‘It’s about ordinary lives at ordinary moments’
Lisa Cholodenko is a native of Los Angeles who studied film in New York and made her debut feature as a writer-director in 1998 with High Art, starring Ally Sheedy. The original screenplay won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the Sundance Film Festival. Her second feature, Laurel Canyon (2002), starred Frances McDormand as a hedonistic record producer who seduces the young stars she works with, much to the chagrin of her conservative son.
Synopsis
New York, the present. Syd, an ambitious but inexperienced magazine editor, discovers that the woman living above her flat is none other than the famous photographer Lucy Berliner. Syd becomes acquainted with Lucy’s work and her junkie friends. Locating a step up the career ladder, Syd encourages Lucy to shoot new pictures for her magazine. At the same time, a strong attraction starts to develop between them. As the photo assignment continues, Syd and Lucy fall in love but with drastic consequences.
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KEVIN CONROY SCOTT: Lisa, you’re from Los Angeles. Did you have a lot of exposure to the film business when you were growing up?
LISA CHOLODENKO: Well, I guess growing up here you get more exposure to it than the average American citizen … and I did have relatives who were in the business; I had an uncle who was married to my blood-aunt who was a producer, and a first cousin who was an entertainment lawyer. So I was seeing it peripherally, I was conscious of what they did. But they weren’t involved in my getting interested or involved in film. And I wasn’t one of those kids who’d put on plays or run around with a Super-8 in the back yard. I wasn’t sitting through double features at the weekends … I was aware of growing up in a cinema-obsessed city but it really wasn’t until I got to film school that I actually was exposed to a lot of the classic films. I went to college in San Francisco, did my undergraduate degree and became friends with people who were in the film school at San Francisco State, and that’s when I first got exposed to films by Fassbinder, Fellini, those people.
Did your parents encourage you at all to express yourself artistically?
My mum is an elementary school principal and my father is a graphic designer. He went to art school when he was younger, he painted and he’s an artist. So there were art books around and a general appreciation of aesthetics, they were very aesthetic people. I think because my father was aesthetically driven, he liked things to be pleasing and beautiful. My mum was like that too, but I think what was interesting about my upbringing was that on the one hand my father is a person who was trained and interested in aesthetics and himself a working artist in a commercial way, and then he is married to this person who was a school principal. I think both of those qualities combined are very similar to the things that comprise the personality of a film director.
Your mother being in charge and then your father having an eye for the frame?
Yeah, exactly.
What did you study at San Francisco State?
Oh, I just went there to go to college. I only got into college by the skin of my teeth. It wasn’t that I was a bad student, I just wasn’t present. I was just way more interested in late seventies’ sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.
Even when you were in high school?
Yeah. I mean I grew up in LA and it was fast, and I was kind of fast! I was just distracted. I was just more interested in the music and social things, and I went to an open public high school and I just wasn’t that focused. So by the time I got to San Francisco State I had to learn how to be academic.
What kind of music were you into then?
I just tapped into what was going on in LA in the late seventies, early eighties – Patti Smith, the Go-Gos. There was a late punk scene that was going on here that largely had its life around the Sunset Strip; it was where punk was giving way to New Wave. X was the largest of the bands and everything that came after them, Split Enz, all of that. So I saw a lot of gigs and was very interested in experimental bands.
How did your education take shape?
I found a major at San Francisco State that really appealed to me, it was an interdisciplinary major in Social Sciences, and basically it had these core classes that taught you how to synthesize a lot of different disciplines and pick a subject that you could study and write a thesis on. So I took classes in Critical Theory, Ethnic Studies, Women’s Studies and Anthropology, and I invented something, some place where they all intersected. It was an abstract degree …
Was writing something that came to you naturally or was it something that you had to really learn?
Because I was so half-in, half-out at high school I felt that I didn’t really learn how to write until I went to college. I had an experience that was kind of central to me. I took classes with Angela Davis and later became her teaching assistant. Before that I was a freshman in one of her classes and I got a C on a paper and I was really bereft about it, ashamed that Angela Davis gave me a C. I went to see her in her office and she said, ‘You know, you can rewrite this and I’ll re-grade you. Let’s talk about how to organize your ideas.’ And she went over it with me, patiently telling me about how to think through my writing.
Did you learn something about structure then?
Yeah, from that point on I realized that I really cared. I wanted to learn how to express myself. These were academic ideas, but it really was important to me to learn how to express myself clearly and succinctly and I think that was a moving moment, a galvanizing moment. It was like, ‘Now I have something to say, there’s something in there, and if I muddle it, it’s not going to come out so I have to discipline myself.’
Were you a light reader or a voracious reader at this time?
I was a casual reader. I really didn’t become a big reader until my mid-to-late twenties. But I do remember my sister had a boyfriend who was studying literature at UCLA and I really admired him. He would give me
books and one that was so hugely impressive to me was Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. In college I was more interested in reading theory, like Roland Barthes, rather than literature. But I did get turned on to Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse had a huge effect on me. I remember reading an interview with the author of The Hours and he was talking about what impressed him about Virginia Woolf, he said her subject matter is ordinary lives at ordinary moments. The detail of the interior neurotic experience was fascinating to me. I was new to literature, so I thought that maybe everybody wrote about that, I don’t know, but for me I was just really taken by that Modernist stream of consciousness writing. It had a neurotic pace, the way thoughts beget thoughts, and it was something that felt familiar to me, a world could be invented that I can enter and totally identify with. So that was the first time I felt intimacy with a character through literature – it had a visceral, psychic identification for me.
Can you tell me about the development of your awareness of cinema?
I’d met these eccentric people at San Francisco State who were doing experimental film, a big person at that time was Trinh Minh-ha, a Vietnamese experimental filmmaker. There was also a pretty interesting faculty for a while, all these people were making personal and experimental films and I was struck by them. But I never thought there was anything viable in it, it seemed like something you indulge yourself in but it’s not a vocation. So I never really thought about it myself in a sustained way, but it lodged itself in my imagination somewhere. I finished my undergraduate studies and went overseas for a couple of years, and when I came back I needed a job so I moved back to LA and got a job at the American Film Institute.
That’s a good place to get a job …
Yeah, well, it was like, ‘I’ve got to do something and it seems kind of cool to be at the American Film Institute.’ Two friends of mine were working there, had been there for years, and they got me in. So I worked in the conservatory at their film school.
Did you see a lot of films there?
I saw a lot of the students’ films.
And were you starting to think that you might be able to do something similar?
It was the first time I could say, ‘This is a profession, there’s a place for this.’ I was in this institute that was like the smorgasbord of everything. There’s the film festival, there was an archive, there was a foundation for training women film directors, there was a film school, all of these things going on like a culture, a society and system and a training place. I thought, ‘Finally, this makes sense.’ And it flicked a switch in me and I was sparked by this. Filmmaking was the first profession I’d come across in my mid-twenties that I thought I could devote myself to honestly. It took me a long time to figure out what I was going to focus on. But it didn’t feel right to not have a focus, I’m not the sort of person who can just hang. So it was exciting, and I was like ‘Ready, set, go.’ I got myself into a summer film programme at Stanford, we did a couple of theory classes and made a film, so I made my first little film up there and learned some rudimentary things about editing and shooting and whatever else I could learn in two months. And then I came back down to LA, left the AFI, and got a job as an assistant editor.
How did that come about?
Well, that’s the great thing about having grown up in LA, you don’t know who’s coming out of the woodwork. I knew somebody who was an executive at Columbia Pictures, her sister-in-law is one of my best friends, and she was the person responsible for Boyz N the Hood. They were gearing up to start filming it and I got a job as an apprentice editor in the cutting room.
I read somewhere that a lot of editors could make good screenwriters. Why do you think that is? Were there any lessons or techniques that you picked up?
I think the most important thing I learned in there is that you start with this huge bear of a film which really has no pacing or no point in a way, because you’re just pasting all the footage together. And that, I discovered later, is almost identical to screenwriting in that you have to keep whittling it down until it has its perfect amount of information to communicate what you need and retain tension. So I think the editing of the film is really the same as the editing of the script.
Basically – and this is what you are prone to do in film school – it’s really important not to get caught up in one piece of the film. If you put everything into getting that one piece into some kind of fine cut, it will be out of balance with the rest of the film. What editors do – or what I’ve done on my films, at least, and I think it’s a standard convention – is that you do capsules of the film. You go through it and make some cuts and get it in some kind of shape and then everything gets narrowed down, it’s like sculpting. So you never just go to the first ten minutes of the film and cut it till it’s perfect and then go to the next ten minutes. You keep slicing through the whole film.
That’s a really interesting analogy.
It’s really the same in a script, because I think if you just keep on the first three scenes you end up with a script that’s tight and good in the beginning and then just falls apart, and doesn’t even know what it wants to say. So it’s really important to know not to panic, it’s all going to come together; you’ve just got to keep pushing forward. You can’t just get hung up in one place.
High Art is primarily about photography and photographers in general. Was photography something that you were always interested in?
There was a group of photographers who’s work I admired and were part of the inspiration for the film. They knew each other from living in Boston and studying at the Museum School in the 70’s. They’re refered to as the ‘Boston School’ in art literature. Jack Pierson and David Armstong were among them, and Nan Goldin is probably the best known of the crew. There’s a sensibility that they all share – a kind of personal documentary style that I was very attracted to. Larry Clark is also in this tradition. He did a famous book called Tulsa and basically used people who were leading underground lives, involved in sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll in a kind of depraved way, and he made art of it. And then it was appropriated in fashion photography in the early nineties and it became what was known as ‘heroin chic’, you know – skinny, strung out. That was all ripped off from these photographers who were shooting their friends shooting up and fucking and passed-out in cars. I was trying to make a meditation on that for High Art because I was struck by this chain of exploitation that was kind of overlooking the tragedy at its core.
So then when you went to Columbia University film school the story goes that you came under the tutelage of Milos Forman. How did that happen?
I was writing and directing, and in our third year the chair of the department, Annette Insdorf, decided to organize this class called ‘Mentors’ where she paired up ten or twelve of us with working directors. I was supposed to be paired with Alan Pakula and we had one meeting but he was really busy and couldn’t take me on. So I was the only one of ten students who was matched up, and Milos Forman had been the chair of the department and did Annette a favour and said, ‘I’ll take one of those students on if you need a back-up.’ So he made himself available and I had a semester of being mentored by him, which really consisted of him reading a draft of High Art that I had been writing while I was a student. He met with me to talk about the script and, ultimately, about how to make the film.
How many drafts did you write before Milos Forman saw it?
I had spent less than a year on it, so probably four major drafts or something. I was nervous; I’d given him this script and then I went to meet him in his house in Central Park South. I sat down in this big fat chair and he sat in the other one and lit up a big cigar, and I was smoking cigarettes at the time so I lit up. And in his thick Slavic accent, he said, ‘This is a great script, this is great writing.’ I was really flattered. At the time he was making The People vs. Larry Flynt and he felt like we were dealing with quite similar themes – the magazine world, heroin; there were things that crossed over. He also said there were one or two places where he didn’t buy it. Then we proceeded to have a conversation about casting and how to make the film in a certain way.
At Columbia, did you know that you wanted to be a writer-director? Was writing very important to you?
Yeah, I felt like there was a lot of attention being given to independent cinema and ‘New Queer Cinema’, a lot of things were going on in New York in the late eighties, early nineties. Jim Jarmusch had become an acclaimed director. And I was really keen to get out of LA and figure things out. It seemed like there was a road map, there was a way that you could take it into your own hands, and I thought that I had stories to tell.
Was High Art your first attempt at a feature length screenplay?
No, I’d written another one before that. It was inspired by some girl I was involved with who was bourgeois and had a gay brother who was whoring around New York. I thought it would be interesting to do a story about these two gay siblings who had these radically different lives. So the script was about this brother and sister, both gay, and the sister has a wife and they live in San Francisco. And the brother is decadent, a real sleep-around guy. The story starts when his lover informs him that he’s HIV, and then it’s about how the brother and sister come back together and help each other out. It was kind of great, but it felt too gay. And it’s still in my drawer. But one of the guys who was in my screenwriting class became a successful producer, and he recently asked me about it so maybe one day I’ll take it out and revisit it. I think I just reached a point where I moved on.
The student short films you made, Souvenir and Dinner Party: were they also inspired by things going on around you?
Pretty much, but they’re both fiction, from my imagination. I was very precious about Souvenir and really painstakingly put it together. I mean, it was expensive; it cost ten or twelve grand to make. It was an ordeal. But I made it, and it was fine for a first film, but I was frustrated and I felt it just didn’t have energy. So with my next short I wanted to do something Cassavetes-ish. One day I said, ‘I want to make this little film, it’ll only take one day or two. We’ll do it in a loft and it’s loosely scripted, here’s the script, you can improvise, I just want to do a Cassavetes thing, it’ll be black and white, not a big deal, I just feel I’ve got to blow off some of this preciousness.’ And the long and the short of it is that it took way longer than two days to make. We shot for a couple of days and I needed to shoot more and we couldn’t get back together for four months and then it was like a sloppy job because I just got my friends from film school to do jobs that they didn’t know how to do. So it took me two years to do this film, but I persevered and I just thought, ‘I could throw this away because it’s kind of a mess and it’s kind of ridiculous but I think there’s something cool here.’
And in fact it ended up I made more money on that film than I did on High Art. It struck some chord and was bought by Canal+. They have affiliates all over Europe and they bought it to screen on TV so it screened in Scandinavia, France, Bulgaria, Poland. And then some Internet company owns it now and shows it on the Internet.
Wow, a profitable short film … I’m interested in hearing about what was the thread for the narrative. Was there an outline or some kind of signposts?
I really wanted to do a voice-over, I really felt like I wanted that kind of immediacy, I always like voice-over when it works, with the dramatic irony that it’s meant to be done with. And so I constructed this little narrative about a girl who’s been spurned by her girlfriend, they lived together in this loft. The real impulse for me to do it was so that I could get into this character’s head, and what we’re hearing her say to herself in her head is completely counter to what she’s doing when she’s at this dinner table with her ex-girlfriend and some girl that she’s attracted to. So she’s an unreliable narrator.
Was it important to you to have lesbian themes in those short films? You talk about the New Queer Cinema; is that something that you’re preoccupied with or is it just a matter of you showing what’s around you?
I just felt like instead of presupposing what I’m supposed to be doing, I’m just going to try to do the world in which I live and the people who I know. And not be bothered by where to depart from my own experience to be broader, more mainstream or whatever.
Were you ever concerned that people would label you as a strictly ‘gay filmmaker’?
I felt really proud of High Art in that it did transcend its world in a way; it’s not like some gay cult thing. I think people see beyond its sexuality. But I really felt with Laurel Canyon that I wanted to stretch personally, in my imagination, and I also wanted to see if I could create a world that had some kind of weight and truth to it but wasn’t a world that was exactly my own.
Thinking about where High Art came from, I was curious about the kind of friends you had in New York because you said you hung out with interesting artists …
I lived uptown for a long time, then I moved downtown and one of my oldest friends from California, who I travelled with a lot after college, had recently moved to New York and she was a photographer – she ended up doing all the photographs for High Art. So I was spending time with her and thinking about her world and what her concerns were. And then there was the Nan Goldin thing which was around and I became intrigued by that kind of photography and it felt exciting and interesting to me. New York’s townie in a way, so you meet one person and then suddenly you have a network of friends, and it turned out that a lot of my friends were either filmmakers or visual artists: photographers, painters. And for some reason the people that I knew, many of them had recently been through a period in their lives where they were pretty heavy heroin dabblers.
I knew going in that High Art was a movie about heroin but I didn’t realize people would just sit around sniffing it in such a casual way. Is that really how it was?
Yeah, well, I think people do it in all kinds of ways, depending on how heavy you are into it. But it had had a sort of resurgence, there had been a lot of really clean heroin around at one point, and it all corresponded to this weird Nan Goldin kind of imagery. Everything was coalescing into that weird heroin-chic moment. And unsuspecting people, young girls from Columbia University, were going downtown and checking out heroin: hanging out, sniffing it, chasing the dragon.
It’s often said that the mood or state of mind you’re in when you’re high on drugs is very subjective and difficult to convey in a screenplay. Did that concern you at all?
I’m not a heroin user but I’ve done enough drugs and been around all that to know what it looks like. And when you’re making a film like that in Lower Manhattan, people who know that world are working on the film. So we had consultants.
How did writing High Art differ to your writing experience on Laurel Canyon?
With Laurel Canyon I really wanted to get another film out, fast, and I was broke so I decided I would try to generate an idea quickly and take it to October Films who, at the time, were still in existence and had taken High Art. I had a germ of an idea already in my head. I’d begun thinking it up when I was cutting High Art, I had been listening to a Joni Mitchell record. I started talking about a character loosely based on that. I had a sketch of the thing but it really wasn’t fleshed out at all. I felt like I really needed to get paid to write but nobody was going to do a blind writing deal, ‘Here’s some cash, everything’s going to be great!’ So I came up with a treatment, went in and pitched it, and got a very small amount of money to write a draft. But it became a lot more arduous than I really wanted. I think I’m just not a believer in writing a treatment – to have a loose sketch of where you might go is cool, but I really think truly inspired work comes from going into the dark hole and trying to write your way to the other end and see what you have. I’ve done two films, and done them in radically different ways, and I just feel like my experience on the first one was so much freer.
Didn’t you find it hard to write on your own in that way, finding a way in the dark?
You know, it goes all ways and I think it’s really hard to say. For me there’s been a lot of pressure to push forward, you have your early career and then you’re on the wave, it’s a very self-conscious and anxious position to be in and unfortunately I think it’s not made writing any easier.
How did you handle moments of self-doubt, where you felt like the idea wasn’t working, or the scene wasn’t working?
I slept a lot … I sometimes wonder if all writers have the same dysfunctional patterns. But I was like a narcoleptic, I slept so much, it was hard to sit at my desk. I had a couple of friends I would call, who were filmmakers who I would melt down with. You really want to know a typical day? It’s like the office never closes, right? So the minute you get up you’re like, ‘Fuck, I’ve got to go back to that fucking script’, like there’s this monkey on your back. So you get up at the crack of dawn and you make coffee, go back into your bedroom and read the New York Times – and that’s the most beautiful period of the day. You’re entitled to have that coffee, you’re entitled to read your copy of the Times.
And check your emails as well.
And check your emails, right. And then it’s like, ‘Now’s the time!’ So you get up and you hobble into your kitchen and you’re like, ‘I may have something to eat’, and then you finally get to your desk, and sit there, and then you rewrite the opening scene for like the seven hundredth time. And basically it’s not rewriting, it’s just taking four words of dialogue and looking in your thesaurus for maybe a better word, or saying it in your mind and seeing if the cadence is right. Really, really, minute, pedantic, unnecessary shit. And then at that point you’re spent – you’ve been there for twenty minutes and you lie down on the couch. Then you get up and have more coffee.
Basically I felt like I was a little rat in my apartment, I would just go from the bed to the kitchen, to the desk, to the couch, to the kitchen, to the bed, to the desk, to the couch. And maybe I’d go out or go running, that and reading the Times was the high point of my day.
Did running clear your mind a little bit?
Yeah, I discovered that if I sweat really hard, I could handle the stress better.
Can you talk about how you construct characters? Do they just evolve through drafts or do you have certain constructs, like writing biographies?
With Laurel Canyon I really tried to objectify the characters, write biographies of them, psychoanalyse them, give them details on paper. Maybe it helped – but in retrospect it feels like it was a really awkward thing to synthesize this information that I’d objectively made up about these characters while I was writing this story.
It doesn’t feel like they’re three-dimensional people at that point?
Yeah, and it’s like a feat to try and make them come alive. Jane, played by Fran McDormand, was really considered the most vivacious and magnetic of the characters in the piece, and she was the first person to come into my imagination – she had a voice before I sat down with any objective details about her, she just told me what she was about. And I feel like that’s the way the characters in High Art came about too.
You said that some of the people you were hanging out with in New York made it into High Art. Where did Lucy come from and how did she get to where she is in the film?
She was really less of a developed character. The piece really centred on Syd. In the first draft she works at a shitty job, and it was all about how she’s abused by her boss. Then she figures out her neighbour is this famed photographer, and they get to be friends. Actually, in the first draft, Syd sneakily gets hold of some of Lucy’s photographs and takes them to somebody that she knows who’s a receptionist at Interview and they get published. So it was really all about this chick’s desire for notoriety, to be recognized, and how that corrupts her. It was super-cynical. And Lucy was really just a prop at that stage, until the story developed. Then I felt I really wanted to do parallel character studies, and have characters intersect at the right and wrong times. I had a sketch of Lucy, she was a photographer, and then it descended into this alienated, heroin-addled world, inspired by Nan Goldin’s photographs and so on. I think there were a lot of little pieces that I knew about Nan Goldin that I took – people at the time were critical of the fact that this character resembled Nan Goldin. But one of the things that was interesting to me was, I’m Jewish and I knew Nan Goldin was Jewish, so I pumped up the fiction a few notches and made the character – this so-called Nan Goldin-like character, Lucy – a trust-fund, heroin-addled daughter of a holocaust survivor with a German mother.
And then one of the three producers on the movie, Dolly Hall, one of her major notes to me which was invaluable was that we had to make it more sympathetic, we have to really think about Syd’s overtures to Lucy and maybe pull a love story out of this rather than make it this cynical dance of seduction. And I took heed. I think it’s more interesting and accessible if I make it that this girl is caught off-guard by things that conflict with her ambitions, and that she has sex with Lucy because of her affection and desire for her and her impulse to save her. And that was a better way to go than some mad-dog descent into trying to get to the top by fucking somebody over. I think it was a more special film by getting into something that was a paradox.
By challenging the audience to care for someone who might also be duplicitous?
Yeah, exactly.
I thought the moment Syd crosses the heterosexual line and starts kissing Lucy was underplayed. Wouldn’t somebody of Syd’s ambitious nature, living in a corporate environment, do a lot of hand-wringing about going for another woman?
I think what was really important to me was to be true to the time, and I think what I realized about women under thirty, this last generation and the one before it, is that they’ve been much more liberal about checking out heroin or crystal meth, and things that are fucking hard-core like stripping or sleeping with other girls. At least in New York City, if you compare and contrast college girls of different generations and of a certain sophistication, maybe not the heroin, but there is this vogue around bisexuality, and I think it was important to me to portray this character as an emblem of part of a culture.
You wrote the screenplay with the intention of directing it. How did this affect your writing?
In a couple of ways. Again, Dolly Hall, who helped me a lot in the early stages of writing and thinking about making a film, encouraged me to keep writing and to think about the budget and not make it unwieldy, that it was something that I could actually do for half a million dollars. And then I was also thinking, ‘There’s got to be something in here that I can connect to, or I won’t be able to direct it.’ And I learned from those short films that I made; where I connected it worked, and where I didn’t connect it didn’t work. So I spent a long time working with the dialogue and the scenes and figuring out the emotional subtext of this story, scene to scene. In a way it was preparation or homework, so that when I got on the set I wouldn’t be standing there with my mouth open, not knowing how to perform it or what it means. I’d already been through the subtext so I could give the direction as to what spin to put on the performance, so you elicit that from the actor and the audience can see and understand what’s being said and what it means.
You were worried that the humour and irony necessary to tell this story would turn absurdist. Why are humour and irony necessary in depicting this part of the New York art world?
I think it’s just a sensibility that I relate to, this comic-tragic tone, because I think there’s a little of both in each thing. And it felt like – this has to do with both films but particularly in High Art – it’s so heavy and interior and dark at times that I felt there had to be some levity and it had to be offset by these strains of absurdism, just like a gallows sensibility where somebody in a grave situation cracks a joke. Also I felt it had to be in there for the audience, to make it feel dynamic, so there was a point of entry.
You enjoy a few laughs related to the people at Frame magazine because they are so unrelentingly pretentious. Did you have prior experience working with people like that?
I had a job in film distribution when I first got to New York and I really didn’t get on with my boss. I just felt really oppressed and denigrated. And I think the original idea for High Art came out of this incredible humiliation I felt at being around this person, how much repulsion I felt at the time and how unconscious and indifferent she was as to how she made people around and under her feel. I was raging, in a way, and this was my outlet.
Were you worried about these characters at Frame magazine being a little bit too transparent, which is what they are?
It’s something that came up a lot when people would be critical of the film and I think, in retrospect, now that I know more than I did then and am probably a more sophisticated writer, I would flesh those characters out better. At the time I just thought it was funny, and that was what I needed to do to bring the point home.
I was very struck by the moment when we know that Greta, played by Patricia Clarkson, acted for Fassbinder. First, it makes her world of heroin-sniffing in the afternoons completely plausible, secondly it recalls the Fassbinder film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, an adaptation of a stage play where a famous fashion designer falls in love with her model, making her live-in lover very jealous. Was that resonance intentional?
Greta was always German, but I think there was a Fassbinder retrospective going on at the Museum of Modern Art at the time. And while I was aware of Fassbinder and had seen his films or pieces of films, I’d never really taken the time, so I decided to really check this out. I would look at these women in his films and I thought that was something I could add to this character to make her really interesting. And I knew that Fassbinder himself was this great neo-melodramatist and that he was hugely cynical, he fucked with his friends, they’d screw each other over, and he had a drug-addled history, so I thought, ‘This is perfect.’ Greta was a little bit young to make it perfectly plausible, but I think it’s a great spin.
There is a scene when Lucy admits to Syd that she is attracted to her. Lucy’s also taking a risk by admitting that she’d had a breakdown before. What were you thinking when you wrote that?
I was thinking that it’s where the conflict and the tension are becoming heightened between Syd’s involvement with Lucy personally, or her responsibility to her personally, to her condition, which involves exploiting her. And it was really important to me to have a scene where we understand what happened to Lucy, so there was exposition needed for that scene, there was a need to have Syd make the overture, ‘I want you to come to the magazine, it’s a good thing’ – it’s a plot point, but also having that information puts Syd in a conundrum because here’s this woman saying, ‘I’ve basically had a kind of breakdown, and I’m sharing that with you.’ But it was also important to me to have it not being like an older, art-star, lesbian photographer who’s preying on this young woman; that there’s something between them, the younger woman is awed by her allure, she’s drawn to her and turned on. She’s excited by it, it’s all really heady.
And it’s something that Syd’s boyfriend is very quick to pick up on.
Yeah, because he thinks that it’s a ridiculous, pretentious world, and it is. And now on top of it she’s up there snorting heroin with these people? What’s up with that?
It’s pretentious, the things she’s saying, almost like someone who’s got a newly minted Masters degree sounding off on everything they’ve just learned.
That was deliberate. I wanted Syd to be pulling every art-theory idea she ever read. And when you read those art-speak books you’re like, ‘For fuck’s sake!’ I wanted her to be kind of an emblem for that. Lucy just rolls her eyes and says, ‘I haven’t been deconstructed in a long time.’
That was one of the most oft-quoted lines from the film. Moving on to the relationship between Greta and Lucy, they have an interesting way of interacting …
It was important to me that there was a contrast in these questions of fidelity, that Syd’s in a more conventional relationship and they’re going through a complication regarding an infidelity, and the hipsters upstairs are so far beyond keeping a rein on each other, they’re so out of the box, their relationship is so unconventional, so co-dependent and dysfunctional that shit like this happens. It’s not like ‘You’ve cheated on me’, it’s like ‘I hate that fucking teenager. Fine, go fuck whoever you want.’ I thought that it was important to the reality of how these women were living out of the box, not to have conventional tropes of monogamy.
Ally Sheedy is a brave casting choice as Lucy. When she became interested in the role, did you find it ironic that Lucy’s career had certain parallels with Ally Sheedy’s own Hollywood trajectory: once famous, now in a kind of casual retirement and a laid-back recluse?
Yeah, it piqued my curiosity; I had mixed feelings, because I think that Ally’s had a mixed reception in the industry. But she pursued the role doggedly; it wasn’t like I went after her. Somebody gave her the script, I got a phone call from her saying that she wanted to read for me, so I said, ‘OK, if you fly out here.’ I was living in New York at the time and she was in LA. And she did. She did that darkroom scene and it was intense, really moving.
I was wondering why you decided to have Lucy’s death happen off-screen? It was foreshadowed with Greta’s overdose; you know it’s a possibility but it’s still unexpected.
Well, it went on longer, it was scripted a lot of different ways. One is where she does more heroin and lies down on the bed and their friend Arnie comes into the room and he lies down and he discovers she’s cold and not breathing, and there’s all this mayhem upstairs and Syd comes out. And it felt like I didn’t need to show all that to communicate what needed to be communicated. I did shoot more than what got left in the film, which is when Arnie wakes up and he goes into the bedroom and he lies down next to them and we see Greta stir like she wakes up when he comes in and Lucy doesn’t and then they go back to sleep, the three of them are sleeping in the bed and that’s the close of that. And then the next morning happens. That didn’t feel like it added anything to the scene and it didn’t feel like the most powerful way to end. I think it was just confusing. I didn’t take it to the point where he discovers she’s gone, so to go from three of them lying in that bed to cut to the next morning and Arnie in the car felt like it muddled the point more than just ending on Ally and then the next day.
And what happens to Syd? Hypothetically, where did she go after that? Do you think she dated strictly women after that or was it a one-time experience?
I thought of it as a one-time experience. I always saw her going back, in a way, to where she was, but as a more informed, expansive person. I saw her as somebody who probably tucked it away, like one of those things you have in your early life where it kicks your ass but you have to compartmentalize it because you don’t really know exactly how to assimilate it or what it means. It’s just like one of those anomalous, ‘Oh my fucking God, that was a trip that I just went through.’
It felt with Syd that she’s had sex before this, but her relationship with Lucy is the first time she’s really been intimate and intense.
For me it was really important that it wasn’t like, ‘Oh my god, this girl’s coming out of the closet, she’s having a revelation and it’s blowing her mind.’ I really wanted to try to do a portrait of all the things that go into passion, and from her perspective it was intrigue and mystery and romanticizing this woman’s decadence and debauchery and her tragic past and her notoriety. There was something that she wanted from Lucy. Here was this woman who was going to enable her to climb up. It felt like it was important to me to take it out of gay/straight and all these illogical components that go into attraction.
It reminds me of your comment on Virginia Woolf and these very small moments made large.
I think for me it’s really important not just to drop into a moment, but to lead the viewer to the moment, so they experience it, no matter how slight, for themselves. That’s the real challenge of writing on any scale, if you can give the audience the right moments, if you can choose one of the right moments to show and take somebody there in an organic, step-by-step way, then it’s really gratifying. You’re in it with the characters.
Hollywood, California
Carlos Cuarón
‘Left-wing chicks are hot, dude.’ Julio (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna) share a joint with Luisa (Maribel Verdú).