Many people know David Duchovny for his years playing Agent Mulder on the popular sci-fi series The X-Files, but he’s also a very accomplished writer. For his second outing in the director’s chair, Duchovny adapted his own novel, Bucky F*cking Dent, into the poignant dramedy Reverse the Curse.
We at FandomWire got the opportunity to talk with Duchovny, along with stars Logan Marshall-Green and Stephanie Beatriz, about Reverse the Curse.
Reverse the Curse Interview
FandomWire: All of you have varying degrees of connection to New York. I have to ask… was it hard having to root for the Red Sox in this movie?
Logan Marshall-Green: I didn’t have to cheer for the Red Sox. I think Teddy is a Yankees fan, but not as avid or certainly obsessive as Marty. But it was handed down to him, as you saw in the first scene.
David Duchovny: Yeah, I mean, I hate the Red Sox. I hate the Celtics. I hate all Boston teams. But I know a good story when I’ve got one, so it was easy to root for them. And I kinda root for them now.
[pauses] That’s not true.
I mean, I wrote this story before the Sox won their first World Series, and I thought, “Ah, they’ve screwed me! They’ve f*cking screwed me by winning! I’ve gotta put that story to bed.” And then I thought, “Oh, there’s an epilogue there somewhere,” and then I wrote an epilogue to the novel and I wrote an epilogue to the script.
But there were a few dark days after the Sox won, not only because they won but because I thought they were gonna ruin a good story I wanted to tell.
FW: I think this really speaks to the power of Reverse the Curse, though — you don’t have to be a Sox fan, or even a sports fan, and it’s still touching. What is it about this story that you think makes it feel universal?
Duchovny: Well, it’s really about parents and children, fathers and sons. I guess it’s about communication.
Stephanie Beatriz: I think all of us have to go through grief. Grief is a universal experience. However, it is absolutely ridiculously individual, which doesn’t make any sense to me. Because we all have to do it, you think there would be a f*cking manual at this point. This is my favorite thing about storytelling — in its specificity, it becomes universal.
In this very, very specific story about these two men who bond over a sports team, and it’s really the only way they can talk to each other about anything — especially in the beginning — you sort of see yourself. You see your strained relationships with people you love, you see your inability to get at the things that really mean something. And you experience through the film loss and grief and how you deal with it.
And it is cathartic. I think the film is cathartic in that way. There’s a lot of stuff in our lives day to day, and there’s no time to feel all the feelings. So we go to the movies, and we sit in the dark with strangers that we know are also human, and we cry. And it’s a great release for us. It’s a tale as old as time, baby.
FW: Ms. Beatriz, I do want to talk about your character. It’s one that in many other movies would be little more than a love interest or comedic sidekick, but in Reverse the Curse, I think she’s a pivotal part of the film’s emotional core. How did you approach this role in a way that’s funny but rooted in emotion?
Beatriz: In terms of acting, I think one of the things that I allow myself to do is really become like an open channel for the character. So whatever is happening in the scene, I am able to let everything else go and just focus on what’s really happening in the scene and what I really want out of who I’m in the scene with. And that changes from second to second, from millisecond to millisecond.
And it’s this really freeing experience to play pretend for me. It’s play, it’s joy — even in the stuff that’s hard. I feel really connected to my own humanity when I’m acting, which might sound strange because it’s playing pretend, it’s not really me.
I don’t want to say it’s easy — it’s not easy — but it is easy to allow myself to live in that experience. It’s very easy for me to believe that everything that I’m doing, from the time that they say action to the time that they say cut, is really real. And I love that feeling. I love getting lost in the story. And I think, I hope, that’s what I brought to the character that was already written that way, as a person who becomes a conduit for other people experiencing grief.
Duchovny: I’ve never heard Stephanie talk about her work in that way. But I would say that that was my experience of directing her. She didn’t want to say it was easy, but it looked easy for her to just go into the scene and come out of the scene. And it was quite impressive and mystical to watch how deeply she could go. How deep she could go just on one little direction. If I just said something like, “Deeper,” she would just go deeper.
FW: And Mr. Duchovny and Mr. Marshall-Green, the two of you have a great father-son rapport in Reverse the Curse, balancing the funny and the poignant. How did you guys build this dynamic?
Duchovny: (with a smile) I’m actually Logan’s father. Logan doesn’t know.
Marshall-Green: (sarcastically) I’m still just flailing without my dad.
David and I got together knowing we didn’t have any time. One of my favorite parts of the process was the summer right before we did it. David and I were both in LA, and we would just be like, “Hey, man, you’re free. Do you want to read that scene?”
We knew what we had to do on the day, but I think it was just really lovely trying to find the two men and that dynamic. Because we knew the house scenes were early as well, I think we approached it in a very light way and answered all those questions that you just don’t have time to answer on an independent film.
Reverse the Curse is now in theaters and on VOD.
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