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Big Eyes Interview with Screenwriters Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander

Pressure mounts on all sides to declare Tim Burton’s sweet and understated Big Eyes either a return to form or a turned corner.

Big Eyes Interview with Screenwriters Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander
Photo: The Weinstein Company

Pressure mounts on all sides to declare Tim Burton’s sweet and understated Big Eyes either a return to form or a turned corner, but for screenwriters Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander it’s just an exemplary marriage of maker and material. The film is a dramatization of the struggle of 1960s artist Margaret Keane (Amy Adams), whose paintings of crying children were as ubiquitous, for a time, as their decidedly less gothic successors in the Precious Moments franchise are today. But Keane’s husband, Walter (Christoph Waltz), took credit for her explosive success, and despite toying with a few loftier notions (alcoholism, gimcrack curios versus capital-A art), Big Eyes is an essentially spare, straightforward celebration of Margaret’s successful campaign to reclaim credit for the paintings. The film is as over-the-moon for postwar modernism as it is a painstaking character study, and, like the pair’s last collaboration with Burton, Ed Wood, strikes a lovely balance between laughing at and with its eccentric protagonist. On the day of the film’s New York premiere, I met with the duo over coffee to try extracting their secret recipe for the modern anti-biopic.

So, I understand people were whooping and hollering at the L.A. premiere, for the draw-off scene between Margaret and Walter.

Scott Alexander: There were a bunch of applause moments, but for us, we know the applause moments and these were new applause moments. That was kinda cool.

Larry Karaszewski: Any time Margaret spoke up for herself, people went crazy. Which has kind of been the biggest surprise from this week of screenings: that people really get into Margaret’s journey. We didn’t think we were making, like, Rocky. It’s like, this one particular screening, they were cheering at her when she actually spoke up at the radio station.

Alexander: We always talked about it like we were writing a 1950s women’s picture. It kind of began with Margaret as a typical ’50s American housewife who believes she’s expected to let Walter speak for her. And we could have chosen to have the movie end at many different points in time, but we aimed for it to end near 1970. So it sort of parallels the beginning of the women’s movement. And these are choices we made, but I think that because it’s really touching a note with women who are identifying that this was really a distinct point in America where things weren’t the way they were supposed to be. As writers, we’re just in there adding plot points—because to get from B to E you need to get through your C and D. And there are moments to cheer, which is really kind of nice, that we weren’t expecting.

Karaszewski: I had two women come up after the screening last night and hug me. People I don’t know! One of them told me, “This is my mother’s story too.” That kind of thing. That’s what we weren’t expecting.

Interesting. I remember an interview where one of you guys described Ed Wood as a “plea for tolerance.” I’m wondering if, when you pitched Big Eyes, was there ever a version that was more pointed along the lines of an agenda: more capital-F feminist? The things people are reading into it are more implied than enunciated in the movie.

Alexander: There was never a pitch actually. It only lived as a spec script.

Karaszewski: It was never more pointed than Margaret was pointed. We were very true to who she is.

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Alexander: Or even aware, really. I don’t think she would have looked at herself as, “Oh, I am a feminist role model.” It’s absolutely not something that would cross her mind in those terms. She doesn’t think that way. She was just trying to look out for herself and her daughter.

Karaszewski: But, I do think that’s something that’s happened to a lot of women. My mother was one of them; she stayed married to my father for 20 years in the same exact time period, and the only reason they didn’t get divorced was that she was a Catholic girl, and it was a sin, and, you know, she certainly didn’t consider herself feminist. But she wound up doing a very Margaret-like thing: grabbing all the kids in the middle of the night, driving away, getting a job, and working for herself. This was right around the same time period. So I think this is something that just happened to American women during this time. So Margaret’s story hits home.

Alexander: I haven’t read them in a while, but you have to look at the stories in the news from when Margaret went public. The first time she outed Walter. There was a People magazine profile, in 1971, I think, and I don’t think any of these issues appeared in it. It was really more about, “My husband is a liar, I’ve been living a lie, and now I’m telling the truth.” That was how the story was framed in its time period, so…

In the context of artwork alone, or…?

Alexander: In the context of Margaret coming clean after lying for all these years.

Karaszewski: It was framed as an art-world thing, not a feminist thing.

Alexander: So it’s interesting for us now to look back at it.

Karaszewski: At that screening the other night we had a woman come up to us, who was a painter, and she barely knew the story before she saw the film—and she’s a female painter who signs her name with her initials.

Alexander: She gave me her card with her paintings on it, and it’s her initials and her last name, because she says, “People don’t buy women’s art.”

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Karaszewski: She’s like, “It’s gotten a little better, but not that much better.”

So, this opens up a question about verisimilitude. One of the things about this and also Ed Wood is, there’s no real judgment made about the work in question. It’s an interesting approach for a biopic, as most would climax with 45 minutes of Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel.

Karaszewski: Because most biopics are the Great Man biopics. They’re being told because somebody did this one amazing accomplishment.

Alexander: I mean, who doesn’t like Louis Pasteur? [Both laugh] What’s not to love? Of course he deserves a movie.

Karaszewski: We deal with characters who are more on the fringe of society—kind of really isolated, just being people who are looked down upon, whether it’s Ed Wood or Margaret Keane or Larry Flynt. Even to a certain degree Andy Kaufman, who was certainly more successful than these guys, but still—you know, basically invented comedy that didn’t make you laugh. So he had a lot of scorn directed against him. Because we’re dealing with these characters with an innate conflict with society, we just find it so much more interesting, to let the audience judge their work for itself. I also think part of the reason we do this is, once you know these people’s personal stories, it does give the work a different feeling. Ed Wood, once you know he was really a transvestite, he made Glen or Glenda? for personal reasons, it becomes an intriguing experimental film, as opposed to just something to laugh at. Same with Margaret. Yes, it’s considered kitsch if you’re looking at it in the context of Walter’s masculinity. It makes no sense why this man is painting sad children and puppies. But if you’re seeing it at Woolworth’s, as anonymous art, it means nothing. But if you know it’s a woman who’s trapped, and those eyes are crying because she’s actually in pain, it creates a whole other feeling, a personal statement.

I’ve read that Christoph Waltz tried to avoid reproducing the “real” Walter Keane, and did a more interpretive performance. Were you guys aware of this?

Alexander: It’s cute that he says that. In fairness, we didn’t have one frame of videotape to work off of. Larry and I tried in vain, for years, to find footage of Walter and, I mean, really, all Christoph had available was text. If he wanted to read articles, or see photographs, you can. If you wanna talk about his side of the story. But there was no film. Now, yesterday, CBS News magically rediscovered a piece of a tape with Walter on The Merv Griffith Show, which we had never seen before. I actually shot the Weinstein Company an email asking them, “We gotta see this!” So, Christoph was sort of restricted, whereas Amy actually got to sit with Margaret.

Karaszewski: But also, he made a concerted attempt. He read Walter’s autobiography, but the problem is his autobiography is completely mad, he’s totally off the rails.

Really?

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Karaszewski: Yeah. And so I read halfway through that, and I was like, “This isn’t helping me. This isn’t a real human being either, this is a delusional guy… “

Alexander: The guy in our script is a consistent character from beginning to end. But the guy in this book was flying on Cloud 28. You should read it, just for the entertainment value. He has “the gods of the arts pantheon,” and I don’t quite know who these figures are supposed to be, but he’s written a bunch of celestial beings floating in the clouds, with pillars like Michelangelo, Gaugin, and at the end of the book Walter is appointed and gets to be up there with the others.

Karaszewski: I believe it’s his dead grandmother telling him about this.

Alexander: Yeah. She comes to him and says, “Walter, you’ve been appointed by the others.”

It’s a whole other movie, then.

Alexander: A science-fiction film. Exactly.

Or you could do it Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby style.

Karaszewski: Well, it’s funny you should say that. Right there is something we were really trying to avoid.

Alexander: Making the movie three times over? [laughs]

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Karaszewski: We really didn’t want to do the he-said-she-said thing. We were given the rights by Margaret, and we only did that by assuring her we were going tell her story. She was really worried that there was still going to be some mystery about who really did the paintings. She didn’t want the movie to take Walter’s side.

Alexander: That might sound like bullshit. I’m assuming you believed what you saw in the movie, right? Because Walter loved the propaganda wars. He loved the camera. He died in 2000 and, right up until then, he was still doing interviews, claiming he was the painter. “Ignore that lady in the corner.” And Margaret is a very reticent person, so when she would choose to allow a reporter to come by and talk to her, those instances were few and far between. And so in 2003, when we had the idea to make this movie, it was still confusing. Because Walter had put out such a convincing scenario, so much disinformation, that Margaret was completely, legitimately concerned: “Which version of the movie are you guys going to make?” Because the world was still kind of confused. Despite the Honolulu Opinion. Okay, fine, the jury decided Margaret’s favor…

Walter spun the ruling as a technicality?

Alexander: Right. “The jury wasn’t paying attention,” “a couple of them were asleep on the bench,” etc.

Karaszewski: The other thing to point out is, the Honolulu trial happened after the paintings had their big success. When the Keanes were on top of the world, the biggest selling artists in America, Walter was the painter. By the time Margaret sued him, they had kind of moved off the front page. So for many people it appeared like, “Oh, the couple who did that art? They’re fighting about it.” They were on page 40 then, and nobody really cared at that point.

Alexander: That’s were we compressed time for the movie, just because it seemed dumb to us to put these actors in old-age makeup just for one last scene. But it did happen a little later.

Well, that’s another classic biopic problem. The E.T. makeup for the death scene…

Alexander: Also, consistent with the reverse-engineering of the movie, you go: “What happens to Jane, their daughter? Oh my god, we need a third actress: to play her as an adult?”

Karaszewski: But these are all the things you have to think about when you change someone’s life into a two-hour drama.

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I know Ed Wood was shot without any revisions from Burton in preproduction, but stuff was added and changed once it had been shot.

Alexander: Tim shot our first draft.

What about this one?

Alexander: Well, we spent years and years trying to make it ourselves. I won’t say we ever did it as a potential rewrite; we tend to like our first drafts. We had done lots and lots of changes for line producers, because each time we’d try to reconfigure the movie in a new city, that’d mean a new line producer. It’s their job to ask, “Can you do it cheaper, guys?” As we bounced from L.A. to Portland to Salt Lake City to New Orleans to Buenos Aires, each line producer would say, “Can you drop these speaking parts? Can you lose these locations?” And we’d go, “Oh, of course!” So in the movie, the first scene where Walter and Margaret go on a date, and they’re sitting at a little cocktail table? In the first version, they had friends with them. And they’re all commiserating. And then by the time we got to the next city, there were fewer friends. And by the time we got to Argentina, there’s no friends at the table. And likewise, it was fewer scenes on the street, because every time you step outside you’re gonna need period automobiles, period clothing, and that’s a lot of money. So the movie just got more and more focused on Walter and Margaret, and their little Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? games going on inside the house.

But it’s clearly tight like that by design. It doesn’t feel lopsided.

Alexander: By design, but it got much more that way.

Karaszewski: What’s interesting is, once Tim came aboard as director, we actually showed him some of the longer versions, to see if he wanted to put some of that stuff back.

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Alexander: Tim can do whatever he wants!

Karaszewski: And he was like, “No no no. I like the tight version.” He wanted to make a sort of lower budget, condensed version of the movie. Which he found exciting.

Interesting. It does seem like a real turned corner for him, none of the cast members have ever worked with him before…

Karaszewski: He wanted a palate cleanser. He wanted to make a movie that didn’t have a release date already, didn’t have a franchise on it, didn’t have Happy Meals connected to it, you know?

Alexander: I mean, it certainly fits into Tim’s body of work in an obvious way, because he likes movies about outsiders. Ed Wood, Edward Scissorhands, both movies about outsider artists in their own way. Which is how Tim goes about himself as an artist. This is also his first movie that takes place 100% on planet Earth. I mean, even Ed Wood is heightened, and Pee-Wee; I guess he’s a man-child obsessed with his bicycle, but maybe that’s just a little odd. We had this realization when we were shooting Ed Wood: Tim is really great at just shooting office scenes. Like, “You two guys, just sit at the table.” Tim excels at two guys at a table. He gets really great performances, which are often overlooked, because there’s so much spectacle and visual cleverness in his films. I think he’s terrific at it; he always gets an interesting angle, his frames are always beautiful, and he gets good work from the actors.

In the later Hawaii passages there are side characters who are clearly there to help push Margaret to the finish line, narratively speaking, but they’re simultaneously funny and yet not total comic relief. Like the judge in the big courtroom scene. Were those laughs supposed to be as big on paper as they are in the finished product?

Alexander: Jim Saito, the actor who plays the judge, did a great job.

Karaszewski: Amazing. I mean when we looked at transcripts from the Honolulu court trials, it was actually too funny.

Alexander: That judge was funny. He asked, “Mr. Keane, do you have cement between your ears?” This is how he was addressing Walter.

This was in the transcript?

Karaszewski: Oh yeah! He court-ordered him to keep his mouth shut.

Alexander: He told Walter, “I’m going to have the bailiff bring in some shackles for you now.”

So the draw-off really happened?

Karaszewski: Well, it happened on two separate days. It wasn’t like, bringing two easels back to back. Margaret painted in court to prove herself, and the judge offered Walter an opportunity to paint, which is when he did the “shoulder injury” thing. Margaret had challenged Walter to a series of paint-offs over time, in public squares, and he didn’t show up. So we sort of combined the idea of the paint-off and the trial scene.

Alexander: We like the image of the two easels, back to back.

Karaszewski: Because when she did it, she’d paint, and there would be an empty easel for Walter there.

Alexander: There’s a great Life magazine photo from one of these, at Union Square in San Francisco. It’s an overhead shot and there must be 5,000 people there for the paint-off. Two easels, Margaret at one, and the other one, nobody’s there. Walter sends a telegram, like, “My boat got delayed in Tahiti. I didn’t get the message in time.” And you’re just like, “What?

Karaszewski: So, yeah, when we did our first draft, the courtroom scene was too broad.

It was this huge scene with extras?

Karaszewski: But it was. There was too much comedy. Even though it’s really comedic now, we had to fine-tune it and make Walter less…

Alexander: Because Walter can’t…I mean, whatever, it’s a movie, we have about 10 minutes to wrap it up. But Walter kept bringing in character witnesses, you know, and they all kept dropping out on the stand. They were expected to say, “Yes, Walter’s a great painter. Yes, Walter’s a great person.” As soon as they’d put their hand on the Bible and start testifying, they’d start sweating, panicking, and realizing that Walter had led them into believing they had seen him paint, but as soon as Margaret’s lawyer would cross-examine them, they’d realize it was this illusion that they were believing, all this time.

Karaszewski: Right. For example, Wayne Newton showed up at the trial, as a character witness for Walter. He had bought a piece prior.

Alexander: He was a fan!

Karaszewski: And it took a lot of restraint for us to not write a Wayne Newton scene. [laughs]

Alexander: He might be the only one who actually came through for Walter. And then the trial finished, and Wayne Newton realized he’d blown it.

Karaszewski: Supported the wrong person.

Alexander: So a month later, he fired up his own personal plane, flew back to Hawaii, just so he could apologize to Margaret in person. And it really meant a lot to her.

I don’t how you’d work that into a three-act biopic structure.

Alexander: Some of the goodies end up on the floor. To all fans of Wayne Newton: We apologize. Then again, your demographic and Wayne Newton’s.

Are there any major real-life considerations you’ve had to condense/leave out/mutate for the finished product?

Karaszewski: Nothing that we have any regrets about. The screenplay just got published and there’s a couple extra scenes that got cut out. For our previous biopics, when we published the screenplay, we published a whole extra section: “Well, here’s a bunch of deleted scenes.” This time we didn’t, because it’s pretty faithful to what we actually imagined.

Alexander: I don’t regret it, but just because of time constraints, we left out Margaret’s third husband, which was actually a happy marriage. And, I mean, he died eventually, and we sort of felt bad leaving him out, but he almost would’ve thrown off the movie, because this was in Hawaii. So for her to suddenly find personal happiness in the middle of all this commotion with Walter, the lawsuit, it just would’ve confused things.

I guess that’s like an extra 20-to-30 minutes right there.

Alexander: Exactly. And we’d have to introduce a new character and so we simply omitted him, which Margaret understood.

Karaszewski: I mean, that’s the thing: You’re turning someone’s entire life into two hours. You have to omit things. A lot of times, that whole fact-checker mentality, they get outraged that, “Oh, you left out that person!”

Alexander: “The movie’s all a big lie because they left out her third husband!” So what? That’s not our plot.

The movie’s not about her trying to find a man.

Karaszewski: Correct. But this is the thing: Every true-life movie has these omissions.

So, as a fan of biopics as a kitsch genre, I have to ask: You consciously made the biopic your specialty, correct?

Karaszewski: Oh, you don’t like Problem Child? [laughs]

I assumed that was autobiographical…

Karaszewski: It was!

Alexander: Our self-imposed marching orders are to cover as little as possible. The narrower the time period, the more successful we can tell the story. So we kinda work backward: “What’s the best place to stop this movie? What’s the end-point where the audience is going to feel like all of the themes and strands came together? Where do you go out feeling bittersweet, or triumphant, or where’s the satisfying ending?” And then from there, we back up and see, what’s the shortest point from which we can back up and start the film?

Karaszewski: We ask the question: Why are we making a movie about this person? If you can answer that question, a lot of times, the answer ends up being the third act. Winds up being the climax of the movie, because that’s what they are gonna be remembered for. So you ask: “How did this person get to that particular point?”

Because, I guess, the business idea of the biopic is to give the audience as much information about a person’s life as they can possibly fit.

Alexander: Well, Chaplin might have included all of Charlie Chaplin’s life…

Karaszewski: And that’s the problem with it. That’s the problem actually with the biopics I don’t find successful: They’re trying to do too much.

Alexander: It’s easy to look at Chaplin for the archetype of the other biopic—the kind we’re trying not to do. Because he’s a little boy, and it takes you all the way to him as an old man in Switzerland. As fantastic as Downey is in that movie, you’re asking the audience to watch a lot of Chaplin’s life.

Karaszewski: Whereas we would have done a Chaplin movie that’s all about him directing A Countess from Hong Kong. They left that part out. [laughs]

Alexander: Oh wow. We should do that next!

Steve Macfarlane

Steve Macfarlane is a film curator and writer from Seattle, Washington. His writing has appeared in BOMB, Cinema Scope, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and other publications.

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