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Interview: Kenneth Lonergan on Margaret

We spoke with Lonergan about the formal and structural qualities that make Margaret an uncommon cinematic experience.

Interview: Kenneth Lonergan on Margaret
Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures

Few films are able to live up to their inciting incident, as the bigger the event, the longer the odds of success. Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret pivots on a grotesque bus accident that would seem farfetched, an artifact of the loosely regulated civic transit of the 19th century, if such mishaps didn’t recur every few months, even in New York City, even in 2012. What follows is a contemporary epic in every positive sense, a controlled shotgun blast from the vantage point of the accident, and what happens to a mostly well-meaning high school girl when her fickle, flip attitude leads directly to an awful tragedy. I was honored to play a role in bringing Lonergan’s film to the attention of critics and cinephiles, after it had been effectively orphaned by its own distributor. Following that, I really wanted to talk to Lonergan about the Margaret-ness of Margaret, the specific formal and structural qualities that make the film special, and an uncommon cinematic experience. Lonergan, weary of treading the ground that concerns his legal and creative struggles, was more than happy to comply. We planned to chat for 20 to 30 minutes, but our talk went for well over an hour.

It was several months after I saw the film that I made the connection that my mother’s name is Margaret.

You just this moment reminded me that my mother’s name is Peggy. It’s a derivative of Margaret, but that never occurred to me before.

It’s a film that gives audiences a little misdirection—in a good way. Theatrical misdirection. Starting with its title, which some still believe is the name of the Anna Paquin character.

I read a couple of reviews which referred to her repeatedly as Margaret, which I figured had been an editorial mistake that they just decided to go with.

We have this expectation that she’s the protagonist—and we’re not exactly wrong, but you construct a lot of the shots to deemphasize her presence, so that one of the things the film has going on is that we’re constantly passing in and out of this “Lisa sphere,” so that if she has any kind of journey in the film it’s between “me and my self, my own space,” and beyond it.

Yeah.

Normally, scripts go along this track of having a character who was like A in the beginning and they progress toward B, but with Lisa, she has this continual oscillation, which I think is very provocative, because it defies the expectation that she’s going to come away from the film a definitively better person.

I’m very glad that comes through, because one of the most important elements of the script, and of the shooting process, and of the editing process was to make the structure, and also the visual story of the film—the emotional story of the film—is that of a girl discovering that the world is 100,000 times bigger, deeper, and more complex than she imagined it to be. Which is something we all discover at some point, at some age, or most of us do. So I very much wanted to prove it by having it happen to her, and to the audience as well—and it became obvious, whenever we stuck just with her, when we were editing it, that the structure collapses completely. Because then, it starts with her, remains with her, and ends with her. And if the movie doesn’t go over to the side of the other characters, as completely as possible, and embrace the size and scope of the city, and the size and scope of the problem she’s trying to solve, then there’s not enough story to sustain our interest.

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Yeah, it has to be a lot of not-her, and then back to her, and then not-her, and so forth.

Yeah, and I like the way it creates an interesting feeling, and an interesting dynamic, because hopefully you’re both going through what she’s going through, and you’re also seeing her, not from her point of view. And the fact that the world doesn’t operate from her point of view, or from any of our points of view, is an undeniable mountain in the way of all of our ambitions and wishes. I tried to have the music reflect that as well—not to have the music be “Lisa music,” but coming from somewhere else. I wanted to have a kind of anthropological look into her in this situation, and I think it’s possible to do that without losing the emotional impact, or losing sympathy with what’s going on with her. Hopefully the film was able to do that.

If there’s a drama there that helps us get a foothold, it’s that she’s been tasked with dealing with something that’s incredibly overwhelming, and subsequent to that, she can’t understand why nobody else is experiencing, even remotely, the same responses. You have scene after scene where she’s looking at characters in disbelief—the cop, her mother, the driver, and so forth—because they aren’t in sync with her. Either because they seem a little bit harder, or because they’re operating on a different register.

I’ve read articles where the mother is described as really self-centered because she’s worried about her play, which I can understand why people would think that, but on the other hand, the mother has every right to be worried about her play, similar to the way whoever wrote that about the movie was probably worried about how their article was going to turn out, and how it’s going to be received. We’re all worried about our jobs. Lisa’s mother is also worried about Lisa, but Lisa is completely shutting her out. The father, on the other hand, I think is genuinely self-centered and narcissistic, and it’s hard for him to listen, and it’s hard for him to really do anything other than pick up and go from whatever point in the conversation he thinks is best. So he’s not so helpful, but everybody else is, more or less, trying to live their own lives. I’ve always found that when you really want something, or when something’s troubling you and you’re trying to solve it, the obstacle of other people not having the same feelings about it as you is always a bit of a shock, and a tremendous frustration. Because it’s dramatic in life, I don’t see why it can’t be dramatic in film.

She becomes aware, in that dramatic showdown with Emily, that she’s not even the “Number One Mourner” of the woman who’s killed, which was a status she’d bestowed on herself.

Right, even though she’s seriously disturbed by what happened. At the memorial service, and all other scenes with Emily, Lisa’s in a very strange position of trying to drive things forward, largely to make amends for what she’s done—not just out of guilt, but from her own sense of doing the right thing. But she also comes to realize that she’s not even the main person affected.

A generalized chaos seems to come into play, so that Lisa isn’t just challenged by the situations she finds herself in, but the environment herself. An environment not just of people and places, but sounds too. A heavy fog of talking.

That’s what happens when, let’s say your brother drops dead, and you walk outside, and two people are talking and laughing about a date that one of them just went on, or you pass an elderly person making their way down the street in slow motion, with very few months to live, or some kids playing with their dog. I mean, there’s so much going on around you, and it doesn’t just rain when you’re unhappy. The furniture doesn’t get darker when you’re in a bad mood. Your clothes don’t all of a sudden get darker. I find this is a common…design motif in films, and sometimes it can be very effective, but I find that it’s more upsetting when I feel like shit, and I walk into a bank and it’s brightly lit, because the bank isn’t going with my mood, and I’m standing there exposed in the very bright light. And the contrast between my mood and what’s going on with the rest of the world, I think, is a major part of life. I also think it’s very good dramatic fodder; it creates a conflict not just between one person and the other people around them, but between that person and their own environment.

It’d be easy for someone to film Lisa’s story and have a scene where she’s looking out the window, and the rain is falling against the windowpane, representing her tears through symbolism.

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Which I don’t always mind. I mean, you look at Casablanca, I wouldn’t change an instant of that film. There’s the scene where Humphrey Bogart is waiting at the train station for Ingrid Bergman, to leave Paris, and it’s pouring rain, and he reads the note saying she can never see him again. The note gets blotched both by the rain and his tears, and it’s fantastic, you can’t do better than that. But I wanted to try something else, and it was exciting to try to do so.

I recently came across a comment by the Russian critic Viktor Schlovsky, who talked about the potential of art to produce an estrangement of perceptions, which would, in turn, to use his phrase, “make the stone stony.” As a lot of us are still trying to get a grasp of what Margaret is about, a good place to begin is to look at the way you first make strange, and then restore, New York City as a place of particular textures and qualities that serve as a background to Lisa’s sense of self, and her encounter with things and people other than herself, who spin independently of her wheels, so to speak.

Ryszard Lenczewski [the film’s cinematographer] had never been to America before, let alone New York. One of the many reasons I chose him, apart from liking his work, is that, if I know the city so well, it would be great to have someone with a strong visual sense seeing it for the first time. There are a number of films that depict New York really well, and many more than simply use it as a background, paying no attention to where anything is, to the point that it doesn’t look like New York at all. We tried to shoot the movie in a way that would remain faithful to the actual locations. It’s so important to the story, to her story, that she’s from a particular neighborhood, the one I grew up in, the Upper West Side, and what happens to her takes her to these other places she’s never been to before: Bay Ridge, the police station, the two law offices. Such a key part of the story was her exposure to different parts of the world that were going along without her help, or without her knowledge, and she’s running up against these worlds, and trying to get the people in them to pay attention to what she’s so concerned about.

In Margaret, the story of the city is also told in the shot, because in this city you have millions of people with millions of things going on in their lives, and hundreds of thousands of other windows that show things that are just as important, more important, or less important, while her struggles continue. And there’s something about the titanic inevitability of all the lives going forward in the city that a teenager can’t do anything about, a concept older people come to understand, but when you’re young, you think you can do something, that you can do things that will affect or help everyone. And it’s one of the things people mock teenagers for, and it’s also something I think is the most beautiful about being a teenager, and enviable, and morally correct. Certainly more so than the “I can’t fix it, so I’ll just worry about myself” attitude that most of us adopt when we come to realize that we’re not going to eradicate justice in our time, all by ourselves. All of those things contributed to the tremendous presence of the rest of the city, and the specificity of the locations. In You Can Count on Me, the town was really important to the story, because of the relationship that each of the main characters had to it, having had their parents killed when they were very young. The brother cannot stand to be in the town, it’s too painful, while the sister has latched onto the town, as her mainstay and her support. Because I’ve always thought of small towns—places I’d certainly like to live, but that I’m afraid I might find stultifying and suffocating—as both beautiful and relaxing, but also limiting. And so Laura Linney’s character, her life is solid and reliable, but she’s very choked, in that town; Mark Ruffalo’s character wanders all over the place, so he’s not trapped, but he’s also got no base. Why I made that story into a film, and not a play, was mainly because the town was such an important element, and I think that’s largely true of Margaret as well, that the city is such an important element, I thought the story would be much more suitable for a film than for a play.

It’s no coincidence that Lisa has these classroom discussions concerning the way America always seems to want to “rescue” the rest of the world, and the negative consequences this can have on…basically everyone.

The classroom scenes started out just showing her still in school, but the content, because I wanted to place it in the current period of this social studies class, would naturally revolve around 9/11. And an interesting thing happened, which is that her views about it are so strong that bad people should be punished, and she’s feeling, very much unconsciously, that she herself should be punished, but the bus driver refuses to acknowledge that he did anything wrong. And he’s so frightened and intimidated by her, and unsympathetic, that he’s willing to terrorize her out of a defensive posture. While all she wants to do is connect with him. She even says, “I just want to acknowledge to you that that’s what happened.” And had he been sympathetic and said, “Yes, it was a tragedy, and I haven’t been able to sleep,” I don’t think she would have gone to the police after that. But the fact that he bullies her and intimidates her and ends up screaming in the face of this 17-year-old girl who’s been traumatized by this horrible thing that they both did makes her feel comfortable trying to get him fired because she feels he’s a bad person, and also liable to do it again. So it’s not that she’s trying to work her guilt out on him, I think she genuinely feels he shouldn’t be driving a bus. Just to put it very simply.

That scene lets us know very subtly that she didn’t exactly go about that encounter the right way. She should have called first, even if a phone call wouldn’t have gotten the job done.

Plus, he was flirting with her. We talked a lot about the scene beforehand, during the rehearsal process, we discussed that one of the elements should concern the fact that his flirtation with Lisa, which causes the accident, needs to be something he doesn’t want to tell his wife, and we discussed the possibility that he and his wife might have marital issues, maybe some affairs in the past on his part. How the house he’s living in has been under a black cloud of guilt and horror ever since the accident, and his wife’s very worried about him, and then the last person he ever wants to see shows up at his door, and he’s too frightened to notice that she’s not there to attack him. And she does try to call, but she’s too scared and she hangs up. The scene starts out where they’re very frightened of one another, and the more scared he gets of her, the more aggressive he gets, and the more aggressive he gets with her, the more aggressive she gets with him, and then they part ways.

He behaves like a trapped animal, plus he’s out there on his own stoop, on his own street, in his own neighborhood, and there’s this subtext like he needs to defend his home against this teenage girl.

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You can see his point of view, but my sympathy is limited when he begins screaming and swearing at this girl. She says to him, flat out, that she’s not there to accuse him of anything or to say he did anything wrong, but also, the fact is, she may have been flirting with him and distracting him, which she shouldn’t have done. She acknowledges that in several places, although that sometimes escapes people’s notice, so it’s possible I didn’t emphasize that enough. I always thought she essentially did acknowledge her role in it, and the fact that he won’t really blows her mind. But his refusal finally gives her something to do with all this emotional energy that has just been, up to this point, turning around inside her. Especially when she takes it to Emily, who’s very black and white about it: He ran the light, he lied about it, he was looking at you, and he should be fired, and hopefully crucified. Lisa doesn’t want him crucified, but she certainly wants him fired, and it’s a tremendous relief to her to find someone with a definite moral opinion, and a definite plan of action.

Lisa comes to a point where she wants to confess, and obviously she wants the driver to confess—and for her part, she has the explosive confession at the lawyer’s office and the conference call. And while there may be characters who hear her say that, there’s not really anyone to “hear her confession.”

No, indeed. The only way she finally gets that is when she forgives her mother for not being able to handle things any better than she’s been able to. And that’s another structural element in the story—that her first confession is to her mother. We see, in the early parts of the film, that Lisa is close to her mother, not snotty and mean to her at all; they get along very well. There’s no indication that there’s any strife between them until after she tries to tell her mother what happened. She doesn’t really tell her mother the whole story, and her mother, having been caught very much off guard, and also guesses wrong what her daughter wants to hear in order to be comforted, comes back with this sort of Upper West Side liberal response to the issue, which is, “I’m sure you don’t want to get this bus driver in trouble.” Which leaves Lisa feeling utterly isolated, and after that she ends up turning on her mother so completely and so viciously. And as you say, the attorney isn’t interested in hearing her confession; she’s confessed to Emily, been berated for it on their way to going after the driver. And there’s been nobody to say to Lisa, “It’s okay.” And there’s nobody to really savage her, except herself. Which she does with these crazy sexual escapades, which she pursues, I think, in order to get some kind of sexual punishment for what she considers to be a sex crime. I don’t think this takes place consciously, but she does do it. She has this understanding that most adults get nowhere because they don’t try, and she’s tried her very best and done very well for a 17-year-old girl; she gets a check written for $300,000, but it’s for some creeps in Arizona.

The sex scene with Lisa and Paul is amazing.

[laughs] Thank you, I like it too.

It’s so uncomfortable and true.

They’re both so wonderful. I’ve seen films that have had loss-of-virginity scenes that are great, but they always strike me as too short. And the painful part of it is that you have to go through the whole thing, you have to go to the person’s house, or they go to your house, you have to get in a room, you gotta get undressed, and then it happens. And there’s what happens afterward, and it’s just one of these horrible moments in life where you wish you were in a movie and you could just cut to the next day, and life doesn’t do that, and I was very eager to portray it that way. And I was very pleased to be able to put in a complete scene in the longer version of the boy having to get dressed, and put on all his clothes, and leave. That’s one of the most painful moments in life. That was very satisfying to do, especially as their performances were so exceptional.

You know what it brought to mind, and it’s not a movie that’s associated first and foremost with uncomfortable love scenes, and that’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

That’s exactly the film I was thinking of! It’s where [Stacy Hamilton, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh] loses her virginity in the pool house or wherever. Usually in these scenes the characters are nervous, but then they finally do it and there’s music and it’s beautiful and it’s either explicit or it isn’t explicit. For the scene with Lisa and Paul, I didn’t want it to be so explicit as to be embarrassing, so it’s in silhouettes, but I didn’t want it to be too beautiful either. And Ryszard Lenczewski found a very happy medium there. In terms of its relationship to the rest of the movie, it’s another real-life situation that’s totally different and much more complex and much more difficult than it was in her teenage imagination.

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I hope the experience you went through, the struggle with, uh, Those Who Shall Not Be Named, regarding Margaret’s completion, hasn’t put you off making films.

I have a number of things I’d like to do, I haven’t quite settled on which. And I will admit I’m a bit tired, but I will recover, and it turned out to be a happy ending, despite the ongoing legal problems. The film itself, both versions, came out the way I wanted them to. And the fact that people who’ve seen them have liked them so much, I want to thank them all. And it’s gratifying to me that the actors are getting all the recognition they’ve gotten. So yes, I’d like to do it again. I find directing to be exhausting even when the whole thing went smoothly the first time, and it went largely smoothly for a great deal of the time, the second time around, and it’s a lot of work. And I’m essentially lazy. [laughs] The managerial part of directing is very stressful to me, so it’s a little bit daunting to think of doing it again. I have a number of plays that I want to turn into films, and a few film ideas that I’m working on. I’m sure I’ll do it again before too long.

Do you think you’ll stick to celluloid, to shoot? There are a lot of these directors, where you never thought they’d shoot on digital video, but then they do…

It depends on how it looks, I suppose. I really like film, and I’m afraid because of the rush to digital that it’s going to die and never come back, and that’s a real tragedy. It’s only been around a hundred years, and I don’t think, nine times out of 10, that digital films look as good as films shot on film. There’s just something about the color timing of digital versus film.

It doesn’t even make the job of a director easier, in any real way.

You’d think it would, I mean, 10 years ago we were being told that, soon, you’d just be able to pick up a video camera and get all the same effects you’d get with this huge camera crew, and so far that’s not the case. And fixing it in post, with the color timing, that’s not realistic either. In fact, I think that one reason why there’s such a popular trend to having stylized colorization in films now, where it’s all blue, or saturated, and all these films are doing that, is because your choices when you’re color-timing with a computer are so vast that to try to recreate real light is almost impossible. And so, I can see why people are now like, “Okay, we’re going to have a blue look, or a gray-blue look.”

The over-truthfulness of digital video presents challenges to lighting that weren’t there before, because the camera won’t let the photographer create expressive setups without giving the game away.

Maybe we’ll reach the point where we figure it out. I mean, what they were doing in the 1930s with single-source lighting, they created astonishing effects that just aren’t possible anymore. Nobody’s left who even knows how to get them. Except Scorsese, who seems to be able to do anything visual. You know, because I’ve got my daughter, I’ve been to see tons of these 3D kid’s films, and I find most of them to be an eye-strain, and a lot of them don’t look any more complex, visually, than the old Creature from the Black Lagoon, two-plane 3D effect. But then we saw Hugo, and I thought, “Jesus Christ, it’s a whole new art form.” It’s incredible. I mean, I’m not a technically minded person, I’m content to try and get things to look just the way they appear to your natural eye, but you never know what’s going to catch your interest later on.

Jaime N. Christley

Jaime N. Christley's writing has also appeared in the Village Voice.

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