Jennifer Merin Interviews Tim Kirkman Loggerheads Directed and co-written by Tim ...

Interviews Tim Kirkman

Loggerheads

Directed and co-written by Tim Kirkman

In Loggerheads, writer-director Tim Kirkman shows us how one event-the adoption of a baby boy born out of wedlock in North Carolina during the 1960s-troubles the lives of three pairs of people: Grace, the unwed birthmother (Bonnie Hunt) and her mother (Michael Learned); Mark, the son who is now a young man with HIV (Kip Pardue), and George, his lover (Michael Kelly); and Elizabeth and Robert, the adoptive parents (Tess Harper and Chris Sarandon).

Kirkman hails from North Carolina, was raised in an adoptive family (he's his parents' youngest and only birth child-the accident, he says, that came along after his parents adopted his brother and sister), and he's gay. So, in Loggerheads, he's dealing with subjects he knows.

Kirkman's first film, Dear Jesse, listed by New York Press as one of the ten best films of 1998, is a compelling documentary letter to Jesse Helms, pointedly challenging North Carolina's conservative, homophobic senator about his politics.

Loggerheads is also set in North Carolina, a state where laws are very rigid regarding adoption records, and it's extremely difficult for birthparents to find a child they'd given up for adoption, and conversely for adopted children to find their birthparents.

Kirkman: While I was filming Dear Jesse, I interviewed two wonderful North Carolina women who'd formed a PAC called MAJIC (Mothers Against Jesse in Congress), following the loss of their sons to HIV. Both their sons were named Mark, and that's the name I gave to the boy in Loggerheads. These women introduced me to Mark's birthmother, whose true story is the basis for the script.

Merin: How does Loggerheads differ from the true story?

Kirkman: I omitted some elements, events are sometimes shown out of sequence, and there are time lapses. And, I made some story changes because some things that actually happened to the birthmother-let's call her Grace-were just too cruel, and I didn't want to put that out into the world.

Merin: Loggerheads seems almost Rashomon-like. Did you use the Kurosawa film as a model?

Kirkman: Unlike Rashomon, which shows how three characters interpreted a single event they experienced simultaneously, in Loggerheads the characters' experiences derived from the event-the adoption-didn't occur concurrently. So, their individual stories play off each other, impact on each other in a different way. At times, they're shown out of sequence. The stories are easy to follow, but the script actually has a pretty complex structure.

For the first three years I was writing it, I thought the film should be just two stories-those of the birthmother and son. It never occurred to me to include the adoptive parents' point of view, probably in part because the real life adoptive parents seemed so cruel, and their point of view felt foreign to me-which was absurd, because I grew up in an adoptive family and their point of view was my life (although I was the birth child in my family, and when I eventually came out, my parents understood my homosexuality and they've become my hometown's gay pride parade of two). But the script for Loggerheads felt incomplete until I realized-and this just happened one day while I was reviewing adoption literature and it referred to the "adoption triad"-that it was essential to tell the three stories.

Merin: It's hard for the audience to choose sides but there is plenty of drama in the film. How did you accomplish this?

Kirkman: . . . Each of the characters had a specific time in their lives when they'd had to make a crucial decision. I had several options for dramatizing their decisions. I could have shown the teen pregnancy, and how it was to be in that home for unwed mothers, or the birthmother signing away her son, or the conflict between the artistic, free-thinking son and his Bible Belt adoptive parents-and the whole range of events surrounding the adoption and the years that followed it. But, in general, I don't like movies that try to show too much, where the overall scope is so broad that the individual sequences seem truncated in a really unsatisfying way. So I chose one decision for each to be the pivotal point for their story: For Grace, it's when she commits to finding her son. For Mark, it's trusting George and staying with him instead of running away. For Elizabeth, the adoptive mother, it's turning away from the hypocrisy of her relationship with her husband and towards the truth of her own emotions. Defining those peak moments helped structure the stories, and the film-and I think those moments challenge the audience to think about what their own prejudices might be and what they would do if they were in the characters' shoes. I want the audience to be moved, but I also want them to think. I don't want my movies to be a monologue?