Director Niclas Larsson didn’t hold back when he approached the reclusive Lara Flynn Boyle about appearing in his new film “Mother, Couch.”
“I needed someone for the character to be broken,” Larsson says. “Instead of faking a broken person, I did some research of who is really broken, and this is something I’ve been very open with Lara about.”
He continues, “I went back to the ‘90s. My mother was a hairdresser and always had all these celebrity magazines. Lara was on the cover throughout my whole childhood. Hollywood fucking raped her. That’s what they do with the starlets.”
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Boyle, Ewan McGregor and Rhys Ifans star as siblings who reunite when their mother, played masterfully by Ellen Burstyn, sits on a couch in a furniture store and refuses to leave.
“I didn’t want any verbal characterization between the siblings telling the audience where Lara’s character comes from, or what has happened to her,” Larsson says. “I just needed a close-up.”
Despite not working much these days, Boyle signed on pretty quickly. There was only one real obstacle: getting Boyle to dye her hair blonde. “She was like, ‘Can I do a wig?’ Larsson says. “But we definitely couldn’t do a wig because of Ellen.”
Burstyn dons a platinum blonde wig in the movie that is hard to look away from. It’s worn tilted, hair sprayed within an inch of its artificial life and becomes almost its own character in the movie. “When you see a wig like that on a person, it’s clear that the person is mad,” Larsson says. “Ellen picked the wig. That’s the truth. When she came to me with this fucking crazy wig, I was like, ‘I don’t love it.’”
To avoid a spoiler, I won’t reveal how Larsson finally agreed to this particular wig, but the director is happy he did: “In retrospect, it’s the best choice ever.”
“Mother, Couch” marks Larsson’s feature directorial debut following the attention and awards he earned for his commercial work and several shorts, two of which were for Vogue and starred Alicia Vikander and Anna Wintour.
A one-time child actor in his native Sweden, the 33-year-old Larsson now lives in New York City. He counts Spike Jonze as a mentor.
“Mother, Couch” isn’t an easy film to classify. Is it a comedy? A dark comedy? A dramedy? Or, as Larsson sees it — a horror movie that he says was inspired by “The Shining”?
“I felt it was important to take a big swing,” he says. “I think everything is so fucking boring right now. Everyone’s so safe and everything is so generic. And as a young filmmaker, we can’t be scared. If anyone should take big swings, it’s young filmmakers.
“I miss the good old days where people were young filmmakers and didn’t care about critics,” he continues. “They didn’t care about the audience necessarily. They just made the movie they wanted to make. I think there’s something pure in that. So I wrote the craziest movie I could think of. It’s not for everybody, but for the ones who it is for I think they will really like it.”
Not that he has anything against mainstream movies. One of his favorite films is “Freaky Friday.” He wishes he had gotten the chance to helm the upcoming sequel with Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis. “I told my agent yesterday if they’re making a remake of ‘13 Going on 30,’ I should be the one,” Larsson says. “I’d love to do that.”
