What was it about Shirley Jackson that attracted you to her?
I came on after it was already scripted. The character is just so witty, and kind of cruel, and complicated and messy. I had loved Sarah’s work on I Love Dick, I thought that Kathryn Hahn’s performance was one of the great female performances of the last twenty years. She just writes such great characters, so it was exciting to be able to dive into the Shirley that she had created. Also, the real Shirley Jackson is such a complicated and fascinating person—I was and am obsessed with her writing. She does in writing a thing that I’m trying to do in cinema, so it was exciting to get to know her work that well.
What things in her work would you like to emulate?
You fall from a real place into an imaginary place without really realising it. She’s very good at sliding you into the character’s mind. It’s a witchy thing that makes her writing feel really exciting, that I haven’t seen that much on screen. I feel like in American cinema there’s this clear line between reality and what’s in your mind, but I think with Shirley that line is very unclear. That’s something I love, that I really pursue in my work and get excited by.
I definitely felt that with Madeline’s Madeline as well, it all feels very slippery.
Totally.
Shirley is the first feature you’ve directed from another person’s script. How was that experience?
It took me a minute to get inside of the world. I’m generally pretty process-oriented, but this film was different. There’s usually a thing that happens as you’re writing, I find I’m writing as an excuse to get the words that are in my head out. So to come from words and try to see the images was a very different experience, but also really exciting. With Sarah’s writing, it was interesting how the space was so important, this house was such a major character in the film. Because it’s such a dialogue-driven script, I worked a lot with the actors in rehearsals. I guess maybe some directors would tell you what to do, and you would start, and you would do that, but I didn’t even realise that would have been an option, so I was like, “Well, we have to make the blocking together” because I was also really adamant that I didn’t want the dialogue to be static.
It was important to me to sculpt some of the dialogue scenes into movement scenes. It was fun to find the dance of the film and allow the actors to choose their own way through the dialogue. They’re all such geniuses. When we would do rehearsals with Lizzie and Michael, it was so fast, they’re so good at working things out themselves. It was just exciting to let them find their own space and then obviously weigh in when I felt like an outside eye was helpful. I feel like a lot of what I’m realising as a director is if you choose the right collaborators, it’s just about getting out of the way!
How would you describe the relationship between Shirley and Rose? It feels thorny—it reminded me of Phantom Thread in of the toxicity.
Generally, Shirley’s own work is about these two female characters who are really different—one is a dark, misanthropic genius, but angry, and the other one is a very light-hearted open spirit who is generous and good at baking and making men happy. I think in her biography there was this idea that these two kinds of women were different aspects of Shirley’s own mind, that she was like both of them. So it was about how different Shirley and Rose are at the beginning, and then that their coming together is such a collision, but then they discover they have a lot to learn from each other and they’re more similar than they realized.
