By Danny Peary
Rebecca Miller, the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller and wife of Daniel Day-Lewis, continues to carve out a name for herself. In addition to penning two novels and a collection of short stories, she has now written and directed five feature films, including The Ballad Of Jack And Rose, starring Day-Lewis, and, adapted from her book, The Private Lives Of Pippa Lee, starring Robin Wright. Here fifth film, Maggie’s Plan, is her first comedy. The New York Times called it “a serious screwball comedy.” In the film, Greta Gerwig portrays Maggie Hardin, a vibrant and practical thirty-something New Yorker who, without success in finding love, decides that now is the time to have a child on her own. She accepts a sperm donation from a college acquaintance, Guy, a kind but spacy pickle salesman played by Australian actor and Vikings star, Travis Fimmel. But when she meets struggling novelist, John Harding (Ethan Hawke), Maggie falls in love for the first time, and adjusts her plans for motherhood. Complicating matters, John is in a strained marriage with Georgette (Julianne Moore), a brilliant Danish academic. With a Greek chorus of Maggie’s eccentric best friends, Tony and Felicia (Bill Hader and Maya Rudolph), observing wryly from the sidelines, Maggie sets into motion a new plan that catapults her into a nervy love triangle with John and Georgette.
FilmInk spoke to the amiable Rebecca Miller about her new movie just prior to the film’s release in New York City…
Would you consider Maggie’s Plan a screwball comedy?
“I looked at a number of forms that are all connected. I looked at French farces from the 18th century. I looked at A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I definitely looked at screwball comedies from the 1940s. And many more films than that. So I had a lot of influences. Screwball comedy and farce are both appropriate.”
There’s actually a division of screwball comedies called “remarriage films”…
“Yes, I’m familiar with those, but to be honest, I didn’t know that there was a genre of them. I definitely looked at Philadelphia Story quite carefully, as well as The Awful Truth and His Girl Friday.”
In the press notes, you talk about how happy you are to do a comedy. Is there pain in this one too?
“You can see it, I guess. But I saw it from a different lens. I could have made this story as a drama.”
I agree that the exact script could have been made into a film without laughs…
“Right, but with a different rhythm and timing and outlook. The key to good comedic acting is that it’s emotionally real. If it’s going to be emotionally real and bad things happen, people are going to react with real emotions.”
The tone of your film is different. You don’t go extreme screwball or to heavy drama, but rather keep it somewhere in between, which is difficult.
“Exactly. It has an unusual tone. It is risky, but Risk is my middle name.”
Is Maggie a quick study? Do we know her right away?
“She’s complex. You know one thing about her right away. The first thing that you see is that she helps a blind man cross the street. Since she’s about to do so many naughty things, I figured that it would be smart to show that she’s a good person before she starts messing everybody up. She’s not a narcissistic person. She’s definitely a person who tries to look on the bright side, but she also has a great wound in her too. One of my favourite moments for Maggie is when she describes her relationship with her mother and her mother’s death. She recovers from it so quickly. She lets herself go there and is surprised that she is revealing that much of herself. Sometimes you have a real connection with someone, and you’re much more vulnerable and open than you thought you’d be. But then she bounces back and she asks about the other person. That makes me love her. She is motivated to control her own destiny. It has to do with destiny having dealt a blow to her.”
The destiny part. I love your quote, “Destiny works better in retrospect.” That’s a great quote. Why do you feel that in regard to Maggie?
“[Laughs] In general, what I meant was when we look back on our lives, especially when we’ve lived longer, things start to fall into a novelistic pattern and look like destiny. You start to say, ‘Oh yeah, this is the man that I was meant to meet because I had a baby with him.’ Then you start to see the sense in what looked like chaos from the beginning. When you start out living your life, it seems like that it is made up of one random thing after another. Then you look back on it, and there seems to be some kind of logic and pattern.”
Did Maggie have a plan since she was a little kid, and this is just the latest of her plans?
“Yeah. She planned out her education. She’s living a very thoughtful life. She wears vintage clothing partly so she can look good, but also because she doesn’t have money to have a whole wardrobe. She lives within her means. She knows what it is to support herself and how to take care of herself. She’s had to do that for a long time. I found it touching that she was sorting the bills when she was twelve-years-old. That’s a special kind of character.”
You cast Greta Gerwig a year ahead of filming. Was this your conversation with her in trying to get to the main part of Maggie?
“Greta understood the character in an instinctive way. We didn’t start so big. It wasn’t really a conceptual conversation that we had, but more about all the details that make up a person, all the contradictions that make up a person. In regard to Maggie’s many characteristics, Greta really built that character. We did talk about her great romance. She’s bowled over by John and all her plans go out the window. It’s a big sexual awakening for her, and she feels this excitement that she hasn’t felt for a person. We wanted to get across that she’s a modest person and isn’t the most experienced person, although she has had relationships.”
Were all her relationships disappointing?
“No one has taken root in her heart. So she starts thinking, ‘Well, I really feel ready to be a mother.’ She’s one of those people. My best friend had that feeling when she was 30-years-old. She said, ‘I want to have a baby, and I want to be a mother.’ One of the reasons that the chapters that [co-writer] Karen Rinaldi sent me were so resonate was that I knew people in similar situations. It was in the air.”
I read where you said that you couldn’t imagine doing it yourself…
“Having a baby by myself? I would not have had kids, personally. But everybody has a different connection. I know people who want to have a baby just no matter what, and that’s the department that Maggie’s in.”
At the age of 30, she is ready to have a baby, but at this time, she meets John and has, basically, her high school crush. And he proves to be a disappointment, like Warren Beatty is to Natalie Wood when she sees him years after high school in Splendor In The Grass. Do you see John as a type?
“You can say that all the characters are types. For instance, you could write off Georgette as a type, but she’s certainly more of an individual than that. What’s interesting to me is what is beyond type. I don’t know if John is a type. I don’t see him like that, but that’s maybe because I feel like I know him so well.”
Did Ethan Hawke ever say that John is a great guy?
“No, and the thing that made his performance so special is that he played him without any vanity. He didn’t try and save him from the confusion, the narcissism, or his childlike quality. He played all of that, and in a way, the generosity in which he played the character somehow for me saves the character and makes him more likeable and more acceptable as I watch the film. John’s not a bad guy.”
You talked about Maggie doing naughty things and messing up people’s lives and even breaking up a marriage. But is Maggie a flawed character? She seems almost perfect. She’s nurturing to everybody, which is why everybody likes her.
“You can look at her as totally perfect or you can look at her as very flawed. It depends on your perspective. She definitely tries to bring out the best in other people’s lives and other people. In doing so, she can seem like a bossy-pants. She’s extremely capable, so she tends to take up a lot of slack in other people’s lives as well.”
How did you work with Karen Rinaldi? She provided the story?
“Karen Rinaldi gave me this beautiful geometry that became the skeleton that I was able to lay the flesh of the story on. There was no Tony and Felicia. There was no Pickle Man. In some ways, the plot was very condensed because there were only a few chapters of a much larger book, which will be published in a year. Some of the characters were already in existence in relation to each other. I always try to write people so they are interesting enough to have their own movie, and I definitely ended up becoming really fascinated by them as individuals. And because the plot needed to be built out so much, a lot of the work became, ‘What would that person do?’ You could end this movie in so many ways, but if you know that you have to get to a place of pleasure, which I really wanted to do from the start, how do you get there in an honest way?”
Why did you make the film about a younger woman, rather than make a film about Georgette, who’s your age?
“The chapters that were sent to me did have Maggie as more of a protagonist than Georgette. So I took that. One of the nice things about being a writer is that it’s very fluid. You can change sex, and you can change age. You can write young or old. You can hide yourself anywhere and no one needs to know. You can be in the male or female character. Not that these characters are me, but for me to really write a character, I usually use some part of myself. But the creation of Maggie came from a deep collaboration with Greta. The lines began to blur in terms of who came up with what. That’s a wonderful moment because it’s like you’re gifting each other stuff.”
Could you hang out with these characters?
“Oh, yeah. I’d love to be really close friends with Maggie, and Tony and I would be quite close. He’s based on one of my best friends. He’s cranky but so loving. He loves Maggie so much. He’s the kind of person that would give his life for someone else but he’s a grump. Sometimes the people that seem thorny are actually the best hearted people.”
Your film deals with second families, fertility clinics, and single women wanting to raise kids. Is this a film about today?
“Yes. For me, it’s very much a message in a bottle. We’ll put it in the river, and 20 years from now, people will say, ‘Oh, they put butter in their coffee and they had fertility apps.’ So yes, I think of it as our very contemporary confusion.”
Maggie’s Plan screens at The Sydney Film Festival, which runs from June 8-19. To buy tickets to Maggie’s Plan, click here.
