To an outsider, the Taylors are the very picture of the successful American family: Charles is a tenured professor on track to become university president, son Michael is a prolific and well-known romance novelist, daughter Ryne is poised to enter a prestigious law school, and on the day we are introduced to them, matriarch Lisa will graduate from college--decades after leaving to raise her children. But when a serious accident interrupts the celebration, the far more nuanced reality of this Midwestern family's history and relationships come to light.
A closely observed exploration of the complexities of love and commitment in a family torn apart when faced with an unexpected tragedy, Fireflies in the Garden marks the feature directorial debut of Dennis Lee from a screenplay he wrote. Lee, a student Academy Award winner for his short film, Jesus Henry Christ, was inspired to write this  semi-autobiographical family drama after his mother's death in 2002. With the backing of German production company Senator Entertainment, Lee assembled a stellar cast of ensemble players, including Julia Roberts, Ryan Reynolds, Willem Dafoe, Emily Watson, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hayden Panettiere, Ioan Gruffudd, Shannon Lucio, George Newbern, Cayden Boyd, Chase Ellison and Brooklynn Proulx.

About Fireflies in the Garden
As Michael Taylor (Ryan Reynolds) wings his way cross country to attend a family  celebration in his Midwestern hometown, the realities of his adult life--a teetering marriage and a less than lofty, if prolific, career as a romance novelist--crowd  is thoughts, along with decades-old memories of angry conflict with his overly-demanding father (Willem Dafoe). Not even the hushed request by an admiring flight attendant for his autograph can distract him from the dread he feels, anticipating a week of strained conversation and forced gaiety that await him at home. The only mitigating factor is the opportunity to see his Aunt Jane (Emily Watson), his mother's younger sister and  coconspirator in his youthful rebellions.
Upon arrival, Michael faces an entirely different scenario. As he and younger sister Ryne (Shannon Lucio) struggle to connect during the drive from the airport to their childhood home, they come upon the scene of a car accident that has taken the life of their mother, Lisa (Julia Roberts) in the prime of her life. Funeral plans replace the graduation celebration, and as he mourns his mother, Michael must come to grips with his fractured relationship with his father. Despite her absence, Michael learns more about his mother, forges closer relationships with his wife, sister and aunt, and in the process, gains a greater understanding of what it means to love as an adult.
Fireflies in the Garden is told from Michael's viewpoint in scenes alternating between vivid memories of tense encounters with his father during the summer his Aunt Jane comes to stay with his family and the present-day realities as they all deal with the aftermath of his mother's death.
"It is a story about a family," says writer/director Dennis Lee. "You have a mother, father, sister and brother. The mother is taken away at the beginning of the film. I think for most families a mother tends to be, for lack of a better way to describe it, like a picture frame that holds everything in the picture together. I think that once that picture frame is gone, things just start falling a part. The question is whether or not this family is going to let things fall apart or do what they can to bring it all back together. In that process, emotions come out and truths come out."
Adds Ryan Reynolds, who plays the adult Michael in the film: "The characters are forced to get together and mourn her each in their own individual ways and also spend time together--however painful and awkward that may be--and bridge a lot of different gaps that have been formed over the years. I don't know a family in this world that isn't complicated on some level and for us to be able to expose and highlight those nuances is something really exciting. This movie is so much about the myth of the perfect home, and for me that's a really important story to tell, and not a story that's been told often."
For Lee, this film is an intensely personal project. "My mother passed away about five years ago from a car accident," says Lee. Then I saw the movie, You Can Count on Me. I thought it was such a great film about how a family deals with tragedy. That inspired me to write this script."
While the story is based upon his mother's accident and his family's efforts to come to terms with her loss, Lee makes clear the story is only semi-autobiographical. His father, in particular, is nothing like the difficult father figure in the film. "Charles is not based on my father. That is the first thing I want to get out. My father is an incredibly kind man. He is quiet but incredibly kind."
The characters and they way in which they deal with their feelings and relationships are complex, and Lee's empathy for each of them, despite, or perhaps even because of their flaws, makes for a story that has resonated with everyone involved in the project.
"What attracted me to this role was the opportunity to play a character that was having a lot of trouble feeling," says Reynolds. "That is something that I can really relate to. When I lose someone, the most interesting thing for me is that you don't feel anything right away. It's sort of like a numb shock, and suddenly that comes out, be it two weeks later, a year later, or two years later. My character, Michael, has come back home and he is most perplexed by the fact that he just can't feel anything. He loves his mother and misses her dearly but he just can't seem to feel it yet."
Emily Watson plays the adult Aunt Jane, who, as a troubled teen (played by Hayden Panettiere) lives with the Taylor family during a pivotal summer and later assumes the role of de facto family matriarch after her sister's death. For Watson, the initial appeal was the depth of the story. "I don't often read scripts where it is this properly complicated," says Watson. "It felt real and I liked the writing. Although the relationship between Michael and Charles often takes center stage,
Lee was equally driven by the desire to represent well the stories of his female characters. "Whether you take the role of Lisa (Roberts), Ryne (Lucio), Kelly (Carrie-Anne Moss) or   Jane (Watson), all the women in this story pretty much have one thing in common. It is about finding their voice. I was a teacher and my wife is a teacher. We have had this discussion about when women lose their voices, especially in this society and in this culture. What I mean by that is when I taught seventh grade I had the most precocious children, girls. Somehow between the summer of seventh and eighth grade they came back and they all started looking the same and talking the same. They lost whatever was really unique about them. This may be a generalization, but I am saying that this happens far too often. In the story of Fireflies, we have Lisa who has found her voice after her children have left. They have gone away to college and she is now finding her own identity. In Kelly, Michael's wife, we are having the same thing. For Aunt Jane, it is the events that happen that summer. For Ryne, it is really her mother's death that forces her to ask herself important questions like, "Who do I want to be? What do I want to do?" Rather than, "Who do my parents want me to be? Or who do I think they want me to be?"

Pre-production
Producer Sukee Chew was an early champion of Lee's work. Chew had seen Lee's student Academy Award-winning short Jesus Henry Christ, and asked whether Lee had additional scripts in the works. "He had a really rough draft of the Fireflies script, and I wanted to help him develop it because it is so beautiful and so intimate--a story that  needed to be told. Vanessa Coifman, a producer at Senator, was looking for a talented writer for an open project and I sent Dennis's screenplay as a writing sample. She called me a day later and begged me to let her produce the film with Senator. Marco Weber loved the screenplay as well and offered to finance the film." Read more

Working with the A-list ensemble cast
"I certainly didn't have any of these characters in mind when I was writing," says Lee. "We were originally going to make this with $500,000. It was going to be an incredibly small, independent film with actors who I still believe are incredibly talented but don't have any sort of name. I will always wonder what that kind of movie would have turned out to be like, especially in comparison to what is happening now with a bigger machine and much bigger budget." Read more

The Production
The script as Dennis Lee conceived of it takes place in the small town of Lockhart, Illinois. Initially, the idea was to find an appropriate location somewhere in Los Angeles, but the goal was to avoid a production that looked as if it had been shot on a back lot. So the decision was made to scout in and around Austin, Texas.
"We chose Texas because we wanted to find cornfields," says Chew. "We tried scouting in L.A., but in every shot where we would pull back, you could see mountains and palm trees. We wanted big empty spaces, blue sky, clouds. In the script there is a big metaphor of an approaching storm front." Read more

The Perfect House
The scouting crew might easily have never seen the historic house that came to embody the film. Its owners, Terry and Patricia Orr, had received an announcement about registering the house with the Texas Film Commission, but hadn't had a chance to sign up for the list. Thanks to the energetic enthusiasm of the TFC, however, the Fireflies crew made that fateful visit to the Orr home. Read more

Conclusion
Ultimately, what will draw audiences to see Fireflies in the Garden is the opportunity to see something of themselves in the characters and their struggles.
"Fireflies in the Garden is about every family in America--every family in the world," says co-producer Philip Rose. "Every single person who has read this script has some kind of affinity to it. Whether there is something in their family dynamic that they can   relate to or something that they think that they are going to project onto themselves as a  character. It is about a normal family and a dysfunctional family."
"If you like iconic American drama, then this is absolutely the movie for you," says producer Marco Weber. "What I like about the film is that it raises issues, and there are some really intense conflicts between characters. But at the end of the day, it also leaves the audience with hope. You see that issues can be solved, even if they've gone on for decades. It is never too late to address an issue, because life is too short to carry it around until it is too late."
"Essentially the movie is about memories, that sometimes we're selective and don't remember the full story," says producer Vanessa Coifman. "When we get the chance to investigate them, we realize that they're not as black and white as we thought."

A First Time Director Earns His Chops
If Dennis Lee stumbled upon his dream team with this production, executives, crew, and actors alike found that working with the first-time feature director was more akin to working with an old pro.
"The nice thing is that he knows the material very well and the script is very clear in its intentions," says Willem Dafoe. "We work very fast and very simply. I think when you know you're on a schedule that exercises different impulses. That is not always a bad thing because you get to it very quickly. Dennis is very sweet and very warm. He likes a very relaxed set, which is a bit of an adjustment for me because I usually like working with people who are sort of out of their minds. Not always, but I am always looking for when problems are going to come. It has been a really sweet family atmosphere, which helps because this is very much about a family."
"He has been incredible, just great," says Hayden Panettiere. "I think the director really sets the tone on the set. The director's feelings and their personality really sort of dictate everyone else's. Dennis has been cool, calm, and collected. He is not someone who takes personally someone trying to help him or suggesting another approach. He is incredibly talented and I think we are all really lucky to have him."
"Dennis is great," agrees Shannon Lucio. "He doesn't toy with you too much, whereas sometimes director's can be so manipulative. He lets you do your thing and if he thinks something needs to be tweaked, he will give you a note. Otherwise he really stays out of your business."
Ioan Gruffudd, who plays a colleague and friend to Charles and Lisa Taylor, has a small but significant role in the film. His only regret about the project was the limited time he had to work with Lee and the rest of the ensemble. "Lee is a brilliant writer, so he  understands what good dialogue is, and the opportunity to work with him on set has been wonderful. He is very encouraging and very loving," says Gruffudd. "I can't work in a difficult, awkward environment. He comes from a place of trust, and I am at my best when I feel comfortable. Dennis has such a wonderful temperament. He loves these characters. He loves his script and the story. He loves the actors and wants to get the best out of us in every take."
Lee's ability to manage the set, despite his close kinship with the material, was gratifying for backers of the first-time feature director. "I have been on sets where some of the directors have been in a panic mode or under so much stress," says producer Coifman. "Dennis never shows it. He has been very calm. He is also juggling so many different actors and so many different things. He is holding it together really well and he is very self-assured."
I think his personal investment is also really interesting. We shot a scene where we had to recreate the car accident. It was a scenario Dennis had actually gone through and he was able to be so collected. Everyone on the crew wanted to know whether he was okay. I asked Dennis whether it was weird revisiting the scene, and he said, "you know what, this is not real life and this is part of what I am putting together. This is movie magic.'"

Filmmaker Bios
DENNIS LEE - Writer/Director
Upon graduating from the University of Chicago, Dennis Lee joined Teach for America, a non-profit organization that places recent college graduates in rural and urban school districts experiencing chronic teacher shortages. During his years in the classroom, Dennis taught kindergarten, 1st grade, and co-founded an art-based charter school for  atrisk middle students in Houston, Texas.
In the fall of 1999, Dennis moved to New York City to attend Columbia University's M.F.A. Film Program. While at Columbia, he wrote several feature screenplays and directed a number of short films. Completed in the spring of 2003, Dennis' thesis film, Jesus Henry Christ, has received numerous awards, including:
AMPAS Student Academy Award, Silver Medal, Narrative Category
Directors Guild of America, East Coast, Best Asian-American Student Filmmaker
National Board of Review of Motion Pictures Award, 1st Prize
HBO US Comedy Film Festival's Jury Prize for Best Student Short
Columbia University Film Festival's Award for Best Film
In 2005, Dennis' feature screenplay based on Jesus Henry Christ won the Tribeca Film Festival All Access Creative Promise Awards. The screenplay caught the eye of Tribeca Productions partners, Jane Rosenthal and Robert De Niro, who have come on board to produce.
Additionally, Dennis is a partner in the New York based production company, Kulture Machine LLC. He is also attached to direct Slay the Bully for New Line Cinema with Ryan Pinkston (Punk'd) attached to star.
Dennis is currently a 2006 ABC/Disney Television Directing Fellow, shadowing on such television shows as Brothers & Sisters and Desperate Housewives.

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