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The Great Lillian Hall is about to be released in Australian cinemas and I had the chance to speak to Tony Award winning director Michael Cristofer about the project…
Matt: I'm talking today with Michael Christopher, director of the Great Lillian Hall. How's things?
Michael: Things are good. I have friends who insist on doing plays and so I’m here in London to see them.
Matt: Speaking of which, it's Tony Awards season on Broadway in New York. As a Tony winner yourself, where do you keep your Tony Award?
Michael: It's in the TV room on the shelf. We actually used it in The Great Lillian Hall. We used my Tony Award along with another one from producer Bruce Cohen. We packed up all our awards and brought them down to Atlanta and put them on the set. It’s the most useful it’s been since I won it.
Matt: Let’s talk about the film and start with Jessica Lange. We don't see a lot of her on the big screen these days. How did you pitch the project to her and get her on board?
Michael: Jessica and I have known each other for maybe 30 years. We were involved one of the worst pictures ever made. It starred Jessica Lange, Gwyneth Paltrow, Nina Foch, and Hal Holbrook and I was called in to do some writing to fix it. I can't even tell you the name because they changed it so many times (Hush). I obviously failed because nothing good came of that movie.
Sometimes you bond more strongly on a bad film than a good one, and that was the case here. We became good friends, but we have never worked together since. We talked about different things over the years and then this script came along. It was loosely based on a famous stage actress in New York who I also knew.
One of my first jobs was in 1969. I got a job to do a two-character play with this actress and, basically, I stood on the stage and listened while she talked. That was pretty much the whole part. She and I became friends, and we stayed close for a long time. At the end of her life, she did slip into dementia. She and I were on stage together once and she had a bad episode. She had deteriorated so badly that we had to help her off stage.
Anyway, this script was floating around based on her life, but it was a very sad one. I said if I do this, I don't want to do another sad movie about slipping into dementia because it's been done and it's been done well. I therefore moved opening night to be the end of the story as opposed to the aftermath that followed. Jessica and I wanted to make a movie about courage in the face of dementia.
Almost everybody on the film was touched by someone who was dealing with this disease and we when I was struggling to get financing, I said I want to make the Masterpiece Theatre version of Rocky, and it got me the money. In the in the face of mortality, how do you keep going? How do you fight to maintain who you are when something is taking away bits of who you are. What is that struggle like? There is triumph in it even though you know the end is coming.
Matt: It's a fantastic cast, but there's one actress I want to ask about. I didn't know much about Cindy Hogan before the film. She steals every scene as the producer who tells it as it is and knows the show is in strife as much as anyone. What can you tell me about her?
Michael: She's so wonderful. Like every film of this kind, we were strapped for cash, and I begged people to do it for no money. I knew Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates, Pierce Brosnan and Lily Rabe who were the film’s core, but I didn’t have any more money to hire people when we shot the film in Atlanta. There was this terrific casting director, Jennifer Fox, and she found Cindy Hogan and you're absolutely right. She brought such weight and authenticity to that part as did Michael Rose who played Lillian’s husband. We found them in Atlanta and they were a godsend.
Matt: I wanted to ask about the husband character. Some fantastic films have been made about dementia and while we see Lillian flubbing lines, an interesting layer is the way the film weaves her late husband into an increasingly blurry mindset. Can you talk me through that element and how you chose to depict it on screen?
Michael: Well, this is a very specific kind of dementia called Lewy body dementia. The delusions feel real to the patient. They could be in bed having a normal sounding conversation with people they see sitting on the edge of the bed. They see people, they see things, they hear things, and for them it looks absolutely like reality and so that's how we did it.
Matt: I liked the pace of the film. I think a reason for that is the “making of” interviews that are woven throughout the film – often with the dialogue from those overlapping with the footage from certain events. Was that always in the script?
Michael: No and it's funny because I've always used that. The first film I directed was called Gia starring Angelina Jolie. It made a bit more sense in that film because she had passed away and people were talking about her. I have an affinity for that technique. If you go back to Francois Truffaut, he would sometimes break the “fourth wall” and have people talk to the camera. I've used him as an excuse to keep doing it.
I love actors and I could spend a whole day putting a camera on an actor and just having them talk. Just have them do speeches and ask them questions. Making this film, I always knew I was going to interview Jessica and I added that to the script right away. Since I was set up that way, I started pulling in the other actors and quickly writing them speeches. It’s revelatory and it helps the actor relax into their character, even if we don’t use it in the film.
Matt: I'll finish up by asking if there’s anything you're working on at the moment? What might we see from you next?
Michael: While we were working, Pierce Brosnan mentioned he’d read an old script of mine called Fade Out and he asked what had happened to it. I said it’s still hanging around and now we’re going to try to do it. It's a half thriller, half art film about an ageing director film director who is having trouble differentiating what is real and what is a movie. He suspects his wife is being unfaithful, but he doesn’t know if he’s seeing real things or whether it’s a movie in his head.