When filmmaker Rodrigo García began to write his most recent film “Mother and Child” 10 years ago, he knew he had a lot to say but wasn’t sure if he had enough experience to say it.



“It took me a long time to finish because I don’t think I had enough writing chops to do what I was trying to do,” García, 50, told EXTRA during an interview. “But the story never left me. I never lost interest in it.”



The story follows the lives of three women (Annette Bening, Naomi Watts, and Kerry Washington) and their personal encounters with the adoption process.



During our interview, García, who is the son of Colombian writer and Nobel Prize for Literature recipient Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera), talked about the type of research he did for the film.



“Mother and Child” opens exclusively at the Century Evanston 12/CineArts 6 on May 21.



EXTRA: How much about the adoption process did you know before writing the story?

Rodrigo García: I had read up on it but not the kind of adoption that we live with today. Adoption now has many shapes and it depends a lot on the culture and the laws. What captured my imagination originally wasn’t even adoption. It was this idea of people being forcefully separated and having to live their lives in each other absence. It made me think of the old adoption system: closed adoption. The whole process was cloaked in secrecy. Much of it was based on shame. There was an embarrassment when an unwed girl got pregnant. But as the years went by, the babies were haunted by not being able to know what their biological roots ...