Photo Credit: Susan Shacter
Jodie Markell
The Loss of the Teardrop Diamond
2008 Toronto Film Festival
www.teardropdiamond.com/home.html
www.teardropdiamond.com/home.html
Bio: Born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, Jodie Markell studied theater from an early age and eventually attended Northwestern University. After moving to New York, Markell studied at Circle-in-the-Square Theater. As an actress, Markell has been featured in films by directors including Woody Allen, Jim Jarmusch, Todd Haynes, and Barry Levinson. On television, she played a recurring role on HBO’s Big Love. She has also appeared in Law & Order and The Good Wife.
Markell adapted and directed the award-winning short film, Why I Live at the P.O., based on Pulitzer Prize writer Eudora Welty’s classic story. The film premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival/Women in Cinema, and has played at numerous festivals since, including the New Orleans Film Festival, where the film was awarded the Moviemaker Magazine Breakthrough Award. The film was screened at the National Museum of Women In The Arts in Washington, D.C.
Markell’s feature film directing debut is Tennessee Williams’ The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Description: Tennessee Williams had a serious knack for writing about Southern women who just couldn’t fit into the culture, who were stultified and driven mad when the constrictions of their world closed in on them. Bryce Dallas Howard is Fisher Willow, the latest Williams incarnation in the newly-discovered script that Williams wrote directly for the screen, The Loss of the Teardrop Diamond.
Willow is an interesting young woman who tries to play by the rules of 1920s New Orleans, but simultaneously chafes at those same rules. She doesn’t fit in and wants to get the hell out, all the while knowing she’s stuck.
The Loss of the Teardrop Diamond also includes performances by Ellen Burstyn as a woman who wants to die with dignity; Mamie Gummer; and a brief cameo by Ann Margaret.
Interview Date: January 5, 2010
Women and Hollywood: Why did you want to make your directing debut with this screenplay? Tennessee Williams is a lot of pressure even for an experienced director. But you took him on your first time out of the gate. Why?
Jodie Markell: When I was fifteen, growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, I was cast as Laura Wingfield in a high school production of The Glass Menagerie. By the time I was seventeen, I had read everything by Williams that I could find, and I had also been inspired by Elia Kazan’s classic films, A Streetcar Named Desire, and my favorite, Baby Doll. Later, as a young actress, in New York City, I saw a number of productions that did not feel organic to the Southern sensibility that I knew.
I wanted to reclaim Williams and bring his visually poetic world to the screen in a fresh way with as much vibrancy and authenticity as I could achieve in the hope of inspiring a new audience to rediscover this original American voice. I never thought of it as choosing material for my first time out of the gate. I simply thought that this screenplay needed to be realized and the connection I felt to the material made it the right project for me to pursue.
W&H: In the production notes you said, “I instantly sparked to Fisher Willow and related to her as a strong female character in the Williams mold.” Can you elaborate further?
JM: As a teenager with artistic tendencies who often felt a bit different, I had an affinity for Williams’ sensitive characters who are searching for something authentic in a harsh world. Fisher Willow is a young woman struggling to find her voice and trying to understand how to connect with someone she loves in a genuine way. I related to Fisher’s longing to be understood in a conventional society. Fisher says, “I am out of my element here.” I think she is not only speaking for Williams himself, but for anyone who marches to the beat of a different drummer. She says, “I want to be with people who do things—paint, write, compose music, and so forth …”—I know how she feels, that’s why I moved to New York.
W&H: Why do you think that Tennessee Williams was able to write such brilliant yet flawed women in a truly unique way?
JM: Williams said he never wrote about a vice that he had not observed in himself. I think there is a part of him in all his characters. And he always had a tendency to look at the more sensitive side of things. He started out as a poet after all. He also had several women amongst his close friends and family that were, as you say, “brilliant yet flawed”—especially his mother and his sister Rose who inspired many of his characters. He often wrote about women who were too beautiful, too romantic, too sincere, too sensuous, and too witty to be understood by a society that did not prize women for being smart or adventurous in spirit. I think he perhaps held the belief that being human means that we are naturally flawed even though conventional society believes that everyone should be flawless, fit in perfectly with what is expected, and not make any waves.
W&H: What were the biggest challenges in making this film?
JM: Before arriving in Louisiana, Giles Nuttgens, our cinematographer, said a period film usually requires a minimum of four months. But we were faced with the challenge of bringing scope to Williams’ world despite the indie budget and our twenty-eight-day shooting schedule. And yet, I actually believe that this kind of challenge comes with the territory of independent filmmaking and forces filmmakers to work efficiently, be resourceful, and make creative choices in a courageous way.
W&H: Talk about the difference between acting and directing. Do you want to direct more?
JM: As an actor, after researching, creating, and becoming the character, probably your most important goal is to be in the moment. As a director, one of your goals is to create an environment of trust and support so that the actors can make discoveries as they work. It is those discoveries that light up the screen. While keeping the creative vision in mind, the director has to wear a lot of hats, run the set, and put out a lot of fires. The director also has to think of how each moment works in relation to the whole vision—from shooting to editing to the final print. The director has to think in the past, present, and future—all at once—whereas the actor gets to be more in the present. But in both acting and directing, it is really all about finding the truth in each moment and sharing that with an audience.
I will continue to work as an actor and director in both theater and film because I think what you learn in one discipline informs the other. But right now, I am looking forward to my next film as a director. I have several projects in development and am reading scripts, as well.
W&H: What do you want the audience to be thinking about when they leave the theater?
JM: I want the audience to feel that they have experienced Williams’ words and his world in a new way. I want them to be touched by the honesty in two young people’s search for something real and their longing to connect. I want them to consider how difficult and how rare it is to really “see” and really “hear” another human being. And most of all, I want them to have their own experience and their own response to the film that I have no way of predicting. Making a film is kind of like raising a kid and then sending her off to college; you have to let go and realize that your film is going to be having all kinds of encounters with all kinds of people that you will never know and that you have no control over.
W&H: What advice do you have for other female filmmakers?
JM: Stop defining yourself as a female filmmaker and just think of yourself as someone who has a story to tell and the skills and the life experience to tell it. Look for material that speaks to you, and then find a producer who believes in the material as much as you do. Every now and then someone says to me, “Do you realize that you are the first woman to direct a major Tennessee Williams film?” I really never thought of it that way; I just thought I had a certain understanding of how to tell this story.