Welcome to the filmmaker

Todd Solondz comes clean

Todd Solondz doesn't seem the kind of guy who would find a dog licking up a 12-year-old's cum cinematic, but then the bespectacled, innocent-looking 38-year-old director has been a beguiling enigma since his Welcome to the Dollhouse established him as the independent filmmaker to watch a couple of years ago. Viewers may see and hear more than they bargained for with Happiness, which in addition to the aforementioned scene brings a light, non-judgmental touch to such topics as pedophilia, obscene phone calls, homicide, and suburban New Jersey.

"I would say that my audience really is an open-minded audience," Solondz explains calmly. "People who say, `Oh I don't want to see a movie in which A, B & C happens,' are not the audience for my movie."

October Films, the studio originally releasing Happiness, wasn't sure it was the right audience, or at least the right distributor, for the movie.

"The problem was that Seagram's, which owns Universal -- I'd been told that they needed to pass things through Congress, and they just don't need an image problem. They said, please take it back. We just don't want to be associated with it. It's not about cutting one shot here or one shot there, it's all of it.

"So the producers of the movie set up an entity [Good Machine Releasing] specifically to distribute it uncut, much in the way Kids was distributed three years ago. In a funny way this actually might be the best scenario possible for the movie. We got a lot more press because of this story. And when you don't have a big advertising budget, you just grab at whatever."

Should viewers under 16 be allowed to see it?

"It's possible that a 17- or a 16-year-old might respond. Lower down the totem pole -- I wouldn't want a 12-year-old to see this movie. But it depends on the 12-year-old. I don't want to make blanket statements."

Complicating the matter is that one of the key characters is a 12-year-old -- the son of the pedophile whose story is one of the most controversial aspects of the film.

"We simply wouldn't have made it if we couldn't get a kid. And we wouldn't get a kid if we didn't have parents that would be entirely supportive of the project. If I had a 12-year-old, I would rather him act in this movie than sell detergent on TV."

If Solondz is trying to sell anything, it's tolerance and understanding. Sometimes that involves shocking people out of their preconceptions -- not an easy thing to do these days.

"There are different kinds of shock. There is the shock of recognition, and there is the shock that is shorter-lasting, a kind of thrill. I didn't set out to shock. That was not my goal.

"The film is very moral, but it's not moralistic. It doesn't tell people, `Rape is Bad.' I don't underestimate the intelligence of my audience, I don't think they need to be told that. It's not interested in punishing so much as in understanding. This character is not a monster -- the point is that he is struggling with a monster within, and he succumbs and this is unforgivable and he's a destroyed man. You have to acknowledge that there is a heart and a mind there, that it is not an other. To not dismiss something as other makes us more fully human."
-- P.K.

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