TH: To be honest, I considered it a kind of lack of ambition or imagination on my part, at a certain level. I just thought Fassbinder was so brilliant at what he did with All That Heaven Allows and if I was really vigorous with this, I would find a really powerful way to apply that theatricality, that use of the soundstage and that use of artifice to a contemporary setting. Now I'm so glad that I didn't. But I knew that I really loved the 50s and how the 50s were so specific to Douglas Sirk and to films of this genre and I just wanted to rediscover and re-examine that list of connections. And Bush had just been elected and we were still in this post-Clinton wealthy economy, and there was almost a suggestion of an isolationist instinct in this new administration, that we were going to shut the rest of the world off and we were going to bask in our ... It seemed so 50s, and I thought that would be an interesting thing to do: to hold up the 50s as a sort of flattery to our innate progressiveness as a culture, of how we've moved on, that we've resolved all those problems. And that would be a great thing to exploit. I think people get that, but what I think is so great is that you have to give an audience something to do, that if you offer them even that slight, metaphoric gap between the frame and the reference, they fully take it. And I realised this when we did our crazy press day in Los Angeles where I did 60 five-minute interviews in one day, and this is very mainstream American press. What I would have expected to hear was choruses of, "Wow, we've really moved on from the 50s." In fact, they all said, "You know, it really makes you wonder how far we've come." At the most basic level, that was so meaningful to me, that they took the bait. I love that, and the film does that in many other ways - it sort of demands that you fill in the gaps and blanks.
SH: And generally your films do ask that; there's no neat resolution of difficult questions. It seems to me that the openness of the films is exactly about getting people to respond in that way.
JM: Yes, it leaves the audience in the position of saying, "And what do you think?" Like that final scene in Safe, where she says, "I love you" and then pffft. And everybody goes, "What?! What am I supposed to think?" People still come up to me and ask, "What do you think happened?" because they're afraid, because that film ends on a note of fear.
TH: It's granted that there are degrees of responsibility or ideas that you can give to an audience. There are films which ask a lot more of an audience to take home and ponder, and Safe frustrated a lot of people and made people think, but it made a lot of people come round to it and embrace it critically and as spectators. But I think Far from Heaven maybe asks ... I don't know but somehow it's kind of made the crossover in a very curious way to a less demanding audience. It can sort of play at two levels, which is intriguing to me.
SH: But then, the film is incredibly rich at all kinds of levels - stylistically, visually, the way it looks and sounds as well as the way in which it plays out. The film has such incredible pleasures and maybe that's why it's doing that.
JM: Todd said something wonderful the other day that I keep quoting in every interview - we were talking about the production design of the film and what Sirk did and what he's doing in this, kind of the source of it, and he said that it's as if the love that the characters feel, the emotion that they carry is too much for them and it spills out into the colour of the sky, and the dress that she's wearing and the music that you hear and the way the room's arranged. So literally every thought and feeling that these people are having is spilling onto the screen. And I thought that was so beautiful and so apt and why this film is such an incredible, visceral experience. You are literally allowed access to feeling in a very wonderful kind of way. What you can't say, you feel, you see, you sense.
SH: Does that mean that in adopting the conventions of melodrama and kind of stretching them, did that then prove to be a liberating thing to do, or did that prove to be a constraining thing? Because it sounds like the fit between the emotional impact that the film needed to have and the rather excessive style was absolutely how it needed to be.
TH: The constraints are wonderful. There's nothing more creatively inspiring than a set of rules and limits that you work within. From the beginning in conceiving the script, nothing that would happen in this universe was going to come from anything other than a very prescribed series of gestures, colours, movements, narrative possibilities from a very specific world of film. That was great and amazing, it gave us this creative framework.
JM: It gives you a channel ...
TH: Absolutely.
JM: ... because things are so powerful, the emotions are so powerful. With this kind of thing, [the framework] allows all the feeling to be really intense. Like, if all he [the black gardener] can do is touch my hand, then when he does touch my hand, it's going to be explosive.
TH: And it helped the production design decisions. Mark Friedberg and I, we began by thinking Hartford, Connecticut in the 50s. So we looked at those colonial houses in New England, but they were really boxed up into little rooms and the scale was completely inappropriate. And we realised that in Sirk's day, everything in this film is interpreted through what a Hollywood soundstage would do to it, how Los Angeles in 1957 would interpret Hartford. It was wonderfully specific.
JM: Which is why I said I had to be a blonde. You look at all these films, and there wasn't a redhead in there. Jane Wyman was a brunette, but that was about as off-kilter as they got.
[Laughter]
JM: It's true, the classic, iconic American ideal, that heroine, our idea of perfection is this blonde woman in a blue dress and a blue car.
SH: But I'm fascinated by what that meant in terms of performance, too. It's not like you are a 1950s housewife. It's almost like a metaperformance - you are acting the part of acting the part of.
JM: That's true, I hadn't thought about that.
TH: But to me, that's the thing. I felt like, that made your job actually harder and my job easier. But you knew that.
JM [laughs]: Yes, I did.
[Laughter]
TH: No, but you talk about this particular kind of acting.
JM: Yes, which I loved because it has this particular kind of shape to it. You have this very presentational, very artificial style, but the content, the emotion is incredibly powerful and very, very real. So, as we were saying, there is no subtext. It is on top of the line. So when I say, "You're beautiful" or any of those lines, I'm giving it in a very pure, unironic way. And it is the style of the time, of these particular films. As an actor, this was fantastic. There was no, "Hmm, what is the behaviour? What are they feeling?" It was incredibly pure.
TH: Don't you think that contemporary acting styles are so dependent on this idea of depth?
JM: Yes.
TH: And disclosure, the notion of psychological depth and concealing, of language as cover.
JM: Yes, that is the conceit of our time. And here's another thing that I'm not fond of, that when the camera sees something on a character's face that the other character doesn't see. I just think, that doesn't happen in real life. One of the things that I love about this film is, that in this artificial little world, that didn't happen to us. It was actually closer to real life. Like that scene where the women are having drinks and talking about their sex lives, and people say, "Why doesn't Cathy say anything?" And I say, "Well, that's because you don't. It's only in films where the character cuts away and the woman's going [face crumples]. We don't do that. So I appreciated that this construct existed in this framework. I actually found that this was more moving and more interesting and strangely more lifelike than current ideas about film-making.
TH: That actually fits into something I always say about Julianne's acting, which is that actors learn to show everything on their face, that's what they're supposed to do, to convey every emotion, and they love being able to do that and show you everything that they can. But who does that in real life? But in fact, if you don't show the audience everything, I think it makes the audience lean in a little closer and look behind the composure. And you know this, this is something that I do see in you in different roles from film to film.
JM: It's like in life, what busts you up? What's the thing that makes you fall apart? And I think it's always when you're in a situation that's incredibly difficult and you watch somebody, your mother, for instance. And rather than falling apart in front of you, your mother handles it, and then you go in the other room and fall apart. And that's the thing that I find so moving in life, that people contain themselves and take care of others and go on and do whatever. That is so incredibly compelling to watch.
TH: That reminds me, I read some of this book called Child Star by Shirley Temple, and the way her mother would make her cry. Her mother was all over her and constructing her into a little star. But she would say, "Think of something really sad and then smile." In other words, create a conflict.
JM: That's right, internalise it.
TH: And that makes you cry. It's exactly like what you said, it's like watching your mother hold it together.
JM: Oh my God, what a demon that woman was.
TH: I know.
JM: Hey, there's a movie. And you're gonna make me play the mother, aren't you?
[Laughter]
SH: You heard it here first. But before we open it to questions from the floor, I just want to ask you one more thing about Far from Heaven. You've talked a little bit about the production design but can you talk about the use of colour and how you were involved in that process and the drawing in of production design and camera and costumes.
TH: Colour was absolutely a key note, the leading stylistic structuring device in the entire way we approached the production. Of course, the first thing that anyone who knows Sirk's films thinks about is the use of colour. And never before was colour such a major preoccupation of mine from the very beginning, where I spent several nights going through the script and just thinking of each scene solely in terms of colour. And I guess what you see when you watch a film like All That Heaven Allows is this beautifully sophisticated palette of warm and cool colours interacting. Films today tend to dumb down the use of colour in such a reductive way, where whole films are blue if they are thrillers or golden honey coloured if they are set in a happy, nostalgic past. And in Sirk and in various moments through Hollywood, colour is very complex as emotion is complex, and suggests ambivalence and a range of complexity. So that was just a beautiful invitation to explore colour subtly and allow warm and cool colours to interact, even if at times one was dominant over the other.
So I made these colour charts, about 24 or 30 swatches of these Pantone colours, and then some poor intern had to make multiple copies of these and give them to Sandy [Powell, the costume designer] and her department, Mark Friedberg [production designer] and his department, and Ed Lachman, the director of photography. And we basically sat for days and just plotted the film, scene by scene, solely by colour, and allotting roles to the colours. Sometimes it would be as simple as Cathy's clothes that she'd wear in the wooded trail, where Raymond was dressed in the colours of fall and she was in this lilac coloured sweater and green blouse, being offset by the environment, and that was a more sort of direct use of contrasting colours.
Then when you go into the black bar with Raymond, the actual colours of the location were very warm so we used theatrical lighting in the bar, purple and green, so that all of a sudden Cathy's colours were mirrored by those of the set itself. But these mood pieces of colour ultimately had to do with how these scenes were lit, the gels that we used; definitely the decor and the costumes were the starting point, but how they're lit and photographed is ultimately the factor.
SH: And is it true that the way in which you went about achieving that kind of visual vocabulary was that you actually did use some of the methods used at the time that Sirk was making films?
TH: Only. One, we didn't have the money to even consider digital enhancement after the fact to push colours and to try to go further in a Technicolor look. So everything was done old school, in camera, using lights, gels, sets, locations. What was amazing is that you can plan a production around a specific need, for instance, a fall setting. But you never know what's going to happen when you actually get out there. So we so lucky; just really, really lucky. It just exploded on cue, just when we needed it to. It was amazing, and so warm.
JM [laughs]: I've never seen New Jersey look like that.
TH: Absolutely. The tourist board should be pushing this.
[Laughter]
SH: Can you set the Shirley Temple film there?
JM & TH [giggling]: Yeah, yeah.
SH: Let's open it up to the audience.
Q1: I want to ask, because the whole tension of the film is built around falling apart and containment, when it's down to one character to carry that, how do you, as a director, and you, as an actor, do that? Like in that clip we just saw [scene where Cathy's husband accuses her of infidelity with Raymond]. How is that done?
[Laughter]
JM: For me, as an actor, a lot of that occurs in the rhythm of the language and the playing of the scene. And Dennis Quaid [who plays Frank, Cathy's husband] that day, he started so hot and high; and I had not expected him to start so high. I was like, "Ooh, Dennis!"
[Laughter]
It was great, it was exciting because we hadn't been doing any yelling and some days it's fun to yell. And so he goes like this, and I thought, how am I going to come in? So I had to start down, and he keeps edging me up, and I edge up and edge up but what's marvellous is that Todd, in the script, has put in rhythmically, "You did this", "YOU did this", "I did this" and "I gave him his notice and we're NEVER going to see that man again." And the heart of the matter is, and this is one of the things that you discover when you're working, he wrote the tragedy into the scene. She had no intention of breaking up with Raymond, she's in love with him, or at least at that point, he's her secret special friend. And Todd has pressed her up against it and makes her decide, in the midst of this argument, that she is going to give him up forever. And so, it's a wonderful rhythmical thing. And not only does Todd do that, but then he directs us that at that point, Dennis slams the door and leaves, and it's like the end of the issue. And they move into the other room, and Cathy says, "But that's not what made you come home from the office, is it?" And so it backs out of her world and her problems and into his. And it's contained but the drama has moved.
TH: The thing about having the 50s as a backdrop is that we easily look at the 50s and see all of this oppression coming from the outside onto poor people, and if only that oppression went away, they'd be free and happy, like we are today.
[Laughter]
TH: But as we all know, there are all these self-regulating aspects of oppression that we sort of inherit at the earliest stages. And it's the interaction between external oppression that we can fight, oppose, despise and the really complicated ways in which we accept it, and feel that we deserve it at some level. So when Frank is screaming at Cathy and blaming her for having an affair with this man, and all they did was walk down the street hand in hand, we all know that that's unfair and that he's the one who is going much further with a desire which is more explosive for the time and getting away with it, and yet he's making her feel guilty for feelings that are absolutely authentic and true. So she's guilty of the things that he's accusing her of without having done anything.
JM: She immediately feels culpable.
TH: But because all relationships are complicated, she can immediately turn it back and resume a sense of power when she sees that Frank is falling apart for other reasons and blaming it on her.
JM: And I loved what Todd did in terms of moving us physically in the space because I went from the kitchen, the confrontation was in the dining room and he turned and walked away defeated and sat down in the living room. So you literally had a flow happen.
TH: We also deviated from Sirk in a nice way, I think, at this point. The camera moves when actors move in Sirk, there are very few moments of a solitary camera tracking you. But after you say that you've already let him go, we slowly move sort of around her a bit as she asks, "What happened at work today?" You feel a shifting of gears, and we let the camera help you with that in a way which probably would not have been true in Sirk.
Q2: I have a question about the dialogue in this film - when Cathy speaks, especially to the children, it's extremely formal, she uses big words that maybe housewives wouldn't have used. Is that the way you wrote the script, as a way to highlight the 50s feeling, or if it's something that you [JM] added to the script?
TH: Yeah, it wasn't flippant.
JM: I think it stands out because we're not used to seeing this, especially in the case of talking to children. There's formal language spoken throughout the film, but it stands out when it's spoken to children because we're so used to informal language around children on film. But it is a convention of these films. Like, in A Reckless Moment, Joan Bennett is always saying, "David, please go upstairs and don't bother Mother anymore!" In that tone.
[Laughter]
So you do see this again and again. There is that formality and children being shifted away from the central focus of the film. We talked about this, one of the things I love about Todd's work and this film in particular, is that no one is without culpability. As wonderful, as utopian, as liberal as Cathy appears to be, you watch her brush past the NAACP on her way to see her boyfriend and you watch Cathy, Raymond and Frank oppress the children they ostensibly adore, the same way that they're being oppressed in their worlds. You watch Raymond send his little girl out there to play with these boys and you think, "Can't he see?" These characters perpetrate the same ills.
TH: And you see these little kids desperately trying to follow those roles. The cycle continues.
JM: Yeah, you see the appearance of perfection, but they're simply repeating the same things that they're experiencing.
Q3: I'm quite interested in the photography in this film - can you tell me what specific techniques you used to keep the 50s present on screen?
TH: Really, nothing more than what I've already said. We used Cooke lenses from the early 70s, which are softer and not as finegrained. Everything has moved toward more finegrained levels of stops and lenses since the 50s. A lot of them give a lot of advantages and make conditions much easier to get a good negative. But Ed Lachman is amazing and he's got a fantastic crew of people - John DeBlau, who's his gaffer, is just a crazy genius. And Ed surrounds himself with the best. And we were also very lucky because we'd come out of the so-called writers' strike, so everyone was available. We had a very overqualified crew for this film with very little money to pay them but they all wanted to work. And then 9/11 happened and whatever else was being planned was gone. It's all the use of gels, really just paying attention to colour and shadow. It's letting things go really dark. Sirk etches his images in beautifully inky blacks and foreground objects are often utterly black. I think it was Sirk who said that the key to beautiful colour cinematography is always thinking about it in black and white first, in terms of ultimate contrast, and then you fill in with colour.
Q4: A question about performances in a film where colour and cinematography were so important - were there times when you threw away the swatches and thought, "I got it wrong, she has to do this in blue and purple"? Do you see a performance from Julianne and readjust your vision of the style, or do you see his storyboard and say, "No, you got it wrong."
TH: Um, no. Mostly because there's just no time to. I admire people who invent on set so much, but I've never practically had the time to. There's just so much that needs to get done in a day that the only way that I can begin to pull it off is to be utterly prepared and to be really specific about what I can tell people, so that we all know what we're doing. And I think there's so much chaos on set that it's hard. I wish I could see most clearly what I'm getting on set and I can't.
JM: I don't like to deviate either. I love how prepared Todd is and sometimes, I'd ask him how many shots he has; not as a way of saying that I have to leave by 7 o'clock or something like that, but because there's something that I will adjust to in terms of how his camera is working. I think that's why we work so well together.
TH: She prepares in a comparable way off the set. She comes with this structure and awareness that's really intact, and I think that's a way to protect something very authentic ...
JM: Yeah, that I want to happen on set. Which is why I want to know what the shots are.
TH: You need to feel structured around that ...
JM: Contained.
TH: ... in order to do it. Which is the way you are about, for instance, knowing what's the next shot, so you can enjoy your break.
JM: That's right!
TH: I'm very much the same way; we're always organising so that we can have the chaos in the middle. We really are the same person inside.
[Laughter]
Q5: What inspired you to deal with the race relations issue? And how do you think race relations in the 50s compares with the situation now?
TH: I didn't intend initially to include such gigantic themes in such a modest film, a domestic setting about a woman. And all of a sudden I had homosexuality, race, etc. But it seemed very necessary to me. I was initially very interested in what would happen to a female character when her husband was struggling with his sexuality. I wanted to focus on how that would impact her in the home.
But I also had scenarios in mind that had to do exclusively with race and at one point I put them together, and it felt like the racial themes balanced out the claustrophobic, hidden tensions at home with something desperately visible and public and open to a whole different kind of distortion due to its visibility. And also, Cathy needed to have her desires elicited and provoked so that that would be a tension as well. And yet I was very aware ...
I loved Imitation of Life, one of the most interesting and complex films about race; there's a moment toward the end of the film where Annie, Juanita Moore, who is the lifelong companion, the black maid/friend of Lana Turner, is dying and she says, "I want to have a big funeral and invite all my friends." And Lana Turner says, "Annie, I didn't know you had friends." And they'd spent 30 or 40 years of their lives together. And Annie says, "Well, Miss Laura, you never asked." And the amazing thing about this is not that Juanita Moore is telling Lana Turner in a movie that she never asked about her life, but that we never asked. We watch this whole movie and we never wondered once what happens to Juanita Moore when she's not onscreen. This is a white movie for a white audience and we're very happy for it to have interesting racial themes to make us all feel good that we're concerned about these things. And the film was very smart about showing the sort of pettiness of the Sandra Dee-Lana Turner storyline against these absolutely unresolvable themes about passing as white in society and how much it hurts the black mother of this girl who's very light skinned.
But I think representation is invariably very limited, it's never going to show you the world: it's always biased and suspect and coming from a single point of view, and the most honest thing you can do is show that, admit that, not try to give the black experience to the audience - reveal the frame, basically, and that's what I tried to do but not nearly as beautifully as Sirk.
Q6: A question for Julianne: of all the roles that you've played on film, which character most closely identifies with your personality?
JM: That's so hard; none of them and all of them. That's the beauty of what actors do, that you only have yourself as a resource. And so the trick is to find something in them that you connect to somewhere. And with every single one of my characters, I have to find something that I really understand and ultimately believe. So I can't answer that. But I guess the most successful characters that I've played are the ones which most resonate with me.
Q7: Julianne, we've seen back to back two films where you play 1950s housewives - The Hours where your character seems in danger of completely falling apart and in this one, where she seems more contained. How has it made you view the position of women in that time?
JM: I actually didn't shoot them very close together. They were released very close but I shot one in the spring of 2001 and the other one in the fall. And it's unfortunate that I have to talk about the 1950s because I feel like I don't know much about that time. But one of the things that you realise is how limited their choices were - these were women who had no avenue out. There was no possibility of employment: that was something outside their realm. The idea that they had an identity beyond that of a wife and mother was unknown to them as well. So in terms of that I think that it hammers home how difficult it is to have just one prescribed role for a person. That being said, [Cathy Whitaker in Far from Heaven and Laura Brown in The Hours] are completely different psychological beings. But in truth, you do believe that the Cathy Whitaker character will sustain a life - there will be a change for her, she will get a job, she will succeed. This is someone who manages to do it, whereas Laura is someone who's disintegrating, and probably doesn't have much of a life at all.
Q8: A question for Todd: all your films seem to have these strong messages, particularly Safe and Far from Heaven. How then did you come to do Velvet Goldmine, which seems so different from the rest of your films. Or was there an important message that you wanted to get across in that film, which seems to stand apart. Or was it just self-indulgence?
TH: Velvet Goldmine embodied so many ideas that I cared deeply about and loved thinking about and still do. And in many ways, this whole notion of turning artifice upside down and finding something totally true through those terms, deconstructed - the ways that that doubles back onto our notions of identity. [Glam rock was] a hybrid of natural instincts and conformity and revolt. It was never something completely organic or divorced from society or something absolutely stable either. That was something that youth culture and music culture have definitely tapped into in various ways, but perhaps not to that degree.
There's also that notion of authenticity and truth in direct sensual expression in music, too. But something about that theatricality and the link that was made between dressing up and exploring sexuality - that specific link with music as your soundtrack and the beat and with big shoes, was kind of an amazing, visionary moment in our pop cultural tapestry. And I think it was uniquely appropriate to film, which is invariably a synthesis of artificial language and something utterly emotional and real.
SH: Far from Heaven opens on March 7. Thank you to all of you who asked questions and made contributions. Now, I'm sure you'd all like to join me in thanking Julianne and Todd for an evening which has not only been illuminating but a huge amount of fun.
