Actor-director Matt Ross says goodbye, Hollywood

This spring, filmmaker-actor Matt Ross and his wife, writer-photographer-chef Phyllis Grant, took their children, 9-year-old Dash and 13-year-old Bella, on a field trip. It was unlike any that most kids — especially kids growing up in a place like Berkeley, far away from the Hollywood film industry — ever get to experience.


The children accompanied their parents to the Cannes Film Festival, where “Captain Fantastic,” Ross’ drama starring Viggo Mortensen as a man raising his offspring off the grid, played to a 10-minute standing ovation and won the festival’s Un Certain Regard directing award. The movie opens Friday, July 15, in the Bay Area.





“The kids like to step in and dress up and play,” says Grant, 46. “(They) see that world, go to Cannes, but then they step back into their world here. I was just so grateful that we got to come back to this.”


“This” is a duplex that belonged to Grant’s grandmother that the couple is renovating, transforming it into a single-family home. There is a garden out back; there are herbs growing on the deck and an avocado tree. Grant’s photographs of the food she prepares brighten one wall in the kitchen. The room is clearly a nerve center for the family, where they prepare and take their meals and where Grant passes on her skills to her children.


“I never push them to cook with me,” she says. “But what’s beautiful is how in their own ways they come and join me in the kitchen.”


Ross, 46, is the first to admit that the Bay Area is an unusual address for someone entrenched in a Hollywood film career. The region is not without its share of the film industry, with Pixar, Industrial Light & Magic, and Skywalker Sound all doing thriving business.


It is also home to a community that includes independent, documentary and experimental filmmakers, along with well-known names like Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Chris Columbus. A handful of actors, including Peter Coyote, Carl Lumbly, Danny Glover, Rita Moreno and Delroy Lindo, also boast local addresses.


But Berkeley is still far from the film industry’s Southern California base. When the family moved north in 2003, Ross was an up-and-coming actor who had taken the lead in a 1996 romantic comedy, “Ed’s Next Move,” and had had supporting roles in such films as “The Last Days of Disco” and “American Psycho.” Los Angeles was the obvious place to build his career.


“If you’re going a make a living in film or television, you really have to live in L.A. at some point, if you want to be at the center of it,” Ross says.


Grant’s postpartum depression after Bella was born brought the family back to Berkeley. She needed the support of family and friends. The couple hadn’t been in Los Angeles long, moving there only in 2001 after more than a decade in New York.


“Regardless of what we thought about L.A., it was a new city to us, and we didn’t have that many friends,” says Ross, adding to his wife, “You didn’t have a community in Los Angeles; you had one here.”


To make family life in Berkeley and a career in Southern California work, Ross has become a commuter. He travels back and forth every few days, logging thousands of miles on his Prius.


The payoff is a flourishing career. He was part of the ensemble nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for “Good Night, and Good Luck.” Television audiences know him from “Big Love,” “American Horror Story” and, most recently, the Bay Area tech-skewering comedy “Silicon Valley.” In it, he demonstrates his range by playing a kind of anti-Matt Ross, the thoughtful actor, husband, and father replaced by Gavin Belson, the soulless, greedy head of Hooli.


On the filmmaking front, the Cannes award for “Captain Fantastic,” his second feature as a writer-director, augurs well for his future as a filmmaker.


“The reason we live here has to do with other things,” says Ross. “I think that one of the things, maybe psychologically, living outside of Los Angeles for me, I’m not so constantly reminded of where I am on the food chain.


“That’s my life,” he says. “So you can make the argument we really should live in Los Angeles, because I’m constantly traveling, but we’ve chosen to live here to raise our kids and like it.”


Raising their children away from Hollywood and its emphasis on status has been one benefit of the move northward. Another has been the opportunity Grant has been given to introduce her kids to the kind of foodie upbringing she had growing up in the Bay Area in the 1970s, when Chez Panisse was first making an impact.


Grant, a former New York pastry chef and cookbook editor, launched a cooking and parenting blog, Dash and Bella, in 2009. Currently, she is writing a food memoir — with the temporary title of “This Food Will Not Kill Them.” The book will include 50 recipes, the ones Grant most often prepares for her family.


“They’re overly tested, they’re absurdly tested. It’s the food that we eat,” says Grant.


It’s striking that at the moment, both partners’ work revolves around issues of parenting, for “Captain Fantastic” is about a well-meaning father whose unusual child-rearing methods land him in hot water.


“I would say for me, because I was a stay-at-home mom for so long, it just sort of evolved from that life,” says Grant. “‘I have to cook, so hey, maybe I’ll take some pictures and maybe I’ll write about it.’ It was very natural.”


“The two of us don’t sit down and say, well I’m going to do something about parenting, you should, too,” adds Ross. “I think, in that sense, it is coincidental.”


Ross admits there have been trade-offs in living in one place and working in another. He does not, for example, feel like part of the larger Bay Area film community. Nevertheless, over the past 13 years, Berkeley has become home.


“Because of the nature of what I do, I’ve always been nomadic,” Ross says. “I felt very superficially connected (living in New York) and I feel the same way here, frankly. I love living in Northern California, I love the politics. I love the food. I love the culture.”