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Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick have been on our screens for so long that we almost feel like we know them. And with their daughter Sosie starring in Smile and son Travis composing music for films such as Space Oddity and Carry the Darkness, the entire family is coming to us via screens big and small. So when all four of them work together in a movie—a film titled Family Movie, in fact—audiences cannot help but think they’re getting a glimpse into the real people.
Audiences would be wrong. “We don’t play ourselves in the movie,” Kevin Bacon tells Den of Geek, after Family Movie debuted at SXSW. But he does allow that he and his wife do spend a lot of time filming their experiences. “We are a weird sort of family,” he adds. “We have a lot of home videos, and we’ve worked in all kinds of formats, starting with VHS and VHSC, and then going to miniDV. There are piles and piles of them sitting in our family.”
Despite what movie audiences might think, Family Movie does not take place in that living room. Instead, it takes place during the production of a low-budget slasher created by a filmmaking family. When real people start dying, the family realizes that the line between fact and fiction has become horrifically blurry.
According to Sedgwick, inspiration came not from family experience, but from the needs of the moment. “It was really a matter of practicality,” she explains. “During COVID and the double strikes, we started to think about what we could do that didn’t need a lot of people and didn’t need permission. We thought of a family that makes horror movies together because we thought it was kind of funny.”
“We pitched [screenwriter] Dan Beers the idea of a family making horror movies,” Kevin elaborates. “He did Zoom meetings with all of us individually and not only asked us to talk about ourselves, but also to talk about each other.
“So he gathered all this information, and when we got the first draft of the script, we were like, ‘Holy shit, how did you even know that?’ And it’s not pieces of dirt, but ways of being: language, our ways of relating to each other. He really picked up on something.”
That level of attention to the family interactions allowed the cast to provide input throughout the filming process, as seen in a dance performed by Sosie’s character.
“I spent an embarrassing amount of time choreographing it, and then we spent an embarrassing amount of time rehearsing it,” she says, laughing. “But it’s really fun, and ended up being a cool part of the movie.”
“I think the movie definitely reflects all our personalities individually, and how we relate to each other,” says Travis. “But we’re still acting, we’re playing characters.”
“We’re not playing ourselves,” interjects Sedgwick, more definitively.
And yet, the very fact that they’re making a horror movie reflects a very real fact about the family and its relationship to the genre.
“Travis wanted to get me into horror probably before I was quite ready for it. He’s three years older than me and he was obsessed with it,” says Sosie. “We had some fights about the Halloween mask he would torture me with.
“But as the years went on, I did come around to it. Now, he’s my horror inspiration. He always has me over to his house, and we watch horror movies together.”
“I feel like it’s something that was more pushed toward me,” reveals Travis. “Of course, when I was interested in it, I went to my folks for suggestions, and they were all good suggestions.”
“Yeah, but we didn’t show you Friday the 13th,” Kevin interjects, referring to the 1980 movie that saw him play a teen who gets killed by Jason. “Because they didn’t look at our movies at all. Any of our movies, not just Friday the 13th.”
“We just went right into Freddy vs. Jason,” quips Travis.
And with that playful shot at his dad’s film, Travis reminds us that no matter how much they insist that they’re playing characters, Family Movie absolutely still reflects aspects of the Bacon family.
Family Movie premiered March 13 at the SXSW Film & TV Festival.
The post Family Movie Turns Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick’s Real Lives into Cinematic Horror appeared first on Den of Geek.
