THE SAVAGES DIRECTOR WRITES FROM PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

The Savages director Tamara Jenkins crafted her script from a personal experience involving her loved ones.

The Savages director Tamara Jenkins’ own personal experiences of watching her grandmother go into a nursing home and seeing her father suffer from dementia became the inspiration for the film.

The story of a brother and sister whose lives are inconveniently interrupted when their estranged father is rejected from one nursing home to the next has moments of laughter as Tamara never likes to bog down her scripts with too much sentiment, however it seemed to have hit a nerve with audiences.

“I feel that people come up to me after the screening and tend to sort of volunteer their own stories which is kind of a profound byproduct of making the movie where people feel compelled to convey their own stories of elder care or taking care of their grandparents or their mother or their father or their wife or their husband. And that’s a very powerful byproduct of having made the movie.”

Laura Linney stars as Wendy Savage, a struggling play write who leads the crusade to admit her father into the swankiest nursing home possible, says the film inspired her to be prepared when it comes to her own parent’s final wishes.

“Fortunately my parents are very much alive and that’s an advantage to me because it gives me the opportunities to talk to them about what their wishes are and what they want which is really quite frankly selfish on my part. So when they go and I am so grief stricken I don’t know and I can’t think straight I’ll know what to do. There are several people who I will hopefully be able to see through the end of their life and I’ve said to them, ‘the biggest act of love you can do for me, is can we talk about this stuff because it will help me so much and I’ll feel like you’re there with me when you go.’”

The Savages is currently playing in theaters.