The locally shot drama Rogers Park, which opens today at the Gene Siskel Film Center for a weeklong run, achieves a commendable sense of intimacy in its portrait of two middle-aged couples facing personal crises. It also conveys what it’s like to live in the title neighborhood, celebrating the diversity of Rogers Park and the variety of careers that are available to people there. The principal characters are a failed novelist working as a librarian (Jonny Mars); his longtime girlfriend (Christine Horn), who works in an alderman’s office; the novelist’s sister (Sara Sevigny), who runs a preschool; and the sister’s husband (Antoine McKay), a former musician who now sells real estate. As I wrote when the film screened last fall at the Chicago International Film Festival, both couples are biracial, but writer Carlos Treviño and director Kyle Henry wisely avoid making this an issue, focusing instead on the characters’ interpersonal tensions.
I ask because Rogers Park has such a local, inside feel. It’s interesting that you describe yourself as something of an outsider.
On and off over the course of a year. The initial workshop was for a long week, and then we would reconvene about every three months, sometimes for as little as a few days, sometimes for four or five days. Carlos would have new pages for the script at each meeting, we would read those pages, and then we would improv material, either from the script or by generating ideas about where the story could go. Mostly it was test out twists and turns, to see what their impact would be. Then we had a reading of a draft of the full, complete script at our home for a group of about 30 people and got their feedback before diving into the final draft.
Were there any particular qualities you were looking for in the actors? For instance, were you looking for people who were very strong with improvisation?
I think that’s built into Carlos’s and my DNA. Carlos helped cowrite a film that I did before called Fourplay, which is four tales of sexual intimacy, and I explicitly set out with that film to expand notions of how sex could be portrayed as a transformative act. One of the shorts that he wrote was an absurd, NC-17-rated, over-the-top slapstick comedy that takes place in a men’s bathroom in Florida. I think, with this film, we didn’t want to make the issues front and center, but we wanted them to be key. I think they are a big part of midlife, sort of figuring out what works and doesn’t work anymore for you. And I’ve known a lot of couples that have either stayed together or fallen apart over sex or money. I wanted to explore those kinds of resentments that those two issues bring up in the life of a couple. So, how explicit it got or what the nature of the relationships would be—I mean, I didn’t want to go into NC-17 territory again, because I’d already done that. I just wanted some stuff to be talked about that we don’t always get to see.
