Interview: Phyllis Nagy on Patricia Highsmith, Sunset Blvd, and "Carol"
Wednesday, January 6, 2016 at 1:00PM 
Phyllis Nagy in Palm Springs with Cate BlanchettMonday night through Tuesday evening was a special 24 hours in the lives of Team Experience. At the NYFCC awards gala, Alec Baldwin, presenting the Best Director prize to Todd Haynes (Carol), quoted a Film Comment piece by our dear friend and podcast mate Nick Davis. That same night Phyllis Nagy was honored for Best Screenplay by the Pulitzer winning playwright/screenwriter Tony Kushner (Angels in America, Lincoln) himself. Though I was not in attendance for the Carol-heavy NYFCC gala on Monday night where the film also took Best Cinematography and Best Film), I had the opportunity to congratulate Nagy the next evening on her fine work adapting the year's best film from the original 1952 Patricia Highsmith novel "The Price of Salt." The occassion was a cocktail event for the movie hosted by former and future Todd Haynes muse Julianne Moore (here are a few photos of that reunion.)
It was our second chat with the sharp and talented Phyllis Nagy, who up until Carol had been best known for her stage plays and the HBO film Mrs Harris (2006) which she wrote and directed.
Here's our original conversation which we hope you'll enjoy...
NATHANIEL: So Phyllis I started this as kind of a joke to myself but then decided to commit to it and have literally asked every person I interviewed from Carol ... How come you're such a genius?
PHYLLIS NAGY: Well, practice. [Laughs] In this case, yeah, practice, many years of it. Which ultimately aided it, it didn’t hurt it, it may have felt like that from time to time...
NATHANIEL: You mean the long gestation period?
PHYLLIS NAGY: Yeah, when no one wants to [make a film], it gives you the opportunity to obsessively go over it again and again on your own time, at least make it a document that you’re proud of. So, luckily...
[Patricia Highsmith's interiority, great actors, and tough rewrites after the jump...]
NATHANIEL R: You've written several plays but film and television fans primarily know you from Mrs. Harris (2005) with Annette Bening. You both wrote and directed that HBO movie so was there ever a moment in Carol's long journey to screen were you hoped to direct it?
PHYLLIS NAGY: I was hired to do this in 1997. I wrote the first draft of Carol way back when, and the producer at the time had someone in mind as a director. Up until that I had written Mrs. Harris, but it was always meant to be directed by someone else, some of them who may have been quite interesting, and some of them not.
But then after Mrs. Harris there was a moment where I thought, yes, we could do it. I tried but we kept running into the same problems about casting, 'who’s worth this and that,' and ultimately, I said, 'Listen, I can’t put my hand on my heart and commit to something where we have to cast X as Carol. This won’t work.' And luckily nothing ever came of those things. And then I went on to other things and developing other scripts. They lost their rights to the book at a certain point.
I was talking to your producer Elizabeth Karlsen recently and she was telling me all about chasing down the rights.
It was a nightmare, and the Highsmith estate isn’t the easiest. Liz got the rights somehow. She’s persistent and she’s good, and the first thing that she did was call me and say, 'Okay, let’s make this movie!' And I said, 'No, absolutely not, I’m done!' I was in the position because it had taken such a long time.
You didn’t want to get your hopes up?
Well, the script was in reversion; no one owned it, I could own it. But what was the point? I didn’t own the rights to the novel. I just said, Look, this is too hard. Also, though many writers would not ever admit it, you’re not the writer you were in order to go back into the spirit of something that was generated at quite a different level as a writer. You have to be able to replicate that first, and then use your experience to make it better. And I wasn’t sure that I could. I was a very different writer whenever it was when she managed to get the rights again. And it took her a year. A year of Liz and Tessa Ross constant hounding till finally I said, 'Oh, shut up, alright.'
I haven’t actually read "The Price of Salt," but I have read a few of Patricia Highsmith’s books, -- the last one I read was "Edith’s Diary." So many of her books have been adapted but one of the things about that novel and about "The Two Faces of January," the one I read right before that, there’s a certain amount of interiority...
All over "The Price of Salt".
...and interiority is very novelistic! I’m like, 'How on earth would this translate?' Or do you just have to trust that the actors will bring that to the character?
No. I mean in terms of "The Price of Salt," it’s a bit easier, but the challenge of this adaptation was actually the opposite of what most people encounter, to allow the described behavior, and the beats, and silences, and the coded stuff and a gesture to actually drive the narrative, rather than speeches about being gay. These things don’t exist in the book, the book is notable because of its profound lack of that. [Carol and Therese] are not guilty, they don’t doubt their feelings. And for its profound view of motherhood, which I thought if we were going to have any problem, it would be there. And we haven’t so far, thank god.
The reason I ask about this is because the best beats in the movie are things where a lot is inferred but not said, and I’m not talking about LGBT issues but like, Harge for example, when he walks in to find Therese in his home...
That’s my favorite scene.
NATHANIEL R: It's brilliant. And when he says, "That’s bold."
PHYLLIS NAGY: That’s bold! Yeah.
Those two syllables alone gave me so much history about other arguments the Airds had had in the marriage, and things that she may or may not have promised him after those spats. So when you write something like that ... do you have to pare down because the actors are getting it, or is that exactly what you wrote?
That’s exactly as it was written. The other thing he does in that scene, my favorite is, when he says to Therese, "How do you know my wife?" And it’s just the way, that little catch in there.
He's such a great actor.
Over the years, there would be financiers, potential people, directors who would come in and say, 'We need more explanation.' And the last five years of it were just about me trying to take it back! And then when Todd came on, he encouraged to do that even more, which was great, because the other people...
They wanted it spelled out?
...were suggesting things that I knew wouldn’t work, just because of my long association with it. There might have been things that we tried in 2001. What I learned most on this is that you can never say 'no, that’s a really bad idea.' You do it, and you do it really well, that bad idea. And 9 times out of 10, they’ll realize, 'Oh no, that’s bad.' It just takes a month of your life.
That must be frustrating.
We didn’t have any of that once Todd Haynes came!
He's just so gifted at telling stories trough the actual visuals.
And he’s also very sensitive to – well, this is the first [of his films] he hasn’t written, but because he didn’t write it, he was more protective of it than I was.
He didn't want to change your work?
Things happen, obviously things happen, like locations drop out or this or that happens. And I was glad I was able to actually be the one to say, 'You don’t actually need that,' or 'You can put it here.'
So you were there for a lot of the filming then?
Yes.
That’s good. You never know with screenwriters. Sometimes they're there. Sometimes they aren’t.
I think half the time you wouldn’t want to be there necessarily, but I’m not really a writer for hire on this, it’s more like the grandmother of the piece.
I have to ask you about the projector room scene. My friends and I have been laughing about that ever since. The wannabe writer says something like 'I’m writing every instance, where they say something different than what they mean.' What's funny about that, is Sunset Blvd itself... Norma Desmond may be deluded, but she actually does say what she means most of the time!
PHYLLIS NAGY: It was Joe in that particular scene. It’s my favorite movie, I have to get it into everything I do, and that scene in particular was the scene I chose in the script, and so it’s Joe, who in that scene, is not actually saying what he means, until actually much later. But Norma is – Jesus Christ. [Laughs] She has good reason to dance on Valentino’s floor like that.
NATHANIEL R: I love that movie so much. I just watched that again a month or two before seeing Carol. It's just... it's perfect.
PHYLLIS NAGY: They don’t make them like that anymore.
Let's talk the future. I was looking through some of your plays and I was wondering, since none of them have been made into movies, do you want to translate your work in that way?
No, I don’t. Part of the reason is that I don’t think my plays would make good movies because they are such plays. They are theatrically rooted. There is one that could be, but I still think that it would become ordinary in a way that it isn’t now, because it’s rooted to a particular theatrical environment.
But if someone were to come along and say, 'I want to adapt this,' would you –
Never. It’s like, no, no. I’m just not interested. Obviously, if some—I don’t know who it would have to be, but somebody, and there was a bunch of cash to assuage my broken heart when it went wrong…. [Laughs] Maybe.
Two Patricia Highsmith novels that Nagy has adapted for different medium. The lesbian novel (since retitled Carol) was originally published under a pseudonym
NATHANIEL R: Now, The Talented Mr. Ripley, I know that you did an adaptation of that.
PHYLLIS NAGY: On stage, yes.
And that was right around the time that Anthony Minghella made that movie!
It was before he made the movie, right before. [Pause] It's a fine piece of work of its sort. The thing that I don’t think is so fine about it is the assumption that -- two things: Ripley’s only talent is sociopathy. He’s a psychopath, he’s really good at conning people and being a murderer, and this is celebrated in a particular way in the novel. To make him into an All American Dreamer, someone who was talented at the piano and didn’t get a break? To make it a class thing, I felt, was wrong. As was the overt homosexuality, which -- Pat herself would deny Ripley was gay. But I think, in her heart, she knew he was. But I think personally, that character would rather slit his own throat in public than admit to being a homosexual. And this is where the tension comes from in the narrative, with the men. And it’s in the whole rest of the Ripley books, too.
Since you have a history with two of Highsmith's novels, would you want to do any others?
Well, not for a while, but there are two that I love. "Deep Water," which I understand somebody is already making, and "Edith’s Diary," which I would love to do.
Lots more on Carol. Previous Interviews. And Screenplay related postings
And it is here, I regret to inform dear reader, that our conversation had to end. Phyllis is a character (follow her on twitter), a great writer, and I could have happily grilled her for hours on Patricia Highsmith novels, Sunset Blvd, and Carol. I've had the privilege of meeting her twice now and both times have stupidly forgotten to tell her that my dream job for her is to write an original screenplay for a biopic on Patricia Highsmith's life. Here's to a third chance meeting where we'll also have to remember to congratulate her on her WGA Nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.
As for the here and now... though Hollywood's awards circus is traditionally resistant to "women's pictures" and Carol has had its share of ups and downs already this season with awards groups, history has always proven far less resistant to female driven classics than Hollywood in the moment. Masterpieces always get their due with time. If (god forbid) Carol is rudely snubbed of its deserving honors in the near future just get drunk on its beauty again and steal a line from Norma Desmond herself, and mutter 'Shut up, it's rich! It's richer than all this new Hollywood trash!'
Reader Comments (12)
Nice read this morning. I've decided Carol is what I will go see this afternoon. Again. In fact, I will be rewatching all od Todd's films this weekend.
Excellent interview. She sounds like an astute reader as well as a talented writer - I guess you have to be the one to be the other.
Sunset Blvd really is perfect, isn't it?
I'm sure Highsmith would be a fascinating biographical subject but everything I read about her makes her sound like...kind of an asshole. And if not a sociopath herself, someone who identified all too well with Ripley's sociopathy!
I love Sunset Boulevard. But perfect it isn't.
The Gloria Swanson parts ARE perfect. It's what everyone remembers
But the Nancy Olsen stuff? Does anyone even remember it? I've watched the movie at least 5 times and each time it just seems more of a blot than ever. If there's a contest between Norma's neuroses and Nancy Olsen's "healthy" mentality, the contest is over before it starts.
Don't get me wrong, I don't expect "perfection" of a certain sort from any movie. Nor do I desire it, really. I don't even think it exists.
lylee -- but sociopaths are all the rage and if men can continue to worship manly sociopaths we deserve some sociopaths with vaginas up in our movies.
ken s -- i love the nancy olsen stuff (i'm actually not kidding)
patryk -- bless.
I kind of rolled my eyes when Sunset Boulevard appeared in Carol. I almost expected Todd Haynes to make me work a little harder if he made a cinematic reference THAT direct. It's not even like the central relationship in THAT movie bears much resemblance to the one between Carol and Therese...other than that she buys her a camera.
Hayden - confused by what you mean about make me work a little harder and too obvious when you directly state that the relationships aren't easily parallel . So what about it was too "easy"
LOL applying Norma's line! However it is absolutely perfect!!! That's exactly how I felt throwing my private and non-private Twitter fit yesterday when the ADG and PGA took a dump. I was all, Carol is just too good for these classless assholes!
I guess for me those were two separate thoughts. I'll explain why I'm not that impressed with the Sunset Boulevard clip:
1. Sunset Boulevard is iconic enough to set the period tone and place you in a specific year, but many other films would have done that. In that respect it feels like picking Titanic to say "THIS IS 1997, Y'ALL."
2. An intertextual reading of the two films doesn't do anything for me.
Carol as Norma Desmond? The film goes to great pains to show us Carol as anything BUT a crumbling monument of beauty and seduction, so what does introducing that thought even add?
Therese as Joe Gillis? The film goes to great pains to show how there's NO transactional dimension to Therese's love for Carol. She's not a kept plaything.
It seems offensive and reductive for EITHER of those points of comparison to enter our understanding of the central relationship. I get that I'm describing strong opposition between the texts and that *could* produce depth. But for me it doesn't here.
3. I will say, the inclusion functions best for me as a signal that "THIS IS A QUEER FILM." Like "It's my movie and I'll include Sunset Boulevard if I want to" accounts for an otherwise broad misdirection of thought and analysis.
As a chronological benchmark it seems uninspired. As a thematic analysis touchpoint I don't think it enhances the story. And as a genre (queer) marker it just seems OTT in a kind of camp way.
@ Hayden: Brooklyn, also set in 1952, nods to The Quiet Man (1952) and Singin' in the Rain (1952).
If Carol had used The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) or Clash by Night (1952). would it have been too much?
This is a great interview :)
A question for those who have seen Carol (one week to go for me!), I have heard that Cate's real life children are in the film. Is that true?
Sunset Blvd really is fuckin' built in terms of screenplay craft. Just terrific.
Hayden W: Sunset Blvd wasn't saying Carol/Therese was transactional; it was saying Therese/Richard was. Look at the context of that screening--it's not about Carol.