Pop Culture Confidential

Episode 24: Creating Carol with Screenwriter Phyllis Nagy

Gorgeous, moving and subtle – ‘Carol’ is a beautifully crafted tale of forbidden love that has wowed critics and audiences alike. And it’s no wonder – director Todd Haynes (Far from Heaven, I’m Not There) along with the films stars Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara have delivered Oscar worthy performances. ‘Carol’ follows two women from very different backgrounds that find themselves in an unexpected love affair in 1950s New York. Their undeniable attraction is challenged by the conventional norms of the time but what emerges is an honest story of resilience and fulfillment. Our guest is screenwriter Phyllis Nagy who adapted Patricia Highsmith’s book “The Price of Salt” for the film. Highsmith wrote more than twenty novels before her death in 1995, many of which including “Strangers on a Train” and the Tom Ripley series but it is the love story of Carol and Therese that draws inspiration from her own life. We ask Phyllis about the twenty year struggle of bringing this story to the big screen, her friendship with Highsmith and how the period drama can be seen as a reflection of todays society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Duration:: 33m
Broadcast on:: 31 Jan 2016
Audio Format:: other

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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It took almost 20 years to get Carol to the big screen, but I have to say it was worth the wait, from script to direction to acting to production design, it really is a masterful love story. Phyllis adapted from Patricia Highsmith's very early novel The Price of Salt. Highsmith is probably most known for her book Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley to name a few. The Price of Salt is set in 1950s New York, and the lesbian romance was based on experiences in Highsmith's own life, and originally published under Sydenham. In the film, Terese, Highsmith's alter ego, is played by Rooney Mara, a department store clerk who falls in love with Carol, a wealthy and much older married woman, played by the almost otherworldly Kate Blanchitt. But you will understand this one day. How many times have you been in love? You're always the most beautiful woman in the room. Terese, Valimat. Carol. Tell me you know what you're doing, and never did. And then it changed. She's still my wife, I love her. I can't help you with that. It shouldn't be like this. I know. The director Todd Haynes has often focused on stories about women, when their own ways rebel against the norms and restraints of their time. But the real champion of this film is screenwriter and playwright Phyllis Naj, who critics and moviegoers agree has done a superbly beautiful adaptation. Phyllis Naj and Patricia Haynes' myth were friends for many years, and Naj has worked for two decades to get Carol to the big screen. Miss Naj, welcome. Thank you so much for being on the show. Oh, thank you very much. My pleasure. Congratulations on the movie and all the nominations coming in from Golden Globes. And I was so pleased the other day that your phone was not on flight mode, when you won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Screenplay, because your tweets from the plane were just priceless. You were so happy. Well, I never keep my Wi-Fi on on planes, but it was a particularly turbulent flight, and flying doesn't please me in general. But I thought, "Well, I'll put on some Wi-Fi and maybe catch up on some email." And the first thing I was hit with was the New York Film Critics Circle. And I thought, "Oh, there is a reason for a turbulent flight. This is it." Yeah, you won Best Screenplay. Yeah, I think we won quite a lot of them, yeah. And Best Picture, too, on that one, and all kinds of nominations. Yeah, and I think Ed for his beautiful cinematography and director as well. I want to talk a little bit later about the 20-year journey that it's been for you with Carol. But if I could start a little bit at the beginning, you knew Patricia Highsmith. You met when you were a researcher at the New York Times doing a piece. Could you just describe her a bit at that point? Yeah, well, she was, at that point, in her 60s, I guess in her mid-60s, and also by that time, I suppose, had accumulated quite a reputation for being formidable and grumpy and snappish. And so the person I met on that day was quite reticent and moody, that seems pretty clear. But she was also funny in a mischievous way. She was very mischievous person at Highsmith, although she did not suffer fools gladly at all, once you were, I don't know, once she made her unfathomable decisions about who was worth spending a little time with, and if you were on the good end of that, you were in. And she was absolutely charming and challenging. I think people can be both of those things quite easily. Absolutely. Those are the best people. Yeah. Yeah. And then you had a friendship for some years until she passed. Yeah, absolutely. Well, at first, I lived in New York, where I met her, and she was living in Switzerland by that time, and in the process of building and designing, actually, what would become her last home. But we had a correspondence for a few years, every week, we'd write letters to each other. And I missed the days when people actually communicated by letter rather than telephone, which, I mean, I'm not sure why people didn't do it as late as the '80s, but perhaps it was because, well, there were no cell phones, and there were only these monolithic telephone companies who could charge you what they wanted, basically, and so people all resorted to letters, and not emails, and there was a great pleasure, at least, that I took in being able to sit down and actually relate the events of a week, or a day, or two weeks. And then I moved to London in early 1992, and the letters continued, but we saw each other much more often than, because, of course, as you know, it's easier to travel in Europe between countries than it is, you know, to do that transatlantic thing. And that continued until she, I mean, she became pretty seriously ill, I think, not that long after I met her, but, you know, as with everything else, she was a bit like her cast, you know, kept everything, and then pretty much a secret until it could be kept a secret no longer. So, as a screenwriter, you were tasked, or you took both adapting the novel, but also writing a quite, this was a quite personal story for her, and you were friends. How was that? Well, in some ways, you know, an accident is fate, but this project didn't actually come along until two years after she died. I don't know what I would have done had she been alive. She was quite anti-every one of the screen adaptations she'd seen of her work. Justifiably, even if the films were great, such as with Strangers on a Train, because, you know, they changed the nature of those books in making certain decisions. And so, who knows, I might not have ever done it had she been alive, although she was really quite interested in me one day tackling one of her books, one of the things that happened when I knew her, is that my own writing career as a dramatist in England really took off, but she's very pleased and encouraging about that. So, you know, I don't know, and I don't know what she would think of Carol. I would hope she would see that it was, you know, that it retained the important qualities and the intent of her, of her novel, and I know she would have loved Kate Blanchett. Yeah, who doesn't? Nothing to do with her acting, but it's just that, is her past type. So, I'm sure she would have been very pleased. Have you sort of added more elements of her in Terese? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Well, because that was one, Terese is obviously the alter ego of the author, both from what we know about the writing of the price of salt, to the clear, strange ways in which Terese relates to the world, almost as a sort of savant in some way. And that was all Pat, but I could, you know, absolutely had great pleasure in putting words I thought Pat would say into Terese's mouth. For example. Well, the way that she would refer to, you know, Pat's not interested in, you know, people, she's interested in objects, and she's always interested in saying exactly what's on her mind, regardless of the ramifications and the context or the audience to which she's speaking, just odd bits of Kate and things like that that, you know, I have a great deal of fun observing, but, you know, virtually no one else, unless a new Pat would probably pick up all of them. So I'm sure you thought it was a man who sent you back your gloves. I did. I thought it might have been a man in the ski department. I'm sorry. No, I'm delighted. Until very much I would have gone to lunch with him. Oh, your perfume. Yes. It's nice. Thank you. Harge bought me a bottle of years ago before we were married and I've been wearing it ever since. Harge is your husband? Mm-hmm. Well, technically we're divorcing. Sorry. Dumpy. And do you live alone, Terese velvet? I do. Well, there's Richard. He'd like to live with me. Oh, no. It's nothing like that. I mean, he'd like to marry me. I see. And would you like to marry him? Well, I barely even know what to order for lunch. You changed the perspective a bit in the novel. Carol's a bit more of a complex character. Am I correct? And you're telling of it. Well, I think what's a difference is that the novel has a very delicious, shifting point of view but not in a traditional sense. It's really Terese's point of view. But sometimes it seems as if we're getting a sort of stream of consciousness monologue from Terese's psyche about how she feels about Carol and falling in love and all of that. And at other times, she seems to be a third-person narrator sitting on her own shoulder kind of narrating not always reliably the events of the novel. So for instance, we only hear about Carol's life through the lens of Terese. Terese's designs, right? And even the quite large events, the custody problems, et cetera, I mean, we're pretty much told about them. We had a problem. Go, Carol had a problem or more. And so what was great about being able to create a life for Carol out of the shards of Terese's memories or Terese's cake on the events. That was one of the great joys of the adaptation because in a movie, obviously you can't have unless it's a very peculiar movie, you can't just have one character's point of view in voiceover and seeing the shadow of a character. In the book, it's terrific because we get to project whoever we want as Carol. We all get our own Carol. Ghost of your love or something, I understand. Yeah, which I suppose is the point, but obviously there was always going to be a real flesh and blood representation of that person. And so that was one of the great challenges of it and the other great challenge of it was to make sure that Carol was empathetic. And that's really sympathetic, none of us really gave a hoot about that because the understanding that what's going on in that story is completely relatable if you're living and breathing or have a pulse. But really so that people did not turn away from Carol in the sense that she has a very difficult path to negotiate through the events of her life, which I'm trying not to say anything about, lest people haven't seen the movie. No, she's completely human. That's what's so wonderful, I have to say, about, it may sound weird for the listeners I try to explain it, but it's the least irritating love story. I've seen there's no 15 minutes of anguished exposition about being gay or married or the age difference. It's completely free of guilt, you just get to see which I suppose the novel is very much as well. Did the producers or any time during this 15 years, did anyone ask you to say we want you to have a little bit of anguish in there? I think that on there might have been, the set of producers that actually ended up getting the film made, of course, are different producers because when things take this long, everyone from producers to actors to directors, potential partners, they have to take other work. So yes, I think early on when we were, and you have to understand this is late '90s. First draft of this is 1997. So there was always going to be two or three people who didn't understand why, who actually, if I'm being unkind, don't understand what dramatic action is and believe it. It's all about a certain sort of cat conflict, in this case, why wouldn't this woman feel guilt about her sexuality? Yes, from all of this, I've learned to very commonly say, "Well, have you ever had guilt about your sexuality?" Obviously, you have guilt about difficult choices you have to make, and there's certainly lots of obstacles in any place for these two, but one of the obstacles isn't, never will be, "Am I doing the right thing by fancying a woman?" Not really what life is about, and I think that is the one thing, well, there are a couple of things, but that's the huge important thing that has been preserved through all the years. And I think it's preserved partially because it was developed in a very different way. I mean, if this movie wasn't developed in the US by a studio, it was developed in the UK by Film 4, which is a British studio, but you know, it's different. It's just a different relationship between creators and the children. Yeah, because I can imagine there must have been through the years people who are afraid of the themes or afraid of this or that or how she should react to the custody issue with her child and all these things that people, which makes it so great that you see her as completely human with obstacles, but not with this guilt and anger. We don't have to go through that in the sense. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The concerns or its thematic concerns are very much relevant in the world we live in today. You know, people say, "Well, why a period piece?" I think, "Well, because in period pieces, you're allowed the freedom to explore really complex subtle things that in contemporary society, we all believe are past us and they're not." And they never will be. I mean, except for, you know, fairly privileged bubbles, pockets of places such as Los Angeles or New York or, you know, but the period gives you license to really focus on behavior that is no longer part of our culture in many ways, but in certain other key ways is profoundly with us. Let me give some coffee. I'm not drunk. You can still come. Let's go back back. I can't do that. Yes, you can. What are you going to do? What are you going to do? What are you going to do? What are you going to do? Are you going to stay here with Abby over Christmas? Are you going to stay with the shop girl over there? Huh? What are you going to do here, huh? What are you going to do, girl? Huh? What are you going to do, girl? What is the one? Stop it. It's a damnit. I put nothing past women like you, girl. You married a woman like me. The movie is a so, it's an amazing subtext going through. I don't know if this is an odd question for a screenwriter, but how do you write subtext? Are you actually writing or do you and Todd work together with these glances they have over the table? Well, I mean, as far as that goes, there's two things that I always have always kept in mind. I mean, yes, of course the script is full of scenes in which people are not allowed to say what they really want to say, which I suppose is the basis of all subtext. People not saying exactly what they mean, but saying it in another way or taking a beat or a pause at a place where maybe words can't feel a space. So the script is full of that stuff, and when you've got a collaborator, a group of collaborators in this case, Todd, the actors, the designers who are all absolutely on the same page about how you tell a story and how you treat a script in which the subtext is allowed to float and is not bludgeoned, then of course that stuff multiplies and ripples and people run with things, and that's what happened here. So yes, it is written, but it's also written in such a way as to allow people to go as far as they can with what they might bring to it. I cannot imagine any two other people doing those roles and having them, they're nailed. Hey, Blanchard is just like something out of a Hitchcock-Glamour, she's just a... Well, that's so funny. She really is. I mean, I have no, I never think of actors or living actors when I write anything. I mean, that's a, you're on a hiding to nothing there, but the one model I had in mind for Carol in the script was a very specific role of Grace Kelly's, and that was in Rear Window. So it was a Hitchcock blonde who was the model for Carol. And I think he's the only other director that even loved, now at this point, to contemplate like, what would Hitchcock's take on Carol at this point? A very different one, and I'm glad I've got the one I've got, but you know, there was the, I smithian elements of Hitchcock's work. And then the other thing is something that Hitchcock always said to people who asked them, you know, how do you, how do you get such tension in your scenes? And he said, well, you know, you should always film your love scenes as if they're murder scenes and your murder scenes as if they're love scenes. That's absolutely how, on a very fundamental level, the script for Carol was written basically. Yes, that explains a lot. Yeah. I read that your favorite movie is Sunset Boulevard, which is mine as well, funny. Oh, right. Great. And there's a pretty spectacular female in that one as well. Yes. Absolutely. Did you think anything about that one when you were doing Carol? Well, I always, yes, the answer is probably yes, because I always think of Sunset Boulevard and I always watched it while I'm working that and all that jazz are the two movies that I watch a lot when I'm working. And for very different reasons, but, you know, and I always try to put Sunset Boulevard into everything I do, no matter how inappropriate it might be. You know, it's like a good luck charm. In this case, it's so very appropriate. And that scene in particular, that's extracted and played in the scene in Carol, I think. Right. Works very well. But yeah, Norma Jesman, what a great character. I want to say, they don't make movies about characters like that anymore, do they? One of the best. Yeah. I'm married to a screenwriter, so, and we talk about, there's not a lot of writer's block. I mean, the writing seems to come naturally, but there's sort of a bullshit block that the money troubles of getting the film made and the waiting for things to happen and producers saying, "Change this or do that in decades." And this is a project that you've been working on for 20 years. How do you stay creative through all that? Well, I mean, I suppose the great advantage here is when something takes 20 years, it's not every single moment of your time, it's devoted to it, so you have great bursts of activity and false starts. And after about the first five years of that, you get pretty, not cynical, but pretty, you know, you just shrug when someone says, "Well, that's the financing we've lost." You go, "Right. I think I'll make a cup of tea." So, what else is new? And so, you get to a point where you don't think it'll ever happen, which is actually quite a good point to be in, because you're not as, you're always invested in it, but you no longer expected to happen, and you can, as I did from time to time, go back to the script and remove the bits that I thought were always a bad idea, but that came from other discussions of people who were flirting with it or, you know, attached in some way. So it sort of worked out to a place where I say, gee, everything should take 18 to 20 years. There's an extraordinary amount of incredible women on this project. I mean, we talked about Todd Haynes, but around them, the producers and Christine Varshon and everyone, it really is a female centric production, right? Yeah, it mostly is, and I, you know, I've known Liz Carlson, who was the real kind of guiding force of a producer on this, who I've known her for years before, together before. I also worked with Liz and Christine before on a film I wrote and directed for HBO, and Todd, of course, and Christine are formidable pair, but he's also been friendly with Liz, good friends for many years. So it felt like the lesson in this is to, is when you're embarking on a film like this, which is tricky for all sorts of reasons, and the least of it being that it's about to lead being women, it is a good idea to know who you're working with, because there's a greater chance of it working out, well, in the end, if everyone is aware of everyone else, and is syntotico, aesthetically, and in various other ways. But it's something that rarely, I think, happened. When I was just reading in the big New Yorker, I could say, about women in the industry, that people just have this idea that women-centered films don't make any money, which I think you're proving wrong. Yeah, Carol is going to prove that, it already is, but as it goes wider in the States and needs to be released internationally, I really, really hope people take note, but that's really all you can do is hope they take note, and if three other films that are female-driven and of quality dramas I'm talking about, I mean, there's always a market for female buddy comedies and such, but I hope if three more movies get made like this, and that's what you do, and you create an effect, perhaps, and the next few six get made. And then when one of them bombs were back to, you know, square one, I hope hopefully not. So what do you think Patricia would have said about your finished movie? I wonder if she'd be as disapproving as she was of all the rest of them, but there's a part of me that thinks she would have liked it and would have appreciated the renewed recognition of her work that the movie is clearly giving her already in the book, and I know she would have fallen in love with Kate Blanchett, so I think that would have trumped every reaction, you know, that should have been quite tough to see Rooney Mara basically portraying herself. So, because the novel, she released the novel without the synonym before she died, correct? Yeah, she retitled it Carol, and she put her own name on it, yes. And I don't think she was ready for a very long time to do that, and then I suppose in the late 80s when she, I think there was a critic, she was Karen's Rafferty, who wrote a very long appreciation of her work in the New Yorker, and suddenly people were interested again. And I think she thought, "Okay, I can finally, I can finally do this," was Bloom's Berry, her British publisher asked her to put her own name on the price of salt, so I hope she would appreciate at least what it's doing for her. When it comes full circle, and when it happens, I want you to imagine me there to greet you. Carol, I will share. And now you're going into award season, is it, is it crazy? Yeah, it's fairly crazy, but you know, it's better to be in this position than in a position where people are not seeing the movie, I'm not talking about it, so. Well, I can't wait for your Oscar speech, I think it's going to be nice to see it. And thank you so much for taking your time, and congratulations again, this was very interesting and so much fun. Thank you so much, take care. Thank you so much to Phyllis Naj and good luck during award season. Go see Carol wherever you are, it premieres here in Sweden on December 25th, it's out in theaters in the US and the UK, so go check out the listings wherever you may be. And keep in touch with me, for example, on Twitter @podpopculture. This show is edited by Tom Hanson, music by Callboy, produced by René Vitistet and myself. I'm Cristina Yarlink-Biro, see you next time. Hello podcast fans, it is I, Bruce Vilanche, for over 25 years I worked on the Academy Awards, so you didn't have to. In that time I've seen and heard things that should not be seen or heard or certainly felt. And now, for the first time, I'm sharing all my behind the scenes stories and firsthand knowledge about the Oscars, the blood, the sweat, the tears, the slap, all the things you didn't see. So join me as I use humor and insight to break down the Oscar Awards of the past to explain how and why your favorite movie didn't win, why some actors and some directors had to fire their agents and how the whole process works or sometimes doesn't work. This is the Oscars, what were they thinking, available wherever you get podcasts. [BLANK_AUDIO]