Interview: Kent Jones on Diane and Its Almost Miraculous Sense of Detail

Film critic, documentarian, and New York Film Festival director Kent Jones has a range of knowledge and influence that’s virtually unrivaled in the critical industry. In his writing, Jones displays a remarkable knack and hunger for tactile detail, examining a film’s aesthetic—and, truly, its soul—with a lively exactitude. (His 2013 piece on John Ford for Film Comment is one of the best and most casually erudite defenses of the filmmaker that you’ll ever read.) As a documentarian, Jones has a similar intensity of curiosity, having most notably collaborated with Martin Scorsese on A Letter to Elia and Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows, the latter of which is particularly essential.

Jones’s interest in behavior and emotional texture is quite evident in his first narrative feature, Diane, which gives character actress Mary Kay Place the role of a lifetime as an aging woman serving a self-inflicted penance for an indiscretion that occurred decades earlier. Diane allows herself virtually no pleasure, caring for her ailing family, including her dying cousin, Donna (Deirdre O’Connell), and her son, Brian (Jake Lacy), a drug addict who eventually seeks salvation in religion. This scenario could easily lend itself to the sort of female martyr tale in which Joan Crawford once specialized, but Jones grounds the film in a wealth of micro gestures, revealing a community of dignity and stature that refutes maudlin emotions. Even at its bleakest, Diane is a kind of celebration of sensorial experience, and it’s this quality that connects the film with Jones’s documentaries and criticism.

In a conversation earlier this week, Jones and I discussed how he and his various collaborators were able to inform Diane with such verisimilitude on a limited budget and a compressed shooting schedule. Over the course of the conversation, it became clear to me that Diane is a wrenchingly personal film for Jones that was a lifetime in the making.

As a filmmaker, do you wrestle with suppressing the formal and historical consciousness you’ve honed as a critic? Would it interfere with your creativity?

It has no place in filmmaking, truthfully. It has no place in the documentaries I’ve made about filmmaking either. Criticism is different. I think I was always aimed at making films, and I took myself through a lot of things before I got there. When I was younger, I think there was a part of me, without being able to articulate it, who knew that I couldn’t make the kind of movie I wanted to make at that point in my life. If I had been younger when I made my first film, it would have been very different and probably would have been self-consciously “cinephilac.” The filmmakers who I personally know—that isn’t a part of their work and it shouldn’t be. The critical knowledge and storehouse—of images and moments and passages from other movies—that’s more of a nuts-and-bolts thing, along the lines of “how is it done?”
It sounds like you didn’t want to make a classic “young man’s film.” Is that fair to say?

Yeah. [both laugh] Well, look, Marty was a young man when he made Mean Streets. Monte Hellman was a young man when he made Two-Lane Blacktop. Arnaud Desplechin was a young man when he made My Sex Life. The young man’s film that I knew that I would wind up making, I didn’t want to make ultimately. Let’s put it that way.

Diane doesn’t conform to the stereotypical idea of the “first film,” with flaunted references, heightened self-consciousness, and such. It feels like you’ve been making fictional features for some time.

Thank you.

Perhaps this is coincidental, but I thought of First Reformed while re-watching Diane recently. There’s a sobriety to both films that’s unfashionable in current American cinema. You handle extremely sad passages with a dignified matter-of-factness. You don’t pity Diane. You take her on her terms. Was it difficult to arrive at that tone? And is this tone connected to you waiting years before tackling fictional features?

Diane goes back many, many years in my life, to when I was a teenager. When all of my great aunts—not my aunts, though they were aunts to me—were still alive and well, and my grandmother was alive and well. And this was the world that I lived in, and I never wanted to leave. As a child going into adolescence, that was where I would go. Everyone would congregate in the kitchen that’s the basis for the kitchen in that scene in the movie. And these weren’t people that I pitied ever—these were people that I admired and that I loved. I loved their anger as much as I loved their sense of humor. I was a child so I was protected from a lot of the anger, but then sometimes I remembered there was anger directed at me.

There was the warmth of a close-knit family, shared by people who had been through a lot together. The fact that they all grew up in the woods was one thing. Another thing was that they all went through the Depression together. And they went through World War II, the men and the women, in different ways. I didn’t pity anybody ever. That was never a basis, and I never wanted to make a movie that was like that. I wanted to make a movie that reflected what it felt like to be at odds with somebody though, and it became a mother and a son story: of Diane and Brian. Then it started to inevitably reflect my own relationship with my mother without me being able to entirely articulate that to myself. It was an evolving process.

I could’ve watched a two-hour movie solely about the family sitting at that table.

Yeah.

That scene is so warm, so lived-in. You feel the comfort they all give one another.

Yeah, that was the only scene that took two days, or a day-and-a-half, actually. We were on a very tight schedule. It also the only scene where we needed two cameras for part of the day. It was very important that we get the right kitchen. It took quite a while to find it, but we did. It was important to get everybody oriented and also in the frame of mind where the energy was right, so that the characters fought in a way that was understood to be a part of their togetherness. It was a great couple of days shooting that scene.

Did you have much rehearsal time built into the shoot?

I wrote the role of Diane for Mary Kay and only her. I never had anybody else in mind. She and I had talked about the character a lot, and we discussed it while I was writing and re-writing. She said, “Well, if we ever get this made, you’re not going to be able to raise a dime on my name.” That’s a truth, but, on the other hand, we did get it made thanks to my producers. She and I kept getting together until the window opened and we had financing. Then it was a question of “What can we do to make the rehearsal process work with no money to pay the actors for rehearsal time?” We managed to find a considerable chunk of time between Mary Kay and Jake Lacy, and put them in a room and taped it off after we had found the location where Brian’s apartment was going to be so we could work out the blocking. I also had Mary Kay sit down for a few hours with Andrea Martin, Estelle Parsons, and Deirdre O’Connell. This was very important time spent, though I’m not sure I would call it rehearsal exactly. They read through their lines, but it was more about the actors getting oriented with each other.

In certain movies, I wonder how long it takes for filmmakers to communicate a sense that characters have shared pasts with one another, as in Diane’s kitchen scene.

The most important thing in that regard is that you have to be comfortable with characters, with nothing much dramatic happening. I kept wanting to put more error into the kitchen scene—more pauses, dead time. It’s not a scene that builds dramatically. It builds in terms of detail, in the way that everybody is with each other. At a certain point, I knew that I wanted a little boy to enter the room and crawl under the table and pop up in front of Mary Kay, because he’s probably done that a bunch of times before. I knew that I wanted a taller boy to walk in the room and kiss everybody on the cheek—he’s played by my son. Stuff like that, where people are walking in and out. The most important thing is knowing what you’re shooting, and not feeling an anxiety to create something dramatic. At the end of the scene, you know, when Patrick Husted asks Mary Kay, “Hey, how’s Brian?”—that’s part of the fabric of how they are.

And you see how it eats at Diane, having to put on this good face all the time, when Brian obviously isn’t doing well.

Right.

Speaking of people entering and exiting spaces, I think Diane is a remarkable film in terms of how actors move. A scene that jumps out at me in that regard is when Diane is weeping outside in a restaurant parking lot after getting drunk on margaritas, and her family seems to almost materialize out of nowhere. Based on the framing, the appearance of her family almost feels miraculous.

Yeah, I wanted it to feel that way.

It’s a lovely effect.

Yeah, that’s good. I’m glad to hear that, truly. It needed to feel a little miraculous.

I thought of Paul Schrader, and his interest in transcendental cinema, during the final scene between Diane and Brian. In the context you’ve established, it almost feels as if God is attempting to reach down and absolve Diane of her self-loathing. Brian seems to be reaching beyond himself to offer an unexpected forgiveness.

People can do that sometimes. We assume Brian is probably in the middle of a 12-step program, and he’s in the making-amends stage, which I believe is step nine, and he needs to tell her this, and he tells her. Does she hear it, and does everything change automatically? No. And he’s able to say to her that he’s going to return to his resentments in the future, but now he’s telling her this and that he wants her to remember it.

It’s very powerful. It’s one of those scenes where I thought to myself “I haven’t seen this before.” I have experience with people who have substance problems…

Yeah, me too.

…and Brian’s final speech is the sort of thing that struggling people say and that we rarely hear in cinema.

That scene took a while. I spent a lot of timing writing and re-writing it. And I would get it to the point where it almost felt like one of those scenes where people achieve a new understanding with each other but not really. The circumstances have to be specific, even if you don’t say them as a filmmaker. There are a lot of movies where things are left out and I feel like the filmmaker doesn’t know what those things are. And that’s never good. You have to know what it is that you’re saying and what it is that you’re leaving out. It took a long time to get that scene right and I’m glad that it works the way that it does for you. That’s nice to hear.

The potential catharsis of Brian’s final scene is complicated by the ending, where Diane seems to still be stuck in these loops of doubt and recrimination.

Well, it’s not so much recrimination. A friend of mine saw the movie and she’s like, “That’s kind of what it’s like, right up to the last minute of life.” We’re always thinking that there’s a whole that can be put together, that there’s an answer. But it’s all here already, though there’s a feeling of “Oh, wait a minute.” That ending also comes from my own experience with my mother when she had dementia. She was always feeling that there was something that needed to be done, like people were left behind in the car. Or what about the people downstairs? Things like that. That hanging feeling seemed apt to me.

Having worked as both a critic and a filmmaker, what element do you feel that critics understand least about the filmmaking process?

Look, I think that auteurism has been a great thing and continues to have an amazing effect, but the byproduct is that criticism winds up being director-centered in the wrong way. Being a director isn’t sitting alone in a room as a movie pours out of you. It’s exactly the opposite: responding to absolutely everything and everybody in the moment. As Kubrick said, you got to keep the spark alive for a length of time, but you’re also letting the film come alive and surprise you. I think sometimes in criticism there’s a weariness about talking about other people’s contributions, such as production design, etcetera. I’m married to my costume designer now. It’s all response, and it’s all, as Martin Scorsese would say, getting everybody to agree that we’re making the same movie.