Did you give any film “assignments” to any of the other actors in French Exit?
The only films that I gave to Michelle were Trouble in Paradise and La Dolce Vita. Not because that’s my favorite Fellini film but it did seem to be the Fellini film that had the most circus-like atmosphere I had hoped to achieve and felt like this world of French Exit inhabited. His films have this carnival spirit to them that just goes for it. They find all this gloriousness in the ugly and vice versa. I wanted Michelle to see that. Then, Trouble in Paradise, those screwball comedies are definitely an influence. I think of this film as a screwball tragedy. I wanted her to see that even those films dealt with a great deal of pain they’re running from.
I’ve always heard variations on the theme that comedy comes from pain.
Yeah! Taking comedy seriously and vice versa. I felt that I had the opportunity with this movie, in particular, to allow me to bring in all these different tones and see how they contrasted and complimented each other. All in the hopes of finding something new.
“I think of this film as a screwball tragedy.”
I think you did! This is just because I’m sort of a cat lady. I only have one cat so not in the extreme sense of the term, but I love cats and I wanted to know how it was working with real cats for Small Frank. I see how it could’ve been difficult.
It turned out to be a lot easier than I expected and I definitely feared. I feared working with the cats so much that I didn’t even think about it. I felt like, okay, I have no idea, let’s see how this goes. It turns out that there really are cat trainers that have been working–in our case, the woman’s name is Jenny, she is just great. There are two main cats, there’s one predominant cat. They’re black cats so it’s easy to kind of swap them out according to one cat getting uncomfortable. What wound up happening is that the main cat we ended up using, his name is Spartacus, got really, really comfortable very, very quickly with our set. So many shots in there that I thought I was going to have to use a doll or some kind of CGI, or a combination of the two, Lucy and Spartacus would say, “Well, let me give this a try. Let’s just see if we can do it.” That happened continuously. All these scenes I had shot I didn’t think we were going to get with an actual cat, we were able to get. I think we got very, very lucky to be in such good hands. From what I understand, that experience is uncommon.
Yeah, that’s just what I can imagine from living with a cat on a daily basis.
Yeah, I know, same. I love cats and that’s why I was so fearful. So many things about this film that really gelled together and I just had a really great experience making it. Not to say that it was a party or that it wasn’t hard or it wasn’t challenging. It just was extremely fulfilling. I got to go to all of these places exactly as I hoped.
You guys shot some of the New York scenes in Montreal. Seeing the film, I would have never imagined it wasn’t shot in New York. I wanted to know, how do you bring the spirit of New York to a film that’s not shot there.
I was dreading shooting New York scenes somewhere other than New York at first. Then I suddenly realized how freeing that could be. Just boiling it down to the essence of what makes something New York. While I may not know Frances Price’s world at all, this city is in my blood. It came down to the smallest, smallest things. Let’s say that brownstone that Frances and Malcolm are leaving from the New York party. Those steps are very common in NYC, especially on the upper east side or around Gramercy Square. There were very, very few of them in Montreal. So just searching and digging and focusing on the stairs more than anything, and then how to change to make those stairs work. We had to take away a middle banister because middle banisters don’t exist in this city. Obviously, it’s somewhere but you have to look for the most general version of something that is easily identifiable as New York. Then do the smallest movements and changes to make it so in the very few options that we had. I think we found three potential staircases that could work. Then figured out how to shoot it and what to isolate. All of that was a cool challenge. Because it just boils down to, “Okay, what is it that feels familiar about the city?” You can find it really wherever you go I’ve found.
