Christine Lahti And Bruce Altman On ‘Touched With Fire,’ Katie Holmes [EXCLUSIVE VIDEO]

In Touched with Fire, Christine Lahti and Bruce Altman are parents to a bipolar daughter named Carla, played by Katie Holmes.

Christine Lahti, Bruce Altman On ‘Touched With Fire’

Holmes’ character Carla in Touched with Fire is a successful poet who is living with bipolar disorder. One night, Carla accidentally checks herself into a psychiatric hospital, unaware that she won’t be able to voluntarily discharge herself the following day. Stuck in the hospital, she meets and falls in love with a fellow poet suffering from manic depression, Marco (Luke Kirby).

Speaking of Holmes and Kirby’s performances, Lahti told uInterview, “I think they’re incredible, beautiful, heartbreaking.” Altman said of Holmes, “I said it was like rolling down a hill because it was really like having a daughter suffer.”

Lahti would know how accurate Holmes and Kirby’s portrayals were, as would Altman; both have siblings who were diagnosed bipolar. For Lahti, it was her sister; for Altman, his brother. The actors used their foreknowledge of the disorder and what it can do to a family to play Carla’s parents.

“[Director Paul Dalio] and I worked very hard on trying to flesh out the parents, and really try to explore what that collateral damage is on the family,” Lahti said. “Because as you said, Bruce, so wisely, but bipolar disorder is a family illness; it affects everybody.”

Altman added, “It’s a family disease, it really is, and I thought this really came through [inTouched with Fire] in that regard. There’s a great maturity in these parents that I don’t know every parent has, you know, dealing with it.”

Speaking about Touched with Fire‘s writer-director Paul Dalio, Lahti shared that she could not help but be inspired by the bipolar filmmaker’s ability to create such a moving work about his own experience.

“Paul, in himself, is such an inspiration to me to all people, I think, with mental illness because what he has done is told his own story with such dignity and such pride and such complexity, that you think, well, geez, this guy, he’s bipolar and he does this,” Lahti told uInterview. “He created this. This is amazing; it’s inspiring.”

Touched with Fire will premiere at select theaters, Friday, Feb. 12.