By Adam Stovall

Jason Lapeyre is a writer/director living in Toronto. His film, I Declare War, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, was distributed by Drafthouse Films and Phase Four Films, and is currently available on DVD and Bluray. The film follows thirteen kids who spend a day playing War in the woods. Recently, Creative Screenwriting sat down with Lapeyre to discuss his film, his childhood, and his fondness for hearing children curse.

What was the seed of the idea for I Declare War?

Basically, I am an Army brat. I grew up on military bases all over the world, my Dad is in the Canadian Army. Growing up, I played War a lot, and I guess maybe because I was around a lot of that military imagery — my Dad had a decommissioned Bazooka in the basement — it was a bit more vivid for me when I was playing.

But the real seed of the idea was that I wanted to tell a story about what it was like to be 12 or 13. I don’t think that’s all that uncommon for filmmakers at the beginning of their career. If you look back on great filmmakers, for some reason there’s this impulse to tell this coming-of-age story as one of your first projects, when you’re first trying to find your voice. So I think part of it was this natural filmmaker tendency. The thing I thought I could bring to the table that was a bit original was to tell a story about kids playing War. Because I knew that all of my friends did that, and yet I had never seen it in a movie. Especially not the way I wanted to do it, which was hyper-intense and hyper-violent.

People have really taken issue with the prospect of a film about kids with guns shooting at each other. I grew up playing War as well, so that hadn’t even occurred to me as a problem. I think you did a good job of playing the bullets and explosions as imagination elements, where nothing is really seen, and nobody gets hurt-

Well, nobody gets physically hurt.

Very true.

I’ve actually been pleasantly surprised by how little has been made about the “Kids With Guns” thing. That was something I was very worried about, particularly in the US, where it’s such a hot-button issue. But I think anybody who actually sees the film recognizes that the film isn’t about that. The guns are there purely as a symbol of the intensity of the kids’ feelings. That was the whole idea, in conceiving the movie, that was there in the script from the beginning: This is gonna look and sound and feel like a war movie, because when you’re 12 that’s how powerful your emotions are. Things hurt way more when you’re a kid. If a girl tells you that she doesn’t like you, it’s the end of the world. As you grow up, those emotions..maybe they don’t atrophy, but they sort of harden a little bit. When you’re 12, man, everything is electric and sensitive. I thought the guns would be a great metaphor for that.

As for the other stuff, the grenades and the blood, that stuff was just fun to play with. It made making the film a blast, and I think that comes through in the audience experience as well. I think people have fun while they’re watching the movie. So the only really negative backlash we’ve had against the film is from people who haven’t seen it. When Drafthouse put the trailer up, there were a few message boards where people just went off. There was one nut-job message board that proposed the film was actually anti-gun propaganda, because it was going to show these kids killing each other with guns, and the film would use that to call for gun control. But these are people who hadn’t seen the film, so they went to town on their worst fears of what this film could be.

I don’t want to go too far down this rabbit hole, but there’s sort of two schools of thought where, on one hand you have that clip of Tarantino talking to a woman on a news program and she’s shaming him for creating these violent scenes that kids are going to re-enact, and he’s saying “But that’s real violence. I make movie violence. Do you see the difference?” And conversely, you have Paul Thomas Anderson saying “I don’t want to do this anymore, because we absolutely have a responsibility for what we put out in the world, for what we put in peoples’ minds.” In trying to reconcile these two, I think what really makes I Declare War work is that you know exactly what movie you’re making. The moment the sticks tied together become the gun, the counting of “Ten Steamboats”, these are reminders that the movie is about 12-year-olds playing in the woods.

On one hand, I’m very much a believer in the Hitchcock tradition, that movies are a cathartic experience. It’s where people go to release emotion, and I don’t really think that a movie can make somebody who is of sound mind and body do something they don’t want to do. But at the same time, I do think that if people want to talk about I Declare War in terms of the relationship between kids and guns, I think that might actually be a valuable discussion, because I think the connective tissue there is the intensity of the young person’s emotions, and how easily a young person is wounded and how deeply they can be wounded.

One of my favorite quotes, a quote that really inspired me when I made this movie, comes from Michael Cuesta, who directed 12 and Holding and has done a bunch of episodes of Homeland. He described childhood as everybody’s little Vietnam, this traumatic thing that we all go through, and for the rest of our life we carry this trauma with us, and it haunts everything we do. If I Declare War is trying to do anything, it’s just sort of remind people of how sensitive kids can be, and how hurtful kids can be to each other, and just to have empathy for what young people are like at that time in their lives. I think something like that is directly connected to something like Columbine. In Bowling For Columbine, there’s that great scene where Michael Moore is talking to Matt Stone, and Stone says, “I just wish I could have told those kids that it’s not always going to be like this. There’s life after high school.” But when you’re that age, you think “This is the rest of my life. I’m going to be the picked-on wimp for the rest of my life.” And then you catastrophize it. That’s the headspace I was trying to get into while I wrote the script; what’s it like to feel things that powerfully? And then to be in that little mini-society, it’s very primal, the way people hurt each other at that age.

As you say, many filmmakers have this desire to tell their “I was twelve years old once” story. Which I think is probably because it’s around then that we start living with some sort of agency. We’re still dependent on our parents or guardians for pretty much everything, but for those of us making movies and writing screenplays, that initial connection to movies was one of the first moments when we started becoming ourselves. And because movies are making us feel less alone, we want to emulate them as much as possible, so that we can feel like we belong even more, which I think is why beginning writers end up copying the style of those they admire.

I think that plays out in the movie to a certain extent, because the kids are making this world that is clearly influenced by movies and books. There’s almost a meta level to the script: One of the characters is named Frost (Alex Cardillo), PK (Gage Munroe) is quoting Aliens at one point, stuff like that.

Speaking of PK! These characters are so vivid. PK, man, I know that kid…

*laughs*

Seriously, man, I knew him. I grew up with that kid. I know the carpet in his great room where they’re going to watch Patton again.

*continues laughing*

When you’re approaching these characters, what is your sort of barometer for getting them to such a specific and recognizable place?

Autobiography and memory! Every single one of those characters is me, to some degree. A lot of it is just digging deep and remembering. I was 12 in 1985, and because I moved around a lot when I was a kid, I had to think back to what city I was in during 1985. I just had to mine those memories for things that left such a deep impression that I’m still thinking about them 25 years later. All the writers that I admire have a great ear and a great memory, and I think that there are moments in great movies where something happens and it’s something they heard on the street or something that happened during a day in their life ten years ago. That was sort of the process I was trying to emulate in writing this script: What are the truthful moments I can use from my life in this story? There’s a lot of me in the characters, but there’s also that kid in 5^th grade who loses a dodgeball game and freaks out and starts crying and totally overreacts. That’s a real thing, so I thought that should go in the story.

Oh man, Skinner (Michael Friend). That story of being invited over to go swimming and realizing that there’s no…that specificity is just incredible.

That wasn’t from when I was 12, that was from when I was a little bit older. But even at the time that happened, I was thinking “Wow, that is extraordinarily cruel.” In fact, I’m still friends with the person who did that, and they’re in the film industry as well. They tracked me down afterwards and congratulated me on the movie, and then apologized, “Man, I think back on what we did back then, and we were real fucking assholes when we were kids.” I’m not setting myself up to a higher standard, I was a fucking asshole, too. It’s incredible how cruel you can be without realizing it. I just knew I wanted to use that as a clear example of something I’d never really forgotten from my life.

Joker (Spencer Howes), with his Either Or questions, is the antithesis of strategy, which positions him nicely against PK. Was this something where you mapped them out on a white board so as to clarify dichotomies, or was it just remembering how kids talked when you were all out playing?

The second one, definitely. I would never designate something as representing something else. I think that immediately puts you in the danger zone of trying to say something important. I try to keep it pretty organic, in that way. The whole thing with Joker happened really organically. I remembered that kids would ask those questions, and kids still do that. I have a 14-year-old daughter, and this whole Would You Rather game is as popular as it’s ever been. There are books called Would You Rather. Cast members would play it in between takes.

But the thing that was super useful from a screenwriting perspective is that it constantly presented my protagonist with a choice. It was a great way to delineate his character, because I had Joker just constantly pitching choices at him, and that’s how you make a character, right, by showing them making choices. The thing with PK that was really fun was here’s a character who was always trying to dodge the choice, he wanted to have his cake and eat it too. That handed me my climax, because at the end of the movie I knew I had to put him in a situation where he couldn’t have both, he had to choose. Joker is kind of the lynch-pin that sort of makes the movie, or at least the structure, hang together.

Which kind of organically brings me to my next question: HOW THE HELL DID YOU CAST THIS MOVIE? These kids are amazing!

*laughs* I wish I could tell you that I’m a genius-level casting agent, but I’m not. When I hooked up with the producers, Lewin Webb and Rob Wilson — Wilson also became the co-director of the movie — we had this idea that we were going to do one of these nationwide casting searches. We were going to go out and find these non-actors, these actual bullies and nerds and girls. We went to a casting agent and told her this is what we want to do, can you help us do this? This casting agent, god bless her, said, “I know this sounds like a good idea, and I know you guys are really excited about this, but I have these kids for you. I promise you. Let me do a couple of sessions, then you come in and see the kids, and if you still want to do a nationwide search afterwards, you can do that.” We agreed, and cut to she brings in the greatest kid actors. I guess because Toronto is a vibrant production center and there’s a lot of children’s programming here, these kids were very experienced. There was a broad range of experience, but they had been trained and they were all professionals. Between two casting sessions, we found the whole cast. We saw maybe a total of thirty actors, to get our final twelve. So yeah, it was Stephanie Gorin, a great casting agent who does movies and TV.

Getting back to writing: What is your process? Do you write every day? Are you a nocturnal writer? Walk me through how you write a script, and how you decide what to write.

I’m a real disciple of McKee. His book Story is kind of my bible. The process he outlines in that book is really how I work.

I really try to be disciplined about it, I treat it like a job. My daughter is older now, so generally speaking I can get in a good work day. But it’s a process of research and note-taking that builds up to a step-outline, which is then reworked and eventually leads to a treatment which is between 60 and 100 pages, and from there I write the script. So, dialogue comes last.

I love that at the very beginning of that process, the script is so contained and such a short thing that it’s very easy to manipulate, and it doesn’t become this very big unwieldy thing until the very end. That’s what works for me.

How long would you say this took you from concept to finished draft?

This script is an unusual case. I wrote it in 2002. So, from initial concept to finished draft, and this is atypical, it was probably a six-month thing. I really took my time with it, because it was so autobiographical. If I am writing on assignment, I take about eight weeks. This was six months.

Also, at the time I wrote it, this was going to be my first film as a director. But then, the script took ten years to get made. Over the course of ten years there were other drafts, but only one nuts-and-bolts rewrite. The rest were just kind of polishes.

Is there anything you lost over the years that you miss, or something that only exists in the movie because of how long it took that made you happy it took this long?

The one sort of significant rewrite was just kind of a character and structure polish. I consider myself lucky to have made 95% of the film as I originally envisioned. And here’s the thing: I also very consciously wrote this script as a low-budget independent feature. Here’s something you can shoot in the woods with no lights, and in essentially one location, because in the woods you can just turn 15 degrees it’s like you’re in a new location. It was very limited in scope from the get-go, which is one of the reasons we were able to make it so quickly and inexpensively. It’s pretty much exactly what I was hoping for.

If you can say, what was the budget and the schedule?

I have been asked to not discuss the budget, but I will happily tell you about the schedule. It was a twenty-day shoot, and it relied entirely on twenty straight days of good weather. In the summer, generally speaking, Toronto is like LA, it’s pretty consistently sunny. We had one day of rain where we got rained out, so it was a twenty-one-day shoot, altogether.

Well, and working with young actors, your entire cast is minors, how did you manage to navigate the strict regulations on that?

We were entirely above the board with everything. There are legal implications of shooting with minors, and there are craft implications. The legal implications are that in Ontario, it’s actually a provincial rule: You can only shoot 8 hours a day with a kid. The way we got around that was because we had a large cast and kids have scenes with different kids, we would stagger the shoot. We would bring one team of kids for one part of the day, then another team of kids for the other part of the day. So we were still shooting 12 hour days, but no kid was shooting more than 8.

The craft implications, and this is probably the most common question we get asked about this film, is “How did you get these performances out of these kids?” Honestly, there’s no secret to it. We treated them respectfully and we didn’t patronize them. We treated them as actors, and they had every capability that an adult actor has. I might argue that they have more. When you’re 12, 13, 14 years old, as these kids were, pretending is second-nature. Your ability to disappear into your imagination is way more powerful when you’re that age than when you’re 25 or 35 or 45. On top of that, you know how a kid’s mind works. These kids had all memorized the entire script, they knew each other’s lines. Their powers of memory were staggering. These kids came to fucking play, man. Their enthusiasm and their dedication was super infectious.

A friend of mine was in a movie where he had to share a bunch of scenes with a child actor, and he went to the kid and said, “I have to say some really bad things to you, and I’m sorry for it. I want you to know I don’t mean them,” and the kid just looked at him and responded, “Yeah, man, it’s acting.”

*laughs* Yeah, like the kid would think it’s real life. It wasn’t just our approach to dealing with actors, but it was our approach to the whole story: Let’s stop patronizing kids for a moment.

That was a motivating factor in the script as well; it seemed like the 90s and the 2000s were very bad times for films about children. There was a massive rise in movies for children. Pixar, which is a studio that I love, had this unfortunate side-effect of creating this colossal industry of movies for children that played down to children and patronized them. I wasn’t seeing Stand By Me or The Goonies or Monster Squad, which are all movies for kids, but also about kids and respectful of kids and not patronizing them, but treating them as the humans that they are. That was another reason I wanted to write the script, because I felt it was time for another movie that portrayed kids as they actually are, and not as some versions that lazy screenwriters sometimes portray.

Yes! I interviewed Wes Anderson for Fantastic Mr. Fox, and there’s a part in that movie where Mrs. Fox says to Mr. Fox, “I love you, but I should never have married you.” I told Wes that I was surprised he would put a moment like that in a kids movie, and he said that he felt kids were far more sophisticated than we tend to give them credit for being.

Wes Anderson wrote Rushmore, one of the great movies about children. Kids aren’t dumber, they just think differently. So that’s your challenge as a writer, give them an opportunity to come at it in their own way. An adult is going to hear that line, “I love you, but I shouldn’t have married you” and they’ll have that life experience. But a kid, even though they don’t have that life experience, is still gonna get a ton of meaning out of that.

Kids have that ability to see things in black-and-white, whereas adults will tell them that the world is all nuances and shades of grey, and they’ll hold this as a reason why kids can’t understand what’s happening around them and why kids are lesser for it. But kids are incredibly perceptive, and they have a great deal of empathy to go along with that. They know that when she doesn’t love you, it means she doesn’t love you and it’s the worst thing ever…but then Thursday happens!

*laughs* Exactly, exactly. I think that’s also unique to being a kid, that sense of timelessness. That was another part of making I Declare War, I wanted the film to feel hermetically sealed. It was any day, anywhere. There was a sense of a reset button being hit at the end of the day, almost. That’s what it feels like when you’re a kid, especially during the summer. It could be any day. It could be after school.

JJ Abrams said that when he was developing Super 8, he wanted to just make a movie about kids running around making a little movie with their Super 8 camera. It was Spielberg who said it needed more, it needed the alien. Watching I Declare War, I kept thinking how the original intention was right, that a movie about kids running around making their own little world definitely works on its own.

And let me ask you this: What is the scene from Super 8 that everyone remembers? Is it the scene where the alien climbs out of the train? No, it’s the scene where Elle Fanning accidentally gives a heart-breaking performance that blows everyone’s mind on the train platform. That movie came out just before we started shooting, and I asked my cinematographer and producer and co-director to go see it, because that’s a great example of a movie that’s about children but did not patronize them. Elle Fanning’s performance in that movie makes me weep, she’s so incredible in that film. That movie’s fantastic.

Going back to what you were talking about in writing the kids as kids, did you have them stick to the script as written, or did you kind of let them improvise and see what they’d come up in the scene?

I’m a big believer in the script being the foundation of the movie. I know that there are filmmakers who can make great films in other ways, but I’m sort of from the Billy Wilder school. If you have a mediocre script, you can’t make a great film out of it. The script has to be great. Not that I’m saying my script is great.

There was never any intention to deviate from the script. We did actually invite the kids to update the slang in the movie, because I’m forty so it felt a little 80s. We gave them leeway there, but there was no change to the structure or the intent of the dialogue. There was no big deviation during shooting. Your script has to be your foundation. Filmmaking is the most complicated human endeavor ever invented. It is very difficult, nearly impossible, to control it and aim it and make it do something. The idea of trying to creatively reinvent a story or a movie in those conditions is chaos to me. I mean, it has happened, and it’s worked out well in some cases. For me, it’s storytelling. That stuff has to be in the script. And then, with your actors and your cinematographer, you’re just doing your best to capture the spirit as best you can.

Right! It kind of hit me the other night while I was listening to LCD Soundsystem that the script is sheet music. The reason you have sheet music is so that every musician knows which note they’re supposed to play, and at what point. So when you’re writing your script, you’re basically creating a document that tells every key collaborator what they need to be focused on in the scene. And to go further, jazz is where the whole point is to dismiss the sheet and focus instead on being present in the moment, making decisions that can’t be duplicated, and creating this ephemeral, rarified space. To bring it back to movies, Miyazaki talks about how American feature animation is all about story beats and set-pieces, whereas he tries to focus on those moments between the story beats and set pieces to let his story and characters breathe and take on life of their own.

To carry on with that metaphor of sheet music: There are infinite ways to interpret sheet music. You can listen to two different musicians play the same sheet and it’ll sound completely different. By no means am I saying the script is the only reason the movie is good, but in terms of deviating radically from the script in the midst of shooting, that scares the shit out of me.

Which is part of why film is considered a director’s medium. The writer creates the world of the story, they figure out the order in which information needs to be dispersed for optimal results. But it’s the director’s job to then interpret that script in a way that immerses an audience completely in a world that is not their own, and really only for a small portion of their day, but that can hopefully then live on in their minds for a long time.

Oh man, are we going to do the Creative Directing interview as well? Because we will be here for a while.

I do think it’s the director’s job, and this is what’s weird about wearing two different hats on a film like this: It’s the director’s job to get in there and kick the shit out of the screenplay and see how far they can push it without breaking it. If something is working on the page, but not working in three dimensions, you cut it. At the same time, I do think you need that rock-solid foundation to start from.

How many people do you have read your scripts, and do you ever show works-in-progress?

Every project is different that way. When I first wrote this script, back in the day, I didn’t have a huge community of filmmakers to show my script and work with. Now, I have a filmmaker I work with here in Toronto that I show stuff to, and I trust him to give good notes because I think he’s a great writer. I’m definitely not one of these screenwriters who are afraid to show my stuff to people for fear that they might copy it. One of my favorite quotes about filmmaking is from John Landis, who said “It’s all in the execution.” This happens all the time, two studios will have two movies that are the same thing, and they come out within months of each other, and the movies are totally different and they usually both suck. It’s all in the execution. Go ahead, steal my idea, I’d love to see what you do with it.

Okay, so I have to ask about Skinner calling Kwon a “chink”.

*laughs* Yeah…

But before we get to that, have you seen the South Park episode where they’re all playing Ninja and Butters gets injured?

I’m a huge South Park fan, but I’ve never seen that episode. I need to, though, you’re like the third person to mention it.

The reason I ask is, did you ever consider having one of the kids get really injured?

No, because the intention of the story was always to tell a story about what it’s like to be a kid every day. It was always meant to be a normal day, where nothing unusual or unique would happen. It was supposed to be a quotidian story of being a kid, this is what life feels like every day. Even the torture that kid suffers, that shit happens all the fucking time. It may not be physical torture, but it sure as shit is emotional torture.

The story of Skinner calling Kwon (Siam Yu) a “chink” is based on a true story. One of my closest friends is half-Irish and half-East Indian. When she was a kid, a kid called her the N-bomb/ When she was 12! I love that story, because on the one hand it’s horrific, and on the other it’s fucking hilarious. Like, how dumb are you to call a half-Irish, half-Indian kid the N-bomb? That struck me as exactly the kind of story element I wanted in the movie, because I think it’s incredibly honest. This is how kids treat each other, this is how hurtful they can be.

Yeah, once you’ve uttered a racial slur, there’s really no dialing back that moment. Joseph Kahn was talking about why he wanted to make Detention, and he said that he really loved this new generation of teenagers who were growing up in the age of the Internet. They are growing up with a global community, and they’re growing up with less racism and homophobia around them. All of these walls are coming down, and they have the capacity to be a step forward in terms of humanity. So when Skinner says “chink” in that context, it made me wonder where this kid lived, and with whom he lived, that he would hear people say “chink” still.

Here’s something that I only know because I have a teenage daughter. I agree with everything you just said, there are definitely reasons to be optimistic for the dwindling future for racism and homophobia. But at the same time, kids are, for whatever reason, fascinated by ethnicity. I would say almost obsessed by it. All you have to do is go on YouTube and look up ‘Shit Asian Dads Say’ or ‘Shit Ukrainian Moms Say’, and it’s like twenty million hits on these videos that would have been hate crimes ten years ago. There’s this complete fascination with ethnic identity that manifests itself in humor, and that was one of the ways the actors recognized that when Skinner looks at Kwan, his ethnicity would be one of the first things he would see. I hope it doesn’t get as dangerous and violent as it has been in the past, but it’s very real still. Racial humor is big, and I don’t know how I feel about it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the sort of modern way in which we identify ourselves. You think about how we use to use the word “nerd” to impugn someone who was different, but now it’s this marketing tool where you can say something is for nerds and that means that everyone who was ever called a nerd has to go support it because it’s for them. But then it’s popular, and people who were never called a nerd are going because they want to be part of the conversation. So it ends up being that everyone self-identifies as a nerd, and when everyone is a nerd, then no one is a nerd. But whereas “nerd” is a more fluid label that can be applied and unapplied with nary a mark made, ethnicity is a very fixed thing, a way to differentiate yourself from those around you. I am this and you are not, so you can’t understand what I’m going through. So it’s a means to feel some sort of superiority, which seems to be a need that’s hard-wired into us.

Identity, at that age, is such a tricky thing. I don’t think it’s conscious, I think it’s unconscious, but at that age, I think kids will look for anything to latch onto to make an identity for themselves. That’s sort of an unconscious goal of all people, but kids in particular.

I think it’s also tied to profanity. When you’re a kid, there’s almost no bigger thrill than cursing. You talk about kids feeling electric, I remember really feeling like I was getting away with something the first time I said, “Damn.” Maybe Skinner heard his uncle say “Chink” or something, and it became sort of mythologized for Skinner as part of what it is to be an adult, so that when he says it in the film, he is doing it as a moment of empowerment for himself, and everyone is just left agog at him saying it.

Swearing was one of the most fun things about the movie! To see how natural the kids swore was such a vindication of ‘Yeah, I knew this is how kids really talk! I knew it! I’ve been one, I remember!’ So, when we were shooting, when the kids swore, it was like listening to music, the way those kids swore. Such natural swearers. Swearists?

Do you remember the movie Can’t Hardly Wait?

I do. I don’t think I remember it well, though.

There’s a story where the people who made it went to a high school football game to reacquaint themselves with how teenagers talk, and they left at halftime because they had to make a PG-13 movie and thus couldn’t use any of what they were hearing.

*laughs* I think that’s such bullshit. I love how teenagers talk. Especially as a writer, words are like my hobby. To see kids playing with language, it’s like seeing them play with a toy. To see kids take out these toys they couldn’t play with around their parents, was such a joy.

My daughter and my wife are really into this as well, we’re constantly fucking with words. Anytime we say a sentence with two words that sound similar, we’ll combine them. We are a family of fucking geeks.

To go back to your comment about filmmakers wanting to make something that reflects their experience growing up: I was talking with Scott Neustadter, who co-wrote The Spectacular Now with Michael Weber, and he said that they were at a library in Oklahoma on a location-scout, and they asked one of the female students what her favorite high school movie was, and she responded “The Harry Potter movies.” They both were just like, “How is that in any way representative of your experience in high school???”

Hey man, there’s a lot in there.

There is! But as you were saying, every so often a bunch of movies about the same thing come out in a very compact span of time, and now we’re seeing your movie and The Spectacular Now and The Way Way Back and The Kings of Summer, all these coming-of-age movies that seek to honor the grounded experience, rather than heighten it with these incredible metaphors.

It’s what John Hughes did back in the 80s. It’s making a movie that honors the experience, because he remembered. That’s all you have to do, just remember how it felt. I remember when I was twelve years old, I heard an adult describe their childhood as “the golden years”. And even at the age of twelve, I was able to call bullshit on that and think “What are you talking about, man? This is a super stressful, super anxious time. I never know what the right thing to say is, and I’m never sure what to do, and I don’t know who I am.” So I made a promise to myself that when I grew up I would never call my childhood “the golden years”. That was definitely one of the impetuses behind writing I Declare War, to tell a story about how it actually feels.

Last year, I went with my Dad down to where he grew up. We were driving around, and he’s telling me about how when he grew up, there was this massive river that he would play near. But then he went back there one time with his Dad, and saw it was just this little creek. It’s strange and universal, having these great mythological things destroyed because the lens of childhood is removed and you can see the real thing as it actually is. We have the idea of these golden years, and then the realization of what the crushing reality is.

I think you summed it up really well. That’s one of the reasons why kids feel things as intensely as they do, because they don’t have that thirty-year context in which to put childhood. When you’re twelve, you can’t even remember past being four, right? So you just have this tiny little window to see life through, and when you just have this tiny little window, things seem a lot bigger and more important than they are.

The real crime for me, though, is…this is tricky, because it’s a double-edged sword. When you’re an adult, you have all these pressures and responsibilities, you think back on being a kid and you do realize that there was a certain freedom there that you didn’t appreciate at the time. At the same time, I think it’s wrong to forget about all the stresses that you do have as a kid. Again, it’s just a matter of ‘kids aren’t dumber, they just think differently and feel differently.’ If the movie can sort of remind people of that, then maybe that’s one good thing about people seeing it.