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"  While doing promotional rounds for The Kids Are All Right, Julianne Moore gave us the scoop on her latest role, as one half of a lesbian couple whose life is upended when their teenage kids reach out to their sperm-donor dad (Mark Ruffalo). We learned at least four things about her: \u2014 She and onscreen wife Annette Bening had easy chemistry. &amp;quot;Someone said `you have chemistry with Mark and Annette. And Stuart Blumberg, our co-writer, said `that&amp;#039;s because you&amp;#039;re pansexual.&amp;#039; But you have chemistry with somebody because of a certain kind of luck\u2014and I think desire too, to make a connection onscreen. With Annette, one thing we had going for us was that we&amp;#039;d both been in long-term relationships and we&amp;#039;re both parents. She has four kids, I have two, so this is not a paradigm that&amp;#039;s unfamiliar to us\u2014it&amp;#039;s something that we&amp;#039;re living.&amp;quot;  \u2014 She prefers directors who take a step back. &amp;quot;With the really detailed ones, you&amp;#039;re like `well, you do it your way.&amp;#039; I really do feel like it&amp;#039;s my responsibility to figure it out. I need to understand it myself so I can do my part of the job and be a conduit. Otherwise, they don&amp;#039;t want an actor, they want an avatar, a puppet. And the great thing about film is the collaborative nature of filmmaking. Everyone has something that they do well, hopefully, and I&amp;#039;m not going to operate a camera the way my friend Mitch can. You all have to operate with your strengths.&amp;quot; \u2014 She helped recruit Bening to the film. &amp;quot;[Director] Lisa Cholodenko had a short list of people and said `What do you think about Annette Bening? Because she&amp;#039;s the one I really see in this.&amp;#039; And I was like `That sounds great.&amp;#039; And I didn&amp;#039;t know her, but I said I&amp;#039;d email her. So I did, because it&amp;#039;s a way to cut through\u2014these things can take months. You send a script to an agent, somebody reads it, they pass it along...but you can get a response from a peer generally pretty quickly.&amp;quot;  \u2014 She&amp;#039;s happy to take on movies with marital themes. &amp;quot;When you start out in this business and you&amp;#039;re twenty-one years old you&amp;#039;re going to play a teenager or someone right out of college. Now I&amp;#039;m in my forties and I&amp;#039;m playing a lot of people who have dilemmas common to people in their forties, like being married for a really long time. Zadie Smith did this book on criticism, and she said that somebody had dismissed Steven Spielberg as being a family filmmaker as if family weren&amp;#039;t the major narrative in people&amp;#039;s lives, and it&amp;#039;s a really great statement. There&amp;#039;s so much to mine in family and marriage and relationships. That&amp;#039;s all we do\u2014aside from going to work.&amp;quot;  \u2014ERIN CLEMENTS Photo: Getty Images "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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