1. ABOUT THE PRODUCTION At once a blistering comedy and a deeply moving human drama, RUNNING WITH SCISSORS is the mesmerizing tale of how a young man survived a nightmare childhood – while keeping his sense of humor and his sense of forgiveness intact. 2. TURNING PERSONAL MEMORIES INTO A MOVIE The film depicts Burroughs’ unsettling, humor-filled and highly personal recollections of growing up under the most berserk and often shocking circumstances. 3. HOW TO CAST LIFE’S MOST ECCENTRIC CHARACTERS As he was writing, Ryan Murphy tried to avoid the temptation of envisioning any particular actors in the roles he was creating. “I wanted them to truly be their own people,” he explains. 4. DEIRDRE BURROUGHS: ANNETTE BENING AS A MOTHER WITH DELUSIONS OF FAME AND FREEDOM For Ryan Murphy, one of the most vital characters in the film was always Deirdre Burroughs, who not only drives the events of the story but emerges as a deeply complicated and fascinating woman of her times beneath her often painfully hilarious words and actions. 5. AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS: JOSEPH CROSS AS A WRY TRAVELER THROUGH A CHILDHOOD HELL Casting a young actor to play Augusten Burroughs would become one of the first major cruxes of the production. 6. INTO THE FINCH FAMILY HOUSEHOLD: BRIAN COX, JOSEPH FIENNES, EVAN RACHEL WOOD, GWYNETH PALTROW AND JILL CLAYBURGH AS THE AMERICAN FAMILY TURNED UPSIDE DOWN This film tells the story of Augusten Burroughs who is just barely a teenager, when his mother abandons him to the care of her shrink, Dr. Finch. 7. NORMAN BURROUGHS: ALEC BALDWIN AS A MATHEMATICIAN WHOSE FAMILY JUST DOESN’T ADD UP For the role of Augusten’s father Norman, whose departure from the Burroughs family precipitates a devastating chain of events for his son, Ryan Murphy right away envisioned Alec Baldwin, with whom he had worked on an episode of “Nip/Tuck.” 8. AN AMERICAN GOTHIC, 1970’s STYLE: ABOUT THE FILM’S DESIGN The next challenge that lay in front of Ryan Murphy was creating a wholly unique visual world for the Burroughs and the Finches to inhabit.

DEIRDRE BURROUGHS: ANNETTE BENING AS A MOTHER WITH DELUSIONS OF FAME AND FREEDOM

For Ryan Murphy, one of the most vital characters in the film was always Deirdre Burroughs, who not only drives the events of the story but emerges as a deeply complicated and fascinating woman of her times beneath her often painfully hilarious words and actions. She begins the film as Augusten’s co-conspirator and confidante but, buffeted by wild bipolar mood swings and an insatiable hunger for artistic success, will later abandon him in a betrayal it takes years of hard-won wisdom to forgive.

In some ways, Murphy viewed Deirdre as typical of many 70s moms who were confused and torn between their roles as selfless matriarchs and society’s feminist dreams of “self-actualization.” He also saw her as the most tragic kind of artist – the type whose work never quite reaches the starry heights of their ambitions. Yet Deirdre was also very much a victim of her own messed-up chemistry, a woman desperately trying to survive an out-of-control inner landscape of delusions.

Murphy understood that he would need an extraordinarily versatile actress in order to get at Deirdre’s particular mix of humor, pathos, psychosis and heartbreak – which is why multiple Academy Award® nominee Annette Bening was one of the very first actors he approached for the film.

“You must be able to empathize with Deirdre, a character who is not always empathetic,” explains Murphy. “Annette, who for some years has wanted to do a picture about mental illness, was able to do that. That is a gift she has. Hers is one of the most harrowing portraits of mental illness I’ve seen. She was very specific, very prepared. She did an enormous amount of research and spoke to many authorities. She knew how someone would speak on a certain drug, how her speech should be slurred, where her focus should be slightly off. She made sure that it was always about the truth.”

Murphy especially admired Bening’s willingness to take an enormous risk in playing a mother who ultimately neglects her child and puts him in danger’s way. “It was very important to Annette that although you don’t agree with what Deirdre did, you understand why she did it,” says the director. “We worked very hard to present both sides of the character because if it wasn’t carefully modulated, she could be a modern day Medea. Annette gave a truly daring performance, throwing herself into it full force. Not many actresses would be willing to be this exposed, naked or raw.”

Bening was an immediate fan of the screenplay. “What I loved about it is that it’s the story of someone who not only lived through a harrowing ordeal but who lived to tell the tale with wit, intelligence and insight,” she says. “What really moved me is that Augusten was able to address his past and move on.”

Right away Bening saw Deirdre, despite her disastrous efforts at motherhood, through a kaleidoscopic view. “I think she’s a woman of great passion who loves her son but also struggles with being very ill,” she observes. “She’s a woman who is lost yet searching for something inside of herself. She’s also a great Diva, full of humor, energy and intelligence -- a very complex woman.”

But while Bening found Deirdre’s inner life intriguing, she doesn’t excuse Deirdre’s actions, which brought so much tumult to her son’s life. “I’m sympathetic to her but that doesn’t mean the story is sympathetic to her,” she notes. “She made a lot of choices that were very destructive to say the least. I think she loved her son dearly -- but she also began to see him as somebody hampering her from expressing herself, sexually and creatively, to the fullest extent.”

In her relentless desire for freedom and expression, Bening also saw Deirdre as being very much a product of 1970s America. “The story takes place in the middle of the Women’s Movement when there was a huge change going on and I think that has a lot to do with Deirdre’s own quest for self discovery,” the actress comments. “She very much wanted to be liberated from her domestic life, to break out and be free to write. I think for a lot of people who feel a creative calling, who feel as if there is something inside that you have to get out, the need to write or paint or sing, is like oxygen. Deirdre felt that this was necessary for her survival.”

To dig even deeper into Deirdre’s fractured psyche, Bening not only consulted psychiatric experts but had many intensive conversations with Augusten Burroughs about life in the shadow of his mother’s pendulum swings. “He was very helpful to me and incredibly specific,” she says. “He has a great memory for details.”

Burroughs was equally impressed with Bening. “The questions she asked were not questions like ‘how did your mother laugh?’ She never asked questions like that. She asked questions about history, about family relationships and dynamics, about hopes and dreams and even what a family means. That’s what she asked.”

Ultimately, Bening came to see her character as a problematic person who nevertheless passed along more than just the family’s genes for eccentricity to Augusten. “Deirdre made many mistakes in the raising of her son, but I also think she had a real knack for survival inside her,” says Bening, “And that might be the one great quality she passed onto her son because he became an incredible survivor, Augusten.”