mother and told her about these notes, and she said: 'Peter, this sounds like a story you're supposed to tell."
Given the financial problems you encountered, were there times when you felt a bit like April yourself - rushing around and trying to achieve the impossible?
I would say that the way we made the movie was identical to the spirit of the story. And because of our compressed sense of time, we had to find what was essential. When we went in to shoot a scene we needed to get the most important part of it, and not always some of the smaller detail. That's how I'm most like April. It wasn't that we felt rushed, we just had to move quickly and we couldn't indulge in any second-guessing. We just kept moving. I realised that part of the reason the movie feels that way is that it was the spirit in which we made it.
Patricia Clarkson has recently been Oscar nominated for her performance as April's mother, Joy...
If you have Patty in a scene and you do four or five takes, your only problem is which take to use, she is that spectacular.
