‘Madeline’s Madeline’: Josephine Decker Talks The Spiritual Process Of Acting Troupes & More [Interview]

Josephine Decker’s “Madeline’s Madeline” is one of the most exciting movies of the year, immersing the audience in a exhilarating cauldron of daring theatrical roleplaying, teenage rebellion, and swirling, innovative film grammar. It’s an experiential arty indie film about the blurring of the boundaries between art and life and it pushes its experimentation and pretentious right to the edge of exasperation. But there’s also a thrilling passion in this kind of whimsical radicalism that teeters on going off the rails, but anxiously, and electrically stays on course.

“Madeline’s Madeline” centers on a theater director’s (Molly Parker) latest project which takes on a life of its own when her titular young star –a breakthrough performance by newcomers Helena Howard — takes her performance too seriously. And when her mother (Miranda July, an actor/director who’s own envelope-pushing films seem to inspire the movie) becomes involved, Madeline’s performative experience becomes more difficult and confusing.

Portraying the unraveling of a talented, but mentally fragile, young actress, “Madeline’s Madeline” is both timeless – channeling the primal and spiritual roots of acting – and timely – addressing difficult issues like the thin line between exploitation and art-making as well as the politics of who deserves to tell certain stories.

READ MORE: Helena Howard Is A Fury To Behold In Josephine Decker’s ‘Madeline’s Madeline’ [Sundance Review]

We recently sat down with Josephine for a fascinating conversation about the intensive work with the Pig Iron Theatre Company — “a space for rigorous experimentation, playful theatre-making, and long-lasting collaboration”– that led to the film, how collaboration can lead to self-discovery, and finding the primitive within the human.

I read that the genesis of the project was meeting Helena. How much of the idea did you already have, or did you develop it collaboratively with her?
The main idea was to make a movie through the process of improvisation. I wanted to write collaboratively with actors through improvisation to create the script and then film it. Because I had kind of improvised my first feature and scripted my second, so I wanted to those ideas combined.  The concepts were just around exploring mental illness, the parent-child relationship in terms of mental illness and also exploring art and the process of art-making.

I had taken Pig Iron Theatre’s summer intensive the summer before I met Helena and it was just amazing. There was a crazy clown intensive. To create a clown you really have to shed all of your layers, you have to be so honest with the audience. After three weeks, I just felt like I saw another side of all these people I had been in ten-hour daily classes with and I was, “Wow, there’s a whole other part of you that I don’t even know if you knew was there, that comes out in performance” and I got excited about the way that performance can strip away… maybe make you more yourself? And I was curious about how that can be safe or dangerous, those were things I was really interested in exploring.

Were you hesitant to work with a teenager or did you embrace that challenge?
I think I was really excited about it. She was so clearly gifted and also I love teen movies. I thought “Twilight” was really fun and also the movies you grow up with are teen movies…

They can be very raw or direct…
 Yeah, exactly! You’re in this very specific, very chaotic part of your life experience that I think also resonates with anyone, asking ‘Who am I?’

Being a teenager is all about exploring different roles and then you kind of kick that into hyperdrive by putting her in this context.
That’s so true. I never thought about it like that but it really is all about role-playing.

I think actors experience this thing where people really project onto them what they want to see or what they want to take away. That was definitely the case with Madeline, where her Mom is deeply projecting onto her experience, saying “You are so sick” and “You are not able to take care of yourself” but then Evangeline (Molly Parker) is saying “You’re the star of my thing” and “You can handle this very difficult task” and ultimately she’s in this position of asking, “How can I take care of myself?” Her journey in the film is kind of her learning her own boundaries and sticking up for them, which is definitely a teenage experience, but also a lifelong thing, I think I’m still learning to stick up for my own boundaries.

Once you did meet Helena, how much did she bring to the character?
The truth is we worked together for so long. It was about seven or eight months of meeting one weekend a month, sometimes it would be the whole weekend, two eight hour days, or sometimes just one day.

Is this just you and her?
It was the whole troupe, around 10 to 12 people usually. By the time that that period was done, I just knew her really well. She’s also really gifted and she has so much fun, she can turn into so many different characters, but she also can have a really loud silence. She’s such a presence and she’s able to say so much with so little. I think a lot of Madeline was just letting her be in the frame – inside of all these other stories that are being told about her, she’s kind of in this space of figuring out what is the story that I want for myself.

Because we spent so much time together before shooting, we had developed a level of trust between the two of us that I think was unusual for a teenager and a director and I think that she was really able to let herself go places. But she’s also a person who goes there, she’s deeply a person who’s going to give her all, she loves performing. It was a joy for her to get to explore that.

You could tell there was this level of trust and she felt safe, but it’s kind of funny since at the same you’re showing Evangeline and this bizarro, bad version of a very similar relationship. Did you already have that contradiction in mind or did it come…
I would say that was deeply born out of the experience of making this work with this troupe and with Helena, and feeling like I was an idiot (laughs).

Like all of my ideas of how this was going to go were pretty idealistic, and the actual reality of the process was that the dynamics were really complex. We had a wonderfully diverse room of people who were also, thank goodness, honest enough with me that we were able to look at some of the failures and flaws in the process.

So I think putting Evangeline in the movie was a little bit because I felt that I learned so much in the making of this movie that I thought I had been quite an idiot along this process and it would be nice to put a few of those problems into the film so that other people can share this conversation around how do you make art ethically and how can you make art collaboratively? And if in a way collaboration is the most exciting or democratic process of art-making, how is that not exploitative or like a dictatorship? (laughs) I don’t have the answers, that’s why I made a movie and was like “Look at this and tell me what you think, because I don’t know!”