I don't want to soft sell Asperger's. But some of us could benefit from having that insight and passion and curiosity. That inability to read nuance can translate as a refusal to take anything at face value, and it's a valuable quality to have.
Q: You observed people with Asperger's to prepare. What sort of traits did you incorporate to embody Adam?
A: The main observation I had was the enormous variety of people with this syndrome. It was a useful lesson for me, personally, and a reminder that any one group is comprised of individuals. It gave me permission to be selective. I didn't have to represent all forms of Asperger's. I also learned that the stimming, or self-stimulation, which could be repetitive behavior or even conveying repetitive information, was calming to them.
Q: How do you think the Asperger's community will respond to the movie, compared to "neurotypicals," as they call us?
A: Well, I know because I've watched the film with people with Asperger's in the room. While it might take someone else a while to figure out what's going on, they get it right away, and so a lot of the laughs and comedy is from that recognition. And ultimately what they take from the movie is what someone who knows nothing about the syndrome takes away, because it's a universal story about the difficulty and desirability of making a connection. There aren't a lot of models of this in film.
Q: Well, there's a few autistic characters in film, but they're usually portrayed as children, save for the occasional adult male, such as in Rain Man...
A: The only movie that feels close is Being There, with Peter Sellers. But that's a very different tone of a movie. That's a fable, a satire, and we weren't trying to make a fable. The difficulty for me was that Adam himself needs to remind you of normal people. People with Asperger's don't scream out to the world that they have a quote-unquote "condition." They can pass, if you like, and they're constantly passing as neurotypicals, like you and me, because the gulf between them and us is not so huge. And so people don't make exceptions for them on the grounds that they need help, because they don't see it. I wanted to put him in that gray area.
Q: So we can actually understand what it must feel like.
A: That's the aim. The whole central quality of the condition is they can't empathize, so there's something mildly paradoxical about empathizing with them. The point of the character is to be as specific as I could get to where you can identity with Adam, and imagine seeing through his eyes. But we're not here to teach about Asperger's. We're delighted that it has that effect, but that's not what we talked about on set. The story is about Adam, but like any story, any love story, any romance, you're trying to see the world through some other person's eyes.
Q: Do you agree with Amy Irving's character, when she says, "Feeling loved is important... but loving is the necessity"?
A: It's not like I have it tattooed on my arm! [Laughs] But yes, it states the case, the alternative case, very strongly. I like that the movie leaves it open, so the line resonates. I don't know if that's necessarily the moral of the movie. When people ask about the message, I don't think it has to have just one. I think it has more than one. And it's not a happy ending that wraps it all up in the end. It's more broadly hopeful, and more the way life really works.
