Gerwig, Kirke, and Baumbach on "Mistress America"

Playing in Theaters

Gerwig, Kirke, and Baumbach on Mistress America

(from Sag Harbor Express Online August 13, 2015)

By Danny Peary

Mistress America, the latest collaboration of critics’ darlings, writer director Noah Baumbach and his partner, writer-actress Greta Gerwig, opens in New York this Friday. The hope is that it will be as popular as their Frances Ha, for which indie queen Gerwig was embraced by the mainstream and received an unexpected Lead Actress (in a Musical or Comedy) Golden Globe nomination. It’s always a pleasure to see the unique Gerwig on screen, and fans of the cult Amazon original television series,Mozart in the Jungle, will surely want to see Lola Kirke (Free the Nipple, Gone Girl) take another step toward stardom. The premise, from the press notes: “Tracy (Kirke] is a lonely college freshman [with writing aspirations], having neither the exciting university experience nor the glamorous metropolitan lifestyle she envisioned. But when she is taken in by her [ten-year-older] soon-to-be-stepsister, Brooke (Gerwig)—a resident of Times Square and adventurous gal about town [who wants to open a restaurant]—she is rescued from her disappointment and seduced by Brooke’s alluringly mad schemes.” Baumbach says, “It’s easy to underestimate the character of Tracy because she’s our way into the story, our narrator. In a sense, she’s an unreliable narrator. The story is about her finding her voice and growing into herself.” As major a character as Tracy, Brooke, too, will be forced to change. Recently I took part in roundtables with Gerwig, Kirke, and Baumbach and discussed their movie. Here are my questions to each of them and their responses.

Greta Gerwig Questions

Danny Peary: Do you see Brooke as a type, or is she unique?

Greta Gerwig: I don’t see her as a type, I see her as a totally unique creation, but the character is definitely influenced by other characters.

DP: I heard you in interviews saying that Brooke is like character from eighties movies, but I was thinking of Holly Golightly, an eccentric from decades earlier. Which you haven’t thought of at all!

GG: There were lots of different influences we were looking at, more wild girls from the 80s, the Melanie Griffiths and the Rosanna Arquettes. They were the type that would take a typically square, straitlaced uptown person and drag that person into their crazy underworld. They were a bit dangerous, and they seemed as if they lived on the wrong side of the law. And then our other influence was really the screwball comedies of Howard Hawks and George Cukor in the 30s and 40s–and Ernst Lubitsch. Those were the ones we were thinking about. But now that I’m thinking about it, I think we probably did watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s in anticipation of this, for ideas.

DP: Like Holy Golightly, Brooke is upbeat to cover up her insecurities.

GG: Yeah, exactly. I never loved Breakfast at Tiffany’s, I know that’s like a sacrilege, but I think it’s because it was such a stretch for me to see myself in Audrey Hepburn. Because she was so beautiful and elegant and brunette and European, and I felt like I didn’t have any point of entry. Even though I don’t feel like Melanie Griffith, there was some point of entry–her messiness and her wildness I felt more connected to.

DP: When collaborating on the script, did you and Noah argue over whether Brooke would be upset by having a story written about her by Tracy, good or bad?

GG: No, we don’t really argue at any point in the writing process. We kind of have like, a brain-meld happening.

DP: Then, did you debate this in your own mind?

GG: I always knew that one of the things we were exploring in the movie is how writing is not a victimless activity. It affects the people that find their way into your work. It’s not that your intentions are bad when you write about somebody, but those people didn’t ask to be written about. It’s something that I’ve dealt with a lot, and Noah’s also dealt with it. I don’t have any easy answers for it, but I knew I wanted to have this younger woman, Tracy, write something about Brooke and then have her be very upset about it. I think Brooke’s also upset about it because she puts on such a show for Tracy. She puts on a show and performs for everybody because she’s got a lot to cover up and needs to put up a big front. She’s very needy and insecure and scared–and there are these little pinpoint moments of seeing something that’s delicate in her. So of course when she reads a story where she feels she’s been seen for who she is, it’s incredibly traumatizing for her. It was something I wanted to explore because I don’t think writers have an absolute right to do what they do. I think it’s complicated and I think it’s not always a bright line of “this is okay, this is not okay.”

Lola Kirke

Lola Kirke Questions

Danny Peary: I read in the production notes that the audition process really went on and on and one reason you eventually got the role of Tracy was that you were both “funny and had pathos,” according to Greta Gerwig. Did she and Noah tell you to be funny and have pathos?

Lola Kirke: No. I think Noah and Greta did  a great job of writing those characteristics into their dialogue. So it wasn’t where I was thinking, “Tracy has to be funny AND have pathos. How do I do that?” And I then didn’t look in the mirror and make funny faces.

DP: What scenes did you read for them?

LK: I read a number of scenes and a lot of them didn’t make it into the movie. The audition process was really unique in that I never got the pages before I went in. I had to get there ten minutes early and then I’d get the pages and memorize what I could and then just go in and do the scene. I enjoyed doing that because it’s very liberating. I think Noah and Greta enjoyed it, too, because it doesn’t give the actor a set idea of what has to happen. And luckily it’s not like some far out thing, but mostly characters talking to each other in a really amazing Noah-and-Greta way where everything they’re saying is at once incredibly naïve and intelligent, and funny and depressing.

DP: Is Tracy surprised that Brooke is upset when she writes the story about her?

LK: Is she surprised? I was surprised that Brooke was as upset as she was.

DP: I agree. But clarify—were you Lola surprised or was it your character Tracy who was surprised?

LK: Lola was surprised that Brooke was shocked. I don’t think Tracy ever would have shown the story to Brooke or think it would ever got to her. That’s why Brooke says “that’s a sneaky, shitty thing.” As much as I can see anyone’s point in that scene, it still surprises me just how everybody gangs up on Tracy at that moment. I remember during the shoot thinking, “But I’m right that Tracy is right, right?” And when we weren’t shooting Noah and Greta were like, “No, that was shitty of Tracy.” I didn’t know if that was part of them helping me as an actor. It’s confusing to me still and that’s an important issue in the movie. How much of your experience as a writer belongs to you and how much of it belongs to the people that you write about.. Greta said it so eloquently, that writing isn’t a victimless activity. I love that the film explores that.

DP: Before you walked in I wanted to ask you if you and Greta have the same rhythm or approach to acting. Because you are so low key in the movie. But now it turns out you are vibrant and out there, like Greta. I’m surprised.

LK: Maybe my approach to acting has changed since working with her. I really admire Greta, not in a creepy way, like Tracy admires Brooke, and I’m not gonna shit on Greta’s life with a screenplay about her. I don’t know. Perhaps my approach has changed a little bit. I’m still figuring out what my particular rhythm is as an actor.

DP: Did you film the final scene—which takes place at a landmark restaurant–at the end?

LK: It definitely wasn’t the last scene we shot. The last scene we shot was me on the steps of the house in Connecticut. It was a real wild experience, a real quiet ending to this raucous shoot. I sat there in the fucking, freezing cold doing a million takes of me silhouetted smoking and then they’re like, “Alright, that’s a wrap.” And I’m like “What!?”

DP: You did all the Connecticut stuff with the full cast at the end?

LK: That was more towards the end. I liked all the scenes in Connecticut, but I particularly like when they’re all in a row and talking excitedly about Brooke’s dream restaurant, that whole spiel.

DP: What was your favorite scene?

LK: I really liked the bar scene in New York with Rebecca Henderson because I think she’s brilliant.

DP: A former high school classmate tells off Brooke for the harm she did her years ago, while Tracy looks on–that’s an interesting scene.

LK: It is an interesting scene. I was actually catatonic during that entire scene. I think I ate twenty hotdogs because we shot it all day. We shot it in a bar in New York that wouldn’t shut for the day because their clientele would have passed away if they had alcohol withdrawal for long enough. So there were many very drunk people at six a.m. watching us, and by five p.m. the weirdest people came in. Rebecca just nailed it despite all the odds that were stacked against her.

DP: What is Tracy thinking as her friend Brooke is told off?

LK: I think that’s a moment where Brooke is affirmed as less stable than Tracy thought. Tracy is also really drunk and eating hotdogs in that scene. And really eager to please And awkward, obviously. It’s horrible to see anyone you admire be taken down a peg.

Noah Baumbach

Noah Baumbach Questions

Danny Peary: Greta said you went back to screwball comedies for inspiration for Brooke, as well as eighties films. I mentioned to herBreakfast at Tiffany’s, but it also comes across to me like a modernized version of Jane Austen. Like Emma, in regard to the relationship between women, one being a mentor. Were you thinking at all about that?

Noah Baumbach: Well, we were definitely thinking of ‘80s comedies, maybe a subgenre of movies where somewhat straitlaced people are kind of taken out of their comfort zone.Something Wild, After Hours. Greta may have, but I hadn’t thought about Jane Austen. But I think when you’re looking at these kinds of comedies, a lot of those references are kind of baked into the menu anyway. So in some ways, our movie almost became that. It was less that we set out to do it, but we kind of acknowledged as we were working on it that it was sort of a tradition that we were in.

DP: I think of your films dealing with two things. One is age. It’s always important how old your characters are. And another is that your characters always are lost. Not in a fish out of water sense, but they’re just out of place, they don’t fit in. I’m curious how you think those two common themes apply to this movie, but first do you agree with me that those are indeed your themes?

NB (laughing): Sure. However, I don’t think of my movies in terms of themes. Of course I’m aware that there are themes that are going to run through it; it stands to reason that since I’ve written and directed all of these movies that there’s going to be a conversation that goes on between them. But I’m not really that interested in what that is. I get interested in each movie individually and sort of want to try to figure out what that is. And often it’s specific ideas or, visuals or characters that have been in my head for a while, that I start to crystallize and that becomes the story that I end up making. But you know, I don’t really think of it like that. I think what you say makes sense. [Laughing] You could probably tell me better than I could tell you.

Rodrigo and His Three Mothers

Find Mother and Child on Video

Rodrigo and His Three Mothers

(from brinkzine.com 5/3/10)

Rodrigo Garcia

Writer-director Rodrigo Garcia is best known for his work on cable powerhouses In Treatment, Big Love, and The Sopranos, but that may change with the release of Mother and Child, a rare film with more than one strong woman's role. In fact, the three major roles in the film are females, and they are so skillfully written that Garcia was able to corral Annette Bening, Naomi Watts, and Kerry Washington for the leads (with Jimmy Smits and Samuel Jackson willing to take supporting roles). I don't want to give away the plot, so I'll just quote from the production notes: "Three women's lives share a common core: they have all been profoundly affected by adoption. Karen (Bening) placed a baby for adoption at age 14 and has been haunted ever since by the daughter she never knew. Elizabeth (Watts) grew up as an adopted child; she's a bright and ambitious lawyer, but a flinty loner in her personal life. Lucy (Washington) is just embarking with her husband on the adoption odyssey, hoping for the opportunity to become parents." I can say that all the women are difficult, very difficult--"I like difficult women," contends Garcia--and go through dramatic transformations. In anticipation of Friday's release, I participated in a press day with Garcia and his three super actresses and was able to pose a few questions.

Danny Peary: Annette, when you were reading your script the first time were you surprised where your character went from the beginning to the end of the movie?
Annette Bening: I was surprised and I hope that we kind of captured that in the movie. I love the way Rodrigo constructed the script and was able to establish these characters and where they end up going. Where they end up going is surprising and I did think that about my character. One of the things I love about the movie is the unexpected. You sort of feel that you know these people but what they end up doing is surprising.
DP: Did you peek at the last page of the script?
AB (laughing): No! I didn't peek--that's an indication of a good script, right? You don't have the tendency to jump to the end to see how the people end up, but let that be revealed when it's time.

Danny Peary: Rodrigo, did you write the script chronologically or did you write the stories of the women separately and then interweave them?
Rodrigo Garcia: When I began working on the script about ten years ago, I was interested not in adoption but people who are obsessed with an absent person--whether that person broke up with you and married someone else; or moved elsewhere; or died; or went to war or prison. How do they live while being obsessed with someone who isn't there? I decided to go back to the most primary situation I could think of, which is a mother and child separated at the baby's birth, and to work from there. I made Karen fourteen because I wanted it to be clear that she hadn't made an informed decision to give up her baby. It was thrust upon her. So I started writing Karen's and Elizabeth's storylines simultaneously, bouncing back and forth between them. Interweaving them. After a while it became a little monotonous and confining so I decided I needed a third storyline to help me get away from these women and vent. By then the theme of adoption was in the air so I invented the character of Lucy, the women looking to adopt a baby. From then on I kept braiding the three stories into one.
DP: In the production notes, you're interviewed about women and you say, "I don't really know what they're thinking but it's fun to imagine it." Was there a fear in writing women in that you had a burden to get it right?
RG: I had a filter, which was the actresses. I have written scripts that no actress would touch. There's one script that I was very fond of and no actress liked the character and no actress wanted to play her. That was a miss. I think there's enough in this script that Annette, Naomi, and Kerry responded to it. They felt they could relate to these characters. I write it as it comes and I think a lot about how my wife would respond to a character. And what would Glenn Close, Annette Bening, or Holly Hunter think? What would these actresses who dissect characters think?
DP: The opening scene when Karen is a young girl is completely innocent by intention, right?
RG: What I like about the subject matter is that it needs no explanation because it's primal. If I say to you that she had a baby at fourteen and it was taken away from her and she never recuperated, you're not going to ask me why. It's clear. So the past could be explained in a sentence but I thought it would be good to see Karen so we could see what a fourteen-year-old looks like when she's pregnant. I thought if we saw her pregnant, we'd have a connection to her that would help us forgive or at least understand her later behavior.
DP: Even before that we see the two teenagers making out and she takes off her blouse and it seems so innocent. Then she's pregnant and there is all this pain.
RG: Yeah, that was one of the tragedies of the story for me. You make an almost childish mistake and you carry it for the next thirty-six years. That's the story of the world, when you go just a little bit too far.
SPOILER ALERTDP: Was there ever a time Naomi Watts' character lived in your script?
RG: There was a time when Elizabeth lived but she was never going to meet Karen. I always thought I didn't want the Hollywood ending where Karen and Elizabeth meet or where Karen inherits the baby, not because I wanted to be perverse but because so many of these things turn out in completely unexpected ways.
END SPOILER ALERT

RG (cont'd): In doing research about adoption, I didn't read books by specialists, only memoirs and accounts of people who had gone through this. I don't mean adoptions in general but adoptions thirty, forty, or fifty years ago. There were these closed adoptions, where the pregnancy and the adoption were cloaked in shame. It was secret and shameful for the girl so that in itself did damage. Because the adoptions were closed neither the mother nor the child had a chance to find out what happened to the other. In these stories I read, people were haunted by the silence and the mystery. The idea of fate having played with their lives was important. Often mother and child would search for each other and not find each other or find each other after one of them had died. Or they'd find each other and not connect or the connection would fizzle out. Neither finding the person nor connecting to the person was guaranteed. So the interesting story for me was one of acceptance. That meant that no matter what happens I wanted to take Karen to a place where she accepts what she can't change. She has moved on. She was repressed when we first see her but has somehow found the peace to be able to say, "This is the way it is and now I can live."

Danny Peary: Naomi, Annette Bening's character Karen says, "I'm not a weirdo but I'm difficult." Is her daughter Elizabeth difficult and a weirdo?
Naomi Watts (laughing): Yes. Though I'm not sure her character isn't weird, too. I didn't really have many ways to relate to Elizabeth. She's quite a complicated woman and [laughing] we're not really that much alike. I was kind of afraid of her. Elizabeth is definitely weird. But she thinks her new next door neighbors, the newlyweds with the pregnant wife, are the weirdos. They're the people who really don't know what they're doing. In her mind, they have no conscious life. [Using a high voice] "Hi, we're from next door and let's all be friends." She's thinking, "Who are you two? What planet did you come from?" In all the things I tried to work out with Elizabeth, the one issue I had a problem with was her secretly putting her underwear in his wife's underwear drawer so she'd find it. I was asking, "Oh, wait a second, is she truly evil?" Rodrigo said, "No." I just think she is trying to get a spark out of people, trying to get them to see who they are rather than the people they behave like. "You think your husband is really that special? Well, guess what, honey, he was looking at me on the balcony the other day and he wants me." I think she has such a low opinion of not just men but of human beings in general--because she's been so hurt--that she wants to expose their flaws. In her own kind of weird way, she feels that she is giving her neighbors a gift.
DP: She is helping the young married woman learn about her husband.
MW: Yes. To see what a lie she is living.
SPOILER ALERT Danny Peary: Kerry, and indication of Lucy becoming a good, secure mother is that she allows Karen, her adopted baby's grandmother, into the life of the child. What was her process in making that decision?

Kerry Washington: I think she's going to be a great mother and you see that at the end of the film. By then she is willing to live on life's terms and is accepting things as they are. She's already doing a great job as a mother when she meets Karen. She looks very comfortable in her motherhood at that point. I think the choice to say yes is really symbolic of how open she has become. In the beginning of the film Lucy is really closed off and anxious, and at the end she takes this risk to open up her home to Karen despite what she's been through, all that drama. I think when she's clear about the legality of letting Karen meet the child and knows there's no danger that she will lose full custody of the baby, she's open.
END SPOILER ALERTKerry Washington (cont'd): I think the film is about the more inclusive ways that we as a society are beginning to define family--because of all the ways families happen now. If you look at the families in the film, you see so many shapes and configurations, ethnically, religiously, age-wise. It's a beautiful part of the film.