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HBO Online Exclusive Interview with Jane Anderson
HBO
Welcome Jane Anderson. If you would, take us back to the genesis of the project for you?
JANE ANDERSON
It actually was a play I had been working on for about ten years off and on. I started writing it, jeez, I think back in the really early nineties. And it's when transsexualism was a much more exotic subject. And I thought I would explore the subject through a marriage.
And it was an OK play. But it wasn't a very sophisticated piece because I was trying to get all my research in, and to prove in my writing that I knew everything there is to know about turning from a man to a woman. And I dropped the piece for a while, and when I got back to it my own relationship and my own maturity of a person caught up to me. And I realized that I really wanted to, to use this, the play as a metaphor for a study of marriage.
And I decided to make it about a couple's enduring love for each other rather than about adventures of a trans-gender person.
HBO
Describe the process of going from play to screenplay.
JANE ANDERSON
You have to be really ruthless with yourself, especially if you've written both the play and you're about to write the screenplay. All writers have a tendency of course to want to preserve and save what they consider their most brilliant stuff. And you have to, you have to just step back and let go of as much material as you can bear in order to adapt it to the new medium.
Theater's medium is words, so in the piece, my dialogue really drove the evening. I had also a kind of magical realism form to it. I had some of my characters talking directly to the audience. Patty Anne, she had one monologue pointing to a chart of the female reproduction system and doing a rant on puberty and menopause.
Wayne, because it was theater, I could have him reading Roy's letters to him directly to the audience and ranting at that. I even had Roy's parents talk directly to the audience.
And I also had another character that I completely excised from the film. And the character's name was Grandmother Ruth. It was Roy's grandmother come back from the dead. And she had escaped her Midwest farm life back in the nineteen teens to go to Paris and live a life as a boheme and as a bisexual. So I used that character as a voice to talk to the audience about sexuality and gender and what is the difference and who cares.
So my play was not only about the relationship, it also threw ideas out there to the audience about the nature of gender, femininity, sexuality.
And in a film, you really need to find one theme and go for it. And what I did was I decided what I wanted the theme to be is absolutely the marriage. And I want the point of view to be through Roy and Irma. So I restructured, re-honed the whole piece for that.
HBO
Were you drawing on any sources when you were researching this? Or was it purely out of your imagination?
JANE ANDERSON
Oh, it's my imagination, it's all fiction.
HBO
I think your single theme came through - the feeling I walked away with was, how does one define love?
JANE ANDERSON
Yes, exactly. That's what I set out to do. What I like to do when I write a play or write a film, I love to take a theme and shake it up as much as I can. And I thought, how can I shake up this notion of love. What could you possibly throw at a long time married couple that would really challenge them?
And of course gender bending is the ultimate challenge for any relationship. And it's really, it's more of a metaphor to me than anything else. A metaphor for the ultimate catastrophe that could befall a marriage.
You know, there have been hundreds and hundreds of pieces done about affairs, and can you still love someone after they've betrayed you. But turning yourself into a different sex really is the ultimate betrayal.
And dramatically it gave me a lot of great challenges. One of them was, how do I make sure that the audience doesn't think Roy is just a selfish bastard, pulling this on his wife? How do I develop an empathy for that character?
Another theme that HBO was very concerned about was how do I keep them together as a couple at the end, and not turn Irma into a non-sexual person? How, how do we give her a degree of fulfillment? How do I indicate that she hasn't given up, her own sexuality?
And it was a very delicate, delicate thing to tread. I was considering in the film putting in a lovemaking scene, and then I decided that, first of all, sexual scenes are so common now that they don't mean much. It's almost like the required car chase, a required bed scene. And second of all it really in the end doesn't matter how they make love, it's the fact that they love each other. And, and the actual act of love making, how they resolve that part of the relationship should be left up to the audience's imagination.
HBO
It certainly strives for a much more profound and deeper sense of what a relationship is defined by.
JANE ANDERSON
Yes, yes.
HBO
Transcending the external, physical aspect of a relationship. I found that very powerful, but done at the same time with a great deal of humor.
JANE ANDERSON
Yes. I always wrote it with that in mind. I think that's one of the many reasons I chose the Midwest, to put it in the Midwest with a very specific kind of couple. Because I find the dry approach to life, of the good Midwest farm person very funny. And also, very endearing.
HBO
It's funny, you talk about the balance - one of my favorite moments was when Roy goes into work with perfume on for the first time, and has to defend his wife's honor because his co-workers think he's cheating on his wife when they smell the perfume.
JANE ANDERSON
Well, with that particular scene, I knew I had a choice. I had to put in a scene in the factory where he is discovered. And I thought to myself, well, the obvious is that they smell his perfume and he confesses and the scene is just about the discovery of Roy being a cross dresser.
But knowing that the theme of my movie was always about their marriage, I decided that the scene really had to be about Roy defending his wife's honor. You have got it exactly. And it's much more interesting.
I learned along time ago that every scene in a film, because there are an average of about a hundred, maybe two hundred scenes in your average movie, and they all have to be strung together like pearls. And every scene must contain the DNA of your theme. And when I'm writing, if I might be stuck on what to do, I always think, what is the whole movie about, and how do I form the scene to reflect that.
So even if it's about Roy being exposed to the world as a man becoming a woman, it had to really be about how he feels about Irma, and yearning, yearning to be back with her.
HBO
What was it like working with HBO? How was that experience?
JANE ANDERSON
I consider HBO my creative home. It's my third project with them. I wrote, "The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom." I was able to do really wacky stuff.
And then I did "If These Walls Could Talk 2." I did the Vanessa Redgrave segment. And I find (HBO's) taste so immaculate. I consider HBO a studio. They allow you to make real films, the kind of films that you can't make in mainstream studios.
They give you money, they give you support. They like to know every single thing you're doing, but ultimately they're incredibly respectful of the filmmaker.
HBO
How was it working with such great stars?
JANE ANDERSON
Yeah, such great, great, great actors. You know, you always end up with the right actors playing your parts. I hadn't thought of Tom at first because he's English. I wanted, you know, an authentic Midwestern actor. But I finally, after seeing Tom in "In The Bedroom" and realizing that he can play American beautifully. But even more than that, Tom has a very everyman, very male, very solid quality.
And I wanted my Roy to be just a regular guy. And I didn't want anybody to think in a million years that this man could be a woman. Tom is big shouldered, and he's very masculine, and very comfortable in that. And also he has this sweet, dear quality about him that I knew that he could carry off Roy's journey without appearing, self-involved.
And Jessica, I think she is one of the great treasures of American theater and film. She's truly one of the greats. And she's a woman's woman. She is very female and sexy and I loved exploring an Irma who you sensed needs to have a man, a male in her life because she is so feminine.
Jessica and I talked about Irma, who was probably the prom queen when she was in high school. She is a girly girl. Which makes her journey all the more heartbreaking. And seemingly impossible.
And, because Tom and Jessica are so smart and both of them are from theater, they were brutal with me about cutting lines and honing the script down. Because the draft I had at pre-production, it was a good draft, but it still had shards of vestigial pieces of the play. Scenes were still a little wordy, they were still a little long.
And we had like three weeks of prep. It was an impossibly tight and short schedule, but we had a couple of rehearsals before we shot. And most of the rehearsals involved talking through the characters and cutting lines. And when you have great actors, you know you can turn the camera on them and let their reactions create the subtext rather than talk.
HBO
What's not being said is just as revealing as what is.
JANE ANDERSON
Right. Exactly. Tom and Jessica also fortunately, had the same rhythm. They liked to work the same way. They're both like first, second, at the most, third takes. They figure a scene out and they like to perform for the camera when it's fresh and still a mystery to them.
And once they both figure out a scene they get bored and they want to move on. And sometimes if you have two stars, one wants thirty takes, the other wants two. But these two just adored each other, and had a wonderful time working with each other.
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