WWTW Interview: Director Andrew Jarecki (‘All Good Things’)

Director Andrew Jarecki ignored conventional wisdom while making his first narrative feature, the fact-based drama “All Good Things.”

Jarecki spent a full year conducting interviews with many of the players behind the true story of real estate scion Robert Durst and his missing wife, Kathie.

“You don’t have to do this, they said,” Jarecki recalls of the reaction to his intensive approach. “If you want to make a movie in Hollywood, find an article in a magazine [about the subject], buy the rights to it and make your story based on the article. Audiences won’t know the difference.”

Jarecki, best known for his celebrated documentary “Capturing the Friedmans,” couldn’t take such a short cut – even if he wanted to do so.

The existing material on the case didn‘t tell him the full story. “Most of the stuff out there was awful, lousy journalism,” he says. Besides, he adds, audiences do the know the difference when they’re watching a movie based on actual events.

“They’re sensitive to the details of real life,” he says.

So he ended up taping the interviews he conducted and sharing them with the film’s stars, Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst.

“All Good Things,” now playing in select cities and via Video on Demand services, follows the decaying marriage of David and Katie Marks (Gosling and Dunst). The pair meet cute and go on to start their own health food store in Vermont. But when David’s wealthy father (Frank Langella) convinces David to join the family business, the move puts a strain on the couple’s relationship. When Katie disappears years later without a proverbial trace, viewers may finger her husband as the culprit.

Was it murder? “All Good Things” isn’t telling.

The Durst story seems ripe for the documentary format, but Jarecki thought it would be best served in narrative form.

“A lot of the story is unknown. It’s interesting to have actors explore that,” he says. The film changes the names of the key characters but otherwise hews closely to the real Durst case.

“There’s a natural desire for me to try to get the story as close to real events as possible,” he says. “Those events tend to speak volumes. Real life is so fascinating.”

Consider the moment in the film when David’s millionaire father tells Katie’s mother, a humble woman with little resources, to pick up her half of a restaurant check. That detail came from the director’s copious interviews and tells the audience a great deal about Langella’s character.

Jarecki applauds Gosling’s ability to convincingly age on screen through the movie via a combination of acting tricks and makeup. But he’s enthused about audiences seeing Dunst in a way they haven’t before.

“She’s been working [as an actress] since she was 9 years old. She’s been able to reinvent herself in a lot of different ways,” he says of the film’s lovely co-star who hasn’t had a role of consequence since 2007’s “Spider-Man 3″ and has battled depression.

He credits her for the success of the 2002 “Spider-Man” feature, describing her as the “heart of the movie.”

Dunst was able to bring something to his new film that he didn’t anticipate.

“When she read the script [for ‘All Good Things’] she immediately said, ‘I’m in.‘ Usually, there‘s a lot of equivocation with actors,” he says. “She‘s a more intuitive responder. She has that in common with the real Kathie Durst.”

Jarecki isn’t the only documentary director in his family. Brother Eugene is responsible for “Why We Fight” as well as one of the segments in the recently released film “Freakonomics.“ Andrew Jarecki says the family background provided a unique crucible for two emerging artists. Their father was a “methodical, hard working German,” he says, and their mother reviewed movies for Time Magazine.

But family friend Melvin Van Peebles, the renaissance man behind “Watermelon Man” and “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song,” also impacted the brothers.

“He pushed us a lot to have a more artistic life,” he says. “My father pushed us to have a more concrete life. Both influences were important. It‘s hard to be a filmmaker now.”

The brothers spent time working under their father and picked up his tenacity and hustle.

“It put us in a better position to understand how to get a movie made. It’s not as simple as having a great idea. It’s overcoming the incredible number of bowling pins thrown at your head while making it,” he says. “Eugene and I have this pragmatic side. We get our teeth into something and we don’t let go until its finished.”

(Photo: Top, right: Filmmaker Andrew Jarecki. Bottom, left: Ryan Gosling plays a distraught married man in “All Good Things.” Magnolia Pictures)

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