Noah Pritzker on the Real-Life Divorce That Inspired ‘Ex-Husbands’
Shortly after the end of his parents’ 35-year marriage, writer-director Noah Pritzker found comfort in the written word. What resulted is now known as Ex-Husbands, a drama-comedy about Griffin Dunne’s Peter Pearce, a New York dentist who’s still reeling from his parents’ divorce six years earlier. Peter must now also come to terms with his dying father (Richard Benjamin) and his own impending divorce from Maria (Rosanna Arquette).
Serving as the Palm Springs International Film Festival’s closing night film on Jan. 13, Pritzker’s second feature follows Peter to Tulum, Mexico, where he reluctantly crashes the bachelor party that his youngest son, Mickey (Miles Heizer), organized for his oldest son, Nick (James Norton). Together, the trio must find a way through their own individual problems as their family begins anew. Pritzker recently spoke with THR about working out his own familial struggles on the page and screen and calling attention to a specific environmental issue in the Tropical Atlantic realm.
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One of the questions that this movie asks is whether it’s worth it to get divorced at an older age …
Yeah, I really wrestled with my parents’ decision to separate after 35 years. I had this idea that after a certain amount of years, you just grind it out no matter what, whether or not you’re happy. And in many ways, I’m grateful that they decided to start fresh in their 60s. You take for granted that what you really want to see is other people trying to find their own piece of happiness.
Did this endeavor help you make peace with your folks’ situation?
I’m still in it, and I don’t know that I have quite enough distance yet to think about whether or not it’s been therapeutic or torturous. I try to leave the personal therapy out of the experience on set and instead task myself, my friends, my wife and my therapist with that work.
Indie filmmaking is not for the faint of heart. Did you have to scratch and claw to pull this off?
Yeah, it took a really long time. We were further waylaid by the pandemic, but I met Griffin Dunne before it, so I stayed in touch with him and rewrote the script during the pandemic. I was once worried that my own wedding would interrupt the shooting of this movie, but three years later, I was still trying to get it made. I feel both pride and shame in how long it takes to make a movie.
What did Griffin add to the Peter Pearce character that may not have been on the page?
I was making a movie about a man in his 60s, and I am not that age. So, to have the perspective of somebody [like Dunne] — who’s been married and divorced, lost parents, raised a child — that was something that I probably took for granted during writing. So Griffin, Rosanna Arquette and Richard Benjamin all brought a lot of lived experience.
Ex-Husbands shines a light on the sargassum problem in Tulum and the Tropical Atlantic. Did you discover its presence during location scouting and write it into the film?
It had always been written for Tulum, but when we got there to scout, the beaches were covered in sargassum. Tulum is on the front lines of global warming, and you really feel the rot and a heaviness about that. I originally felt intimidated by the idea of a major change to the script, and I wondered if we needed to look elsewhere. But these guys go on a vacation that does not go the way they want it to, and so I quickly realized how perfect the sargassum was. I’ve never seen a movie with a beach covered in sargassum, and I found it to be this amazing cinematic texture.
What do you want moviegoers to take away after seeing your film?
I want people to feel for this father and his sons, as these sensitive guys try to figure out how to support each other through their own crises. I hope people find some humor and solace in that.
This story first appeared in the Jan. 4 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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