Screenwriter Lucinda Coxon is in LA to talk about her labor of love, The Danish Girl. I met with Coxon and we talked in depth about her journey, working with Tom Hooper and how her background as a playwright helped her during the making of The Danish Girl.
AD: The book was written in 2000. When did you get involved?
LC: David Ebershoff finished the book in 2000 and that’s when Gail Mutrux, one of the producers optioned it. She was trying to get the money together and that finally came together in 2004 and that’s when I arrived. I wrote the first draft 11 years ago.
AD: That’s a long journey over 11 years in the making. What made you stick to it?
LC: We’ve all been trying to get it going ever since, you know? It’s four crazy women, with three producers and me hawking it around every town for 11 years. Apart from the fact that I thought it was such remarkable love story, it’s just such an inspiring tale of courage and vision. The fact that it was based on these real lives, these people I’d never heard of until I read David’s book and then I researched around that. I think you feel just a huge debt of personal responsibility to those people and I think maybe it’s impossible to know what you could have done in other circumstances, but I think the fact that those people really existed and their story had been lost once. You kind of think, “You know, I think we really are going to get this out there.
So little was known about them, nobody was really worried and very few people were very interested and that has changed quite a bit over the last ten years. You know, because of the huge profile of trans issues. I think that we just really believed in it and not in a way that you often believe in projects, but we believed in it and we felt a responsibility to it.
AD: So how did you find out about the book, going back to that?
LC: So Gail sent me the book. She’s seen another British film I’d written and she felt I might be the right fit. And I think she was also interested because I’m a playwright, I write for the stage as well, and I’ve come to think, very recently, when people are asking about the process, obviously you’re not always examining your own process, I think that the theater was really quite a big part of my writing process with this project. It’s something that I wanted the experience to be really immersive and intimate and I wanted to get under the skin of that marriage. So, I suppose, one of the things I did with the book was I got rid of a lot of the more obvious fictions and the serious fictions and made it as much of a true story as I could. I also, in doing that, got rid of a lot of extraneous characters and really boiled it down to the two of them so that you are in that marriage with them, going step by step. You can’t really hide and it sometimes feels very claustrophobic and I really wanted you to be stuck in it in the way that they are, through the highs and the lows. I want the audience to feel really bound into it. I suppose that’s the theater writing in it, in a sense, that really getting in there with them.
AD: Well you’re going on that journey with both the characters.
LC: There was a kind of challenge in writing both of those characters. The challenge with Gerda was to write someone who was incredibly good and incredibly selfless. She wasn’t the victim or passive at all, she’s an incredibly feisty and active and radically forward thinking woman. She is also fantastically good. I did write a character who’s fascinating and who’s good and a force of nature and a person who won’t look away from the thing they have seen. She’s a person who’s determined that their partner should self-actualize and should become everything that they can be to be happy. That was a really exciting thing, to write a woman who wasn’t always worried about whether you liked her and all those things.
AD: That was refreshing to see on screen as well, even though it is set in a different period.
LC: And she certainly was that. She was a powerful, rule-breaking woman and it’s great to see that, especially in that period. It’s almost easier in a period film, I think, we always find it more palatable in a period film. Of course in writing Einar, I was writing Lili to have to write the Einar section of the film and though into Lili, you’ve got to create a period at the beginning of the film where Einar is very in front of you. He is completely male and, yet, in retrospect at the end of the film, you look back, and you realize it was always Lili who was in front of you. So you’ve got to write Einar enough and create the spaces in which Lili can emerge so that you have that gradual sense of showing through. By the end of the film, you realize there was no way it could have ended differently. Calibrating that is an exciting challenge, but, again, I think you do it from being under the skin and a way in, for me, was always through the fact that Gerda was person who had first seen that maybe the full Einar was waiting to look at Lili. If I went in through Gerda’s eyes, at the beginning of the film I could get that journey started. Then, it was about writing enough of those scenes where Einar is alone, where there is a lot of space with no dialogue. Like the scene in the mirror where he’s looking at his body is beautiful. I spoke to a journalist a few weeks ago and he said, “I just wanted to say how much I loved the film. The script, I thought it was amazing. But some of the things I really liked best about the film are the things you haven’t written.”
AD: Tell me more about that because that’s a truly beautiful scene and moment.
LC: [The journalist] said, “I love that scene where he’s just watching the woman and he’s doing those moves.” I said that’s all in the script and he said, “No, but I mean, the way he’s doing it.” It’s very scripted that scene. I think there are a lot of those scenes.
AD: When he doesn’t say anything…
LC: Yes, exactly. It’s something that the director and the actors have made up. It’s creating quite a lot of those scenes where there’s silence and space. There has to be silence because there are things that there aren’t even the words for. That was an exciting challenge.
AD: Did Eddie Redmayne do much improv or was it very much scripted?
LC: Well it is heavily scripted and Eddie was really respectful of the script. Also, we had an opportunity to rehearse for three weeks together and we’d done a lot of script prep before that so anything that Eddie might have wanted to bring to the table would have been incorporated then anyway. And it was a very tight shoot, we had an enormous amount to get through in 44 days so I think on the day it needed to go the way we were expecting it to go. And you have to factor in the dog as well. I think the dog got to improvise more than anybody else actually!
AD: [Laughs] They say never work with children or animals.
LC: I’m embarrassed to say that one of the most exciting and fun things was doing the dog auditions. They said to me,”You might not want to come in tomorrow morning because we’re auditioning dogs.” I was like, [laughs] “Hell, I am in for that!” I needed to come in for that. Who’d not want to be at the dog audition?
AD: What was that like? How many dogs did you go through for that?
LC: It was great! It was probably five and Pixie was the clear winner for me. Some of the others had really extravagant tricks that they could do and I thought maybe I could write that trick in, like where the dog comes in carrying a tray with a martini on it, but none of them really looked like pets. Just when they were sitting waiting to do their auditions, if you go and sit and talk with the handlers, they were kind of show dogs performing. Pixie was the dog where when you went and sat down, she immediately came and sat next to you and rested her head in your lap and looked up at you. I thought that’s what you need, a dog that likes people.
AD: What was it like working with Tom [Hooper]?
LC: It was great. Obviously, he was not the first director attached to this project. I’d worked with several other directors before him and I think we gotten to the wire and almost made the film several times. I’m afraid when he came in and said that he was going to make the film, I thought [laughs] no way. He said that he thought I’d be more excited than that and I was like, “Yeah, I am excited,” but quietly excited because I was managing my expectations about it. When Working Title came in and Universal came in, I thought, “My God, we really are going to make this film.” Then it was very exciting and I think Tom and I have had a really great working relationship. He’s got a fantastic will and a tremendous amount of energy and that’s very lifting in some ways. He inspires people to do their best work, he gets an incredible amount out of the cast and crew, and he has such a passion for this film. He’s always been incredibly gracious with me and endlessly said it’s the best script he’s ever read and endlessly saying that in Q and A’s. That’s very gracious for a director operating at his level. And it’s fantastic for me that he feels that way and he really just loved it and fought very hard for it. He brought Eddie to the table before anyone had seen The Theory of Everything. I was very excited when Eddie came in because his acting work is something I’ve really admired for so long in theater and on screen. We’ve been a good team.
AD: You watch that film and it is a beautiful story; the journey, the script, the costumes, the cinematography.
LC: We built the set and the Paris apartment and also the house in Copenhagen was all a set. I have to tell you, when you walked into that set, it was essentially like walking through a serious of paintings. You just become a sort of art object when you walked into those rooms. That was really thrilling. The attention to detail in the set was phenomenal. The design department really did an incredible job. That was extraordinary, but also this cast. Can you imagine sitting at a table with not just Eddie and Alicia, but also Ben Whishaw, Matthias Schoenaerts, Sebastian Koch. I have been wanting to work with Sebastian Koch for a decade. Watching Eddie and Ben Whishaw, for example, rehearsing their scenes, you just think that these are really possibly two of the finest actors in Britain and here they are in a room with me [laughs]. It’s not a bad scene! We rehearsed for three weeks, it was very old-school with tape on the floor and furnished with the props department. We rehearsed it like a play. Every now and then, we’d watch it and it was like sitting and watching a play. We’d get it to a performance standard. I’d just imagine if we’d sold tickets for this! It was the most thrilling process. It’s lovely that we can still have ownership of it where it all still feels very intimate and I think that was one of things Tom created, that sense of harmony. When you got onto that shoot, it was all moving very, very fast and that hint that they’d already lived it and a history together.
AD: Just going back to the book, at what point in that book did you say, “Okay, I need to get this made?”
LC: We talk about it now as a transgender film because of where we are in the culture and this extraordinary moment the film is being released into. But, 11 years ago, it wasn’t that. We didn’t feel that. Certainly, it had this extraordinary story of this very early gender confirmation surgery, but it felt like a love story with a big difference. A story about a marriage happened to evolve through a profound change. But, I think for me, it had to do with the paintings. It was the moment where I realized that Gerda, who was so passionate, ambitious, frustrated, and committed as a creative person, found a way to move forward to create a thing that unlocked her creativity, but also unlocked this block in Einar and enabled Einar to become Lili. The sense in which the two of them co-create Lili, Gerda enables it through the paintings. It’s the moment where you realize that she lost Einar passionately, but through this work that she cannot help but do. She has seen this thing that she can’t look away from, she is going to lose him. That is the truth. Once I saw that mechanism moving, I thought “my God, this is fantastic.” There’s nothing that she can do but go forward, but she won’t look away or step back. She just goes forward with it. I think that was just so fascinating to me; the idea that the paintings are the thing that enabled Lili to manifest, but they are also the thing that mean she will lose her husband. She will gain something else, but in any transformation there is loss also. In an interview I was listening to with someone who transitioned recently, they said that the moment they realized that what they were on the inside was the happiest moment of their life because it a liberation. They had a huge understanding of where they were in life. I thought that’s so fascinating, but I think if you’re Lili Elbe in that period, you don’t feel that. You feel terrified because the word transgender doesn’t exist. Lili thought she was considering a lobotomy or suicide before the surgery. After the surgery, she lived happily for a while in a middle ground, but eventually needed to push through to an authentic place. It was watching that middle section with the paintings and bringing them to life that I found giving me chills.
AD: It’s profound actually, seeing that. As you say, it’s come to life in 2015 where transgender is a word and there’s a lot of media attention and focus on the transgender community. What’s the feedback been from there?
LC: It seems to be very positive. We consulted a lot during the making of the film with trans advisers. Eddie did a fantastic amount of research with the community. We had trans actors working on the film in the UK and also extras in Copenhagen and Germany. There was a ton of reach-out to that community and I think it’s really important that a film like this, which isn’t aimed at a sort of very informed metropolitan elite. It’s not aimed at the LA LGBT community, it’s aimed at everybody. I think the Caitlyn Jenner hoopla is one thing, but I think there are “Lili Elbes” all over the world; in a place where there are no role models, where it is not acceptable, where you face discrimination or terror, and no medical understanding. To put a film like this out there that has a wide appeal and will penetrate into places where other films might not, I think it’s really important. Just last week, a trans woman in the UK committed suicide because she was put in an all male prison and she said she couldn’t cope with it. There’s all kind of abuse and it’s a tragedy. It’s a very fast moving situation and there’s very little understanding of it. Any film that helps people to understand it and promotes acceptance is really important.
AD: I saw the film the other night and so many of the images in the lines and your script just stay with you. It haunts you beautifully. You said it took 11 years to bring to the screen. Talk to me about some of the challenges about actually getting it there.
LC: It was pretty straightforward in that the subject matter was deemed commercial poison, that’s what we were dealing with at the time. I made the classic mistake of falling in love with it, we got a script that people were incredibly enthusiastic about and I thought,”Here we go, this is going to be great.” It’s an epic love story and it’s got this remarkable, historical, lost gem in it. But, of course, the doors started slamming. We always had actors who were very keen to be attached to it, very great accomplished directors who wanted to make it. But we could never quite get it off. We had the finance, but then we’d have dates slip and it was always really precarious. Finance was always really pieced, studios would just run a mile away. So, the fact that Tom came in and championed it and public mood was changing, that’s really what enabled Universal to make it at this level, even though it’s still a very low-budget film, the same budget as The King’s Speech. Every penny is on the screen. You see the costs in the crew and designers. That was always really reassuring. I’ve written many, many drafts for different directors and sometimes we’ve written drafts just to cheer ourselves up and keep it alive and revisit it. I think we always were going to get it made, I’ve had so much work with the script circulating. I’ve met so many fantastic directors and actors who wanted to be involved with it and it’s been a huge part of my life for the last decade it would have been rather odd if it died.
AD: That’s inspiring.
LC: I never broke faith in it, but also producers never broke faith in me. Somebody said to me, “Were you the only writer on it for 11 years?” Yeah, it was just me. Nobody ever thought that we should try something different.
AD: When did you see it for the first time?
LC: Well, I was part of the editing a lot, but I saw it for the first time at the Venice Film Festival, with a lot of other people. The turnaround was so tight on it that we didn’t manage to see it before then. A lot of us hadn’t seen it before then either and that was terrifying. I would have perhaps liked to have a screening. But I could hardly watch it, I was so nervous and then I saw again it a week later in Toronto. In Venice, it’s strange because you’re watching it with an audience that doesn’t have English as their first language so the film had subtitles on it for the first time. You’re kind of watching the audience instead of the film. There’s that festival excitement and nervousness. I was really glad to actually be able to watch the film at Toronto a week later.
AD: What was the reaction in Venice?
LC: In Venice, they all stay really still. There were a few people who laughed in places, but it was very respectful. I thought that they were hating it or that they were asleep. Someone said to me that the quietness was actually very good because in Italy, they don’t sit still very often. We got to the end and there was this extraordinary standing ovation. It was all very unusual, but I was hugely relieved at the reaction. With other types of audiences, like British or American, it’s much easier to read what the house is like.
AD: There’s a lot of excitement around the film.
LC: That’s great. I think it’s really important that this film reaches out to a very wide audience. It’s so easy to think that there’s a lot of lying and there’s just not. We’ve made a lot of progress with racism and women’s issues and with same-sex marriage in some places now, but everywhere, there is either a minority or majority of people who would absolutely like to see that progress rolled back. I think we’ve just got to keep going and pushing it out there and helping people to empathize and understand and use their imagination a bit. This film says that this is nothing new and has been around for a very long time and urges you to not be frightened and to reach out. This film is really about love and empathy.
AD: It is, really. That’s the thing, it is a love story at the end of the day and she stands by her partner regardless. It’s a beautiful story. And the cast is so good. Eddie Redmayne is such a great actor.
LC: We stayed open during casting because of his incredible ability to transform himself. I think the last thing I’d seen him in was Red, a play he did with Alfred Molina. And he was extraordinary in that. Eddie’s is the smaller role, but it’s a role where the power starts to gradually shift. Eddie was just sublime in it with his attention to detail. He has a genuine magnetism on the stage and I hope he’s not going to be so busy now in film that he’s not going to work on stage anymore because he really is a remarkable stage actor. I was thinking about those kind of concordances. Then The Theory of Everything came out and he was so remarkable in that, then the nomination came along, then he had two days off from the shoot to go to the Oscars, came straight from the airport, got in a car and had to come back to the set to continue shooting with his Oscar in his handbag!
AD: [Laughs] How many drafts did you do over the 11 years?
LC: I think there were a lot of drafts just for myself and then I was also doing drafts for different directors. Probably around 20 full drafts, I would say. It’s a lot, but it was over 11 years. In the end, the film that we shot was a relatively early draft. I did do a big rewrite for Tom and then we reverted to the previous draft. It’s not unusual, you’ve got to find a dialogue with the director and the director has to find the right project. Sometimes the director has to explore a project by going down a few blind alleys or throwing the pieces and seeing how they land. It’s a way for them to get under the skin of the project. I’ve adjusted to that. And it’s a way of getting to know one another. It all has to be done. I wanted to feel that I’d explored all the possibilities. There was also new research material coming to light all the time over the 11 years. It was sometimes confusing and contradictory so we had to think whether we’d incorporate those things. Sometimes you’d get enormously intense research material and you’d think actually we’ve already done that, we didn’t know that, but we did know it and it’s already in there and I don’t have to worry about it.
AD: So what’s next for you, now that this baby has been birthed?
LC: [Laughs] I’m making a film with Lenny Abrahamson, who just made Room. We’re doing a film called The Little Stranger next year and I’m going to try to finish a play. I’ve got a play that is so badly over-delayed, I think they’ve almost given up on me, but I really am going to finish it. After Christmas, I’m back on the play and then Lenny and I, I hope, are going to make the film in the early summer.
AD: Well, congratulations.
LC: Oh, thank you. I think it is a great achievement. So many people worked for so long on the film to try and make it happen. I never thought of it as “the transgender film” because these people are more interesting than that. I really hope the film will bring many more people to Gerda’s art. It’s enormously satisfying that this film is happening in this moment and I think that’s a testament to the activism of the community. It’s great we’re a part of it.
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