Su-City Pictures East, LLC
Screenplay & Film Consulting By Susan Kouguell
Month: October 2018
Tamara Jenkins’ Private Life at the New York Film Festival
Writer and director Tamara Jenkins re-teamed with producer Anthony Bregman for PRIVATE LIFE about a middle-aged Upper West Side couple navigating the choice to become parents thanks to their IVF egg donor niece.
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image credit: Jojo Whilden
About Private Life
Writer and director Tamara Jenkins (The Savages, Slums of Beverly Hills) re-teamed with producer Anthony Bregman for this film about a middle-aged Upper West Side couple navigating the choice to become parents thanks to their IVF egg donor niece.
At the New York Film Festival press conference, Tamara Jenkins, and actors Kathryn Hahn, Kayli Carter, and Molly Shannon, talked about their experiences making the film.
Jenkins spoke in depth about her writing process, including that she rented an office for the first time to write, and stated, “As Virginia Woolf once wrote, the importance of having a room of one’s own.”
JENKINS: The script took a long time. It usually takes me two years to write an original script. The first draft of Private Life was 200 pages, and then I had to chip away at it. I feel like I have to write something that is almost novelistic and then I have to adapt my own novelistic thing, so it can fit inside a narrative film.
KOUGUELL: Was there any script input from the actors? How much did the project change from being on the page to the screen?
JENKINS: It did not change. I remember speaking with Paul Giamatti and he said, ‘Is this one of those movies where we improvise?’ and I said, (she laughs) ‘‘No, there will be no improvising because I wrote this f-ing thing and I wrote those words.’ Of course, there’s improvised behavior, but not much in the language department.
HAHN: (addressing Jenkins) There was a huge sigh of relief when you said that to us in our first meeting.
JENKINS: Yes, because Kathryn’s an improviser and so is Molly (Shannon).
HAHN: All we had to worry about was doing justice to this beautiful piece of writing. There was so much freedom in that, and relief about just worrying about what was in front of us; that’s all we needed.
CARTER: If anything, I felt I had to get out of my own way with it. There was a day when I was working on a really long chunk of text, and Tamara’s words are so specific, and I wanted it to be right. Tamara and I walked around while they were setting up cameras for about 20 minutes, and I just said that piece of text over and over again to you (Tamara) until there was no inflection at all, until it was in my bone marrow. It was incredible. It was really freeing as an actor to have a piece of writing that was so good where you don’t have to do anything with it to sing.
SHANNON: Tamara’s so creative. I’ve never worked with a writer / director before who’s done this, but when Kathryn and I were standing around talking, and Tamara saw us near a piano, she said, ‘Bring the camera over to them—it was my dream when I was in drama school of how people would make movies.
HAHN: There’s something about this movie that isn’t even about a baby. It’s so much more—it’s an existential movie. Even when I read the script for the first time, I couldn’t even picture a baby. We see that there’s this quest that they’re on together, but it’s really about this marriage. Paul Giamatti said to Tamara, ‘This isn’t about a baby, this is ‘Waiting for Godot.’ It’s so true. As you described it, Tamara, it’s about this couple having a co-midlife crisis. There are all the frozen and amber dreams they had in their 20s and 30s, and all of a sudden they’re looking at them, waking up and they’re in their 40s, and then what do you do?! What happens with this next chapter? As Tamara said, it’s about this marriage.
Jenkins (l) Hahn (r)
Private Life, which premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, opens Oct. 5 in select theaters and on Netflix.
The Favourite at the New York Film Festival
Yorgos Lanthimos’ new film, The Favourite, screened for the press the morning of its premiere as the opening night selection at the New York Film Festival. Susan Kouguell took the opportunity to speak with the film’s director and writer.
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Image credit: Yorgos Lanthimos (Emma Stone)
“Humor in general is something I can’t get away from, no matter what the material is.”
–Director Yorgos Lanthimos
Yorgos Lanthimos’ new film The Favourite, screened for the press the morning of its premiere as the opening night selection at the New York Film Festival. In attendance was Lanthimos, along with writer Tony McNamara, costume designer Sandy Powell and actors Emma Stone, Olivia Colman, Nicholas Hoult and Joe Alwyn.
Image credit: Susan Kouguell
Lanthimos’s previous films include Dogtooth (2009), The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer(2017).
About The Favourite
Early 18th century. At the height of the War of the Spanish Succession, England is at war with the French. Nevertheless, duck racing and pineapple eating are thriving. A frail Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) occupies the throne and her close friend, Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz), governs the country in her stead while tending to Anne’s ill health and mercurial temper. When a new servant, Abigail (Emma Stone), arrives, her charm endears her to Sarah. Sarah takes Abigail under her wing and Abigail sees a chance at return to her aristocratic roots. As the politics of war become quite time consuming for Sarah, Abigail steps into the breach to fill in as the Queen’s companion. Their burgeoning friendship gives her a chance to fulfill her ambitions, and she will not let woman, man, politics or rabbit stand in her way.
Image-credit Yorgos-Lanthimos. (Rachel-Weisz-Olivia-Colman)
The Screenplay
Loosely based on historical events, the film is divided into eight chapters with titles, including This Mud Stinks, I Do Fear Confusion and Accidents, What an Outfit, and I Dreamt I Stabbed You in the Eye.
I asked McNamara and Lanthimos about their collaboration, and the involvement that the actors had, including any improvisation, and how closely they stayed to the script.
“We were on the same page very fast when we first talked about it; we always knew where we were headed with this tragic comedy and very complicated characters that we were driving towards.”
Lanthimos: “We were around during rehearsals and saw how certain things worked or didn’t work, and changed a couple of things, but other than that, not much changed. The script has a particular tone, so when you think it is right, you just try to go with it. I think it helps the actors as well. Any kind of improvisation was mostly physical, or the way we staged the scenes and maybe we added a couple of lines here and there. It’s all about figuring out how the scene is set up and how you can change it in order to make it work better, because you might have thought something different before, but it doesn’t really work the same way when you’re actually there and going through it.”
The Emotional Center
When asked what the emotional center of the film was, writer Tony McNamara responded: “We didn’t focus on one, but I think the moment when Anne sees the kids playing their instruments and drifts away from Abigail, which leads into the dance—that connects them in a much bigger way, but it also shows a deeper sense of Anne’s tragedy, and how mentally unstable she is at times.”
What Drew Lanthimos to the Material
Lanthimos: “It was a story about three women in a particular point in time that had this type of power and also their characters and personalities, and how that affected a whole country, and the fate of the country of thousands and millions of people.”
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