It’s all about the pie — but it’s also not really about the pie at all.
In “Labor Day,” Jason Reitman’s new film in theaters Friday, Josh Brolin stars as an escaped convict who takes Kate Winslet’s home hostage. But the more Winslet’s character gets to know her captor, the more their dynamic changes. The scene you won’t soon forget, like the iconic pottery-wheel moment in “Ghost,” is the one when Brolin’s character teaches Winslet’s to make a peach pie — with his arms wrapped around her.
To teach Brolin how to bake for the pivotal scene, Reitman flew in Joyce Maynard, who wrote the novel from which the film is adapted. Maynard, 60, is an experienced baker, having learned from her mother.
Here’s her recipe for movie magic.
25 years of memories
For the first half of her life, Maynard didn’t even make pies.
“I didn’t have to! My mother made pies,” she tells The Post. But as her mother’s life began to slip away due to a brain tumor in 1989, Maynard — who grew up in New Hampshire and, at 18, famously had an affair with J.D. Salinger — eased the pain by baking a pie for her every day.
“I wanted [my mother] to have wonderful food,” she says. “It was a gift of love I wanted to give her.”
1 heart-filled page
On page 64 of “Labor Day,” Maynard poured out her heart through the voice of the convict, in the form of instructions for making her mother’s pie.
“It wasn’t a conscious decision to insert this lesson,” she says. “But I wanted to think how to make very physical and concrete the tenderness of [the convict]. The pie came to mind, and he started baking on the page.”
A dash of opinion
“Any good baker knows it’s never about the recipe,” she says. “It’s the crust that many people are intimidated by, and then [they] resort to that unthinkable store-bought crust. You just need someone to show you.”
1 request from an acclaimed director
Once the movie was on its way to being made, Reitman filmed Maynard making the pie on his phone and asked her to teach Brolin to make the pie on set.
“It was about teaching Josh Brolin to have a command of crust,” she says. “Not just to make the pie, but to have that assured look.”
Several hours of practice
Maynard spent an afternoon with Brolin, and the two made three pies.
“I’ve taught a lot of people to make pie — conservatively 2,000 — and he was a natural,” she says.
During the lesson, the two shared memories of their mothers. Brolin clearly took a liking to the new
hobby — he told Maynard he made a pie nearly every day that summer.
1 food stylist who maybe didn’t get it
“I wanted it to look like a pie made by an escaped convict on the run, which is what my pie looks like — it’s very flaky and a little messy!” says Maynard.
“They had a professional food stylist standing by in her perfectly pressed white chef outfit looking quietly appalled.”