Focusing on anything besides what’s going on in America’s streets is difficult at the moment. In another reality the entertainment industry is debating what can only be described as questionable standards for resuming production in an era of COVID-19, fans are celebrating Lady Gaga’s “Chromatica” and getting excited about the potential resumption of the major sports leagues. More pressing issues are at stake and how long the people have to take to the streets for change to be seen remains to be seen. If you need a short mental health break, may we suggest checking out yet another great Elisabeth Moss performance in Josephine Decker’s exquisite “Shirley” when it arrives on PVOD this Friday?
READ MORE: “Shirley”: Josephine Decker returns to the rich landscape of the fragile mind [Review]
An adaptation of Susan Scarf Merrell’s novel of the same name, “Shirley” imagines a short period of time when a fictional young couple, Fred and Rose (Logan Lerman and Odessa Young), live in a guest room of increasingly famous author Shirley Jackson (Moss) and her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), a professor at Bennington College in Vermont. Fred is a graduate assistant under Hyman and his work finds Rose increasingly under Jackson’s eye. Working on a follow up to her landmark story “The Lottery,” the pressure to match its critical success begins to take its toll on her. How that plays out with Rose allows both Young and Moss to deliver two masterful performances.
Moss, who is coming off the hit “The Invisible Man” right before the pandemic arrived and will next appear in Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch,” jumped on the phone last week to discuss her portrayal of “The Haunting of Hill House” author and, notably, working with Decker, whose reputation as an auteur to watch was cemented with her latest effort.
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The Playlist: Hi Elisabeth, how are you doing today?
Elisabeth Moss: I am great. I am a huge fan of The Playlist. You guys have been very, very kind to me.
Oh, thank you. Well, I think we’re just being truthful. That’s the goal.
Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I have noticed you guys have been really supportive of my work and the work of people I work with, and thank you for that.
I saw “Shirley” at Sundance and it’s one of the few movies I caught there that has really stuck with me in the months since. What about the project made you want to get involved in the first place?
Sarah Gubbins wrote this script that was honestly one of the best pieces of writing I’ve ever seen and I was blown away. And I was like, “Well, this is one of those roles of a lifetime kind of things,” you know? And I didn’t know whether or not they wanted me in the movie, and I was really young for Shirley. At the time, I was like 36. So, I kind of waited hopefully that they would pick me and then they did. I was sent out this email, and I was so excited. I’ll never forget that moment when I found out they were going to offer it to me. And yeah, it was a great honor.
Am I correct in that you’ve never played a historical character of this, I don’t know if “magnitude” is the right word, but this well-known before?
Yes, you are right, and no one has asked me about that yet. That is true.
You would think that there’d be a lot of research material that you could find on her, but she didn’t do a lot of interviews from what I’ve read. Was it hard to find background on her?
Yes, it was. And the hardest part was that there was no video footage of her. There’s just something you can get from watching somebody actually speak and seeing their face that is really helpful. I had two recordings, I believe, And one of them was her reading “The Lottery.” So, I had that to go on for her voice and her accent and then pictures. There’s a fantastic biography. And then these letters that we got from, I believe, the Library of Congress between Stanley and Shirley. Michael and I poured over those letters. And that was it. I remember at one point, because we had done all this research and all this prep, and the hair, and the makeup and the costume, and all this shit. And at one point, I turned to Michael and I was like, “You know what has to happen now, Michael? Right? We have to let it go. This is where we let it go, and this is where we tell the story of our Stanley and Shirley,” At a certain point, you kind of have to just do that. And I’m proud of what we did.
How did you frame Shirley in the period of time we meet her at the beginning of the film? What is her mental state from your perspective?
In our extremely sort of fictionalized, f**ked up account – which is very inaccurate – it’s after “The Lottery” had come out, so she’s just become sort of famous. “The Lottery” remains the story that The New Yorker still has gotten the most mail about and not at all nice mail, to this date. I checked this. She’s now kind of making a kind of a sophomore effort, and she’s going to write “Hangsaman” which came out in 1951. So, that’s where we placed it. She’s dealing with this newfound fame, which she has very much a love/hate relationship with. She’s very happy that her story did well. It’s also very difficult to get all that hate mail and she’s having a bit of a writer’s block. And she’s kind of dealing with some demons trying to [break] the story to “Hangsaman” so that’s where she is, yeah, mentally.
Do you think that Shirley is aware that she’s using Rose sort of as a muse to manipulate her for creative ideas?
Yeah, absolutely. It’s kind of a cat and mouse sort of situation. It’s like when a cat gets a mouse and is playing with it and can’t decide if are they going to kill it, or they should just play with it a little longer. Should they become best friends with it, or should they eat it? Like, I think that’s what Shirley is. She sees herself in Rose. I think she sees the person that she sort of lost in herself in Rose. And it’s kind of that relationship where she’s like, “I’m going to f**k with you because if somebody is it’s better if it’s me.”
At the end of the film, and I don’t want to give too much away, do you think that she realizes that her manipulations went too far? Do you think she has regret about that?
No, I don’t. [And] not just from Shirley’s perspective, I think she did set up Rose to have a better life. To be a stronger person and to not just do whatever her husband told her to do and to pursue her own goals. I think she doesn’t give a shit about anything except whether or not Stanley likes [her work]. That’s the only thing that matters.
In terms of the surreal moments that happen in the film, how much was in the script and how much was it Josephine’s direction?
It was all in the script, all that kind of crossover between imagination and what’s real and what’s not real. I mean, there was actually more in the script that we ended up not doing. But yeah, that was all in the script, but that’s why Josephine was kind of such a perfect director for it because that is so her style. She really thrives in that kind of storytelling. So, I think that’s why she was such an incredible choice for the movie because she knew exactly what that was supposed to look like. And then we had this incredible cinematographer, Sturla Brandth Grøvlen, who was so adventurous, so game to just like pick up that camera and do weird shit every day.
By the way, he is an amazing cinematographer. I’m always looking forward to seeing what he does next.
Isn’t he incredible?
He shot “Victoria” which was one of my favorite movies the year it came out, a one-shot movie. But let’s talk about Josephine. There’s so much moving camera within her work. How does she direct onset compared to other filmmakers? How does she let a scene play out, or is it not that markedly different?
It’s not that markedly different, I would say. I mean, we had this great script to work off of. Josephine did a really great job of navigating the different kind of working styles of all the people involved. I think that Odessa and I are kind of similar. Michael and I are really different in the way that we work. And so, we met in the middle. He likes more rehearsal. I don’t. And so, we kind of met in the middle on that. Because we have so much respect for each other and each other’s work, that I was like, “Whatever you want to do, Michael Stuhlbarg is fine with me. I will follow your lead.” But she did a really good job of navigating the different working styles of the four different actors that she had to work with every day. And I think that it was kind of a perfect balance of improvisation, a little bit, playing, doing things differently every time. But at the same time, it was really important to me to kind of keep Gubbins’ script present as well, because it was such a good script. I think she did a really good balance of it.
My last question for you is about one particular scene, the one-shot when Shirley’s husband is reading the script for “Hangsaman” far, far behind her, in the living room and she’s at the dining room table. I think the shot must last over a minute. Do you remember what was going through your mind while shooting that scene? Because, clearly, you’re conveying a lot of Shirley’s insecurities and her thoughts about her work at that moment.
Yeah, that moment wasn’t intended to play out in one shot. We did cover that scene, but Josephine chose to play it out in that shot and I was very flattered by that. I love doing that kind of shot. I love doing that kind of scene. I love an opportunity to just bitch with a camera in front of me and kind of and explore all the different places that a person can go while they’re waiting for that. I mean, I was like a pig in shit. I love doing that kind of stuff. I think that we shot that on our last night of shooting in that house, and we were going to lose the location. It was very late at night, I want to say midnight or 1:00 in the morning. And I was getting on a plane at like 6:00 in the morning to go shoot Jordan Peele’s “Us.”
Oh, wow.
So yeah, so it was an incredible sort of pressure-filled situation, but I tend to operate really well under pressure. And I find that some of my best work has come out of being in a pressure cooker. And so, I think I knew that I didn’t have many chances to do this. And so, I kind of just poured everything in. I loved it. I mean, I love doing that shit.
“Shirley” debuts on premium VOD on Friday.
