May’s director Todd Haynes says Hollywood’s approach to true crime is “exploitative.”
Watch: Todd Haynes discusses May and December
Todd Haynes believes that all “storytelling is exploitative,” but Hollywood is especially so when it comes to depictions of true crime, he told Yahoo UK.
The director’s new film released last May explores the lengths an actor will go in search of the truth for a movie, as Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) meets Gracie (Julianne Moore), who twenty years earlier had a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old girl. A boy gave birth to his child while he was in prison on charges of grooming him.
Gracie and Joe (Charles Melton) are now married with three children, and Elizabeth is set to portray the former in a biopic that aims to “set the record straight” on their story.
The film makes an interesting commentary on how Hollywood depicts true crime, suggesting that there is little concern for the damage one does in the process of taking a story from screenplay to screen.
“Oh, yeah, I think it’s exploitative,” Haynes says of Hollywood and its approach to depicting true crime.
“But I kind of feel like culture is exploitative, and storytelling is exploitative. There’s no clean way to engage in cultural discourse.”Todd Haynes
“What you want to do is expose that process that happens all the time and in different ways, so that the person watching that process has the opportunity to make choices about it, or learn about it, and not just see the benefits or the benefits of obscene products around them.”
“I think that’s what I felt when I read that script, and what I hope the film helps you feel is all these layers of conflicting outcomes of what they’re looking for.”
“Even the very question that Elizabeth carries—the supposed sense that we all know what she’s talking about, that is, getting to the truth,” Haynes continues.
“What is the truth? Whose truth are we talking about? And who has the right to determine that? How partial is this truth and to what extent does it serve larger forces?”Todd Haynes
“All of that I found is available material in this story, but also questions that I hope the audience will feel excited to think about.
“Of course you’re upset, but that active sense of wonder was something I felt when I read the script and it was fun, and there was a sense of humor. So there was a safe way to deal with these issues.”
True crime has been a topic of interest since the beginning of the media, says Hines: “The proliferation of media and the reality thing and all those things made it seem very contemporary, the obsession with it.
“But I think the experience of a feature film is always moving. It’s a safe place to go in the dark and think about these things that you can’t do in your life that are part of our dreams or subconscious or part of the things that we think about but don’t actually live out. We commit those Crimes or those sexual acts ourselves.
Telling truth through fiction
The film, written by Sammy Burch and Alex Mechanic, is loosely inspired by the true story of the 1997 scandal involving Mary Kay Letourneau, who began a sexual relationship with 12-year-old Vili Fualaau and pleaded guilty to two second-degree charges. Rape of a child and putting him in prison.
But Haynes insists the story is entirely fictional: “The film has very specific differences from that particular story.
“It was something I was aware of at the time, wasn’t particularly tracking it, and some of my friends were more interested in it.
“And when I started this project, I really said, ‘No, no, Sammy doesn’t make those distinctions with him,’ and I really wanted to see it as our own fantasy that we were creating.”Todd Haynes
“But there were parts of the research process, especially the conversations I would have with Julianne Moore, where looking at that story and analyzing the documentaries and interviews and the details of it helped us understand how it happened.
“How we understand it, how she can portray it. But we still feel like we’re doing something that has its own fantastical features about it.”
Ethical gray area
May December presents an interesting mystery to its viewers with Elizabeth and Gracie, as they wonder who is more trustworthy and whether or not they can be considered good or bad.
This was a deliberate choice, Hines says: “This is where everything happens, in this indefinite place.
“You kind of start thinking, ‘Oh yeah. Elizabeth will be the agent. She will be the trusted narrator coming into this world from the outside. You’ll be on our way, you trust it and it becomes an investigative journalism story as you try to find out who Gracie is.
“But things start to turn and she begins to question her motives, how much of a coward she can be, and the collateral damage she is causing in her quest to tell the true story of what happened.
“And so these two complicated, stubborn women face off throughout the film, and there are similarities between the two in many ways, which I think neither of them would see in themselves as they see in the other.”
Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman’s working relationship was ‘amazing’
Hines agreed to produce the film when Portman came to him with the script, and he was keen to bring in his frequent collaborator Moore, who had worked with him on Far From Heaven.
But what most impressed the Carol director was how well the two worked together.
“It was a wonderful thing to witness. I know Julie very well, and I was getting to know Natalie, and the way Natalie and I started talking about this from the beginning reminded me of Julianne Moore. It’s second nature to think of Julianne for this role,” he says.
“There are a lot of similarities in how they both think, about the kind of films they’re drawn to, the kind of characters they like to explore, the gray areas they like to inhabit, the questions they like to ask. I think as actors.”Todd Haynes
“But you never know how two people of such distinction and intelligence will work together in reality. But it was amazing to see real camaraderie.”
Hines adds that he felt the actors had similar mindsets when it came to their work: “We come prepared so we can have fun with each other on set, and they’re both the type of actors who…they’re not actors in the way they prepare.” Move forward and then try to enjoy the actual film process as much as you enjoy making it.
May December premieres in theaters on Friday, November 17.
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