Interview: Gina Prince-Bythewood of “Beyond the Lights”

Posted on November 14, 2014 at 9:28 am

It was an honor to speak to one of my favorite filmmakers, Gina Prince-Bythewood, writer/director of one of this year’s best romantic dramas, “Beyond the Lights.” As I spoke to her, she had just received word that Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who stars as Noni in the film, had been nominated for a Gotham award.

You must be so proud of this great recognition for Gugu Mbatha-Raw.

It was a pretty phenomenal morning to wake up to that. Gugu started working on the character really for two years but really hard-core for six months in terms of being in the dance studio for hours, a couple of days a week and then the vocal studio with the vocal coach and the amount of work she put into this character knowing that this character is a hundred and eighty degrees from who Gugu is. You know how bold and brave she had to be to put this out there and to go there and we knew we had to go there given what is happening in the industry now and needing to compete with that and having the knowledge that you have to lead an audience into a world before you can lead them out. So, the fact that she bought into the vision of the piece and really went there — it is just a beautiful thing that she is being recognized and not only for the incredible work she did but in terms of just the preparation. But she gives a really phenomenal performances. I love that it is being recognized.

As a woman who writes and directs, you did a particularly good job of addressing the objectifying elements of what goes on in show business today. Was that an important theme for you to address?

Absolutely. first as a woman who is seeing what happens especially in the music industry and the blueprints that the young artists have to follow to make any sort of noise when they first come out, it really is hypersexualized. But also as a mother of two boys in seeing the trickle-down effect that is happening, the hyper sexualization becoming normal and teen girls and teen boys – and the things that they are doing now are very frightening to me as a mother. And we really are hoping that the film can change the conversation.

I like what you said a moment ago by taking people into the world before you can take them out of it. Tell me a little bit about what that means to you.

For me to put this out there, I mean it was hard shooting the music video as at the beginning of the film and putting that out there in the world and telling an actor to put that energy out. We went there because it was necessary. This is the character that five minutes later is on the edge of a balcony about to jump and we really needed to show the psychological effects on a 10-year-old girl who just wants to sing, who’s probably in front of a mirror singing into a hairbrush and no one dreams about being in an artist and putting that kind of energy out but to make this dramatic jump to that music video and I want the immediate question of how did that happen, how did that little girl become this and what is the psychological effects of that film. So we had to push it and we had to go there because it was important to the story that we were telling.

You have said that you were very glad to be working with Nate Parker again on this film. What makes him one of your favorite actors?

I love Nate as an actor because he has no inhibitions and he would just go for it and that karaoke was a scene that he had to do that. Obviously he is not a singer and he just wanted to do it live and whatever came out of his mouth came out of his mouth. There was a real crowd out there but he just threw himself into it and it is so great the reactions that the audience get when they see it because this character has been so reserved and serious. It was really important to see them thrive in Mexico, both of them letting go and finding their voice and falling in love. And that was a really important aspect to see his character see what Noni brings out in him as well as what he brings out in Noni.

What is next for you?

The next one I am going to write, I’m very excited about it but I can’t talk about it too much. It does deal with female friendships. All my films have a personal aspect and this one is no different, so I’m very excited. And it will be a little more comedic in tone.

You create some of the best love stories that I’ve seen on screen and it is a compliment to say they remind me of the classic romances of the ‘40s with actresses like Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck. Are you a fan of that era of movies?

That is a tremendous compliment, thank you. I have to say the great things about film school is being exposed to films that you normally would never see and you get to seei them on the big screen, films like “The Apartment,” which is I think is such a great film influenced on me, “The Rose” is a fantastic film that came out in the ‘70s, “Lady Sings the Blues,” I love that type of romance, to wrecked by movie emotionally and then be built back up and leave inspired. Those are the kinds of films I love to watch and so for me it is writing what I want to see.

Interview: Ted Melfi of “St. Vincent”

Posted on October 19, 2014 at 12:55 pm

Writer/director Ted Melfi got Bill Murray to appear in his first film by calling him. Murray does not have an agent or a manager. He has an 800 number. And Melfi left message after message until Murray finally called back and asked Melfi to pick him up at the airport. Apparently his pitch skills (and driving skills) impressed Murray because he stars as the title character in Melfi’s “St. Vincent,” as a bitter Vietnam vet who drinks and gambles too much and has sex with a pregnant stripper (Naomi Watts), and, desperate for money, agrees to babysit the son of his new neighbor, a single mom played by Melissa McCarthy. I talked to Melfi about the film.

I heard about the unusual path to getting Bill Murray, and want to know how you cast Melissa McCarthy for what is essentially a dramatic role.

Once Bill Murray signed on, everything kind of became a lot easier. Everyone wants to work with Bill. And my first choice for the role of Maggie was Melissa. And I told the producer Jenno Topping “I really want to try get Melissa McCarthy,” and she said, “Oh my God, I think that’s brilliant.” And so we told Harvey Weinstein and he said, “I don’t see it. I don’t see it at all.” And he’s like ”I don’t think it is going to work, the movie is a drama with some comedic moments and she is a purely broad comedic actor,” and I said to Harvey. “She’s an actor, first and foremost.” “I am not going to lie, I just don’t see it.” And I said, “Well, what if I get her to audition?” And he said, “Well, sure if you can get her to audition, well of course we will look at it.” And so I called Melissa then I said, “Melissa,” I said, “I don’t know, I said “Who am I to ask you this, who am I at all, but I really want you to play this part and I think you really want to do it too, but do you think you’d be willing to audition and go on tape for it?” And she said, she actually said, “F**k yeah.”

On a Friday, she came over from her show and I taped her doing a couple of scenes. And I sent them to Harvey Friday night and Monday morning my phone rings and it is Harvey, and he goes, “Ted, I don’t say this often and you might not ever hear it again, but you were right and I was wrong. She is a revelation. I can’t take my eyes off her. I can’t see anyone else in this part. She makes the movie for me.”

Tell me about working with Jaeden Lieberher, who is so good in the film as Oliver. How did you find him and what were the challenges of directing a child in a story with very adult material?

I have done a lot of commercials and I have worked with a lot of kids over the years. I really have a good connection with kids, I have two kids myself. So I don’t have any problems with working with child actors. I find that child actors are the purest form of acting because
they are not spoiled yet. They are not ruined yet. And so, I was looking forward to working with the kid. The biggest problem with Oliver in this film is finding him. It was so hard to find. It took a sixteen hundred auditions, sixteen hundred kids across the country.

I think that is where comedy lives, that is when you do things that are completely inappropriate and then you make them appropriate, you make them okay. But Jaeden’s mom, her name is Angie, she is just this fantastic lady and they are just game for everything. It is not about money or desperation or pleasing you. It is literally about the art. Jaeden actually gets mad when he has a day off, he is like, “What? I want to be working.” He was born to be an actor.

How did you find the determination to keep calling Bill Murray’s 800 number?

My wife says I have what is called happy delusions. I guess I have had this disease for most of my adult life or most of my life in general. It is like I don’t stop. I actually put it in my calendar: “call Bill Murray” every day, every other day, once a week. People think I’m crazy and I guess I am. I am just so persistent, I mean, I don’t know much about myself, only that I am persistent. I am so persistent that it drives people crazy. Maybe it is all OCD, I don’t know, but I just keep going and I keep going, and I keep going. I probably just wore Bill down even if it is to call me back and get a restraining order.

The first time I met him was in the town car driving for three hours from L.A. to the Pechanga Indian Reservation. When I screened the movie for Bill for the first time, we screened the movie on an airplane from Atlanta, Georgia to LAX and then we took a town car to somewhere else. Bill loves travelling. I don’t know if he loves travelling but he’s does it an awful lot so I assume he loves it.

So tell me a little bit about what your concept for the clothes worn by Murray as Vincent.

Ted: Our wardrobe stylist is brilliant. Kasia Walicka-Maimone. She lives in Brooklyn. She does a lot of Wes Anderson’s work. Kasia was saying, “Okay, who is this guy?” And I said, “Kasia, let me give you one thing that I have, that I believe this guy…that encapsulates his entire existence.” So I gave her the only pair of shorts I held on to from college, green camouflage cargo shorts. I said, “That is what I want him to wear.” And she looks at it and says, “Now I know who he is.” And she took that thought and my shorts and she found the shorts and she found a couple of them, and she just rolled with it. And she’s from Brooklyn, and she just found all these vintage shirts and short sleeved shirts that are pit stained and red sweatpants and sandals and flip flops and that hat he wears. And for Daka (the Watts character) she invented something we called chic trash.

What was your inspiration for the film?

The movie is based on two true stories of my life, two inspirations. Eight years ago my oldest brother died and he was thirty-eight, and it was just kind of totally unbelievable. And he had an eleven-year-old daughter, the mother was not in the picture, so my wife and I adopted her and we moved her from Tennessee to Sherman Oaks where we live, in California and we put her in Notre Dame High School when she was ready for high school and in her sophomore year she goes to a world religion class and in this world religion class, the teacher assigns her this project, find a Catholic saint that inspires you and find someone in your real life that mimics the qualities of that saint and draw a comparison. And so she picks St. Monica of Rochester, the patron saint that adopted children because she just got adopted. And she picked me. So I said, “That’s a movie.” I couldn’t get it out of my head. It made me feel very proud and happy and it was a very emotional time.

And I said it is not going to be me, it’s going to be an old guy that doesn’t have much to live for anymore. And the second part of the story is like “Who is Vincent. Who was Vincent?” And Vincent was inspired by my father-in-law, my wife’s father who was a drunk Vietnam vet who abandoned all his kids. He abandoned my wife when she was nine, smoked, drinks, gambles – just not a good guy. Twenty five years later my wife is in a psychology seminar in Los Angeles, in one of those “Find Your Life” weekend seminars? And the assignment is to get complete with the people in your life – which means, make amends. And so she sent a Dear Dad letter to this address she found in the white pages. Two weeks later the phone rings. He says, “Kim, it’s your dad.” And then she just starts crying. And from that moment on they became father/daughter, for the last ten years of his life, she even helped him through his cancer when he died and he became a saint for her and she became a saint for him. And that was Vincent for me, that guy.

Related Tags:

Directors Interview Writers

Dear White People: Interview with Writer/Director Justin Simien

Posted on October 15, 2014 at 3:55 pm

“Dear White People” is fresh, provocative, timely, and very funny. In the tradition of “Higher Learning” and “School Daze,” it is the story of four black students at an Ivy League college, all making different choices about adapting or challenging the biases and privilege of their classmates. At the center of the story is Sam (Tessa Thompson), an outspoken woman whose program on the school radio station is called “Dear White People.” Sam is unexpectedly elected to be the head of the house that was once exclusively for black students but now has been opened up to everyone through a school-wide program of color-blind placement. Meanwhile, a white fraternity is holding a party where attendees come in exaggerated and racist “ghetto” costumes. Over the final credits, we see photos from real-life “ghetto” parties on college campuses.

Writer/director Justin Simien sat down with a small group of journalists to talk about the film, and he was as thoughtful and engaging as his film.

“I think college is such a great microcosm for a larger American experience. And particularly this sort of vaguely Ivy League college. I wanted to deal with the aspect of America where everyone is sort of cutthroat and has ambition and wants it. I wanted my characters to be in that particular environment because there are a lot of black places and white places. For me, I left my home community. I went out into the world to do something in particular and I found myself always being the only black person in the room. And so I wanted to find a way to create that in a microcosm where we could get into all the issues, Which was just easier to do at the school level. And some of my favorite movies do that. “Fame” and “Election,” and “School Daze” really effectively uses school as microcosm and for me there was just no other place to set the movie really. And also I started the movie in college so it was sort of obvious thing. And as I kind of continued to be the only black person in the room, as I left college it progressed in my professional life. It just still made the most sense.”

When he was in college, Simien began the film as “2%.” “I was in college and I was having a conversation at the black student union and my really good friend and I were musing like, ‘Are we friends with these people just because we are all black or because we would like them?'” That led to the first version of this story, influenced by director Robert Altman, which followed eight or nine characters through a year of college, as a way to talk about identity. “It was terrible! I thought it was funny in certain parts but film school doesn’t really prepare you to write multi-protagonist screenplays so I kind of kept working at it through the years and wrote other things and started life as a publicist. I always returned to it and I reworked it as a TV show and I reworked it as a different kind of screenplay.” The script evolved over time to respond to changes in history and culture. “Obama had been elected president and this ‘He’s really from Kenya’ crap started. The post-racial bubble of America began to burst a bit and that’s when the movie became ‘Dear White People.’ That’s when it really became more about the American black experience at large as I understand it and that’s when I started to take more of a satirical tone, that’s when it really began to be about something. And so I just worked that script with every possible waking hour that I had. And I took it to a workshop, and we all truly loved it and that’s kind of really the beginning of what ‘Dear White People’ is now.”

Originally, there was a blackface party in the script and he took it out as too over-the-top. But then news stories about actual parties on college campuses began “my kind of rabbit hole research experience where like I realized how prevalent the blackface parties were and was just kind of interesting that in the Facebook age, they are now just bubbling up to the mass culture. And so for me, that was really just a really truthful but visceral way to kind of re-create the experience of what it feels like to see myself as interpreted through the eyes of a culture that doesn’t know anything about me. So especially when it comes to commercial black culture, the stuff that sells T-shirts and jeans and shirts and music and whatever, white people are actually setting, creating what black culture is in order to sell products. And often times that culture is confusing, it doesn’t represent me and it’s kind of the viscerally offensive. Nothing articulates that feeling quite like a black face party; people who in their minds are either celebrating or I don’t know what they think they are doing per se but it just feels so oppressive to see that imagery. And it was something that happened. So to me, it was just, as a storyteller, it was like the perfect storm of something that really happens and something that perfectly articulates without words, the feeling that I am trying to get across in that moment.”

With all of the focus on identity and authenticity, it was an interesting choice to have the central character be a woman. “I don’t think there was a part in this where I sat down and decided she was going to be a woman for any particular reason. Sam White just came out as Sam White and that’s the truth. And what I wanted to do with her character is sort of create someone who authentically had an opinion, had a point of view who then became a spokesperson and then that identity became too constricting for her. She was angry at a certain point in her life and she communicated that and now she has always be that in order to hold the movement. And that’s kind of what I wanted to talk about; her character. I can’t really say why but I knew that I wanted, for all the characters, for you to think that you knew who they were at first glance and as you discover more about them, to be surprised at the layers underneath that and the things that sort of went into the creation of that person.” In one funny moment, we find out that Sam listens to Taylor Swift. He has especially enjoyed having black audience members confide that they, too, have some secret “not cool” favorites.

Simien says that all of the characters are aspects of his own feelings and experiences. “I would say that I have been all of them at some point. I have done those things to get along as a survival tactic. I have sort of clinged to no identity. I have sort of hinged everything on my black identity like Sam and sort of tried to be the correct black male like Troy. And I have tried to sort of like use my blackness to get ahead like Coco.”

Hair is very important in the film, as indicated on the poster. All of the black characters change their hair in some way during the course of the movie. “There are so many angles to black hair. Like I remember when I had had that was never as big as Lionel’s fro but it was fro-ish I would say. That line about, ‘It’s a black hole for white people fingers’ was really true. It was like, ‘Get out of my hair please!’ But then there is also like curiosity about hair extensions and weaves and like all like. Black hair just no matter who you are whether it’s natural or whether it’s not natural, whatever, it’s an area that is ripe for micro-aggression and identity. And because African-Americans feel the pressure of being held to a standard of beauty that’s more European. It’s also rich for specifics of racial identity. Like should you wear hair natural or should you straighten it? That becomes like a very racially charged decision for people and it divides us internally and it’s just a interesting rich topic. And so I think for that reason subconsciously frankly it all seeped in. But even with where Lionel nets out with his hair and I won’t say it in case there is anyone who hasn’t seen the film, it was almost a statement for me too because to me it’s really about being authentic to yourself. There are a lot of people walking around with fro’s and natural hair do’s and it has nothing to do with the way they see themselves. That can equally be as about fitting in with a trend or a standard of beauty as wearing your hair straight. And for me, the characters were all battling to figure out how to be authentic, not to be black or authentically black because that’s a moving target that isn’t real. Authentic to themselves because authentically black is, it’s fiction, it’s an illusion. There is no such thing.”

Toye Adedipe was the costume designer who helped create the look of the characters. “It takes place in the heightened reality,” Simien said. “I love the theatricality of film making. I just love movies that immediately tell you that you are watching a movie. And the clothes had a big part to play in that. And because we were dealing with the archetypes and we were dealing with the hyperreality, the hyper style, it was important to me that the clothes reflect that. The black hipster look is something that hasn’t really been in the movies since maybe early, early Spike Lee. I thought would be really cool to showcase that in the film and also at the same time, say things about the characters. And so just like every piece of art in the movie, the clothes were just as much a character that anything is because we were really creating this world. There were lots of references. ‘Well, today Sam is Lisa Bonet and tomorrow she’s going to be Annie Hall and then she was going to be Angela Davis.’ We had that kind of conversation about all of the characters. Because we were thinking about identity and not to get too deep but we are in a postmodern age of filmmaking and everything is very referential and their identities a very referential so it was fun to sort of pull from things that already existed out there in order to create their looks. The only exception to that was Lionel who really pulls from nothing. He is certainly a lot of fun too. To make someone who had no fashion sense was really fun because Tyler is very stylish and Toye is very stylish and that was kind of fun too creating his look, his sort of non-look together to tell the story of his character.”

Next for Simien is a Dear White People book and a possible television series.

Interview: David Dobkin of “The Judge”

Posted on October 14, 2014 at 3:47 pm

Interviewing David Dobkin was a double pleasure for me. First, I loved the film he co-wrote and directed, “The Judge,” starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Robert Duvall. And second, he is the son of old friends Jim and Irma Dobkin, now sadly gone, but still great influences on the lives of our family. The night before our interview, I did a Q&A with David at a screening of the film, and he talked about how his lawyer father used to cross-examine in him in the kitchen when he got into trouble, and how that experience inspired the father-son relationships at the heart of the film. Dobkin, best known for wild comedies like “Wedding Crashers,” brings to “The Judge” a maturity and richness of storytelling, and co-producer/star Robert Downey, Jr. gives his most open and vulnerable performance as the arrogant criminal defense lawyer whose own defenses must crumble.

I love the use of sun flares in the movie, visually striking but also dramatically impactful.

Janusz Kaminski and I spoke very early on. It’s such an honor to work with Janusz. I couldn’t believe it; he was the eye I wanted and when I first sat down with him like five minutes in I said, “Look, if you do the movie…” and he’s like, “No, no, I’m going to do the movie.” And I was like, “He just said he’s going to do the movie!” But I said, “You know, I think that the movie’s about perception and the movie’s also told strictly through Hank’s point of view.” And I wanted to rack focus , I wanted there to be layers and depth and I wanted there to be the idea of the things that we perceive and then the things that are real. And he just started to backlight and hit the lens with the flares all the time and with the lights, it’s his instinct to start to do that and especially in the courtroom and in other certain moments. And at moments it’s beautiful and at moments it’s distracting and interesting, you know, like when he pulls into the driveway and he talks to his daughter and there’s that beautiful sunset which is really a light that he put right in the frame. So he had this weird subconscious thing going on and you just trust. You speak about what the ideas are and he will find a language to make that happen.

And the color palette was very elegant and elegiac without being too somber.

Just keeping it very realistic and not too glossy. We didn’t want the movie to be inaccessible. We wanted it to be real. We didn’t want to over-Hollywood it. We want to feel the people. You know, even the make-up for the women, there’s very little going on.

How did being the son of a lawyer influence you in thinking about these characters?

A lot of it was subconscious at first. I think that I was very drawn to the drama of the law. I got in trouble a number of times when I was younger with the law and having my father be a lawyer, that was a very sacred thing. And there were a few times, I never lied to my father, it was something that he kind of imbued on me very early on that I would always be okay if I didn’t, but the few times I’d tried to, there were a couple times when I was in the kitchen in my house trying to get out of a situation and not quite telling the truth and the way he could look at me and cross-examine me I was like, “Wow.” I knew what it was like to be in that dynamic and I chose very quickly not to. I was like, “I’m just going to tell the truth and he’ll help me sort it out.”

So, you know, the law was always something that was very sacred. That courtroom in the film was like a church to me, not in the religious sense, but in the sense that Robert Duvall’s character really revered what the law stood for, as a man. \He believed in honor, he believed in responsibility and consequences. All those things were very important to him and they were imbued into me so I thought naturally all of the sudden I’m making a family drama based on some very autobiographical elements and the courtroom just suddenly showed up as the place where that was going to happen.

My father believed that people, if given compassion, will actually become the best of themselves. Looking back, for a guy who never went to therapy, it was more a therapist’s kind of point of view than a lawyer’s point of view. Which is that “I understand the behavior that happened in this incident came from something and somewhere that was unintended.” And we can heal that. He really believed in that and so that was his sense of justice and I think as a storyteller, I think that’s been imbued in me because my characters always go through their hard lessons of what they need in order to come to a place where they can find compassion for the people that they’re in conflict with.

Even in your comedies, you have had a lot of characters who have a lot of growing up to do. It’s interesting to me what in this film, the big confrontation goes right back to the teenage years.

I remember every Thanksgiving coming home and you know, I deeply love my parents and you would come home and the first few hours was so pure. Maybe even though it was only the first hour, but as soon as people’s behavior kicks in and it’s just, you know, it’s rote, you just happen to, you know, an inflection of a voice listening, you know within a day, you’re like, “Oh, we’re back into this again! Like I’m fourteen years old.”

No matter how long you’ve been away, you still sit in the same seats at the dinner table.

That’s interesting you said that. I always explained it to Downey that “You come home, your mother is gone so there’s an empty seat at the table, but you don’t have a seat. You’re not really invited back with the family. They go to breakfast, they leave you behind. And when your father gets in trouble, it is a chance for you to try to win back that seat and your place that you finally have something to do. By the way there was a scene that is not in the movie where someone says to him, “The way a surgeon is not supposed to operate on their patients, a lawyer should not represent his family.” And he says, basically, he goes, “The one place, the one thing I can control is the courtroom.” It is amazing that we’re always trying to win that acceptance still, you know. Or some of us are, at least for me I was trying to. No matter how much they were accepting me, I somehow thought there was more I had to do.

You have a lovely, very classical, Hollywood score in the film from Thomas Newman.

He did this really amazing thing -— and he did it unconsciously because he’s a true artist — but the first time we see the courthouse, he brought horns in and it seemed like “Oh yeah, that’s a color we expect to hear.” It felt like an old movie thing which I really loved. And then he did something really brilliant which is when the judge later in the movie talks to Hank about the importance of honor and the importance of legacy, he brings the horns back in. It imprints on you: “Oh, this guy actually has a very deep sense of the world and the way he believes it should run. That’s what he’s been protecting. It’s not just his own personal legacy, it’s what this town expects and it’s important to him.” He says, “Forty-two years I sat on that bench,” and they don’t deserve what he’s gotten them into, that’s what he’s concerned about and the pressure that it places on Hank. And at the end of the movie in a very significant moment when he does something truly unexpected and he claims responsibility for his actions which he preaches from the beginning. His words come back in and that scene played a certain way always. It was always a really powerful moment but when the horns came in and you understood it, the movie’s intelligence rose exponentially like it’s just that the emotionality of it. There’s no way you could have contextualized that moment that way without that color coming in from the horns, even if you are not aware of it.

You worked very closely with Robert Downey, Jr. on the development of this script. What was that like?

He is Tony Stark. He is that colorful and that fun as a person like if you bump into him and you’re sitting at the craft service table and he’s just as funny and entertaining. So Tony Stark is very much him which is I think we know that, that’s why we love that character. It was really fun to use that same persona in this movie – something similar and say, “Here’s what a real version of that guy would be like and here’s what would happen if we took that persona and we took him through a true dramatic arc and saw what happens when that guy’s got to go home and face his family.”

I like the way you have him begin with the fancy suit and the fancy car and the fancy house and then end up in his old bedroom with junk all over, wearing his high school Metallica t-shirt and riding a bicycle.

It was fun because there was a very clear delineation between this guy who’s so snapped together and then he goes home and he is slowly unraveling and becoming his younger self again. You know the bicycle was Robert’s idea. Originally that scene was Hank putting on his clothes and they don’t quite fit anymore and going for a jog and realizing that he can’t even make it. And Robert had this memory of this old bicycle that he had. The one we got is the exact bike that he had as a kid. He said, “I used to go ride with my bike and I would bike down the road and close my eyes.” That’s exactly what he used to like to do when he felt free and comfortable and he felt taken care of. And I was like, “God, that seems broad but let’s do it.” And as usual with Robert, it was just—-there’s something fun about seeing him kind of get beaten up a little bit, you know, everything go wrong for him. Seeing like just the normality of life get the best of him is really satisfying.
N

Related Tags:

Directors Interview Writers

Interview: Zane, Writer of “Addicted”

Posted on October 13, 2014 at 3:15 pm

Zane is the pseudonym of the author of steamy novels and founder of two publishing imprints. “Addicted,” which opens on Friday, is based on her novel about a woman who risks her loving marriage with three affairs due to sexual addiction rooted in past trauma. It was a pleasure to speak to Zane, whose warmth, creativity, and empathy are immediately apparent.

What does addiction mean to you?

I wanted to write a story about a woman who had it all like a lot of women do but still it wasn’t enough. Outside of just being promiscuous, she actually has a sexual addiction that stems from a traumatic childhood that she hasn’t addressed.

So the difference between addiction and a lack of self-control is the compulsion?

It’s just like with any kind of addiction, similar to whether somebody’s an alcoholic or a drug addict or they’re a gambling addict anything like that, they want to be able to stop. They want to be able to control themselves but it’s a true addiction. Just going out and just doing things you want to do is one thing, but this is a woman who actually truly loves her husband, truly loves her career, truly loves her children, but yet everything spirals out of control because she is unable to control what she’s doing. It was really just examining the fact that most of our actions are a direct reflection of something. They usually symptoms of a much bigger underlying problem. So the idea is to address that underlying problem which is what she does by going to see a psychiatrist.

A lot of addictions, whether you’re talking about shopping or gambling or drugs, are a way of numbing yourself.

Absolutely.

The film has some of the most attractive actors working today as the main characters. Is this how you imagined your characters looking, to be so gorgeous?

Absolutely, we do have a very beautiful cast. And more importantly, a very talented cast. I’m very excited about it. I’ve had two Cinemax series so this is not the first time I’ve actually seen that, but being on the big screen is amazing and I hope that this is a beginning of a long-term relationship.

In your writing, there’s a lusciousness in your description of all kinds of sensual things whether it’s the weather outside or the food, so tell me a little bit about how you evoke the senses in your writing.

Even as a child I had a very vivid imagination and it really stems from that, not when it comes to sensuality, all of the elements that come into play in real life. When someone is making love or just having sex, there’re all these different things and a lot of times in books those things aren’t examined; I’d like to set up the whole vision, the whole picture of it.

What in your life experience has made you so sympathetic to the kind of pain you write about?

I actually was raised by two parents who taught all of us not to be judgmental about other people, and at the same type exposed us to a lot of different cultures and a lot of different people. My father for example, grew up in a shack literally in the mountains of North Carolina but got his PhD at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. SHe taught at the University of Argentina, at Oxford in England. So they always taught us to embrace the differences in people instead of fearing them. I’ve always had an open mind about stuff. So I listen to people, I observe people, and I do it without judging them because I understand that everybody is just a culmination of everything they’ve ever been taught, experienced, or witnessed.

I know you have some very passionate fans. What are some of the questions and stories that they bring to you?

I get hundreds of advice emails every single week and while most of them have nothing to do with sex, some of them do. Most of them really have to do with relationship issues or parenting issues, they run the gamut. But the whole thing is sex is simply a part of their lives; it is one aspect of it. In all these years, no one else has ever had my password for my account so I actually do read every email. There’s some people I’ve been dealing with for several years (actually one young lady for a decade now) and so I would never want them to feel like “Oh, someone else is reading the e-mail” or get a generic response.

Do you have a favorite character in Addicted? Do you have one that is especially dear to you?

It would have to be the main character, Zoe, because everything centers around her. She owns a art business. She’s very successful at what she does. She has two children, a husband who’s an architect, she’s very close to her mother (her mother actually lives with them in the film), and she always had a very good upbringing and everything but it’s one of those situations where she did something that she has not addressed that she needed to address. And that has caused her to do things that she would never do under normal circumstances. But she tries to be open and communicate with her husband. Some people have marriages where one person may think the marriage is wonderful, they have great communication, they have everything anyone could want, and the other person sees the marriage totally differently. So one thing I hope that people walk away from with this is the importance of communicating when something was wrong and also for the person at the other side to actually hear when their mate is trying to tell them something. In this film, he’s intentionally avoiding the subject, he didn’t. He tries to avoid accepting that there’s really something wrong.

What challenges did you face in turning this book into a film?

Addicted was totally from the perspective of Zoe. What we had to do is take a 95,000-word book and cut it down to a screenplay that was about a fifth of that. We did have to lose some things from the book, but at the same time what we did effectively is we kept the overall message, the saying, which was what was most important to me.

Were you very involved with the adaptation?

The director called me all the time. Unfortunately, I was not able to be on set for this particular movie, I was on set for my TV shows all day every day though, but the filming on this got pushed back from the original date until it fell into a time when I was on a 28-city 35-day book tour.

What would you say is the message of the film?

It is about healing and forgiveness. The soundtrack features Conqueror by Estelle and the reason that was chosen is to show that you can conquer things if you decide that you truly want to do that and put in the time and effort to do it.

Related Tags:

Interview Writers