LOS ANGELES—Julianne Moore will do whatever it takes to assure that her career doesn’t get in the way of raising her family. Whenever possible, she tries to get the production to relocate to New York, where she is raising her two children with her husband, director Bart Freundlich. Sometimes she runs into people who are just as determined as she is to not relocate their families. Annette Bening, her costar in The Kids Are All Right, wanted to make the movie in Los Angeles.

“I had said, ”˜I can do this movie anytime if you move it to New York,’ ” she says in an L.A. hotel room. “We were going to do that, and Annette was happy to come to New York, but then she had issues with her family because of camp and she said, ”˜I can’t come to New York.’ So I said, ”˜I can come to L.A. if you shoot it after school gets out, and then we [Moore, Freundlich, and their two children] can all go there,’ and that is how it happened. The kids loved it in L.A. We stayed at the house that [Kids director and cowriter] Lisa [Cholodenko] had used for the movie Laurel Canyon, and they still talk about it. But this affects every [film-business] parent I know. If someone says, ”˜I have a movie for you, but it shoots in Cologne between September and Christmas,’ I have to say, ”˜No, I can’t do it.’ You have to work things around your family. It is challenging, but I have done okay.”

The movie, which opens in Vancouver next Friday (July 16), stars Bening and Moore as a long-time lesbian couple who have raised two children together. Things are fine until the children (Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson) decide to locate their sperm donor. When they bring Paul (Mark Ruffalo) home with them, he meets with resistance from both parents. Neither feels comfortable with the idea that a stranger is walking into a family they have worked for many years to create. As time passes, though, they can see that the more they reject him, the stronger the bond becomes between Paul and their children.

One of the more interesting elements of the film is its accepting attitude of the relationship between the two women. The children and their friends don’t see much that is unusual about gay parents. Moore says that every generation changes the environment regarding intergender relationships. She says gay parenting has become less controversial as an increasing number of gays and lesbians move out of the closet and start their own families. She recalls being approached in the mid-1990s about playing a lesbian police officer. She says that the script made it seem normal that the cop hadn’t come out, and she voiced her concerns to the director that the plot seemed dated for its period.

“I have said it a lot, but films don’t influence culture as much as they reflect it. The reason this movie is the way it is is because these are the families we are seeing right now. It is not shocking, and that being said, a recent New York Times article was talking about the fact that what does change is proximity. If the person next to you in a unit is gay, you don’t consider it to be different from the norm after awhile. So the fact the movie presents everything this way is great. But it is also generational. Today’s kids are living in a world where these things are happening all around them. I actually read a script 15 years ago that was about a lesbian cop who was in the closet. I remember e-mailing the director and saying, ”˜You may have to make it a period piece,’ which I thought was great.”

As for her own attitude toward families, she says that having built one in her 40s, she has come to the conclusion that the word family may be taken too lightly by those who have yet to forge one of their own. “I always disagree with the idea of people talking about building a family on the film set. You build a work environment. When people say, ”˜We were just like a family on the set,’ I say, ”˜No, we weren’t. We were there for eight weeks and we went home at the end of the day.’ The thing about families is that they are with you from beginning to end and through some tough stuff and some great stuff. Mia was saying that your family members are the only people who go through that whole life experience with you. They see everything, and there is something that is incredibly intimate about that. I see this film as being an interesting exploration of those things.”