Jane wrote Olive Kitteridge, and this chat was back in Venice, September 2014
Q: What does it mean to bring Olive Kitteridge here to the Venice Film Festival?
JA: Fran [McDormand] and I have been really curious to see how European press will respond to this deeply American story, and we’re hearing that people love it.
Q: Did you worry about that? The central themes, like depression, seem universal.
JA: Europeans can do depression really well! You have Jean Paul Sartre, and you have your Norwegians, and then there’s nothing like a depressed Englishman (laughs). Fran and I have worked on this for several years, and I guess our deeper concern would be, because it’s such a quiet story, would anybody take the trip with us? That’s what you do as artists when you get really into it, or as a writer – you think, ‘God, does this work?’ But because Lisa [Cholodenko has done such a remarkable job, and Fran is so brilliant in it, and Richard [Jenkins], it just worked.
Q: How did this project come about for you?
JA: I had read the novel for pleasure, years before, and had just deeply admired the book. Then when Fran approached me and said, ‘Do you want to adapt it?’ I said, ‘God! Absolutely.’
Q: Did you and Fran know each other?
JA: We were aware of each other professionally, but Joel [Coen] and Fran, and my spouse, Tess, and I – we all happened to have adopted our sons from Paraguay. Kind of a month apart, we were down in Asunción, and then we all have places up in Northern California, in Marin, where the hippies are, and we all have this sensibility. People said, ‘You have to meet each other,’ so we became friends, and our sons are the same age. Then, professionally, Fran approached me about this because she knew my work as a writer.
Q: What was your initial reaction?
JA: Terror! It was terror, because it’s a great piece of literature, and, as you know, the more complex a piece of literature, the harder it is to reduce it into a dramatic, filmic, narrative. I talked to Elizabeth Strout on the phone and she basically gave me permission to do whatever I wanted to do with it, and to deconstruct it and take it apart and that gave me heart.
Q: Were you ever considering a movie?
JA: What’s funny about it is that Fran bought the rights and then she went to HBO, and HBO grabbed it, and the ‘Series’ department grabbed it, which is different from ‘Mini-series’. So we tried to figure out how to make it into a series, but how do you make Olive Kitteridge something people would watch for five seasons? We both knew in our gut that it was wrong, but we wanted to be good sports. Finally we walked into a meeting with them and I said, ‘you guys know that this is not a series. Would you please let us walk it across the hall to mini-series, because it needs to have that end.’ That’s the emotional movement. You watch a woman go through this journey of depression and struggling with her marriage, and then finally lying down on the bed with Bill Murray’s character and admitting that she can be loved, and it’s not a high concept. Long series demand a high concept.
Q: Was it easier to progress once they had agreed to that?
JA: It was such a relief. Then it took another two years to really work it. I don’t know if you’ve talked to Fran yet, but Fran is remarkable. Fran doesn’t have a vain bone in her body. She kept saying, ‘Let’s not make it about Olive. Let’s make it about everybody else.’ She just cared about it as a piece of literature, and telling a story, and I almost had to fight her to say Olive is the main character. Fran likes to sneak up on the side-lines as a character actor. She always has regarded herself as the character actress on the side, sneaking in, and that’s how she wanted Olive to be. I think she’s realised now that she is truly a star, and can carry her own film, but that is the brilliance of Fran, because she’s not into being a star, and she has exquisite literary taste.
Q: Did you keep the author in the loop throughout writing?
JA: No, she said she didn’t care, and you can’t keep them in the loop. I’ve adapted other books. I adapted How to Make an American Quilt, and Whitney Otto became a good friend, and just gave me permission. It’s when the original author will say, ‘Go, do it!’ That’s when your inner muse can say, ‘Okay.’ I’m adapting a new novel, Cutting For Stone, and that will be a mini-series as well, and that author has said, ‘Do what you want.’ I always like, writer to writer, to say to them, ‘Just to check in.’
Q: You are keen to honour the book, then?
JA: Oh my god, yes. You channel it. Because Olive is such a beautifully rendered character, and because I had Fran, who, in a way, was channelling Olive even before she hit the set, for the two of us, Olive was this crazy, cranky, spirit woman (laughs). She kind of guided us. I know, as an adaptor, I’ve succeeded when I no longer remember what was the original material and what I made up. Elizabeth Strout got to see all four episodes and she’s crazy about it. She’s here in Venice, and she’s crazy about it! That’s when Fran and I went, ‘Phew!’
Q: What was that character like to live with for that long?
JA: Well my mom was an Olive, so organically I understood her. Very judgmental, difficult, but infinitely decent, and a moral woman, and that’s what made me love her. Olive may be horrible to her husband, and to her son, but if somebody needs her, like a troubled kid in her class, she gets them. She gets bad kids. She gets ladies who are about to slit their wrists. She knows how to walk into the home of Kevin’s mother and say, ‘Get it together,’ and not judge. She knows when to stop judging in order to save another soul.
Q: Do you know small town America?
JA: I grew up in northern California, in the Bay area. I didn’t grow up in that environment. My father was one of the first people to have a company in Silicon Valley, so in that hippy culture. You know, in Europe, all of you have the benefit of exploring the cultures of all of these beautiful different countries. In America, we’re this big, crazy, vast landmass, with different pockets of culture. We have our Texan culture, we have a West Coast culture, we have New York culture, and then the Maine culture is that straight-ahead, button lipped, northern Yankee way, where you don’t reveal much about your inner life and you just persevere. Then we have the great vast Midwest, which is another culture. With everything I’ve ever written or directed, I like to explore the different regions of our nation. It’s interesting, the last table I was at, one of the journalists said, ‘If this were directed by a European filmmaker, Olive would have blown her brains out, and the European audience would be perfectly fine with it.’ It’s an interesting point. With the American ethos, as dark as we get with our films, we always want, finally, an emotional out, a shred of hope, or a shred of decency. That’s what I believe in as well, just personally. If you’re going to make an audience sit through something for a long time, give us an out, or hope, or redemption. I guess you can have a darker film in Europe.
Q: Tell me about the casting. Do you have people in mind while writing?
JA: Fran said, ‘We have to get Richard Jenkins.’ She said it years before. Richard Jenkins is a deeply skilled actor, and he gave Henry dignity. It’s very hard to play a man who has a wife who is constantly criticising him, and not look like a shmuck. He manages to give Henry the dignity of the optimistic. He did a remarkable job with our Henry. Then Lisa found Zoe Kazan to play Denise, and I think it was Fran’s idea to get Bill Murray, who was such surprising casting. The character is this conservative, Republican guy, and I think by casting Bill Murray it gave him a certain vulnerability, and a sadness that you could love.
Q: Was Bill Murray hard to track down?
JA: Yes, Bill can be a little difficult to get hold of (laughs). Fran and Bill had just done the Wes Anderson movie (Moonrise Kingdom) together. I think it was many, many, texts and it was at the last minute that they finally got Bill. Bill plays the tragic clown, and what a marvellous thing to plug into that man who listens to conservative radio.
Q: Did you visit set a lot?
JA: No. I visited a bit. Once the script is written, and Lisa and I had met before production to talk things over, there’s no real purpose to a writer on set. Having directed, I know this: the last thing a director needs is some writer lurking. God you hate the lurkers! They’re always standing in front of the monitor (laughs). As a writer, on a set, you’re like an appendix. I visited once and I was there for pre-production. Every step of filmmaking, you turn it over to the next person, and that’s the glory of collaboration. If you want total control, write a novel.
Q: You worked on Mad Men, too?
JA: I wrote a little bit. Writing on staff is different from creating it yourself, but I’ve written and directed a lot for HBO and Showtime. I’m also a playwright, and I think with TV you can take your time. It’s about dialogue and it’s about ideas. It’s exciting and it’s immediate, so for writers, especially on shows that are topical, you can just start borrowing from what’s going on in the actual world. It goes back centuries, when whatever was going on politically at the time, the actors and the writers would grab it, and put it on stage. That’s what Shakespeare was doing; whatever crazy, political crap was going on with Elizabeth, he could just grab it. That’s what television is like. I think it’s closer to theatre than anything else. Also, films take so long to get the financing!
Q: You mentioned not being sure how European audiences would respond. What do you think American audiences will make of this?
JA: I think they’ll dig it, especially an HBO audience, which is used to very subtle things. But you never know. I think it’s a miracle anything gets made, and it’s a miracle that all the collaborators work well together, and then it’s a miracle that anybody likes it, and I’m just infinitely grateful at every stage.
Olive Kitteridge is out now on Blu-ray and DVD, courtesy of HBO Home Entertainment
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