Chances are you’ve watched something adapted from words written by Shirley Jackson.
Physically unassuming with bookish glasses, the mother-of-four penned some of the most frightening passages committed to paper, exactly the kind of stories that filmmakers have loved adapting for the screen.
Perhaps you’ve seen the 1957 film Lizzie, about a woman with three personalities, or the Sebastian Stan-starring thriller We Have Always Lived in the Castle. More likely, you voraciously devoured Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House a couple of years ago, scared out of your wits.
Jackson, who died aged 48 in 1965, is the mind behind those twisted tales, and now the subject of her own psychological thriller, a movie inspired by the writer’s life, even if it’s not quite historically accurate.
Directed by Josephine Decker and starring Elisabeth Moss and Odessa Young, Shirley is a bewitching story of two women – one of them Jackson (Moss) and the other Rose, the young wife of an academic staying with Jackson and her husband in their hothouse Vermont home – who stir in the other confidence in their desires, and a sexual awakening.
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Shirley, releasing in Australian cinemas this week, is a heightened, stylish and hypnotic film that explores the uneasy intimacy in a complex, intoxicating female relationship forged in a claustrophobic setting.
Moss is mesmerising, at homes chilling and erratic, a figure of misunderstood talent while Australian actor Young holds her own against Moss, an actor widely considered one of the best of her generation.
The Texas-raised and Princeton-educated Decker is an indie director known for films including Madeline’s Madeline and Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, the latter of which starred frequent collaborator and major mumblecore figure Joe Swanberg.
It’s those admired albeit little known films of Decker’s that opened the doors to her to take on Shirley, a film written by Sarah Gubbins from a book by Susan Scarf Merrell, and executive produced by Martin Scorsese.
Shirley debuted at the Sundance Film Festival at the beginning of this year, picking up a US Dramatic Special Jury Prize.
Ahead of Shirley’s release, Decker talks to news.com.au about her experiences crafting a fictional story inspired by one of genre literature’s true giants.
Did you know much about Shirley Jackson’s life before working on this film?
I didn’t know anything about her life. I knew [her short story] “The Lottery” but not really the rest of her work. I read We Have Always Lived in the Castle around the time I got this job, but now I know a lot about Shirley. I got pretty obsessed with Shirley, which is a fun person to get into.
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Do you think aspects of the real Shirley comes through in her work?
For sure. I mean, your art is like a mirror. She was such an incredible story writer and artist because she was writing things that were very personal, intimate and unusual. She had a fascination with the occult, but also with violence and identity. There is a fracturing identity in so many of her longer works.
I think it’s funny that we think of her as a horror writer because she writes all kinds of work and, in her time, she was mostly known for these hilarious personal memoirs. She had these funny memoirs about her kids that were in family magazines, women’s magazines. That’s how she made a lot of her money.
The film carries her name and some of her biographical details, but it’s not really Shirley Jackson. The story borrows her life but were there certain boundaries you didn’t want to cross in the dramatisation because she was a real person?
We always knew we were making a fictional story, and it was a fictional Shirley because she had kids in real life and we didn’t put them in the movie, and the timeline doesn’t really work out.
There were some deliberate choices to make it more fictional so that we would be able to have the liberty of knowing that it’s fiction and we can let it be whatever it wants to be. But also taking a lot of inspiration from the real human being because that was the point.
We mostly tried to be faithful to the ways Shirley tells stories and to the way she slides inside the mind and back out again, and the way she takes you into a space. Then you realise the space you’re in, which was a normal room, has become a liquid part of someone’s unconscious experience.
So, it’s almost like being in a Shirley Jackson story?
Exactly, I think that was our main intention with the film, to make it feel like a Shirley Jackson story.
How did you get Elisabeth Moss involved? She’s so in-demand.
She is! She loves to fill her schedule, she is so busy. I don’t know how she does all the things she does. She was our top choice. We went out to her immediately after I came on, flicked her the scrip and she was obsessed with it, as I think we all were.
Lizzie is super collaborative and we got to find Shirley together. Her instincts are always really good. What I saw really early is that Lizzie has a real mesmerising, magnetic, witchy isn’t the right word, but there’s a sorcery inside her. And when she goes into that sorcery, she makes these small choices where she can access something quite unhinged.
The movie is called Shirley but it could have just as easily been called Rose – that’s such a key role. How did you guys find Odessa Young?
She auditioned and I just loved her audition tape and Lizzie loved her audition tape and Sarah, our writer and producer, loved her audition tape. We felt that she was doing something that felt dangerous in Rose, and that felt so right.
Rose wasn’t supposed to be a safe character who became unhinged a little big. We wanted Rose to feel like she already had that something inside her and Shirley just cracks the egg and Rose oozes out.
I think Odessa is such a force and she’s part of the reason Lizzie jumps off the screen so much. We’re experiencing Shirley as if she’s bewitching us, and I think a lot of that is the open porousness of Odessa’s performance.
Do you think you made the movie you set out to make?
I thought I was making a Hitchcockian film, like all of my visual references on the mood board were from Hitchcock movies.
But Hitchcock is a lot of wide angles and when we shot wide frames in this movie, it never felt right. There was a desire to be really close to the characters, very intimate with them.
Being far away from across the room was a nice way of making someone else’s movie but our movie wanted to be more intimate. I don’t think I made the movie that I thought I was making, but then I love the movie that we did make.
What do you think Shirley Jackson would’ve made of Shirley?
Ooph. I think she might’ve been into it. I hope so! I really hope so, or she would’ve been like “You know what? I could’ve done a better job than you guys did!”. But we’ll never know.
(Interview condensed for length and clarity.)
Shirley is in cinemas from Thursday, July 9
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https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMipQFodHRwczovL3d3dy5uZXdzLmNvbS5hdS9lbnRlcnRhaW5tZW50L21vdmllcy9uZXctbW92aWVzL3NoaXJsZXktZGlyZWN0b3Itam9zZXBoaW5lLWRlY2tlci1vbi1jcmFmdGluZy1mYW1lZC1hdXRob3JzLXN0b3J5L25ld3Mtc3RvcnkvM2EwMDczYjQ3MGU5YzhiOTdiMmQ5YWY2MzM5NmMxNTnSAaUBaHR0cHM6Ly9hbXAubmV3cy5jb20uYXUvZW50ZXJ0YWlubWVudC9tb3ZpZXMvbmV3LW1vdmllcy9zaGlybGV5LWRpcmVjdG9yLWpvc2VwaGluZS1kZWNrZXItb24tY3JhZnRpbmctZmFtZWQtYXV0aG9ycy1zdG9yeS9uZXdzLXN0b3J5LzNhMDA3M2I0NzBlOWM4Yjk3YjJkOWFmNjMzOTZjMTU5?oc=5
2020-07-06 11:14:05Z
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