The father in this film barely speaks, and after the Sundance screenings the people waiting for the director were men who could not get a sentence out either.
Cole opens up about why he thinks the family dynamic is a source of both peace and damage for almost everybody, and why a father struggling in public breaks something open in an audience. He talks about coming from a home with two parents and none of the trauma in the film, and about the growth he needed to do before he could stop judging the parents in the story. He gets candid about Robert Machoian walking the actual route before writing it, pointing out the gas station where they stop for ice cream and the hotel where they swim. Cole walks through two years in the Dominican Republic at nineteen, living among people on dirt floors who saw the world as richly as he did, and what travel does to a person’s sense of their own significance. He also reflects on six brothers who all flew in for the opening night screening, on self-funding a film at forty, and on the question he now asks before making anything.
An essential watch for anyone who grew up around men who could not say it.
