Michael Cristofer has a mind-boggling CV: actor, playwright, director, screenwriter, he has won both a Pulitzer and a Tony. His most recent project is directing the equally incredible Jessica Lange in his latest feature, The Great Lillian Hall. Cristofer kindly spoke to Glam from London, where he is catching up with several plays starring friends of his, before returning to his part-time home in Ireland.
With so many strings to his artistic bow, we were interested in how his involvement in this film came about.
“There was a script floating around loosely based on an actress who was very famous in the New York theatre scene and who I happened to have known for a very long time. One of my first acting jobs in 1969 at a small theatre near Philadelphia was a two-hander: me and the great Marian Seldes. I knew her from that time until she passed away [2014]. At the end of her life she slipped into dementia and had a rough last couple of years. In fact I was on stage with her about a year or two before she passed away. We were doing a presentation of Tennessee Williams material and she was reading one of the beautiful letters that Tennessee wrote. She got to a certain point in it and stopped, then went back to the beginning. And then she got to the same point again and she stopped. She had lost her way completely and we had to kind of finesse her off the stage.”
The Great Lillian Hall tells the story of a theatre actress’s struggle with the early stages of dementia, a topic which Cristofer clearly holds dear.
“I also went through [dementia] with my father. Everyone has someone who has been touched somewhere somehow by this dreadful affliction.”
But despite the incredibly sad nature of the material, he was determined to make a film that was not relentlessly depressing.
“[Originally] this little script…was another sad story about dementia. I knew I didn’t want to do that. I also knew Marian Seldes would not want us to do that! So I sort of took over. In the original script, the opening night that she fights her way to happened in the middle of the movie and the rest was this sad decline into further dementia. So the first thing I said was ‘No we have to leave her with this triumph.’ Jessica Lange and I discussed at and it was important for us, and the people we knew, to tell the story of courage in the face of what’s happening to you. And we had both seen that in the people that we knew. Every day is a bit of a triumph. Also it’s a story about courage in the face of mortality. And that becomes a story for all of us. Something is going to happen to all of us: no one gets out alive! And it’s how we maintain who we are in the face of what’s happening to us.”
Although talk was of Meryl Streep being originally in line for the lead, it seems as if this role were made for Jessica Lange.
“There is a great quote, I forget who said it, but it’s something like ‘an actor has to have a whiff of the gallows about him’ and Jessica certainly has that. Jessica and I worked together almost 35 years ago on one of the worst pictures ever made. And they kept changing the title so I couldn’t even tell you what the title is! But sometimes you bond more strongly in a bad film. So we became really good friends, but in the meantime have not really worked together.”
Although loosely based on the last years of Seldes’s career, this is no bio-pic. Lange and Cristofer have crafted a story which strands on its own.
“Jessica is the complete opposite of Seldes who was a very mannered, grand, sort of figure in the theatre. Bringing Jessica to it completely turned it around because she brings the most human, grounded, performance.”
Cristofer spoke openly about the difficulties of making an independent movie, that isn’t based on a spy novel or a comic.
“And then there is the struggle to make this kind of movie. It’s getting really really hard. We made this originally to be a feature but a when you’re doing independent financing, you can get wonderful experienced people to work on the film, but you don’t always get experienced people financing it. They are wonderful but they don’t have the experience in what it takes to release a film theatrically. And for this kind of film it gets harder and harder to find a theatrical release. So what happened was HBO came after us , and this being a safe thing to do the finance people jumped at it. But this prevented it from being shown in the theatres in the US. However the good thing with that deal was that HBO do not control theatrical release across the rest of the world. So now we can sell it abroad, including Down Under!”
Cristofer, an energetic, passionate 80 years old, is still working like crazy.
“At the moment I’m acting in a television series called Fallout, which was very successful last year so we just did a second season. And we’re hoping to do a third. Also Jessica and I have been working on another project [about Marlene Dietrich].”
That is certainly one to look forward to.
In the meanwhile we have The Great Lillian Hall now showing in cinemas in Australia.
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