I think there's a dishonorable tradition in Hollywood to give the idea, particularly to children, that evil characters are dark.
What children, in fact all of us at any age, find frightening is unreliability and emotional coldness. The idea that you can't affect someone, that you can't see where they're coming from and can change tact at any moment.
Maybe it was my revenge on people who had been unkind to me as a child. But it was very easy and a thrill to freeze up children.
I am the only living person in the English speaking world who didn't have the Narnia books as a child.
What bothers me is that the cinema - what Fox News calls the "wholesome cinema that our children are supposed to be able to see" - is so violent. I'm not even talking about the content. I'm talking about the way in which it's cut.
In The Deep End, you have a woman who looks like a J. Crew mother who can manage it all. Then we begin to realize what's going on inside. Every time I see one of those women stuck at a stoplight with the children in the back of her car, I sort of think, "What have you just done? What's going on in your life?".
