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Kousha Navidar: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar, in for Alison Stewart. The new film, Ezra, is a highly personal look at parenting a neurodivergent child. It's based on screenwriter Tony Spiridakis's own experiences grappling with his son's autism diagnosis. In the movie, Bobby Cannavale stars as Max, a standup comedian searching for his next big break.

He's co-parenting his son Ezra, with his soon to soon-to-be ex-wife, Jenna, who is played by Bobby's real wife, Rose Byrne. Their son is struggling in school and the administrators recommend a school for kids with special needs and some medication. Jenna wants to follow the new plan, but Max disagrees. Instead of talking it out, Max does something pretty impulsive.

He kidnaps his own son in the middle of the night and takes him on a road trip. Ezra is directed by Tony Goldwyn, who you might know from the Scandal series, and also stars in Law & Order. The film premieres in theaters today, and I am joined in studio right across the table right now by the two Tonys, director Tony Goldwyn and screenwriter Tony Spiridakis. Welcome, both of you.

Tony Goldwyn: Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Kousha Navidar: For this, we're going to go with Tony G. and Tony S., so folks-

Tony Goldwyn: Perfect. That always works.

Kousha Navidar: -listening right now know what's going on. Tony S., you gave a TED Talk in 2013 about your relationship with your son and with his autism diagnosis. That was over a decade ago. I want to start off just by playing a clip from that talk. Here it is.

Tony Spiridakis: When my son, Dimitri was three years old, he stopped making eye contact. He pretty much stopped speaking. In fact, he started communicating mostly by grunting and growling. We went to the doctor, and my wife and I were told that our son was on the spectrum. Now, this was 15 years ago, so I had nodded my head and pretended that I knew what she was saying, but I had no clue what autism was.

When she said the word spectrum, my mind just flashed to my son space traveling to a galaxy far, far away. Then I heard Rod Serling in my head say, "Your son is traveling to another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of the mind. He's going to be taking a journey, a wondrous journey to a wondrous world called autism." I heard this doctor telling me my son was going to be living in the twilight zone. I wasn't happy about it, but that's what I do. I try to make a joke out of something. All right. I try to hide how scared I am, like most people, say something witty, and get the laugh.

Kousha Navidar: It was a beautiful talk. What made you decide you wanted to speak about your son in this public forum? When did you know that you were ready to write this movie?

Tony Spiridakis: Thank you for playing that. Because I saw how my son would do things that they were because he was autistic and then there was a certain amount of negative judgment of his behaviors, and that bothered me. Then I thought that that was something that I should explore and talk about because there's shame that comes with that, and you don't want your son to be criminalized because he's autistic, so he has no filter.

He'll say, "You're a terrible teacher," or, "Why are you doing this stupid thing?" It seems like he's being belligerent, and he's really autistic and in his own world. Learning the social norms and cues, I thought, was a fantastic thing to explore in a film and let other people see somebody getting into trouble.

In my instance, with this film, it ended up being that the father was way worse. [chuckles] His inappropriate behaviors were sort of the thing. I did that because that's what it was like. I would go and defend him and advocate for him. I was completely inappropriate at times because I was too hot, I came in too hot.

Kousha Navidar: Tony G., when did you know that this was the next movie you wanted to direct?

Tony Goldwyn: About three years ago now. Tony and I have been friends, best friends for over 40 years. I lived through Tony's trials with Dimitri and with his family and his marriage. I had read several drafts of this script that he was writing about it because I knew he really wanted to express his amazing son through this movie and their relationship.

I hadn't really thought about directing it. I hadn't read a draft in quite a while. Almost three years ago, Tony called me and he said, "Would you take a look at this? I've reworked the script," and just as a friend because we share each other's work all the time. I read it and it just hit me really hard. I felt that Tony had somehow cracked certain things in terms of the way he was structuring the script that really worked.

I felt, "Oh, this is a movie now. This works, and I think we need to do it together." We just started. Then it was like, "Okay." I thought, "What an amazing thing to do for our friendship." To myself I was like, "Wow. If I can do this for my friend, get his story on screen, what a cool thing, what a cool adventure to embark on together," and it has been.

Kousha Navidar: That idea of cracking something in the script, I think, is really poignant because you think about representations of autism in film and television across history. There's so many of them. Tony S., for you, what do you think the maybe biggest mistakes or misconceptions have been with how before, we might have seen autism displayed in film and movie?

Tony Spiridakis: I think the world that takes that on in television and film or books or whatever it is, there has to be a, I hate to say it, but almost a superpower attributable to this thing called autism. Sometimes that just felt like it minimized it somehow. Absolutely, there are special talents that autistic people have. Absolutely. It seemed like those were the representations that we saw, so and so is a brilliant doctor or so and so can tell you what planes crashed and what year and all these great things that are absolutely part of being a savant in that spectrum world.

There was something about, I think what I wanted to do was to show the family as a unit associated with autism. Not just so much, it was just the autistic person. It was the autistic person and the ripple effect that it had on a family. I felt like it was as much for the parents as it was for the autistic child.

Kousha Navidar: What were you trying to do in the script in that sense? What were you trying to show from the parent's perspective?

Tony Spiridakis: As my father said in Greek that I could make the biggest salad, and he meant by that to say that I would make a big mess. What I wanted to show was that parents are going to make a mess and they don't get up in the morning and say, "How am I going to make a salad out of my kids' life? How am I going to make a mess?" They try to do the right thing, but I wanted to write a movie about some father who does so many wrong things.

That in the end, he just has every good intention in the world. He's himself somehow in that world of magical spectrumness. I think he's clearly that, and I think his anger issues and his feeling of paranoia that people are always out to get him comes from his father. I felt like that was a very amazing way to look at a child who's autistic and see that child as the unifying event in the lives of all the adults.

Kousha Navidar: Let's talk about that child for a second. If you're just tuning in, we're talking about the new movie Ezra, which premieres in theaters today. We're talking with Tony Goldwyn, the director, and Tony Spiridakis, who's the screenwriter. I want to talk about Ezra. Tony G., why was it important to you to cast a neurodivergent child in this role, and how did you land on William Fitzgerald?

Tony Goldwyn: Well, from the first minute we decided to do this together, Tony and I committed to having a neurodiverse kid play Ezra and to find someone on the autism spectrum to do it. It's hard to even put into words why. It just seemed critically necessary both in terms of representation and what that might yield us artistically. It was so exciting to us. We didn't quite know what we'd be getting into because every autistic person has different and varied sensitivities.

You think, "How are we going to find a kid who can be on a movie set and do?" It's hard making movies. It's a very adult world and it's hard for any child actor. We said, "Let's just go for it." It seemed a really exciting challenge. Then it was about finding an actor who could play this central title role in our film.

The first step really was to involve the autism community in this search. Our casting directors, Kerry Barden and Paul Schnee, teamed up with two autism consultants, Elaine Hall and Alex Plank. Alex is autistic and Elaine is an educator. She's also neurodiverse, but she has this theater company in LA called The Miracle Project, which is just an incredible group that does theater with autistic people. They helped us. We dug into their networks and we launched a nationwide search and saw about 100 kids. The kids would send us tapes of reading a couple of scenes, and then we did Zoom callbacks and brought a couple of kids to New York to work with Bobby Cannavale.

Honestly, after a few months, we had not found our kid. We saw some amazing people and all so different from one another, but we hadn't found him. We were about three weeks away from shooting. We had Robert De Niro, we had our entire cast, but we didn't have an Ezra. We knew we didn't have a movie without the right Ezra.

Kousha Navidar: I just saw the other Tony-- [crosstalk]

Tony Goldwyn: No, it was intense. I've done this for a while, and casting is one of these alchemical processes. You just have to have faith and you'll know it. You just have to hang in there. Lo and behold, Kerry Barden, our casting director, called me and said, "This tape just came in last night and this kid lives in New Jersey," when we were here in New York. "You got to see it." I watched William's tape. His mom had found the thing on a Facebook posting and thought, "Oh, what a fun thing for William to do." It was a weekend project for them to do this audition.

As William says, he said, "We knew our chances were slim to none of getting it." I saw him and I was like, "We got to meet this kid." He came in, and the second I saw him, Bobby and Tony and I were in a casting office, and I went out to meet William and his wonderful parents, Laura and Dave. It was, first of all, a spitting image of Dimitri Spiridakis at 12 years old, Tony's son. Literally with the same glasses, same curly hair. I was like, "Oh my God," when I met them.

Kousha Navidar: I had that thought too because from its TED Talk and watching the movie, I saw that similarity as well.

Tony Goldwyn: They look so similar. They literally could be brothers. I ran into the room and I said, "Tony, it's Dimitri out there." [laughs] Then William came in and he's just a natural actor. He absolutely has that rare ability of great actors to just be himself at all times in front of the camera. He's completely unselfconscious, completely intimidated by the very formidable actors he was working with. He's just a natural. He and Bobby hit it off immediately, and we just knew, within 10 seconds, we'd found our guy.

Kousha Navidar: Oh, you mentioned you didn't know what you were getting into and what you would have to do maybe on set to make sure that this kind of dynamic worked out well so that everybody was able to work together. What resources or support did you bring in to make sure that this kind of project would be safe and good for William?

Tony Goldwyn: Well, the first person I talked to who has an autistic child and is in the autism community, she said, "You're taking a big risk here." She said, "I'm just telling you as someone who really-- but great. Go for it." We had a lot of people in the community advising us. Alex Plank, who I mentioned before, helping us cast, where Alex was an associate producer. Alex is autistic and was on set every day to help facilitate. We did a training for the entire casting crew.

We spent a lot of time talking to Laura and Dave, William's parents, and to William himself about what he needed so that we could anticipate. What I found is it's like anybody, man, like every actor. It's like, "What do you need to do your best work? What environment do you need to feel safe to create?" Because every person has their sensitivities. It's just most of us are more able to modify ourselves [laughs] and, therefore, inhibit ourselves to be professional. Whereas William is William. When he's stressed out, he's like, "I'm done." It was about anticipating things. He was incredible. Because he's so gifted, he actually worked much faster than most actors one works with. He's ready to go at all times.

Kousha Navidar: In terms of taking direction or in terms of-- [crosstalk]

Tony Goldwyn: Taking direction. He's way ahead of me in direction. He's so bright that every time I started to give him direction, after about three words, he's like, "Yes, I got it, Tony. Just let me do it." [laughs] I had to be very succinct. William also has ADHD, so he's easily distracted, but he's so present. He would just nail it all the time. Then if he was getting overwhelmed or stressed, we would just take a break. He had certain snacks and food issues that he needed accommodated, but that's all. So do a lot of movie stars. [laughs]

Kousha Navidar: Totally. You are talking about a movie star in this case as well.

Tony Goldwyn: We are now.

Kousha Navidar: Yes, we are now. I want to talk about the salad that you brought up as well. From the parents' perspective, how you can make a big salad, it's going to be a mess, because Max and Jenna in the movie, the parents, they have very different ideas about what their son needs. Jenna, on the one hand, is open to the idea of a school for kids with special needs and to medication, but Max is completely vehemently opposed to it. Can you see both sides of the argument there? The film doesn't really seem to take a side.

Tony Spiridakis: I see both sides, and I think that it's one of the realities of being a married couple and then having something so tense come between you, you end the marriage or one of you wants to end the marriage. In this case, Jenna ends the marriage, and I think the Max character is holding on. Here's what's constant. There're always going to be colleagues in the advocacy of their child. That's the different thing for parents of autistic children. I think that's true of all parents. It's obviously true of all parents.

It's fraught with all this tension because if one parent thinks you should do this to take care of this child and the other thinks the other way, it's really hard to-- I've seen it cause so much disruption in so many marriages between husband and wives of autistic children. I thought this was a great opportunity to explore what that terrible salad is at times. This was a foundational element in my life. I thought it was really worth taking a look at. The part about it that was hard is I was so wrong for a long time.

Kousha Navidar: Was there an element of your own relationship with Dimitri, your son, and the challenge there that you wanted to give to Max and Ezra's relationship?

Tony Spiridakis: 100% yes. He was a constant positive force in all of that tension. Again, everything we're saying about an autistic child would be true of a child, right?

Kousha Navidar: Yes.

Tony Spiridakis: In the sense of what Dimitri was like, the more there was conflict around him, he seemed to be centered in a way. When nobody was around, all of a sudden, he'd be tapping my back if he saw me getting excited or angry. There was this calming effect that he had a desire to not have there be any of the storm or salad around him, and so he was very good.

I think the reason I wrote the film more than anything is because of his amazing spirit. That spirit helped both my ex-wife and me and my new partner because we have Dimitri. It's something that just happened. Everyone was fighting, but we were all fighting because we loved him. We weren't fighting necessarily with each other.

Kousha Navidar: You know where that comes through in the movie as well is with the generation above, with Robert De Niro's character, the fighting specifically, because part of Max's relationship with Ezra seems to be directly a conversation with Max's relationship with his own father, like I mentioned, played by Robert De Niro. What aspects of Max's relationship with his dad did you want to show trickle down to his relationship with then his son?

Tony Spiridakis: I wanted to show two men trying to be examples for their children. Two fathers who had so many issues that sidetracked them from being good fathers. They wanted to be good fathers, but they had their own issues of who's stealing from me, who's trying to put me down, who's trying to attack me. The answer for both of them that they find out by trying to help this child is nobody.

Here's the real truth, Stan and Max. Nobody is really thinking about you that way. The dog wasn't trying to bite you. The guy who said his stake was undercooked, [laughs] you didn't have to assault him and lose everything. Then all of those things like that Stan lost his wife, and here's Max in that same position. It just seemed to me like a really great way to put a light on what should we do for Ezra. We should probably let Ezra be Ezra and stop trying to beat somebody up about it.

Kousha Navidar: I hear so much of that in the direction that you wanted to see Bobby Cannavale take with his character. Tony G., for you, I'm wondering, you have this actor here who needs to give a performance that is funny and angry and hurtful and heartfelt. What's an aspect of Max's character that you two, you and Bobby, really talk through that you wanted to nail and get right and that you work together on?

Tony Goldwyn: Well, it just comes naturally to Bobby, and it's why we cast him. He's unapologetic in his bad behavior. He's not worried about being liked, and yet everything is coming from his heart and driven by this intense, passionate love for this kid, combined with, as Tony just mentioned, his own paranoia moving through the world. He moves through the world in a crouch that everyone's ready to attack him, or everyone's trying to crush his child, or the world is a dangerous place, and he's learned to walk through life with his fist up.

We talked about that, but it's both-and, that, in no way ever, negates his passionate advocacy for his kid. That's why we're with Max, even though we're thinking, "What are you doing?" Because he does a lot of really destructive things. The original title of the script was Inappropriate Behavior.

Kousha Navidar: Oh, which is the title of the TED Talk. Just so our viewers, our listeners can understand that.

Tony Goldwyn: We just talked about that duality. I guess the only thing I encourage Bobby is both can exist at the same time, and we have to have both at all times.

Kousha Navidar: For you, Tony S., did Bobby bring anything to the character that you hadn't seen in the words, but then you saw on the--

Tony Spiridakis: So much. So much of what Tony just said, which was I wasn't necessarily-- obviously, it's inspired by things from your own life. All of a sudden, seeing Bobby made me go, "Oh, my God, this is me." [chuckles] You know what I'm saying? The way he did it, I thought, I can't believe this guy is getting away with this stuff, but then it's Bobby Cannavale being so much a father himself. I think it's just in him. It's in his DNA to make jokes about things.

Fathers who make jokes about things are-- like the idea that Max wanted his kid to stay in a public school to learn how to fight. He meant fight. He didn't just mean have a tough spirit. He meant like, "I have somebody who's going to bop me, I'm going to bop them back." This is a bad idea. I think that Bobby can do that. He was able to do that, and he brought so much love behind it and so much humor. He has this fascination with stand-up comedy. He had it before. When he read the script, and I had that same fascination, so he brought this perfect tone and pitch to the performative part of being a comedian. He was like, "Don't worry about the jokes, Ton. I talked to so and so. It's about how I'm telling a story. I'm telling a story about how my life is going, and that's enough."

He settled me down and helped me work on all those sets that were done. Bobby brought himself and so many fantastic ideas that it just made our lives so much easier because that was a very big unknown, the comedy part. We were like, "Oh, we're going to just have to hire somebody to write this because I don't write this." Bobby was looking at us and saying, "No, no, no, let's just find what the story is for the character and let the humor and comedy, let me work on that." That was what happened. It was great.

Kousha Navidar: Looking at the piece as a whole, I'm wondering, has Dimitri seen it yet?

Tony Spiridakis: Yes.

Kousha Navidar: I'm looking at the clock at about 30 seconds left, but what does Dimitri think?

Tony Spiridakis: He goes, "That William kid, he's great, dad. He's great. Kitchen's closed."

Kousha Navidar: Kitchen's closed. Well, unfortunately, this conversation has to come to a close, but it's been such a pleasure. We've been talking about Ezra, which premieres in theaters today. We've been talking to Tony Goldwyn, who's the director, and Tony Spiridakis, who's the screenwriter. Thank you both so much for hanging out.

Tony Goldwyn: Oh, thanks for having us.

Tony Spiridakis: Thank you so much.

 

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