Annette Bening sounds off on the effects of teen pregnancy and adoption

Annette Bening at the New York City press junket for "Mother and Child"

Annette Bening excels at playing complicated women. Her role in the dramatic film "Mother and Child" is no exception. In the movie (written and directed by Rodrigo Garcia), Bening is a Los Angeles physical therapist named Karen, who is emotionally damaged from the experience of being a teen mother who gave up her only child (a daughter) for adoption when the child was a baby. Feeling disconnected from those around her, Karen masks her pain by having an unfriendly demeanor and not letting people get too close to her.

When a co-worker named Paco (played by Jimmy Smits) tries to date Karen, she initially gives him the brush-off, but she eventually falls for his charms. Encouraged by Paco’s advice, Karen tries to get closure from her past by finding the child whom she gave up for adoption. Karen’s journey in finding her child intersects with the lives of two other women: an icy attorney named Elizabeth (played by Naomi Watts) and an adoptive mother named Lucy (played by Kerry Washington). When I sat down with Bening at the New York City press junket for "Mother and Child," she opened up about the effects that unplanned teenage pregnancies have on people’s lives and what real-life people were some of the inspirations for playing a mother who gives her child up for adoption.

When you were reading the "Mother and Child" script, were you surprised at where your character storyline went from the beginning to the end?

I was surprised, and I hope that we capture that in the movie. I thought the way that Rodrigo [Garcia, the writer/director of "Mother and Child"] constructed it and was able to establish these characters, where they end up going I think, for me, when I’m watching it …I think where they end up is surprising. I did feel that about the character. It’s one of the things I love about the movie — the unexpected place it ends up. You sort of feel like you know the people, and yet what they end up doing is surprising.

Annette Bening and Simone Lopez in "Mother and Child"

So you weren’t tempted to skip to the end when you were reading the script?

No, I didn’t peek. That’s the indication of a good script, right? You don’t feel that tendency to jump to the end and see where these people end up.

What was it about the "Mother and Child" script that made you want to do this movie?

I guess there was a kind of eccentricity about it. The subject matter was fascinating. I knew it was Rodrigo. With movies, so much of it is, "Who is the human being that is going to be directing it?" Because it is their medium. In a way, you are serving the director, and when it is someone that you feel you can have a lot of confidence in, it can make a big difference. I met him. I didn’t know him well, but I knew him slightly.

I thought that they [the "Mother and Child" characters] were all human beings. There was a kind of reality to the people that I like. There was a kind of human-ness to it, I don’t know how to put it — and especially liked Karen, the character I played. I felt like she was someone that I knew, that I had known, or I had seen. I guess that began the picture I had in my mind, like someone that you’ve seen at the grocery store. You don’t know them, but you might have seen them a number of times in your neighborhood. They’re kind of cranky, but part of you thinks, "What’s the deal? That person’s gone through something." But maybe you never know what it is.

Anyway, that’s how I saw [Karen], but I felt that all of the characters have that to a degree. There is also the whole issue of adoption, which is such a charged issue, and it’s a way to talk about people that brings out very deep emotions, that whole subject. I thought that [Rodrigo Garcia] dealt with that in a really imaginative way — and surprising — where he gets to weaving all these stories together.

Kerry Washington, Naomi Watts, writer/director Rodrigo Garcia and Annette Bening at the New York premiere of "Mother and Child"

The New York premiere "Mother and Child" premiere benefits Inwood House, a non-profit organization aimed at sex education and helping pregnant teens. What are your thoughts on this program? Have you become an advocate of these types of programs as a result of "Mother and Child"?

No, I haven’t worked in that area at all. I think it’s very important but I haven’t done that. I think the whole issue of teen pregnancy is something obviously because I play a character that got pregnant as a teenager, that whole issue was fascinating for me to try to really go back into that time when I was in high school, and girls around me were getting pregnant, and what happened then.

By the time I was in high school, Roe vs. Wade had just passed, so things were beginning to change. The movie was really a wonderful opportunity for me, just personally to look at that time, friends that I knew that got pregnant. There’s one particular girl who I always think of who just disappeared, and she was very bright. I had known her since we were very little. So by the time we were in high school I had known her since we were literally little enough to play together.

[She was] a very vivacious, beautiful girl, and then suddenly she was gone. "What happened to so-and-sp?" "She got pregnant and she’s been sent away." This whole thing that still happens, where there’s an accidental pregnancy, what that would be like — especially for Karen, my character, who got pregnant so young at 14, to be caught up in this maelstrom of shame, and how you’re shaming yourself, shaming your family, being sent away, then going through the pregnancy alone, and often through the birth alone, which happens to a lot of these girls.

And then the family wanting to do the best for their children, the remedy was, "You just get to back. You had the baby. It’s over. Then you can just go back to high school." To think what it was really like for these girls, having gone through pregnancies myself it is such an enormous experience, and to go through it as a kid. So I thought all of that history that Rodrigo constructed for this woman was interesting. Of course, it’s something that goes on all the time now. Families and cultures deal with it in different ways.

Annette Bening, Elpidia Carrillo, Simone Lopez and Jimmy Smits in "Mother and Child"

How would you describe Rodrigo Garcia’s directing style?

Well, he is very much a receptive director. It was interesting. We did some press last week and I did a few roundtables with him. I found myself very intrigued by his answers, especially about his story and how he created the whole thing. He doesn’t talk a lot and he’s very modest. So for a lot of those things, I was thinking "How did he create those characters and how did he figure that out."

As far as directing … he’s very receptive, so he is going to let you go with your impulses first. And then if there’s a little tweaking he wants to do here and there, he does. I’ve heard him now say this, so I think I can say this pretty confidently and that is that he doesn’t want to get in anybody’s way. And that’s the very interesting thing about good directors, when I think about people that I work with that are well-known people, that’s generally what they do.

I kind of thought when I started in movies that I would come in and [directors] would just walk in and boss everyone around, like, "You go here and you sit there," but generally, they watch. They are very receptive to what’s happening, and they want to see what you are doing so that they can figure out where to put the camera, where they can get the most light, and given everything they want to put in the frame. He’s very like that, and he also doesn’t over-explain whatever history you want to create. We had some shared history in terms of our characters and all that.

So he was a real pleasure. And we also didn’t have a lot of time. Sometimes people can do a lot of takes if they have time to do a lot of takes, but on pictures like this, it didn’t feel rushed to me, although Rodrigo was more concerned about time more than I felt, because I didn’t see it as that because he always looked relaxed. I didn’t feel rushed. He’s very chill.

Warren Beatty, Annette Bening, David Ramsey, Kerry Washington and Samuel L. Jackson at the Los Angeles premiere of "Mother and Child"

Besides remembering teenagers you knew who got pregnant, what else did you do to prepare for the character of Karen?

The most useful stuff for me is first-person accounts, so I found some really good material. I just went to the library; that was one of the places I went to look up first-person accounts, women talking about the experience of having given up a child. There’s a whole range of people. Some people handled it much better than others.

In other words, some of them were able to get back in their lives. They wondered about the child but they were able to move on, they got married, and had [more] children. And for some of them, it was just like a battle wound, like they were scarred in a way that they could never really get connected to people and have healthy relationships with men. Often too, within the family of the girl, it really upset the dynamic.

It was a loss for everybody. That was one of the things I never thought about. I always just thought about the girl and what would that be like, but then I thought about the parents not only in being horribly ashamed for the kids, but also that they lost a child. That’s a grandchild. So the mystery of that and wondering what happened and who’s that person out there. Now there’s more openness to adoption, at least for people who want that. Sometimes it was very traumatic and sometimes people just got on with it. But I think what happened to Karen and how Rodrigo wrote her, it is true for a lot of girls to go through that. There’s a kind of an arrested feeling about her life in that everything sort of stopped. She gets older, but there’s something where the rest of her life isn’t moving forward.

Cherry Jones and Annette Bening in "Mother and Child"

Fathers are absent from many of the female characters' lives in "Mother and Child." What do you think about the role of fatherhood in the film?

Well, one of the things when you were asking about the reading and the research is thinking about the boys that were involved. That too is a very delicate subject. A lot of the boys were … first of all, their families wanted to distance themselves from the girl often, and yet there was a feeling of culpability and involvement. They were also going through pain. Sometimes these were relationships [between] girlfriends and boyfriends, a really serious connection, and then they [the boyfriends] were shunned and weren’t allowed to be through the whole process. Things weren’t really discussed.

And then suddenly, the girl is gone, and the boy is feeling bad about what happened, yet not express it to anybody and not helped through the process himself. Not to mention having a child out there. "Oh, I’ve fathered a child and who is it?" And [that] just being shoved in the closet and then going through your whole life knowing that there’s a child out there that fathered that you never really know. So in some ways, I think for the boys involved it was really hard, because no one took their feelings into account or even involve them in the process. They were made to feel bad about what they had done.

Like I’ve heard Rodrigo say that it’s a 10-to-15-minute mistake you made and that lasts your entire life. Now in the movie [Karen] goes back and finds him, the boy who was her boyfriend [who fathered Karen’s child]. I know for me, it made perfect sense, especially for Karen that it took her that long to see the person she always wondered about. She’d seen him. I think she said that when she runs into him, when she finds him. And at first she couldn’t deal with it at all, but then she found she really wanted to find him and seek him out. I found that to be charged, and emotionally, it made sense for me, especially for Karen because she’s someone who hasn’t done those things to get on with her life. And so she’s finally able to do that a little bit.

Annette Bening in "Mother and Child"

Karen has to be compassionate with people in her job as a physical therapist, but in her personal life, she’s cold and bitter. Can you talk about the challenges of playing a character like that?

I know what you’re talking about. Yes, she is so cranky and prickly, and that is in the material … I liked in the movie how there was a similarity in [Karen and Elizabeth], in that they are both not people pleasers. They are not trying to win people over. There’s a standoffish approach to the world and the people. It’s not serving them well, but that’s in Rodrigo’s story. I felt it was really important.

My own instinct was, especially at the beginning you see someone who doesn’t handle things well, who isn’t warm, and who doesn’t know how to engage people. It’s self-destructive, but it’s what some of us do because of what we went through. I felt like that was in the story. I tried to find a way to express that without being too horrible, because you want people to like the character enough to be involved in the character. I felt it was really important that she was somebody who doesn’t know how to talk to people. She doesn’t know how to say the right thing, even though she’s looking to connect to people.

That’s the irony of most people caught in that situation. It’s not that they don’t want to be connected. It’s not that they don’t want relationships. They want it but they are ill-equipped to figure out how to do that, so in my view of the story, part of it is fate, and part of it is her finally waking up to saying, "Well, I actually can do some things here, and let go of some of my baggage and try to be more normal."

What’s next for you?

I have a picture, another movie called "The Kids Are All Right" [that will be released] in July [2010] with Julianne Moore. That one’s next and that’s it.

Kerry Washington, Naomi Watts and Annette Bening at the New York premiere of "Mother and Child"

"Mother and Child" has three strong female lead roles, which we don’t see too often in big-screen movies. What are your thoughts in participating in a movie with such strong female characters?

Rodrigo is just fascinating. I’ve sat through some interviews with him, and I find myself thinking "How does he do that?" He’s not verbose. He doesn’t really talk about his process. He worked on the script for a long time, years and years, and when he describes it, he describes it like many writers do. "Well, you know, these things started happening, then she started to say this, then she meets Paco. And Paco was always a Mexican guy who was middle-aged, then there was this guy and he started to appear …"

So he’s describing as though something is happening to him. Meanwhile, I think he worked on it for 10 years or over 10 years, so everything was percolating and changing. He has a very pragmatic description on how he builds the narrative. "Well, I thought that was kind of boring and there was too much of that, then I decided to weave in the other stuff." How he gets to that empathic place …

Also the little details about women he put in were great — things like being mad at somebody because they were giving you a gift. When I read that scene, I thought "Now that is interesting." Those are the little things that happened in our lives where you would think, "If you tried to put it in a movie, nobody would believe it." You would think someone would give you a gift, and that’s the scene where they meet and they’re happy together, rather than her getting angry at him. That’s the kind of thing that he finds, those little moments of human nature. Where does he get that? I don’t know.

One thing that I say about Rodrigo is that I try to say he started as a camera operator, which is very unusual, so he’s literally looking through the lens operating the camera. He worked on "The Birdcage" with Mike Nichols. Then he went to be a DP [director of photography] … then started writing and directing. He has a way of being on a set that directors don’t get because they haven’t been on the set a lot. So it’s interesting about him.

Photo credits: Photo #1: Carla Hay. Photos #2, 4, 6, 7: Sony Pictures Classics. Photos #3, 8: Getty Images. Photo #5: AP.