MARIAYAH: Good afternoon or evening everybody, welcome back or welcome if this is your first lecture. This is the 12th edition of the Screenwriters Lecture Series. I want to thank the founder of the series, Jeremy Brock and also Lucy, from the JJ Charitable Trust for their support since the beginning of the series and their dedication of it throughout. If you can please take a moment to turn off your phones, this is a non-photography event, we do the filming, so please be aware there are cameras in the room. If you should require the bathroom throughout the lecture, please use the exits at the back. That would be helpful. We are not expecting a fire drill so if the fire alarm does go off, please make your way down the stairs. The if you need assistance, please stay where you are and we’ll come and help you. After the lecture, the cloak room shuts by 7pm, so if you have any bags or coats, remember to pick them up before you leave. If you haven’t already, there’s a QR Code here which if you scan will take you to the brochure for this series, and give you a link to the past 60 lectures in full on BAFTA’s YouTube channel. And now, I would like to welcome the series founder, screenwriter and BAFTA winner, Jeremy Brock.
JEREMY: Thank you. Marielle’s credits include the seminal The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood and this year’s stunning Nightbitch, starring Amy Adams. Marielle is currently in New York but through the magic of the big screen, we will bring you a pre-recorded lecture followed by a live interactive – she’s over there and we are over here – Q&A with none other than BAFTA’s very own Mariayah Kaderbhai. She’s the force behind the Screenwriters Lecture Series and without her deep knowledge of film and film makers, we would simply not have the global reach we have. Mariayah is responsible for finding the lecturers, no mean feat, negotiating their fear, foibles and sometimes tricky management.
My own passionate belief in the film making process would be nothing without Mariayah’s gift for relevance. Without her, I would be boring the arse off everyone in the bar. We’ll now hear from Marielle in a pre-recorded lecture from New York, and that will be followed by Q&A with Marielle and questions from the floor, ladies and gentlemen, Marielle Heller.
MARIELLE: Hi, I’m the writer and director of Nightbitch. I am going to talk about adaptation. Nightbitch is based on the best-selling novel Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, a beautiful novel that I absolutely loved. And, adopting novels is a process that I think people don’t totally understand or it’s a bit misunderstood. I love adapting novels, I feel like it’s a really fulfilling, creative process but I think people tend to think of adaptation as something like translation, like taking something that’s in one language and translating it and it really isn’t that. The way I think about adaptation, it’s much more like taking a painting and turning it into a sculpture. It’s taking something in one form and turning it into a totally different art form, a totally different medium.
For me, adaptation, it’s not any less work than starting from scratch. Sometimes it actually feels like it’s more work. I have to start with the source material that I love. I have to start with something that I have a lot of love for and I need to get to know that material so deeply that it’s almost like I could have written that book myself. So that I can then almost throw it away and start from scratch. People have asked me whether when I’m adapting do I cut and paste from the original documents. Not at all. It’s about starting from total scratch and thinking about what I can use from that source material as inspiration and letting it become something very new and unique in a cinematic form. The visual form of movies is totally different than the experience of reading a book, and I think when you try to be too close to an original source material, you run into a lot of the problems. It either doesn’t translate because it was not intended as a movie, or when you have just too much reverence for source material, I think it can also make it that you don’t allow the movie to become something new with its own kind of cinematic life and its own visual language and structure. The structure of movies is so different from the structure of novels. A novel is intended to be picked up and put down multiple times. A movie is intended to be sat through and watch the whole thing without looking at phones, you know, the way film makers want people to watch their movies, from beginning to end!
And that is a different arc, it has to have a different build and complete experience, if that makes sense.
Today I’m going to talk about how I have adapted source material into movies and three projects. My first movie, which was The Diary of a Teenage Girl, based on a graphic novel by Phoebe Gloeckner, Can You Ever Forgive Me? based on the memoir by Lee Israel, and then there was a number of scripts that had been written before I came on board as well, and then Nightbitch which is my most recent movie, based on Rachel Yoder’s book, a wonderful book, and I adapted it. And so what I’ll do is, with each one, I’m going to talk about one scene that was in the original book. I’m going to talk about it as a script and then how it ended up in the final film. I’m going to start with The Diary of a Teenage Girl. One of the hardest things whenever you are working on a script is how you are going to open a movie, how you are going to get to know your main characters. I always think about it like, when you are introducing a character, you need to have the audience fall in love with that character, even if they are a flawed character or are imperfect, you need to be let in on their way of seeing the world and need to be put into their head so that you can fall in love with their unique perspective. And with The Diary of a Teenage Girl, that was a particular challenge, because for those who haven’t seen this movie, it’s about a 15-year-old girl who is having sex with her mother’s boyfriend, set in the ’70s in San Francisco. From her perspective, this is a very complicated and exciting experience of losing her virginity and kind of discovering herself sexually and also her creative artist self. And she is coming to the story without a lot of judgment. It was important when thinking about how to adapt the book that I loved so much, how could I give the audience this experience of not judging this lead character? So I wanted us to fall in love with her before we really knew the circumstances that she was in. So first, okay, I’m going to go back and start with how the book opened. I’m going to read it to you and then we’ll look at my script.
Okay, this is the beginning of The Diary of a Teenage Girl.
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
Obviously, all of this is description in a book that you wouldn’t need when looking at somebody’s face in a movie. I’ll just say that, the book is set up like a diary with graphic novel elements. Okay, back to the text.
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
Okay, so, everything about this passage and how it’s written, it’s so vulnerable without being self-conscious. There’s this voice of this girl that I love. I just love her, I love the way she talks about herself, I love her tangents and the fact that she is talking about very vulnerable things in a way that’s so open. She’s not putting anything on. There’s an intimacy because she’s confessing all of this to a diary. I remember when I was thinking about how I was going to adapt this, it was like, how do I get that intimacy, the feeling of getting her internal voice without wanting it to be just voiceover, and I came up with this idea that maybe she would be recording her diary into a tape recorder. And this opened something up for me in terms of like, I wanted to capture her alone, her confessing without thinking about, you know, somebody hearing or interpreting what she’s saying, and I wanted to get like all of this energy of being a teenager, the tangents, the ups and downs and the way that the language flows from one thing of like loving eggs to losing her virginity or having her mother’s boyfriend touch her boob. It was about coming up with this structure where I was like okay I need to set up that this character lives in San Francisco in the ’70s, that is a specific time and place, I’m from the Bay area with its own culture there. There’s a looseness around rules and convention that people not from the Bay area understand, especially like around different generations and how a lot of my friends grew up with parents who didn’t really feel like parents, they kind of all felt like we were all contemporaries. People would smoke weed with their parents, we’d get drunk with our friends’ parents, or there was just this kind of culture of looseness and exploration that is different than other places. And it was the ’70s, so it was like even more so, even looser than when I grew up in the ’90s. So I was thinking about how to start this movie and I was like, I have to set up that we are in a very different time and place, we are in the Bay area, in San Francisco and it’s the 70s, but then I want to get the voice and fall in love with this girl. I want to feel her perspective in the world. She sees things in an artistic way. She’s an artist and she draws and, how do I show that she has this beautiful way of seeing the world? Okay, so now let’s go to my script. Okay. So, I’m going to read now a bit of the script of how I set up all of these different elements that I wanted to bring in in a visual way.
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
I’m going to say that I left certain things in the script that didn’t make it into the final edit but you can see my process of, I wanted to show this animation in a great animation so that we could that she’s a comic book artist. In her book, there’s all of these mixed mediums. There’s graphic novel elements, there’s the diary, and I wanted to show how she makes projects and sees the world through this artistic eye.
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
I don’t think that made the final cut. And I don’t think that did either.
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
This image of a drying, coming to life of a woman’s body in a sexual position that then turns into the birth of a baby was one of the first images I had in my head when thinking about adapting this novel into the movie. It felt like a natural adaptation because the book is a comic book and the main character is an artist, so much visual language to it all. And the book notes different mediums in a beautiful way, like it kind of segues between graphic novels, full page illustrations and these diary elements, and so I thought about a lot about how can I keep that flow and feeling I had when reading the book when I was reading this intimate personal story, I was being let in on her experience but I was also getting to witness all of her artistry, and so it was how do I tell a story in a movie setting which makes me feel as the audience the way I felt as a reader to the book.
I feel like that’s always my guiding force, like what was my experience as a reader, what was special about that experience, and how do I translate that into a movie? How do I give an audience of this movie as special of an experience I had when reading the book? For me, reading The Diary of a Teenage Girl was a mind-blowing experience. I felt totally seen. Like I had never seen a teenage girl being portrayed in a way that felt so honest and real and strong and sexual, but also naïve and emotional and all the funny parts of being a teenager too, like the parts of it that cries but loves what it feels like to cry. There’s just so much about it that I felt like, I felt invigorated reading the book. I felt like, this is a character I’ve never seen on screen before. I felt so much responsibility to do right by this character. I also knew, as I worked on this, that I couldn’t just translate what was in the book to a movie. It would have been five hours. It wouldn’t have been a movie, it was like why make it into a movie if it’s already a book? It had to become something new. Let’s watch the scene this turned into.
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
I am Minnie Goetz. I’m a 15-year-old living in San Francisco. I’m recording this on tape because my life’s gotten crazy. If you are listening to this without permission, stop now. Just stop. I don’t remember being born. I was a very ugly child. My experience has not improved so I suppose it was a lucky break when he was attracted by my youthfulness. You stupid cat, I love you. Do I look different than I did yesterday? In all manner of actuality, it happened like this. I was wearing an old night gown which was embarrassing when I think about it but I’m not going to change that detail because it was the truth. My mother was married a long time to my stepdad Pascal, a sciencey guy, a PhD.
He has a lot of ideas about how the world works, doesn’t think women should drink or smoke. So gross. I can’t watch TV without you…
Maybe that is why she’s not married to him anymore. She’s looser now.
Munro is her boyfriend but they are not possessive.
I am crashing, you guys. Night.
I know it seems weird, but I had this strangely calming feeling that even if he meant to touch my tit, it’s probably all right because he’s a good guy because he knows how it goes and I don’t. But I wonder if my breasts felt small.
You touched my tit. How was that? Can I just say, erm, touching your breasts was erm… really great, Minnie. Fantastic breasts. Perfect.
MARIELLE: There were parts that I had written in that I thought I would keep early on in the sequence. Ultimately, there was this sort of introduction that she did in the book that I really did try to keep going but I had to find a way to make it much more visual and complete. Anyway, I feel really happy with how that movie started. I felt like it was a tricky balance to get a character who is that complicated and have us meet and understand all of her given circumstance so quickly.
Similarly, a very difficult thing is, how do you end a movie or end a sort of big arc within a relationship in a movie.
I’m going to move on to talking about Can You Ever Forgive Me? It’s a book based on a memoir and a real person, Lee is real, she was for those that don’t know, a kind of failed memoir writer who could not support herself, living in New York, and she took up forging letters of famous authors in order to pay her bills, basically. Noel Coward, Dorothy Parker, the witty, wonderful writers. She could really write in their voices, that was one of the things that made her so amazing.
So I came to this project in a slightly different situation. Diary had been a project where I pursued the rights for years to get the right to the book that I loved. Can You Ever Forgive Me? was a project that already existed, other writers were attached to it before me and a number of versions of the script existed. Lee wrote a short memoir, that was really delightful, but was not a full movie. And, then there was all this research. There was, when I came on to the project, Nicole had been attached to direct it before me and handed over lots of boxes and stuff from her life. So the first thing I did was read the memoir then also immerse myself in the research about the crimes and how she had been caught and everything that had happened. But the thing that really excited me about this project was this relationship between her and Jack Hock, her sort of comrade in crime. But he was not actually a very big part of the script or the book. But it was the thing I felt most emotionally connected to. When I did my version of the script, one of the biggest things I did was flesh out their relationship and it also had sort of no ending. I realised this relationship was the thing that I felt the most emotionally connected to and I really, really wanted to give it a satisfying ending. I say satisfying because, to me, I want movies to end satisfyingly, not necessarily happy, or sad, but I just want to feel like I went on this journey for a reason and it’s satisfying. I especially didn’t feel when I came on board like that storyline ended satisfyingly.
So one thing about this relationship is there was two characters who were both gay in ’80s New York. And, in the script there was no mention of AIDS which felt like an enormous omission. The real character of Jack Hock, played by Richard E Grant in the movie, dies of AIDS, I knew in the research that I had done, that he had dies of AIDS, and that wasn’t mentioned in the script at all. So that felt odd to me and sort of like something that was being left out, it just felt like a glaring omission, like how do we talk about two gay characters in ’80s New York without mentioning AIDS which was dominating life?
And their relationship also felt like this is a relationship between a lesbian and a gay man. That alliance that was already happening in New York at the time was happening largely because lesbians were stepping in to be caretakers for a lot of gay men whose families were abandoning them. And who were dying, so there was this fascinating allegiance and a larger context for this relationship. I just loved Jack and the idea of this character and the grifter and I loved the two characters who had nobody in their life except each other.
I went back to the book to see if I could figure out anything about their ending. There was very little actually about Jack and how Jack and Lee ended their relationship before he died. In the script, he didn’t even die, but they just sort of, he just drifted off, and he wasn’t there at the end of the movie. So I went back and found this very short, little excerpt from the book, I’ll read that now and then talk about how that led to what I put into the script:
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
That was it! They hadn’t had an ending, she had seen him once and they hadn’t spoken about this huge thing they had gone through together. There was also very little details about how they’d ever met. So one thing that I added in also was a lot of details about how they’d first met each other and come into their other bit. I filled Jack out and kept trying to research him as a character and there was really nothing that I could find. I talked to people that had known Lee. I was able to take liberties because there wasn’t much information about him. I took the idea that she saw him, he had a broken leg, he was limping, she knew he was dying of AIDS and she wanted to trip him. It was so funny to me, like, that this character, she just, the way she sees the world so fucked up and dark, but funny, and I took this and it was the inspiration for the last scene between Lee and Jack. Then I had to figure out a way to motivate them back together. He got her caught by working with the Feds to get them caught for the crimes. They have had the total split. Let me read from the script for the last scene. Actually, and what I used to bring them back together, was this idea that she has an idea to write this memoir but she’s going to ask him if he will give her permission to talk about what they’ve done.
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
I had two AA jokes in the final edit, there’s only one because I couldn’t do it twice. It was really funny that she was using her AA meeting to actually meet him, like something about that just made me laugh. I felt like I knew her by the end of working on this script, I just felt like I understood her wicked humour, and that just tickled me.
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
I also felt like I knew Jack so deeply, like he was based a lot on dear friends of mine from college and people that I loved and put a lot of stories of real friends of mine into his character. They have clear voices in my head and thinking about this scene, even though it wasn’t based on anything real and in the book except for that one little idea, it was like their characters needed to have this final moment.
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
That is the point of the scene, she’s going to come to him and ask her permission to write about what they did.
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
It’s an excuse for her to see him one more time. These are two people that were soulmates, they loved each other, they cared about each other more than anybody else.
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
I love the idea that he comes in lying about having a boyfriend. I just had this in my head. Like he’d just be putting it on. In the end when he’s dying of AIDS and homeless and he’s probably not being cared for, he’d just sort of put on a fur coat and puff himself up.
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
I guess it’s not a huge plot twist. Trying to figure out how to talk about the sickness, because I didn’t want it to become preachy in any way. I felt like these characters would find a way to morbidly laugh about his situation.
So she says:
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
Now let’s watch the scene of Lee and Jack’s final meeting at the end of Can You Ever Forgive Me?…
Lee: Thanks for coming.
Jack: It was inconvenient. I have some meetings.
Lee: Do you need a drink? I’m buying?
Jack: Not today. Gin tastes like mouthwash. Takes the fun out of it.
Lee: You should cut a deal. Probation. At least you are out and about.
Jack: So are you.
Lee: No I’m at an AA meeting.
Jack: I can’t imagine what was so important that Lee Israel swallowed her pride and asked to meet me, so spit it out.
Lee: I’m thinking about writing a new book about what happened and what I did and about you. If you let me.
Jack: Like hell I will. What will my boyfriend say about my shadier dealings?
Lee: Top 10 of shady dealings.
Jack: Fair enough. I don’t want a book out there about me. I’m a very private person.
Lee: And I need to write again, I need to do something.
Jack: What about Fanny Bryce?
Lee: It’s Price. I should be writing about us.
Jack: I’m still mad at you, you know. You treated me like shit. I didn’t think you are a very nice person, Lee.
Lee: I would agree with you.
Jack: Well, I suppose you might be mad at me as well.
Lee: Well, if you didn’t look so decrepit, I might be.
Jack: Yeah, well, always going to catch up to me eventually.
Lee: You did fuck your way through Manhattan.
Jack: I mean…(Laughter) I would like that on my tombstone.(Laughter) Will you make me 29 with perfect skin? Don’t make me sound stupid?
Lee: Thank you.
Jack: Late for a board meeting. They’ll be waiting.
Lee: I just had such an urge to trip you just then.
Jack: (Laughter) You’re horrid, Lee.
Lee: You too, Jack.
MARIELLE: Everything with them had to be sub text, right, so you’re a hard ct Lee means, I love you. So are you Jack, means I love you too. And I loved writing this scene because it was like, how do I take these two characters who I’ve gotten to know so well and give them the most emotional ending without saying one thing shmaltzy? How can I take the piss out of every single moment? They were so incredible when we filmed it, it was such a beautiful experience filming the scene. It’s one of my favourite scenes in the whole movie and we got to shoot in Julius’ bar, one of the oldest gay bars in New York City. It’s where Lee actually drank. A bunch of people who used to drink with her showed up. It was really special. It felt like we had the ghosts of the people who really lived, walked and drank in this bar and I was giving them an ending. Giving them a completion to their story.
All right! Let’s move on to Nightbitch. All right. So, Nightbitch, what was so fun and challenging about the adaptation of this is, the book is very internal. Rachel Yoder’s book made me feel so invigorated and seen because I felt like, my gosh, she’s been spying on my brain. When I read her book, I just had my second child, I moved out of the City to the woods, it was the pandemic, and I was pregnant and so I had my second kid and my husband went back to work first and I was home alone for the first time with my two kids. And I was losing my mind, I mean we were all losing our minds. It was post-pandemic stuck in our houses, there was very little, you know, communal anything, you know, I still hadn’t gone really back into the world and that is similar to what happens when you first have a baby, you are stuck in your own house and brain. I read her book and it felt like somebody’s been spying on me and she knows my deepest and darkest thoughts. The book was really internal, written like a monologue of her internal thoughts. It’s not cinematic in that way. But there were certain scenes that when I read the book, I was like, oh, I see this, I see this as a movie and I remember getting to this one scene that I now call the kill salad scene and I stopped and read it out loud to my husband and it was making me giggle so much. And it’s a scene that is kind of right in the middle of the movie, so we talked a about the beginnings, the ends, this is really just a scene that was like an anchor for me about this character and how she feels invisible in her life.
So, what Nightbitch is about is about a mother who is losing her identity. She feels like she’s just someone’s mom, she’s no longer herself, she doesn’t even know who she is anymore, and there’s a scene where she goes back and has dinner with her former artist friends who she went to grad school with and she just feels like she has nothing to add to the conversation. She doesn’t even know how to put a sentence together. She’s only talking to a two-year-old all day. She doesn’t even know how to talk to adults, let alone having something intellectual to add to a conversation about current art exhibits or what’s happening in culture.
She feels so invisible, she’s also an ageing woman, which I think any woman as we age can say, the feeling of invisibility is major, you start to feel like, what did Tina Fey say, you reach a point when you are unfkable and no-one wants to hear what you have got to say. That reminded me too of Can You Ever Forgive Me? Because one of the reasons Lee Israel got away with her crimes was because she was a woman of a certain age and she was invisible and nobody paid attention to her so she got away with more. This is a character who is on the cusp of beginning to be invisible. Going from somebody who was vibrant with her own life, being a successful artist in some way and has now started to morph into somebody who feels she’s invisible. This kill salad scene encapsulated all of the feelings in a way that felt so satisfying and funny and dark and it was just so relatable to me. So let me read from the book first.
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
In this part of the movie, the mother is called herself Nightbitch. I’m going to pause to say, this comment on their art was something that just made me laugh so hard, probably because I come from the sort of, theatre world of pretentiousness and people talking about art in this way that can be so alienating. I remember being a new mom and feeling like I stepped away from my artistic scene for a while and coming back into it and feeling like everybody was talking and it all felt like such bullsh*t. This was making me laugh a lot when I read this part of the book.
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
If anyone is an artist, you know the thing somebody can ask you, not the thing, but the thing that can be the most triggering for you is, “what are you working on…”. I had this idea about my character in this movie that she’s at a point in her motherhood journey where she’s convinced herself she’s going to give up on being an artist, that she’s going to dedicate herself to being a mother, and let go of her guilt about not doing art. Which is slightly different from where she was in the book, but it was a very conscious choice in terms of the bigger arc of what I was working on in the script, that she’s really said, I’m not an artist anymore and I have to just accept that. Let’s go back to the book:
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
Once again, this is a character whose voice I love. She’s just so self-deprecating, funny, snarky, dark, I love it.
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
These other successful women discussed their many successes, swapping the names of art world agents with heightened excitement, screeching with joy as one announced a new show or another new grant, comparing residency schedules and teaching dates for the coming year.
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
Okay, that was a long passage, but it encapsulated everything I wanted this movie to convey in so many ways. Not everything, but a lot of the ideas that I was in love with about this character and I so related to her. It was fun when thinking about how the scene could play out to think about the art school friends, these grad school friend and all of their pretension. I decided to expand it out and make only one of the women a mother and everyone else childless. Which was just fun to kind of create the different characters and give them more complete differences amongst them.
Because I had decided that the character would be in the process of giving up thinking of herself as an artist, although deep down that’s not what she wants in her life, but she’s trying to convince herself that that’s the right thing to do. I felt like, this is the go to scene where that conflict of her saying I’m giving this up, but really deep down she feels so much jealousy and like she’s lost track of who she really is as an artist, is going to well up into this explosion. And the kale salad became a focus of it. So let’s go to the script and see how I wrote this into a scene:
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
I had this idea very early on that in this scene no-one would be looking at Amy Adams’ character, a mother, until a very specific point. So I directed all of the actors to not look at her at all. Like this scene is happening and she’s feeling invisible.
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
In my mind this is all fun gobbledegook, you know. And I kind of loved trying to writing is something that sounded like pretentious bullsh*t.
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
This was just my own idea of one of the most embarrassing feelings of becoming a new mother. Which was, even though I knew I was supposed to be engaging in adult talk, I would always bring things back to my kids and it felt like this tic that I couldn’t control and I would know that I sounded obsessed with my children and that I was being unrelatable. But I also found that dynamic really funny. So that is where this joke came out of. She says:
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
Then I wrote this voiceover which we ended up taking out where she says, stop talking, abort, abort.
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
I loved writing the discomfort of this moment because obviously in the book what she described had that feeling but it was like how do I get dialogue that gives that exact feeling of that discomfort.
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
When we were filming this scene, the actor who was playing the server said, “can you explain to me like, why can’t I hear her when she’s asking for the kale salad”, and that was a really chaotic day and we had 50 extras in the restaurant and all this moving stuff and it was a very important scene for me, so I really quickly said to him, oh, your ear is not tuned to hear women over the age of 40 speak. And he was like, “oh okay” and everyone kind of laughed and I said, that is why, and he was like “got it.” But it sort of gave us like this lack of naturalism that we were going for within the scene where it’s like we really are in the mother’s experience of that invisibility. And if you are somebody who has ever felt invisible, in a room full of hip people, you know what that feels like when you feel like you are talking and nobody can hear you. So it was about how to embody that in a physical way. All right:
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
I had this feeling when I was a mom where it was like, how are all of these parents like not just surviving but thriving and their kids are doing the extracurriculars and I can’t manage to get them washed once a day. So that’s where a lot of these jokes came in.
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
I don’t always do this when I write in sound design to a script, but this one was very clear in my head. Everyone is talking but there is no sound, the mother is in her own world.
(Quoting script – displayed on screen)
Insignificant. That word in the book was so powerful to me. To feel insignificant is one of the worst things you can feel in the world, right. As she says it, it feel so real, her friends voices fade back in. Let’s watch the scene and you can see this is one of my favourite scenes in the movie. It was complicated to film. It was a scene that had a lot of elements, a lot of big moving pieces, but ultimately was like such an intimate, quiet scene about her experience. Amy’s performance is one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen in it. So let’s watch it.
We have lost some objectivity.
I’m working on a video piece of a woman, taking over with an actress acting us that same day, masturbating.
How do you know which woman is the woman?
Exactly, that is the genius of it, what it is to be watched.
That sounds really interesting.
Are you working on anything?
Me?
Yes.
No, no. No, I’m not working on anything really, no.
Beautiful sea bass, homemade cavatelli…
(Laughter) What is funny?
My son and I have this joke about things. You have to be there because he has this lisp.
Can I have the cavatelli without the chantarelle.
Kale Salad.
What?
Kale salad.
What?
Kale salad. And another Manhattan.
I’ll have the lamb.
How is Lilly-Anna doing now, is she six now?
Yes, she’s really into the cello, as well as the violin, amazing watching her blossom.
Wow. Is it ever hard to balance it all, like motherhood and art
Not really. I mean, I couldn’t do it without Christie, thank God for my nanny, but I guess I’m a better mom because of my work. I just haven’t lost myself, you know?
Application for the Founders Grant, did you get it in?
Barely. I turned it in at like 2am, fucking idiot.
I did it weeks ago.
I haven’t even turned in my application, what am I going to do?
Let’s just call a spade a spade, the show is the most important artistic event of our lifetime.
I am a zen cow. I am a zen cow.
Can I have…
Just pushing it down further. All of them. Rage and disappointment. I thought that I had digested it, but it’s still down here, just burning a hole in me. And the woman that I used to be, this talented, plucky young woman with big ideas, she’s down there also. In my intestines. Just biding time. And maybe she’s dead. Beautiful lighting of this beautiful fucking restaurant. Just this middle aged sagging mom with nothing intelligent to add to the conversation. Insignificant.
MARIELLE: I feel like this scene is one of my favourite examples of adaptation and how it can be successful. You know, something that you love, a piece of work that you love, that has to shift and grow into something different in a script form and then again something different in a final film form, and I really believe in the idea that the film tells you what it wants to be and you have to listen, you have to let it grow and morph but hopefully there’s an emotional truth that you are sticking to. Something from the original work that touched you or meant something to you and hopefully if that stays true, it’s like one of the best compliments I got was when Phoebe Gloeckner saw the movie of The Diary of a Teenage Girl, she was like, “that’s not exactly my story, but something about it feels true. I know them.” That’s all I could ask for, right.
I’s going to be told through a different lens, it’s going to have a different perspective put on it. I’m going to bring in my own life and experiences and so much of my own story into the version of these books that I’m going to adapt into a screen play. But hopefully the thing that made me fall in love with the original source material is still there or is maintained in this final piece that we end up with.
Anyway, I do love adaptation, I think it’s a really exciting, challenging art form and I hope you enjoyed the exploration of the three of my adaptations. Thank you.
Q&A
MARIAYAH: Okay, if Zoom and the time differences interline, we should have Marielle joining us right now.
MARIELLE: Can you see me?
MARIAYAH: Good evening.
MARIELLE: Hi.
MARIAYAH: I hope you can hear that applause. Thank you so much for a really insightful brilliant deep-dive into adaptations. You really have shown the process in the most illustrative way, thank you.
MARIELLE: I’m so glad.
MARIAYAH: I’m going to start off with a question and open it up to the audience straightaway after that. You spoke about sub text in the most beautiful way, and I wanted to ask you a bit more about that, to delve into the process, kind of, the inner world of Minnie, of Nightbitch, of the scene that we saw with Lee Israel, it’s so honest and you have got a really unique way of capturing truth. Do you have any particular techniques for dissolving kind of into those characters’ minds?
MARIELLE: I can only make a movie if I really understand the characters from a deep place, you know. People say you only really write yourself in various versions, and there is some truth in that. I think what I love about all three of those characters is they’re people who feel misunderstood in their lives, feel like they don’t have the voice that they otherwise wish they had. They are not getting the recognition for something within their life and they feel ultimately pretty alone and misunderstood, and so the movie in that way functions to kind of bring to light some of the darker thoughts that they may have under the surface which maybe is the type of character I’m drawn to and love. Somebody who, you know, doesn’t have anybody else to speak to in some way, and so this movie is giving them a voice.
MARIAYAH: It was illustrated superbly in all the scenes that you picked. Thank you so much. I’m going to open up to the audience now. Two roving mics in the audience, if you can wait for a mic then ask your question. One question just here at the front.
QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: Thank you very much. It’s very important that we see the transition from novel to film. Is there any other adaptations that you have watched over the years that you feel that they have made a successful transition to film that you feel has worked better on film than in the novel and vice versa?
MARIELLE: Oh, I am sure there are many. An adaptation that meant a lot to me when I was a kid and I think it’s the first movie I remember loving and then reading the book, was Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. I remember recognising there were some differences. The sub text that went over my head was more explicit in the book, there was sort of like a lesbian storyline that I missed when I saw it as a teenager. Unfortunately, adaptations of books get bad reputations because the bad ones are the ones that stand out and so I like talking about this subject because it can be done really well, but it’s more of an art form than people recognise.
MARIAYAH: Another question? A microphone here and one to this gentleman here. Thank you.
QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: Hi. I saw your film at the film festival, absolutely loved it, Nightbitch, it was really wonderful.
MARIELLE: Thank you.
QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: I loved how it looked at female physicality and what happens to you when you become a mother, what that feels like, and how you present that. And I would love to hear a bit about the process of working through that with Amy Adams who herself is someone who is used to being admired and how that worked with, you know, your relationship with her to create the character and what that was like.
MARIELLE: You know, I think one of the first things Amy and I connected about was being moms, the feeling of being a mother, our relationship to our kids and then ageing, you know. We talked about what it is to be a woman who is ageing and for Amy particularly, a woman in Hollywood who is ageing. She had just come off of doing The Glass Menagerie in England and, I think she was sort of thinking a lot about this part of her life of like, do I want to be scrutinised on film, now that I’m becoming older? I don’t know. She was really giving an honest portrayal and she was game for that. I talked about how the movie could be an anecdote to Instagram culture that if we are fed the perfect images of perfect bodies and faces and how damaging that is for our daughters, that we could do something really different with this movie. We could really be brutally honest and poke fun at ourselves in some way and just kind of take the air out of all of that pressure that women feel and that it could actually be a very meaningful thing. I remember her saying that she wanted to do that for her daughter, as scary as I think it was, at times, to be quite so intimately vulnerable in this movie I think she really understood it to be a meaningful thing to do and that women in particular would find it really liberating to see a movie star kind of look the way she looks in this movie and just look like a real person.
MARIAYAH: Thank you. The gentleman there?
QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: Hi. I’m Zak, nice to meet you and I saw the film at the London Film Festival and really enjoyed it so congratulations on the film.
MARIELLE: Thank you.
QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: My question is, what does it mean to you to impart your own experiences of motherhood on to Amy’s character and how has that helped you reflect as a mother?
MARIELLE: I put so much into this movie. I immediately saw myself in it, like we all do when we see a story that is reflecting truth in it, it’s a cathartic experience to feel represented in that way. And, for me, it was a representation of motherhood that I didn’t feel like I had seen before. I couldn’t help but see it through the lens of my own life and put my own experiences in it. It was cathartic and fun to kind of have an outlet for all of my maternal frustrations. While I was writing that script, my husband had gone back to work and I was home with our two kids for the first time. And I was really overwhelmed, truthfully, it was post-pandemic and I didn’t have any help except for my parents who came in and out, and it was a very overwhelming time. So for me, I was able to put a lot of my frustration of what I was going through into my day, and writing, and I was having a good time with it too. Because it was my second child that I had, I had a bit more distance and knew that it was going to end, I was in less of a dark place than I was probably after my first child where I couldn’t even imagine that the phases would ever end.
So a lot of the times when Amy and I would be looking at a scene or talking through something that happens in the script, I would give her stories about my real life or we would kind of share jokes about our own relationships so that we could find our personal ways into these moments.
MARIAYAH: I guess that is important, representation does matter in that way. I read that when you first picked up The Diary of a Teenage Girl in 2002, you felt, for the first time, that’s how teenage boys must have felt when they picked up a copy of Catcher in the Rye and saw themselves for the first time reflected in that way.
MARIELLE: Yes. It makes you feel less alone and less of a freak. We all walk around probably feeling in some way like our experiences make us very alone and then when you feel represented, you suddenly can feel less alone. I hope that that is what movies can do, I know it’s what books can do.
MARIAYAH: Time for one last question and there is a hand up just here. Thank you.
QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: Hello, hi. I’m Joelle and I also saw Nightbitch at the Film Festival and it was wonderful, so congratulations.
MARIELLE: Thank you. I love that you were all there!
QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: I’m an editor at a publisher and the publisher that actually published Nightbitch.
MARIELLE: Nice.
QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: My question is, what is it actually like working with the living author on an adaptation of their work? Because, we are always thrilled when film makers buy the rights and come along and it’s always really exciting and fun but when the work starts the author freaks out a bit because their work is now being turned into something that is completely different. Like you said, as it should be. So what is the relationship like, actually with the author when you are adapting their work?
MARIELLE: You know, I’ve had all types of experiences. I had my first experience with Phoebe Gloeckner, and she and I became very, very close, but it was a complicated thing for her to let go of her story as well and we built up a relationship over many, many years. And then, Can You Ever Forgive Me? Lee Israel was dead so that was easy enough.
With this book [Nightbitch], Rachel Yoder is the most generous artist and she understood deeply what my work was going to be when I came on to this and she just had a generous spirit around it. She gave me the space to do what I needed to do. She was there when I needed her with any questions, or conversations about changes I wanted to make and why, and she was just ultimately very, very supportive. That I don’t think is normal, it’s my experience that has been very, very positive though. I talked to Rachel early on. It would have been harder for me to take on the project had I felt we weren’t to have a harmonious relationship.
MARIAYAH: What are you working on now?! Kidding! Sorry!
MARIELLE: I appreciate that!
MARIAYAH: Marielle, thank you, thank you for giving so much time and dedication to the lecture you gave. Thank you for joining us when I know that you are mid travelling as well, and the audience really have appreciated your time. You have heard many of them already seen Nightbitch and it’s out in cinemas soon. Thank you so much.
MARIELLE: My pleasure, thank you. Thank you for having me.
MARIAYAH: Thank you all for coming. If you are back tomorrow, we have two more lectures. Thank you. (Concluded)
