John Cameron Mitchell :: Rabbit Hole's unlikely director

"I lost a brother when I was a teenager," John Cameron Mitchell says. "He was the same age as the character in this film."

I'd love to report that a moment of levity followed this ballast, but none comes. Aaron Eckhart will regale the assembled press corps with tales of Nicole Kidman walking the streets around their homey Rabbit Hole location in Queens wearing her pajamas. "Not my pajamas, Kidman cries out in mock horror, "my Ugg boots." But that moment comes later. Right now there is only heaviness.

Welcome to the new John Cameron Mitchell. The 47-year-old Texan has gone deep before--race and gender in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, sexual power dynamics in Shortbus--but there's always been a punchline.

Playing it straight

Today, much like the prestige picture he's selling, the auteur is playing it straight. "There wasn't a lot of grief counseling that was really part of the culture," he continues of his childhood in El Paso. "We had religion and it was about moving on and letting go before you were really ready to, so it was books and it was stories that helped me through that. I realized when I read David's adaptation of his own Pulitzer Prize-winning play that it was some unfinished business for me."

"Puuu-lit-zeeer..." the aforementioned David Lindsay-Abaire repeats, dragging out each syllable, and finally breaking the ice. "I don't know if you heard that," he jokes about the prize awarded to his play Rabbit Hole, which he adapted for the screen. That Broadway run also garnered actress Cynthia Nixon a 2006 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play. "I was going to wear it today," Lindsay-Abaire continues of his own 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, "but I thought it might be a little much."

A terrifying subject

It's hard to compete with a mega-watt movie star like Nicole Kidman, but a chunky, gold Pulitzer medallion just might do the trick. Kidman, for her part, shouts-out Lindsay-Abaire when talking about the difficulty of her role. "He wrote about this thing that terrifies him the most," Kidman says, "and as an actor I played the thing that terrifies me the most." That terror would be the loss of a child. Kidman has two adopted children with ex-husband Tom Cruise and recently gave birth to Sunday Rose with current husband Keith Urban.

She picked up the gauntlet of Becca Corbett, a suburban, young married whom we meet eight months after the tragic death of her four-year-old son Danny, and is also a producer on the film. She even needed to drop out of Woody Allen's latest in order to make the schedule for Rabbit Hole. As mentioned, the film, which graphically depicts support groups for couples who've lost a child, is dark, but sometimes exhibits an unnerving, gallows humor. That darkly comic sensibility was lacking in the play, but here comes in regular, 20-minute intervals.

"I always feel when I'm doing something intense," Mitchell explains, "I want comedy. Aaron and I could have, oddly, a lot of laughs between scenes. I needed that because as a director, you sort of internalize all the scenes, but you don't have the release of actually saying the lines. So after their giant scene about 'you've erased the video,' I had to go into the garden, lie on the grass, and just conduct all of that energy into the ground, literally, to get it out. I remember talking to Todd Haynes and he said, 'I'm really jealous of actors because they can relieve themselves of the emotions and release, and the director never gets to do that.' Maybe when an audience is watching it for the first time you get to do that, but that's the great grace of performing. You can release."

One of the biggest laughs comes from behind those closed doors of the support group. Those rooms are something Kidman's co-star Aaron Eckhart experienced firsthand, infiltrating an actual group and telling the story that underpins the film in character. It's a decision he now regrets, saying, "I thought it was a little unethical and somehow duplicitous."

But Kidman gave it the old college try. "I was told, 'Unless you've actually lost a child or a loved one, you're not to come into the room,'" she relays. "I completely respected that because they said, 'It's just too raw and it's too dangerous. It's a very sacred place and we can't let you in to observe.'" She thinks about it for a moment, then adds, "I'm glad that they didn't now, when I look back, because the way that the emotions came to me in the character were through just my own, the way that I vibrate and the rawness of loving my children. I was able to leap there very quickly. I was amazed at how deep that well is and how available it is."

Opening up the play

There's another tool that's back at Kidman's disposal and, well, you're looking at it. I'll stop short of the Entertainment Weekly headline that crowed "The Return of Nicole Kidman's Face," but it seems like ever since 2007s Margot at the Wedding, Nic's gorgeous visage, particularly her high forehead, has been paralyzed.

The irony of it is, in a picture like Margot, the neurotic titular character needed every facial muscle at her disposal. In Rabbit Hole, not so much. Kidman's deep into Laura Linney "snow-covered volcano" territory here, but in the film's very first scene, where we join the frosty Becca digging up her garden, she's cocking eyebrows, making wide eyes and wrinkling that gorgeous forehead that's as big as her native Australia.

Director John Cameron Mitchell was able to lead his cast, foreheads and all, from first-hand experience. The pixieish director, who bears a strong resemblance to Six Feet Under's Rachel Griffiths, says he was able to "work through some stuff while working on this beautiful piece. It was really wonderful to work with these virtuoso actors because as they did their scenes, I felt like I was in the scenes with them and feeling all the things they were feeling from behind camera, and it allowed me to release some stuff. Of course that's the point of work like this, that's the point of art. The Greeks always told us to safely, vicariously live something so you don't have to, so you're ready to when it happens to you."

"I saw it as a challenge," Lindsay-Abaire says of adapting his work for the screen, "but also as a great opportunity. I lived with these characters for so long, and what the play had in its back pocket that most plays don't, is a fairly involved off-stage life. The play is just five people in a house. It's just the family members and the boy that comes into their lives. That's it. And so they talk about the support group."

In the film, they circle up the chairs and attend one. And while the support group scenes make for some Rabbit Hole's funniest sequences, most of those laughs hinge on Sandra Oh's grieving, stoner mom, a character we don't even meet in the play. Even the backyard open, with Kidman digging in the dirt, feels like an opening up and flowering of the material when compared to the play's opening scene with Cynthia Nixon entombed in her basement laundry room.

"It was a great opportunity to go to all of those places that I know in my head," Lindsay-Abaire continues, "and meet all of those people and find out who they are and find out how those relationship start to grow. So it was just exciting to me to reinvent and revisit these characters and the story and try and tell it in a completely different way without losing what I thought was important to the story."

When speaking of degree of difficulty, it is probably Kidman's bar that's set highest. "I don't know if it was the toughest job," she downplays, "but she's in so much pain and so unable to let it out. She's trying desperately to move on and cannot move on. So that's why she lashes out at herself and then hurts other people, and then there's regret. It's so complicated, each little aspect, and that's why I wanted to make it a really detailed performance. I think it's important and I hope that it makes people feel not so alone. That's the point of it."

As for Mitchell, the film might have been healing, but grief is always there. "The loss doesn't go away, he explains, "it changes shape and diffuses into different parts of your life. Dianne Wiest's character gives that speech about it being this brick in your pocket that you can't forget about, but you're grateful. It sounds strange, but grief is a replacement for a person sometimes, and you're sometimes grateful for the weight that no longer exists as a person's weight. It becomes a companion that you can forget about, you can hate, but you can also be oddly grateful for and that's a way of thinking about it that I've never seen put so beautifully."

Rabbit Hole is currently in limited release. It expands to a national release on January 17, 2011.