Lucinda Coxon was born in 1962 in Derby.
As a playwright, her work includes: Waiting at the Water’s Edge (1993); Wishbones (1997); Nostalgia (2001); Vesuvius (2005); Happy Now? (2008); Herding Cats (2010); and Alys, Always (2019).
Her screen adaptation credits include: The Heart of Me (2002, novel The Echoing Grove by Rosamond Lehmann); Wild Target (2010, film Cible émouvante by Pierre Salvadori); The Crimson Petal and the White (2011, novel by Michel Faber); The Danish Girl (2015, novel by David Ebershoff); and The Little Stranger (2018, novel by Sarah Waters).
Approaches to Adaptation
Do you prefer to adapt material which chimes with your own work, or material which is completely different and gives you a chance to try out new things?
Writing original material and adapting are discrete processes for me. What it largely comes down to is that I write original material for the stage and I adapt for film and TV. I haven’t written original material for the screen in a long time, not least because I’ve not had great experiences of doing that. But in terms of the material I’m attracted to adapt, it’s very difficult to predict. Producers ask, ‘What are you looking for? What do you want to do next?’ and I never really know until I see it. I’m fortunate enough at the moment to be offered a great range of material, and a lot of it is really intriguing. It will sometimes be classic books, sometimes contemporary books, and I may really love them, but I mostly decline, either because I don’t have the time, or because I think, ‘Yes, I could adapt that, but so could a lot of other people.’ If it’s a thing that anyone could do, then why would I do it? You’re attached to these projects for a long time, so it’s got to be a situation where you feel the material needs you and you need it. In fact, the thing I’m going to do next is exactly what I wasn’t looking for – a TV series, eight episodes – but when I read the novel I thought, ‘Yes, I can live with this for two years. Or ten years, if that’s what it ends up taking.’ The book’s humane and bittersweet, it’s not too issue-y but it speaks to the time – and it’s set in Rome, so I’m excited about a research trip! But then I’m often excited about the research trip, and don’t actually make it until the writing process is finished. I was working on The Danish Girl for 11 years, but only went to Copenhagen when we were shooting.
Do you think adaptations involve a completely different set of creative gears to original screenplays?
No, not really. I mean, obviously you’ve got the gift of the material. I adapted The Echoing Grove by Rosamond Lehmann – the film was called The Heart of Me, because Americans never knew what a grove was – and that’s an outstanding book, very rich pickings in terms of the underpinning it gives you. But with your own work, once you’ve got the material of the first draft, it’s the same process.
Do you always agree a mission statement or direction of travel with whoever has commissioned the adaptation?
There’s always a general conversation with producers about the book, but no matter how much you talk about the ‘take’, it’s hard to know whether you’re all imagining the same project. That’s often not clear until it’s too late. I actually think it’s almost harder to be certain about the shared vision with adaptations than with original material.
Do you usually produce an outline or treatment before you start writing the script?
Not if I can possibly help it. Treatments are comforting for producers, but they’re not always very useful for writers. I find them incredibly time-consuming to write, and in fact a lot of writers now have other people produce them. I’ll often produce a summary of the book for myself, I’ll break the book down, but I won’t write an actual treatment. The occasions in the past when I have written very developed treatments have mostly resulted in a script that was just dead on the page. You start writing using the treatment skeleton and you’re essentially just putting in the dialogue. You end up with something that ticks all the boxes and has all its turning points in the right place, but has no organic flow to it and is flat as a pancake. I’m mixing metaphors now, but you’re flogging this flat pancake through draft after draft after draft and it just becomes a flat pancake with all the trimmings. But essentially it’s still a flat pancake, and you’d be better off with something more alive and unpredictable. I understand why producers want treatments, and of course it’s another way of trying to work out if you’re talking about the same book, but in the end it’s a terrible waste of time for many writers.
If the author of the source material is living, do you find it useful to have their input on the script?
I find it useful to have their blessing. If the author is living I always ask, ‘Do you have any ambition to write this yourself?’ and if they say, ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ then I’m out. I don’t want anyone looking over my shoulder in that way. If the material is factually based and you’re dealing with a historian or a biographer that can be helpful, but fiction is a different animal, and I’ve been very lucky that the living novelists I’ve worked with have been terrifically supportive and hands off. So, for example, I couldn’t have asked for better colleagues than Sarah Waters on The Little Stranger and David Ebershoff on The Danish Girl. I knew that The Danish Girl had been a great passion project for David, but when I went to meet him he said, ‘You mustn’t worry about me. If you sell your apartment you can’t get upset when they put in a new kitchen.’ The one I was most frightened about was Rosamond Lehmann, who wasn’t living but was famously passionate about spiritualism. I used to think, as I was chopping out huge swathes of this very autobiographical book, ‘Is Rosamond looking down at me, hissing?’
Is it easier to navigate notes from directors, producers and script editors when you have a piece of source material to measure the screenplay against?
I guess it is. I once worked on a World War II project, which involved a huge amount of historical research, and the producer’s notes would include things like, ‘Is there any way the Americans could come into the war a bit earlier, because it seems to take ages to get there.’ One’s eyes widen, you know? You’re sitting in a meeting saying, ‘Hmm… you’re not the first person to wonder that. Churchill was quite exercised about it himself. But I’m sorry, the Americans really can’t come into the war a bit earlier, they’ve just got to wait for Pearl Harbor.’ I think, generally, when you’re dealing with notes from producers and directors, you’re always dependent on them being good on script – and that’s not something you can actually take for granted. There are wonderful directors who are not very good on script and there are average directors who are brilliantly good on script: the two don’t particularly go hand in hand. And there are wonderful directors who are not very interested in script development: they just want you to deliver it. Similarly, there are producers who hate development because what they love doing is making films, and there are producers who love development and then get cold feet when it comes to shooting it. You get a curious mix of different people, so it’s not one size fits all in that respect.
Have you ever started work on an adaptation and found it harder to adapt than you anticipated?
Always. It’s always harder than I anticipate. If I thought about all the problems, I’d never start. But I’m never interested in projects where I can see exactly what the process or trajectory will be. With The Crimson Petal and the White, I knew what the emotional arrow flight was, but then there was that huge trunk of material to deal with. And The Little Stranger has been interesting, because it’s a sort of hybrid novel – it isn’t horror, it’s a psychological thriller with horror elements – so it’s not a straight genre film. I can imagine a version where you said, ‘Let’s take this and make it into a pure genre piece,’ but we haven’t done that. The film has retained a lot of the ambiguity of the novel, including the unreliable narrator. I love an unreliable narrator, but an unreliable narrator in a film is very different to an unreliable narrator in a novel. The novel turns on a series of apparently supernatural events that are only reported and never seen, and of course in a film you have to make a decision about whether to show them. So another writer might well have pursued the genre version, but that wasn’t something that interested me.
Have you ever been offered material to adapt which you felt couldn’t, or shouldn’t, be adapted?
Yes, actually, a book I absolutely loved – and I turned it down because I loved it and couldn’t think of a way to do it without destroying it. It’s a novel called The Vintner’s Luck by Elizabeth Knox, and I still wake up sometimes thinking, ‘Maybe I could do it in the theatre or as a ballet,’ because I would love to work with it. It’s set in France in the nineteenth century, and it’s about a man falling in love with a male angel who he meets on the same day every year, so it’s completely sui generis and structurally an absolute nightmare. I genuinely racked my brains thinking, ‘Is there a way in?’ and in the end I decided I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if I was the person who served up the dog’s dinner of this book. In fact, Niki Caro [writer-director of Whale Rider] took it on, and I gather that didn’t work either, and I just thought, ‘If she can’t do it, then maybe it can’t be done.’
Are there any screen adaptations which you think are especially good or you particularly admire?
That’s almost too big a question to address. But I can certainly remember the first time I even thought of screen adaptation as an art form, and that was after seeing Laura Jones’s version of Janet Frame’s An Angel at My Table, directed by Jane Campion. That would have been in 1990, I suppose, when I was writing for the theatre and just starting to develop some original material for the screen. It was such a brilliant and arresting piece of work. I can absolutely recall that moment of thinking, ‘Okay, this might be an interesting way of collaborating…’
Adapting Fiction
Some writers try to include as much of the novel as possible by boiling scenes down to their essence. Others are more ruthless in editing it down to a sort of greatest hits, but being true to the spirit of it. Do you favour either of those approaches?
I think adapting fiction is pretty much a three-draft process. The first draft is working out how much of the book is going to make it into the screenplay. The second draft is managing the structure of what you’ve got and solving the problems of what you’ve cut. And the third draft is taking ownership of it as a writer – which can mean lots of different things. The Echoing Grove adaptation took great liberties with the novel, but it’s such a wonderful book, and Rosamond Lehmann has such a strong voice, that when I was minting fresh dialogue for it I was fighting to make sure I was absolutely in tune with the existing dialogue. It’s very particular – particular to a period and a place, but also highly idiosyncratic – and one of my happiest moments was sitting with the producer, Martin Pope, and the director, Thaddeus O’Sullivan, and them being unable to distinguish what I’d written from what had come from Lehmann. When The Danish Girl came out, I was doing a press tour with David Ebershoff and I had to ask him what was his and what was mine; I’d been working on the material for so long that I couldn’t entirely remember. That’s how it should be, really, that you’re under the skin of it to that degree, but it’s hard to achieve that until you’ve got the nuts and bolts out of the way at the beginning. I’m afraid that practical initial response on reading is hardwired into me now. I can hardly even look at a novel on holiday anymore without thinking, ‘You could cut the brother. She doesn’t need to have that friend. They wouldn’t have a dog, it’s too expensive.’ It’s terrible!
If a novel has an unusual structure, would you try to reproduce that in adapting it?
I think you’ve got to decide what the relationship is between the structure and the story. Crimson Petal is full of postmodern tricks and I retained as much of that as I could, but what made those flourishes easy to fight for was the fact that it’s also got an enormously strong story motor. The Echoing Grove is probably the novel I’ve had to break down the most, because it goes backwards and forwards in time so often, and when I took it apart to try to figure it out I couldn’t really get it back together again. The chronology didn’t work and characters would turn out not to be old enough at certain points or too old at others, and in the end I had to say, ‘Okay, if we’re really going to bring this story to the screen, what’s actually useful?’ So we concentrated on the central love triangle and narrowed it down to, I think, two or three timeframes, as opposed to the twenty-seven or something in the novel – and people liked it and were mostly very complimentary about it. But there’s easily enough material for another film in that book – or a five-part series, if you were doing it now. So that’s the novel that I’ve had to attack most aggressively, but I’d probably never take on anything that was super-quirky structurally. I don’t much like films that are fundamentally a trick.
Do you try to avoid voiceover in adapting a first-person narrative, or do you see it as another tool in the toolbox?
There’s a great snobbery about voiceover because it’s viewed as cheating – and sometimes it does get put on a film very late in the day to plug the gaps – but I’m interested in telling stories and audiences like being told a story. In Crimson Petal and The Little Stranger, you’re being told a story by someone you probably can’t believe, and that makes it more fun, so why wouldn’t you have voiceover? It can be a hostage to fortune: you can find yourself in the edit, for example, and people are saying, ‘Maybe we can put a bit more voiceover on it,’ because it’s the thing that’s easiest to rewrite. It’s also useful on occasion, being able to shuffle the pack of the voiceover. I have absolutely no compunction about it. I like it. I like direct address in the theatre, too. And when you think about a film like American Beauty, what would it be without that opening monologue?
Do you use the language of the novel in writing the screenplay, or do you put the whole thing in your own words?
It varies. The first draft probably has a bit of the original prose in it, then by the end much less. With something historical like Crimson Petal, Michel Faber had done an extraordinary amount of research – I mean, he was writing that novel for years and years and years – so there would be some quirky bits of Victorian detail that just had to be in. The Danish Girl has very little of the prose from the novel in it, but that was a slightly different process.
Do you keep the novel beside you throughout the adaptation process, or do you try to internalise it and set it aside somewhere along the way?
The latter. I read an interview with a writer – a wonderful writer who adapts really well – and she was saying that she loads the whole novel into Final Draft and then chisels away at it like a sculptor, so it begins as a 400-page screenplay and she just keeps cutting bits out. And I just thought, ‘God almighty, that’s terrifying.’ I certainly couldn’t do that, I have to make all the marks on the page on my own, but I was impressed by the chutzpah of it. For a moment I thought, ‘Am I missing a trick here? Is that what I should have been doing all these years?’ But that really wouldn’t work for me. At the beginning I have to live alongside the book very closely. I had to rip Crimson Petal into four just to carry it around, because I didn’t have a pocket or bag big enough to hold it. It felt very transgressive, breaking this book into pieces – and then I had to buy a new edition, because the pages started fluttering away. But I had to keep it to hand; I couldn’t just do the surgery on a computer screen.
How much pressure do you feel when adapting a well-known and much-loved novel, knowing that you won’t be able to please everyone with the finished product?
You hope people will like things, but if I’m honest, I don’t really worry about it. A book and a film are different. Terrible books can make marvellous films, and sometimes wonderful books become terrible films, so you just hope for the best. What I was worried about, when I wrote Crimson Petal, was whether Michel Faber would like it. Michel and I have since become very good friends, but I had absolutely no contact with him until we’d shot it, so I adapted the book in the dark. It’s a mighty piece of writing, and I was so under the skin of it that I felt very connected to him. It really mattered to me that he liked it. So I feel lucky: I wanted Michel to love it and he did. He was incredibly generous about it. But in terms of the public, the readers, what can you say? All you can do is cross your fingers.
case study: The Crimson Petal and the White
UK/Canada, 2011 • Directed by Marc Munden • Produced by David M. Thompson, Steve Lightfoot, Greg Dummett • Screenplay by Lucinda Coxon, based on the novel by Michel Faber • Cast: Romola Garai (Sugar), Chris O’Dowd (William Rackham), Amanda Hale (Mrs Agnes Rackham), Shirley Henderson (Mrs Emmeline Fox), Mark Gatiss (Henry Rackham Junior), Richard E. Grant (Doctor Curlew), Gillian Anderson (Mrs Castaway), Isla Watt (Sophie Rackham)
What was your initial reaction on reading this doorstop of a novel?
I’d been approached many years before about doing the novel as a film, and that didn’t go anywhere. At the time, I was very unsure about it. My daughter was still very young, and I couldn’t imagine going to L.A. with a two-year-old. I also couldn’t imagine a studio making the film, because it’s filthy in a proper, dirt-poor kind of way. And I was worried about the sexual politics of it, wondering whether the novel wasn’t sometimes having its cake and eating it. So I thought it was brilliant, but I was nervous about it, and in the end Curtis Hanson was brought in as director and I was immediately out of the conversation. He brought his own writer in; they then had about 20 writers on it sequentially and never made the film. Fast forward almost a decade, David Thompson – who had been the executive producer on The Heart of Me – got in touch with my agent and said that he now had the rights, and would I think about looking at it again? I still had the book, so I got it down and started re-reading it and about a quarter of the way in I thought, ‘Okay, I know exactly what this is and I have to adapt it.’ It was the same book, but a completely different experience, and the difference was not in the material, it was in the fact that by then my daughter was much older and I had learned that when you parent a child you have the luxury of, in a sense, re-parenting yourself – and I could see that in the book. I could see that the real centre of the novel was the love story between Sugar and her lover’s daughter, Sophie. Their relationship was as complicated and terrifying and as full of passion and betrayal as any adult love story, and as long as I could deliver that, the project would sing.
Could you even conceive of it as a feature film now?
I don’t know how one could do it as a film. We had to really cut it down, even with four hours of screen time to play with. A lot of secondary characters got a bit shaved and I would like to have had more time with them. I could have done a whole episode that was just Agnes Rackham’s diary. But in terms of the main story I think it was a pretty rare thing, where we managed to give it a real engine, but also allowed breathing space around the story. In many ways, it was by far my most straightforward experience of adapting – or of writing for the screen at all. Mostly because the show was greenlit very quickly and there wasn’t a lot of time for rewrites. Some things need a lot of reworking to get right, but I came into this at quite a pace, I knew what I was doing with it and I think there is a freshness about it which would have been lost in revisions.
When I took it on, having told David I absolutely had to do it, I sort of had panic attacks because I wasn’t a TV writer at all, and I feared it was going to be one of those bloody awful, badly-lit period dramas we’ve all seen too many of. I called Martin Pope to share my fears, and he was just great. He said, ‘You can’t think about it like that. You’ve got to assume it’s going to look like Barry Lyndon and have the performances from The Lives of Others’ – which had just come out. It was brilliant advice. I thought, ‘He’s right. I’ve got to set the bar in such a way that it’s impossible to make it look like one of those things. I’ve got to come in with the high style.’ So I went into the writing process swinging an axe above my head, in that respect. Then Marc Munden came on board, who’s a really fantastic director and no stranger to the high style, and he really got it and wanted to make something extraordinary. I remember him looking at the first two pages and saying, ‘I don’t want to do all that Dickensian shit. It’s got to look like Mumbai,’ and I thought, ‘Yes, exactly.’ I was very lucky with it and it was a very happy process.
The novel has the denseness and richness of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, but also a frankness and explicitness they could only dream of, the ability to tackle head on subjects which they could only allude to. Did you capture as much of that as you wanted to, given the sensitivities of TV audiences?
When I wrote the first episode there was a rumble among the producers that the scene in the brothel was quite harsh. In fact, someone said, ‘I was thinking the brothel would be more welcoming and sumptuous,’ and I thought, ‘Yes, that’s the punters’ point of view, and that’s not what we’re making. We’re making it from the girls’ point of view.’ It’s a place of constant danger and degradation, but also the only place they can call home. It’s a place where people shit in a bucket because they have to, or where people pay to watch someone else shit in a bucket because they can. It’s a place where anything can and will happen, and where there’s no room for niceties. That seemed really important. I was very mindful that those scenes should not be titillating. I went out of my way to give the viewer no pleasure in that regard. Because what happens around those back streets is not beautiful. It should be clear that these women lived with a threat of violence over their heads constantly. The other thing I was pressured to tone down was Sugar’s friend Caroline, the prostitute, having been beaten. The producers said it was an incredibly depressing way to start, and I thought, ‘Yes, but that’s the motor, and that’s potentially Sugar’s future: being beaten to death for fun by these vile middle-class men.’ She has to operate out of that place of pain. Obviously I thought hard about the sexual content. But I think the really terrible frankness in the adaptation are the scenes with the children in, because it’s a world of such terror that any time you see a child on that screen you’re afraid for them, even though there are people trying to look after them – or imagining they’re looking after them. In a sense, Sugar is a child: she’s her mother’s child, and her mother is her madam. It’s a world where there are no grown-ups, there are just people who are bigger or richer or crueller than you. The little boy she leaves behind when she leaves the brothel; the betrayal of that boy is almost the hardest thing in it for me.
I remember David Thompson was somewhat squeamish about Sugar’s psoriasis and used to note me on it, to the point where it became a kind of joke. He’d say, ‘You think I haven’t noticed that you haven’t cut the skin condition, but I have noticed and in the end you’ll have to cut it.’ My response was: ‘David, you might be right, I might have to cut it, but I haven’t cut it yet,’ and then we ran out of time and I didn’t cut it. The psoriasis was a brilliant device for a character who has very few people she can talk to and who is unable to articulate her emotions verbally; having her skin flare up when she’s under pressure is a fantastic barometer for her. I think it’s also part of her appeal: it’s disgusting, it’s beautiful, it’s unravelling, it’s like lace, it makes her vulnerable and porous in the world. It’s so many extraordinary things. I mean, why would you lose that? Anyway, that ended up being a battle I won, and David’s been gracious about it since. It’s fascinating the things that people are squeamish about. With The Danish Girl, the one note that I’d get endlessly was, ‘Is there any way we can talk about Gerda not being pregnant without talking about her period?’ and I said, ‘There are only so many ways to find out that you’re not pregnant!’ I was sure it wouldn’t be a problem, but it came up again and again – especially in America.
The opening of the novel has one of the boldest narrative voices I’ve ever read, a direct address to the reader which is both completely of its time and entirely modern. In the series, it’s Sugar who takes us by the hand and looks us in the eye and leads us into this world – which is equally bold in its way.
I was always very determined and specific about that opening visual. That was always how those pages ran – with that set of images and Sugar writing her story – and I don’t think we changed it at all. In the novel, there’s an omniscient narrator who introduces the story, then disappears halfway through, and it just becomes a free for all. Obviously that wasn’t going to work for us, but I also wanted passionately for it to be Sugar’s story. The beginning, with her plunging us into this confusing landscape as she’s desperately trying to write her way out of it, seemed very important. And then when we arrive at the end, so much of her anger and confusion have left her, have been poured into this book that is finally jettisoned and she’s on her way – without us. The ending of the novel frustrated people and there was a suggestion that, of course, I would find a less ambiguous way to end the series, and I thought, ‘Fuck, no. We’ve seen this woman from every angle, she’s had so little privacy. Sugar’s entitled to keep the next chapter to herself. It’s hers, not ours.’ We did briefly talk about whether there would be some kind of sequel – what Sugar did next – and there was quite a lot of excitement around that, but for me, she has to disappear, into whatever the future holds. The idea at the end is that she says, ‘Your money’s run out. Time’s up.’
The novel is in five parts: ’The Streets’; ‘The House of Ill Repute’; ‘The Private Rooms and the Public Haunts’; ‘The Bosom of the Family’; and ‘The World at Large’. The series is in four parts, compressing the first two sections of the novel into the first episode, then more or less following the shape of the book for the next three. Did that compression of the opening sections come from a desire to get things moving as quickly as possible?
That’s probably about right. One of the things that made it a pleasure to write was that the four parts are very different. They’re completely different landscapes, but all of them are dangerous. The streets and the brothel are dangerous, but living as a kept woman and being isolated is also dangerous. Then the third episode, where she moves into the house, is like a thriller – and the fourth episode, when she tries to cross back into those other worlds, is something else again. To have those four discrete worlds to play with was very good fun.
A screen adaptation gives you the chance to cross-cut and juxtapose scenes in ways which a novel may not. William showing Sugar the burning lavender fields, for example, as Henry immolates himself while lost in lust for Mrs Fox. Do you feel at those moments like you almost get to improve on the novel?
Compression is often a bonus. You’re experiencing something in a completely different timeframe when you’re watching things on screen, and there’s something hugely potent about that. There are lots of pleasures in that novel, and I hope that people saw the series and then went on to read the novel, but the truth is that you can sometimes deliver a different set of pleasures. The ability to work that way, not just with visuals, but with sound design as well, is a gift. Crimson Petal was a truly immersive watch because those elements were so strong. Marc and the designers really delivered an unusually rich sensory experience.
The novel doesn’t teem with characters in the same way that Dickens’ do, and in fact for such a big book a lot of it is quite contained, but you obviously still had to make some pretty hefty cuts. How did you determine what to keep and what to cut in terms of character and plot?
It was actually relatively simple, in that Sugar came first. Sugar’s story was the most important thing, and her trajectory with Sophie, that terrible chain of mothers and daughters. That’s why Agnes’s diary, fabulous as it is, simply couldn’t be a big feature. But Sugar’s relationship with Agnes is so brilliant: by helping Agnes escape from her husband, Sugar simultaneously saves a woman in peril and gets rid of her lover’s wife – just as she rescues Sophie by abducting her. You’re so spoiled as a writer to be allowed that sort of ambiguity, to be working in a universe with characters who are so shifting and true. I really loved Sugar as though she were my own. I love that she’s not cold and calculating, she’s just a survivor, a human being trying to find a safe corner somewhere. I really think she’s one of the great female characters. It’s a great role and Romola Garai did a brilliant job of inhabiting her.
The novel positively drips with disgust at the way most of its male characters treat their wives and lovers – and women generally. It feels like you picked up that ball and ran with it – and it seems even more relevant several years on.
Absolutely. We’re living at a time now where lots of ‘nice’ men feel tarred by the #MeToo brush and are angry about that. I think William Rackham knows just what they’re going through: ‘I’m a nice guy, I’m not like them.’ And there’s a moment in the story where you think he’s really going to evolve and become the good guy, but of course that’s impossible. His limitations are what they are, he’s operating in the context that he’s operating in, and it’s a crazy fantasy that he might marry this prostitute, his mistress. Sugar responds to this betrayal with incredible speed and nerve, stealing the daughter he’s not fit to look after and leaving him in a place of abject pain. But where and to what does she take that child? Is history going to repeat itself? Is she saving Sophie, or is Sophie going to be a prostitute in ten years’ time? All that ambiguity, all those possibilities, are there in that ending, which just frays away to eternity.
case study: The Danish Girl
UK/US, 2015 • Directed by Tom Hooper • Produced by Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Anne Harrison, Tom Hooper, Gail Mutrux • Screenplay by Lucinda Coxon, based on the novel by David Ebershoff • Cast: Eddie Redmayne (Einar Wegener/Lili Elbe), Alicia Vikander (Gerda Wegener), Ben Whishaw (Henrik Sandahl), Sebastian Koch (Dr Kurt Warnekros), Amber Heard (Ulla Paulson), Matthias Schoenaerts (Hans Axgil)
I found this novel very moving but quite distressing: Lili’s physical and emotional journey is so hard. How did you respond to it?
I’m embarrassed to say that the book sat on my desk unread for quite a long time, because on the first edition it said, ‘The story of the world’s first sex change’. That’s not the language we’d use now – and it’s actually not true – but it wasn’t something I felt I was especially interested in. So the book hung around for a while and then after a nudge from my agent I started reading it, and it wasn’t what I’d expected at all. I suppose the thing that really gripped me about it was this deeply loving marriage between two artists. I was just fascinated by Einar and Gerda’s shared trajectory, and by the sense of Lili as her own art project, achieved through their collaboration. Gerda’s love for Lili and her willingness to embrace incredible change, and Lili’s bravery in becoming herself – the courage and vision involved in the decision still astonishes me. But also the incredible modernity of their imaginations. Lili is so much more than the product of a surgical procedure, the ‘sex change’. I have a painting from the set of the film of Eddie as Lili, and it always has a vase of lilies in front of it. I find myself sitting and looking at it sometimes, just wondering about her. I spent so many years trying to really understand and imagine her.
Lili’s story has always had an ambiguous relationship with historical fact. David Ebershoff’s novel is a fictional story inspired by her life, and he describes her own edited book of diaries and correspondence, Man into Woman, as a ‘semi-fictional, hybrid biography’. He’s also described how she worked on the manuscript in the last years of her life and was ‘keen to tell her story, but also conscious of creating a myth about herself’. Adapting the novel, which itself drew on her book, what course did you set out to chart between fact and fiction?
Well, the novel tells the story from before they met and takes place over a much longer period of time. Also, Gerda is called Greta and she’s American, and when I asked why, David was very straightforward and said, ‘It was my first novel, and the idea of writing a woman at all was terrifying and the idea of writing a Danish woman was even more terrifying, so I thought if she were American it would give me a much more secure base to imagine her from.’ There’s also a character central to the novel who doesn’t appear in the film at all, and that’s Gerda’s brother. I couldn’t see why we needed him; he seemed to me to be extraneous to the story and to get in the way of that central relationship. I wasn’t interested in the before and I wasn’t interested in extra people, but David had done a lot of research, so I thought, ‘Why would we tell the story if we’re not going to tell the story? Let’s take what’s factual in the novel, and what David has so brilliantly imagined of the factual, and strip away everything else.’ There are so many stories about Lili, but the facts are very slippery and she remains mysterious in lots of ways. I suppose I dealt with that by having my point of view in the film be Gerda’s. I always felt it was Gerda’s film in many respects: she’s the audience’s proxy, and I was behind her eyes a lot of the time. That role is a stealth lead, which is perhaps one of the reasons Alicia won the Oscar for it.
How much additional research did you do before writing the script?
I read a lot – Man into Woman, of course, and everything else I could find – and when I first delivered the script I thought, ‘This is going to be a cinch to get together. The story is extraordinary, the roles are phenomenal, who wouldn’t want to make this film?’ But it turned out that lots of people didn’t want to make that film. There were directors who were intrigued, and there were actors queuing up to be in it, but there were also financiers who said, ‘Fantastic script, but no one wants to see a film about a man having his dick cut off.’ And you think, ‘Wow. You could have dressed that up a bit, but what a reality check.’ So the original producers – primarily Gail Mutrux and Anne Harrison – tried valiantly for a decade to get the film made. The script didn’t really change very much over that time, but I constantly thought it was going to have to, because in those ten years trans awareness really gathered pace. There was so much more interest in the territory, more research material available – and, crucially, the internet happened, which meant that previously uncollected documents in French and German started appearing online. Europe was in chaos in the period after Lili’s death. The hospital in Dresden where she had her operations was firebombed by the Allies in 1945, so her medical records vanished. But gradually archives began to be unearthed and I was constantly thinking, ‘Oh, Christ, some document is going to appear which will mean I’ll have to completely rewrite the second act.’ But mostly, when new facts emerged, we were on the right track, so there were very few revelations that surprised me. The only thing I found out quite late in the day that I wished I’d known earlier was that Gerda was considered very wild as a young woman, and her bourgeois parents were thrilled when she met Einar because he seemed so conventional and they thought he’d settle her down.
In fact, Gerda’s own sexuality may have been more fluid than presented in either the film or the novel, as suggested by the erotic lesbian element present in some of her drawings and paintings.
Yes, and there were certainly conversations about including that. There’s no question in my mind that Gerda would have loved to continue in a marriage with Lili, and to some extent expected that. But Lili wanted to be a ‘real’ girl: a conventional, heterosexual girl. So in the end societal pressure has its way with our heroines. I was much keener than others to make something of this. Gerda produced a lot of really beautiful, really witty lesbian erotica, and I was interested in including it as an expression of her sexuality and of her love for Lili, but the feeling was that we were already going as far as we could with the film. There were other things I wanted to address that fell by the wayside. One of the reasons Lili pursued further surgery was that she was interested in finding out whether or not she could have a baby, and I said that was something extraordinary that we should explore, but again the feeling was that it would be very alienating. It was a sort of madness at the time for her to think that way, but look where we are now with these issues: she was just way ahead of the curve. So I fought that corner, and I fought the lesbian corner, and in the end, even though I would like to see a version with those elements in, it became clear that the producers were absolutely right, and that if you were looking for people to actually finance a film in this territory, it was already over the line.
The fateful favour which Gerda asks of Einar – to put on women’s clothing and take the place of her absent subject in a portrait she’s painting – comes right at the start of the novel. You spend a little more time establishing Gerda and Einar, including their respective achievements and ambitions as artists, before you get to that scene. What were the key things you were trying to set up in the first ten pages of the script?
I was interested in it as a love story, but also a love story between two artists. Two artists in a house, there’s inevitably an element of competition – and for this couple, it’s also heavily gendered. Gerda was incredibly underrated as a painter, and it seemed to me that we needed to bring that out, to make it clear they knew that being a woman came at a price. We also needed to understand that this relationship was full of give and take, that they were extremely comfortable as a couple, and that Einar was happy to do this for her. In the film, it comes out of Gerda having had a difficult experience, and in that moment Einar will act the woman and Gerda can act the man and she can feel better about herself as an artist and ‘he’ will enable her. It’s about love and art, and gender and selfhood, and release and surrender. It’s about personal realisation, I suppose, and about love and art as the tools for that realisation. Stories of courage come in all sorts of guises – with guns and on horses and in refugee camps – and this happens to be a story of courage that comes in silk stockings. A story of courage and of incredible imagination.
I wrote down a line from the novel about that: ‘He’d begun to think of his make-up box as his palette.’ In other words, Lili becomes Einar’s life’s work, the ultimate form of self-expression. And, in turn, Gerda’s best work comes from capturing that transformation and interpreting it in her own style.
When you first see that painting, Einar’s painting, and Gerda is looking at it, there’s a sense that she’s looking to understand him as well as looking at the brush strokes. She’s fascinated by him as an artist, but she’s also just fascinated by him. She’s in a relationship with him and she has questions about him, and at that point in the film those questions are not articulated, but by the end of the film she’s in the landscape of that painting and, finally, she knows. She understands the person she’s been in love with all these years, no matter what name or gender they have gone by. You know, before a film is released, there’s always a terrible marketing meeting where they show you these charts and tell you the demographic most likely to enjoy it. And obviously, that happened with The Danish Girl. The first time I saw the film with an audience was in Venice at the festival, and that’s a very particular industry crowd so you can’t glean much from the experience. Then, when I saw it in Toronto, it was with a much older, white North American audience, and I was frankly a bit nervous about their reaction. But people found it incredibly moving. There were a lot of middle-aged men who would not have been in our subset on the marketing diagram, and one of them came over to me at the end of the screening and said he had gone out and phoned his wife because the film had made him think about their long journey together and he wanted to hear her voice. People who had been in seasoned marriages didn’t think it was about trans issues; they thought it was about a long road, about the stuff you fight through together, and the compromises you make and whether you choose to self-actualise at the expense of someone else. What are the limits of love?
One of the themes of the novel is the extent to which we are all a product of our pasts, and whether we can efface the parts of our past which we no longer identify with, and there are sections devoted to Einar and Greta’s lives before they met each other. In the film, Einar’s past is dealt with through dialogue, while Gerda’s past is barely mentioned. Were those easy cuts to make, or did you consider including some of that material via flashback?
We had an opening sequence for a while that was in flashback, of Einar as a child in his mother’s wardrobe wearing his mother’s clothes after her death. It was a seductive idea, but actually not a sufficiently specific one: the little boy in the lovely clothes, and the dad beating him because he wants to be pretty, felt a bit generic. It also felt like very hokey psychology: the child who has lost a beloved mother and is now over-identifying with her. The imaginative weight of a detail like that in a film is enormous, and it felt as if we were trying to explain Lili – and I didn’t want to explain her, I wanted her to explain herself. So it went. And again, I wasn’t interested in the before. It’s a story that takes place in the present. As painters, and in their marriage, they’re in the now, all the time.
The novel ends with Lili playing hooky from the hospital in Dresden with Anna and Greta’s brother Carlisle, after Greta and her lover, Hans, have got together and left for America. The film ends with Lili dying at the hospital during a visit from Gerda, then Gerda and Hans visiting the place in Jutland which forms the first shot of the film and the subject of Einar’s landscape painting. Both end with an image of unfettered flight – a kite in the novel, a scarf in the film – but your ending, in some ways, is sadder than David Ebershoff’s, which is unusual in a commercial film. Again, can you talk about the interplay of fact and fiction there?
I wanted Gerda to be there at the end. I wanted them to go all the way down the road together. In reality, Gerda wasn’t there at the end, she’d actually remarried – a marriage that didn’t last very long, a rebound. But she and Lili were still very connected. Lili was going to come and stay with Gerda to recuperate when she came out of hospital, and there’s a story – I can’t remember if it’s in Man into Woman or in another account – that Gerda was preparing the room for Lili and suddenly felt the air go cold… and she knew what had happened. So I felt that they still loved one another, that they were still taking care of one another and were still one another’s primary emotional connection, and I wanted to honour that. The question of whether Lili would die in the film or not was really fraught, because on the one hand I was worried about the hetero-normative ending where the LGBT character dies and the ‘straight’ character gets a boyfriend, but on the other hand I wanted to be honest about Lili’s courage and the fact that, even though she lived, really lived to the fullest degree, the surgery did kill her. They had friends who thought that the surgeon should have been prosecuted; who thought that she was murdered, essentially, by surgeons who had gone too far. The type of surgery Lili was going through was performed by people who learned their trade on the battlefields of the First World War, and I think she knew that she was risking her life. And in the end, I thought it would be wrong to shy away from that.
Tomas Alfredson and Lasse Hallström were attached to direct at different points before Tom Hooper came on board. You said the script didn’t change much over a decade, but presumably all three of them had their own ideas about it?
I did maybe ten drafts with small changes before the different directors came in, then I did a pretty big rewrite for Tomas, until we had quite a different film – though I think we would have gone back to something more like what we’d had to begin with – then I did a less radical rewrite for Lasse, then I did a very big rewrite for Tom, and then it kind of slipped back to where we started. When directors board a project, they’re often playing catch up. If you’ve been working on something for ten years and someone comes in and says, ‘I’ve had this brilliant idea about how to do it differently,’ you probably have tried to do it differently and there’s a good reason why it hasn’t worked. There’s a process of directors needing to get across the territory, to get up to their elbows in the project, and a lot of the time you’re conscious that the rewrite you’re working on, the pages you’re showing them, are things that will never make it into the film. You have to decide how much you trust a director, or get more skilled in understanding why they’re asking for a rewrite, because the risk is that you deliver something you’re unhappy with – and you’re then stuck with it. So we did have a very different version of The Danish Girl, and then Tom and Alicia and Eddie went into a week of rehearsals, just the three of them very early on, and Tom rang me and said, ‘This new version is great, and Eddie and Alicia have had some ideas, and we’re really looking forward to showing you what we’ve got.’ I went in and there was this cut-and-paste version they’d come up with, and we all read it and I thought, ‘Okay, it’s already in a version I’m not happy about, and now the actors and director have had a go it’s in a version I’m even less happy about. So what am I going to do?’ But I didn’t have to do anything. There was a pause at the end of the reading where we all looked at each other, then Alicia said, ‘Shall we just do the script we had at the beginning?’ and everyone very quickly said, ‘Yes, let’s do that.’ So that’s what happened. And it was a great and happy moment for me, as you can imagine. But those detours are important. Everyone had gone through the process they needed to go through and we reverted to something very close to the script we had begun with. There was really valuable input from various colleagues and a fair bit of fine-tuning, but what Tom shot was, in the main, the last draft I wrote independently – the last best draft.