Erin Cressida Wilson on the set of FUR: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus
It might be brutally honest to say that many people are excited for this film more for the cast rather than the subject because Arbus is still a bit of a mystery. That said, it's great to have had this project bring not only her work but her existence to light and to a bigger audience. Was that something that you were hoping to do, something you felt she was deserving of?
I don't know; I don't see things that way. When you say people are excited about it less for the subject than for the actors, it's a bit strange to me because I don't see films as "What is the subject?" or "Who is it about?" or "How real is it?" or "How not real is it?" or "Who was Arbus?" To me, I see a film as a piece of art that I go into and I'm ready to take the ride. I'm fascinated by Arbus and have been since I was very young and most people I know are fascinated by Arbus, so I don't really know people that aren't. I think that the truth is that the majority of the audience don't know who Arbus is so part of my task is to create a film that would hopefully insinuate the message of her spirit to people that didn't even know her, that don't even know her work. I wasn't interested in having Nicole imitate whatever I thought Arbus talked like or behaved like; I wasn't interested in having a series of scenes reenacting things that happened to her that people that knew Arbus would go, "Ooh, ahh, I recognize that!" More importantly, what I was looking at in Arbus' life rather than the foreground was the background and tiny detail of how she would look at another human being, of how she would observe the world, of her humor, of her curiosity, of her bravery in breaking out and becoming this incredible individual at a time and a place when that was almost impossible. These were the things that interested me. And I always am consciously interested in creating empowering film and plays for women but also for the individual inside all of us. And the freak inside all of us.
I wasn't going to start off with that question but it comes from a personal point of view that I believe many other people share, so it had to come out. You speak of the people that you know and how they are very familiar with Arbus, but personally I come from a small town in Texas and didn't discover Arbus until I had flung myself out of that orbit and into academia. When I got a job as a docent in the college art museum, there were Arbus' photos and they were a far cry from the notions of art that grew up with. And because of that, I know most of the people that I grew up with won't be excited about a film like this because of its subject. The way that they and probably a broader audience would identify with this film would be, "I know Nicole Kidman; I've seen one of her movies," or, "I know that Robert Downey, Jr. guy; he's kind of cool." So it's more that there is a certain set that will be attracted to this subject, but the great thing about a movie like this, for me, is the bridge that gets created with such a cast to non-academics or to people who have not necessarily been exposed to an artist like this. Hopefully inspires them to think better about art or to think more about their own truths or their own selves.
I know! And I definitely wrote it with the task in mind that any old person could get pulled into this film and that it might make them brave enough to find the imagination and the muse in the darkness by themselves.
Which is very empowering and I hope it reaches its mark. Tell me about your own process of becoming an artist. What did it take for you to confront any fears about going into a life of art or creation, especially as a woman?
You know, it’s interesting - I never questioned it. It isn’t until literally right now, at the age of 42 – now that I have a family and I have a little son – that I suddenly realize, “Wow, this is a dangerous life!” And it's an unstable life. I had a strange learning curve in terms of that. I was raised in an extremely liberal, wonderful environment where I was encouraged to be an artist in the 1960’s and 1970’s and I was doing visual arts at a special nursery school for visual art, I was a dancer, a photographer... I moved to New York right after college and I went straight into acting and playwriting and did various things to make money, like I was an assistant director and puppeteer for Julie Taymor. Eventually, I started to teach when I was about 30; I taught at Duke University for eight years and Brown for three, which is a phenomenal way to avoid being a homeless artist. Though I had a very rough time in my 20’s because I made virtually no money, I didn’t care because I hadn’t been raised the way I’ve noticed the way some people are raised these days, which is I couldn’t have cared less about clothing or possessions. It didn’t matter! So it was fine; it worked out. I thought by the time I grew up maybe I’d have a house and stuff but I still don’t. I have only lately started to think, “Well, this is what you chose! You’re an artist and you’re living the life you wanna lead.” And I see people I grew up with who never did what they want to do. They have babies, they got married, they live off their husbands’ money – I wouldn’t want that in a million years!
What about crises of creation? Were there ever any times when you hit the wall with writer’s block or something like that?
Not exactly, no – I haven’t had the writer’s block. I’ve certainly wrestled with the type of material that audiences are ready to see and certainly wrestled with my conviction to stay true to what voice comes out of me and try to marry it with a voice that speaks to a larger audience. And I would say that has been the biggest task for me. I found that teaching really helped because I had to articulate what I was up to and what my students were up to and the more I articulated myself, the more I learned how to take subversive scenes and structures and make them hopefully more easy to swallow for a general audience.
Is it more difficult to do that with film than plays?
I’ve had an easier time with film than with plays. The problem with plays is that the audiences are conservative, generally. So you will get a small audience in there and they may enjoy it very much and it may go very well but if you get one bad review, it's dead. The great thing about film is you can get all the bad reviews you want and that thing’s gonna come out on DVD and people all over the world are gonna see it. Even if someone else has tried to kill it, they’re not going to kill it - it can’t be killed! And that I find glorious because I write stuff that often takes a while to seep in. I try to write things that haunt you, that come to you later, that speak to you later. I don’t write things that necessarily you walk out and you go, “I know what just happened." The great thing about having a film on a DVD is you can keep going back to it, so that’s one of the reasons I love film. After all that work, the final outcome can stay alive.
And stay in somebody’s hand for as long as they need it. FUR is terribly evocative in that way and that’s obviously what you were going for. Tell me how much direction or detail - like those snaking camera shots through an airshaft or certain symbols like a rabbit – was your writing and the script and how much of that was Steven and his vision?
I wrote it for him to direct, first of all. I don’t think there were any added scenes—as far as I know they were all in the script. I think it’s very funny because people think of scripts as like just dialogue and think the director and the actors made up the rest! (Laughs) It’s like this vision of what a screenplay is that is just so ridiculous and funny to me. It’s almost hard to answer the question... Of course the rabbit is central to the script. In fact, it was bigger in the script than in the final film. I found it very important that Diane give her daughter the legacy of the rabbit; that was very, very important to me when I was writing it. The rabbit was a little more present in the script but I think it’s plenty in the film. The point comes across and it’s great.
What was the process like of discussion with Steven about the points you wanted to make versus the way he might want it to look when it was done? Then, how did you translate that into what you wanted to write?
We had some conversations about what we both wanted to see in this film and when those points intersected they became things that I would write about and if they didn’t intersect they’d either get dropped or we’d argue about it. At the time, he was working on so many films that it didn’t look like this was going to be his next project. In the end, wrote it very quickly and I knew it was very much something that he would want to direct. I mean, I hoped it was; I really tried to make it something that would attract him to work on next because there were many other, more flashy films ahead of me it seemed.
How I write it is I take hundreds and hundreds of notes on notecards and rearrange them over and over and over again until they finally tell a story. I create image portfolios that I work with - I work quite a bit with images. Part of the first draft is creating the visual palette of the film, of the house, of the apartment building – all of which is her mind and the way she views the world. I tried to create a movie that was her eye, that showed how she felt and slowly started to allow the world to come at her in a visceral way. And you don’t see it fully implant itself into her, that way of seeing the world, until the very last second of the film…I would say until the last line. It’s a slow burn. Nicole really so beautifully did that scene and the whole film - she did the transformation like a real person. She plays the part like a real person, not like a big imitation of some historical figure. She does such a gorgeous job. I was extremely happy with the production design, the DP, with what they all did.
And the imagery of the film is even more pertinent because she was a visual artist herself.
Diane’s photographs, were very much a part of the how-to, what scenes got created, and how and what they looked like.
Meaning that you used those as references to create certain sets or looks?
Yes. They helped to inform what the story was going to be about.
In terms of informing the story or at least getting it across, you brought up something very critical for you, which was this was mean to be a display of her mind and her way of thinking and feeling more so than any sort of truth. But then there’s the inevitable dilemma over telling the truth, so to speak, about a real person. Were you ever worried or paralyzed at any point during your writing that maybe Arbus' family or friends would call you out for not necessarily telling “the truth”?
No, this never occurred to me. I don’t know what the truth is. What it be more truthful if she slit her wrists in the bathtub? Would her family have enjoyed that film? I think that I tried to tell my interpretation of the truth of her. I’m an artist and I interpret and create a portrait on paper of a famous artist just as a painter would, just as a composer would. I don’t see why those rules can’t apply to a filmmaker, why a filmmaker can’t take and make a portrait or have a point of view. Why not? And so I never pretended or thought this was supposed to be about truth. That would be a documentary and I think that’d be a fantastic documentary that I’d love to see.
To me, this is about the truth of Diane Arbus through my eyes and through all of the artists that participated in making this film. This is through Nicole’s eyes, this is through Steven’s eyes, through Robert’s eyes – it’s a collaboration of interpretation based on a script. The foreshadowing of her death is in the film. Would it be more truthful to have shown her kill herself? I guess if you’re a completely literal person, yes. But I tried to create what I thought was the truth, which was that Diane Arbus saw the world not through a literal lens, but through a very dark, magical, beautiful, courageous lens and I tried to create one interpretation of that world. The film is a metaphor about a woman engaging her imagination in a romantic relationship. That’s what the film is about. If you said, “Well, it’s not true,” it would be both beside the point and exactly right. The argument that it’s not really about Diane Arbus is silliness, in my opinion. It’s like, “Well, what are you doing? Are you gonna watch the film or are you gonna talk about your obsession with biopics?”
A question like that speaks to the danger of people being lazy and wanting not to have to think, not to be provoked.
They just don’t want to have to think a single thought. It’s been certainly very eye-opening.
Tell me a little bit about the collaboration with Steven. Were there any lessons you learned from making Secretary together that you wanted to carry over to this project or things you wanted to do differently this time around? And what’s your relationship built on fundamentally that makes it work so well?
One of the beautiful things about Steven is he lets me write in my voice and he appreciates and is activated and activates me with my ideas and his ideas. That is a gift and I love working with him for that reason.
Did we learn any lessons from Secretary? No, not really – we didn’t even mention Secretary! We just went on to our next project. There wasn’t any calculation. We wanted to do it, we did it. It wasn’t like, “Would this be the right next move? Will we be hated for our sophomore effort?” All that sort of thinking, that’s for other people to think about. We just really were in love with this project and with the work of Diane Arbus and we wanted to express that.
